…ok…so I’m feeling particularly like “a bear of very little brain” this morning…but…I don’t seem to have quite got the hang of the blissful part of ignorance…so…I worry

Until 3 November, none of the water pipes from Israel into Gaza were working – although two out of the three are now functioning – and a pipe connecting the southern towns of Rafah and Khan Younis is leaking, according to the UN.
[…]
According to the UN, only 5% of Gaza’s water needs are now being met. Lorries with aid that entered the territory from Egypt on Wednesday carried enough water for 15,000 people for one day. More than 1.4 million people are now displaced in the territory.

Some people in the south of the territory have been getting water from desalination plants but they are operating at just 40% capacity. Plants in northern Gaza are not operational.

Water from wells is being accessed to try to ease some of the burden, but it has a relatively high salt content.
[…]
Gaza has struggled with access to water since Israel imposed a blockade in 2007, with groundwater sources becoming polluted from overuse. But conditions have worsened since Israel tightened the siege of Gaza after the attacks by Hamas last month.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2023/nov/04/lack-of-clean-drinking-water-for-95-of-people-in-gaza-threatens-health-crisis

Decades of untreated wastewater and infrastructure damaged in past conflicts make the water even more unhealthy. According to the United Nations, more than 95 percent of water from the coastal aquifer is not drinkable.

[…] under ideal circumstances. Surface water and dependable power would make pumping, desalinating and treating the water possible.

But there has been no natural surface water in Gaza since the early 2000s. The enclave is left to depend on Israel’s National Water Carrier to supplement its groundwater sources.
[…]
Gaza’s desalination infrastructure, while inadequate, is supposed to provide the majority of potable water to the strip’s residents.
[…]
“The immediate risks when water is so constrained is dehydration,” said Syed Imran Ali, a research fellow at the Dahdaleh Institute for Global Health Research at York University. “It forces people to drink non-potable, unsafe sources of water. And that creates a situation where highly infectious waterborne diseases like cholera, typhoid and dysentery, those can start tearing through a population.”

More than 8,000 Palestinians have been killed since Oct. 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Diminishing water supplies often lead to an increase in infectious disease, said Juliane Schillinger, a researcher on conflict and water at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

“There’s this whole hidden part of indirect casualties … people who die weeks or months afterwards from impacts like lack of clean water,” Schillinger said.

With hospitals over capacity and struggling to keep the lights on, they cannot handle another public health crisis.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/gaza-israel-water-crisis/

…but then…we’re easily distracted creatures at the best of times

For 20 months, Ukraine has been resisting Russia’s brutal invasion with courage and sacrifice, but it cannot maintain this effort without continued support from the United States and Europe. For now, most U.S. and European people and politicians stand behind Ukraine — providing money, materiel and homes for refugees. However, the prospect of a prolonged bloody conflict is beginning to erode this support.

The U.S. Congress declined to provide additional resources for Ukraine in the stopgap bill that’s currently funding the U.S. government. The authorized aid that remains will last for, at most, only a few more months. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has yet to articulate a clear strategy for how this war should end, and this leaves ordinary Americans uncertain about how the Ukrainian struggle aligns with their own interests.

All this is disturbing for Europeans, who know that their security, as well as Ukraine’s, depends on continued U.S. support. They would do well to keep in mind that they can encourage U.S. help by maximizing their own financial and military support. (For more metrics on the war in Ukraine, see the Brookings Institution’s Ukraine Index at https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ukraine-index/ )
[…]
Although they are closer to the war, Europeans are also questioning their solidarity with Ukraine. The Eurobarometer survey shows that two-thirds of Europeans support European Union sanctions, financial aid, humanitarian aid and taking in refugees. A smaller majority is in favor of paying for military equipment. An open question is whether the rise of hard-right parties in Europe — many of which cultivate ties to Russia and China and are critical of Kyiv — will constrain European governments’ ability to keep up current levels of support. Slovakia just elected as prime minister a populist who ran on an anti-Ukraine platform. On the other hand, voters in Poland have returned E.U.-friendly liberals to power; this will make coordination among European capitals immeasurably easier. The next electoral test for the extreme right will be E.U. parliament elections next June.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/25/ukraine-war-support-united-states-european-union/

…maybe if the prospects of those sorts of tests being passed were a little less sickly-looking I’d feel better…but…I dunno…the grade of parliamentary officials on the board who pass for representatives is…well…let’s just say it isn’t looking too well…however you look at it

McConnell — an 81-year-old Republican of a different political generation than Johnson, 51, with a reputation for fiercely pursuing party goals — has in recent years broken with orthodoxy and sided with President Biden and the Senate Democratic majority on key domestic and international priorities. McConnell and much of his conference hope to pass bipartisan bills to fund the government and send aid to Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan to defend their democracies.

