Open Thread: Reading Is Fundamental As Is Journalism

/63 Comments/in , /by

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I want to kill a few birds with one post: publish an open thread, discuss a topic in which most of us have an interest, and address an essential issue critical to our survival over the next several years.

The topic is books — what have you been reading or about to read which is enlightening, edifying, and worth discussing with others? What book(s) do you believe others will find necessary as the SHTF?

The essential issue is journalism — apparently we need to burn it all down and start with the basics, by which I mean crack a book used as journalism curriculum in J-school.

The book I find essential was recommended by journalism instructors I once worked with. At less than 300 pages in paperback, it’s a straightforward and slim read: The Elements of Journalism: What Newspeople Should Know and the Public Should Expect, by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel. There have been four editions published to date, any of them are worth reading, and there are +100 copies available now through used book reseller Alibris so you don’t have to go to Bezos’ Amazon.

The frontispiece sets readers off in the right direction. It’s not artwork but text and it’s the outline of the rest of the text:

THE ELEMENTS OF JOURNALISM ARE:
• Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.
• Its first loyalty is to citizens.
• Its essence is a discipline of verification.
• Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
• It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
• It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
• It must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant.
• It must keep the news comprehensive and in proportion.
• Its practitioners have an obligation to exercise their personal conscience.
• Citizens, too, have rights and responsibilities when it comes to the news.

Based on this manifesto, it’s difficult to say that the Washington Post is a legitimate journalistic venture. Long-time editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned this past week from WaPo. The spiking of her cartoon which criticized billionaire oligarchs and media businesses for sucking up to as-yet-uninaugurated Trump — including WaPo’s ultimate owner Jeff Bezos — demonstrated yet again WaPo’s inability to fulfill the necessary attributes of authentic journalism.

The public should be demanding the resignation of WaPo’s editor-in-chief, Will Lewis. They should have been doing so for months now, after a string of gross failures not the least of which is WaPo’s elevation of the fucked-up politicized prosecution of Hunter Biden, but the obvious preference for Trump in its coverage in spite of Trump’s manifest unsuitability for the White House.

WaPo’s management doesn’t even have the balls to come out and say it has a preferred ideology on which it frames its published work. Instead it hangs the burden on its staff.

You know damned well if it spiked Telnaes’ cartoon, it’s spiking other content, too, in ways which are much less obvious to the public.

The public bears considerable responsibility for this situation as well. It does not respond as it should to WaPo’s failures. It’s this lack of appropriate response which encouraged me to pick up The Elements of Journalism once again, because we need to get on the same page and have the same understanding about our relationship with the Fourth Estate.

The First Amendment reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

There’s no daylight between our freedom of speech and that of the press. We need to stop acting like the press is a wholly separate entity, because it doesn’t exist without us as readers. Only the business of the press is separate so long as our representatives don’t choose to regulate it otherwise. The right of the free press is our right as citizens in this democracy.

Elements explains to its readers:

What do we do as citizens if these rights are not met? What action, for instance, can and should we take if a newspaper reports on a case of business or political fraud but doesn’t follow up on the controversial issues it raises? First, of course, such contact works best if it comes constructively, as advice and information rather than condemnation. Second, if it is ignored it should be offered again, perhaps through more than one means. If, for example, an e-mail is not acknowledged, send it again, and then pick up the phone or write a letter, with a copy to the editor in chief. If you want to make other citizens aware of your complaint, keep a public record of your attempts to contact the organization and their reactions on a blog.

What can we do if as citizens we offer news organizations this feedback and our contributions, ideas, or criticisms are ignored? Rights mean something only if they are viewed as rights. At that point, withhold your business. Drop the subscription. Stop watching. Most important, write a clear explanation of why you have done so and send it to the editor or media critics, or post it on your own site. …

There’s a bit more reminding us that passivity is our failing. We get the media we fail to demand.

We need to learn how to demand better in a big fat hurry.

Farewell to the Man from Plains

/69 Comments/in , , , /by

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Former president Jimmy Carter passed away today. He was 100 years old, the oldest former president and the first to attain their centenary. His wife Rosalyn Carter passed away in November 2023.

He will be remembered most for his immense contributions to society post-presidency, from his diplomatic efforts to the founding of The Carter Center and its support of voting rights and democracy, his efforts through the Center to eradicate disease, and his work for Habitat for Humanity.

He will also be remembered as a national hero for his role in preventing a nuclear accident in 1952. The episode was not widely publicized until 2021:

Carter, a young U.S. Navy lieutenant in 1952, was in in nearby Schenectady, New York, training to work aboard America’s first nuclear submarine at the time of the accident at a reactor in Chalk River, Ontario, just 180 km from Ottawa, the Canadian capital.

According to a Canadian government website, mechanical problems and operator error “led to overheating fuel rods and significant damage” to the core of the reactor, prompting officials to turn to the United States for help in dismantling the device.

A total of 26 Americans, including several volunteers, rushed to Chalk River to help with the hazardous job. Carter led a team of men who, after formulating a plan, descended into the highly radioactive site for 90 seconds apiece to perform specialized tasks.

Carter’s job, according to the CBC recounting, was simply to turn a single screw. But even that limited exposure carried serious risks; Carter was told that he might never be able to have children again, though in fact his daughter Amy was born years later.

Carter was generous and humble, faithful and steadfast, true to his family, faith, and country to the end.

May he rest in power.

__________
Photo: Carter with future spouse Rosalynn Smith and his mother at his graduation from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, June 5, 1946, via Wikipedia.

