The Hundred Lights, 46th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor): Ausar Temple is a track by the musician Angel Deradoorian (Deradoorian, Dirty Projectors, Slasher Flicks) from her highly recommended 2017 album Eternal Recurrence. The track consist of 2½ minutes of more-or-less random gongs, symbols, and drums. Ausar, also known as Osiris, was a member of the ancient Egyptian gods and the offspring of Seb and Nut. He held a close relationship with Isis, who was both his sister and his wife (eww). The track sounds a lot like the gongs in a Zen temple.and since August 2024, I have been using it as a timer for my kinhin (walking meditation) between my period of zazen (sitting meditation).

Without any fixed rhythm and although still ambient in general tone, I nonetheless found all the clanging and crashing in the track a little too disruptive even for my walking mediation  That's not a knock against the piece itself - I easily tolerated it for over a year, and even came to enjoy the chaos - it's just an observation of its utility for something for which the composer had no intention.  But I still wanted to use the opening, Zen-like gongs as timers for my home meditation practice so last October I fired up that music-file editing software mentioned in previous posts and spliced two minutes of Annea Lockwood's sound collage World Rhythms to the opening of Ausar Temple and, voila, created the perfect (for me) timer for kinhin between the audio timers I use for zazen.

Today, the fourth day of the Rohatsu practice period, I sat for three and a half hours. The timers were very nearly the same as yesterday, although for the additional 30 minutes, I slipped in the whisper-quiet electronic track i come out of your sleep by the artist Ruth Anderson after the three Caves. The track appears on the same LP, Sinopah, as Annea Lockwood's World Rhythms. 

Also, instead of Eno's 60-minute Reflections, I substituted all four 15-minute tracks from his Sisters album. The tracks are generative music similar to Reflections and very similar to one another (hence the title, Sisters). The silence between tracks is shorter and less pronounced than some of the silences or near-silences within the tracks themselves, so it didn't feel like sitting (literally) through four different compositions. And the great part is, one can easily delete one or two of the tracks to create 30- or 45-minute timers as desired.

Here then, is the playlist of timers for today's sitting:

Laraaji - Twenty Five-Minute Cave, zazen, zafu (0:25)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (0:30)

Ana Quiroga - Ten-Minute Cave (edited to 25 minutes), zazen, zafu (0:55)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (1:00)

Will Epstein - Fifteen-Minute Cave (edited to 25 minutes), zazen, zafu (1:25)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (1:30)

Ruth Anderson - i come out of your sleep, zazen, zafu (1:55)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (2:00)

Brian Eno - Sisters, zazen, seiza bench (3:00)

Deradorian/Annea Lockwood - Ausar Temple/World Rhythm (edit), kinhin (3:05)

Annea Lockwood - World Rhythm (60-minute edit), zazen, zafu (3:35)

All times above are approximate; the entire playlist of timers was actually 3 hours and 32 minutes.         

 

High Paralysis, 45th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Then, on the third day of the Rohatsu practice period, he sat for three hours. 

Today, I sat for three, 30-minute periods using a zafu (round meditation cushion), then one 60-minute period using a seiza (kneeling) bench, and then another, final, 30-minute period using the zafu again. My timers were three Caves stretched out to 25-minutes each (with five minutes of intro/outro ambient music), an hour-long Brian Eno ambient composition (Reflections), and then a 30-minute edit of Annea Lockwood's World Rhythms. Even though it was aggressively ambient, the Eno piece called too much attention to itself - or to be more precise, my mind was able to focus on it too easily - and I probably won't be using that one again.

Since it's Betelgeuse, a walking day, I got my steps in today too, another Madisonian 4.1 miles.

The Stable Genius probably did something stupid today, I'm sure of it, but I was too busy with my sitting and my walking to notice. In other words, it was a good day.   

 

Day of the Waste Arena, 44th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): The Stable Genius warned today that any country he believes is illegally manufacturing drugs destined for the US is vulnerable to military attack. Great. Because the War of Drugs worked so successfully here (sarcasm) that it's time to take it global.

It's the second day of the Rohatsu practice period and I added a half hour to my now daily (for this period) sitting. Two and a half hours, consisting of two 30-minute sits and two 45-minute sits. 

I use timers for my meditation rather than stare at a clock. I used to use the timer app on my iPhone for a timer, but no matter how gentle the alarm I selected, I still found it jolting when it went off, and then I had to scramble and fumble around with my phone to turn it off. That made for a rude ending to a graceful sitting period.

A few years ago, I came across a compilation album by the label Other People titled Caves, a "compendium of timers for every-day use." Each track starts with some gentle, wordless, new-age/ambient music for a minute or so, and then fades to silence for five, ten, or more minutes. At the end of the silence, the music gently returns for another minute or so. The "caves" are the silences between the sounds. One track by the ambient musician Laraaji is a 25-minute cave, and with the intro and outro, the whole track is 30 minutes in length, perfect for a half hour of zazen and kinhin (walking meditation). The other tracks are all of shorter length, but I used some music-editing software to expand the silences of those other tracks to 25 minutes and for a year now have used three of them as timers for my 90-minute meditation periods.

Meditating while listening to music isn't Zen meditation, or shikantaza ("just sitting") as the Japanese call it. Just sitting is exactly what the words describe - nothing other than simply sitting still, and anything added to it - sitting and chanting, or sitting and practicing mindful breathing, or sitting and thinking about a koan - is not "just sitting." Just sitting, with no "and." So sitting and listening to music is not shikantaza, but with the Caves tracks, the music quickly falls away just as I'm settling in, and the "and" disappears. 

But sometimes, especially during this Rohatsu practice period, I also use some extended-length recorded tracks as my timers. It's not shikantaza, but in my experience it can still be a form of meditation. It won't work if I'm listening to anything with words or singing, or instrumental melodies, or even a fixed rhythm. But there's some drone music that consists of little more than a single tone sustained for extended lengths and there's some ambient music that's so ephemeral and nebulous that there are no hooks or anything else for the mind to latch onto, and those tracks can make good timers. The sound simply disappears into the background, not unlike the other ambient sounds of the house on an afternoon - the fan from the HVAC, the birds outside, the occasional passing car, sometimes (and annoyingly) some landscapers working their gas-powered leaf blowers somewhere in the neighborhood. 

