Jelly Fish tamer

05/03/2022

It's a love song, folks!

01/03/2022

The Big Smoke America is now six years old and has published almost 2,500 original articles and essays. Here are the Top 10 (+14 more) from 2021.

10/29/2020

Even controlling for crime rates, class and income, racial bias infects every nook and cranny of our courts, prisons, jails and police stations.

10/20/2020

Manaus Mayor Arthur Virgílio Neto proposed a new two-week lockdown after Covid-19 cases have seen significant increases.

08/23/2020

10/31/2019

Like sneaking veggies into dessert, these board games teach STEM, strategy, and executive functions through the joys of play.

02/25/2019

Polina swapped the big city for life in the country, and makes hilarious videos about keeping up with urban trends while surrounded by sheep and goats.

11/30/2018

07/21/2018

Checking out Gulliver’s Gate, the NFL Experience, National Geographic Encounter: Ocean Odyssey and Spyscape.

07/08/2018

Conservationists scaled the sheer cliffs of Mount Lico as part of wider effort to build the case for the protection of Mozambique's mountain forests.

05/14/2018

But this makes liberals feel more powerful than they are. Or, more accurately, this kind of power is double-edged. Liberals often don’t realize how provocative or inflammatory they can be. In exercising their power, they regularly not only persuade and attract but also annoy and repel."

That's the core of it and it's something I've yammered for over two years.

I don't agree with his political conclusions or analysis but we must lose any tone of smug superiority--basket of deplorables personified it...and she's a centrist! Get into the stridency, rhetoric and tribalism of identity politics and revolutionary zeal and thought crimes start getting committed. I

It's too easy in red areas to paint an unpleasant intolerant portrait of people who should be the opposite by virtue of their philosophy--hence the resentment--it's hypocritical while subtly devaluing their supremacy ( yup racism and sexism) . Never mind that a factual scam is being out over on them of epic dimensions-- narrative trumps fact, and that's not the story they want told or want to hear.

the problems is two fold:

1. the principles of the left are innately more inclusive and egalitarian, so any sense of being made 'less than', which happens no matter what in politics just by who gets focus-- is anathema. Not so the right, not a problem, no one gets 'alienated' if you're white--still a significant majority made to feel oppressed and beleaguered by FOX and co..

Any perceived unfairness or lack of compassion on the left is seen as hypocritical and fraudulent in light of leftist principles. The right, based more on notions of the individual--with exclusivity a part of their "thing"--has no such problem.

2. The other thing it's tough not to start sounding self righteous or smug and superior when you argue long enough with people who know so little, have so much prejudice, so many many fraudulent assumptions and shibboleths, who watch one source of information religiously and/or believe in magical white sky dudes.

Then there'a the fact that the education gap is widening drastically between those on the left and right--in part due to how leftist campuses are.

Some of them fear smart people--like them jews, those "connivers" Trump sounding like them wins them over--the crude and the vulgar, viand stupid--they love it. IN some way this a war between urban and rural, and between dumber and smarter. Now don't I sound like the worst of all liberal blowhards?

I read smart rightist commentary whenever possible but it's been left behind in the Trump slime trail.

We need to find an inclusive message for red states--weed, drug prices, health care, schools-- and most of all we need attractive candidates.

Self-righteousness is rarely attractive, and even more rarely rewarded.

04/24/2018

04/07/2018

03/15/2018

02/22/2018

Psalm For a Palm

Misty was listless
mostly moist yet maybe lost
already,
like an overcooked spaghetti...

Out of her habitat
and into a rabbit hat
of magic making for Jessicating
her tropical dreams dashing up to the sky.

Misty...why?

If we all become myth, then missing entirely
then Misty perhaps will persist
in a rootless topography
to imbibe our sobriety
to mock our photography
for leaves that fall, for the hours scant
for death is no potted plant.

02/03/2018

A visual guide to the many links between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

01/31/2018

Nuclear power could help us solve climate change — if weren't so absurdly expensive.

01/22/2018

Isaac Babel crafted a style to shock readers into seeing the strangeness before their eyes. He gave his words a terrifying twist that lodges them in the heart and mind.