Dear Media: Media Crit Like It’s Football, FFS

/39 Comments/in , , /by

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I’ve been fuming about this since — oh, check the date and time on this graphic:

For the NFL football or Michigan uninformed, the Detroit Lions played the Buffalo Bills on Sunday evening at home. The hometown crowd was amped up because the Lions had a 12-1 season and already garnered a playoff slot.

But they also knew things would be tense because of the number of injured players on the team.

The Bills opened up a 14-point lead in the first quarter and the Lions were never able to catch them; the final score was 48-42.

That’s the frame from which the above report in Gannett’s local affiliate the Detroit Free Press (Freep) reported on CBS Sports’ coverage of the game.

Gannett is the largest newspaper publisher in the US; it’s the owner and publisher of USA Today and 32 other news papers. Freep’s criticism of CBS Sports coverage follows decades of CBS missteps in the Detroit market.

During what little I watched of the game, CBS’s talking heads were shit. Very little commentary on a couple lousy calls, or not-calls, in at least one case of pass interference early in the game.

I won’t bother to post his crap here but commentator Tony Romo was a dick, not exactly endearing CBS to the Detroit Metro audience. You’d think he’d know by now there’s quarterback smack talk and then there’s former player professional broadcaster sports talk, the latter for which he is paid.

All that aside, this article does more to criticize another media outlet’s coverage than we have seen among national outlets who have systematically fucked up coverage for decades.

How and why can a large newspaper owned by a national organization freely criticize a national broadcast and streaming media organization about its coverage, but the same kinds of organizations have failed our democracy by bootlicking for fascists?

By bootlicking I offer as an example ABC News which folded like a broken lawn chair settling $15 million on Trump who’d claimed he was defamed by ABC. ABC had used the same language leveled at Trump in court but somehow a national news broadcaster is no longer permitted to exercise free speech reporting facts in Trumplandia.

After the gross moral and ethical failure of the Washington Post to make an endorsement in the presidential race, after Los Angeles Times’ similar failing, one can only wonder what’s left of the country’s once-free press.

Don’t get me started on the bullshit coverage which parroted right-wing talking points over the last three presidential elections, from “But her emails” to “Joe’s old” to “Hunter Biden Hunter Biden Hunter Biden.”

NYU’s Jay Rosen has encouraged news media to depart from its toxic horse race coverage of elections and move toward reporting the stakes of the race. Stakes coverage should be a minimum across all coverage of politics and governance.

If media can’t do that — and they’ve demonstrated they can’t — if they insist on treating our democratic governance like sports, the least they can do is criticize their own industry’s performance like they do when it comes to football.

 

This is an open thread.

The Myths of Bluebeard and Orangeskin

/88 Comments/in , , , /by

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I have been tamping down my disgust for the last four weeks, just as many of you have.

I’m completely disgusted with talking head punditry blaming everyone but themselves, including Democrats and Democratic Party-wannabes who decided after the election that it was a good time to kick minority groups and blame them, or turned stupid before the camera and insist the barrier to winning was something facts say it wasn’t.

But I have a specially level of revulsion allocated for – brace yourself, it’s not about some of you personally – white women.

53% of white American women have voted for Donald the adjudicated rapist Trump not once, not twice, but three fucking times – in 2016, in 2020, and yet again in 2024.

For some it was about financial issues like taxes – I earned this, I’ve got mine, fuck you, they voted, wanting Trump to ensure their rank in the economic pecking order was conserved.

For others it was about race and/or misogyny. Internalized oppression makes these voters believe they are somehow exempt from the oppression when they are only a future victim.

In a handful of states it’s clear reproductive rights were important to this bloc of voters because they voted against abortion restrictions. And yet they still voted for Trump.

Trump’s claims that he would leave abortion to states to decide apparently convinced them they could have things both ways. They could belong to the cult of Trump and white patriarchal supremacy and still retain their reproductive rights.

What poppycock. Trump had already made the biggest move possible to eliminate their rights at federal level by ensuring the Roberts’ Supreme Court would undermine them.

It’s infuriating and yet somehow predictable.

This cognitive dissonance in women is the stuff of myth, the kind of behavior we’ve been warned about in stories nearly a millennia old.

We’re watching once again the unfolding myth of Bluebeard.

~ ~ ~

Here’s the tl;dr version of the Bluebeard myth from Simple Wikipedia:

A rich man has a blue beard which frightens young women. He has been married several times but no one knows what has happened to his wives. He woos two young sisters in the neighborhood but neither are inclined to consider marriage. He treats them to a lavish time in his country house. The younger sister decides to marry him. Shortly after the wedding (and before he travels to a far land on business), Bluebeard gives his wife the keys to his house. One key opens a door to a distant room. He forbids her to enter this room. He leaves and his wife opens the door to the forbidden room. Here she finds Bluebeard’s former wives, all dead and lying on a floor covered with blood. She drops the key. It is magic and becomes stained with blood that cannot be washed away. Bluebeard returns. He discovers the blood-stained key and knows his wife has disobeyed his order. He tells her she will take her place among the dead. He grants her a few minutes to pray. She calls her sister Anne and asks her to go to the top of the tower to see if her brothers are on the road. After several tense moments, Anne reports seeing the men approaching. Bluebeard raises a cutlass to decapitate his wife. Her brothers burst into the room. They kill Bluebeard. Their sister is safe.