Today, I used three of those 25-minute Caves and two 45-minute ambient tracks for my sitting. The first ambient track was Elaine Radigue's Occam XXV performed by the organist Frederic Blondy. The entire 45 minutes is one long sustained note played on organ that slowly, imperceptibly, rises up out of silence and then fades back again by the end - now that I think about it, the exact opposite strategy as the Caves. It's the aural equivalent of watching paint dry, perfect for meditation (Radigue, it should be noted, is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist). 

The other 45-minute track was Annea Lockwood's sound collage World Rhythm, consisting of field recording of various nature sounds - a babbling brook, lapping waves, bird songs, honking geese, occasional rumbles of thunder, with moments of silence or near-silence. To some people, it might not even qualify a "music," although the counter argument is that sounds arranged from field recordings of nature is no less arbitrary than sound arranged from plucked strings, drum beats, and vibrating columns of air.

FYI, I'm off Spotify now, and all my timers today were ethically purchased off of Bandcamp, including the Caves, Occam XXV, and World Rhythm.      

 

 

The Living Help, 43rd Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Helios): Forty-third day of Hagwinter, first day of Rohatsu practice period. Even though I sat yesterday (90 minutes), I sat again today for 120 minutes - four sitting periods (zazen) of 25 minutes each, with five minutes of walking meditation (kinhin) in between. 

Also, since Helios is officially a walking day for me, I went out and walked a Madisonian 4.4 miles, the shorter distance necessitated by the extra time needed for all that sitting.

tl/dr: another day in paradise

  

 

Winter Drum, 42nd Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Electra): Secrets of the Essence Chamber, the 50th day of Hagwinter, is Rohatsu, the date of the Buddha's awakening. The next eight days leading up to the holiday comprise the Rohatsu practice period, a stretch of intensive meditation practice.

Monks around the world shudder in anticipation of Rohatsu. I'm not formally a monk, although I do fancy myself as an "urban monk." For many years early in my practice, I thought that when I finally retired from the workspace, I would join a Zen monastery somewhere, maybe Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York, or Upaya Zen Center in New Mexico. Maybe even go to Japan. But as retirement approached, I lost my enthusiasm and started to consider myself less and less of a Zen Buddhist in the traditional sense of someone participating in, as Dogen put it, the unmistakable tradition handed down from teacher-to-student since the time of the Buddha. 

Also, joining some new community didn't sit well with this introvert. However, as I studied the koans and lives of the ancient Zen masters, I read about forest monks and mountain monks who left the monasteries to practice on their own in seclusion. Those cartoons and comics that you see about the wise old man sitting on the mountaintop is based on the concept of the mountain monk. A forest monk is basically the same thing, but deep in the woods rather than on top of a mountain.

But as I thought about it, one can be just as isolated and alone in the city as on top of Old Smoky or deep in the forests of Fangorn. Urban loneliness and alienation are well-documented modern-day problems, the dark side of the anonymity and seclusion that cities can offer. To be alone in the midst of a bustling crowd seemed like as Zen a concept as any (the distractions are all in your mind, anyway), and after I finally did retire I went about fashioning a life of urban monasticism.

The covids were my first teacher. The pandemic broke out within a year of my retirement, and along with the rest of society, I wrestled with the new practices of social distancing and staying home alone. But even as the restrictions were lifted and life slowly returned to the new normal, I continued to hone a practice of urban monasticism. With each passing month and each passing year, I adjusted myself a little more, leaning into those activities that seem to belong on this path and dropping those activities that don't. 

I'm sociable enough to my neighbors - I say "hello" and exchange pleasantries over the backyard fence when we bump into each other - but I don't seek them out, don't invite them over, and didn't accept invitations until they eventually stopped coming. Just as a monastic occasionally has to go to the market for the sake of the monastery, I go food shopping at the supermarket when I need to, although I don't go out "shopping" as a social activity. I chant the Heart Sutra at least once a day - generally, whenever I think about it. I sleep when I'm tired, and get up when I awaken. After I finish a meal, I wash my bowls and even disconnected my dishwasher to encourage mindfully fulfilling that chore.  

My meditation practice, as I've noted here before, is currently 90 minutes every other day. With the approach of Rohatsu, it's time to step that up. My goal for the next eight days is to sit daily, instead of every other day, and to increase my time by at least 30 minutes each day. By the end of the practice period, I should be sitting for 5½ hours a day. I'll still try and maintain my alternating day walks, although with shorter daylight hours each day and more time spent sitting, I may have to cut down my nine-mile Harrisons to five-mile Monroes, or less.

For the sake of all sentient beings, now my watch begins.    

 

Day of the Still Boulder, 41st of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Deneb): The kid sister finally came home from the hospital today after completing her cancer surgery and recovery. She's still in pretty rough shape - a feeding tube to her stomach, a tracheostomy tube still in her throat, her jaw still wired shut, and will need care and assistance by her husband for some period of time. But the good news is that the cancer was successfully removed.

In the stark light of the reality of her life-and-death experience, other events seem sore of irrelevant. 

The Overday, 40th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor): Never before has an American president demanded absolute loyalty in the way the Stable Genius does, not only by attempting to destroy any Republican who opposes him but by demanding regular public displays of sycophancy, such as the North Korean-style cabinet meetings in which everyone competes to see who can offer the most effusive praise of the president’s magnificence. 

For the most part, it has worked: The atmosphere of fear surrounding the Stable Genius’ cult of personality has kept Republicans from criticizing him even when they think he’s wrong. However, writing in Public Notice, Paul Waldman notes that many Republican politicians and influencers are now breaking with him, or at the very least fighting amongst themselves in ways that weaken his movement. Most of the following comes directly from his article.

After months of resisting the release of the Epstein files, the Stable Genius faced a revolt from his own party in Congress, where both houses voted nearly unanimously for a bill to force a release, which he then signed.

Ideas he has floated recently, including 50-year mortgages and $2,000 checks given to Americans supposedly from tariff revenue, have not resounded in Congress, and few members come out to back them. His demand to eliminate the filibuster has received little support from Republicans in the Senate.

His apparent interest in invading Venezuela has caused a negative reaction from supporters who believed him when he said he wanted to break with our history of foreign adventurism. Republican officeholders have begun raising questions about the Pentagon murdering alleged drug smugglers by the dozens without providing any evidence of who they were or what legal authority the administration is operating under. Sen. Rand Paul, for one, said, “I think you’ll see a splintering and a fracturing of the movement that has supported the president” if he invades Venezuela.

While Republican legislators in Texas saluted and followed his order to redraw their congressional maps, Republicans in Indiana said "no" despite intense pressure from the White House. While it received less coverage, Republicans in Nebraska and Kansas also declined to redraw their maps to eliminate Democratic seats.

