The Democrats have taken back the House! Yes!
This is of monumental importance. The Speaker and the House Committee chairs are going to be Democrats. There will be a real check on Trump’s excesses and the appalling Republican legislation that have come out of Congress. For the first time, there will be more than 100 women among the 435 House of Representatives.
The Republicans will retain the Senate. A bitter disappointment for Democrats in the Senate races, was that Texas star and El Paso native Beto O’Rourke’s inspiring campaign against incumbent Republican Texas senator Ted Cruz, came up short.
Alright. If 2016 was the Year of the Angry Older White Male in American politics, maybe 2018 is the Year of the Female College Graduate, says Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report. These suburban and younger women take a very dim view of our 45th president. (As do I).
The Democrats really need to win the House. Hopefully they will not snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, like they did in 2016.
It is unlikely they will win the Senate.
There are also some very interesting gubernatorial (state governors) races. For my fellow citizens in red states (Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin): some free advice. DO NOT vote for a Republican governor. Republicans DO NOT CARE FOR PEOPLE, not even for you.
Update Wed 11/7: The Dems got the house, but not the Senate. Michigan, Pennsylvania & Wisconsin voted in Democratic governors.
Katy Tur interviewing a die-hard Trump supporter. She says nothing has changed at these Trump rallies since 2016. Trump supporters don’t follow the news, or simply say: ‘Why is all the coverage so negative? We don’t believe it’. (Psst. The reporting on Trump is negative because what Trump does flies in the face of American values, democracy and decency).
We ran out to the movie theater today to go see the just-released Freddie Mercury/ Queen biopic called ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. It had gotten mixed reviews from the critics – but as it turned out: what do they know? I thought it was very, very well done.
American actor Rami Malek worked hard to undergo a stunning transformation to portray Freddie Mercury’s flamboyance and human side. The filmmakers collaborated with Queen’s drummer Roger Taylor (71) and lead guitarist Brian May (69). (Bass guitarist John Deacon (67) retired from the band’s activities a few years after Freddie Mercury passed away in 1991).
The movie ends with an amazing recreation of Bob Geldof’s Live Aid concert that was held in 1985 at Wembley Stadium in London (worldwide rock concert organized to raise money for the relief of famine-stricken Africans).
Great picture of Freddie Mercury and partner Jim Hutton. They had been together for 6 years when Mercury passed away in 1991. [Picture from Hutton’s memoir ‘Mercury and Me’, published in 1994].
This is the time of year for some mushrooms to sprout in urban gardens here in the Pacific Northwest, and I discovered a new type under my laurel fence this year. Maybe they’ve been coming out every year, and I just haven’t noticed before!
These are honey mushrooms (Armillaria mellea) .. there are several distinct Armillaria species within the group formerly called honey mushrooms (or honey fungus). The ‘honey’ is a reference to the smooth appearance of the caps, and not their flavor, which is anything but sweet. (I am not about to try these suckers by cooking them, thank you very much. I’ll stick to buying my mushrooms in the grocery store!).A view from the side that shows the little collar on the stem, and the adnate gills (gills fully attached to the stem). The cap is about 3 in. in diameter.
I am still adding to my old South African bank note collection. My latest addition is the R2 note issued in 1966. It arrived in the mail today, sent by an Ebay seller – from Istanbul, Turkey, no less.
The Gariep Dam on the back of the note is South Africa’s largest, by far (cap. 5.7 cubic km /1.4 cubic mi)* . Its turbines can contribute some 360 MW of electricity to the national grid.
*By comparison, the Hoover Dam in Nevada can hold a vast amount of water, some 32.2 cubic km (7.7 cubic mi). It has not been filled to capacity since 1983, though. Then there is the Three Gorges Dam in China that is bigger still (the world’s largest), with a capacity of 39.3 cubic km (9.4 cubic mi).
