Category Archives: Digest

Periodic Digest # 1

I often have a hard time finding things I’ve written about on this website, even when searching by remembered key words.  I write virtually every day, on several different subjects, and pieces get mixed together and buried quickly.   I will try to post a digest from time to time to help readers, and myself, find some of the better things I’ve written lately.   Here are a few from the past week, click the title to read on:

PERSONAL

Take Your Inspiration Wherever You Find It

Here is a bit of inspiration for those who can take it. Admittedly, I’m not the typical hero of an inspirational story, I haven’t had that great heartwarming moment of underdog triumph we are used to seeing in movies, hearing about in author interviews on Fresh Air.  I have achieved little in the outside world, though my inner world, where I live most of the time, is a place I can recommend highly.  I offer this encouragement to follow your impulse to delve, imagine and create, and to go boldly where it leads.

 

A thought about my father’s talent for empathy

I was thinking about the mild, kind, nurturing side of my complicated father recently.   It was not his default setting, he was usually guarded and ready to attack if he felt in any way threatened, but it was a memorable side of him that needs to be brought out in describing him to you.  He was capable of great sensitivity and supportiveness, in the right emotionally threatening situation.   Anybody who ever found themselves in a tough spot, and was calmed by my father’s talent for using his great intelligence and warm humanism to relieve worry, will remember him gratefully.

 

Five Elements Soup

We discovered this delicious soup a few weeks back in a vegetarian Chinese joint called Zen Garden.  DEEE-licious broth, truly the most flavorful broth I’ve ever tasted.   It is also supposed to be very healthy.  This is how it’s described on the menu:

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Scientific drawing:

In the spirit of Leonardo Da Vinci 

 

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POLITICS

 

Cutting through Mueller’s legalese to draft articles of impeachment

The problem for the Trump impeachment is not a shortage of impeachable behavior, it’s an overwhelming ongoing pattern of high crimes and misdemeanors.  The challenge is putting the worst of it into a few easy to understand sentences, strong articles of impeachment subject to proof based on irrefutable evidence.

 

Religious Fanatic, Polished Partisan Liar, Authoritarian and ‘Pathetic Porcine Puppet of a Puerile President’

A few recent sickening details HERE.
The burning soul of fellow religious fanatic lawyer Antonin Scalia lives on in Bagpiper Bill Barr,  the relentless, moralistic worldview that justifies every outrage in lawyerly cavil.  They are the moral equivalents of the original Jesuits, lawyers for the Spanish Inquisition, defenders of the faith and the auto de fe. 

Bill Barr defends the Unitary Executive

In Bill Barr, president Trump has found his long sought Roy Cohn, the fiercest, most powerful attorney a president could have — Trump appointed him  head of the Department of Justice.  Barr has been tireless in protecting his boss.   He is currently traveling the world to assemble evidence that the Independent Counsel’s report, which according to Barr exonerated the president of all wrongdoing, was a partisan witch hunt– the six convicted close presidential aids charged pursuant to the investigation notwithstanding.

One more treasure from Bill Barr’s 11/15 speech to the Federalist Society

I can’t help it.   Just read the remainder of Barr’s recent remarks in detail  (looking for his apparent, and telling, ad lib about Secularists — not found in the original text) and this gem was too beautiful to ignore.  In arguing about how wrong it is for courts to second-guess the actions of a conservative president, he offers this: