Obscenity

 A video recently went viral, according to the Intercept, of body cam footage showing a small town police officer wrestling a grandmother to the ground at a No Kings protest. 

Her crime? 

Wearing an inflatable penis costume. 

Neo-Orthodoxy

 As I was scrolling through the headlines on the New York Times yesterday, the storied paper insisted I pause over one video. The thumbnail showed the lugubrious face of Ross Douthat. The headline below it read: "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?"

The answer, presumably (given the source) is going to be "yes." 

Soaking the Poor

 Well, Trump has unveiled his new budget request for the coming fiscal year—and it appears to be a nightmarish exaggeration of a classically evil GOP wish list. It proposes to spend 1.5 trillion more dollars next year on the military, as Trump wages an illegal war of aggression in the Middle East and routinely threatens similar invasions in Latin America. 

And how does he propose to pay for this? By slashing safety net programs for the poor, of course. 

Freedom to Obey?

 Those last two books of Bertrand Russell's career—Unarmed Victory (about the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Sino-Indian war) and War Crimes in Vietnam—both written in the tenth and final decade of Russell's life—are both oddball entries in his oeuvre that share a number of eccentricities in common. 

I won't say they are my favorite Russell books. They are missing some of the wit and wry humor that are so conspicuous and delightful in the middle phase of his career (though there are still flashes at times of both in the books). 

The Great Whales

 News broke today that Trump has convened the so-called "God Squad" of executive branch officials to grant an exemption from the protections of the Endangered Species Act to expedite his proposed oil and gas drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico. Predictably, they signed off on his plans. 

The winner here is the fossil fuel industry. The losers include all of us who must reside on a warming planet—plus the animal life that supplies much of the biodiversity of the region. 

Then How Come...?

 Last night, an ad played for fifteen seconds at the start of a YouTube video—and I'm still kicking myself for letting it play to the end. I was effectively suckered in. Goddammit, their tricks worked on me. 

The ad consisted of a series of wholesome images and awe-inspiring scenes, set to the sounds of a child's voice asking some very valid questions: "Why are we here?" "Is someone punishing us?" 

Wastrels of Our Sorrows

 Here's the thing about living with a loved one with terminal illness. They are still alive. You can wake up every morning and see them. If you are mourning their absence in advance, you can still go and give them a hug. That, surely, is something. 

But it can also give one an illusion of normality. On a given day, you can catch yourself up in the miniature struggles for survival and daily living. You can lose yourself in your work. You can forget, for a time, that anything's changed.