The front of the 1966 R2 note features Jan Van Riebeeck, a founding father of sorts: the first administrator of the the Dutch Cape Colony in 1652. The back of the note shows the Gariep Dam located in Free State province. South Africa’s largest dam, it was decades in the making, and construction was finally completed in 1972. Its primary function is for irrigation, hence the cob of corn in the top left corner. [Picture from Ebay].A still frame from Dirk Grobler’s YouTube drone video of the dam from Feb 2017. At the time the water level was only at 61%. In April of this year, the dam was full, and attracted tourists from all over the country that came to see the water spill over the sluice gates in the arched wall.
Five days to go before November 6, and Trump’s lies and propaganda are reaching a fever pitch.
1. Migrant caravans with Hondurans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Nicaraguans in Mexico, walking to the US border, are going to ‘invade’ the country. The Pentagon was told to ready as many as 15,000 troops to go to the Mexican border. Fact: The threat is very small. Only a small percentage of the migrants will make it to the border, is the Pentagon’s assessment.
2. The Republican Party will protect our healthcare. Fact: Twenty Republican governors are suing the Federal Government right now, seeking end to Obamacare. Trump supported the wholesale repeal of Obamacare.
3. Trump will reduce middle-income taxes by 10% before the midterm elections. Fact: Congress is not even in session. A pipedream and laughable lie.
4. Trump will end birthright citizenship, presumably by executive order. Fact: Pfft. Not going to happen. He will have to get Congress to overturn the 14th Amendment.
5. Trump warns of widespread voter fraud. Fact: The only widespread voter fraud is that which is committed by Republican governors and legislators. They are working flat-out to prevent voters from minority groups and others that support Democrats, to vote. This is in addition to a long tradition of gerrymandering districts in many states.
A page from an unclassified document (but for official use only), that was leaked to Newsweek today. The U.S. Army projects that only a small percentage of the 7,000 migrants will actually reach the border. And those that do, will have done nothing illegal. That is how international amnesty laws work: you show up at the border IN PERSON, and apply for amnesty. These people are desperate and fleeing violence, misery and a drought that has caused major crop losses in Central America.
I just watched the two episodes on the public television channel called ‘The Facebook Dilemma*’ – and did not find it reassuring. Facebook has a long history of being too late to address disastrous uses of their platform: for hate speech, for spreading lies, for sowing distrust and division. Should anyone trust them again, ever?
*Facebook should be reinvented (run with different functionality & algorithms) or even be shut down, but it has become too big and powerful.
Congress – and the citizenry – have a responsibility as well. Do we care enough? Here’s former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos: “We’ve had two years since the main part of the Russian attack against the 2016 election, and very little has been done as a country, as a government, to protect ourselves,” Stamos told FRONTLINE. “We have signaled to the rest of the world that interfering in our elections is something that we won’t really punish or react to.”
Is Facebook ready for the 2018 Midterm elections? The answer: Nobody really knows – nor does Facebook. Here’s the Facebook ‘War Room’ with the Facebook election team. The team will do real-time monitoring on election day, to monitor fake news stories and delete fake accounts. [Picture from Frontline at https://www.pbs.org]
I don’t have a Halloween pumpkin on my porch – but found a crow sitting there today (on the post by steps to my front door).
I like Mr Crow’s sharp, inquisitive look, checking me out, as I was snapping his picture.
Crows and ravens belong to the Corvid family (which includes jays and magpies) and are considered to be among the most adaptable and intelligent birds. Although most bird books recognize populations along the coast and Puget Sound to be a distinct species called the Northwestern crow (Corvus caurinus), some experts classify the smaller Northwestern crow as a subspecies of the American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos). [From Washington Dept. of Fish & WIldlife].
The official list of the victims killed in the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday:
Joyce Feinberg (75)
Richard Gottfried (65)
Rose Mallinger (97)
Jerry Rabinowitz (66)
Cecil Rosenthal (59)
David Rosenthal (54)
Bernice Simon (84)
Sylvan Simon (86)
Daniel Stein (71)
Melvin Wax (88)
Irving Younger (69)
Six people were injured, four of which were police.
Flags at half-staff on the White House and the Washington Monument.