The Stable Genius has championed the unfettered development of artificial intelligence, but many on the right are wary of the technology and the tech companies creating it. When news broke that he wants to prevent the states from adopting AI regulations, state-level Republicans pushed back.

The right is currently being torn apart over the question of how friendly it should be to Nazis. While the Stable Genius’ own position on the question is a bit muddled, his administration is teeming with white nationalists.

Some Republicans are even worried about backlash from the administration’s nationwide campaign of masked thuggery. In response to the recent invasion of North Carolina, former Gov. Pat McCrory told Politico, “From a PR and political standpoint, for the first time, immigration is maybe having a negative impact on my party.”

The Stable Genius had an Oval Office meeting with New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist. Rather than calling the Mamdani a vile communist to his face like he did in multiple tweets, the president couldn’t have been friendlier.  “I think you’re going to have hopefully a really great mayor,” he said. “The better he does, the happier I am, I will say.” 

That meeting and the Stable Genius' embrace of the mayor-elect had supporters reeling. Steve Bannon shared a long lament about how “heartbroken” the base was, and a Fox Business analyst posted, “I really think the wheels are coming off" the Stable Genius' presidency.

Punchbowl News reports that MTG’s displeasure is just the tip of the iceberg in the Republican caucus in the House. The White House, one anonymous GOP member told them, “has treated ALL members like garbage … More explosive early resignations are coming. It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower.”

The most immediate explanation for why all this dissension and displeasure is roiling to the surface is that the Stable Genius is extremely unpopular right now — especially on the economy, the issue every elected official rightly fears.

The cracks are starting to show in the Stable Genius' facade and, just like Jericho, the walls will soon come tumbling down.

 

Tempest Birth, 39th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Now, probably more so than ever, the words of  William S. Burroughs seem appropriate:

(For John Dillinger and hope he is still alive)
Thanksgiving Day, November Twenty-eighth, 1986: 
Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts.
Thanks for a continent to despoil and poison.
Thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger.
Thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcasses to rot.
Thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes.
Thanks for the American dream to vulgarize and to falsify until the bare lies shine through.
Thanks for the KKK, for n----r-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.
Thanks for Kill a Queer for Christ stickers.
Thanks for laboratory AIDS.
Thanks for Prohibition and the war against drugs.
Thanks for a country where nobody's allowed to mind their own business.
Thanks for a nation of finks.
Yes, thanks for all the memories: All right let's see your arms! You always were a headache and you always were a bore.
Thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
    © Songs Of Virtual, Wixen Music Publishing

 

Approaches, 38th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): Every morning, I wake up and open the news on my phone, looking for that death notice. Not just any obituary that might appear buried way down deep and low on the site. I'm looking for that front-page, giant-font notice that tells me the long nightmare is finally over.

Meanwhile, I have to console myself by watching the Stable Genius' agenda fall apart. Old, demented, and senile, he can barely string together a coherent sentence. I'm watching him call for capital punishment of a member of the Senate,  a highly decorated military veteran and literally an astronaut. I'm watching him tell a reporter that he plans on meeting with former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro "in the very near future" a day after Bolsonaro was incarcerated for tampering with his ankle bracelet while waiting to start his 38-year jail sentence. 

I'm watching his attempted prosecution of two political rivals laughed out of court for incompetence. I'm watching him, after weeks of strenuous resistance, submit to the inevitability of the release of the Epstein files, although I still don't believe that anything meaningful will ever be released, certainly nothing detrimental to the Stable Genius.

I'm watching him fall asleep in front of the camera during press conferences. I'm watching him slur his words like an alcoholic on a ten-day bender. I'm watching him string out sentences in long, rambling tangents, many of which revert back to his grievance of two, five, or more years ago and totally unrelated to the topic he was addressing.   

What am I not watching? I'm not watching the announcement that his DOGE project has been formally disbanded, because there was no press conference on that one and they're trying to keep it quiet and on the down-low. I'm not watching his big health-care announcement scheduled for last Monday with Dr. Oz because the announcement  was quietly cancelled without explanation (hint: they don't have a plan for health care).

Every morning starts with the disappointment that the announcement's not there. But there's always tomorrow.

 

Black Clotted Corridor, 37th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Helios): The kid sister is still in the hospital - eight days now and counting - recovering from her cancer surgery. The doctors expect that she'll be discharged on Thursday, Thanksgiving Day.

She's still got a long road ahead. The tumor was in her jaw and her mouth still isn't fully functional. For at least some period of time, her husband will have to feed her and give her medicines via a feeding tube. Tomorrow, she'll endure yet another procedure to have the tube moved from her nose directly to her stomach. If that's successful, then she'll be ready for discharge on Thursday.

I can't imagine the psychological strain this is putting on her. Pain, the institutional indifference of the hospital, day after day of being face-to-face with your own mortality. The mid staggers thinking of what she's going through. 

It's been a rough couple years for the little nuclear family in which I was raised. My father passed in 2006, and my mother just left us last January. My kid brother died a yar ago September, and my cat, Izzy, the December before that. Impermanence is swift. 

The doctors say the surgery was successful and they were able to remove all the malignant tissue from her jaw, but on top of everything else it's a heavy, heavy burden, especially as the ordeal drags on day after day.

         

 

Wild Sun, 36th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Electra): Before starting your Thanksgiving feast this week, you should consider the innumerable efforts that brought you your food. 

The first and most obvious is the hours of shopping, baking, mixing, and cooking by the hosts. Don't forget to acknowledge their efforts, help with the dishes, and if appropriate, tip your server.  Awareness of those immediate efforts, though, can then expand to the grocers, and then to the farmers, and then to the truckers who hauled the food farm to market.

But look even deeper. Someone had to build that supermarket, someone had to build the farmer's tractor, someone fueled the truck. Someone else milled the steel used to build the girders, the engines, and the truck body, and yet others mined the iron used to mill the steel and pumped the oil that fueled the entire enterprise. Someone felled the trees to pulp the paper in which to wrap the food. 

If we look deep enough and with enough imagination, almost every effort in the world has directly or indirectly led to the food appearing on the table. The city paved the road from farm to market, some venture capitalist provided the funds to start the iron mine, a vast industry was established to obtain and distribute the fuel for the tractors and trucks, and armies and policemen provided stability and safety for all of these activities to proceed - sometimes to protect against other armies and police who were trying to disrupt the activities.