I’m not going to write out the full Bluebeard myth here. I’m going to trust readers to do their homework reading the original, more complex Wikipedia entry and possibly the Charles Perrault version available for free at Project Gutenberg.

There are many versions of this myth across languages, countries, and cultures. It has been adapted in contemporary culture repeatedly. In other words, humans have been telling a story in which the same familiar elements have occurred because humans universally find it relatable across history and now.

We’ve even begun discussion of universal liberation and the enslavement of fully-conscious AI “women” to serve Bluebeardian men, as in writer/director Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015).

It should not be difficult to see the parallels between Bluebeard and Trump – the multiple silenced wives, the naïve woman/women who yield to promises of wealth and pleasure, the unpleasantness of discovering the truth beneath the promises, the mortal price to be paid.

Nor should it be difficult to see the meta layer of this myth, where wealthy men feel entitled to demand subordination by women including the suppression of knowledge and therefore consent. To slip this leash is to suffer loss unless rescued at the last moment. That rescue is the only thing separating the bride from the corpses of sister brides.

The biggest single variant between versions of the Bluebeard myth is the means of rescue. A sister or sisters, brother or brothers, or a mother figure steps in at the very last moment to save the final girl.

Unfortunately, the parallel here is that they believe naively they will always be the lucky final girl; in truth we as societal siblings are always the rescuers.

We did a shit job three elections in a row, mostly because we assumed the victim(s) were fully informed and aware of the danger, failing to reach them at a level mythic stories connect. Many were fully informed and blithely voted for Trump because he said he would leave reproductive rights to the states.

Like the last bride in Bluebeard’s myth, they may have been amply informed of the manifold deaths of previous wives yet plunged ahead into marriage believing they were somehow immune.

What if the victim(s) refuse efforts to save them?

~ ~ ~

Three women married Trump, two of whom should have known better. More women were involved with him consensually; they, too should have known better.

Note status of consent here – some girls and women were forced to be involved with Trump without their consent, from minors at the Miss Teen USA pageant to E. Jean Carroll. Don’t confuse these persons with the former. Many of them fought in some way not to be involved with Trump, informing more women about his nature as they did so, clawing back against his efforts to stuff them in his bloody oubliette by way of SLAPP suits and other forms of legal harassment.

The women who voted for Trump three times are among those who expressed their consent at the ballot box. They agreed to what he offered them as a candidate.

Like the younger sister who heard all the rumors about Bluebeard, who may have been warned by mother and sisters against him, they went ahead and consented to Trump as president.

The only thing which gave Bluebeard’s final wife pause was her own discovery in the personal pursuit of information. In many versions of the myth she is merely overwhelmed by her own curiosity about the forbidden. In other versions she is upset about being denied access to what is hers by rights as his wife. Whatever it is that drives her, it is she who must put the key into the lock, she who makes the discovery of the many corpses, she who in terror drops the key and eventually exposes her intransigence to Bluebeard.

It is she who must be threatened for her failure to obey and she who must face the intense fear of death.

She will seek her ready rescuers only after she has been confronted with the reality of Bluebeard’s immense monstrousness and his intent to kill her.

In short, the 53% of white women who voted for Trump will only realize the enormity of their mistake when he threatens them personally at immense personal cost.

They will ask us for help once they are fully aware of the immediate danger to themselves and loved ones – not before then.

Or as Adrian Bott as @Cavalorn tweeted so elegantly on the dead bird app back in 2015,

‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.

So very prescient that he used a woman as a face-eaten victim.

Until a substantive number of these 53% of white women voters actually lose their faces so to say, they will not reach out for aid.

~ ~ ~

You may be depressed now. You may already be angry. But you must be prepared for the day that last bride, the final girl, the blundering substantive number of white women Trump voters emerge from their privileged state of heedless unawareness – unwokeness, dare I say – holding out a bloody key of knowledge asking frantically to be saved.

Because you’re going to have to be ready to save her sorry stupid ass in order to save us all.

If this wasn’t true humans wouldn’t be telling this story over and over so many times in so many ways, both as a warning to the women who need to be informed, and as a reminder to the rescuers they will be needed if Bluebeard is to be stopped from taking yet more victims.

Furthermore, you need to prepare yourself to tell your children and grandchildren about the myth of Bluebeard.

Now with Orangeskin.

To You Charming Gardeners

/81 Comments/in /by

Save for my spouse’s football games on TV, this Thanksgiving holiday is very quiet here. Our family celebrated together this past weekend because my youngest works in manufacturing at a facility which can’t shut down for holidays. They’re at work now as are millions of others who continue tend to our needs, forfeiting time with friends and family for us.

Someone sent me this graphic for which I have no originating attribution:

Thank you to the workforce whose labor has ensured our holiday feasting is amply endowed with this growing season’s finest.

Thank you especially to the undocumented workers who are worried about the incoming administration and what may happen to them and their families. Without these hard-working folks we would have a fraction of the produce and meats on our tables today.

Thank you to our neighbors Canada and Mexico, who likewise are concerned about what is to come, who have ensured our country’s economic growth through trade with the U.S. Some of the produce we’ve eaten this week wasn’t picked in the U.S. but imported from both Canada and Mexico.

It’s not easy to give thanks now. It’s tough to look past the pain of loss and the fear of what’s to come. But there may never be a better time to give thanks than right now, because we don’t know what lies ahead. Let’s do it while we can.

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” ― Marcel Proust

Thank you to you, our readers and donors who are the charming gardeners of this site. You help motivate us to slog on when it gets tough.