The bank I referred to yesterday is Wells Fargo. I’m in the process of closing out all my accounts there. It’s really just to simplify my finances, but I could have justified it with the never-ending stream of scandals coming out of this bank.
Says Huffington Post: ‘To any reasonable person, Wells Fargo is a rolling disaster – a ripoff, wrapped in a swindle, inside a bank’. And: ‘Wells Fargo’s very existence, not to mention its continued profitability, is an indictment of two decades of embarrassing regulatory oversight from four separate administrations‘.
Among the scandals: millions of new accounts in customers’ names without their consent, wrongly repossessing 27,000 cars, and foreclosing the homes of 400 families for no reason.
Nice picture collage of Seattle’s history outside the Wells Fargo branch at Westlake Center, though.
I closed my safety deposit box at the bank today. It had a few Krugerrands in, and an 1894 20 Deutsche Mark coin. I bought the coin from my dad long ago in South Africa, and it’s worth about $400 today. It was gifted to him by a German business associate called Eduard Dörrenberg in the 1970s, says a little cardboard note with the coin.
The obverse of the coin. The coin is 90% gold (0.23 oz), slightly smaller than a US quarter. Wilhelm II was the last German Emperor and King of Prussia, reigning from 15 June 1888 until his abdication on 9 November 1918. Says Wikipedia: ‘Bombastic and impetuous, he sometimes made tactless pronouncements on sensitive topics without consulting his ministers’. Sound familiar?The reverse of the coin. The eagle is from the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Prussia (1871–1914). I love these ferocious creatures that are featured on coins. The implicit message is: Don’t mess with our sovereignty!
The count of pipe bombs sent to high-profile Democrats was up to 10 by Thursday. Authorities believe it is from the same person. The packages look similar and were sent from Florida. None of the devices has so far exploded. Investigators are trying to determine if the devices were even capable of detonating.
‘Fake mail bombs’, ‘a conspiracy from the left’ say right-wing conspiracy pushers & trolls on Twitter. Trump blamed the mainstream media in a tweet. Nothing to do with his Democrats-are-the-mob speeches at rallies and his non-stop war with the media.
From the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC. It’s just a matter of time, then the FBI will find the sender, and lock him up for a long time. (Pretty sure it’s a him. It usually is). This is domestic terrorism.
Update Fri 10/26: Fervid Trump supporter Cesar Sayoc (56) was arrested outside a car-repair shop in the Miami area. He left a fingerprint from one of the bomb packages and DNA on two others. The van that he owned and drove around in, was festooned with delusional Trump propaganda on the windows, and pictures of his targets (Pres. Obama, Secretary Clinton, others) with gun scope crosshairs trained on them.
There is finally some rain on the way for Puget Sound, after a long stretch of dry weather. The meteorologists can see the systems approaching from way out west over the Pacific Ocean.
Below are some high-speed photographs of falling water drops, from an article published in 2009 by Emmanuel Villermaux. He wanted to study how big raindrops behave, as they make their way down to the ground. Raindrops of all sizes can come out of clouds, as the tiny drops (20 µm) combine to make bigger ones. But really big drops will flatten as they fall through the air, into little pancakes, then turn into little bags, and then break up altogether. So drops that reach the ground are at most 6 mm (0.25 in) in diameter. The terminal velocity of a rain drop is about 10 m/s (20 mph).
My Nov 6 ballot is in (we vote by mail in Washington State – no waiting in hours-long lines). I voted ‘Yes’ for initiative I-1631 that proposes a carbon emissions fee. Starting in 2020, it would impose a $15 fee on large emitters of carbon, based on the carbon content of fossil fuels sold or used in the State, and electricity generated in, or imported, for use in the state. The fee will increase by $2 increase each year until at least 2035.
Yes, it will raise gas prices and make homes more expensive to heat, and increase transportation costs. But at some point, someone needs to point the way to start to save what clean air we have left on the planet, and get serious about promoting clean energy.
As for every one the Republican candidates on my ballot: forget about it. Your party is grotesquely anti-democratic, and a lying, cheating, immoral scam of an outfit.
