If someone asks you how you find yourself in these terrible times, you can tell them, “Why, every morning I just fling back the covers, and there I am!”
Pharrell Williams - Happy (Video)
🗽 Dark Brandon as President! 🗽
Biden, Harris and their administration have been hard at work. Here are the last week’s posts at the White House briefing room.
Biden cancels another $7.7 billion in federal student loans
87% of Biden Judges Haven’t been White Men. A Massive, Over-the-top Record.
Good News for Us
From Daily Kos
Abortion Amendment Continues to Drive Enthusiasm in Nevada: Another Canvass Report
Watch Rachel Maddow interview embattled Georgia DA on Trump case
As usual, Maddow nails it.
Willis, too. Rs didn’t think Big Brother should watch over county DAs, until
Suddenly 14 minorities won.
Democrats might flip a seat on Georgia's Supreme Court, thanks to abortion
Conservative Supreme Court Justice Andrew Pinson faces former Democratic Rep. John Barrow in an officially nonpartisan race that, because only two candidates are running, will serve as the general election. (A November runoff would have been possible in a multi-way contest.)
Conservatives will still control the nine-member body no matter how the contest for this six-year term goes, but a victory would be another strong sign that the Peach State's shift to the left during the last few years isn't over.
Legislative interns help Missouri school districts claim over $1 million in federal funds
Those federal dollars are part of the American Rescue Plan and must be budgeted by September. A large part of the interns’ project was calling districts to notify them that they had money that could expire if they didn’t act quickly.
50 states, please?
Norway, Spain and Ireland set to recognize the state of Palestine
Slovenia is another EU country expected to recognize Palestine and the country will coordinate with Ireland and Spain to persuade other EU-member countries to recognize Palestine and try to get the whole bloc to recognize Palestine to jump start the two-state peace process after a permanent ceasefire in Gaza is agreed to. Malta and Belgium are also rumored to follow their EU counterparts and recognize the state of Palestine sometime soon.
By the end of next week, the state of Palestine will be formally recognized by at least 150 member states of the United Nations.
Other Regular Sources
Biden Leads in 6 New Polls, The Booming American Economy, The Republican Party Is Broke and Broken
Preventative cancer treatments moved a step closer, bison helped to fix the climate, and TikTok got teens reading, plus more good news
‘The Green Steel of the 21st Century’
Cheap, strong and plentiful, bamboo has been used in Hong Kong for ages as an ultra-sustainable building material. Other countries are catching on.
Overcoming despair and apathy to win democracy
Lessons on movement building from one of the founders of the Serbian student movement that brought down dictator Slobodan Milosevic.
Activists Aim to Abolish Parental Consent in Abortion Care
Rabidly Repellent Republicans Rushing to Ruin/Bad News for Them
Liars and Cheaters and Thieves, Oh My
That part hasn’t changed at all except that nearly all of them now belong to warring factions of only one party. But that’s all bad news, and we can simply concentrate on throwing the entire Party of Blindly Fearful Rascality out.
Or to a large extent, allowing them to throw themselves and each other under the electric bus.
For example:
Morning Digest: Republican attacks primary rival for being too strict on abortion
👆👆😂😂👆👆
ICYMI: Donald Trump is preparing to lose, and check out the desperation of Ted Cruz
among many other things.
Robert J. Costello was the frumious Bandersnatch rather than Michael D. Cohen
All of the legal eagles on MSNBC agreed that they knew about this as a possibility, but none of them had ever witnessed a judge clearing a court to give a witness What For and explaining how close he, Costello, had come to being jailed for contempt and having his entire testimony stricken from the record.. Not just sending the jury out. Everyone but the legal teams and court personnel. Even those in the press who don’t understand how public trials work. (The transcript of the ensuing sidebar has been made publicly available.)
Orly?
File this next item under Rats Climb on Sinking Ship.
Haley says she will vote for Trump, calls Biden ‘a catastrophe’
The ex-UN ambassador said the former president ‘has not been perfect,’ 🤦either.
Haley said her priorities as a voter are supporting a president who would back America’s allies 🤦 and hold its enemies accountable,🤦 who would secure the border,🤦 support “capitalism and freedom,” 🤦and who would lower the national debt.🤦
Trump's offer of a quid pro quo of ending climate fight in exchange for Oil cash has been accepted
Big Carbon is defending more than ten trillion dollars of soon-to-be-stranded assets. Of course they took him up on it. And of course we can put this into our campaign ads. And I will highlight it in my next Renewable Tuesday.
Christina Bobb - A Mug Shot is an Awful Lot of Alcohol. But a Mugshot can be Seriously Sobering.…
Christina Bobb, the new RNC senior counsel for “election integrity,” is the new “Ignorance is Strength”.
On April 24, 2024, Bobb and seventeen others were indicted on nine felony counts each of fraud, forgery and conspiracy in connection with the 2020 Arizona fake electors plot that attempted to reverse Trump's 2020 presidential election loss in Arizona.
Trump's PAC copied classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago onto an unsecure laptop.
Former President Trump's attorneys found classified documents in his bedroom four months after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, per court documents unsealed Tuesday.
Worth noting: A witness scanned the contents of the box containing the classified materials and stored them on a laptop in her possession owned by Trump's Save America PAC, according to a footnote in the opinion.