Best to you and yours this holiday. May we all find joy when we need it to keep us going in the year ahead.

Our Choice of Fathers

/37 Comments/in , /by

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

Happy Father’s Day to all the fathers in our community, to the fathers-by-proxy who’ve stood in place of missing fathers, to the mothers and others who’ve had to take on more than one parenting role.

Happy Father’s Day to my friends who aren’t parents at all – may you enjoy the convenient gender-biased hardware marketing blitz aimed at the do-it-yourself dads among us.

(I’m really going to enjoy my new power rotary multi-tool, must say. Been needing one for years and this summer I’ve got a lot of projects a certain father here won’t touch – it’s on me.)

This day offers us not only a chance to thank fathers but to think about fatherhood. It’s hard to escape fathers and fathering in a patriarchal society, but perhaps this is a best reason to consider the nature of fathers.

Especially when this year’s presidential election once again comes down to a choice of fathers.

~ ~ ~

The Los Angeles Times has an excellent piece on its front page below the fold today – Biden, Trump and 2 Very Different Dads – comparing and contrasting fathers Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and their progenitors Joe Biden Sr. and Fred Trump. (Sorry – I want to share a link but LAT makes it impossible for subscribers to do so this soon after publication. As I wrote this it wasn’t available on the LAT website. Article now available at LAT but the headline has changed to Biden brings up ‘Dad’ a lot. Trump, not so much.)

In essence the article describes a father who values dignity and a father who values transactions.

What a distillation.

While we’ve already made comparisons between these two candidates at the polls in 2020, the essentials of these two men have only become more stark over the last four years.

They exemplify neatly George Lakoff’s Moral Politics model of the nurturant parent and strict father which Lakoff first laid out in 1996, again in 2001 and 2016 editions, and discussed further in his 2010 text, Thinking Politics in Chapter 4, The Nation as Family. (Thinking Politics is available for free online for download as a PDF.)

It’s telling that Lakoff categorizes a bifurcated diametric model as nurturant parent and strict father – patriarchy is autocratic, rejects departures from black-and-white, wrong-or-right, my-way-or-the-highway binary thinking. Do as your father orders you to do.

The nurturant parent model is inclusive, in contrast. Any gender can identify as and model nurturing. Nurturing is adaptive, because needs change with conditions though fundamental values affirming the dignity of humanity remain set.

Which parent of this nation should we choose at the polls?

I can’t help think of a particular story about Trump as father, in the wake of Hunter Biden’s conviction and Joe Biden’s loving response.

Before the 2016 election, a classmate of Donnie Jr. recounted an episode of physical abuse they felt necessary to share with the public before voters went to the polls.

I was hanging out in a freshman dorm with some friends, next door to Donald Jr.’s room. I walked out of the room to find Donald Trump at his son’s door, there to pick him up for a baseball game. There were quite a few students standing around watching, trying to catch a glimpse of the famed real estate magnate. Don Jr. opened the door, wearing a Yankee jersey. Without saying a word, his father slapped him across the face, knocking him to the floor in front of all of his classmates. He simply said “put on a suit and meet me outside,” and closed the door.

A father willing to do this to his own namesake in front of witnesses, a father who apparently failed to assist his son whose classmate called him a “drunk,” isn’t the kind of person Americans needed in 2016 or in 2024 in the White House.

Reports surfacing only now that Trump while in the White House talked about executing persons including those who leaked information is extremely troubling. What if it had been his own family members leaking information?

If we are a nation as family, whoever the prospective leaker might be is family – and Trump has expressed a willingness to kill them.

Trump has already displayed openly a bent toward violence. The extrajudicial assassination of Iran’s Major General Qasem Soleimani was a demonstration of Trump using violence at the furthest reaches and beyond of his presidential powers. We have heard and read numerous examples of his incitement to violence including the attack on the capitol on January 6. What would he do to Americans at home and abroad if he was elected again?

And of course Trump has already promised retribution against his perceived enemies if he should be re-elected.

Which parent should we choose, indeed.

At least this election we still have this choice. Choose wisely.

Washington Post’s Sunday Night Editorial Massacre

/50 Comments/in , , /by

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

This morning’s Washington Post newsletter – The 7 – offered a peek into the outlet’s ideological bent.

The seven topics offered to subscribers before 7:00 a.m. to help them catch up, in order presented:

1 — Mexico elected its first female president yesterday.

2 — Hunter Biden’s trial on criminal gun charges begins in Delaware today.

3 — President Biden announced a new cease-fire plan for Gaza.

4 — Anthony Fauci is set to testify in Congress today.

5 — Billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars are being used for tuition at religious schools.

6 — Simone Biles won her ninth national all-around title.

7 — A Chinese spacecraft landed on the “dark” side of the moon yesterday.

That’s right: the U.S.’s fourth largest newspaper by number of subscribers feels that Hunter Biden’s trial is more important than the Biden administration’s efforts to stop the genocide in Gaza.

Never mind the protests across the country over the last six months which have spurred numerous horserace polling articles as well as coverage of conflicts on U.S. campuses.

The trial isn’t even being held in D.C. which the Washington Post calls home.

At the very bottom of the newsletter is this news blurb:

Before you go … some news from The Post: Sally Buzbee, our executive editor since 2021, has stepped down.

How benign that sounds. Happy trails, Ms. Buzbee, good luck on your future endeavors.

