Kurt

He's tall, but he hopes to achieve more in life than just that.

Little Humans

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I love my pets, don’t get me wrong. Anyone who’s spent even a little bit of time around here knows Zeno and Aurelius are a huge part of my life. And I love and respect animal adoption centers and those who run them and support them. But every time I see a post on Conspiracy Theory Central, aka facebook, with a cute puppy or kitten in need of a human to love them, and I see a lot of them — that’s a good thing — I can’t help but wonder how many little humans are out there in need of the same…

While technically no longer referred to as orphans, The Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption pegs the number of children in U.S. foster care at a staggering 443,000, more than 123,000 of whom are considered to be waiting children available for adoption.

How Many Orphans in the U. S.?, ADOPTION.COM, April, 25, 2019

#prayforthelittlehumansinneed

The Inequality of Hate

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It’s a disgusting national shame how many of our innocent, unprovoking citizens are murdered by other small-minded, blood-lusting citizens motivated wholly by hate and personal delusions of a superior bloodline while being criminally supported by institutional delusions of the same.

“…if we as a community had not been willfully blind to our institutionalized racism, Ahmaud might still be alive.“

Ahmaud Arbery Holds Us Accountable, The Bitter Southerner, May 2020

#irunwithahmaud
#prayforamerica

If You Believe It, You’ll See It

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I really, really wish I could believe all the bizarre hocus pocus things like astrology and palm readings and other pseudo-sciencey, pseudo-religiousy things so I could lay all my blame for all the unpleasantries going on all over this pretty yet petulant planet of ours (those dang locusts in Africa are biblically unrelenting) on a misaligned moon or star…

That said, Claire Comstock-Gay of The Cut has an interesting take on the subject, whether you want to believe it or not.

“Astrology’s skeptics and detractors like to make a fuss about how foolish it is to imagine that, simply by looking to the stars, we can know what the future will bring. But to argue this is to completely misunderstand one of modern astrology’s central purposes — not to find our destinies, but to find our actually existing, living human selves.”

Who Cares If Astrology Isn’t ‘Real’?, Claire Comstock-Gay, The Cut, May 14, 2020

#alonetogetherwiththeskeptics

And the geeks shall inherit the earth…

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Or something like that.

For all you computer nerds out there, this is an excellent read from Wired on the making, undoing, and remaking of a hacker.

Tried to highlight some of the spooky goings on of the Dark Web in my last book The Good Kill. That stuff fascinates me in an horrifying, schadenfreude kind of way…

Hutchins remembers mentally racing through every possible illegal thing he’d done that might have interested Customs. Surely, he thought, it couldn’t be the thing, that years-old, unmentionable crime…

Screenshot captured May 14, 2020. Click the image to view the article.

#alonetogetherwithmycommodore64

Empty Words of the Privileged

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It’s hard to believe so many people have to live so miserably in the richest, most powerful country in the world.


This has become cliché and empty to say, especially from those of us speaking from our privilege, but since there are so many pockets of wretched poverty all around the country such as described in the following article, it’s hard not to say it.

Courtesy New York Times

“Hundreds of miles of roads are unpaved, so it can take up to three hours to get a sick person to help. It’s difficult to self-isolate because families live in one-room homes called hogans. Up to 40 percent of Navajo households don’t have running water, making it hard to wash hands. Cellphone service and Wi-Fi are limited, so it’s difficult to keep in touch and to get information about the epidemic.”

A Life on and Off the Navajo Nation, New York Times, May 13, 2020

#alonetogetherwithourprivilege

An Expression of Love

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Don’t worry, my relentless efforts to completely overpower you politically is nothing more than a love-like expression… 😘

The actual exercise of physical violence substitutes for the psychological relations between two minds, which is of the essence of political power, the physical relation between two bodies.” He wrote that “all foreign policy is the struggle for the minds of men.” Genuine political power couldn’t be forced on people. It was complex, organic, unquantifiable. Elsewhere, Morgenthau compared it to love.

The Book That Shaped Foreign Policy for a Generation Has More to Say, NewYork Times, May 9, 2020
Virtually as soon as it was published, Hans Morgenthau’s “Politics Among Nations” became one of the most influential books of the 20th century. Credit…Associated Press [Via the New York Times]

#alonetogetherexpressingourlovepolitically

Straight On Through*

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You just have to go on when it is worst and most helpless -there is only one thing to do with a novel [or anything important**] and that is go straight on through to the end of the damn thing.

Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1929 letter from France, courtesy the New York Times archive
Hemingway and Fitzgerald in Paris, 1925, courtesy Brainpickings (lord only knows where she got it from)

#alonetogetherwiththelostgeneration

*Even though it says Straight On Through and not Break On Through, I wonder how many first thought of the Doors…

**IMO