The Sweet Sound of Silence

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and proof of old saying “no news is good news” while we await the possible horror of a new Chernobyl, another uncontrollable fire somewhere in the world and the ever-present hurricane season to say nothing of the next political scandal or snafu.

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28 thoughts on “The Sweet Sound of Silence”

  1. oh, yes let’s not forget the next pox pandemic rather than a pax political

    Aug 7, 2022 John Oliver discusses the recent monkeypox outbreak in the U.S., how we’ve fumbled our response to it, and some aspirations for this coming autumn.

  2. “ok so joe & co pulled off a major win yesterday, but what have they done for us lately” proclaims today’s media making sure to point out what the GOPers did and the dems didn’t do and failed at. 

    Inflation Reduction Act: Senate approves legislation, clinching long-delayed health and climate bill – The Washington Post

    The Senate on Sunday approved a sweeping package to combat climate change, lower health-care costs, raise taxes on some billion-dollar corporations and reduce the federal deficit, as Democrats overcame months of political infighting to deliver the centerpiece to President Biden’s long-stalled economic agenda.
    The party-line vote was a milestone in a tumultuous journey that began last year when Democrats took control of Congress and the White House with a promise to bring financial relief to ordinary Americans. With a tiebreaking vote from Vice President Harris, the 50-50 Senate sent the bill to the House, which aims to approve it and send it to the White House for Biden’s signature later this week.
    Dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the package would authorize the biggest burst of spending in U.S. history to tackle global warming — about $370 billion to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below their 2005 levels by the end of this decade. The proposal also would make good on Democrats’ years-old pledge to reduce prescription drug costs for the elderly.
    [continues]

  4. And of course Repugs drop a little shit in the punch bowl. Wapo 

    Republicans block cap on insulin costs for millions of patients

    GOP senators move to strip a $35 price cap on insulin under private insurance from the Inflation Reduction Act

    Republican lawmakers on Sunday successfully stripped a $35 price cap on the cost of insulin for many patients from the ambitious legislative package Democrats are moving through Congress this weekend, invoking arcane Senate rules to jettison the measure.

    The insulin cap is a long-running ambition of Democrats, who want it to apply to patients on Medicare and private insurance. Republicans left the portion that applies to Medicare patients untouched but stripped the insulin cap for other patients. Bipartisan talks on a broader insulin pricing bill faltered earlier this year.

    […]

    Those diabetics don’t need no help with insulin prices, right? 

    BTW, Jack. Joe Pass was playing a Gibson ES-175 in that video. Certainly playable as an acoustic but really a designed electric introduced as a one pickup electric in 1949 but his was a a two pickup electric 1957 ff. that was a transition model to the ES-335 that was introduced in ‘58. (Think BB King).

  6. https://reasonstobecheerful.world/homegrown-wildlife-sanctuaries-restore-biodiversity/

    “Residential yards make up more than 16 percent of all land in the contiguous United States, and are rapidly expanding. Most of these are simple turfgrass, which is now the nation’s largest irrigated crop. Yet these lawns are ecologically inert — many scientists refer to them as “biodiversity deserts.”

    “…New Neighbors, in English — envisions a world of yards like this, where suburban landscapes teem with life and buzz with planet-nourishing biodiversity. The Montreal-based nonprofit aims to “transform the culture of lawns” by educating people about how they can turn their yards (or balconies, or window ledges) into critical habitats for native plants and pollinators.”

    Posting this so we don’t just become an echo chamber of doom; there are solutions.

  7. Now, back to your regular programming.

    Explain, yourselves, Republicans.   What do have against diabetics?  You, with your Cadillac healthcare, thanks to American taxpayers and your lobbying money from producers of non-food foods that make folks even more unhealthy and push them toward the need for insulin.   Oh, so now it’s about personal choice? OK, then.  What do you, Republicans, have against type one diabetics?

  9. another day, another book and excerpts from it in

    Inside the War Between Trump and His Generals | The New Yorker

    It turned out that the generals had rules, standards, and expertise, not blind loyalty. The President’s loud complaint to John Kelly one day was typical: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”
    “Which generals?” Kelly asked.
    “The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.
    “You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.
    But, of course, Trump did not know that. “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” the President replied. In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the President was determined to test the proposition.
    […]
    In the morning before the Lafayette Square photo op, Trump had clashed with Milley, Attorney General William Barr, and the Defense Secretary, Mark Esper, over his demands for a militarized show of force. “We look weak,” Trump told them. The President wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and use active-duty military to quell the protests. He wanted ten thousand troops in the streets and the 82nd Airborne called up. He demanded that Milley take personal charge. When Milley and the others resisted and said that the National Guard would be sufficient, Trump shouted, “You are all losers! You are all fucking losers!” Turning to Milley, Trump said, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”

  11. also from the above new yorker article and the new book “The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021”:

    In the days after the Lafayette Square incident, Milley sat in his office at the Pentagon, writing and rewriting drafts of a letter of resignation. There were short versions of the letter; there were long versions. His preferred version was the one that read in its entirety:

    I regret to inform you that I intend to resign as your Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thank you for the honor of appointing me as senior ranking officer. The events of the last couple weeks have caused me to do deep soul-searching, and I can no longer faithfully support and execute your orders as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country. I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I’ve come to the realization that I cannot, and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that.
    Second, you are using the military to create fear in the minds of the people—and we are trying to protect the American people. I cannot stand idly by and participate in that attack, verbally or otherwise, on the American people. The American people trust their military and they trust us to protect them against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and our military will do just that. We will not turn our back on the American people.
    Third, I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal. All men and women are created equal, no matter who you are, whether you are white or Black, Asian, Indian, no matter the color of your skin, no matter if you’re gay, straight or something in between. It doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, or choose not to believe. None of that matters. It doesn’t matter what country you came from, what your last name is—what matters is we’re Americans. We’re all Americans. That under these colors of red, white, and blue—the colors that my parents fought for in World War II—means something around the world. It’s obvious to me that you don’t think of those colors the same way I do. It’s obvious to me that you don’t hold those values dear and the cause that I serve.
    And lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships. That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that. It is with deep regret that I hereby submit my letter of resignation.