There exists an enormous, universal web of interdependence that ties all the world's activities together, and while it all wasn't done for the express purpose of putting that cranberry sauce of your table, that cranberry sauce on your table is an inseparable part of the web. Everything is everything, and your Thanksgiving feast is a result of pyramids built, oceans crossed, wars waged, and continents tamed.

May I suggest that instead of some trite and probably untrue fable about the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag, or some prayer to a deity who probably doesn't even exist in the first place, try reciting to yourself or among yourselves the following verse:

Innumerable efforts have bought us this meal.
We should consider how it came to us, 
and whether our virtue and practice are worthy of this offering.
We regard greed as poison of the mind.
We regard this meal as medicine to sustain our life.
May all be equally nourished.

The first portion is to end all evil.
The second is to cultivate every good.
The third is to free all beings.
For the sake of awakening, we now receive this food.

Day of the Axe, 35th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Deneb): If it seems like I've been writing a lot about environmental policy this week, it's because it's been quite the week for environmental policy news. Even the New York Times noticed, with the headline, In One Week,  Florida Man Moves to Reshape U.S. Environmental Policy (okay, "Florida Man" was my embellishment). As one expert put it, this was the week from hell for environmental policy in the US.

The rollbacks came one after the other last week, potentially affecting everything from endangered species to wetland habitats. On Monday, the EPA proposed to strip federal protections from millions of acres of wetlands and streams, narrowing the reach of the Clean Water Act. On Wednesday, federal wildlife agencies announced changes to the Endangered Species Act that could make it harder to rescue endangered species from the brink of extinction. And on Thursday, the Interior Department moved to allow new oil and gas drilling across nearly 1.3 billion acres of U.S. coastal waters, including a remote region in the Arctic where drilling has never before taken place.

The proposals could reshape U.S. environmental policy for years to come. Unless stopped by the courts, each proposed rollback could do irreparable harm to the nation’s water quality, critical habitat, and marine ecosystems.

While all this was going on, down in Brazil, some 3,300 miles to the south, negotiators from nearly 200 nations, notably not including the US, could only muster the most noncommittal of possible commitments to maybe, someday, think about possibly ending the use of fossil fuels. Or not.

Fortunately, it could take the government up to two years to finalize the proposals unveiled this week. At that point, environmental groups and other opponents could challenge the rules in court, leading to lengthy legal battles. But Lee Zeldin, the Stable Genius' eminently underqualified EPA administrator, said the goal was to write regulations that would be “durable and withstand future swings of presidential elections to come.” He also suggested that 2025 could set a record in terms of environmental rollbacks.

Here's your so-called protector of the environment bragging about how he's not doing his job: he boasted to some podcaster, “We will do more deregulation in one year than entire federal governments in the past have done across all federal agencies combined.” Ladies and gentlemen, your EPA, telling us that he's going to let polluters go unwatched.

 

The Boy Patriarch, 34th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor): After two weeks of negotiating in Brazil and in the implacable face of opposition from oil-producing nations led by Saudi Arabia, its allies, and Russia, the best the other 80 COP30 representative countries could manage was a "voluntary agreement" to "begin discussions" on "a roadmap" to an "eventual" phase-out of fossil fuels.

The talks were hauled back from the brink of collapse in an all-night session on Friday that lasted into Saturday morning. It was a tiny baby-step toward the end of the fossil fuel era, but not nearly enough to avoid the ravages of climate breakdown.

tl/dr: We're doomed.

 

The Rusted Machines, 33rd Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Shhh. Be very quiet. Actually, let me try that again, but this time in a trembling, Elmer Fudd voice: be vewy, vewy qwiet. 

Do you hear it? That's the sound of MAGA dying. The hateful movement is in its death throes. It's impossible to ignore the advanced dementia of the Stable Genius, once loyal sycophants are now asking "Stable who?," and the inevitable tide of reality is rising against the sand castle of lies and grievance that he's built. The end is near.

That makes these times extraordinarily dangerous. He's liable to lash out to prove his relevance and his potency, and that might take the form of mass arrests, or military occupation of American cities (but this time for real, not just National Guardsmen picking up trash on the National Mall). It might mean court-sanctioned executions of political opponents on the White House lawn. It could even mean a Truman-esque dropping of the big one. Nothing's off limits to an injured ego lashing out - did you ever see the movie Forbidden Planet?

 

Harsh Blankness of the Noon Day, 32nd of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): Since its passage in 1973, the Endangered Species Act has faced criticism from a range of business interests, including farmers, ranchers, loggers, and rural landowners. Opponents have accused environmentalists of weaponizing the law to block infrastructure projects without consideration of potential economic benefits. Yesterday, the Stable Genius proposed to significantly restrict the Act with new rules that would clear the way for more oil drilling, logging, and mining in critical habitats.

One of the most controversial proposals would allow the government to consider economic factors, such as lost revenue from a ban on oil drilling near critical habitat, before deciding whether to list a species as endangered. The Act currently requires the government to consider only the best available science when making these decisions. Another proposal would also prohibit designation of critical habitat for species threatened by climate change and gut the government's ability to designate habitat in unoccupied areas needed for recovery.

The proposed changes would also gut nearly all the protections for species newly designated as “threatened” under the Act. The changes would allow developers and industry to override the recommendations of experts to block habitat protections, and weaken the consultation process designed to prevent harm to endangered animals and their habitats from federal activities.

Especially considering with recent proposals to restrict the wetlands protections in the Clean Water Act, the proposed changes aren’t about protecting endangered animals and plants. They are about letting the biggest companies in the country drill for more oil, log old-growth trees, and mine for coal even if it causes iconic species to go extinct and cheats Americans of their natural heritage. It's about opening the country up to be plundered and butchered by business and industry, to designate North America as "a continent to despoil and poison," as William S. Burroughs once put it. 

As the tough-as-nails biker chick Rikki Patel reminds us in the zombie survival game, Days Gone, “Rivers do not drink their own water. Trees do not eat their own fruit. And clouds do not swallow their own rain. The great ones always act for the benefit of others.”

 

The Night Crescent, 31st Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Helios): Analysis by ProPublica and The Guardian that draws on modeling performed by independent researchers found that the Stable Genius' drill, baby, drill agenda of expanded fossil fuel use while also fighting efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will substantially add to the number of people dying from increased temperatures. 