Gentle Brain Bleach Music
BBC Proms 2010 - Bach Day 10 - Wachet Auf—Sleepers, Get Woke
Science! Animals! Weirdness!
5/14 Renewable Tuesday: Peak Carbon is Here! (The Diary I had ready unaccountably disappeared. Sorry. But there is a new version up.)
5/21 Renewable Tuesday: Peak Global Pollution, Too!
I do not understand why so few people check out these excellent posts.
Me neither.
DK is all Trump/Politics all the time.
Best bet is just to boost them as much as possible! I still see this one being pushed on the front page. People will see it.
Yeah, I get a lot of that. Well, as you can see, I have pimped this to nine groups here on DK. I also share my posts on social media, as I document in Boosting Biden Outreach posts. Anyone here can help with that.
I work on my headlines and ledes for the best impacts I can manage.
Welcome New Users: Do I Want to Read Your Diary? (Don't Bury Your Lede)
You help, of course, and whoever puts me on the Trending list the moment I publish.
Perhaps we should suggest to all of our climate and environment authors that we should all promote each other’s work explicitly. We could compose a suggested paragraph to include in all such Stories.
DK is a treasure house of environmental news that we can all share. You can see all of our contributions in the weekly posts from Meteor Blades, curating and summarizing all of them.
Pass it on.
That link goes to a search that picks up the weekly summaries back to 1/1/23
Remember to look for PWB (Pooties, woozles, and birdies) Peeps, and Backyard Science, including the Daily Bucket.
Webb Cracks Case of Inflated Exoplanet
Data collected using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, combined with prior observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, show surprisingly little methane (CH4) in the planet’s atmosphere, indicating that the interior of WASP-107 b must be significantly hotter and the core much more massive than previously estimated.
The unexpectedly high temperature is thought to be a result of tidal heating
caused by the planet’s slightly non-circular orbit, and can explain how WASP-107 b can be so inflated without resorting to extreme theories of how it formed.
Funny or Fuggedaboudit
Support your local cartoonists.
Look for “cartoon” in the DK image library. Check out DK’s Stories from Comics, too. And various DK authors and commenters provide excellent material all over the place.
Search for “political cartoon” on Twitter and elsewhere. Learn how to embed tweets and other posts.
You have been served, Mr. Giuliani.
Some thoughts are unavoidable.
P. D. Q. Bach
P.D.Q. Bach - Traumarei for unaccompanied piano (S. 13)
The Traumarei exists in two different forms, the later of which is part of the Notebook for Betty-Sue Bach, but it is properly dealt with here because it was first discovered separately and because it is the only piece in the Notebook that was written during the Initial Plunge. Of the three extant pieces from this period, the Traumarei is the least ambitious, and therefore, the most successful. It is a slow, introspective work; occasional outbursts of rapid scale passages alternate with aimless meanderings, as if the composer had written it while sitting at the piano one cold winter night, musing over some past nightmare, distant but not forgotten.
The temptation to identify the trauma of the title with the death of the composer’s father when P. D. Q. was eight years old is irresistible, which is more than can be said for the piece itself, as the work of a rank amateur, however, it at least has the virtue of humility, in that it pretends to be no more than what it is: rank and amateurish.
The author of the present treatise had the good fortune, on one of his manuscript-hunting tours of Europe, to stumble across the actual piano owned by P. D. Q. Bach during the Initial Plunge; the resulting sprained ankle is regarded by the author as a small price to pay for such an important find, for the Furtfurt piano answers a question that had been nagging P. D. Q. Bach scholars ever since the discovery of the Traumarei: why, since the piece is definitely in the Baroque style and not the Classical, was the Traumarei written for piano and not harpsichord? Although the pianoforte, with its characteristic hammer action (as opposed to the equally characteristic plucking action of the harpsichord), was invented early in the eighteenth century, it did not begin to overshadow the harpsichord until the last quarter of that century, and Baroque works written expressly for the piano are rare indeed, although not as rare as Romantic works written expressly for the krummhorn. Was P. D. Q. writing for what he, in a moment of uncharacteristic clear-sightedness, perceived to be the wave of the future, or was he simply writing for what happened to be at hand?
The answer to this question is as misleading as the question itself. Upon hearing the piano, we are struck by the realization that P. D. Q. did not compromise as much as we had thought, for even allowing for almost two hundred years of inadequate care, the tone of the Furtfurt piano is resoundingly tinny; in fact its timbre may perhaps be best described as an almost uncanny combination of harpsichord and kazoo.
Our Authors
- The Monday GNR Newsroom (Jessiestaf, Killer300, and Bhu).
- Alternating Tuesdays: Niftywriter and arhpdx.
- Wednesdays: 2nd MCUBernieFan, 3rd WineRev, 4th karij. 1st and 5th: lemay50, Andrew F Cockburn, DoctorStrange.
- Thursdays: Mokurai.
- Fridays: chloris creator. Regular links to the White House Briefing Room.
- Saturdays: GoodNewsRoundup, the one and only!
- Sundays: 2thanks. A brief roundup of Roundups, a retrospective, a smorgasbord, a bulletin board, an oasis, a watering hole, a thunder of hooves, a wellness, a place for beginners to learn the rules of the veldt. For instance, we do not welcome Doomer, Gloomer, or grammar-police comments in Roundups.