Sunday, March 03, 2024

Container Gardening (book review), Idiot of the Week, and Kylie Minogue performed at the Brit Awards

Book review time.  I wasn't finding anything to read and then my daughter and  I were watching TV, flipping channels, ended up on a show about gardening.  My mom has a flower garden and she grows some vegetables during the spring, summer and fall and we've got a walnut tree.  I grew up with that.  Love to tell you I helped out.  Didn't.  We're staying with C.I. in California and she grows flowers, plants, fruits and vegetables.  Betty's daughter learned about gardening from C.I. and they used to grow things together all the time.  Now she's in college and she's got a container garden.


A what?

She is in an apartment and doesn't have a yard so she grows things in pots on the balcony.  


I'd like for my daughter to know how to do that.  So I went looking for a book on container gardening.  

At KINDLE, I found Tammy Wylie's CONTAINER GARDENING FOR BEGINNERS: A GUIDE TO GROWING YOUR OWN VEGETABLES, FRUITS, HERBS AND EDIBLE FLOWERS.

Tammy's a longterm gardener who started gardening at the age of two.  In addition to container gardening being good for people without access to yards, she notes it's also good for many other people including kids and you can get some containers that are easy to garden in while in a wheel chair.  

The book consists of two parts.  The first focuses on selecting containers and seeds or seedlings to grow and the basics of that.  The second half focuses on the various fruits, vegetables, herbs and edible flowers you can grow and their nutrients.


My daughter and I decided on containers that we would put on C.I.'s deck.  So they'll be outside.  If you're growing indoors, you can use a window or buy grow lights.  What did we want to grow was next?  Using the book for what would be easy, we decided on green onions, bell peppers, radishes (my daughter's favorite vegetable), cilantro, parsley and nasturtium.


We took longer deciding on containers.  Ceramic containers absorb water, we learned.  You could make your own containers or recycle.  You need to think about how deep the pot was -- especially if you wanted to grow regular size carrots and not baby sized. And we had to decide on soil. 

Now we were ready to plant -- which we did Friday.  Reading the book, we had the choice of seeds or seedlings and we went with seedlings.  

Important point, "Every time you water your container, you wash away valuable nutrients."  So we got some compost tea (one of the recommendations in the book). Since this is our first time, my daughter and I also took Tammy's suggestion of keeping a garden journal so we'd know when we planted, when to expect harvest, etc. 


 Idiot of the Week?  Little Bobby Junior.


Oh, Little Junior, he's such a joke.  In a world of men, he's a junior.  At 70, he's a little junior.  Read Ruth's "Oh, Little Junior, you were always someone's fool" for all the reasons Little Junior won Idiot of the Week.


Lastly, my daughter's favorite singer is Kylie Minogue and she performed at Saturday's Brit Awards.


Here's C.I.'s "Iraq snapshot:"


Friday, March 1, 2024.  Marianne Williamson delivers a major speech in San Francisco, THE NEW YORK TIMES mythical rape 'report' continues to fall apart, instead of answering questions about that report the paper is trying to figure out who is speaking to the press, and much more.


Marianne Williamson announced Wednesday that she was unsuspending her campaign for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination and was back in the race..  She spoke at an event in San Francisco last night.


Excerpt.