The vast majority of deaths are expected to occur outside the US. Most of the people expected to die from increasing temperatures in the coming decades live in poor, hot countries in Africa and south Asia. Many of these countries emitted relatively little of the pollution that caused the climate crisis, and are least prepared to cope with the increasing heat.

The US has only 4% of the world’s population but produces 20% of its greenhouse gases. 

The greenhouse gases released in the next decade as a direct result of the Stable Genius' policies are expected to lead to the deaths of 1.3 million more people worldwide in the next 90 years than would die otherwise. The actual number of people who die from heat during that period will be much higher, although a warming planet will also result in fewer deaths from cold.

The analysis used modeled estimates of the additional emissions that will be released as a result of the Stable Genius' policies as well as the mortality cost of carbon. That metric, which builds on Nobel prize-winning science that has informed federal policy for more than a decade, predicts the number of temperature-related deaths from additional emissions. The estimate reflects deaths from heat-related causes, such as heatstroke and the exacerbation of existing illnesses, minus lives saved by reduced exposure to cold. It does not include the massive number of deaths expected from the broader effects of the climate crisis, such as droughts, floods, wars, vector-borne diseases, hurricanes, wildfires, and reduced crop yields.

The numbers, while large, are just a fraction of the estimated 83 million temperature-related deaths that could result from all human-caused emissions over the same period if climate-heating pollution is not curtailed. But they speak to the human cost of prioritizing US corporate interests over the lives of people around the globe. 

A great America is a clean, healthy country with clean, healthy air. A cut-rate, dollar-store America is one where natural resources and ecological services are sacrificed to increase the bottom line of business.

 

Day of Slack Rains, 30th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Electra): Last month, the Stable Genius said he would open the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas drilling. Last week, he further announced that drilling would also be allowed in a remote stretch of tundra and wetlands in another part of Alaska that is among the Arctic’s most important wildlife habitats.

The decisions to drill in Alaska would “unlock Alaska’s energy potential, create jobs for North Slope communities, and strengthen American energy security,” according to the administration. Although Trump has repeatedly said he wants clean air and clean water, decisions like these show that he believes environmental concerns should not supersede the needs of the economy. 

Yesterday's proposal to scale back the Clean Water Act of 1972, which Congress passed to protect “waters of the United States,” would benefit real estate developers eager to build on shorelines, farmers with fields that run along waterways, and manufacturers who build petrochemical factories on tidal marshes. The proposal "is going to be met with a lot of relief” from those businesses and landowners, according to Lee Zeldin, the Stable Genius' underqualified administrator of the EPA.

But wetlands store carbon dioxide, and provide food, shelter and breeding grounds for a variety of species, and also protect against flooding by absorbing tidal surges during storms.

As stated yesterday, the proposal would exclude from federal protection wetlands that sit beside “intermittent” or “ephemeral” streams, those streams that sit dry for most of the year but fill up after rainfall or snowmelt and provide more than half of the water flowing through this country's river systems. The proposal could affect up to 55 million acres of wetlands, an area roughly the size of Utah.

The proposed rule addresses what constitutes “waters of the United States” in the Clean Water Act. The Obama administration widened the definition to protect the headwaters of rivers and smaller streams that aren’t always full of water. Trump repealed that rule in his first term, and a 2023 Supreme Court decision (Sackett v. EPA) makes it harder for subsequent administrations to strengthen the protections.

The case involved an Idaho couple who wanted to build a house near federally protected wetlands. The Supreme Court ruled that those wetlands were not, in fact, federally protected, and with the newly proposed rule, many more acres of waterways may no longer be protected. The National Association of Home Builders said that the proposal would help in “reducing regulatory red tape, cutting permitting costs and lowering the cost of doing business in communities across the country.”

So short-sighted. So that an Idaho couple can face less red tape, so that homebuilders can lower their permitting costs, and so industries can build their sprawling factories on cheap wetland property, the Stable Genius is sacrificing the continent's ability to protect against floodwaters and to filter our fresh-water resources, while exacerbating climate change and reducing critical habitat. 

A great America is a clean, healthy country on clean, healthy land. A cut-rate, dollar-store America is one where natural resources and ecological services are sacrificed to increase the bottom line of business.         

 

Hint Impending Wonders, 29th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Deneb):   The Clean Water Act of 1972 was passed to protect the water of the United States and gave the U.S . Corps of Engineers permitting authority for discharges into the country's "navigable waters." But to protect the quality of the navigable waters one has to protect the quality of the waters that feed into them, and many parties were surprised to find themselves required to get permits for projects that impacted wetlands, swamps, and even small streams and drainage ditches that no one could navigate even the tinies of kayaks through.

Case in point and true story: Way back in the 1980s, I was hired to investigate the hydrologic properties of a piece of land in upstate New York that a major paper company wanted to use for a landfill. We advanced several text borings to measure the depth to groundwater using a truck-mounted drilling rig, which got stuck in the mud after a rainy day. It took quite an effort to get the truck free and the more the wheels spun the deeper the tires sank into the soft earth. We finally used some chains and another vehicle to pull it out. leaving some deep ruts behind. 

A few months later, the Corps came by to inspect the property for potential wetlands, and although they found no natural wetlands on the property, they declared the deep ruts our truck tires left behind to be a man-made wetland (they would fill with water after a rain). The paper company would have to apply for a wetland permit pursuant to the Clean Water Act to build over the tire mark, even though no person (or any ecological receptor for that matter) would consider it a viable habitat and it wasn't connected to any other water body in any reasonably imaginable way - rainwater would just sit in the ruts until it evaporated away.

The lawyers eventually figured out some legal loophole to avoid permitting, something to do with de minimis size or something, but the paper company was still furious and complained about the "death of common sense." I understood and respected the Clean Water Act and agreed with the concept of the Corps' permitting authority, but even I thought it was ridiculous to call some wheel ruts deep in the woods a wetland and couldn't conceive of any way that building over them would impact "the navigable waters of the United States."

That paper company among others probably rejoiced in 2023 when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito limited the Corps' permitting authority under the Clean Water Act to only wetlands with a “continuous surface connection” to a “relatively permanent” body of water. Today, the EPA took it further, proposing new rules that would exclude wetlands that abut or touch intermittent streams (which do not flow during dry periods) or ephemeral streams (which sit dry for much of the year and fill up only after rainfall or snowmelt). According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the changes could strip federal protections from up to 55 million acres of wetlands, or about 85 percent of all wetlands nationwide.

