Ach! Once again, life on the home front has become very, very full! Nothing bad, but very busy. Posting here may reflect that. I’m trying to get a handle on it all, because posting content and writing are important to me–they’re my main form of release and mental relaxation these days–but bear with me as we keep working through stuff! I’ll eventually write about some of it, maybe.
Meanwhile, it’s time to close out some tabs again!
:: Shakespeare was Shakespeare.
Yes, it’s another article about the constant, and quite manufactured from literally nothing, “controversy” as to the authorship of Shakespeare. I, too, find some of the notions out there as to who really wrote those plays and poems interesting and entertaining, but not one of them is based on any actual evidence. Quite the reverse, really: they all seem to be based on the lack of concrete historical detritus left behind by Shakespeare himself: no copies of his work in his own hand, no evidence of the personal library that he must have owned to have written so erudite a body of work, et cetera. But, as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
:: Don’t reform the courts. Disempower them.
Obviously I’m no legal expert, but it’s plainly obvious that we’ve weirdly evolved into this odd state where, rather than having three equal branches of government with checks and balances imposed upon each, we’ve settled on this state of affairs where the courts are pretty much unchecked entirely, with vast abilities to simply wipe away entire bodies of law “because of reasons”. This is increasingly untenable, if we don’t want this country sliding backwards into a disturbing blend of right-wing paranoid fascism and profit-driven capitalism. (Of course, if you do want those things, you are likely happy as a clam right now.)
:: The saga of America’s and Britain’s eerily-similar self-inflicted collapse.
Britain’s future is to become an American Red State. It already is. And America’s future is also, perhaps, to become One Giant Red State.
Lord, I hope not.
(I’m not sure why the yellow highlighting is there. Something to do with Medium’s functionality, which I don’t entirely get because I’m not a regular user of Medium.)
:: Good coffee.
It’s a gray morning here. After a span of days with high temps and a magical thunderstorm, Mother Nature is taking the weekend off to relax. The highs are twenty degrees lower, the sky is overcast, and it was so chilly last night Friday curled into bed with me and I fell asleep holding her barrel chest like the little spoon she was born to be. Felt like camping in the best way. Like when your environment is just a tad less comfortable but you still can sleep in surrounded by soft things and warm fur.
One of my favorite bloggers, taking life day by day. She’s a great model for this.
:: “The smoke is good for you!”
Is smoke okay or is it bad and also Canada’s fault? Those are a few of the weighty ideas Fox News has wrestled with over the last week in attempting to craft a response to the United States’ worst-ever day of wildfire pollution.
Wednesday night, Fox News host Laura Ingraham invited general-purpose reactionary Steve Milloy, whose career includes stints shilling for the tobacco and coal industry, to weigh in. “Look, the air is ugly, it’s unpleasant to breathe and for a lot of people they get anxiety over it,” Milloy said. “But the reality is just that there’s no health risk.”
You can always count on FOX News to tell you the stupidest shit. A good rule of thumb here is, if Steve Milloy says it’s good for you, stop doing it, because it’s terrible for you but someone rich is paying him a lot of money to tell you it isn’t.
:: Finally, a lot of weirdos online have been spreading rumors, based on nothing at all, that George Lucas is preparing to buy Star Wars back from Disney. This is, of course, complete nonsense, but it does remind me of a commercial I enjoyed back in the day:
Later, folks!
The smoke thing. As I remember the Clean Air Act (Passed in my lifetime, so not THAT long ago) specifically included a reference to PM 2.5 (which is the main pollutant in smoke) as being ESPECIALLY hazardous, because it gets much deeper in the lungs than PM 10, the larger particulate matter.
But of course, people who become politicians “don’t need science” (I had a buddy in grad school who had a student tell him that) so they don’t care. But people were dying in the 1950s because of pollution from PM (the “killer fogs” in London).
ISTG that some days I feel like I’m drinking goofy juice when I hear the stuff people spout off and how it compares with my education