DEAR READER
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
trying on a metaphor
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
titsay
@theartofmadeline
No title available
Show & Tell
Three Goblin Art
JBB: An Artblog!
cherry valley forever
hello vonnie
Stranger Things
No title available
Cosimo Galluzzi
we're not kids anymore.
h
RMH
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Romania
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from India
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Germany
seen from United Kingdom
@mikerass
Oh my goodness gracious,
What you can buy off the Internet
In terms of overhead photography!
A trained ape can know an awful lot
Of what is going on in this world,
Just by punching on his mouse
For a relatively modest cost!
Donald Rumsfeld, June 9, 2001
We don't need no immigration
We don't need no gun control
No dark sarcasm by the media
Liberals, leave us saps alone
Hey! Snowflakes! Leave us saps alone!
All in all you just won’t give us bricks for the wall.
All in all you just won’t give us bricks for the wall.
Rooftop Photos of Paris at Night
“Over Paris” is a gorgeous ongoing photo project by photographer Alain Cornu, who brings his 4×5 large format field camera onto rooftops around the Paris for views of the city at night. Cornu has spent nearly a decade adding photos to the series.
Seascape, Night Effect, 1866, Claude Monet
One morning, when JR awoke, an image lingered from his dreams: The wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and above it a young kid peering curiously over.
A child just 1 year old, who has “no idea that’s a wall that divides people — he has no idea of the political context,” JR imagined. “What is he thinking?”
He had no answers to his question, but the question stayed with him — and eventually, the French street artist decided to give it form. This week, within days of the Trump administration’s decision to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program protecting 800,000 immigrants, JR erected a massive artwork towering dozens of feet above the existing wall.
As Boy Peers Curiously Over Border Wall, His Artist Asks: ‘What Is He Thinking?’
Photo: Courtesy of JR
The demon-haunted republic
The great Carl Sagan feared the emergence of the Trump fiasco over twenty years ago:
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...”
- Carl Sagan 1995 -
"Max is not going to text me back. I'm not going to hear his voice again," Mayor Megan Barry said of her only child. The 22-year-old died last month of an apparent overdose near Denver.
The Garden Of Monet At Argenteuil 1873
Claude Monet
By CRISTIANO LIMA
Sen. Mark Warner and Rep. Adam Schiff, the two top congressional Democratic leaders on government intelligence, on Sunday backed calls for an independent commission to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
“I do think the events of this week call out the need for an independent commission quite separate and apart from what we do in Congress,” said Schiff on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Schiff first called for such a probe on Twitter on Saturday.
Warner echoed Schiff’s call during a later appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” while noting that creating such a commission would be an uphill battle politically.
“Listen, if we could get an independent commission, I’m open to that,” he said. “That means you’ve got to pass a bill, [and] the President’s got to sign it.”
Read more here
Be the watchful observer to your own life.
Anne Frank on her first day at school in Frankfurt, 1932
via reddit
Trump’s War on the Truth Tellers
A normal president and a normal White House respond to facts or arguments they disagree with other verifiable facts and arguments that make their case.
But Trump and his White House don’t argue on the merits. They attack the credibility of the institutions that come up with inconvenient facts and arguments.
They even do it preemptively. Last Thursday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer warned the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office couldn’t trusted to come up with accurate numbers about the costs and coverage of the Republican’s replacement for the Affordable Care Act.
“If you’re looking at the CBO for accuracy, you’re looking in the wrong place,” he said.
Bear in mind the director of the CBO is a Republican economist and former George W. Bush administration official who was chosen for his position by the Republican Congress in 2015.
Attacking the credibility of an institution that delivers unwelcome data has a long-term cost: It undermines the capacity of that institution to function in the future.
For more than four decades the U.S. budget process has depended on the CBO’s analyses and forecasts. Under both Republican and Democratic appointees, it’s gained a reputation for honesty. The trumped-up attack will make it less able to do its work in the future.
This has been Trump’s MO.
When as a candidate Trump didn’t like the positive jobs numbers emanating from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, what did he do? He called the official unemployment rate “such a phony number,” “one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics” and “the biggest joke there is.”
It’s possible to take issue with the ways the Bureau of Labor Statistics measures unemployment, but why undermine public trust in the Bureau itself?
Spicer has tried to wrap Trump’s institutional attacks in populist garb: “I think [Trump] addressed that in his inaugural speech when he talked about shifting power outside of Washington D.C. back to the American people because for too long it’s been about stats … and it’s been about, what number are we looking at as opposed to what face are we looking at?”
Rubbish. By all means consider real people, real faces, real problems. But the only way we’re going to understand the true dimensions of problems real people face is with data about them from sources the public trusts.
If the public stops believing those sources are reliable, where else can it look? Presumably, only Trump himself.
On a few notable occasions the intelligence agencies at times have been notoriously wrong but over the long haul they’ve been competent and professional – and a president and the American public need their assessments.
So when Trump sends out disparaging tweets with “intelligence” in quotation marks and blames the intelligence agencies for the downfall of his first national security advisor, he’s impairing the ability of these agencies to do their jobs in the future.
When he labels a member of the judiciary who stopped his original travel ban a “so-called judge,” and attacks the appellate judges who uphold the stay as a judicial system “so political” it’s not “able to read a statement and do what’s right,” Trump isn’t just disputing their specific findings. He’s calling into question the legitimacy of the judicial branch of government.
