Ponietz
Ponietz's JournalSchlump should have been toast in 2021
Leaving Wray as FBI Director was a monumental mistake. Wray was Schlump’s hand-picked successor to Comey.
Appointing Garland as AG was a monumental mistake.
They both played patty cakes when Lady Liberty screamed for justice.
Biden believed a message of unity would win MAGA over.
He was wrong and bowed out too late for a meaningful Democratic primary.
God bless Joe Biden but he miscalculated.
The strangest insult in US politics: why do Republicans call it 'the Democrat party'?
On Tuesday, the former presidential candidate issued his latest condemnation of the “Democrat party”, endorsing a bizarre linguistic tradition among haters of the institution. As Donald Trump told a rally in 2018: “I call it the Democrat party. It sounds better rhetorically.” By “better”, of course, he meant “worse”, as he explained the next year: he prefers to say “the ‘Democrat party’ because it doesn’t sound good”.
In removing two letters from “Democratic”, the former president is adopting a jibe that’s been around since at least the 1940s. Opponents of the party long ago decided, for some reason, that this brutal act of syllabic denial would shame their opponents. Democrats don’t seem particularly devastated by the attack, but Republicans and those who love them have stuck with it. We hear it regularly from party luminaries such as JD Vance, Mike Johnson and Nikki Haley; pragmatic independents like RFK Jr; and media voices across the vast spectrum from Fox News to Infowars. Last week, even Tulsi Gabbard, once a Democratic presidential candidate herself, wrote an op-ed proudly describing her departure from the Democrat party and support for Trump.
But even if the misnaming doesn’t exactly leave liberal snowflakes in tears, it does serve a purpose, says Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s a marker of affiliation – an indicator of the media a person consumes and the politicians they listen to. She recently heard a friend remark on “Democrat party” policies and asked why they used the term; the friend wasn’t even aware they had done it. “Language is contagious, especially emotionally charged political language,” Holliday says. “Most of the time, we don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to think very hard about every single word that we’re using. We just use it because it’s what other people do.”
That lack of awareness “shows how normalized it’s become”, says Larry Glickman, Stephen and Evalyn Milman professor in American studies at Cornell University, who likens the term to a “schoolyard taunt”. It suggests the party is “outside the mainstream of American politics so much so that we’re not even going to call them by the name they prefer. We refuse to give them that amount of respect.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/sep/05/democrat-party-republicans
Repubes works for me.
NM Forestry Division giving free trees for Arbor day
https://www.krqe.com/news/new-mexico/nm-forestry-division-giving-out-free-trees-for-arbor-dayThe second Friday in March is recognized as Arbor Day in the Land of Enchantment. This year it will be March 8. “Urban and community forests provide a multitude of critical benefits to residents such as cooling shade, improved mental and physical health, reduced air and noise pollution, and cleaner water,” Alyssa O’Brien, Urban and Community Forestry Program manager said in a news release. “Trees even have economic benefits by drawing more visitors to businesses, raising property values and lowering crime rates.”
Applications for the Arbor Day Celebration Trees are available here, or email Alyssa O’Brien at Alyssa.obrien@emnrd.nm.gov.
The nation's top law enforcement officer sat on his ass during the mayhem
It’s the Trumpstank.
Curious his former law firm represented Rosneft and Gazprom during his tenure there. If he were a lawyer today in civil private practice, imputed disqualification rules prohibit his taking a materially adverse position to the scope of his firm’s former representation. Ethical rules impute disqualification because of a lawyer’s continuing duty to former clients to maintain confidentiality. Those Russian energy giants would disqualify him in a civil case. I presume Putin would disqualify him in a criminal case.
In the criminal arena that appearance generates suspicion in a reasonably prudent person. Hand-picked successor to the castrato Comey, Mueller, spies, interfering in investigations, Gaetz and Jordan hiding their tracks by summoning him to testify, accusing him of politicizing the FBI to help Biden. That appearance of impropriety, at the very beginning, is a certainty, for me, 7 years later. He’s also a member of the Federalist Society.