Except this is what happened, reported last night:

Steve Herman @[email protected]

Washington Post – Matt Murray, former Editor in Chief of The Wall Street Journal, will replace Sally Buzbee as Executive Editor until the 2024 U.S presidential election, after which Robert Winnett, Deputy Editor of The Telegraph Media Group, will take on the new role of Editor.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2024/06/02/sally-buzbee-steps-down-executive-editor-washington-post-matt-murray-rob-winnett-take-editorial-leadership-roles-new-newsroom-structure/

Jun 02, 2024, 10:58 PM

Did Buzbee leave willingly? WaPo’s certainly not telling us. It’s as if Buzbee accidentally fell out a window leaving a vacancy.

Here’s the first two paragraphs from the WaPo’s own report on the shakeup:

The Washington Post today announced Sally Buzbee has stepped down as Executive Editor. Buzbee has been with The Washington Post since 2021, leading the newsroom through the turbulence of the pandemic and expanding its service journalism, including Climate and Well+Being. Under her leadership, The Washington Post has won significant awards, including the recent Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.

Matt Murray, former Editor in Chief of The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), will replace Buzbee as Executive Editor until the 2024 U.S presidential election, after which Robert Winnett, Deputy Editor of The Telegraph Media Group, will take on the new role of Editor at The Washington Post, responsible for overseeing our core coverage areas, including politics, investigations, business, technology, sports and features.

Why would WaPo allow an Executive Editor who oversaw award-winning work to “step down”? Why would they promptly replace that EE with a temporary placeholder, and one who operated in a very different news organization?

It seems incredibly convenient that former Murdoch-News Corp editor Matt Murray will run WaPo just until the election.

Then WaPo will be helmed by an editor from a British conservative right-wing news organization, because we don’t have enough of our own Tories in media here. We need to rescue from Brexit import a Tory from a flailing media outlet overseas.

Not to mention Robert Winnett leaves a British paper with a subscriber base one-third the size of WaPo and with far less domestic and international impact.

When WaPo announced their slogan in 2017 – Democracy Dies in Darkness – one month after Trump was inaugurated, most observers scratched their heads. Would WaPo truly shine a light on that which is intent on killing our democracy? Would the paper be up to what has proven to be a monumental task?

But in hindsight we didn’t see that slogan for what it was. WaPo warned us it was going to turn off the lights. This abrupt change in editorial executives moving the paper further to the right is an indicator of yet more dimming of a truly free press.

Breathing Room: What Are You Growing?

/94 Comments/in /by

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

It feels like we’ve been running a marathon since jury selection began for the Trump hush money fraud trial, even though this site hasn’t concentrated as much effort on this prosecution. Bravo to the folks who have kept us up to date with their daily reporting from the court room and aggregation of reports from outside the courtroom. They’re definitely recovering from a marathon.

All of which is a way of saying we could use a little breathing room before the next big thing comes along and occupies our energy.

~ ~ ~

Because it’s what I’m working on this weekend, I want to ask what it is you’re growing. It’s nearly summer, gardens are being planted if they aren’t already well established. What’s in yours this season?

If you don’t have a garden are you growing other plants indoors?

I harvested a crop of sprouts recently, started before my garden beds were ready for vegetable seedlings. I’ve had a hankering for spicy sukju namul, a salad-like dish made with mung bean sprouts. The local grocery stores have been out of bean sprouts and I really haven’t felt like going to the local Asian grocery because I end up buying far too many additional items besides what I need.

Left: mixed salad microgreens; right: mung bean sprouts. Sprouts are four days old grown in quart-sized large-mouth canning jars equipped with a stainless steel mesh lid beneath a screw-on jar ring.

Left: mixed salad microgreens; right: mung bean sprouts. Sprouts are four days old grown in quart-sized large-mouth canning jars equipped with a stainless steel mesh lid beneath a screw-on jar ring.

It saves me a lot of time and money to simply grow my own sprouts. A couple tablespoons of seeds in a canning jar yields a tightly-packed quart of sprouts inside five days. They’re fresh and crunchy, have a slightly sweet taste missing in store-bought sprouts which have been stressed by packaging and shipment.

Ditto for microgreen sprouts – in fact two tablespoons of mixed salad seeds in a quart jar is a little too much, the jar is packed too tightly. I have enough for a week for myself and enough to give to a friend in just one jar.

Not gonna’ lie, you have to care for these several times a day. Each jar of sprout seeds must be rinsed with fresh cold water three times a day. It doesn’t take long but it’s more work than feeding a goldfish once a day (not that I raise goldfish to eat!).

At harvest time you’ll also need plenty of water to rinse away seed hulls. They won’t hurt you if you miss some, providing a little extra fiber and crunch if hulls remain in the harvested sprouts.

Bean sprouts are definitely more work depending on how fastidious you are about their appearance. To ensure a consistent pale appearance, the jar must be covered to prevent exposure to light which induces greening in the sprouts. The hulls are larger; many need to be picked off by hand. Many people also prefer to remove the long, thin root from the sprout.

Right: Jar of mung bean sprouts encased in a sleeve made of recycled navy blue jersey fabric scraps stitched into a tube. The

Right: Jar of mung bean sprouts encased in a sleeve made of recycled navy blue jersey fabric scraps stitched into a tube. The “sock” blocks light from reaching the sprouts, maintaining their light to white color.

But bean sprouts being larger also don’t need the same kind of equipment microgreen salad sprouts need. You can grow them easily in recycled milk cartons.

Since my last harvest I’ve had sprouts in just about every dish I’ve prepared for myself, from salads to sandwiches and stir-fry. I’ve also enjoyed my sukju namul though I think it’s time to start the next batch of bean sprouts so I can have that spicy dish again next week.