But Johnson and his conference passed a $14.3 billion aid package for Israel this week that lacked Ukraine funding, attaching a partisan measure beloved by many in his conference that would rescind thousands of new IRS employees provided for in Biden’s signature legislative achievement.

The new speaker suggested that if the Senate sends back an Israel aid bill that does not include spending cuts, he won’t put it on the floor.

“We have obligations and we have commitments and we want to protect and help and assist our friend Israel,” Johnson told reporters. “But we have to keep our own house in order as well.”
[…]
“At the risk of repeating myself, the threats facing America and our allies are serious and they are intertwined,” McConnell said this week. “If we ignore that fact, we do so at our own peril.”

…honest question…if neither of them mentioned the war & they both just said their avowed priorities were to see that nothing which might imply that the US had a functional government be allowed to develop legislative traction it feels like they could save a lot of time & not have to pretend their interests were unaligned…so…doth the lady protest too much?

The end-of-year rush to address myriad must-pass legislation will test both Republican leaders as their conferences are guaranteed to clash in unforeseen ways this year. Johnson must compromise to get legislation through the Democratic-controlled Senate, but when his predecessor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), did so to pay the country’s debts and keep the government open earlier this year, House Republicans ousted him and McConnell faced growing skepticism from his right flank.

…or is it just me that hears that & thinks it might make the bit before look like window dressing?

In a move to appease his far-right flank’s demands, Johnson is considering pushing for spending cuts in a short-term funding resolution that must pass two weeks from now to avoid a government shutdown. If Johnson adopts that proposal it would be a non-starter for Senate Democrats and many Republicans who have found bipartisan agreement on how to fund the government.

There are many other reauthorizations Congress must address by the end of the year, including the farm bill, federal aviation, a Pentagon spending bill and legislation on foreign intelligence surveillance.

…sure…in his own way mitch is classically resentful of the whippersnapper fucking up his carefully stacked senatorial deck much the same way pelosi wasn’t a fan of “the squad” & all…but…they seem equally determined to break shit that produces the same lack of result

This puts pressure on McConnell not to provide Republican votes to pass any compromise legislation through the Democratic-controlled Senate that doesn’t have Johnson’s blessing.
[…]
Johnson has far less leeway with his own members, who have already shown their willingness to push out a leader over personal vendettas and for straying from conservative orthodoxy, and who have yet to overcome the deep tensions that were exposed during the three-week speakership fight.

…or is this the equivalent to hearing “we’ll fix it in post” on set?

And House Republicans are incredibly wary of being steamrolled by the Senate. Republicans have largely agreed that they should send the most conservative version of a bill — in large part because it’s the only way to ensure passage through their razor-thin four vote margin — knowing full well that negotiations between both chambers would eventually result in a more watered-down, but still conservative, version of their proposal that ends up on the president’s desk.

“If someone wants another dollar for Ukraine, they gotta come make the case to me, and that includes Mitch McConnell,” Roy said. “He might think he can do his old guard steamroll crap through town, but I think the signals that are being sent over the last year is that there’s a new day dawning in Washington, D.C., and Mitch McConnell, frankly, it’s going to blow past him. It’s going to be up to the rest of the Senate to figure it out.”
[…]
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) said he believed McConnell and Mike Johnson were more in sync than they might appear, and have spoken at least three times since Johnson took the job. McConnell and Johnson met privately for 45 minutes before the lunch, a McConnell aide said, kicking off their regular standing meeting.

“He knows the limitations of Mike’s ability given what he’s working with and he knows his own,” Cramer said of McConnell. “The perception that somehow there’s this clash between the two [leaders] is really more of a clash between the institutions.”
[…]
Many House Republicans do not know which path Johnson will choose if a bill aiding Israel comes back from the Senate without the IRS repeal, or with Ukraine aid tacked on. If both chambers conference and agree on a compromise, does Johnson put it on the floor and risk irking Republicans who want a more conservative bill or will he prevent it from ever receiving a vote? Johnson has suggested he won’t put forward a bill without the IRS provision — a move that could cost him his job.
[…]
Laying out an ambitious schedule to tackle funding the government for a full year when campaigning for speaker, Johnson already missed the mark after having to pull consideration of a transportation appropriation bill. New York Republicans are keen on ensuring that Amtrak, a major mode of transportation in the northeast, does not face significant cuts. Other Republicans worry that proposals to slash housing will negatively affect promises made to districts that more housing projects would be coming. And the House Freedom Caucus keeps insisting on ensuring all those proposed cuts stay in the bill.

