Drive through rural America and see how many underpopulated small towns there are. Shuttered businesses for lack of customers. Abandoned buildings. These places need people.

Know what I love about Rockwell? The hands. Artists always talk about how hard it is to draw hands. Rockwell, that dude could draw hands, and he knew it. He drew hands in this picture, through the doorway, when there was absolutely no need to, because he could. And if you look at a bunch of his pictures, he doesn’t just draw hands, he draws hands doing complicated things, making complex gestures, gripping fiddly little objects, he draws old people with wrinkled skin and funky joints on their hands… he was goddamn good at drawing hands and he was not shy about showing off his hand-drawing talent.

People calling him an illustrator and not an artist are just jealous of his hands.

Edit:

Hands:

(Assuming that “no consequence” also means that I won’t die on the trip…)

• Witness the Tunguska impact.

• See a Beatles show when they were just some small time dudes playing in a crummy club.

• Visit the Great Exhibition of 1851 and go inside the Crystal Palace

I voted Uncommitted in the primary so that Biden and the Democrats would get a count of how many people took the issue seriously. Primaries are a great place for message votes.

I also donated, volunteered, and voted for the Biden and then Harris campaigns, and didn’t hold back any support in public. I had no illusions about how bad it would (now will) be with Trump in the Whitehouse.

There was a Tom Clancy novel, either Sum of All Fears or Red Storm Rising, where the president and cabinet were a bunch of stupid fuckups that kept on making bad decisions taking us closer to World War 3.

There are people who, disturbed by “big government” today and its tendency to curb the advantages they might gain if their competitiveness were allowed free flow, demand “less govern- ment.” Alas, there is no such thing as less government, merely changes in government. If the libertarians had their way, the distant bureaucracy would vanish and the local bully would be in charge. Personally, I prefer the distant bureaucracy, which may not find me, over the local bully, who certainly will. And all historical precedent shows a change to localism to be for the worse.

—Isaac Asimov, Nice Guys Finish First, collected in The Sun Shines Bright, 1981

I love SOHKN MILINE!

Mirrored:

No, I took it

Person A: I like the Star Wars prequels!

Me: That’s your right.

PA: They’re my favorite Star Wars!

Me: You’re allowed to like whatever you want.

PA: They’re better than the original trilogy!

Me: [Through gritted teeth] There’s no such thing as objectively good or bad media so…

PA: Anakin is a tragic hero!

Me: Okay so…

We need never be afraid of the vote of informed Americans. It is only the ignorant voter we have to fear, ignorant politically, no matter how fine his house or how expensive his schooling. Such people have never experienced democracy; they have merely enjoyed its benefits. It is hard to explain what democracy is; it is necessary to participate in it to understand it.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

Unfortunately, there seems to be an awful lot of ignorance out there today.

Which indicates that policy is secondary to messaging. On every substantive policy metric, Democrats are better than Republicans. People even say they prefer Democratic policies over Republicans’ when polled, by wide margins. So it must be the messenger and the way the message is being conveyed that is losing elections. That’s not to say that policies don’t matter, they absolutely do, but if you’ve got great policies and shit messaging, then you’re not going to win voters over, no matter how much better you are.

I don’t actually think it’s productive to debate whether Bernie would have won or not. I can think one thing and another person can think another, and we can argue forever and it’ll achieve virtually nothing. What I will absolutely assert is that, on paper, there’s no reason why Bernie Sanders, a socialist Jew from the second least-populous state in the nation, should be so successful, so he must be doing something that resonates with a lot of people! He’s acknowledging that people feel abandoned by the system and he’s demanding that something be done about that. Demanding change has been the source of all the biggest political success stories since Barack Obama. If the DNC can’t recognize the power in that, then they’re never going to get anywhere.

No one will ever find our red-headed girl with a dappling of freckles on her nose and cheeks attractive!

There’s still a lot of analysis still to be done, but the Pod Save America guys pointed out that the Harris campaign saw less slippage in states where they were actively competing on the ground than in solidly red states where they didn’t fight as hard. This indicates that the campaign did make a positive difference, just not enough to overcome the negatives.

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

Don’t forget the mood “goo goo for babies”