Egg and tofu salad on a bed of mixed lettuces, topped with mixed salad microgreen sprouts and a sprinkle of sriracha seasoning.

Egg and tofu salad on a bed of mixed lettuces, topped with mixed salad microgreen sprouts and a sprinkle of sriracha seasoning.

I really wish I’d grown sprouts when my kids were younger. I think they would have enjoyed both the growing and harvesting process as much as eating them. It’s a great way to ensure the family is getting enough vitamins and minerals from fresh vegetables.

~ ~ ~

If you’re not gardening outdoors or indoors, where are you getting your vegetables and fruits? At a local farmers’ market? Ordered from a farm co-op? Or from the grocery store?

Are you experiencing problems getting the vegetables and fruits you want? Bean sprouts aren’t the only vegetable I have difficulty buying at the store here in the Midwest – some of the largest grocery chains here don’t carry Napa cabbage reliably. The pandemic caused disruption but then the weather in California two winters running has also disrupted supply. I may have to try growing this vegetable hydroponically using the Kratky method.

Share your experience in comments below.

Treat this thread as open EXCEPT FOR ALL THINGS TRUMP. No Trump-related anything in this thread because this is a Breathing Room and we could use a change in topics.

“Not Your Mother’s Ireland Anymore”

/86 Comments/in , /by

Forty years ago today, I arrived in Ireland for the first time.

My family was taking one of those pilgrimages that Irish-American families take, or took at the time. Along with so many Irish people, over the course of 60 years in the 19th Century, my great-grandfather and all known ancestors of six other of my great-grandparents had left Ireland for the United States. My father grew up in a working class city outside of Philly that had an Irish Church, an Italian Church, and a Polish Church — as my relatives tell it, everyone was Catholic — with social halls and other civil society to match. It remained, even in my teenage years, the kind of place where Irish-Americans got jobs as cops. So he was raised and so we were raised investing a lot in that Irish-American identity.

We arrived in Ireland, with the names of distant cousins in hand, to see what this place called Ireland was really like.

I remember three things about that pilgrimage most vividly.

First, the night before we left, we went to the Medieval banquet at the Bunratty Castle, a totally schlocky tourist show, now just 20 minutes up the road from where I live. They’ve been doing the banquets ever since, and have expanded into Victorian culture tourism. I recall they gave you just a knife with which to eat your steak. Maybe I was permitted to drink mead.

My family did visit one of those distant cousins, in a 4-room house where a bunch of kids had been raised. The cousin of the same generation as my parents wanted to get out of the too-small house, so we walked down the street to the local pub at a bend in the road. The pub had a thatched roof. There was a fox hunt going on, so there were horses tied up outside the pub. I once believed, but was probably wrong, that that pub was just a half hour from where my now-spouse had lived all his life. My spouse and I have spent decades looking for that thatched roof pub, with no success. It provides a nice excuse to keep looking, anyway.

My family departed from Shannon, but we arrived in Dublin and so were in the Capitol on St. Patrick’s Day. It was quiet and much was closed on account of the bank holiday. One after another person asked us, with puzzlement, why anyone would come from New York to Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day, because New York and Chicago were where it was at on St. Patrick’s Day.

It’s a bigger deal in Ireland now than it was when my family wandered the famous heart of Dublin on a bank holiday so many years ago (but then, so is Halloween, to my spouse’s chagrin). We’ve got parades and everything is lit up green and oh by the way the Irish team won the Six Nations Championship in rugby, again, yesterday.

But so much of what we know as St. Patrick’s Day is about celebrating an American identity, the descendants of the Irish diaspora living in big cities with Irish-American political machines. And so much of that — a white, urban, working class identity — was consciously part of constructing race in America. So much of that was constructed as a way to reinforce conflict between freed slaves and cheap immigrant labor, starting in the 19th century, but still very real today.

I’m thinking of that manufactured conflict this year, as Trump tries to ride it back to the White House.

I’m thinking of that manufactured conflict this year, as outsiders seek to stoke the same conflict within Ireland. In the last year, the American far right had close ties to those stoking arson attacks and the Dublin riot, targeting migrants.

Since my spouse and I have moved back, we have a saying, “It’s not your mother’s Ireland.” For example, I used that line the first time I came back from a local Dunnes store location, the big Irish-owned grocery and department store chain. On one of my earliest visits to my in-laws, years ago, my mother-in-law and I went to the town center to the Dunnes store. I remember thinking it was slightly dingy with very little selection. Since then, Dunnes built a new location on the outside of that town, and Tesco built an even bigger store. Still, for over a year after I moved to Ireland, I avoided Dunnes because of my memory of that dingy, poorly-stocked store I visited with my mother-in-law years ago. So when I came back from the location on the outskirts of Limerick, I couldn’t wait to tell my spouse. This was like a Wegmans. Along with a reasonably stocked normal supermarket, it had a health food outlet, a Sheridan’s cheese counter, a high end bakery, a high end butcher counter, and a passable fishmonger. To this day, we call that supermarket “Not your mother’s Dunnes.”

Then there are the freeways, built with EU investment. We routinely drive on the freeway that didn’t exist when my father-in-law first took me to his home town outside of Galway and the freeway that didn’t exist when my spouse’s parents picked us up from Shannon on our first trip after we married, the one that now features a Barack Obama rest stop. Many of the roads in Ireland still suck — narrow lanes that require pull-offs for passing traffic. There aren’t a lot of roads I’m comfortable cycling on. But those freeways are totally new since my spouse and I got married, to say nothing of that pilgrimage 40 years ago.

