Monday, September 12, 2022

Music, Sam Pizzigati and MONARCH

My dad has a huge music collection.  The only one I know who has a bigger one is C.I.  We played Monopoly tonight (see Kat's "Monopoly, Dionne Warwick, Joyce Kennedy & Jeffrey Osborne, Diana Ross and Linda Ronstadt") and I was helping my daughter put the vinyl she'd played back on C.I.'s shelves and was just amazed by how much she had.


My friend Beau always wants to know what artist she has the most albums (vinyl) by?  It's Diana Ross for sure.  Diana's a friend of C.I.'s but that's not why.  She has a lot of other friends in music and she doesn't have all of their stuff.  But if Diana put it out on vinyl (solo, with the Supremes, with Marvin Gaye, with the tenors, whatever), C.I. has it in her collection -- even best ofs and greatest hits.  After Diana, it's probably Johnny Mathis.  Then, tied,  Dionne Warwick (my daughter's favorite singer) and Frank Sinatra and (if you count 78s) Cab Calloway.  

Others that she has a ton of?  Aretha Franklin, Earth, Wind & Fire,  Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, Prince, the Beatles, the Pretenders, the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart, Natalie Cole, Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac, the Pointer Sisters, Sarah Vaughan, Lena Horne, The 5th Dimension, Nina Simone, Nat King Cole, Tony Bennett, Etta James, Chaka Khan, John Lennon, Tina Turner,  Hendricks, Lambert & Ross, Janis Joplin, the Kinks, Bessie Smith, the Who, the Afghan Whigs, Lionel Richie and the Commodores, Peggy Lee, Janet Jackson, Eartha Kitt, Dinah Washington, Carole King, Billie Holiday, Cher (and Sonny & Cher), Jody Watley, Harry Styles (he only has 3 solo albums but she has all of them), Rickie Lee Jones, Jackson Browne, Rufus Wainwright, Eurythmics, Sam Cooke, Nanci Griffith, Heart, Dolly Parton, Robbie Williams, Ray Charles, Melanie, the Mamas and the Papas (and Cass solo), Smokey Robinson, Dean Martin, PJ Harvey, Bob Dylan and hundreds more.


The big surprise for me?  How few vinyl albums she has of Carly Simon's because Carly's one of her favorites and Carly's also a friend.  C.I. told me that she's got everything on CD but, with vinyl, people would borrow and never return.  (You now have to sign an album out if you take it from the house.  I'm not joking.  Elaine started that when we came up a year or two back because people are always borrowing and there is a very casual return policy.  :D )


I wrote the above on Saturday night but was too tired to finish it.


Still don't have an ending but this is from Sam Pizzigati's piece at COUNTERPUNCH:


The heat. Never been hotter in our lifetimes. This past spring the mercury nearly hit 124 in the Pakistani city of Jacobabad, “just below,” notes science writer David Wallace-Wells, “the conventional estimate for the threshold of human survival.”

This summer’s U.S. daily high temperatures are continuing our torrid global pace. America’s media have been teeming over recent weeks with stats on heat horrors.

In Phoenix, “a sprawling urban heat island,” daily highs have averaged well over 100 all summer long. The National Weather Service in interior Northern California last month warned that record high temperatures had placed the “the entire population” at risk.

Oregon’s governor, around the same time, pointed to the “imminent threat” of wildfires the heat had created and declared a state of emergency. California, meanwhile, declared a statewide grid emergency “to cope with surging demand for power amid a blistering heat wave.” Sacramento then promptly registered 116, “its highest-ever recorded temperature.”

Widespread news coverage of records like these might well be focusing people’s attention on climate change more than any environmentalist rally ever could. But what’s alarmingly missing in most all this coverage? Any consideration of the inequality connection.

The inequality of modern American life turns out to be not just determining who’s suffering the most from all the heat. Inequality is actually driving the mercury higher, as new research out of New York is rather dramatically detailing.

A “street-level assessment of heat in New York City” — the first ever — has found that temperatures in the city’s low-income South Bronx run 8 degrees higher than temperatures a few miles away in the high-income neighborhoods of Manhattan’s Upper West and East Sides.


