NY21, This Is an Emergency!

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A farmer, not a politician.

A couple of nights ago, I attended a Zoom meet-and-greet with Blake Gendebien, the Democratic candidate to replace Trump toady Elise Stefanik in New York Congressional District 21 when she vacates it to be vetted by the Senate for her appointment as UN Ambassador. As you might expect, the voters in the mostly rural, 86% white NY21 in the far northeastern part of the state, are as far politically from the voters in New York City, where I live, as New York City is geographically from NY21. The district voted solidly for Trump in all three of his presidential campaigns.

The GOP believes it now owns the district, though Stefanik, who was first elected in 2014, was the first Republican to represent it since Hamilton Fish IV was redistricted out in 1992. A long-term holder of the seat before he, too, was redistricted out was the “staunch progressive” Paul Tonko, who now represents NY20.

To get an idea of how radically NYS and US politics have changed in recent times, before migrating north up the Hudson River, NY21 represented New York County, otherwise known as Manhattan. Back then (in the 1960s and 1970s), it was represented by actual liberal Republican (and Liberal Party member) Jacob Javits, who early in his Congressional career, as an example of his political inclinations, opposed Taft-Hartley because it threatened the strength of labor unions.

Who is Blake Gendebien?

Blake Gendebien (pronounced JEN-da-bean) is what is now known as a “moderate” Democrat. (Republican operatives call him “far left.” More about that in a moment.) He’s a dairy farmer and small businessman who with his wife Carmen, a Cuban immigrant he met while studying agriculture and business at Penn State, owns 500 cows and 1,500 acres near the St Laurence River. Like Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz, Gendebien is a dad and a former coach. He says he wants to “strengthen the border” and get rid of regulations that hamper small businesses like his own.  He owns a gun, says he supports the Second Amendment and subscribes to Gun Sense Voter principals. It seems, so far, that only the Gun Sense part could possibly be controversial in his district.

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Republicans in Congress Are Fine with Musk Power Grab

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First phone lines in Kathmandu being laid in 1959 with help from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This photo is from an archived USAID site. At the time of this posting, the USAID site itself was dark.

There are some extraordinary admissions from powerful Congressional Republicans in a NOTUS article by Haley Byrd Wilt, Shifra Dayak and Ben T.N. Mause :

In interviews on Monday night, Republican senators — including members of the Appropriations Committee tasked with setting funding levels — dismissed Musk’s moves to consolidate his power and seize sensitive government systems to shut down spending. They say that Musk, in rejecting appropriations laws passed by Congress, is simply following Trump’s priorities.

Some, like North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, even acknowledged that what Musk is doing is unconstitutional — but “nobody should bellyache about that.”

“That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,” Tillis said. But “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”

Other Republicans argued that Musk is making the government more efficient, and they said they’re glad — if nobody on Capitol Hill is going to slash spending — that someone has finally taken charge.

“The actions that have been taken with USAID are long overdue,” Sen. Bill Hagerty said. “The agency is out of control.”

And Sen. John Hoeven said “they need to be accountable.”

Yes, a Republican says, a US agency that has been at the center of foreign aid (and secret foreign policy) for more than half a century needs to be held accountable, but the party’s choice for effecting that? The world’s wealthiest man and his team of barely legal social media minions, none of whom has been vetted by Congress or any other Constitutionally empowered entity.

Or do they want to make the case that the Constitutionally-elected and seated president picked him to wield extraordinary powers over the government, so it’s virtually Constitutional somehow? No, they don’t say that. They admit it runs “afoul” of the Constitution–but who cares?

Adios, “strict constitutionalism.” Hello, interesting times.

Statement from the family of Ayşenur Eygi – International Solidarity Movement

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Today our family and our community are in shock and grief, as we wrestle with the reality that our beloved Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi is gone. Like the olive tree she…
— Read on palsolidarity.org/2024/09/statement-from-the-family-of-aysenur-eygi/

Down the Xitter

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Jokes about decapitation may be lethal to your X/Twitter health.