But it’s the diversity that has really changed Ireland. Partly that’s being part of Europe. I joke, even still, that if I adopted a Czech or Spanish accent I might be recognized as an immigrant rather than perceived as a tourist, since so many recent arrivals came from Spain or Poland; people aren’t used to Americans coming to stay. In the last two years, there have been places in Clare County where I couldn’t figure out whether local colors were a Clare flag, or a Ukrainian one. Ireland remains more accessible to outsiders than some other parts of Europe; I hear a lot of Brazilian Portuguese on the streets, often students taking advantage of favorable student visas to learn English. There are immigrants from all over the world working in jobs at tech companies, many of the American multinationals. Most notably, though, are the number of migrants Ireland has welcomed, many (though not all) refugees from one or another war America has fought. Most families in Ireland have family members who’ve been welcomed in America, whether for a few years to work or, like my family, for six plus generations. It is only natural that Ireland return the favor.

And so, this year, rather than use Ireland’s privileged face time with the American President in advance of St. Patricks Day to discuss peace in Ireland or the fate of Ireland’s children in America, the Taoiseach pushed proud Irish-American Joe Biden to do something about his Gaza policy. Even the Irish, who take great pleasure in the long line of American Presidents it can claim, is peeved by America’s failures to do more about the Gaza crisis.

This time, Ireland is trying to teach America, not vice versa.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day.

It’s not your mother’s Ireland anymore.

But if the American far right had its way — those who’ve fought to exacerbate centuries-old manufactured racism and with it fear — they would return Ireland to what it used to be.

After Kansas City, Who is Next?

/91 Comments/in , , /by

A KC Chiefs-branded AR-15 from Guns.com.

I knew yesterday was going to be weird. I just didn’t know how weird.

Yesterday, the Hallmark holiday of Valentine’s Day fell on the Christian observation of Ash Wednesday — two very different kinds of days — and then the Kansas City Chiefs went and won the Super Bowl, which added the Chief’s parade and celebration rally to collide with the other two holidays. As the players were boarding the observation deck buses to start the parade, I noticed Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker, who had a cross of ashes on his forehead – a sign he had been to an early morning mass. Behind him was Taylor Swift’s boyfriend and future NFL hall of famer Travis Kelce. Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, right at the heart of the Super Bowl victory celebration.

All around the metro area, schools were closed, in large part because a sizable number of teachers, custodians, bus drivers, and cafeteria workers informed their supervisors that they would be taking the day off, and nowhere near enough substitutes could be found even if the schools wanted to try to hold classes. Similarly, many businesses found the same dynamic with their people wanting to take the day off. Some closed completely, while others tried to make due with a skeleton staff. Estimates of the crowd size went as high as a million people, and traffic around the area certainly made that seem about right.

I was not at the event, but know many who were. I was watching the wall-to-wall coverage on KSHB television, the “home of the Chiefs”. They had reporters all along the parade route, all throughout the crowd, and sitting in midst of the crowd at the rally on an elevated open-air temporary broadcast booth.

The parade rolled out, and many of the players who started on the rooftops of the observation buses got out and walked the route, engaging with the crowd. They signed jerseys, took selfies, and high-fived with what felt like everyone in the front row of the street. They danced and shouted, tossed footballs back and forth with folks in the crowd, and did impromptu interviews with KSHB reporters along the route. And while the parade proceeded, musicians and DJs were amping up the crowd at Union Station who were waiting for them to arrive.

Union Station is a grand old railroad building that sits at the bottom of a massive bowl. To the south is a huge grassy area, which goes uphill to the US National World War I memorial that sits on one of the high spots of the whole city. In that bowl, hundreds of thousands of people had gathered to party. There were old folks, who remember Len Dawson and the first Super Bowl which the Chiefs lost and Super Bowl IV, which they won. There were young folks, who were there in 2020 for the parade and party right before everything shut down for COVID, they were there last year, and they were back again yesterday. There were also the folks in between, who missed the Len Dawson era, but lived through the fifty year drought between Super Bowl wins. There were rich folks and poor folks, lifelong Chiefs fans and newcomer Swifties, there were folks from all parts of Kansas City, from the majority African-American folks south of the Missouri River to the white folks north of the river to the Hispanic community on the west side. Folks from the suburbs were there, from both Missouri and Kansas. Folks from the Ozarks and the Flint Hills, folks from Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, and all across the country were there. They brought blankets and lawn chairs and coolers, filled with beverages and food to last the day. It was a joyful sea of red.

The MC for the rally was longtime KC Chiefs radio announcer Mitch Hulthus. He cast the day as a massive history lesson, which other speakers who followed picked up on. KC Mayor Quinton Lucas and Chiefs owner Clark Hunt both spoke of how the Chiefs had changed KC’s image with the world, noting how the Chiefs brought the NFL draft to KC last year and were instrumental in bringing the World Cup to KC in 2026. Missouri’s republican Governor Mike Parson was greeted with loud boos that pretty much battled with the volume on the PA system throughout his speech (boos from Kansas folks because he’s the Missouri governor and boos from the KC folks because he deserves it for his long history of disrespecting Kansas City). When the players took the stage, the crowd went nuts. Every player was grinning from ear to ear, and as the microphone was passed around, the word “Three-peat” echoed louder and louder, and their praise for the Chiefs fans grew ever stronger. Some players were eloquent, some had had one too many adult beverages along the parade route, and quarterback Patrick Mahomes and Mitch Hulthus seemed to be working to keep the rally going while at the same time trying to keep the folks who had overconsumed from falling off the front of the stage. Finally it came to an end, the music came up, and the crowd cheered and shouted and danced.

