dragonlady7 | Nov. 8th, 2020

Nov. 8th, 2020

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so last night i let the cat out into the yard for a little bit, after dinner, because she asked politely. she’s crepuscular, she likes to creep at creeping time (that’s what we etymologize ‘crepuscular’ to in this household, that it’s about creeping), and it was normal.

but then i was sitting in the living room, not on the porch where the open door is, so I did not notice if she came back in.

Come time to go to bed, I could not tell whether she were in the house or not. We called around, made Dinner Noises, and she did not come out. We went around the yard in the dark calling to her but she did not come out.

So we went to bed with the door propped open, which we rarely ever do, but we were both so tired.

Normally I’ll wake sometime in the night and hear the cat and drag myself out of bed and go shut the door, but I didn’t hear her at any point in the night.

FInally I woke up at 3:45 and could not sleep any longer. All I could think about was the cat, and wondering where she was. So I gave up and got out of bed a bit after 4, and wandered as quietly as I could around the house, checking all the doors. No sign of her.

I went and sat on the couch and about ten minutes later she came in all purring and sat on me for a few minutes. I sniffed her fur, and it smelled of the cardboard-smell of our unfinished attic. She hadn’t been outside at all, she’d been upstairs the entire time.

Of course now I can’t go back to bed but like. What an asshole. I’m glad she’s all right

Oh, I never told the story of yesterday– so on Wednesday we took the cat to the vet and I had to haul the mattress off our bed to get her? and I noticed there were a lot of socks under there? Dude had said he’d help me but then he clearly was not going to, so I got a broom yesterday and hauled out all the stuff under the bed, and sure enough, there were like a thousand socks under there….

and no two were the same. Yup! She had collected an enormous number of single socks under the bed.

I mean like…. an enormous number. I did not take a photo, but I should have. I collected everything into a laundry basket, took it outside, beat the lint off, and then washed it all, and it was an entire washing machine load. Of socks, plus two t-shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of work pants from my waitressing job in 2005, and several pairs of underpants.

Chita probably disappeared to the attic to cope with my having destroyed her best nesting spot. It serves me right.

topical art

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details2decern https://details2decern.tumblr.com/post/625356623485992960/by-mike-shine:

By Mike Shine

ok but the link. This print is $100 (a reasonable price, it’s hand-printed) but there is a charming postcard about the USPS https://mortalmachinenola.com/products/copy-of-mike-shine-postcard?pr_prod_strat=copurchase&pr_rec_pid=4759846092885&pr_ref_pid=4747216224341&pr_seq=uniform that is $5 and a similar one of a grocer that reads “some heroes wear aprons” that is simply stunning.

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An idyllic Sunday morning celebratory brunch, featuring that Boingboing pandemic sourdough waffles recipe (Google it, it’s a good one!) and French 75s garnished with [Bad username or site: laughing @ earth] raspberries from the freezer. I am living, watching the celebratory videos– but guys there were over 350 positive COVID tests in Erie Co yesterday, please stay in. (Oh also I am wearing cheekbonebeauty liquid lipstick in Shannen and it is the color I have always wanted, go check them out if you like cosmetics at all, they are local (on the other side of the border but nearby!) and Indigenous-women-owned and very cool.) It feels like being able to exhale, and like the worst isn’t over but the bottom’s not so deep, and like there’s a lot of work left to do, so happy day, everyone. (I feel like I can look at Facebook again?) Oh also I found 300 left socks under the bed yesterday, thanks Chita… (at Buffalo, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/CHVdvvyByLF/?igshid=1h9upzhzpcb8f

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red-mercer https://red-mercer.tumblr.com/post/634092866096054272/casualbaloth-bacoose-i-cant-believe-castiel :

casualbaloth https://casualbaloth.tumblr.com/post/634027508482916356/i-cant-believe-castiel-went-to-super-hell-to-turn :

bacoose https://bacoose.tumblr.com/post/634027075594076160/i-cant-believe-castiel-went-to-super-hell-to-turn :

i can’t believe castiel went to super hell to turn georgia blue

please god let me find these things out normally I am begging you

If you go to the circus for news don’t complain if a clown tells it to you

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America Needs to Prosecute Its Presidents https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/29/america-prosecute-presidents-pardon-trump-nixon/:

chamerionwrites https://chamerionwrites.tumblr.com/post/634258945186398208/america-needs-to-prosecute-its-presidents :

The American political system has no tradition of official disgrace or damnatio memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae. All presidents are honored, even those who were awful or, in the case of President John Tyler, disloyal. Tyler, the tenth president, not only ran a disastrous administration but ended https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/john-tyler-traitor-well-yes-actually-/2013/02/24/a387eece-7d29-11e2-9a75-dab0201670da_story.html his public life as a congressman in a brief-lived treasonous slave power. And yet even Tyler receives official remembrances, including a presidential dollar coin https://www.usmint.gov/coins/coin-medal-programs/presidential-dollar-coin/john-tyler featuring his image.