I’ve been meaning to write about this for a couple of months: I am now persona non grata at X/Twitter. It’s kind of a shame, as my Twitter conversations were once a major source of inspiration for this blog. But honestly, I don’t miss being on Twitter much these days. What I used to get from it in the way of stimulating discussions with people I agreed with (and more often didn’t agree with) I now get to some degree on Bluesky. More about that in a bit.

Ever since Elon Musk was forced by a judge to make good on his empty threat to buy Twitter last year, it was clear to me that my time on that platform was marked as doomed. I had no intention of paying for a service that was deteriorating in value for me and millions of other long-time users by the day. But I believed I had as good as, if not a better chance to outlast Musk there. I underestimated his tolerance for being profoundly hated, and my own vulnerability to the consequences of that behavioral quirk.

My tenure at Twitter, which began in August 2008, ended in early September, not long after I “celebrated” my 15th Twitterversary. The beginning of the end was my tweet quoting a news story about Australian multi-millionaire Tim Gurner, who told an audience at a “Property Summit” in Sydney, “‘We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40, to 50 percent in my view. We need to see the pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.”

My response to this heartlessness: “How to get to the front of the line when the guillotines are ready.”

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It’s Willfully Stupid to Pretend the Shakespeare Authorship Question Is Resolved

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More than meets the eye?

In response to the recent publication of Elizabeth Winkler’s lively and thought-provoking Shakespeare Is a Woman and Other Heresies, which is, among other things, a powerful book-length argument for academic freedom in English departments, Slate.com published a review by staff writer Isaac Butler labeling Winkler’s book “Shakespeare Trutherism” and urging a supposedly long-overdue full stop to Shakespearean authorship studies. Or, as the title of Butler’s review grumbles, It Is Long Past Time to Retire the Oldest, Dumbest Debate in Literary History.

The reason the debate may actually be the dumbest is because one side argues the way this title and the review itself argue, pretending there’s nothing to debate. Unfortunately for the intellectually curious, the truly dumb (read, willfully incurious) side comprises the academic gatekeepers. Doubting “the Bard” is a surefire way to avoid hiring or career advancement in traditional English departments and publishing houses. But the authorship of the Shakespeare canon is far from being a settled matter. The deeper scholars outside the academy dig into the question, the shakier the orthodox case inside looks.

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The Readiness Is All: ChatGPT and the Future of Authorship

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Act I, Scene I

[Enter three pigs, Jolly, Merry, and Happy]

Jolly: Oh, how fair the morn has broken,
And how sweet the dew on the grass.
We three pigs, no words unspoken,
Shall build our houses that shall last.

Merry: But hark! What threat looms o’er us?
The wolf, who seeks to do us harm.
We must build strong, lest he come nigh us,
And bring upon us his foul alarm.

Happy: Fear not, dear brothers, for I shall go,
And build my house of straw and hay.
With haste, I’ll have it done, and lo!
The wolf shall never come our way.

…

[Enter wolf, snarling and snapping]

Wolf: These pigs, they think themselves so clever,
With their straw and hay, so flimsy, light. 
But I’ll show them, with my cunning, never
Shall they escape my appetite.

–ChatGPT, given the prompt to write The Three Little Pigs in the style of Shakespeare

The other day, after a discussion we were having about the danger the artificially intelligent ChatGPT tool seems to pose for unemployed writers like myself, my wife and I decided to test the robot with a series of prompts to see just how much of a threat it really is.

We weren’t just interested in having a chat with ChatGPT; we wanted to see what ChatGPT could do. What kind of literary stuff was this writing robot made of? After some simple writing exercises, we asked it to write the story of the three little pigs in the style of Shakespeare. You can see some of the result above and the whole mini-play below. Continue reading →

I’m Back. And I Think Assange Should Be Freed.

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{{Information |Description={{en|1=Demonstration in front of Sydney Town Hall in support of Julian Assange, 2010, December 10}} |Source={{own}} |Author=Elekhh |Date=2010-12-10 |Permission= |other_versions= }} Category:Julian Assange [[

I wrote my last post for this blog all the way back in May 2017, before Julian Assange was booted out of sanctuary in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London. Since then, he has been convicted of skipping bail, indicted under the US Espionage Act, and begun fighting extradition to the US from his current residence of Belmarsh Prison in the UK.