A sign here in my neighborhood in support of I-1631. It is the most expensive ballot initiative in Washington State’s history, because it threatens Big Oil’s Earth-destroying profit model. They have poured in $26 million to fight I-1631.
We had morning fog around the Puget Sound the last few days, delaying air traffic at Seattle-Tacoma airport at times.
Fog is really a low-lying cloud with tiny droplets of water suspended in the air. And the difference between mist and fog? If visibility is reduced to less than 1,000 m (0.62 mi), it’s fog.
Fog made the spider’s web in my backyard into strings of tiny water pearls. Mr Spider waited patiently for the sun to come out, and with the drops gone later in the day, his booby trap had its stealth restored.
I made my way down to the Amazon biospheres today to catch a glimpse of Morticia*, the name given to the giant corpse flower that is blooming there. (Report by local TV station King5 here).
I had to be content to just check the flower out from the sidewalk. It was too late to book a time slot (all were taken), and I don’t have a friend employed by Amazon that could take me in as a guest! Aw.
*I suspect this is a reference to Morticia Addams, a fictional character from The Addams Family television and film series. A memorable quote (Morticia to her husband): ‘Don’t torture yourself Gomez, that’s my job.’
These flags are above the main entrance of the new Hyatt Regency hotel at 8th & Howell (scheduled to open at the end of the year; 45 floors and 1,260 rooms). From left to right The Stars and Stripes (of course), then the Washington State flag, and then the 12th Man flag (it shows support for the Seattle Seahawks).Look for Morticia the corpse flower, in the lower right of the picture. She will be moved out of the spheres by the end of the week, said the guide at the spheres.The cladding on the third Amazon tower across the street from the spheres is progressing nicely. I’m sure there is still a lot of work on the inside to be done. The new Shake Shack around the corner is open now. There was a long line of eager customers waiting patiently to place their order, on Sunday afternoon.
I love this picture of an octopus, the ‘chameleon of the seafloor’. The skin of an octopus is like that of a pointillistic work of art: it has millions of chromatophores (cells with pigments). Octopuses have yellow, orange, reds, browns or even black pigments, and can camouflage itself against its background when an enemy approaches. There is a complex connection between its brain, its nervous system, and the nerve cells that control the color of its skin.
Source: Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Picture by Stephan Junek.
‘The Greatest Stories from the Arabian Nights’: a childhood book that I have vivid memories of. Saudi society is difficult for outsiders to comprehend to this day. Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen in 2015 (with a coalition of other Arab states). The war has brought terrible suffering to Yemeni civilians (mass starvation), and is on-going. Osama bin Laden was a member of a wealthy Saudi family until 1994. And 15 of the 19 attackers on 9/11 in 2001, were Saudi Arabian nationals.
Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi (59) entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct 2, to obtain documents necessary to marry his Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz. He was not seen again after that.
Turkish authorities believed he was killed in the Consulate that same day. (He had often been critical of the Saudi government).
Was the killing ordered by someone in the Saudi government?
Will there be a ‘thorough, transparent, and timely investigation’ as promised by Saudi officials to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo?
Will there be ‘severe consequences’, as promised by President Trump?
The world is watching.
The front page of the Washington Post on Saturday. Says CNN Co-anchor Jim Sciutto on Twitter: ‘Having met Khashoggi, the idea of the 59-year-old bespectacled intellectual engaging in a physical fight with several intelligence agents is beyond the imagination’.
Early voting for the all-important Nov 6 midterm elections has started in many places. Some districts report that three times as many early voters have shown up so far, compared to the 2014 midterm elections.
That sounds good for the Democrats .. but in other places, Republican governors and their administrators are engaging in aggressive efforts to purge voter roles (remove voters that say, have not voted recently). Let’s give a special shout-out to the United States Supreme Court with its recent 5-4 ruling in Hustad v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, that has enabled all of this.
In spite of all of this, I dearly hope that there is still going to be a Blue Wave that will put a brake on the destruction of our democracy, wrought by the Trump Administration.
The Democrats have taken back the House! Yes!