I oppose this decision. By nature's design, wetlands temporarily store rain and floodwater to let organic and suspended matter settle out before the water discharges to larger streams and lakes, even if the connection between them is intermittent or ephemeral. Those designations don't mean the streams aren't working as well or as efficiently as continuous-discharge water bodies. Oftentimes they work precisely because they're intermittent or ephemeral. Your bladder isn't any less efficient or work less well because you don't emit a constant flow of urine (you don't, right? I hope you don't). 

My experience with the truck-tire ruts getting classified as wetlands probably says more about over-zealous or inexperienced regulators than it does about the value, or lack thereof, of the the Clean Water Act. Poor guy or gal was probably under some pressure, self imposed or not, to find "something," and our truck-tire ruts were the best they could find. 

Lee Zeldin, the under-qualified and inexperienced administrator appointed to the EPA by the Stable Genius, crowed that “across the country, news of today’s proposal is going to be met with a lot of relief from farmers, ranchers, other landowners and governments.” Maybe. Still doesn't mean it's a good idea, though, and some day in the future, when we have fewer wetlands but more frequent and more severe floods and more polluted streams, rivers, and lakes, we'll regret this short-sighted decision.          

 

The Mindless Eternal, 28th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor):  Today, I heard my first words from my kid sister since her cancer surgery earlier this week. Her jaw's still wired shut and she has some sort of tube in her throat for some reason, but she was able to grunt out a "hello" and a few words to me as her husband held the phone up to her face. 

She and the husband are something of technophobes - she doesn't even have a cell phone and he only has an old flip phone. That's unfortunate, because if ever there was a time for communicating via text messages, it's now. As it is, she's using an electronic pad provided by the hospital to write out short messages by hand and her husband reads me what she's written over his phone. I find it amusing when I see young people sitting across from each other and texting instead of talking, but when your jaw's wired shut and there's a tube down your throat, I think it's acceptable to text.

Impermanence is swift and life and death are the great matter. This dew-like existence should be cherished while it lasts, even while we recognize that sickness, old age, and death are the inevitable results of being born.

 

Day of the Mounds, 27th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse):  The water-rights wars in Texas are pitting agriculture against industry against municipalities. The wetter parts of the states fight to protect “their” water from thirsty and fast-growing cities. Recently, grass-roots groups in rural Georgia organized to prevent Atlanta from tapping water in their part of the state, and legislation prohibiting "inter-basin transfers" of water was introduced in the state capitol. The premise behind the ban was that if the rain didn't fall in your river basin, you had no right to expect to tap into the bounty of other basins. "Already," an transfer-ban proponent wrote, "thirsty Atlanta is looking to stick its long straw into convenient nearby water basins." As resources dwindle, meaningful action will be even more difficult if water conservation comes to be seen as a partisan issue.  

A thunder shower
In the middle of a fight
About water rights
(adapted from a haiku by "Homeless" Kōdō Sawaki) 

Beyond the mere irony of a thunder shower occurring in the middle of a fight over water, when the sky suddenly darkens and the rain begins, people lose their reason for fighting. The fight was conditioned on the state of drought, and when conditions change and the drought is no longer present, the fighting over water can stop (and we can start fighting over high ground to avoid floodwater). 

Commenting on his poem, Kōdō said, "Imagine looking back on our lives after we die. We’ll see that so many things didn’t matter."

As Shohaku Okumura points out, when we die we return to oneness, just as all rivers eventually flow into the ocean. In fact, rivers and ocean are both manifestations of the larger circulation of water. Depending on our perspective, we can see them as separate or as one. When we abandon our self-centered attitudes and live without being driven by our own desires and aversions, a way beyond duality manifests itself. And when we see the true interdependent reality of all beings, we can relax and open our clinging minds. We can then each sit in our own caskets and view things from nonduality, or complete interconnectedness.

 

The Subtle Cabinet, 26th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): Tehran is about to run out of water, and we'll son learn what it's like when a city of nine million people don't have drinking water or sanitation. Tehran has done little to endear itself to Americans (and vice versa) but I don't wish what I fear is going to happen on anyone. 

In a world where immigration and mass migration is a geopolitical flash point, eight million displaced Iranians won't exactly soothe tensions. Already, the water shortage is one of the reasons Iran is expelling millions of Afghan refugees and why there has been fighting at the border.

Water's scarce in Texas, too. Part of the problem is the state’s antiquated approach to water policy, writes Rachel Monroe in The New Yorker. "Texas follows the rule of capture, also known as absolute ownership, which allows landowners to draw as much water from below their property as they’d like, even if this has a negative impact on neighboring properties." The rule of capture incentivizes over-pumping, as the more water you pump, the larger the area of a well's influence. Property owners in Texas can’t prevent someone next door with a bigger pump and a deeper well from sucking groundwater from underneath their property. "I'm drinking your milkshake." Every other Western state has abandoned absolute ownership, opting instead for “reasonable use,” but Texas culture holds private property sacrosanct, and state lawmakers can't seem to move beyond absolute ownership. 

Despite their challenges, Texas is still courting large, water-intensive industry in the name of "economic growth," an it's not difficult to imagine a Tehran-style future for the Lone Star State. 

Since the 1950s, over-pumping of groundwater has caused the ground surface to subside by as much as 12 feet in the Wilcox Basin east of Tucson, Arizona. According to the Arizona Geological Survey, over 3,000 square miles of the state are affected by subsidence, especially in urban areas. Large, populous cities in the desert are not long sustainable as Tucson and Phoenix and SLC are learning. The indigenous Pueblo culture in the area have already learned, as their once vibrant civilization fell into decline around the year 1300 due to drought.

Migration to the US from the Northern Triangle in Central America was due to drought, crop failure, and back-to-back hurricanes. The civil war in Syria was a direct result of drought. Drought and food shortages kicked off the Arab Spring. Drought even reportedly doubled the rate of forced child marriages in Ethiopia, as child marriage provides income to an impoverished family while removing one mouth to feed. 

Water will eventually become as valuable as oil. 

 

Day of the Given, 25th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Helios): The sister is doing well in her post-op recovery from cancer surgery. She still can't talk - her jaw is literally wired shut - and she has to take her meals by straw. But this too shall pass.

I walked a 9.4-mile Harrison today and didn't feel any of the stiffness or soreness that made me cut Tuesday's walk short.

Like you, I'm reveling in the schadenfreude as the Stable Genius freaks out over the slow, drip-by-drip release of the Epstein files. Child molesters in jail are famously mistreated, even murdered, by the other prisoners. Now we know why the Stable Genius was so alarmed and fought so furiously against the charges brought against him in 2023 and 2024, and why he's on such a vendetta now against those who brought the charges of his crimes against him.

 

Ascendent Eye, 24th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Electra):  My kid sister just survived cancer surgery yesterday. She had a tumor removed from her inside cheek and jawbone, following a month of immuno- and chemotherapy. 

There's really not too much that can be said beyond that. Impermanence is swift, but it hasn't caught up with my sister yet, although sickness and age are taking their toll.

Deets: She discovered a lump on her cheek last September, was quickly diagnosed, and began the treatments. I only learned about all this last week. She had the surgery yesterday at Mass Eye and Ear Hospital in Boston and will be there for at least another week recovering.  All reports indicate the doctors were able to remove all the cancerous tissue and reconstructed the parts of her jawbone they had to remove with a piece of her shoulder blade, and she's doing as well as can be expected, all things considered.

Her husband has taken up residence in an adjacent hotel for the duration of her stay.

It's been a tough year - both my brother and mother died, and a sister was diagnosed with cancer. I wish her well, of course. Cancer is a bitch, but it seems she beat it back.         

 

The Wander Stones, 23rd Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Deneb): Still cold. The low temperature last night (28° F) was 16 degrees below normal. That's only four degrees above the record low set in 1913. I moved to Atlanta in 1981 and never once saw it get this cold in November - these are January-February temperatures.

Deneb is a walking day and despite the temperatures I got my steps in. I wound up settling for a 4.8-mile Madison not so much because I couldn't stand the cold but because I felt stiff and achy, possibly due to the temperature or possibly because of Sunday's 10.3-mile Polk. In either event, I decided not to push it and took a shortcut back home earlier than usual.

Reminder that ever since seeing someone suggest walking 39 miles in the month of December as a tribute to Jimmy Carter, our 39th president, I've been naming my alternating-day walks after presidents. A one-mile walk would be a Washington, a three-mile walk a Jefferson, and so on. My record so far is a 12.1-mile Taylor, and my goal is to someday complete a Lincoln. My usual distance ranges from a Jackson to a Tyler.

Meanwhile, the world continues its descent into hell. The government shutdown is ending, but the Stable Genius still wants to deny SNAP benefits to hungry Americans. ICE agents in Illinois pepper-sprayed a couple and their one-year-old child, and California police had to intervene when a plain-clothed ICE agent pointed a gun at a woman. The Navy is sending an aircraft carrier to the Caribbean as tensions escalate with Venezuela, and the Stable Genius wants to permit oil and gas drilling off the California coast (the same man who said offshore wind farms were eyesores is apparently fine with offshore oil derricks). He's also trying to dismantle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. 

Meanwhile, the Epstein files still haven't been released.

 

The Red Hand, 22nd Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Castor): Fuck, I'm cold. 

Sub-freezing temperatures as low as 15° F are expected across north and central Georgia until at least  10:00 am tomorrow. Last night, the temps fell down into the 30s and warmed up only to the low 40s this afternoon. Cloud cover is deflecting the sun's warmth today, and then clear skies overnight will let whatever warmth we have left to radiate away.

The cold air is due to a dip in the jet stream that is allowing cold air to spill down from the Arctic. The jet stream typically keeps the cold air contained over the Arctic, but a warming Arctic disrupts the normal jet stream and a more wavy, meandering pattern develops, which leads to lobes of cold Arctic air moving southward. Periodic bouts of these wavy, undulating patterns have always occurred in the jet stream, but a warming planet is increasing the natural variability. Just like there's always been hurricanes but climate change is increasing their strength, there's always been dips in the jet stream but climate change is increasing their frequency .  

Whenever it gets cold like this, Zen practitioners always bring up a famous saying of the ancient Chinese Zen Master Dongshan. A monk once asked him, "When cold or heat comes, how can we avoid it?" 

Dongshan said, "Why don't you go to the place where there is no cold or heat?"

The monk asked, "What is the place where there is no cold or heat?"

Dongshan said, "When it's cold, let the cold kill you; when it's hot, let the heat kill you." 

A place neither hot nor cold. The place where there is no cold and no heat doesn't exist as a geographical location. The term's a pointer toward the absolute and the relative. Does a marble roll around in a bowl, or does the bowl move around the marble? Is it the marble that moves, or the bowl that moves? Or is it the mind that moves? 

Similarly, is the weather hot or cold, or is it the person that's hot or cold? After all, it's only hot or cold relative to our bodies and our preferences. Today is a warm day to a glacier or an iceberg. Going to a place that's neither hot nor cold means giving up our preferences and abandoning the ego. It's recognizing that "it's" not cold, we are what's cold. Further, letting the cold kill us doesn't mean dying, it means letting go of the self and its preferences. It's an ego-death, not hypothermia. 

Cool. Doesn't make me feel any less cold, though. 

The Stoics advise that the weather is simply part of nature and beyond our control, and that we should focus instead on what we can control, such as dressing warmly or building a fire. All things, including cold weather, are temporary. We may think the cold is more than we can bear, but the time will come when the weather is warmer and we will realize that we had the strength to endure it all along. Enduring cold weather doesn't make us stronger, it just helps us realize that we've always had the strength.  

Consider the Wizard of Oz. The Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow never lacked courage, heart, and wisdom. They had the attributes all along, they only needed to realize it. We have the strength to endure this cold snap if we only silence that part of our mind that tells us that we don't.

 

Day of the Iron Crown, 21st of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I had to check three news sources before I believed this one was true. Sadly, it is. 

It's not bad enough that the Stable Genius is denying SNAP recipients financial assistance during the government shutdown, or that he's gone to the Supreme Court to overrule a lower court decision that said of course he has to use the emergency funds set aside specifically for this kind of event. No, that's not cruel enough. Late yesterday, he told states to “immediately undo” any actions they may have taken to provide any food benefits to low-income families, threatening financial penalties if they did not comply. SNAP helps roughly one in eight Americans buy groceries.

If you told me that the President of the United States was deliberately using hunger as a political weapon, I wouldn't have believed you but I would have assumed you meant it was against foreign enemies. If you told me, no, he was deliberately starving American citizens, and going to court and issuing warnings to the states to not provide food to the citizens he was targeting, well, I wouldn't know what to tell you.

We live in troubling times.   

