please talk among yourselves. my next diary is proving a bit more time-consuming than i’d hoped, especially since i lost a hella lot of links that i’d collected for it. come to that, RL is proving more time-consuming than i’d hoped… old, slow, and in the way more than ever. ;-)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
There is really no adequate way to thank you ms wd for the compassion and understanding that you have personally extended to me of late. Although, I doubt anyone is wondering where i disappeared to, among other things I have devoted myself to sticking to extremely local politics. For over a year prior to local elections last April, I informally partnered with people about protecting what is left of the WI state constitution, court battles were won and the hopes of turning a special interest city council from a 4-3 majority to a 4-3 public interest change, through door knocking and local blogging informational means, worked out to be a 6-1 public interest majority now at the helm of that same city government.
An outdated redevelopment authority that had taken questionably and supposedly blighted properties and essentially gave these away to their friends for private financial gains, financed by public borrowing thru the TIF mechanisms is now in the throes of being eliminated with the new city council majority. This same former city council majority and the redevelopment authority have been held at bay through public initiative, as they’d tried to ignore the state constitution’s public trust doctrines, in collusion with Scott Walker’s WI DNR, that decided since before statehood (1848) when this region was a territory, that public ownership of and public access to the waters of the state was to be preserved.
With an extremely heavy heart I will reveal that my 21 yr-old child passed away unexpectedly last week while residing with the other parent. Diagnosed as residing on the high functioning autistic spectrum, our last conversation involved my “child,” attempting to explain to me working in blockchain to mine bitcoin and how savings of $50 off last month’s electric bill had been accomplished. This child got bored with HTML and C+++ by age eleven, self taught when the only option for internet we had then was dial-up. Related crises for my child is part of what has demanded my focus and parental attention. Sincerest apologies for just vanishing and I don’t pretend to guess what the future holds with blog participation.
Immediately (grassroots as opposed to party affiliations) support for the Midwest Environmental Advocates who just challenged WI GOP Scott Walker’s Fox Con deal and who were instrumental in the judgements upholding the WI state constitutional public trust doctrine and who just filed suit opposing the FoxCon and who do so much with so little deserve your immediate support. Just tell them nonq sent you.
http://midwestadvocates.org/
Right at the heart of WI’s most fearless and genuine activists is the person who creates and lives MAL Contends. The latest post explains an aspect of the fight against industrial agriculture which is destroying our once proud environmental leadership role in the Great Lakes and upper Midwest and nationally.
http://malcontends.blogspot.com/2018/06/wisconsin-supreme-court-to-release.html
Hugs and peace and resolve ms wd
Thanks for the soapbox.
My sincere condolences nonquixote.
Thank you, nonquixote, for all you have been doing – my one actual, physical protest was in support of Wisconsin’s champions way back when, and I truly admire your political achievements in light of my feelings of being a fish out of water at that one time. Also thanks for making your departed child present to us here – those of us in similar ongoing heartbreaks (and I know wendye is one, hence her compassion) do know what you have been enduring, and now you will keep your child in your heart, travelling with you in all you do. Heartfelt condolences to you also.
best wishes to you in your public & private struggles. I am sorry for your unimaginable loss.
Thanks for the kind thoughts Al, Juliania, j in oly and of course you ms wd. I’m in a bit of a spin with friends, my family and people like all of you good folk expressing your care and concern for me. Telling the stories is most therapeutic for me and having a place to be heard is golden.
Part of today’s big stories here, the first being a day without a bucket of tears for my daughter, is the Koch Brothers owned WI Supreme Court ruling against town zoning and in favor of another CAFO extracting all the water they want and dumping liquid manure on close to 5000 acres in the central sands region of the state. Local zoning control over land use in any of our communities will be in question now, statewide.
The state of Michigan just awarded the final permit to allow a sulfide rock metallic mine on historic Menominee tribal lands in Upper Michigan, 150 feet away from the Menominee River, tribal lore claiming the river as the sacred birthplace of their people. When it is operational and there is a spill, it will contaminate this fairly clean and restored river and major natural fishery and spawning grounds, along with all of the Bay of Green Bay.
It becomes confusing as to which hurts more, in a way, one child or the whole western Great Lakes being lost.
Peace where we can find it and Resolve to carry on.
oh, my, how wonderful it is to see you again, and learn all that you’ve been doing locally in Walkerstan. and i’m so glad to have been able to have been of some comfort, or at least provide an ear…in this epically tragic time in your life. ‘the other parent’ just about sums it up as far as far as i remember your awesome daughter calling ‘the maternal parental unit’ (or close). i can barely imagine the heartbreak of experiencing a child who dies before her parent..
i’ll read the links as time allows, but for now: for you, and for your daughter who’s now in spirit, love, and this poem by mary oliver some say kinda makes you look forward to crossing to the other side.
Well, I guess I’m toast over there at C99. The bridges are burning. The democrats have won, no dissent is tolerated, for long.
Just in time for the election season, imagine that. It’s almost like someone planned it that way.
Anyway, thinking hard on what to do. I need something tangible to try to use the knowledge I’ve gained. I was thinking local, but I’ve long focused on the big dogs controlling this country and the planet. It just keeps getting worse.
you meanin’ on accounta the only three new diaries at c99 are gjonsit’s? he certainly i prolific, lol.i can sure enable you as an author here again, and your diaries might do better than mine, but this place (and dagnabbit) is now partially by way of a launching pad to cross-post there, even w/ all the bitchin’ about: too long, no text boxes, too many fax, can’t read the colored ink’, and all that. let me know. but give me a bit a time to remember how to do that, as i have RL obligations/desires up the wazoo, and i might be almost ready to post a new diary…. much the same as the complaints i’d laughed about above. and in my email, it was a senior moment: what i’d mentioned about jtc was ‘vote tulsi gabbard’, omg. how about ‘gabbard/cynthia nixon: 2020’ bumper-stickers.
but there are other readers diaries places i’ve posted in the past, but the huuuge drawback for me was: no conversation. op-ed news, reader supported news, or you could submit to dissident voice, even counterpunch, fwiw.