Marianne Williamson:   The Battle of Gettysburg was the battle at which it was decisive.  Once the North won that battle, it was decisive that the Union would in fact survive.  So Abraham Lincoln himself went to the battlefield.  And his words, of course, in The Gettysburg Address is that the men who died there -- for the North -- he said that they had given their last full measure of devotion so that a government of the people and by the people and for the people would not perish from the earth.  My message to you is, once again, although we don't already know this, is it's perishing now.  It's perishing on our watch because we are for all intents and purposes a government of the corporations and by the corporations and for the corporations.  And ever since particularly CITIZENS UNITED and the unlimited permission given to corporate forces to flood our political system with the undue influence of their money, at this point, they hold Washington hostage. Washington is a system of legalized bribery.  I can tell you from being in the belly of that beast, this is how the system operates.  If you don't have, I mean huge money -- I don't mean money, I mean huge money -- Remember the President has a billion dollars for this campaign. If you don't have either huge amounts of money or access to people with huge amounts of money, you don't have a chance of being anywhere near the pinnacles of power in this country.  And that's why you might ask yourself, 'Well given all the things we've been talking about tonight, why don't they pass policies in Washington that make it better?  Why don't they pass policies that help the average American?"  That's because there are so few average Americans in that place.  And how much power is exerted to make sure the average American either doesn't get in or once they do get in they're manipulated to the point where there's just more suckers for the same establishment?  There's only one way to override this at this point. And that is for a peaceful revolution -- a peaceful revolution at the ballot box. John F. Kennedy said that those who keep us from peaceful revolution make violent revolution inevitable. So I believe that we are at a crossroad.  I think we all know that we're at a crossroad. But like I said before, this is a moment for data analysis.  I didn't say anything tonight that everybody here doesn't already know.  I mean maybe I gave a statistic or two that you might not have considered.  But in general it's like the dots are scrambled.  It's not like the dots aren't there.  And it's not that we're stupid people.  It's that we've been trained -- we've been trained to expect too little.  We've been trained to farm out our best critical thinking.  And we've been -- even those of us who are Democrats -- we've been trained to give up the democratic process.  We've returned to Tammany Hall politics -- to men around a table a hundred years ago who got together with cigars and decided who the candidates would be and would come up with these ridiculous policies like, "Oh, no, no, we don't primary an incumbent president." Tell that to those of us who remember Lyndon B. Johnson because Eugene McCarthy primaried him, Bobby Kennedy Sr. primaried him.  We didn't think that was weird.  We thought it was democracy.  People primary sitting senators all the time.  People primary sitting Congress people all the time. But we've just been 'oh! oh! oh!'  This is codependency now.  Because the DNC said "Oh, no, we have to go with Joe.  The DNC says we're going with Joe."  Who the hell is the DNC?    I'll tell you something, political parties are not mentioned in the Consitution. And George Washington, in his farewell address, warned us about them.  He said, he predicted -- and, man, this one rings true -- he said they could form factions of men who were more loyal to their party than to their country.  John Adams would then say he saw political parties as the greatest threat to our democracy.  And I -- many of us in this room -- grew up in a time when political parties sat in the background.  We still honored that democratic principal that political power lies in the hands of the people.  The people would make a decision in a primary who to nominate.  The party would have nothing to do with it until the people had chosen and then they would step in.  But, of course, they decided once Bernie Sanders came along, "Oh, we're not going to have any of that." And then they got away with that.  And then they did it the next time and they got away with that.  And now they don't even pretend. Now they don't even pretend. And we're just going along.  So I ran for president because I feel that we need an economic u-turn -- an economic u-turn in this country. Because I feel we're like a ship headed for the iceberg here and that one major party just heads right towards it and another major political party heading more slowly and will hit it at a different angle.  We have one major political party representing a total nose-dive for our democracy because you can't have a thriving democracy where you don't have a thriving middle class. And the other major political party is moving in the direction of a managed decline. These political parties do not just chop wood and carry water for these corporate forces, they are huge corporate forces.  So seems to me we need to turn the ship around. Now I was very enthralled by Franklin Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights which would include universal healthcare, Medicare For All, tuition free college and tech school, a complete elimination of the college loan debt by using   The Higher Education Act.  It would include all of the things we've mentioned.  It would include things like ramping down fossil fuel extraction rather than ramping it up which all of those presidents of the modern era -- Democrats and Republicans -- end up falling in line with Big Oil.  Now one of them pretends not to.  See, one of them has learned what we want to hear so will say things like "I'm the Climate President" and will even make sure that there are healthy investments in green energy in The Inflation Reduction Act and we say, "Oh, that's so good! There are these wonderful, wonderful, very beneficial in the Inflation Reduction Act.  Oh, yes.  Oh, yes."  Guess what?  It's a classic purse thief distraction technique.  That same president has given more oil drilling permits than even Trump did.  That same president okayed The Willow Project.  That same president must know that all of the investment in dirty energy completely nullifies the investments in healthy, green energy.  We are suckers if we're okay with that. And all of the presidents in the modern era -- Republican or Democrat -- are willing to fall in line -- obviously -- with the defense industries.  And so what we need is a guaranteed living wage.  What we need is guaranteed sick pay.  All of those things.  And we need to repudiate the permanent war machine.   Americans are figuring this out.  We need to play peace games, not just war games.  We need a peace academy, not just military academy.  We need armies of peace builders just like we have armies of military personnel. We need a peace academy, not just a military academy, because we need to learn to wage peace.  Even Donald Rumsfeld said we need to learn to wage peace. 