When the press disputes Trump’s claims – that millions attended his inauguration, he won by a landslide, the election was marred by massive voter fraud, undocumented immigrants account for a disproportionate number of crimes – he doesn’t respond with data to back up his assertions.
Instead he calls the press “the enemy of the American people,” “dishonest,” purveyors of “fake news,” and “the opposition party,” and he questions their motives (they “have their own agenda, and it’s not your agenda, and it’s not the country’s agenda.”)
When pollsters show Trump has a low approval rating, he doesn’t say he expects the rating to improve. He attacks the pollsters, asserting “any negative polls are fake news.”
When scientists come up with conclusion he disagrees with, he doesn’t offer other sources of scientific data. He attacks science.
Trump thinks climate change is a hoax. His new head of the Environmental Protection Agency said last Wednesday that climate change isn’t caused by human activity.
What does the Trump administration do? It tells EPA staffers to remove pages from the EPA’s website concerning climate change, and threatens to review all the agency’s data and publications, and cuts the budgets of all scientific research in government.
Trump and his administration aren’t just telling big lies. They’re also waging war on the institutions we depend on as sources of truth.
In so doing, they’re undermining the basic building blocks of American democracy.
Shame on them.
Fifty days of carnage
March 10, 2017
It’s been fifty days but it feels like fifty years. Since January 20, Trump has issued two “travel” bans, he has lied blatantly about imaginary voter fraud and President Obama “tapping his wires.”
We heard about terrorist attacks that didn’t actually happen and Trump has promised “one of the greatest military build-ups in American history" which is as unnecessary as the ridiculous wall on the border with Mexico. And as expensive.
The Republican sycophants in Congress started to abolish the affordable healthcare ordinary Americans have begun to rely on. And then there is Russia… and Ben Carson...and Betsy.
Trump has insulted the judiciary and keeps accusing the “totally dishonest” media of being the opposition. As far as veracity is concerned it’s a case of the kettle calling the pot black, of course, but he might have a point because media organizations trying to report facts are by default opposing the “alternative facts” of the Trump administration that many think of as lies.
One of the most dangerous “alternative facts” was presented by his new EPA director Scott Pruitt who dismissed a basic scientific understanding of climate change by denying that carbon dioxide emissions are a primary cause of global warming.
The gravest threat to the United States and the entire planet is global climate change and our deplorable leaders do not even acknowledge it’s happening. It can not be halted or reversed with aircraft carriers or Muslim bans, and certainly not by denying it altogether.
When the irrational fear of terrorist infiltration, sharia law, immigrants and refugees, marriage equality and outsourcing jobs is long forgotten, the polar caps will still be melting and the sea levels will still be rising dangerously.
The good news is, the Trump inauguration was a wake-up call and the resistance is beginning to show results. The first “travel” ban was stopped by the courts and displays of public anger in town hall meetings about plans to take people’s health insurance away have had some effect.
But we also need to start saving Mother Earth from Trump, Pence & Pruitt. And we’re running out of time.
Every day, another horror
February 17, 2017
Donald Trump’s crazy news conference on Thursday provided plenty of insanity to last us to the end of the week. Not for the man himself, though. Today, the Associated Press reports that Trump is considering mobilizing the national guard to round up “unauthorized” immigrants. He’s also working on a new and improved travel ban after the federal courts stopped his first crude attempt at a Muslim ban.
It’s been a fairly crazy first four weeks: the travel ban created widespread chaos and economic uncertainty, we heard claims of a “massacre” in Kentucky that didn’t happen and accusations that the media didn’t cover terrorist attacks like Paris and Nice that were all over the news media for days when they happened.
We had a first resignation, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, on day 25 of the carnage presidency because he misled about his ties to Russia. Flynn had to go because he lied, imagine that! And the next guy didn’t even want the job.
There are now efforts underway in Congress to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency while the climate change news gets more frightening on an almost daily basis.
Alas, all the crazy “alternative facts” and the dangerous executive orders still find the support of all too many Republican voters and the GOP enablers and collaborators in Congress. The rest of the anxious nation is awaiting the next Trump lunacy with bated breath.
In loving memory of the crew of Apollo 1, lost this day (Jan. 27, 1967)
Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom
Edward H. White
Roger Chaffee
Hell week in Washington
January 27, 2017
Donald Trump is really going to build that shameful wall, it seems, and relations with our neighbor Mexico have plummeted to a low not seen since the mid 19th century. The degradation of our environment has begun with green lights for the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. EPA employees have been hit with gag orders. The webpage on the threat of global climate change has disappeared from the White House website.
Donald Trump has initiated a completely fake and unnecessary assertion of massive voter fraud. His top advisor Kellyanne Conway has given us the concept of “alternate facts.” Instead of making up with the nation’s security services, Trump went to the CIA headquarters to complain about the media misrepresenting the attendance numbers of his inauguration.
The promised crackdown on refugees and immigrants started with an executive order that could slash funding for so-called “sanctuary cities.” The Department of Homeland Security has suspended all refugee resettlement interviews.
On Monday, Trump kicked off his efforts to erase Barack Obama’s legacy by formally scrapping the flagship Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal with 11 countries in the Pacific rim.
Every day brings fresh horrors but there is hope, too. The global women’s march was an impressive demonstration that the resistance to Donald Trump’s policies is significant and he has only been in office for a week.
A march in support of science is next. We have to march to support science—in America in the 21st century—who would have thought!