    The letter was dated June 8th, a full week after Lafayette Square, but Milley still was not sure if he should give it to Trump. He was sending up flares, seeking advice from a wide circle. He reached out to Dunford, and to mentors such as the retired Army general James Dubik, an expert on military ethics. He called political contacts as well, including members of Congress and former officials from the Bush and Obama Administrations. Most told him what Robert Gates, a former Secretary of Defense and C.I.A. chief, did: “Make them fire you. Don’t resign.”
    “My sense is Mark had a pretty accurate measure of the man pretty quickly,” Gates recalled later. “He would tell me over time, well before June 1st, some of the absolutely crazy notions that were put forward in the Oval Office, crazy ideas from the President, things about using or not using military force, the immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, pulling out of South Korea. It just went on and on.”
    Milley was not the only senior official to seek Gates’s counsel. Several members of Trump’s national-security team had made the pilgrimage out to his home in Washington State during the previous two years. Gates would pour them a drink, grill them some salmon, and help them wrestle with the latest Trump conundrum. “The problem with resignation is you can only fire that gun once,” he told them. All the conversations were variations on a theme: “ ‘How do I walk us back from the ledge?’ ‘How do I keep this from happening, because it would be a terrible thing for the country?’ ”
    After Lafayette Square, Gates told both Milley and Esper that, given Trump’s increasingly erratic and dangerous behavior, they needed to stay in the Pentagon as long as they could. “If you resign, it’s a one-day story,” Gates told them. “If you’re fired, it makes it clear you were standing up for the right thing.” Gates advised Milley that he had another important card and urged him to play it: “Keep the chiefs on board with you and make it clear to the White House that if you go they all go, so that the White House knows this isn’t just about firing Mark Milley. This is about the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff quitting in response.”

  12. the article concludes with jan6:

    That night, waiting for Congress to return and formally ratify Trump’s electoral defeat, Milley called one of his contacts on the Biden team. He explained that he had spoken with Meadows and Pat Cipollone at the White House, and that he had been on the phone with Pence and the congressional leaders as well. But Milley never heard from the Commander-in-Chief, on a day when the Capitol was overrun by a hostile force for the first time since the War of 1812. Trump, he said, was both “shameful” and “complicit.”
    Later, Milley would often think back to that awful day. “It was a very close-run thing,” the historically minded chairman would say, invoking the famous line of the Duke of Wellington after he had only narrowly defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. Trump and his men had failed in their execution of the plot, failed in part by failing to understand that Milley and the others had never been Trump’s generals and never would be. But their attack on the election had exposed a system with glaring weaknesses. “They shook the very Republic to the core,” Milley would eventually reflect. “Can you imagine what a group of people who are much more capable could have done?” ♦

  13. There are a great number of government agency telephones which have been “swiped clean” lately.

     “We won’t get fooled again……”

  14. sturge, am sure both the old-fashioned and the new techy definitions for “swiped” in this instance are applicable.

  19. no way to respectfully segue from sad news about a fine gentleman passing to the hubris of a crude one, but here’s your opportunity to be creative in bathroom humor genre 

    Exclusive: See the Trump toilet photos that he denies ever existed (axios.com)

    Remember our toilet scoop in Axios AM earlier this year? Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book about former President Trump will report that White House residence staff periodically found wads of paper clogging a toilet — and believed the former president, a notorious destroyer of Oval Office documents, was the flusher.
    Why it matters: Destroying records that should be preserved is potentially illegal.
    Trump denied it and called Haberman, whose New York Times coverage he follows compulsively, a “maggot.”
    Well, it turns out there are photos. And here they are, published for the first time.
    Haberman — who obtained the photos recently — shared them with us ahead of the Oct. 4 publication of her book, “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.”
    A Trump White House source tells her the photo on the left shows a commode in the White House.

    The photo on the right is from an overseas trip, according to the source.

     

  21. The floor and baseboards on the photo in the left look very worn and, well, unpresidential.

    Is this real?
    Is that Orange Adolf’s writing?
    If so, did he ever not use a Sharpie?

  22. And the Boomers keep going silent – Olivia Newton-John dead at age 73.  Seems to be the cancer that returned a few years ago.  Sigh.  Time to find where Grease dvd is sitting.

  23. Olivia Newton-John died.  73

    Strange that when I watched “Grease” when I was younger, it didn’t strike me as odd that the actors were all waaay too old to play high school students. Now, the casting just seems ridiculous, as some were probably pushing 30. Still, Olivia was perfect casting for Sandy. The thought of how they would cast it now, with those who are the actual age of high school students, but the attitude and savvy of 40-year olds, is unsettling.

  27. Aaaah!  

    They even “broke into” his safe.

    And, you weren’t “under siege” by the FBI, Adolf. They were executing a search warrant, so they must’ve had probably cause.

    Also, it’s only never happened to another US prez, because you, Cadet Bonespurs, are the only prez to attempt a coup to stay in power.

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