L.

I love jily, history and art.

[ewatson]

Harry Potter book series by J.K. Rowling 1997- 2007

[libbyframe]

Most powerful wizard

[sunandherpetals]

lucky me <3 

[eyeheartfarms]

Faery’s hoard

[allcatsconstitutethesamefamily]

“Live with us and be a rabbit.“  From Good Times on Our Street by Gates, Huber, Peardon and Salisbury, 1945.

[artfully-wayward]

Anne Sexton, A Self-Portrait Through Letters

[headspace-hotel]

the theme that always resonates me the most in stories is “the world is cruel; therefore I won’t be.”

[blueviolet56]

[wishingwellfairytales]

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less’ - Lewis Carroll

[artbyg7]

Sometimes a family is a candy man, a nanny, one orphan, 4 self-orphaned kids and a witty cat and I think that’s beautiful.

Also why aren’t more people talking about this movie

[whitepeopletwitter]

[rezby]

[cheese-greater-official]

Holy-

[no-longer-another-bondi-blonde]

In 1990, the high school dropout rate for Dolly Parton's hometown of Sevierville Tennessee was at 34% (Research shows that most kids make up their minds in fifth/sixth grade not to graduate). That year, all fifth and sixth graders from Sevierville were invited by Parton to attend an assembly at Dollywood. They were asked to pick a buddy, and if both students completed high school, Dolly Parton would personally hand them each a $500 check on their graduation day. As a result, the dropout rate for those classes fell to 6%, and has generally retained that average to this day.

Shortly after the success of The Buddy Program, Parton learned in dealing with teachers from the school district that problems in education often begin during first grade when kids are at different developmental levels. That year The Dollywood Foundation paid the salaries for additional teachers assistants in every first grade class for the next 2 years, under the agreement that if the program worked, the school system would effectively adopt and fund the program after the trial period.

During the same period, Parton founded the Imagination Library in 1995: The idea being that children from her rural hometown and low-income families often start school at a disadvantage and as a result, will be unfairly compared to their peers for the rest of their lives, effectively encouraging them not to pursue higher education. The objective of the Imagination library was that every child in Sevier County would receive one book, every month, mailed and addressed to the child, from the day they were born until the day they started kindergarten, 100% free of charge. What began as a hometown initiative now serves children in all 50 states, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, mailing thousands of free books to children around the world monthly.

On March 1, 2018 Parton donated her 100 millionth book at the Library of Congress: a copy of "Coat of Many Colors" dedicated to her father, who never learned to read or write.

[vizuart]

Lenka Clayton - Dead Flowers in the Conservation Department (2016)

[vizuart]

Monica Rohan - Of course not (2019)

[blogology]

QAnon - (Grab A Tinfoil Hat)

Have you heard about QAnon ? No ? Well grab a tinfoil hat because you’re going to need it. QAnon is the mind-boggling mother of all conspiracy theories, hatched on the internet, that refuses to die. In fact, amid the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s found new life and is flourishing like the virus itself.

It’s spreading everywhere. Wild QAnon conspiracy theories are regularly re-tweeted by old Tweety-Pie Trump himself. The Oregon GOP has just selected as their official Senate candidate a notorious QAnon conspiracist, Jo Rae Perkins. The whole unhinged farago that had previously bubbled away in the toxic online fever-swamps of right-wing craziness is now surfacing in the mainstream. 

So what is QAnon ? It’s hard to know where to start because QAnon is so all-encompassing. It seems to have originated in one of the notoriously shadier areas of the internet with cryptic ‘crumbs’ of ‘information’ posted by a person or persons using the screen-name ‘Q’. Hence QAnon (Anon as in Anonymous). Q’s ‘insider’ posts claim to be informing the public about a vast, secret conspiracy to ‘save the USA’ led by Donald Trump. Seriously !  

What exactly will Trump be saving America from ? Central to the QAnon conspiracy story is a belief that Trump’s predecessors had all been ‘criminal presidents’ in league with people and groups that have featured in previous far-right conspiracy theories. These include the ‘global banking elite’, Hillary Clinton ‘death squads’, ‘deep-state’ intelligence agents, Hollywood ‘liberals’, and an imaginary child sex-trafficking ring somehow connected to the satanic Democratic Party to name but a few. Sickened by the grip these evil manipulators have on America, the story goes, patriotic military top-brass begged Trump to run for the presidency so he could lead them in ‘taking back the country’.

