23 thoughts on “Meadows Flipping?”

  3. Stephen looks at some of the strange rituals that accompany a change of monarch in the United Kingdom, and the CEO of MyPillow has found it hard to run his company after the FBI seized his phone.

  5. another day, another book of stuff we already knew or suspected

    Trump chief of staff used book on president’s mental health as White House guide | Books | The Guardian

    Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff secretly bought a book in which 27 mental health professionals warned that the president was psychologically unfit for the job, then used it as a guide in his attempts to cope with Trump’s irrational behavior.
    News of John Kelly’s surreptitious purchase comes in a new book from Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker. The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
    The book Kelly bought, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, was a bestseller in 2017. In January 2018 its editor, then Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee, described its aims in a Guardian column.
    […]
    Kelly, a retired general, became Trump’s second chief of staff in July 2017 – after Trump fired Reince Priebus by tweet – and left the job in January 2019.
    His struggles to impose order on Trump and his underlings and his virulent falling out with the president have been extensively documented. According to Baker and Glasser, who interviewed Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general bought a copy of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump as he “sought help to understand the president’s particular psychoses and consulted it while he was running the White House, which he was known to refer to as ‘Crazytown’.”
    “Kelly told others that the book was a helpful guide to a president he came to consider a pathological liar whose inflated ego was in fact the sign of a deeply insecure person.”
    The authors report that Kelly’s view was shared by unnamed senior officials, quoting one as saying: “I think there’s something wrong with [Trump]. He doesn’t listen to anybody, and he feels like he shouldn’t. He just doesn’t care what other people say and think. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
    The 25th amendment, which provides for the replacement of a president unable to meet the demands of the job, was seriously discussed at the end of Trump’s presidency, after the Capitol attack he incited.
    Baker and Glasser say the amendment was tentatively discussed by cabinet members “within months of Trump taking office”. However, its flaws – if Trump opposed its use he would be all but impossible to shift – precluded further action.
    [continues]

  6. Time for the annual recommendation of The Freddy Books (26) about Freddy the talking Pig (and poet) on Mr Bean’s  Farm, written by Walter R Brooks.  If you know any children who are old enough to read these books are magical. Though way out of print they can still be found online. By chance Mr Brooks also wrote about Mr Ed, the talking horse…..of course.

    Brooks died in Roxbury, NY 1958, a true son of the Catskills.

  7. Yvon Chouinard gives Patagonia away – puts it in trust to promote conservation values that have underpinned the company since it’s founding in 1973. WaPo 

    Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard announced Wednesday that he is giving away the outdoor-apparel company — an unorthodox moveintended to help combat climate change and the environmental crisis.

    In a letter posted to the company’s website, Chouinard wrote that ownership of the company, which was founded in 1973 and reportedly valued at about $3 billion, has been transferred to a trust that was created to protect the company’s values and mission as well as a nonprofit organization.

    “Earth is now our only shareholder,” it said. “100% of the company’s voting stock transfers to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, created to protect the company’s values; and 100% of the nonvoting stock had been given to the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature.”

    In addition, profits that aren’t reinvested back into the business will be distributed by Patagonia as a dividend to the Holdfast Collective to help address climate change, according to a news release. The company projects that it will pay out an annual dividend of about $100 million — an amount that could change depending on the health of the business.

    “It’s been a half-century since we began our experiment in responsible business,” Chouinard, 83, said in the release. “If we have any hope of a thriving planet 50 years from now, it demands all of us doing all we can with the resources we have. As the business leader I never wanted to be, I am doing my part. Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth, we are using the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source.”

    “I am dead serious about saving this planet,” he added.
    ***

    The decision, which was first reported by the New York Times, reflects Chouinard’s maverick approach to tying his business to conservation and political activism over his roughly five-decade career. The company lambasted President Donald Trump and members of his administration forscaling back public land protections, and even sued Trump over his move to cut Utah’sBears Ears National Monument by 85 percent.
    ***
    In 2021, Patagonia announced it would no longer sell its merchandise at a popular Wyoming ski resort after one of the owners hosted a fundraiser featuring Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and other Republicans who support Trump.
    ***
    Chouinard has “just set a new bar for retailers,” Paula Rosenblum, managing partner of at the retail consulting firm RSR, wrote in an email. “No greenwashing here. He put his money where his mouth was.”

    I never bought much Patagonia clothing – I thought it was overpriced (a lot of Outward Bound instructors referred to it as Patagucci) although Chouinard climbing gear was the industry standard in the 70s and I had a bunch of it, but I did get a couple of items as gifts, and I have to admit they were particularly well designed and were of high quality. Still have a gray fleece pullover that’s the warmest fleece top I own and still looks great after 30? years. I may rethink Patagonia and buy a jacket.

