What the hell is a famous Walker Evans picture of an impoverished American mother and her children doing at this point in this video about Nazi sadists?
AI is so so stupid. Don't you guys ever fact check this junk? Artificial "intelligence" is going to be the total death of a sense of reality being reliably attached to reality. Unless law and deputedly democratic governments take serious action to stop it, democracy won't just be endangered, it will be impossible.
Built in 1909, the Johnson Public Library is a Carnegie-style brick building that sat between Railroad Street and the Gihon River. Johnson is a former mill town where two rivers meet. Over the years, countless floods have devastated the library and town, most notably in 1927, 1996 and 2023. The library lost 1,500 books in the recent flood and has been operating out of the basement of the nearby Masonic Temple. When they heard about a grant opportunity, library staff and town leaders worked together to apply, in the hopes that they could create a new future for the library and their town.
On April 25 and 26, the library was transported from its home of more than 100 years and carried half a mile away to higher ground to Legion Field on School Street, below the elementary school. The Herculean effort took all night and included dozens of community volunteers, utility and construction workers, road and moving crews, first responders and 28 bucket trucks. Route 15 was shut down for three hours, and the power lines had to be removed to make way for the formidable 40-by-45-foot library on wheels.
New England Building Movers used diesel-powered hydraulics and a series of six dollies to maneuver the library forward on 48 wheels. It moved slowly and got stuck turning tight corners — a few trees had to be cut down, and three inches were shaved from its eaves to make it fit. Despite the late hour, townsfolk lined the streets to see the slow parade of utility trucks and the glowing brick structure, which took up the entire road and was lit up with lights.
The library’s new location is outside the floodplain; it will be expanded with an addition that will include more space for community activities. This project is funded by a $1.68 million grant from the Vermont Department of Libraries through the U.S. Department of the Treasury Capital Projects Fund grant program. Community members applied for the grant, coordinated the all-night move and celebrated the library’s new home.
In the latest episode of “Stuck in Vermont,” Seven Days senior multimedia producer Eva Sollberger saw the library crossing the Pearl Street bridge in the twilight hours — it had to be lifted above the guardrails — and attended the community celebration in the afternoon on April 26. It rained all day, but no one had to worry about water in the basement at the library’s new home. Staff hope to reopen the new and improved library by the end of the year.
My sister and others I've talked to never had junk calls on their cell-phones until after Musk and his incel-boy army started stealing files in the federal government. I am going to assume they're selling the data they've stolen, including things like contact information. And I have no doubt that they are going to use it for far worse than to financially profit from it. The Constitution and the law has done nothing to prevent this when both should have prevented the executive branch irregulars stealing it to start with. This is a prelude to Communist China style control of the population, that's so obvious that mainstream journalists are noticing it.
if Trump and the Republican-fascists say that parents should replace the toys that won't be under the Christmas tree with guns. I mean, look how many of them have posed with guns on their family Christmas cards in previous years. That he might, and only a very remote might that is, be taken down by the disappointment his policies will cause during the Christmas season is something I might take but it is one of the most terrible of truths about the American public under our Constitution and the culture and legal regime it gave rise to. It should have happened far faster and over the intentional immorality and consequent amorality of Trump and his supporters and the media, the sacralized "free press," which did so much to impose Trump on us in the beginning and reimpose him on us after they sandbagged and forced out Biden, one of the most rarely moral and competent presidents in the history of the country.
Trump is the worst president in history, our Constitution is doing nothing to remove him as he brings on an economic catastrophe because he is too stupid to learn what a tariff is and how they operate as a consumer tax on the citizens of a country that imposes them - no doubt he learned everything he knows about tariffs from his corrupt fascist dad saying they should replace the income tax, something his idiot economic advisors, Navarro (his LARP name: Ron Vara), the idiot Howard Lutnick, the smiling idiot Kevin Hassett . . . tell him because they are whores of Trump and the billionaires who own him. I'll point out two out of just that three are, like Trump, products of Ivy League schools. Just to point out the role that our alleged educational elite played in this.
Whenever you hear one of the As Seen On TV lawyers talk about the Constitution saving us you should now start to believe they have gone from being naive to being liars because if the Constitution were going to save us from what the Constitution should never, ever have permitted to start with, letting an insurrectionist, a known asset of Vladimir Putin and whatever corrupt billionaire, despot or not who says they'll build a building he can put his name on, a criminal who stole and very likely sold some of our most important security secrets, . . . . . . . . . be nominated and elected as president after the most corrupt and criminal first go round, that would have happened long ago.
Our Constitution had corrupt features installed in it from the beginning, many obvious ones, many less obvious ones and some enhanced or installed later by, for example, Supreme Court rulings - never installed by Constitutional means, the absence of a provision forbidding the Court to do that one of those most dangerous of features - it will not save us. Republicans, their theorists and, most importantly of all LAWYERS AND LEGAL SCHOLARS have identified and weaponized every defect in that document, intended by the framer-slaver holder-financiers and the more subtle and Court invented ones to install corrupt politicians and TV stars to serve anti-democratic ends. It is a document and a political system AND A LEGAL SYSTEM which has been so weaponized and once that has been done, the thing cannot be turned back to something less bad that ran on the tolerance of a margin of corruptible voters of sometimes good will and the sense of "honor" among politicians and "justices" of that dangerous court.