The remaining bills that the House must pass are the most controversial. Two are still stuck in committee because internal Republican disputes on policy won’t allow them to move them to the floor. And House Republicans have been unable to resolve differences that led to the failure to pass an agriculture bill on the floor that is riddled with far-right priorities, including federally banning abortion pills and slashing funding that helps poor women feed their children.

“Well I’m from Louisiana, so I describe everything in either football or hurricane metaphors,” Johnson said when asked what his first few days as speaker had been like. “Let me say this is like an F5 hurricane. It’s been a whirlwind, but in a great way.”

Mike Johnson and Mitch McConnell are on a collision course [WaPo]

…but then…what’s a person supposed to think?

It’s easy to become inured to the extremism that has suffused the Republican Party in recent years. Donald Trump, the dominating front-runner for the party’s presidential nomination, spends days in court, in a judicial system he regularly disparages, charged with a long list of offenses and facing several trials.

In the House, Republicans recently chose a new speaker, Representative Mike Johnson, who not only endorsed the attempted overturning of the 2020 election but also helped to devise the rationale behind it.
[…]
A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that [to believe that the country is in such dire straits — has reached a state of apocalyptic decadence — that democracy is a luxury we can no longer afford]— giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse. Some catastrophists take it a step further and suggest that officials might contemplate overthrowing liberal democracy in favor of revolutionary regime change or even imposing a right-wing dictatorship on the country.
[…]
The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024. It includes respected scholars at prestigious universities and influential think tanks. The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.

That makes this a crucial time to familiarize ourselves with and begin formulating a response to these ideas. If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.
[…]
Probably the best-known faction of catastrophists and the one with the most direct connection to Republican politics is led by Michael Anton and others with ties to the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank in California. Mr. Anton’s notorious Claremont Review of Books essay in September 2016 called the contest between Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton “The Flight 93 Election.” Mr. Anton, who would go on to serve as a National Security Council official in the Trump administration, insisted the choice facing Republicans, like the passengers on the jet hijacked by terrorists intent on self-immolation in a suicide attack on the White House or the Capitol on Sept. 11, was to “charge the cockpit or you die.” (For a few months in 2000 and 2001, Mr. Anton was my boss in the communications office of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and we have engaged in spirited debates over the years.)
[…]
After leaving the Trump White House, Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”

…look…I know they say talk is cheap…& when a lot of it is worthless argument that feels on point…but people are quite literally paying for this degree of idiocy with their lives all over the damn world & the sheer breadth of context it’s required be ignored for some of these pronouncements to even pretend to make any kind of sense is fucking breathtaking

Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.

That’s how, in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.

…just…sit with that for a second…the US…a “theocratic oligarchy”…you know…I could almost see it if you were talking about big money & the old-school “christian” bedrock of those wacky conservatives that always seemed to have figured a way to not just thread the camel through the eye of the needle but make being rich a prerequisite for entrance to their idea of paradise…but no…these people…with a straight face…are looking to claim that what passes for the left in the united states of freaking america…is basically the same thing as…I dunno…the islamic republic of iran…or the house of saud…or some such monsters-under-the-bed fucking nonsense…& there’s a willing audience for shit that far off the map into “here be dragons” territory

In this conversation, Mr. Anton and Mr. Yarvin swapped ideas about how this theocratic oligarchy might be overthrown. It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.

A year ago, Mr. Anton revisited the topic of “the perils and possibilities of Caesarism” on “The Matthew Peterson Show” with several other intellectual catastrophists with ties to the Claremont Institute. (Another panelist on the online show, Charles Haywood, a wealthy former businessman, used the term “Red Caesar,” referring to the color associated with the G.O.P., in a 2021 blog post about Mr. Anton’s second book.)

On the Peterson show, Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.”[…]

…but then if you already have a captive audience prepared to hew to such pillars of faith as “it’s the white christian males who are the ones being unjustly persecuted in america”…the fuck won’t they believe?

Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives.

…sure-jan.gif

Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”

Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny. Establishing the validity of that parallel is the main point of the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.” (The title is drawn from the writings of the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.)

But Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame offers the most elaborate and intellectually sophisticated response in his recent book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.” (Mr. Deneen and I worked together professionally at several points over the past two decades, and Mr. Dreher and I have been friends for even longer.)

Mr. Deneen’s previous book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” was praised by writers across the political spectrum, including former President Barack Obama, for helping readers understand the appeal of the harder-edged populist conservatism that took control of the Republican Party in 2016. “Regime Change” is a much darker book that goes well beyond diagnosing America’s ills to propose what sounds, in certain passages, like a radical cure.
[…]
Mr. Deneen is inconsistent in laying out how postliberal voters should achieve the overthrow of this progressive tyranny. In some passages, he advocates a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and proposes modest reforms to replace it. They include relocating executive branch departments of the federal government to cities around the country and the establishment of nationwide vocational programs.

But in other passages, Mr. Deneen goes much further, describing the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianity. He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.

…when they talk about broadening your appeal to an electorate…there’s normally something else to it than “embrace the crazy”

Farther out on the right’s political and philosophical extremes there’s Costin Alamariu, the person generally understood to be writing under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert.

He self-published a book in 2018, “Bronze Age Mindset,” which follows Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors beloved by the European far right in proclaiming that Western civilization itself is on the verge of collapse, its greatest achievements far in the past, its present a “garbage world” in an advanced state of decay.

All around us, Mr. Alamariu declares, greatness and beauty are under assault. Who are its enemies? Women, for one. (“It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization.”) Then there’s belief in democratic equality. (“I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe.”)

But blame must most of all be laid at the feet of the creature Mr. Alamariu calls the “bugman,” a term he uses to describe a majority of human beings alive today. This insectlike infestation venerates mediocrity and is “motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful.”

…anyone remember people saying of a certain someone that “you need to take him seriously not literally”?

In a recent essay, Mr. Alamariu wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’ …. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”

It’s hard to know how seriously to take all of this. Mr. Alamariu, who has a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, writes in such a cartoonish way and laces his outrageous pronouncements with so much irony and humor, not to mention deliberate spelling and syntax errors, that he often seems to be playing a joke on his reader.

But that doesn’t mean influential figures on the right aren’t taking him seriously. Nate Hochman, who was let go by the presidential campaign of Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida after sharing on social media a video containing a Nazi symbol, told The New York Times that “every junior staffer in the Trump administration read ‘Bronze Age Mindset.’”

Mr. Alamariu’s recently self-published doctoral dissertation reached No. 23 on Amazon sitewide in mid-September. Among those on the right treating the author as a friend, ally or interlocutor worthy of respectful engagement are the prominent activist Christopher Rufo, the author Richard Hanania and the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen.

…ummm…probably not done with this one, I’m afraid

…they might get the more prestigious byline placements but the lies of these pillocks are small beer when it comes to playing the flame to their chosen moths

Why Liberal Academia Needs Republican Friends [NYT]

[…sadly…while ross is capable of grasping that it’s good to have friends…he clearly fails to grasp the underlying meaning of the term “friend”…possibly due to a lack of familiarity with the source material…who can say…but he’s been a busy little bee, has ross]

That means the dilemma of the 21st century isn’t how Earth will feed an ever-growing population, but how the world will deal with a potential mass rebalancing of population via migration, an altered wealth-and-people equilibrium, in a world where technology is making the movement of peoples easier than ever. The hopeful way to view this transformation is as a win-win: “African countries have a vital resource that aging societies are losing: a youthful population,” is how Walsh puts it, and you can imagine the future as an acceleration in the exchange of resources, with younger African workers going north and sending remittances south to help boost the developing economies they leave behind.

…when I had math teachers way back when sometimes they’d take pity on a mostly right but importantly wrong answer by identifying that the bulk of the working was sound but the bit that contained the small mistake that was subsequently compounded by it was the consequence of an “error carried forward”…& I guess it might be a cheap shot but I’d be tempted to say suggesting that the current international climate is one in which the movement of people is “easier than ever” is a fairly profound misreading of a situation where…for example…pakistan just recently pretty much evicted a whole slew of people who wound up there on account of being refugees from afghanistan…& arguably that isn’t even in the part of the venn diagram that has to do with climate change induced migration…to be fair to the man, though…there’s a non-zero chance some passages reflect working that could be sound in a different context?

Because, again, the scale of what we’re talking about, the interaction between migration pressures and low birthrates, is not mass immigration as we knew it 50 years ago. Here it’s worth reading a new paper by Paul Morland and Philip Pilkington, respectively a demographer and an economist, modeling Britain’s economic and demographic future. Britain had below-replacement fertility for about half a century, and it’s been relying on unprecedented immigration rates to supply younger workers — “by a very long way the fastest ethnic change the country has seen, not since the Norman conquests of the 11th century, but rather since the Anglo-Saxons arrived in the 5th century, or maybe earlier still.”