Didn’t Wray watch events on TV about the same time as the human canker on 1/6/21? He failed to protect our nation’s capital during an emergency; that’s unforgivable.
NY Times and the 30-year anniversary of the backpass law introduction
[link:https://theathletic.com/3397785/2022/07/20/thirty-years-of-the-backpass-rule
Trawling back through footage of Graeme Souness’ 70-yard backpass for Rangers against Dynamo Kyiv in 1987, or Peter Schmeichel and the Denmark defenders running the clock down in the 1992 European Championship final against Germany, is a bizarre experience, not least because you wonder how that kind of thing, which everyone in the game was doing, had been tolerated for so long.
“If I watch games from that time — I don’t want to lose respect for the players who played then, I had my idols — but today I can’t watch this anymore, especially the view from the goalkeeper,” Pascal Zuberbuhler, the former Switzerland goalkeeper and FIFA’s senior football expert, tells The Athletic. “I was excited at that time, ‘Oh, great football game’. Backpass. In the hands. Rolling out. Backpass. In the hands. Today, I can’t see this. It’s crazy.”
Back in 1992, the main reason for introducing the backpass law was to reduce the amount of timewasting to make football more entertaining. Thirty years later, timewasting still exists in one form or another and probably always will, but even the backpass-law sceptics — and there were plenty of those at the time — accept that the game has benefitted hugely from the change.
(Amidst the quotidian posts of The NY Times’ errors, euphemisms, misnomers, omissions, and outright lies)
I add a perspective to this piece.
In the latter 80’s virtually every world soccer fan knew of René Higuita, “El Loco”, Columbia’s electric, offensive-minded GK. Owners and coaches worldwide saw the potential in having a GK with ball skills and focused on it. Also, indoor soccer in the US during the 80’s already required GK’s to play with their feet, and every indoor soccer player I ever met was just biding time until the weather was nice enough to play outdoors. The spirit of the game had already changed by ‘92 — High School, youth, and Sunday city league teams had adept, ball-playing GKs.
FIFA had already instituted rule changes, twice, to cut the shenanigans; first, by prohibiting the GK from running in her box with ball in hand. This necessitated a second attempt — by not allowing the GK to pick the ball up twice without it being touched by another player. By ‘92, skilled GKs the world over made a joke of even the modified rules.
So the current rule was FIFA’s third effort to remedy the absurdities created by the Higuita revolution. As far as I’m concerned it’s the Higuita rule.
The Times omitted the most salient facts.
[link:]
I was chased by a Nazi and saw him get punched
In 1972, I was 11. I loved life, knew everyone in the neighborhood, played in the streets and parks whenever school was out. Everyone knew me—I was always knocking on doors to sell little league raffle tickets, do yard work, or collect on newspaper subscriptions.
The kids would play touch football in the street after dinner and knew to avoid the yard of our ex-Nazi neighbors. The wife would call the police if the ball went in her yard. The grown daughter was a recluse who always wore army surplus. The father was a German scientist relocated here at the end of WW2. There was no animosity amongst my pals but the wife’s behavior was a joke. This family wanted to be left alone and we didn’t bother them. I already knew half the lesson.
One summer afternoon I was walking home and happened to look behind me. The father was walking quickly toward me, 100 yards or so behind. It startled me so I quickened my pace. I looked again and the man was running now. It terrified—I ran and jumped a wall leaving him behind.
My mother and father came home from work. I stayed near their closet until they arrived—still hysterical. Inconsolable.
Did I mention my father was a Marine? Saipan, Okinawa, Nagasaki occupation. Coolest cucumber I ever met. All he said was, “Is everyone ready to go out to dinner?”
We all got into the station wagon. “Where does he live?” he said.
