Friday brings the expectation of rain at midday.  Always I welcome the arrival of rain.  Drought is the condition that concerns me most here in the mid-West.  Weather patterns are crucial to the well being of all living things, the trees growing here before my arrival as well as the arbor vitae shrubs that I planted several months ago.  I am certain many wild mammals live in Braeburn marsh not more than a five minute walk.  They surely depend upon a regular cycle of rain and sun for enough to eat.  They’ve not invented a “supply chain” to cushion times of food scarcity, or the onset of contagion, as have we.

---

I finished the slim volume, BREATHING, Chaos and Poetry by Franco “Bifo” Berardi.  I have read the last chapter twice, and it is worth reading yet again.  Here are some of the lines:

Mysterium Coniunctionis

After billions of years of evolution,
substances transmuted into words.
After combining and recombining atoms for countless eons,
at a certain (uncertain) point matter entered into the cycle of signification.
wars,
   love,
      excitement,
          and elegance followed,

And the sensitive organism went walking hand in hand over the bridge
that transcends the primordial abyss of the absence of meaning.

So we named the millennia and we stayed at the top of the hill,
gazing hopefully for a light in the distance.

Then everything dissolved as an effect of the acceleration*,
and now human signs are turning back into their original magma,
where light glitters for no eyes and information is eternally silent.
Frail is the architecture of happiness
and heavy is the architecture of depression, as everybody knows.
We all know from experience that brightness is easily shadowed,
while the ensuing darkness is not easy to dispel.

*  The acceleration refers to the effect of the insertion of technology into every aspect of human interaction, as well as the virus pandemic which accelerates technologies use and consequences.

Excerpt, BREATHING, Chaos and Poetry, by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, taken from the last chapter, p. 142

---

I did not intend to write directly about politics this morning.  However I am obligated to convey this, read in today’s The New York Times, The Morning update.

Falsehoods and threats

President Trump’s attempts to overturn the election result are very unlikely to succeed. For that reason, the effort can sometimes seem like a publicity stunt — an effort by Trump to raise money and burnish his image with his supporters.

And it may well be all of those things. But it is also a remarkable campaign against American democracy. It has grown to include most Republican-run states, most Republican members of Congress and numerous threats of violence. I want to use today’s newsletter to explain it.

The new centerpiece in the effort is a lawsuit that the state of Texas filed this week with the Supreme Court and that Trump supports. It claims that the election in four swing states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — suffered from “unconstitutional irregularities.”

The suit is based on the same lies that Trump has been telling about voter fraud. In reality, there was no meaningful fraud, as local officials from both parties have concluded. William Barr, Trump’s attorney general, came to the same conclusion.

Nonetheless, the attorneys general of 17 states — including Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, Utah, Arizona and the Dakotas — have backed the Texas lawsuit. Yesterday, more than half of House Republicans released a legal brief supporting it. “If they get their way in court (they won’t), they would break the country,” David French of The Dispatch, a conservative publication, wrote.

In order to read the entire article by David Leonhardt, CLICK HERE.