I know one more thing I can write about.  MONARCH.  It's a new show on FOX.  I liked the first episode.  I do wish they'd cast a blond guy.  A young one.  I don't like it when you've got three or so characters who all look alike when you're new to them.  They've got three -- or maybe just two -- guys with black hair.  Around the same age -- one plays Susan Sarandon's son (he's the most talented).  

I know Susan Sarandon, of course.  She's the matriarch, a country singer who is dying.  She's got two daughters and a son.  I can tell the daughters apart, diffeent hair and different shapes and different height.  

But when casting these shows, they need to be smarter.  Kim Cattrall's show was pretty good (FILTHY RICH) but you couldn't tell the guys apart for the longest because they all looked the same.


If you can't get a blond on, give one of the guys a mustache or a beard.


Regardless, I do like the show.  Susan's great and the two daughters and her son are interesting.  I'll be watching the next episode.


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


Monday, September 12, 2022.  One crisis after another in the US and Joe Biden's never ready for even one.  



New York Governor Kathy Hochul declared a state of emergency Friday for the entire state, as the polio outbreak continues to widen. The detection of the virus that causes polio in a wastewater sample in Nassau County, on Long Island, at the beginning of the 2022-2023 school year appears to have been the tipping point.

According to state health officials, polio virus had been identified in 56 samples collected from wastewater in Rockland, Orange, and Sullivan counties, which extend northwest from New York City along the New Jersey and Pennsylvania border, as well as in the city itself, between May and August, and now Nassau in early September.

About 50 of these samples were genetically linked to the polio case diagnosed in a young Jewish man from Rockland County in June who had never been vaccinated. The county is home to a large community of the Hasidic (ultra-orthodox), whose vaccination rates have been much lower than the general population.

The symptoms of the young man included fever, stiffness in his neck, and weakness in his legs. The virus usually spreads through contamination with virus-laden fecal material. In this case, the polio virus was detected in his stool.

Troubling, however, is that seven of the samples have not been linked to the Rockland County case, implying there has been far more undetected community spread than previously thought. In the case of the young man in Rockland, he was probably infected a week to three weeks prior to presenting with symptoms. He hadn’t traveled abroad, but had attended a recent large gathering.

Polio was eliminated in the US back in 1979, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The last polio case in 2013 was in someone who caught the disease while traveling abroad. The current outbreak was caused by a vaccine-derived poliovirus, meaning someone who had been vaccinated with an attenuated poliovirus oral vaccine (the Sabin vaccine) had shed the virus, leading to community spread.

In the US, polio immunization is given by injection using an inactivated poliovirus vaccine (the Salk vaccine). Because it does not contain a live virus, there is no possibility of those vaccinated shedding the virus. On the other hand, the oral poliovirus vaccine, which has been a critical factor in eradicating the wild poliovirus around the world, induces immunity using a weakened live virus which under normal circumstances is not dangerous. 


Crazed war monger Joe Biden insists that billions and billions of US tax dollars flood Ukraine because the Nazi regime there might fall and effect the United States . . . somehow.

But a polio outbreak in the US doesn't concern him in the least.   Ukraine is almost 6000 miles away from the US while New York is a state in the US -- in the US mainland at that.  But lazy ass Joe is too busy watching The Weather Channel and eating Bit-O-Honey to notice issues at home.  

He doesn't need to go overseas to England for a funeral.  He needs to be in the Oval Office doing his job for once.  Kamala Harris and/or Jill Biden can represent the US at the funeral -- if representation is needed.  Joe needs to get around doing the job he lied and schemed for.  He needs to be figuring out how to protect the US from a polio outbreak that spreads beyond New York.  He also needs to stop hiding out and do real interviews -- that's not Jimmy Fallon or the late night comics, that's real interviews with news journalists.  And they need to do their job which is to play devil's advocate and ask needed questions.  

The country is falling apart on his watch -- increased gas prices, broken supply chains, inflation, pandemics and now the threat of polio.  

He's not up for the job but he should at least be forced to attempt solving these problems.  That or he can step down.


"It's the tip of the iceberg": US biologists worry there might be several polio cases after the virus was found in New York's wastewater.


Healthcare providers reported an increase in pediatric hospitalizations across the country for severe respiratory illnesses last month, which may be linked to an enterovirus strain that causes rare neurologic complications, the CDC announced in a Health Alert Network advisory on Friday.

