Things That Made Me Smile This Week

Five things that made me smile this wee.

1.   I got the most smiles from our weekly visit with our daughters.  They live about 40 minutes away and have been coming over to have dinner with us on Saturdays.  We’ve also been watching series together.  We watched all four seasons Fargo, which I totally loved.  The dark humor was awesome.

I didn’t think I would enjoy Castle Rock as much; I was totally spoiled with how great Fargo was.  I was a bit confused at first watching the first season episodes and it didn’t really make a lot of sense to me until the episode before the last one.  I had a big aha moment when I realized what was happening.  It took me back to my old favorite series, Dark Shadows.  The end left me wondering if The Kid was the devil for sure or was, he trapped in a world in which he didn’t belong?  I know how I wanted it to end; it didn’t go the way I wanted.  That’s okay.  We’ll start watching Season 2 next time we’re together.

Watching series together has been a great way for us all to relax and unwind.  We’re all pretty much home bound so we don’t have a lot of news to share.  When Bill has evenings off, we watch series together.  We watched all of Roots and Stranger Things.  I saw Roots when it aired originally in the 1970s and wow! In 2022, it’s still powerful.  I totally love Stranger Things and have enjoyed watching those kids grow up.  Season 4 was the best ever and I’ll be very happy when Season 5 is released.  Now the three of us are watching the Centennial miniseries.  That’s another show that is very well made.

2.  The next thing that made me smile was working the phone banks for Democrats running for office.  I absolutely adore and respect our Representative Andy Kim.  He is so down to earth and wants to help us regular people.  He’s not as progressive as, say, AOC, Bernie or Elizabeth Warren but that’s ok.  He looks out for us and lives in NJ (not Washington) to be with his wife, family and people.  He should have been a shoe-in again but the census caused redistricting.  Our district lost one county and gained parts of two new ones.  We’ve been calling voters in those two near areas mostly.  Most of them were unaware of the districting changes.  None of the people I talked to have been mean to me.

I’ve also done a couple of phone banks for AOC and the Democratic NY state senate candidate she’s supporting, Kristen Gonzalez.  I’d never heard of Gonzalez but she sounds like she at least leans progressive.

I smile because I feel like I’m doing something to stop tRump and the GQP from destroying our democracy and replacing it with authoritarian fascism and “Christian” nationalism.

1.     3   I signed up to be an election worker.  Again, I felt like I was doing something positive.  I’ve been reading about how tRump, the GQP, and other domestic terrorists have been harassing and threatening election workers to the point they don’t want to do the job anymore.  But we can’t let the bad guys win by intimidation.  That’s what organized crime figures do, terrify and threaten people to get what they want.  It can’t stand.

2.     4.  It’s been a busy week for the FBI and DOJ.  Finally, after such a long wait, there may be justice for the kingpin plotters of the coup attempt.  The FBI raided tRump’s Mar-a-lago because he continued to keep files he should have turned in when he left the White House.  Some of these seemed to be nuclear information files.  A lot of them were top top secret.  What was tRump doing with them?  The wheels of justice grind very slowly but also surely and hopefully tRump will finally be indicted for all his crimes.

All of tRump’s henchmen are beginning to fall too, like dominoes.  All of that made me smile.

3.      5 Last, but not least, after a year of bickering, dickering and betrayal, Congress finally passed the Inflation Reduction Act.  That was the name given it so that all the Dems would vote for it, including Smanchinema.  The act will pump a lot of money into trying to reduce climate change.  I smiled and smiled about this one.  I’d been writing about all the damage our recklessness has caused by abusing the Earth and its resources.  Now we have dirty air and water, intense heat waves, more powerful storms and drought.  Without making changes, we would make ourselves extinct along with all the other animals, birds, fish, and sea creatures.  Another big benefit is that Medicare will be able to negotiate with suppliers for the most expensive drugs.

Hoping to have a post like this again next week.

 

Glasses That Can Caption!

Yesterday I noted in my Good News Network newsletter a new device to help Deaf people understand speech through a a pair of glasses.  Sounds amazing!  I read up on it to learn more.  It was developed over in Great Britain so it’s not available here yet.  Here is how it works: it’s a simple pair of glasses that the Deaf person wears. Using Alexa and a cable for a cell phone, voices become captions that appear on the glasses. 

The article showed a Deaf woman wearing the glasses and holding a cell phone to her ear. She’s reading the other person’s message on her glasses.  Seems cool.   The picture looks like the woman is going to answer with her voice.  This would work for someone who was once hearing or has excellent speech skills.  But some Deaf people have difficulty with speech.  Would this option work so well then?

A major issue is that the program can’t cope with cross talk.  Well, what good is it then?  It seems that’s when a Deaf person might need those glasses the most.  I remembered family gatherings when I was younger.  We’d be either with my mom’s side of my family or my dad’s.  Everyone would be sitting in a circle to try to include my parents but they always got lost in the cross talk.  My parents didn’t want me to interpret and I wouldn’t have been able to keep up with it anyway.  They’d try to lipread but with crosstalk, who was speaking when?  My parents would sit there with vague smiles on their faces, nodding, and pretending they knew what was going on.

