Cats: I Don't Live With Them
Can't live without them
Links are at the end, in the link museum.
I spent five or six days with the cats while I wasn’t writing. Endlessly comforting, entertaining, and mildly infuriating.
Your cat is busy with other shit
According to de Mouzon, just because cats react in subtle ways doesn’t mean they are aloof.
“Cats don’t do what you expect them to do. But if cats don’t come when we call them, it may be because they’re busy doing something else, or they are resting,” she said.
“People have these kinds of expectations because when you call a dog, the dog will come. But if you call a human when they are having a nap at the other end of the house, would you go?”
Anyone who has owned cats or spent any significant time with them already knew this, but now we have proof. Science!1
Nancy Pelosi Meets The Exorcist
[Daughter] Alexandra, always the id to her mother’s superego, was more blunt: “I think that weighed really heavy on her soul. I think she felt really guilty. I think that really broke her. Over Thanksgiving, she had priests coming, trying to have an exorcism of the house and having prayer services.”
The passage is from a long Maureen Dowd interview/profile of Pelosi. I didn’t know anybody but Opus Dei and similarly-fixated people still take the Catholic church seriously enough for an exorcism, but that’s me having a Pauline Kael-Nixon moment.2
The guilt: I did know that was a thing; one of religion’s primary functions, at least in the major ones. And I confess to feeling uncomfortable with people who take their religions so seriously. A Speaker who could levitate and do a 360 with their noggin, though—that would be cool. Dominate the structure.
Is there an overlap among people who like Maureen Dowd and people who like Nancy Pelosi? That would be the target audience. If you dislike one or the other, the piece is way too long to read.
Elsewhere, Dowd says Pelosi was “that rare, courageous lawmaker who fought the Iraq invasion, while other top Democrats inexplicably went along with the tragic decision.”
In fact the majority of congressional Democrats voted against the Iraq authorization for the use of military force. It’s true that the two most recent Democratic presidential candidates didn’t, although one of them appears not to remember and the other says it was only that Bush was such a silver-tongued deceiver.
Despite her own opposition, Pelosi didn’t regard lying the country into an illegal war as an impeachable offense; per Dana Milbank, it wasn’t even as offensive as the prospect of protesters and homeless people on her San Francisco sidewalk.3
Milbank can give Dowd a run for her money in the smarm-and-snark sweepstakes. The personal penalty for reading them is steep.
How did we get here? This was only meant to be about the exorcism. Goddamn, I’ve been possessed.
Mining giant 'sorry' over lost radioactive capsule in Australia
That would be Rio Tinto, the world’s largest and arguably most evil mining concern, perhaps best known for blowing up a 50,000-year-old Aboriginal site in order to expand an iron ore mining site. Priorities.4
The casing contains a small quantity of radioactive Caesium-137, which could cause serious illness if touched.
It was lost between the town of Newman and the city of Perth, a distance of roughly 1,400km (870 miles).
Blowing up the Aboriginal site led to an exorcism of the company’s top leadership, but demons remain.
As Wendsler Nosie finished his evening prayers sitting before a mesquite fire, a ceremonial yucca staff festooned with eagle feathers by his side, he gazed sternly toward a distant mesa where mining companies hope to extract more than a billion tons of copper.
That mine could help address climate change by helping the United States replace fossil fuels and combustion engines with renewable energy and electric cars. But to Mr. Nosie, a former chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, it’s the latest insult in a bitter history. The tribe considers the rolling hills and hidden canyons under which the copper lies — an area of Arizona called Oak Flat — to be a corridor to God inhabited by holy spirits. The tribe’s reservation is roughly 35 miles away.
The mining companies in question are Rio Tinto, which already operates the world’s largest borax mine elsewhere in the U.S., and fellow Australia-based colossus BHP.5
We sure have fucked things up.
“Mr. Nosie’s efforts have already helped to stall the project for years, and years more of delays are likely.”
Knows a demon when he sees one. John McCain is largely responsible for opening the portal letting these ones in. Sad that he’s not alive to see a few Apache stick a staff in his spokes.
I’m gonna go book an appointment with the cats.
Music to exorcise by
Art Pepper, “Cinnamon;”6 Cannonball Jane, "Knees Up;"7 Morningbell, "Sincerely, Severely;"8 Dada Plan, "Dance Miraaj;"9 Monica LaPlante, "Noir;"10 Wastewomxn, "Wastewomxn;"11 Noël Wells, "It's So Nice."12
Not a dud to be found, and I especially liked the Wastewomxn album. All of them except the Art Pepper album were new to me, although I had listened to Cannonball Jane’s other effort.
That, Comrades, is all I got
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Take care; be well.
I hope you noticed your discomfort with Nancy Pelosi's religious position and implied approval of the Native Americans' religious position.