OK, A Few More Words on, Umm,

Anti-fascist pugilism.  Snopes.com on whether Jack Kirby would have punched out Nazis with bonus "socking Hitler" Captain America cover.  Mark Evanier on whether Jack Kirby would have punched out the Nazi or written a cracking good story instead.  Tim's take on the subject.

In pleasanter news, I woke up with the memory of a dream of Meryl Streep and Adam Sandler singing a duet.

REM

Mr. Trump claims that African-American voters will vote for him tomorrow.

Or on YouTube.

I think that tomorrow after I read the comics, I'm going to disconnect until the evening.

"Careful With That Axe, Eugene"

Still meditating on that generosity thing.  And pondering what it meant that Mom left all that luggage in front of the seat on the train and then disappeared (another dream, more weirdness).  In any case, all these tabs have got to go.

• Via Echidne of the Snakes, another conservative misapprehension.

  For note that a good economy, a safety net which encourages entrepreneurship (and stops the vortex that results in extreme poverty), fair wages and retirement systems would NOT create "a permanent majority demanding government hand-outs." Because the majority of people would be paying federal income taxes and sharing in the expenses of our shared concerns.

• Republic of T on the peculiar things conservatives believe about the Employment Nondiscrimination Act.  With videos.  Bonus:  "Speaker Boehner, Job Discrimination Is Not "Frivolous."  With examples and personal testimony.
• Good news!  Illinois voted to allow same-sex marriages!  (OK, so this is a day or so old.)
• Mills River Progressive on restraining the NSA and on the Farm Bill.
• Fancy that:  Obamacare gaining positive attention in the polls.  Gee.  And in spite of all that negative attention, too.  Gosh!
• Music!  Music!  Music!

Surreal Estate

Yeah, another dream.

A man with some kind of t-shirt over his head grabs my fist as I'm passing and attempts to coerce sex.  I refuse and fight loose.  The man turns out to be a middle-aged clergy person (cross between Geoffrey Rush, John Wood, and Alan Rickman), and we have a meal, walk about and talk (I do not remember any of the conversation), and eventually end up on First Avenue (in Manhattan; teens and 20s), where I leave him.  There are cats lying around, one quite large.  I set off toward home (which meant north) and a largeish bushy gray cat crosses my path.  It gets dark and I remember that it will be getting cold and I didn't bring a jacket.  But it turns out I'm wearing shades, just as I'm trying to cross First Avenue.  (Whew!)  Having crossed, I walk up a couple of blocks, then head crosstown and find myself going through a sanitation yard with odd robotic machines and the sun is quite bright.

At which point I woke up.  And wrote it down pretty immediately, so that all I lost was the conversation and why I thought I was at Stuyvesant Polyclinic.

"Tesky Prohesky Can Dance!"

That was the dream.  It had a tune.  There were several dreams that interwove and this is the only bit I remember because I wrote it down and then fell back asleep.

Some food grown in Japan is dangerous.

The Daily Howler pokes at unasked-in-the-media questions.  For example:

Might we suggest another “dark moment” from Romney’s life which might “offer clues into his character?” This moment led to very bad outcomes for people not in his family.

We’ll suggest the moment we’ve mentioned all year—the looting of GS Technology, the story the New York Times has simply refused to report. Our question: How did workers’ pensions get “underfunded” at this company while Romney was lugging off big wads of cash? Why was Bain unable to meet its obligations regarding these people's health care?

The New York Times has refused to report this story, even though Reuters offered a detailed report on this episode all the way back in January. The Times still hasn’t reported this “dark” episode—although this morning, Stolberg offers us two dark moments which we might find inspiring.

I ran across a comment somewhere suggesting electing Romney because he's a bigger crook (not the original phrasing); *twitch*

Musical background:  Gary Numan, "Are Friends Electric?"  Make of that what you will.

Dreamtime

In which a house that I am very familiar with appears with the staircase...altered.

(The rest was Freudian revisionism.  Hmmmmm...)