Thanks. I’m thinking more along the lines of something active, like trying to hook up with some people here in Portland and start some trouble before the next election.
Writing? I don’t know, I’ve said what I wanted to say. Usually I just do it to rant because I don’t really have anyone to rant with anymore. I’m not sure I can post at C99 now, the insults and seeming animosity from some have been a bit much. My daughter, her friends, granddaughter, etc., just aren’t there yet. :), so I write. But it’s summer now.
Maybe go help start the “Summer of Rage”.
gotcha. ‘summer of rage’ would be your own invention? i like it, in any event. i’ll go check out CP; gawd’s blood, is he vermin. i mean: ‘Namaste’.
And speaking of Gabbard, there was an article on Modi at Counterpunch this am.
as i’d said: modi is vermin.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/04/four-years-of-modi/
Hi, wendye and other friends. Just thought I’d pop in and say hey here also since I’ve made an appearance at that other site. I’m not really up on the nitty-gritty of things but I have noticed we USians seem to be headed to hell in a hand basket or on a fast train, maybe in a hand basket on a fast train. I only know that I find it ever more important to keep in touch and to let my friends know they are remembered. Y’all please consider yourselves so apprised. I’ll try in future not to be such a stranger. (And maybe even share a thought or two about some of the subjects you do such a yeoman’s job of writing about.)
hey, wascally wabbit. good to see you, but i must apologize that my eyes are so crap by tonight,my brain so frazzle-rocked, that i’m not quite able to decipher your comment. but allow me until tomorrow, and i swear (lol) that i’ll try to remember to reply tomorrow. (she sayed hopefully)
ah. no, don’t be a stranger, and yes to: to hell in a hand basket, over the waterfall… faster and faster. as to commenting over yonder, i’d had occasion to say to someone yesterday at c99 that while the (john travolta film) archangel michael said he’d invented standing in line…i’m pretty sure that i’d invented commenting at multiple websites. ;-)
but we are so apprised, and caring and solidarity are indeed ever-more important in these dark days. and thank you, wabbit. oh, and mr. wd told me that our burning eyes were from the wildland fires in the area filling our valley w/ smoke. seems to have dissipated for now, but climate chaos grows and grows.
On the ‘add what you’d like’ theme, I’d just like to add (before enjoying your latest which I see is up today) a quote from a book I am really enjoying, picked up as a freebie down at our townhall/firehouse/library/mailbox complex:
“…Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—-they are the life and soul of reading;—-take them out of this book, for instance,–you might as well take the book along with them;—-one cold, eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;—-he steps forth like a bridegroom,–bids All hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.
“All the dexterity is in the good cookery and management of them, so as to be not only for the advantage of the reader, but also of the author, whose distress, in this matter, is truely pitiable: For, if he begins a digression,—from that moment, I observe, his whole work stands stock-still,—and if he goes on with his main work,—-then there is an end of his digression.
—–This is vile work.—For which reason, from the beginning of this, you see, I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with such intersections, and have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going;—and, what’s more, it shall be kept a-going these forty years, if it pleases the fountain of health to bless me so long with life and good spirits.”
[The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
by Laurence Sterne]
I tried to copy the exact punctuation – but see I have erred in not putting enough — around ‘This is vile work’.
I thought the whole extract a very fitting description of this beautiful site and wendye’s work herein, not to mention the many worthy contributors she has encouraged. Forty years? One can only hope…..
Carry on, all!
wow, that’s the original? for some reason i’d always thought it was this one i play every once in awhile while tears well up. guess it hits too close to home. .
an x-file: your comment came in via email. your avatar and name were on the recent comments list, but not on the open menu. turns out that askimet had called you spam, not even ‘trash’. restored.
RT Video: US restores White Helmets funding
CBS: State Department: Trump authorizes release of some funds for Syria’s White Helmets
Washington, June 14 — President Donald Trump has authorized the release of approximately $6.6 million for the White Helmets, a Syrian civil defense organization, and the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism, a U.N. agency that is investigating war crimes committed during the Syrian conflict, according to a statement. That accounts for a fraction of some $200 million in frozen funds for Syria stabilization programs — a move that leaves nearly $195 million in limbo.
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement Thursday that the U.S. government “strongly supports” the White Helmets.
“These heroic first responders have one of the most dangerous jobs in the world and continue to be deliberately targeted by the Syrian regime and Russian airstrikes,” the statement said. “Since 2013, more than 230 of these brave volunteers have been killed while working to save innocent Syrian civilians.”
Nauert’s statement made no mention of the remaining $193.4 million that remains frozen, and officials could not say whether a decision had been made to eliminate it altogether.
thanks, greyson. it’d be funny if it weren’t so deadly to actual syrians, wouldn’t it? wasn’t it you who’d brought one of those videos showing these brave rescuers pullin’ a kid out of the rubble, and doin’ a ‘take two!’ a person has to be willingly blind not to look at the abundance evidence brought by beeley, barlett, narwani, et.al. to understand what a dastardly and dangerous psyop it all is. one thing is, though, it sure separates the #fake left from the eyes wide open radical anti-imperialist left jig quick.