The speech was broadcast live on YOUTUBE (2,844 views -- those may not include live views) and TWITTER (9448 views).  (TWITTER -- I don't work for Elon Musk and I don't have to indulge him.)

It was a major speech covering many important topics and explaining why she was back in the race -- a candidate unsuspending their campaign is news -- it's always news in the rare times that it happens.  Most infamously, it happened in 1992 when H Ross Perot came back into the race.

So news outlets can hire reporters to cover just Taylor Swift or just Beyonce, but there's no one who could cover a speech in a major US city -- one also broadcast live over the internet?

That's rather sad and one more sign of a democracy in peril.

And I'd rather money be spent covering the arts than covering sports so let's add in all the reporting that took place after the Superbowl ended.  I think everyone who wanted to see it, watched it.  The coverage in the days after the game was not needed.






Gaza.

ELETRONIC INTIFADA continues to cover the mythical rapes of October 7th that have still not been documented.  And the revelations that THE INTERCEPT and others have turned up in the last days.




New doubts are emerging about the New York Times’s coverage of sexual violence during the October 7 Hamas-led attack — and the paper owes its readers an open and transparent explanation. 

What’s more, its reporting on this issue has become so questionable that it should assign new reporters to go over the entire story again.

The latest questions are centered around Anat Schwartz, an Israeli who co-authored several of the paper’s most widely circulated reports, including the now well-known and scrutinized December 28 article headlined: “‘Screams Without Words’’ How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.

Independent researchers scrutinized the online record, and raised serious questions about Schwartz. First, she has apparently never been a reporter but is actually a filmmaker, who the Times suddenly hired in October. You would expect the paper to look for someone with actual journalistic experience, especially for a story as sensitive as this one, written during the fog of war. Surely the paper had enough of its own correspondents on staff who could have been assigned to it.

Next, the researchers found that Schwartz had not hidden her strong feelings online. There are screenshots of her “liking” certain posts that repeated the “40 beheaded baby” hoax, and that endorsed another hysterical post that urged the Israeli army to “turn Gaza into a slaughterhouse,” and called Palestinians “human animals.”

(Just this morning, more evidence emerged online; Schwartz apparently also served in Israeli Military Intelligence.)

Finally, one of her co-authors on two of the reports was Adam Sella, who is her nephew. ********* [see note added below]*****

Let’s pause here. What would happen if the Times suddenly hired a Palestinian filmmaker with no journalistic background, who had recently publicly “liked” posts that called for “pushing Israeli Jews into the sea,” to co-write several of its most sensitive and contested reports? 

(We don’t have to speculate. The Times fired Palestinian photojournalist Hosam Salam in 2022 after one of the pro-Israel media watchdog groups protested about his social media posts.)

After Anat Schwartz’s online history became public, she locked down her accounts and then deleted much of the incriminating content.

The New York Times imposes strict rules on its reporters to maintain the appearance of objectivity. Reporters are not supposed to attend demonstrations of any kind, wear campaign buttons, or post opinions on social media. By hiring Anat Schwartz, the paper clearly violated its own guidelines, and it should publicly explain and apologize.


***********[Added 3/1/24 2:49 PM EST, not her nephew.  Jeremy Scahill explained that on today's DEMOCRACY NOW!

And her partner in this, Adam Sella, is the nephew of Anat Schwartz’s partner, and they’re not married. In fact, Amy, The New York Times, they requested a correction from us, because we had initially said that it was her nephew, which I think in the context of America and other countries you would say. If you’re somebody’s longtime life partner, you would say, “Oh, yeah, this is my nephew.” OK, they’re not blood relatives, and they emphasize that she’s not married. Fine, we corrected that.

My question is: Where are the corrections in The New York Times piece? The New York Times has grave, grave mischaracterizations, sins of omission, reliance on people who have no forensic or criminology credentials to be asserting that there was a systematic rape campaign put in place here. And to publish this article at a moment when Israel was intensifying, after that brief pause where captives were exchanged — intensifying its genocidal attack against the people of Gaza, this played a very, very significant role. And the more we learn about this, the more we discover that the reporting tactics that The New York Times used are certainly not up to the standards that the newspaper claims to be promoting. They will not issue any corrections on what has already been documented to be very problematic sins of commission and omission in this piece.

Use the link for Jeremy and Ryan Grimm's discussion with Amy Goodman on today's DEMOCRACY NOW!]



Jeremy Scahill, Ryan Grim and Daniel Boguslaw (INTERCEPT) reported Wednesday: