Hi gang! Happy Friday. Hope everyone had a good week. Mine was pretty decent – slogging along at work but we’ve had some nice weather and the pickleball classes are going well. It’s fun!
Zelensky in DC:
Zelensky arrives at the White House
https://wapo.st/46k8LKN
Who says that about a CHILD? Grrrr.
2 police officers being investigated after telling a father his 11-year-old daughter could face child porn charges for sending images to a man online
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/20/us/columbus-ohio-police-officers-under-investigation/index.html
Get yer free covid tests, again
Free COVID tests by mail are back, starting Monday
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/09/21/1200750128/free-covid-tests-by-mail?ft=nprml&f=103537970
Sprots!
The Browns sold their souls to sign Deshaun Watson. The results are not pretty
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2023/sep/21/the-browns-sold-their-souls-to-sign-deshaun-watson-the-results-are-not-pretty
Stonks!
Dow tumbles more than 300 points to notch third day of losses amid fears of higher rates, government shutdown
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/20/stock-market-today-live-updates.html
Gonna be a ugly weekend in the northeast
Updated forecast: Odds of wind-swept rain Saturday have increased
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2023/09/21/dc-forecast-sunny-before-storm/
Bears!
What is Fat Bear Week? Everything to know about the big, beefy event.
Have a great weekend!
Clarence Thomas’s violations of judicial ethics has gotten even worse.
https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-secretly-attended-koch-brothers-donor-events-scotus
Drip Drip for a total drip.
Doesn’t matter. He’s bulletproof and he knows it.
He’s the purest example of “gives absolutely no fucks” that I’ve ever seen. Ever.
The fact that he and his patrons have been keeping it under wraps suggest they do care. I think it’s more of PR damage than anything else, but there’s a reason the Kochs spend tens of millions on PR every year. It matters on some level to them.
I agree that his patrons care. If Thomas actually did, he’d do a better job of covering his tracks.
It’s funny I’m saying this to you, but it does seem like the time is pretty ripe for the national media to color in some of the lines between these “independent” organizations and the “independent” judges who magically seem to always vote their way. Why, if I were a more skeptical man, I might think it was almost planned this way!
(They won’t, of course, because most of the Washington media are also deeply involved in legacy systems. But a man can dream!)
The hard work of research on these connections has been done, but the ones who need it the most won’t read it or think about it. What’s nuts is that this is juicy stuff that would goose audience numbers, but only certain types of juicy subjects seem to matter.
To be fair, the Browns didn’t have much of a soul to begin with.
When your owner is Jimmy Haslam… what do you expect?
The No. 1 outcome would have been for Watson to face punishment for what he did. A decent second outcome, though, is for him to be so bad that his signing tanks the Browns for half a decade. They deserve it for what they did to get him.
…it’s a bit of a long-read…upwards of 15mins anyway…but this is pretty interesting
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/21/opinion/china-underground-historians.html
…it ran under the headline “Even the Most Repressive Regime Can’t Stamp Out Independent Thought” but arguably the URL is a better description…it’s sort of an abridged version of what’s going to be in a whole book by a person who’s spent decades in china & has been in contact with a lot of people who are themselves the sort of people it tags as “counterhistorians”
…we know in a few senses that china is kinda the way a place looks if all the things the batshit-right say the woke deep state was up to were true…& this a credible parallel for the state of the union if the same lunatics wrest control of the asylum again & go hog wild on their “project 2025” goals to pour tanker-loads of gasoline on their divinely-ordained dumpster fire
…& much the way the state stepped on rakes in its handling of covid…the problems the economy over there looks like it’s staring at seem liable to get more people hunting around in ways that let them find this stuff…it’s not like it paints a pretty picture exactly…but…it swings for optimism in a way I don’t always manage to myself so I figured I’d lob it in the direction of anyone who might be interested?
Land sakes! How awful for those poor people! And somehow I’m utterly sure that the NYT takes no responsibility for its complicity in assisting repression here.
…I guess they might in an ideal world…but in this one they’ve been slowly ratcheting up the spread of just how bad the bursting of the real estate bubble is rippling…& it sounds a lot like the approach from the top is to squeeze tighter & force more out of its grasp…it’s not clear it can afford to take the steps it would need to to smooth those ripples out & they sound like the sort that do some of that weird shit where economics seems to operate a lot like it follows the laws of fluid dynamics
…nobody’s saying there’s a visible tsunami but they sure do seem to think the horizon has some hallmarks showing up?
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/22/business/china-economy-trusts-zhongrong-zhongzhi.html
…I…probably shouldn’t…but I guess I take some comfort in how that still seems like a contrast to the state of things in europe & the US…there are a lot of indicators cropping up of pretty major stuff going the wrong direction in a lot of places that ought to know better & it sort of helps to put that stuff in perspective now & again
…so…yes…those poor people…& by the sounds of things the ones that are poor poor people might be spiking in the not-too-distant…certainly offers a lot to think about, any which way you look at it?
Peter Hessler of The New Yorker has written some excellent articles about his experience teaching in China and the changes he observed over the years. He eventually became entangled in the state machinery after a student raised implications about something he said in class.
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/peter-hessler
He spends a lot of time dealing with issues of state control and group pressures, and how everyday Chinese people adapt for better and worse. It’s not exactly grim but it’s undeniably repressive, and you can get a good sense of how warping the pressures are.