Cruisin' for a Snoozin'

Apparently I didn't really want to sleep.  Tough.  Thing is that whenever I dozed off, sooner or later I found myself in the position of having somehow offended someone (the someone was different every time) who was very determined to Get Back At Me.  The nature of the offense was never clear, and I didn't know any of the people.

I've got lots of stuff to feel guilty about but I'm not sure which transgression the dream was addressing.

Southern Beale (who got "Best Liberal" in Nashville Scene's "Best of Nashville" issue, yaaaaay) spins a fantasy and views the fact that a Kentucky senator fails to check Snopes.com before blathering in public with alarm, as well one should.

Terrance of Republic of T on empathy and the conservative horror of it:

However, when I put it in the context of popular and growing movements like Occupy Wall Street and We are the 99 Percent, and even the movements in Wisconsin and Ohio, I was not surprised to see Brooks holding forth on the shortcomings of empathy. The success of these progressive movements constitute a powerful challenge to conservatives.
[...]
Empathy makes casting moral judgments upon others more complicated and more difficult, because seeing something of our reality in them gives them a context — a “story” like our own, which frames their choices and actions with complexities that bleed over into our stories and those of others.

For conservatives like Brooks, empathy in government becomes even more troublesome, because it subverts morality by shielding people from the consequences of their sins.  [Emphasis in original.]

And then he gets nasty.

And for the win:  Shark-fu:

I’m weary of the never ending circle of over the top insult followed by defensiveness followed by frustration with folk for being offended by offensive shit followed by apologies for “if anyone was insulted” that contain dismissive language about “intent” followed by calls for dialogue that assume people of color possess unlimited quantities of understanding and forgiveness.

Oddly enough, I had weird dream-fu involving an ex and I having a regular normal conversation while waiting for a bus.  Although the bus never showed and eventually we tried to chase it down...

And They've Been Weird

Yesterday's morning dream involved seeing the molecular structure, numerically expressed, of either my eyelids or the sudoku puzzle I had fallen asleep trying to solve.

This morning's dream I've already spaced.

So,

I had two (2! 2 for the price of 1!) nightmares; most of the first is gone except for the last bit, which was me and another woman escaping from a serial killer in a conveniently open elevator.  The second involved me at a boring job (I know, what else is new?) in an office layout I have never encountered, going out to lunch except I kept getting interrupted, getting on the local train uptown, getting a quick lunch, and then...not being able to find the entrance to the downtown side through something like a maze and being late.  The horror.

And of course my body was in full fight-or-flight mode.  I'm surprised I made it to church.

Two items getting crossposted:

• NY Times report:  Is sugar toxic?  

  Sugar scares me too, obviously. I’d like to eat it in moderation. I’d certainly like my two sons to be able to eat it in moderation, to not overconsume it, but I don’t actually know what that means, and I’ve been reporting on this subject and studying it for more than a decade.

• Charlie Crist apologizes (on video) to David Byrne for unlicensed use of song (from Mediaite via skippy the bush kangaroo).

  Former Florida Governor Charlie Crist has recorded a no-nonsense video apologizing to Talking Head’s front man David Byrne for the unlicensed use of the song “Road To Nowhere” during his Senate run of last year.

Morning Readings

1. Weird dream, involving:
• Scenes from The King's Speech, which I have not yet seen;
• Saruman walking through walls and windows.
2. Via Comrade Misfit, further shenanigans in that budget that the Governor of Wisconsin is hiding.  One of the comments there pointed to an article at George Lakoff's blog, "What Conservatives Really Want," which in part addresses the failures of Democrats:

   Democrats help conservatives when they function as policy wonks — talking policy without communicating the moral values behind the policies. They help conservatives when they neglect to remind us that pensions are deferred payments for work done. “Benefits” are pay for work, not a handout. Pensions and benefits are arranged by contract. If there is not enough money for them, it is because the contracted funds have been taken by conservative officials and given to wealthy people and corporations instead of to the people who have earned them.
   