 

The Open Stages, 20th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Aldebaran): Just a quick snapshot of where things stand here in America after nine months of the Stable Genius' presidency: the government has been shut down since October 1, 38 days so far and with no end in sight. Millions of low-income families around the country are confronted with delays and disruptions to their food stamp benefits. Emergency funds designated specifically for emergency situations such as this exist, but the Stable Genius is actively blocking the funds to be used for the nation’s largest anti-hunger program. Let that sink in for a moment. - the duly elected president of the United States is actively using his political power to prevent American citizens from accessing food. The Supreme Court, naturally, is allowing the withholding to continue. 

Tens of thousands of military personnel are working without pay and others are furloughed, and in many communities that employ large numbers of military personnel, local economies are struggling and food pantries are unable to meet demand.  

Air-traffic controllers are also working without pay, and the airlines were ordered to cut 10 percent of all flights at 40 airports. Under 800 flights were cancelled yesterday and similar levels of reductions are planned throughout the week. 

Is this really what people voted for? Americans going without food, military families unable to make ends meet, the air-traffic infrastructure collapsing? You're good with this? 

The shutdown will eventually end (I think, I hope), but we still have over three more years of this chaotic kind of governance.

 

Anaconda, 19th Day of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Helios): At the end of his term, the worst president in U.S. history refused to attend the inauguration of his successor. Instead, he stayed and sulked in the White House, and then quietly slipped out without notice or fanfare.

The worst president was openly racist, had a terrible personality, and was extremely insecure. He had no curiosity at all, no understanding of how the world worked or what other people's lives might be like. All he wanted was to amass power. He made his cabinet swear loyalty oaths, and those who didn't were summarily fired. 

When asked if there was anyone in politics he didn't like, the worst president admitted that he had an enemies list. He claimed, without evidence, that two members of the opposition party were plotting to kill him, and his supporters viewed the accusations as a declaration of war. 

The worst president purged government agencies of those he deemed disloyal and replaced them with loyalists who would do his bidding. On Washington's birthday, he gave a long, rambling speech that lasted over an hour and only mentioned Washington's name a handful of times, but mentioned his own name over 200 times.

He was so bad, the worst president in U.S. history was impeached by Congress, although he survived conviction by a single vote. And so Andrew Johnson, the 17th President of the United States of America, the man who assumed the office as a result of Lincoln's assassination, was able to finish out his term. Who'd you think I was talking about?

He was not a charismatic man. When Lincoln picked him for vice president, the New York World opined, "To think that one frail life stands between this insolent, clownish creature and the presidency! May God bless and spare Abraham Lincoln!" 

An open racist, Johnson was quoted as saying, "This country is for white men. And by God, as long as I'm president, it shall be a government for white men." His actions were true to his words. He made it easier for Confederate states to come back to the Union without first guaranteeing equal rights for Blacks. After Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and created the Freedmen's Bureau to assist the former slaves,  Johnson vetoed the bill, although Congress was able to override his veto. Johnson responded to the override by replacing the Freedmen's Bureau personnel with his own loyalists. His impeachment was for firing War Secretary Edwin M. Stanton without the consent of the Senate, although Stanton had been appointed with the Senate's consent.

In 1865, General William T. Sherman's Special Field Order No. 15 had designating the entire Southern coastline 30 miles inward for exclusive settlement by former slaves. Freedman could settle there, taking no more than 40 acres per family ("40 acres and a mule"). By June of that year, 40,000 freedmen had moved onto new farms in the area, but in August, Johnson returned the land to the Confederate owners, and the freedman were forced off, same at bayonet. 

Historian Glenn Lafantasie notes Johnson is frequently a favorite candidate for historically worst president because of "his complete mishandling of Reconstruction policy  . . . his bristling personality, and his enormous sense of self-importance." Another said that "Johnson is now scorned for having resisted . . . policies aimed at securing the rights and well-being of the newly emancipated African-Americans." In short, it's generally agreed that Andrew Johnson scuttled the Reconstruction and initiated nearly 100 years of Jim Crow.     

If any of his traits and actions sound familiar, like his ignorance and lack of curiosity, the loyalty oaths and list of enemies, removing Senate appointees without due process, his egocentricity, his paranoia, his racism, his vindictiveness, and the impeachment, you're drawing parallels between the Stable Genius and the worst president in U.S. history (so far).

Except the Stable Genius was impeached twice (so far).

 

Day of the Thigh Whip, 18th of Hagwinter, 525 M.E. (Electra):  Out with the old and in with the new. I'm old, but even I recognize that it's time for fresh new voices and new solutions to our problems.

Nancy Pelosi announced today that she is retiring after 39 years in Congress.  Chuck Schumer has been in the Senate since the Clinton presidency. The Stable Genius is 79 years old and last year beat an incumbent who was 81. There's an argument to be made that we're in the mess we are now because Biden didn't recognize the limitations of his age and was oblivious to how he appeared to others.

On the other hand, Jasmine Crockett is 44 and Jon Ossoff is 38. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is 36. Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City this week at the age of 34. Sam Foster, a 24-year-old IT systems engineer, lost the mayoral election in Marietta, Georgia to a 78-year-old incumbent by fewer votes than there are letters in this sentence. Susan Collins has been Maine's Senator since 1997, but is being challenged by 41-year-old candidate Graham Platner. 

I'll take some of that Crockett-Ossoff-AOC-Platner energy over the same old Pelosi-Schumer rhetoric any day of the week. Politically I don't have major problems with either Pelosi or Schumer. Thank you for your service, madam and sir, but it's time to step aside and give some oxygen to the next generation.

There's a lot to be done to change America for the better. We have to fight for our freedoms, for the environment and the climate, for justice and equality. This fight will take more leadership and energy than old mee-maw and paw-paw have to offer. 

The woman ahead of me in line at my polling place who was concerned about "whatever will happen to New York City?" had to have been in her 60s. I don't know the age of the homeowner association person who emailed me a warning about "radicals" running for the Atlanta City Council, but she's lived in the house she's in now since 1994 and has an aol.com email address. Old people are frightened by change while the young embrace it, and we need change right about now.

When I was in my teens, a popular slogan at the time was "Don't trust anyone over 30." It was people over 30 who started the Vietnam War, created the war on drugs, and were pro-censorship and anti-sex. But then we all turned older and the Yippies became yuppies and the slogan was abandoned. But it's been scientifically proven that the adult mind loses a few thousandths of a second reaction speed each year and that by the age of 40 our brains have begun to deteriorate. However, the process actually begins as early as 30, when brain maturation is fully complete and it's harder to create new neural pathways.