That coin illustrates the natural arc of American political culture: institutional ignoring of the misdeeds of the powerful in the name of “healing.” Yet this norm does not heal; it harms. It makes a mockery of Americans’ belief that they have a government of laws, not of men, if those laws do not apply to the men who enforce the laws. It constitutes a denial of justice and an amnesty granted only to the powerful. Left unchallenged, this norm will protect Trump from the reckoning that the country needs.

Consider how the system dealt with Nixon.

Time has so effaced the details of Nixon’s malfeasance that he has regained a patina of statesmanship. Thus, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, could recently tweet https://twitter.com/RichardHaass/status/1308928396752293888?s=20 a favorable comparison between Nixon and Trump, arguing that that “Nixon, for all his flaws, was a conservative who abided by norms.”

Haass’s viral tweet reflects an irony that, in death, Nixon has finally been accepted by the sort of institution whose rejections kindled https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BORMIRG/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 in him a lifelong resentment of the Eastern Establishment he tried to join. In doing so, it reflects a general amnesia about why Watergate was so bad that illustrates how far elite culture will go to forgive the crimes of the powerful.

The signature moment of Watergate is the June 17, 1972, break-in https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/watergate/watergate-break, when a team of burglars were caught in the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Reporting and investigations soon uncovered ties to the White House. But that was just the tip of a very dirty iceberg. Subsequent prosecutorial and congressional investigations broke apart not just the Nixon administration’s frantic, illegal cover-up of its ties to the burglary but uncovered an entire panoply of what Attorney General John Mitchell called https://www.nytimes.com/1973/07/13/archives/white-house-horrors.html the “White House horrors.”

These included use and the attempted https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2020-06-25/spying-americans-new-release-infamous-huston-plan use of government agencies like the IRS https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/johnnie-walters-irs-commissioner-under-president-richard-m-nixon-dies-at-94/2014/06/26/e6ae4906-fd3d-11e3-b1f4-8e77c632c07b_story.html to go after the president’s political enemies. The administration sought to persecute its enemies, leading to abuses like an attempt to steal the files https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/daniel-ellsberg-nixon-white-house-wanted-shut-me-assault-n774376 of dissident Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The president directed https://www.nytimes.com/1996/11/22/us/tapes-show-nixon-ordering-theft-of-files.html his aides to retrieve classified papers from the Brookings Institution by any means necessary, including stealing them or firebombing the think tank. Even the Watergate break-in turned out to be the second one—the first https://www.history.com/topics/watergate-scandal-timeline-nixon, on May 28, 1972, had been undetected.

And Nixon was not above using his position to enrich himself. He used government agencies to improve his private residences. And he evaded taxes, including by improperly claiming deductions https://minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/45978/MA26_1_2.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y related to his gift of his vice-presidential papers to the government. Far from abiding by norms, he broke them with abandon…

Ford’s pardoning of Nixon was unpopular at the time, with 53 percent of https://news.gallup.com/vault/218198/gallup-vault-pardon-took-decade-forgive.aspx Americans rejecting it. It has since become conventional wisdom among America’s institutional elite that Ford’s act was merciful and correct. In 2001, a panel of eminences https://www.jfklibrary.org/about-us/news-and-press/press-releases/president-gerald-ford-and-civil-rights-leader-john-lewis-named-recipients-of-2001-profile-in-courage recruited by the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation honored Ford’s pardon of Nixon by giving him its Profiles in Courage Award.

At the awards dinner, Senator Ted Kennedy praised https://www.jfklibrary.org/events-and-awards/profile-in-courage-award/award-recipients/president-gerald-ford-2001 the wisdom of Ford’s decision. “I was one of those who spoke out against his action then,” Kennedy said. “But time has a way of clarifying past events, and now we see that President Ford was right. His courage and dedication to our country made it possible for us to begin the process of healing and put the tragedy of Watergate behind us…”

The healing myth has become part of a bipartisan catechism even though its central premise—that the pardon healed the country—is unsupportable. In the long run, as Holtzman said, “the Nixon pardon has had terrible ramifications.” It set the stage for later pardons related to executive self-interest, including George H.W. Bush’s pardons of many figures involved in the Iran-Contra scandal.