Because clearly Trump’s personal history of high morals and integrity msde him uniquely qualified for such a task. After an Oscar-worthy display of acting that disguised his secret mission, Trump got himself elected to be the first ‘honest’ President ever (Yes .. I know) ! Now, esconced in a position of power and with his military allies, he will at some point (which strangely never seems to come) arrest all of the cabals and criminals who have secretly run the country and ship many of them off to Guantanamo Bay. Trump’s coming purge of the elites is called ‘The Storm' by QAnon conspiracists. A storm of arrests, political turmoil, and glorious Trump-follower vindication that they were right all along.

There’s a LOT more, though, much of it even madder. It morphs and adjusts over time to dismiss anything that casts doubt on the core fantasies and incorporate new stories that support them. The coronavirus pandemic, for example, has QAnon conspiracists claiming variously that it’s cover for Bill Gate’s master-plan to subjugate the world, a plan to microchip everyone via vaccines, that shutdowns are stage one of a ‘deep state’/elites plan to enslave Americans, that 5G masts are causing it, and so on. 

And that’s just scratching the surface. I really haven’t been able to do justice to the sheer range and nuttiness of it all here but if you’re curious and want to follow the trail of QAnon crumbs further yourself the internet offers a multitude of rabbit holes to disappear down. Just make sure you can find your way back to reality when you’re done.

Part of the attraction of QAnon for it’s believers is that it brings a huge array of previously disparate right-wing conspiracy theories conveniently together under the single unifying banner of a new Messiah (Donald Trump) and a coming political apocalypse. It’s a lunatic mashup that makes a great story. Better than anything you’ll find in a James Bond movie or Tom Clancy novel. I would say you couldn’t make stuff like this up except that, clearly, someone has.

QAnon provides confirmation (if it were needed) of the extreme gullibility and inability to deal with reality of some on the right-wing. Their desire for an alternative reality in which there are shadowy elites to blame for everything bad in their lives and where Trump will heroically save and avenge them. Ironically, it’s the very same people who parrot his silly ‘Fake News’ slurs who are the ones avidly gobbling up the nonsense peddled by QAnon.

It’s a sobering thought that you live in a world where the President of the United States regularly repeats and amplifies wild internet conspiracy theories on Twitter and QAnon believers embrace his daily lies as facts in a self-sustaining loop that excludes truth and reality. Yes, we know life is absurd but does it have to be quite so batshit crazy ?

Of course for Trump it can serve a practical purpose. Remember the start of the impeachment hearings when his Republican minions tried to to derail proceedings by dragging up the discredited QAnon ‘deep-state trying to oust Trump’ conspiracy theory along with debunked pro-Russia propaganda that it was Ukraine and not Russia who meddled in the 2016 US elections. 

In the end, I suppose, it may depend on your mood how you view QAnon and it’s believers. In a good mood you can probably enjoy laughing at the Red-Hats waiting fretfully for a Trump/Military coup that will ship everyone they hate – non-whites, liberals, Muslims, feminists – off to Guantanamo and restore them, the faithful, to their rightful place in charge of society. It’s self-inflicted satire.

If your mood is darker, however, it’s an unwelcome reminder that, throughout the ages, large numbers of people have always believed passionately and with complete conviction in the most stupid, cruel, absurd, and often harmful things. It’s a long time now since Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity. QAnon is confirmation, if anyone needs it, that some things never change.  

Does it matter ? Well, it might if the beliefs of so many people are profoundly disconnected from reality. There are plenty of examples throughout history of that happening, and they rarely end well. As Voltaire warned, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

Blogology

(cartoon Mike Peters)

[adrasteiax]

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”

— Donna Tartt, from The Secret History

[dankmemeuniversity]

[goodboylupin]

One of the most underrated things about Harry Potter (the character, not the series as a whole) is that the kid with absolute shit eyesight is a prodigy at spotting a tiny golden ball flitting around in a field that’s like five hundred feet wide. What a little legend he is.