     

  9. sturge, pogo suggested yesterday gophers instead of moles on the golf course. to me more like a mole in gopher clothing who eventually becomes a rat

  10. Zelenskyy in Kyiv Crash After Recaptured City Visit, No Serious Injury (businessinsider.com)

    A car crashed into Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s motorcade but the president did not have any serious injuries, Zelenskyy’s spokesman said early Thursday morning local time. 
    A doctor accompanying the Zelenskyy examined him after the crash and found “no serious injuries,” Sergii Nykyforov, the president’s press secretary, said in a statement.
    Medics who were travelling with Zelenskyy gave “emergency aid” to the driver of the car that crashed into the motorcade and put him in an ambulance, Nykyforov said.
    Nykyforov did not clarify exactly when the crash happened, but said that it happened in Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital. Zelenskyy said after Nykyforov’s update that he had returned to Kyiv from his trip to visited newly retaken territory in Kharkiv.
    Ukrainian police will look into the circumstances of the crash, Nykyforov said. He did not speculate as to any cause.
    […]
    Zelenskyy shared a video address early on Thursday, in which he did not mention the crash.
    He said he had returned from his trip and thanked the soldiers he had met on the front line.
    […]
    His trip to Izyum is the latest in a series of his risky trips to greet Ukrainian troops, which stand in a marked contrast to President Vladimir Putin, who has not been documented visiting any of the fighting. 
    The crash will have been a jarring event to the president’s security team. He made the trip despite having said, at the outbreak of war, that he was Putin’s “No.1 target.”
    According to the Times of London, 400 mercenaries were dispatched to hunt him down in Kyiv in February.
    And in April, when Russian forces neared Kyiv, the president and his staff feared both a missile strike and even a deadly gas attack. 

  11. In other news, Samson arrived a few days ago at the NE Florida nest to start this year’s nestorations.  Gabby returned yesterday to start loudly issuing instructions on stick placement.  

    AEF NEFL Eagles ~ Let The Nestorations Begin! 💕 Samson & Gabrielle Bring In Sticks & Moss! 🎄 9.14.22

  12. pat, Caddyshack reference.  Drunken Bill Murray tour de force. Sort of a Cinderella story.
     
    Ruth Marcus @ WaPo on the Lindsay  abortion legislation proposal:

    So much for all that talk about the freedom of states to decide on their own abortion rules. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham on Tuesday unveiled legislation that would ban abortion nationwide at 15 weeks. The South Carolina Republican’s proposal puts the lie to the notion that the Supreme Court, in overruling Roe v. Wade,merely returned the contentious issue of abortion to state control.

    It did that, but it also opened the door to proposals such as Graham’s — and even more extreme restrictions — to be imposed nationwide. Anyone who thinks abortion opponents will be content with a state-by-state patchwork of abortion rules isn’t taking the determination of the antiabortion movement seriously enough.

    Graham’s move might be politically bone-headed, coming less than two months before a midterm election in which voters already appear angered and energized by the court’s action. But it is just the opening salvo.

    The court’s conservative majority doesn’t want you to think so. In his opinion for the court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. painted a post-Dobbs picture of happy federalism, laboratories of democracy free to experiment with different approaches.

    “In some States, voters may believe that the abortion right should be even more extensive than the right that Roe … recognized,” Alito wrote. “Voters in other States may wish to impose tight restrictions based on their belief that abortion destroys an ‘unborn human being.’ … Our Nation’s historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people’s elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated.”

    How lovely. How misleading. That was clear from the moment the decision was released. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, in a concurring opinion, acknowledged that Congress could step in. “The Constitution is neutral and leaves the issue for the people and their elected representatives to resolve through the democratic process in the States or Congress,” he wrote — and then proceeded to echo the majority’s emphasis on state sovereignty.
    ***

    And Little Marco, always looking for a way to get noticed – and always a half step behind, signed onto Lindsey’s proposal yesterday according to the news I heard in the car yesterday afternoon. They should hold “How to Be an Asshole – A Seminar for Those Who are not yet Flaming Ones but Who Want to Be”.. For $500 you get half an hour with Lindsey and Marco spouting bullshit and calling it manna.

  14. The right-wing SCumOTUS is more concerned with accurate leaks of their concertedly contrived opinions than with children being murdered in schools, they can fuck right off
     
    Pardon me ✌️

  17. From Wapo’s coverage of the war in Ukraine:

    Russian forces retreating from the Kharkiv region left behind “high-value equipment,” which is essential to Moscow’s artillery-focused style of warfare, Britain’s Defense Ministry said in a daily update Thursday. It said the abandoned weaponry revealed a “disorganized retreat of some Russian units and likely localized breakdowns in command and control.”

    I wonder whether any of the Ukrainian artillery folks can figure out how to use Russia’s abandoned equipment against them.

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