If I sound like a broken record on that it is because you have to repeat the hard truth more times than even a flimsy lie constructed for easy sale in order for that truth to overcome even temporarily told lies. The lies of our Constitutional lore and civic religion are far more deeply embedded than that and getting that corrupt document changed AND REMOVING THE POWER TO OF THE SUPREME COURT TO AMEND IT AT WILL is going to be a huge job, one which I will almost certainly not live to see happen, short of a disastrous and bloody and catastrophically failed revolution that will teach that lesson faster. I doubt that will happen, a bigger miracle of a revolution coming up with something better is less likely than a divine miracle doing that. The putrid and lying civic piety that has been installed in the American public about the Constitution is, itself, a barrier to peaceful change. One of the reasons I had the reaction to the lying history of "Hamilton" was because it added a huge lie about one of the worst of the framers, one who at least one historian said was one of the three most dangerous men in the United States at the time of his death - his killer being one of the other two. But he was hardly alone in those who early on tried to game the Constitution they had constructed for evil ends, that is the real history of that document in the hands of the framers, themselves.
Update: I can't recall who the third one of the three named by the historian as being the most dangerous men in the United States in 1804 was but I'd put John Marshall, the author of Marbury v Madison the year before in that position.
IF I WASN'T AFRAID THAT I'D JINX HIM I'd announce that I am 100% all in on Pritzker for president.
Of those being often mentioned, he seems to be the best to me, so far. He seems to know what is needed whereas Gavin Newsome doesn't. He has Washington experience which I consider an absolute requirement for anyone who wants to be president. But I won't jinx him by supporting him until after the convention.
I DON'T WATCH movies about the Catholic Church because they're either nauseatingly and dishonestly pious or sensationally and dishonestly anti-Catholic. I never watch movies about real People because they are so unreliable and, so, inevitably bear false witness. That didn't bother me until I found out in conversations online that many PhD holding teachers at accredited universities and prep-schools mistake movies for history or biography. If they're so duped by Hollywood why should anyone expect those with lesser educations to make the distinction between reality and make-believe? Make-believe is dangerous when it's mistaken as reality.
In the many things I read and heard about the upcoming conclave and about the events leading to it, I was horrified to hear someone say how many People on their plane trip to go to Rome for the funeral of Good Pope Francis were watching the movie INCLUDING A BISHOP. I mentioned how I suspected the putrid and pious and grotesquely unrealistic "The Shoes of the Fisherman" led to the election of Karol Wojtyla as John Paul II - a really bad papacy - so hearing that bishops were watching that movie put me on my guard.
So far as I know, very little about what has gone on in any modern conclave has been leaked by a reliable source and what has leaked is often tainted by ulterior motives so I doubt much about it is accurate. Much of the lore surrounding the elections of Popes is sensational and even more obviously ideological and polemic so it's mostly useless if you want to really know. That is what happens when such a choice is made in secrecy by a small group of insiders - like the legendary smoke-filled rooms where presidential candidates of the major parties were said to have been chosen. Of course, back then we got a few good ones whereas today good presidents are even rarer than they once were, The well meaning democratic reforms of the primary system were more than swamped by the Courts opening up the airwaves to millionaires and billionaires flooding the American political system with lies so as to influence voters. I don't think opening up the choice of the head of the Catholic Church to that would be likely to make things better. Imagine if the likes of Tim Busch and the media operations like EWTN and The National Catholic Register (NOT TO BE MISTAKEN WITH THE GENERALLY EXCELLENT NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER!) and their like around the world flooded the airwaves with American style lying.
For some ideas of what might be an alternative to that but which is almost certainly not likely to ever happen, you might look at this piece at Religion Dispatches. Much as I favor democracy as the only potentially valid means of selecting a legitimate secular government, without major protections against the influence of lie campaigns and prejudice ruling, its capacity for producing better results drastically erodes. There is no world-authority who could do that for the Catholic Church. Hell, we can't even protect American democracy at home from it under our Constitution.
As I said, we'll have to see what the Cardinal Electors give us. If they give us someone at least as good as Francis was - and while I think he was a great Pope, he was hardly perfect - all well and good. If they give us someone as timid as Paul VI, as power-hungry and controlling as JPII or as incompetent as Benedict XVI (dear God, not another academic theologian!) that will be typical. There have been remarkably few great presidents of the United States, even though we get a new chance to get a new one every four years. There have been remarkably few great Popes though I think there have actually been a higher percentage of good ones than we've had good presidents. Some of them like Benedict XV have been far better than they have been accorded by history (the late Richard McBrien convinced me of that) some have been downright awful. Just like leaders in putative democracies are, it's a mixed bag.
It's a lot safer and easier for movie makers to make a sensational and false movie about the Catholic Church than it is about secular politics, the old idea that a Catholic audience is going to refuse to watch a movie if the bishop tells them not to was likely always exaggerated and is certainly not true today. I don't care to watch fiction when I can read about reality. I like fiction to be fictitious and not something that tries to risk rational people mistaking it for reality. I've heard at least two people who believed "Conclave" informed about the truth when it is reported to contain nonsense - an unknown Cardinal presenting himself to the Conclave as a Cardinal Elector when those qualified to participate have to be publicly declared by the Pope before hand and a Cardinal breaking the seal of confession - which would mean automatic and immediate excommunication if they did it and every other person in the Conclave would know that. Lord knows what's in it that I haven't read about, yet.
Here are words to live by, which come from my favorite comedy series, Corner Gas "MOVIES AREN'T REAL."