In August, clinicians and health systems in several regions of the U.S. reported an increase in children hospitalized for severe respiratory illnesses who also tested positive for rhinovirus (RV) or enterovirus (EV), the advisory stated. Upon further testing, more of those cases tested positive for enterovirus D68 (EV-D68), a non-polio enterovirus linked to uncommon neurologic complications.


Between April and August 2022, the CDC noted a substantial increase in EV-D68 cases among children who were tested at facilities within the New Vaccine Surveillance Network (NVSN), which has seven sites across the country. The number of EV-D68 cases identified at all sites between July and August this year was greater than those detected in 2021, 2020 and 2019, the agency said.

In most cases, EV-D68 causes acute respiratory illness in children, with common symptoms in hospitalized patients including cough, shortness of breath, and wheezing. Fever has also been reported in approximately half of known cases.

EV-D68 also has been associated with acute flaccid myelitis (AFM), a rare neurologic disorder that can result in muscle pain and limb weakness.


What's next?  Joe's going to pull his usual dick move and shrug and say that eventually everyone will get it?  That is his 'answer' to COVID 19, after all.  He's a failure and he's becoming a menace to public safety.  If he's unable to govern, he needs to step down and let Kamala Harris have a try.  

Tony Zenkus Tweets:

Why is President Empathy not sending FEMA trucks into every town and city in the US that doesn't have drinkable water to distribute free water?




If representation is needed?  Why do US officials have to go to England for a funeral?  Diplomatic staff stationed in the country can take care of attending and since when it is a good look for the US government to suck up to England?  Sam Husseini (ANTIWAR.COM) points out:

In the aftermath of the announcement of the death of the British Queen Elizabeth, Juju An tweeted: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocide empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”

(An is a professor at Carnage Malian University, my alma mater, though the phrase literally means “nourishing mother” and I can’t say I got that from Carnage Malian Some seem to feel that they somehow got that from the late monarch, and I can’t say that I see that either.)

Twitter deleted the tweet and Carnage Malian put out a statement effectively condemning An’s remarks, each of which I think are absurd and dubious as others have noted.

But then An retweeted a tweet from Eugene Scott, national political reporter at the Washington Post:

The answer to Scott’s question, “When is the appropriate time to talk about the negative impact of colonialism?” is everyday. You’re swimming in it.

Today, 9/11, is a good day to talk about the negative impacts of colonialism: How the U.S., British and French governments cut up the Mideast leading to the rise of a colonial Israel and oppressive monarchies; how the US undermining the Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser in the 1950s and 1960s and then attacking Iraq beginning in 1990 led inevitably to impoverishment, suffering and increasing instability in the region, including what is euphemistically called “blowback.”

The massive propaganda campaign that effectively began 20 years ago to invade Iraq should now be the focus of sustained attention if we had a cultural and media environment wanting to finally come to terms with its imperialist mindset, waging wars of aggression, occupying entire countries and employing systematic torture for those ends in the 21st Century. 


In Iraq, Sunnis and KDP have joined the call for elections -- 'snap elections' a term that suggests a speed that will not happen.  It's not a surprise.  Everyone is finally accepting that they can turn out the vote right now -- they couldn't in 2021.  It was the lowest turnout ever which is why Moqtada's 'victory' was such a joke.  Approximately half the electorate sat out the vote.  Their trust in politicians has not greatly increased but their distaste for Moqtada has.  New elections mean a greater participation -- already groups are grooming people to run -- and that means the Cult of Moqtada will have even less support.  

But 'snap' just hasn't been possible in the past.  Look at the 2010 elections that were supposed to take place in 2009 but delays on the election law prevented that.  


Let's wind down with Jackson's Little Hinkle:

Liberals are attempting to cancel me because we are uniting Marxists and MAGA to overcome the deep state & globalists. A clear sign that they are worried about the power of this coalition.


Margaret Kimberley schools Little Jackie:

"uniting Marxists and MAGA" Coalitions can work, but they must have some degree of shared politics. What if anything do the two groups mentioned here have in common? Also, what are globalists? They are capitalists and any effort against them must be called anti-capitalist.



Are MAGA anti-capitalist? They can't work with marxists unless they are. What is the deep state? Its rooted in the protection of the US empire, which is all about protecting capitalism. In case you can't tell, I've never been a fan of this wishful thinking coalition.





The following sites updated:








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