If U.S. political culture can congratulate itself for rehabilitating Nixon, then the temptations for a Biden administration to do the same for Trump will be powerful. Doing so will let the administration move on to other priorities, sensible centrists will argue. And the next election is only two years away—do you really want to have Trump still in the news by then?

Advocates of a pardon or other forms of clemency will point to other factors as well. They will argue that, in a polarized country, the specter of politicized prosecutions will raise the possibility that vengeful Republicans will retaliate later. And indeed, it would be disastrous for democracy were each administration to misuse prosecution against its political enemies.

Yet given what we already know about the president’s finances and conduct in office, an investigation of the Trump administration is unlikely to be politicized in any meaningful sense. It is only a refusal to prosecute that could be politicized, in the sense of being guided by political calculation rather than a commitment to the rule of law. (That would apply doubly to the idea that a pardon could help ease Trump out of the White House without strife.)

More sophisticated observers might caution that even potentially justifiable prosecutions could have deleterious effects on U.S. politics and the country’s standing in the world. The prosecutions of Brazil’s most recent presidents—Lula, Dilma, and Michel Temer—did much to clear the way https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/brazil-lula-carwash-corruption-temer-due-process-dilma/552056/ for the election of the country’s disastrous current president, Jair Bolsonaro. Similar concerns have been raised about other prosecutions elsewhere, like Ecuador’s conviction https://www.france24.com/en/20200408-ecuador-s-former-president-rafael-correa-found-guilty-of-corruption of former president Rafael Correa, which barred him from a return to politics.

But it’s strange to argue that democracy depends on not prosecuting those who commit crimes. In France, even a prime minister caught misusing public funds may now go to jail https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53217298 rather than retire to a villa. And although some have criticized https://www.aei.org/foreign-and-defense-policy/asia/south-koreas-troubling-history-of-jailing-ex-presidents/ South Korea for prosecuting its ex-presidents (over half of whom are now in prison), measures like the Varieties of Democracy index show that Seoul’s record on liberal democracy https://www.v-dem.net/en/analysis/CountryGraph/ is stronger than that of the United States.

It should not be surprising that democracy and prosecutions of former officials can go together. That is, after all, the entire point of the rule of law. Holding officials to account forms a critical part of strengthening democratic institutions. And the ballot box is only one way to do that.

That is why Biden must not waver. If a former president has never been prosecuted in American history, that’s because the last time the country had a chance to do so it was denied that opportunity. Far from being bad for democracy, a sober, lengthy, and deliberative investigation would be good for establishing a record of the rot in the Trump administration. And it would be a major boost for liberal democracy and anti-corruption efforts by demonstrating that in mature democracies, officials face consequences.

Having a president who committed crimes is not unprecedented in American history. What would be unprecedented would be to end this long national nightmare by letting them face the same justice that any other American should.

photography

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i am sharing three pictures that are probably duplicates of what i put on IG but here they are, slightly edited.

one is just a selfie showing the makeup i wore today for not leaving the house, because why not.

the second is the basket of socks I paired, out of Chita’s stolen stash and the basket I’d set aside in bewilderment at why I didn’t have pairs of socks anymore, and then had forgotten about and buried. What’s astonishing is how few overlaps there really were between the two stashes. Somewhere, there are a lot of single socks… possibly a second cat stash???

and the third… is the adorable sock thief.

Am wearing assorted cheap grocery store products including an ELF eyebrow thing with the gel and the powder, some shitty liquid eyeliner that seems to have slightly separated, and a glorious liquid lipstick by Cheekbone Beauty that I discussed in my initial Instagram post. Hilariously, Android’s “Portrait Mode” setting that blurs the background decided my earring was a background item and blurred it for me. Ha! [image description: me, a 41-year-old blonde white lady with glasses, staring slightly to the left of the camera lens, looking a little startled, which seems to be my best camera face.]

[image description: a laundry basket entirely full of paired socks made into those little balls where one contains the other, in a muted variety of colors mostly black and navy blue.] y’all I don’t remember ever owning most of these socks, I can’t begin to contemplate where they came from. There were seven single navy-blue argyle socks, most of them slightly different; I paired some of them anyway because they were the same size and texture.

[image description: a gray cat with green eyes and a white stripe on her chest lies nestled in a fluffy paisley-patterned duvet with her paws tucked in and her eyes wide and fixed on the camera; the light from behind shines somewhat through her ears.] This is not the face of someone who repents of her sock crimes.