Another mass shooting. This one close to home. A fetishistic fascination with guns, power, and violence permeates American society. It’s symptomatic of a deep cultural pathology, and it’ll take more than laws to address the sickness. BUT, at least gun regulations are a place to start. And, compared to treating a moral illness, they’re low-hanging fruit. So, let’s make gun regulation an “easy” first step in trying to find a cure for this disease in our national soul.
I can imagine someone who found these fields unbearable, who climbed the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust, cracking the brittle weeds underfoot, wishing a few more trees for shade. An Easterner especially, who would scorn the meagerness of summer, the dry twisted shapes of black elm, scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape August has already drained of green. One who would hurry over the clinging thistle, foxtail, golden poppy, knowing everything was just a weed, unable to conceive that these trees and sparse brown bushes were alive. And hate the bright stillness of the noon without wind, without motion, the only other living thing a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended in the blinding, sunlit blue. And yet how gentle it seems to someone raised in a landscape short of rain – the skyline of a hill broken by no more trees than one can count, the grass, the empty sky, the wish for water.
Someone spoke to me last night, told me the truth. Just a few words, but I recognized it. I knew I should make myself get up, write it down, but it was late, and I was exhausted from working all day in the garden, moving rocks. Now, I remember only the flavor— not like food, sweet or sharp. More like a fine powder, like dust And I wasn't elated or frightened, but simply rapt, aware. That's how it is sometimes— God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you're just too tired to open it.
Russian propagandists do not need to wait to check facts or verify claims; they just disseminate an interpretation of emergent events that appears to best favor their themes and objectives. This allows them to be remarkably responsive and nimble, often broadcasting the first “news” of events (and, with similar frequency, the first news of nonevents, or things that have not actually happened). They will also repeat and recycle disinformation. The Russian "Firehose of Falsehood" Propaganda Model: RAND Corporation, 2016.
... flood the zone with shit. Steve Bannon (to Michael Lewis, 2018)
“The meeting will come to order.”
Praise the spells and bless the charms, I found April in my arms. April golden, April cloudy, Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy; April soft in flowered languor, April cold with sudden anger, Ever changing, ever true -- I love April, I love you.