   Democrats help conservatives when they use conservative words like “entitlements” instead of “earnings” and speak of government as providing “services” instead of “necessities.”

   ETA: Ahem. Confirmation.
   
3. Happy birthday/blogiversary to Shark-fu!
4. Jill of Brilliant at Breakfast (with the help of the New York Times) excoriates (you wish!) the Governor of New Jersey.

   The question is what this state will look like by the time he gets done with it, and people realize that the reason for a good chunk of his spending cuts is that he has continued the noble tradition started by that OTHER Christie, Christine Todd Whitman, of stiffing the state pension fund for other purposes. In Whitman's case it was for income tax cuts, from which the pension fund has never recovered, and in Christie's case it's for cooking the books.

5. Another con man mulcting the national security agencies of unspecified amounts of money...

Subconscious Weirdness

Wink Martindale?

Coincidence

I had a dream involving gravel roads (I am just old enough to remember a couple of these in upstate New York) overnight.  Just part of the high price of asphalt in that world (it wasn't Earth).

Apparently I was not alone.

Or, as I keep saying, I didn't like the twelfth century the first time.

The Surrealists Scratch Their Heads

Much to-ing and fro-ing, reason forgotten; the image that stayed at awakening was Sir Paul McCartney in a flaming orange baby's-head mask, otherwise invisible, running through crowds of people, on a rescue mission.
'

A Maze of Twisty Little Passages, All Alike

So I'm I think in the shower.  I hear a clock radio start up.  I get out of the bathroom.  The upstairs south side of my parents' house has been grafted to the back of my apartment.  My mother and a baby are in the apartment's bedroom (I have no idea who the baby is).  I turn on the light and explain that [my brother] has to use the bathroom.  Mom reminds me that [my brother] is actually dead.

Bloomin' Subconscious

Apparently when sudoku is being particularly intransigent, I become a Monster of Filk, although the only thing I remembered was "On Top of Mount Wicca."  (And only that line.)

Hallu-hallu-cina-cina-cina-tion-tion-tion

[Beginning of dream, with credits, lost.]

A friend and I are at a house, working on something (we are clutching stuff, but what the stuff is is gone) and talking (subject gone) for a while.  I discovered that the ceiling is leaking onto a bed (there is a circumstance in which that has actually happened, but this isn't the place).  The friend, sounding like my mom (paging Dr. Freud!  Dr. Freud to the red courtesy phone!), complained about my inability to get anything done and eventually directed me up a flight of stairs with ratty carpeting (instead of the folding ladder, which exists but isn't used in the dream) to a secret (and open) door at a half stair part of the way up.  Instead of mostly empty space just under the roof, there is a storage warehouse.  Really.  Except for the part over the bed, which didn't exist.  There were shouts from downstairs; that turned out to be either my sister and brother-in-law or two other friends (maybe they morphed a lot).  The female of the pair announced her pregnancy, with synonyms, and then we all had to leave.  Somehow, we got on a train and agreed not to go all the way to Penn Station, and I saw abandoned stations and sidings, and then I woke up.

Huh.

Dreaming

Shades of brown, beige, gold; auto-da-fe.  Images of bound feet; sounds of moaning.  Someone who was not Colin Firth sentenced to be burned at the stake.

Not pleasant.

Adventures in the Empyrean

The retreat/reflection was interesting, centering on the Spe Salvi encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI.  It's a wide-ranging document, citing Dostoevsky and Marx.  I'm going to go read some St. Augustine.

One of the things I got out of it, though, is that the Pope should start a blog.

On to the dream, which featured a seriously weird apartment building with the remains of rails buried under debris in one corridor and a semi-transparent floor allowing one to see the tracks on the next floor down, preceded by [a beautiful woman] in a nearly-red flared-skirt dress whom I embraced.  The other stuff going on was probably the stuff important to my subconscious, but that, of course, is the part I forgot.

Huh?

The Swedish royal family/house?