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You know you’re getting old when you get that one candle on the cake. It’s like, ‘See if you can blow this out.’
― Jerry Seinfeld
Harlem Globetrotters Day *
OLD ROCK DAY
Bobblehead Day *
Tempura Day
Computer Programmers’ Day *
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Apple Tree Day
Bean Day
Cuddle Up Day
Shortbread Day
Technology Day *
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Screenwriters Day *
National Bird Day *
Whipped Cream Day
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by NONA BLYTH CLOUD
There are “some people” who wonder why I do this weekly series on poetry. The readership isn’t large, although I am often surprised by who shows up, and from where they are visiting. I’m passionate about the written word in all its forms, but poetry has that certain something more for me.
So I was delighted to find this quote by today’s featured poet, C.D. Wright (1949-2016):
“Nobody reads poetry, we are told at every inopportune moment. I read poetry. I am somebody. I am the people, too. It can be allowed that an industrious quantity of contemporary American poetry is consciously written for a hermetic constituency; the bulk is written for the bourgeoisie, leaving a lean cut for labor. Only the hermetically aimed has a snowball’s chance in hell of reaching its intended ears. One proceeds from this realization. A staggering figure of vibrant, intelligent people can and do live without poetry, especially without the poetry of their time. This figure includes the unemployed, the rank and file, the union brass, banker, scientist, lawyer, doctor, architect, pilot, and priest. It also includes most academics, most of the faculty of the humanities, most allegedly literary editors and most allegedly literary critics. They do so—go forward in their lives, toward their great reward, in an engulfing absence of poetry—without being perceived or perceiving themselves as hobbled or deficient in any significant way. It is nearly true, though I am often reminded of a Tranströmer * broadside I saw in a crummy office building in San Francisco:
We got dressed and showed the house
You live well the visitor said
The slum must be inside you.
If I wanted to understand a culture, my own for instance, and if I thought such an understanding were the basis for a lifelong inquiry, I would turn to poetry first. For it is my confirmed bias that the poets remain the most ‘stunned by existence,’ the most determined to redeem the world in words. . .”
― C.D. Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil
* Tomas Tranströmer, the wonderful Swedish poet
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Hypnotism Day *
Spaghetti Day
Pop Music Chart Day *
World Braille Day *
National Trivia Day
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Chocolate-Covered Cherries Day
Drinking Straw Day *
Festival of Sleep Day
J.R.R. Tolkien Day *
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National Cream Puff Day
National Science Fiction Day *
55 MPH Speed Limit Day *
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By ann summers
![20020309_1[1]](https://flowersforsocrates.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/20020309_11.jpg?w=540&h=327)
Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
Experts don’t think the trolls behind Russian Facebook accounts could have determined who to target on their own, but the question is whether the help they got came from Trump’s orbit. The leading suspects at this point are Kushner and Brad Parscale, the campaign’s digital media director.
The money path and/or all those emails in Mueller’s possession could confirm the interoperability between the Trump campaign and the various Russian troll operations.
The current assumption is that Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner could have communicated to intermediaries the approvals or instructions to share/transfer/customize datasets and those intermediaries had some association with either Trump or Russia, or that interesting oligarchical intersection of the two.
It already has been proven that information was hacked and that some degree of transformation occurred in order to become ‘weaponized’. The identity of those responsible parties is in the continuing details of investigation. What may finally emerge at the end of Biglygate is the fragile, anti-democratic connection between money laundering and data laundering. Brexit had a smaller scale parallelism between social media and parliamentary politics.
The open question for the Resistance is whether such evidence exists or remains. The current reasoning seems to indicate that IC information can corroborate such communications much like the current indictments have been triangulated from other intelligence services’ intercepts.
More details are expected about internal and peripheral communication in two related but more complicated areas: the Trump campaign pre-election and the transition group post-election. Fortunately, Michael Flynn’s role spans both and because of his other entanglements, provided Mueller with leverage.
Because of the differences and overlaps, the nature of Flynn’s ‘lies’ and the coordination of pre- and post-election interactions among Trumpists, the GOP leadership, and even inaugural investors should be made known.
Fortunately the lack of leaks from Mueller help assure us that democracy might survive Lord Dampnut’s rampage into autocracy.
Mike Flynn’s plea bargain among other prosecutions have probably made the multiple, parallel timelines stronger, much to the dismay of Manafort and Kushner, among many.
More interesting could be the synchrony of conventional versus social media ad buys and swing state targeting in 2016, and who helped whom in the fog of election warfare, since there are the earmarks of coordination between legal and illegal activities. Continue reading
Euro Day *
Bloody Mary Day
Black Eyed Peas Day
Hangover Day
Polar Bear Swim Day
Copyright Law Day *
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Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 