That’s what happened already, and it hasn’t prevented Britain from already slipping a bit into economic stagnation. (Here it’s also important to stress that when you rely on immigration for younger workers, it’s not a one-off solution: If your birthrates stay low, you have to keep finding new immigrants, because immigrants don’t all come as 18-year-olds; they themselves age and become retirees, their own birthrates converge with natives’, and they often bring their older relatives after them.)

What will happen, though, is something much more dramatic. According to Morland and Pilkington’s projections, if current birthrates hold in Britain, within 50 years, more than a third of the country’s population would need to be first-generation immigrants to keep the old-age dependency ratio around 40 percent. (A 25 percent ratio means there are four workers for every retiree; a 50 percent ratio, just two.) If birthrates slump much further, toward the dire level seen in a country like South Korea, to maintain a sustainable dependency ratio in the late 21st century, more than half of Britain’s population would need to be first-generation immigrants.

…I mean…I for one wouldn’t trust ross for an accurate read on the interplay between the kind of immigration that formed the backbone of the NHS even as the “windrush generation” got treated in ways that seem outrageous by today’s standards…despite which they in fact continue to be treated in ways that seem outrageous…or how that plays back & forth off an aging demographic with increasing distrust of “foreigners” & a bunch of sunk ideological costs in brexit colorways…hand in hand with an increased reliance on the very public services & healthcare that they’ve merrily voted to slash funding for while doing their best to evict the primary employment pool upon which they rely…because…frankly…I don’t think ross knows shit about how any of that works or quite possibly even that it is a context that exists…but…I know one thing

It’s not that I think borders inherently can’t be enforced or that immigration can’t be restricted and redirected; clearly policy matters, as you can see just in the differences between the Biden administration and the Trump administration. But the circumstances of the 21st century are going to be highly unusual by historical standards, Europe’s situation is different from America’s, and I think conservatives and immigration restrictionists who imagine that it’s simply a matter of will are going find that even a much more right-wing continent will end up looking more like Morland and Pilkington’s scenario of rapid and destabilizing demographic transformation than like contemporary Japan.

There is, of course, another possibility, which is that dynamism could be restored by higher birthrates, a “more children” option, which would render immigration less economically necessary while perhaps also making substantial immigrant populations less threatening to natives and more easily assimilated.

Two Ways of Looking at the West’s Population Dilemma [NYT]

…nobody’s appetite for making babies ever got increased by reading one of ross’ columns…although I can see how he might have gotten confused on account of the profusion of “fuck”s that crop up in a lot of first reactions to the things…but then false equivalence is pretty much the name of the game for the Gerontocratic Oligarchs Projecting side of the divide…so…is it really just par for this particular wayward course?

It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.

Yes, our politics is increasingly turbulent. Yet the country endured far worse turmoil just over a half-century ago — political assassinations, huge protests, riots, hundreds of bombings, often carried out by left-wing terrorists — without dispensing with democracy or looking to a Caesar as a savior.

The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.

…when c.s. lewis got biblical talking about the time to “put away childish things”…he included “the fear of childishness and the desire to appear very grown up”…but…gotta be honest…if these assholes had a bit more fear of childishness & a lot more desire to appear very grown up…I can’t help feeling like we’d all be a damn sight better off?

There may be little the rest of us can do about it besides resisting the temptation to respond in kind. In that refusal, we give the lie to claims that the liberal center has tyrannical aims of its own — and demonstrate that the right’s intellectual catastrophists are really just anticipatory sore losers.

Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism [NYT]

…whichever way you stack it

How Speaker Mike Johnson’s plans for a Christian law school unraveled [WaPo]

Mike Johnson, theocrat: the House speaker and a plot against America [Guardian]

Continued support for Ukraine will cost the west less than letting Putin win [Guardian]

…how does it go again…fools rush in

Amy Schumer gets response from MLK’s daughter after tweeting video of his support for Israel [NBC]

…where angels fear to tread?

and for us to work for true peace, which includes justice.

He said, “Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”

We have much to correct.

Here is a clip of my father talking about withdrawing from the Vietnam War and “moral power.”#MLK pic.twitter.com/Y0ZMp1K6qa

— Be A King (@BerniceKing) November 1, 2023

…oh…hang on…that’s right…I was gonna crowbar this in somewhere but I forgot

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

If – Rudyard Kipling

…but apparently I never figured out quite where…which…is probably fitting after a fashion

When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.

A.A. Milne

…so…probably taking it slowly is about the only thing I got going for me today that I could point to as evidence of any kinda wisdom?