For the past nearly six years, visitors to this blog might understandably have been led to believe I am not sympathetic to Assange. My last post certainly was not.

But before I turn to other topics, let me disabuse any readers suffering the misimpression that I’m anti-Assange. I have never been in favor of Assange’s being brought to the US to face trial for his part in uncovering the atrocities of the Iraq war. I think WikiLeaks provided a great service in making the world aware of the realities behind that war, and they made several other important contributions toward shedding sunlight on the corruption behind the curtains of world power centers, as well. People need this kind of service to help us see our “leaders” for the imperfect, corruptible weaklings so many of them are.

However, one thing ought to be clear to anyone who has followed Assange’s career since 2011: He’s not so perfect a human himself, but, like the world leaders he has exposed, is all too human. His behavior around the Seth Rich bullshit is just one example of what I view as a self-dramatization fetish that has led Assange to make numerous blunders that have only made his situation worse than it had to be.

But I really don’t want to pile any more crap on the poor guy. His suffering (some of which he brought on himself) has gone on far too long. Biden should pardon him and let him go home to his family, who have also suffered for his sake beyond their fair share.

And now, on to other topics.

Did Seth Rich Leak to WikiLeaks?

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assange.jpg

Julian Assange plays coy on Dutch TV

There’s a simple answer to the question posed in the title to this post. Either he did or he didn’t. The question was raised directly to Julian Assange last summer by a Dutch TV interviewer, and it has become “relevant” (as far as relevancy goes these days) again because of a sputtering non-story that broke on Fox News this week that nevertheless lit a fire under conspiracy theorists on left and right.  Continue reading →

Reagan Spending vs. #TeaParty Austerity

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christofpierson's avatarTragic Farce

Would Tea Party Republicans have voted to give Reagan his 50% spending increases and 700,000 more government jobs?

In an article from the Washington Post on “Tea Party” Congressman Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina, these paragraphs caught my attention:

Mulvaney mostly meets with voters through weekly town hall meetings. Sometimes he brings with him a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation, full of bar graphs and fever charts depicting the growing federal deficit and the surging cost of health care. In January, Mulvaney added a chart on the automatic spending cuts, known as sequestration, which next year will total about $100 billion.

To him the numbers make sense. “In the greater scheme of things, they are not that big,” Mulvaney said.

But, every once in a while, a personal anecdote punctures his certainty. Earlier this month, a friend and former campaign volunteer stood up at one of the town hall meetings to tell Mulvaney…

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Tortured Argument from a Straight Talker: On Democrats, Progressives and Centrists

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“Two parties can never do justice to the diversity of thought in a polity. By restricting virtually all dialogue to false either/or, win/lose dichotomies, they can only ossify the division between the powerful and the people. The actions of a bipartisan oligarchy are necessarily restricted to a very limited palette, the colors of which the ruling class chooses. Thus, we wind up with “health care reform” lacking a strong public option, despite such being very popular among the voters. Robust publicly funded health care, let alone a single payer system, is ruled out out of hand by the leader of the allegedly “progressive” half of the oligarchy.”

christofpierson's avatarTragic Farce

I’m in the middle (or hopefully, at the end) of a much more involved debate than I was expecting on Twitter with a fellow named Milt Shook, who operates a blog called, colorfully enough, Please…Cut the Crap. It’s on a topic that is bound to get a reaction from me: the question of whether progressives harm Democrats’ chances with centrists and other purported persuadables by criticizing the party’s standard bearers. He puts his case in a nutshell in the last graph of an article he calls “Stop Complaining About Dems. In 2014, Voters Will Still Only Have 2 Choices: Them or Disaster“:

Voters have two choices every November, and these days, the choice is between competence and disaster. When you trash “the Democrats” mercilessly, the Republicans gain. And if you don’t think we lose when Republicans gain, then you haven’t been paying attention. And we cannot…

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