…hong kong remains arguably unrepresentative of the mainland…but it was a sort of public-facing canary in the coal mine so the broad strokes have been pretty clear for a good few years…even before it was handed back
…& some of it is…sadly…familiar in pattern recognition terms as far as the mechanics of a repressive state apparatus goes…but whether it’s east germany under the stasi or soviet (or indeed modern) russia or this or that banana republic…there’s some dismal constants…but it’s heartening on the one hand that one constant is that even under that sort of yoke you get people who don’t stop thinking & finding the cracks & driving wedges where they can to try to take something brittle & shatter it
…the fact that the people trying to build a similarly abusive state in the states borrow rhetoric to cast themselves as the persecuted minority trying fan that righteous flame rather than stomp it out with a set of jackboots really feels like a damning indictment of the extent to which we seem to have selected for a stunning lack of understanding of the terms it’s expedient to throw around, though
…today’s hardly the first time I’ve read about the project 2025 stuff…or the myriad parallel efforts from “agenda 47” to stephen shit-gibbon miller contesting every executive order through the courts…but that shit really ought to be borderline frivolous compared to life in Xi’s china…the baseline of background ignorance, indifference & general illogic required to make it a threat to a democracy as well-established as the US is…staggering whenever I can’t stop myself from considering it?
Yesterday, mom had what can be politely termed as a mental breakdown. As I mentioned, her mental descent has been quick (3-4 months) and it’s not good. She claimed she didn’t have a home and she has no husband or kids. In the past when the whole family pisses her off, she spits out dramatics like that (not very often thankfully) but this wasn’t the case.
A crisis team (including a mental health worker) showed up because a neighbor called 911 and later I got a call from them so I left work to deal with this.
Sometime today I’m going to be dealing with a case worker.
What’s worse is my mom realizes something is wrong, but she can no longer put it all together.
Story to be continued later…
That’s heartbreaking, thinking of you and your family.
…wishing you all the help that can be marshalled to keep that from getting any harder
…it’s an inherently gruelling thing to contend with but with any luck it doesn’t have to have stuff come with it that makes that worse instead of better so crossing my fingers & hoping you catch a break on that side of the equation
Good luck, dementia is such a struggle to deal with. Hope you and she can get the help you need.
Sorry, Manchu. I guess there’s no hope of getting them into a facility of some kind?
My MIL is now making noises about how she can’t live at home any more, but it’s one of her attention-getting gambits. She wants my wife to spend weekends driving her around to adult communities so she can look them over. My wife did this a few years ago until she figured out her mom was just having weekend outings with a captive audience. Every place is too small and full of old people (she’s 88). Plus there are literal tons of debris in her house that she’d have to leave, and she’s never doing that. Financially it’s a disaster — even if we sold her house, she could pay about 8 months at any senior living place near her. If she outlived that, I’m not actually sure what the next step would be.
Plan ahead, people. Don’t do this to your kids.
God bless my uncle who is covering the cost of most of my mom’s home care for dementia.
She’s the oldest of 6, who was in her first semester of college when her father had a massive coronary and left her mom with 5 kids at home; the youngest was 9. She came home, went to work and lived at home til she was 31 and married my dad.
Every single one of her siblings was able to get an advanced degree due to her sacrifice (Masters or better, including multiple PhDs). My uncle has done well in life and he knows why and is willing to pay her back at this stage.
I can’t possibly thank him enough.
My sister covered a lot of the costs for my mom, too, and handled the vast majority of the medical paperwork. She was the director of nursing at the facility we put my mom in, so she was able to get special rates and make sure mom got treated right. I didn’t appreciate it enough until my wife had to start dealing with her mom without that kind of support.
Sorry to hear this. I’m hoping your family can handle all of the issues with your mom as best as possible, I know it’s hard.
@ManchuCandidate, sending you support vibes. Emmer’s suggestion regarding the UTI is spot-on, with my Mother I saw the odd mental incapacitation that comes from an UTI in the elderly. Otherwise, I’m glad that you have a care team, and wish you and yours the best possible outcome.
I’m sorry that it’s getting worse, and I hope your family and your care team can get things in place for her.
I’m sorry Manchu. The sudden onset made it impossible to plan for and that much harder to manage. Sending you patience and hope for a competent caseworker.
Ugh, I’m sorry
Sorry for your troubles and I hope it’s not to hard on her or those around.
Manchu, it may seem counterintuitive, but I’ll be over here holding out some hope, that it’s something physical & fairly easy to treat, like a UTI, with that rapid onset you’re all dealing with.💖💞💓💗💝
I hope you get whatever going on figured out soon, and that everyone stays safe.💖
Dehydration is often a problem for the elderly and can seriously mess up thinking.
Working my way through the links, and Fat Bear Week is awesome, but how the hell have I never heard about Explore.org’s LIVECAMS before today?
Julie Ertz bids farewell as USA women stroll past South Africa in friendly
Rapinoe is retiring after the next game, too.
Lost Michigan toddler found asleep in woods using family dog as furry pillow
Those are good dogs.
I didn’t get a chance to go shopping. Mom started screaming about someone robbing her, but how as there was no sign of a BnE. I’ve had my house broken into and it’s usually a damn mess as the motherfuckers would ransack the place. However, there are no signs of entry and the house is a damn mess, but not if a bunch of criminals would enter (or the cops that arrived would have already put it in a police report.)
She wanted to go to the cops and register her lost things. If this were 3 months ago I would have gone, but mom has gotten so damned scatter brained that it is more likely she just put them somewhere. I refused and told I wanted to find her stuff then go food shopping.
Mom started screaming that dad’s been throwing out her stuff. Dad, despite his flaws, doesn’t do shit like that. Mom has. Like when she cleaned out my closet of toys and games when I was 13 and at school and threw everything out.
The worst part was her slapping me and dad as well as berating us for being stupid. Again, if this happened 3 months ago I would have exploded, but I couldn’t. I just ended up going home. They have stuff to eat but not much.
Now I’m sitting at home waiting for the case workers to call.
What a nightmare. I imagine she must be terrified. And you have to be worried sick.