And then the shots rang out.

Some folks did not hear them at all. Others heard them as they echoed off the surrounding buildings, and wondered where they were coming from. But the folks near Union Station itself heard them, and knew where they came from. Older folks looked around, many wondering what to do, but all the kids didn’t hesitate. Instead of “duck and cover” drills at school that their elders grew up on, they have been living with “active shooter” drills at school for their whole lives, and they took charge and told their elders what to do. Everyone started running.

They jumped barricades and ran into Union Station, which had been blocked off as a staging area for the players, their families, and folks on stage. They jumped barricades on the edge of the bowl, and ran for the side streets. The reporters anchoring the coverage for KSHB threw the broadcast back to the folks at the station, and dropped to the floor of their elevated broadcast area which suddenly felt very exposed and dangerous. At past rallies, it took hours for the area to clear, but yesterday it felt like it emptied out in ten minutes. Left behind were strollers, backpacks, blankets, coolers, and tents. Cell phones were dropped, and there were random empty shoes.

I won’t say more about the deaths and injuries, as the numbers still seem to be shifting. I won’t say much about the shooters, save to say that three people have been taken into custody, no motive has been announced or is obvious from the context, and no description of the specific weapons used has been released.

At the now-routine press conferences afterwards, the familiar words were said. “We stand with the victims . . . We thank the first responders . . .  We pray for those in the hospitals . . . Here’s what we know about the status of the investigation . . .” Just as one press conference was ending, though, the police chief stopped walking away, and turned back to the microphone to make one more statement: “This is *not* Kansas City.” (start at the 11:40 mark)

Those five words touched a nerve.

Social media exploded in Kansas City, with many chiming in to say “this is *exactly* who we are.” Kansas City set a record last year for homicide deaths, largely involving guns. There is huge distrust in the police within the African American community, because of a pattern of racist (and deadly) police interactions with that part of Kansas City that finally forced the resignation of the previous police chief. Similarly, a non-trivial part of the white community thinks the police are being too lenient with “those people” and that is why violent crime is so bad. In one of the more racist parts of Kansas City, a young black youth named Ralph Yarl rang a doorbell, mistakenly coming to the wrong house to pick up his siblings (he had the right house number, but should have been one street over), and the elderly white homeowner shot him through his door. Kansas City has a pattern of using guns to settle beefs, to “stand your ground” when threatened by innocent folks, and to a non-trivial degree, don’t trust the police to help.

For all the talk that “the Chiefs bring people together” (or, more generally, “sports” or “the Super Bowl”, as Biden said in his post-shooting statement yesterday), this is not the first time gun violence has touched the Chiefs in a very personal way. Back in December 2012, well before the Patrick Mahomes/Andy Reid era, 3rd year linebacker Jovan Belcher came to the Chiefs facilities on a Saturday morning, got out of his car, and pointed a gun at his head. He told then-general manager Scott Pioli and other coaches that he had killed his girlfriend/mother of his child, Kassandra Perkins. They tried to talk him into putting the gun down, but Belcher pulled the trigger and killed himself. Police soon discovered that he had been drinking, and had been having relationship issues with Perkins. When the police went to her home, they found her dead – shot and killed by a different gun legally belonging to Belcher. Maybe I’m the only one who connected yesterday with Belcher and Perkins. I listened to the news coverage, and heard nothing. I ran an online search for mention of Belcher in the last 24 hours, and came up with *crickets*.

Despite KCPD Chief Graves’ words, guns and gun violence have become an ordinary part of ordinary life, and not just in Kansas City. We use them to end our own lives, when we feel things are so out of control in our lives that ending it all seems like the only solution. We use them to settle beefs in our homes, either by using them to threaten or using them to kill. We use them to settle beefs in our communities. We use them to settle beefs in our nation.

And all that world-wide coverage of the Chiefs that Clark Hunt and Mayor Lucas talked about is now going to come back to bite Kansas City. In Europe, every major shooting in the US makes folks wary about traveling here. Now, even as Kansas City worked hard to win the right to host several games in the 2026 World Cup, this shooting will make hosting those games that much more difficult — and not just in Kansas City. Who wants to risk their lives for a sporting event?

This was not the first shooting involving the Chiefs. It wasn’t the first shooting of the year in Kansas City, or even the first shooting of the day in Kansas City. As one local sports talk-radio host said yesterday, Kansas City has joined the list of cities where you say the name and everyone thinks about guns and violence and death, like Uvalde or Sandy Hook. When folks say “Super Bowl rally”, it will evoke the same memories as Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (which happened on Valentine’s Day six years ago!), the Pulse Nightclub, and Columbine High School. This is who we are, now.

I’ll say it again: no, Chief Graves, this *is* who we are. It’s who we are, in Kansas City and across the country. The gun in that photo above lists for the low, low price of $2999.99 at Guns.com. It is, however, out of stock. Why doesn’t that surprise me?

Until we learn to argue with one another without leaping to violence, the question is not if there will be another shooting like this, but where it will be. I’m not one of those folks who were asking “how could this happen here?” yesterday. My question is simply “Who is next?”

________

Corrected to note that Ralph Yarl survived being shot. I inadvertently mixed up that shooting with another event.