We parked at the curb and, though I didn’t want to, had to come with him to the Nazi’s door. The Nazi answered. “My son tells me you chased him today”.
“Yeah, look here!” and the Nazi crosses the threshold to point to his window. It had a BB hole in it.
I was joyful in my innocence. “I didn’t do it! I wanted a BB gun for Christmas and you said no!”
“He says he didn’t do it”
“I don’t give a shit what your son says!”
It all happened so fast but in an instant it was Clay standing over a fallen Liston. My father had dropped the guy with one punch. He towered over the Nazi whose nose now bled, and told him if he ever came near me again he was a dead man.
We returned to the car. I was triumphant. The matter was dropped. In that moment I understood the whole lesson:
Don’t provoke Nazis but when they cross the line they must be punched in the face.
When many say the 48 Laws of Power is the most important book
they’ve ever read, we’re witnessing devolution in real time. It was published in 2000. Machiavellianism spawned neoliberalism and both prioritize power while ignoring everything that makes human existence meaningful.
Another idea I stumbled upon yesterday is the concept of psychopolitics. Asimov published his first Foundation novel in 1942. In them, the science of psychohistory has reached an apex. He was prescient in seeing that psychology has a profound impact on the traditional scientific disciplines.
Then, in the early 50’s L. Ron Hubbard (Scientology) published a forgery on brain washing and psychopolitics, attributing it to Beria of the Soviet Secret police. It was only considered black propaganda, then, but the traitor caucus seems to have adopted its strategies.
Here is the opening of Hubbard’s forgery:
American students at the Lenin University, I welcome your attendance at these classes on Psychopolitics. Psychopolitics is an important if less known division of Geopolitics. It is less known because it must necessarily deal with highly educated personnel, the very top strata of "mental healing."
By psychopolitics our chief goals are effectively carried forward. To produce a maximum of chaos in the culture of the enemy is our first most important step. Our fruits are grown in chaos, distrust, economic depression, and scientific turmoil. At last a weary populace can seek peace only in our offered Communist State, at last only communism can resolve the problems of the masses.
Our unprotected online personal data and rogue corporations like Meta make it EXTEMEMELY EASY to drive wedges into our psyches.
Korean-born and German Philosopher Byung-Chul Han outlined many salient aspects in his 2017 book: [link:https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/dec/30/psychopolitics-neolberalism-new-technologies-byung-chul-han-review
So it’s truly ironic that psychopolitics, from a fraudulent inception, could be the most important academic discipline today. Free people must know and understand it to remain free.
"We're gonna be okay, I promise"
https://twitter.com/kenolin1/status/1563746582607958016NASA encouraging everyone to grow chile plants
https://www.krqe.com/news/space-news/nasa-encouraging-everyone-to-grow-chile-plants-after-space-experiment/]There’s a link to get seeds. Pretty cool.
Torres said they found the crop very adaptable but growing plants in space takes longer, which can be a setback. He also explained that instead of growing straight up, the plants grew into a sphere, making the physiology of the plant unique.
Now, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has decided to fund a new project aimed at growing chile around the world to show that the crop can adapt to many different environments as well as space.
The team working with NASA will send chile seeds for you to grow the crop, and Torres said that even though the crop is usually grown in New Mexico, they also want New Mexicans to take part. Schools are also welcome to grow the plant in their classrooms. As of July 1, 2022, there have been 110 entries for the “Space Chile Grow a Pepper Plant Challenge.”
If you love samba like I do, here's a brand new masterpiece
https://kikodinucci.bandcamp.com/track/foi-batendo-o-p-na-terraIt moves, like Tom Zé
Lyrics
Foi batendo o pé na terra I’m tapping my foot on the earth
qué vovó me ensenou a sambar So it can teach me samba again (My translation)
😢🇺🇦 🕊 🕯
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Gender: MaleHometown: NM
Current location: Taos
Member since: Thu Jun 28, 2018, 06:04 PM
Number of posts: 3,322