In an interpreting situation, I handled cross talk by requesting that one person speak at a time.  People tried to do that but sometimes in a heated situation, they couldn’t help themselves and many voices would try to drown each other out.  The interpreter has to listen carefully and then sign as much of the differing opinions as possible before asking again, “Please speak one at a time.”

This idea is still very much a work in progress.  Now that my parents, aunt and uncle have passed, I have lost my connections with the Deaf community.  I’m curious to know what they think of this new potential technology?

 

The "Pollution, Pollution" Song

Who remembers this?  I think the song was originally released around 1965?  I remember singing it a lot during my teen years, just before we began to celebrate Earth Day.  And now?  Well, all I can say is thank God for the deal Sens. Schumer-Manchin pulled off to get the Inflation Reduction Act passed.  It's been signed by President Joe Biden.  Although it's called "Inflation Reduction" because that's more palatable than addressing climate control or health care, President Biden has to take a lot of credit for this.  It's got parts of his Build Back America plan in it, the one that Smanchinema thought they killed.  The most important part of the bill is the way it begins to combat climate change.

Make no mistake about it: climate change is here, rapidly increasing, and it's deadly.  I wrote about climate change some time last week.  Since then, there's been more bad news about how the world is changing due to pollution, mostly by carbon emissions.  This summer, we've already suffered with heat waves that sickened people because of high temperatures and poor air quality.  It's predicted that by 2053, the middle of our country from the south up north of Chicago could experience heat waves where the temps would feel like up to 125 degrees.  That's desert weather.  The dire report comes from a non-profit research company called First Street Foundation.  Can you imagine this?  This is the area we call the "bread basket." What can you farm in the desert?

Reservoirs are drying up.  Out west, several states share water from Lake Mead.  Now, though, it's down to 27 per cent capacity.  There's a picture of it here.  The Colorado River is so low that Arizona, Nevada and Mexico have to reduce how much water they draw from it.  Here in New Jersey, we live over a large aquifer and yet we have to voluntarily reduce how much water we use.

If that wasn't enough, heard of The Blob?

That's why it's so important that this bill has been signed into law.  When the bill was finally passed, former President Obama tweeted that "This is a BFD."  That's what Vice President Biden whispered to him when the ACA was passed.  And he's right.  It is a big fucking deal.  Dan Rather wrote a column about it.

This explains how the Inflation Reduction Act can help. 

Goodbye Temporarily, Liz Cheney

Last night there were election primaries in Wisconsin and Alaska.  Liz Cheney lost, sadly to a tRump based right wing nut Harriet Hageman.  Liz Cheney has been an outspoken, almost lone Republican, trying to stop TFG.  She voted to impeach him and is serving admirably on the insurrection investigation committee.  TFG still has an unbelievable stronghold on the Rethuglicans and backed the screwball who ran against Cheney. 

In fact, any Repub who opposed TFG faced his wrath and either lost their primaries or decided to retire.  Adam Kinzinger, the other Repub on the committee, also voted to impeach and wearied of the threats on his life and on his family, deciding not to run again.  In Alaska, Senator Murkowski went up against TFG’s candidate.  TFG had a boner for her because she voted to impeach him.  What saved her is that, in Alaska, the top four contenders advance to the general election.  She was one of the four.

All of this goes to show how much influence TFG has among his party and his voters.  After all he’s done, people are still entranced with him.  It’s mind boggling.

I wanted to focus on the environment today but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.  There is just so much about Liz Cheney and her possibilities for the future.  What could they be?  After her loss, Cheney told NBC that she wanted to do whatever she could to see to it that TFG is stopped with “whatever it takes.”  For the now, she formed a new PAC and donated what was left in her war chest. 

The new PAC is called “The Great Task.”  It is great in more than one sense of the word.  To begin with, because tRump’s tentacles are so deep and because other quivering GOP members are too chicken shit, it’s not going to be easy to stop tRump unless he’s finally indicted.  It’s also a great task in that we need to get rid of the tRump malignancy sickening this country.  Maybe the other quivering GOP chicken shit members will join her in the effort.  It would be nice.

And what about running for the Presidency in 2024?  Cheney says she’s “thinking about it.”  Robert Reich mentioned that possibility in his column today.  Personally, I hope she does run.  She is just what the old “Grand Old Party” needs to bring it back to a sane, more humane track.  Or, the party could split in two: GOP and GQP/Thuglicans.

Would I vote for her?  Nope.  The reason why is this: she has voted with the rest of the Rethuglicans against every single piece of legislation that would help the American people.  She didn’t need to be loyal to them.  After all, after TFG disowned her, the party basically tossed her out on the street.  She was stripped of her powerful title in the House.  The fact that she still voted lock-step with the Rethugs says to me that she is just as cold bloodedly capitalistic as the rest of them.  Her family is rich and powerful in Wyoming and I don’t get the idea she knows anything about being in the middle or lower class.

So, no, I would never vote for her.  However, I think she’d run a more ethical campaign than TFG ever did.  I still admire her dedication for and determination to protect our Constitution.  So goodbye to the House, Liz Cheney, but I know this is not the end for you.