Category Archives: Monday Musings

inspiration, Kindness, Monday Musings, motivation

Monday Musings — 18NOV24

Leave a comment

It time to Gird your loins folks. It’s time to do battle and get to work.

I don’t think the next 4 years (hope that’s all it will be) is going to be great for lot of people. In fact if Trump does half of what he’s telegraphed, then it’s going to be really shitty. So get ready to put some hard work into the things you feel are important, and that the elites are going to try to fuck up.

I put some resources in last week’s Musings, and a few more since then. Check them out.

So, I’m handicapped. Can drive myself, don’t leave the house as much as I used to (especially in the cold weather), I’m weak (can barely lift myself out of a chair), all that crap. I can write and make art still. Thank goodness for that. Have all (or most) of my faculties. So I can still read, also. I can’t join protests, making it to meetings is, while not impossible, not practical, unless it’s via Zoom or something. It’s not something I worried about, even a couple of years ago, but there you have it. I do what I can. Around the house I do chores, with lots of rest breaks, I cook, etc. I work in my studio, when I can. Some days motivation is damn nigh nonexistent, others it comes back.

So I do my art, I write this blog. Which I hope can be motivating for you all. I donate money to causes (not much). I Zoom with some people who help me motivate to write the comic I’m working on. I do what I can. You should to.

On that note, I’m an old fart, and there’s an organization for older people who want to make a difference. Read about it:

“Experienced Americans” are the fastest-growing part of the population: 10,000 people a day pass the 60-year mark. That means that there’s no way to make the changes that must be made to protect our planet and society unless we bring our power into play.

We’re used to thinking that humans grow more conservative as they age, perhaps because we have more to protect, or simply because we’re used to things the way they are. But our generations saw enormous positive change early in our lives—the civil rights movement, for instance, or the fight to end massive wars or guarantee the rights of women. And now we fear that the promise of those changes may be dying, as the planet heats and inequality grows.

But as a generation we have unprecedented skills and resources that we can bring to bear. Washington and Wall Street have to listen when we speak, because we vote and because we have a large—maybe an overlarge—share of the country’s assets. And many of us have kids and grandkids and great grandkids: we have, in other words, very real reasons to worry and to work.

Anarchy, Art, Climate, gardening, Kindness, Monday Musings, survival

Monday Musings 11NOV24

1 Comment

Well, its been a week hasn’t it? I wasn’t very happy with the election results, like many of you out there. I’m not a big fan of the orange man (someone called him a yam which I think is funny and somewhat appropriate)and voted for Harris.

Not a big fan of her either, but I wanted the Dems to stay in power because a lot of their agenda aligns with mine (climate, unions, anti-monopolist). That isn’t happening, and it’s time to dig in and do it ourselves, which is pretty much par for the course.

I don’t really expect the government (on either “side”) to do much for us, since both Reps and Dems are in bed with the global elites/big business. Although Biden was definitely making waves in monopoly busting.

So what do we do now? How do we address climate change, union busters, genocide in Gaza, monopolies, etc.?

We need to organize. That means unions need to step up. If your workplace isn’t a union shop, organize one. There are unions for everyone. If you can’t find one join the IWW (wobblies). They are a worldwide grassrootsunion, with a long history, that can help you organize your workplace (even us self employed workers–I belong).

Josh Hill has a nice post about this with several resources at the end. Here (Time to Prepare)

Worried about book bans? Join your school board, and/or the board of your local library. Give to your local library. Also, here’s an organization that organizes country wide. https://www.librariesforthepeople.org/

Climate change is a monster. What do we do about that? Solar and wind power are getting cheaper. Put some solar on your roof, add a windmill somewhere on your property. Buy an EV, car or bike. Bikes are great in cities and small towns. Battery life on vehicles is getting better all the time, and prices are actually coming down. Start a garden, or just grow a few plants if all you have is a patio to grow on. Buy local at farmers markets. Better food, and shorter distances for it to get to you. Invest in a heat pump, electric appliances. You can still grill, don’t be a jackass.

Make sure your utilities are investing in and using alternate sources of energy. Join organizations that are trying to mitigate climate change. Boycott and protest big oil, join, or donate to organizations that do that.

Here’s one https://regeneration.org/

Don’t like the wars we’re involved in join a peace organization. Preferably local. Protest, make sure the politicians know.

Don’t like abortion laws, write your reps, join, or donate to, Planned Parenthood

There is so much more to do. What’s important to you? Find organizations that work on that problem. No organization, build one. Do what you can to the best of your ability.

Make art, write, help a senior.

Speaking of which. Write letters to seniors or others that can’t get out and about. Here’s a couple of sites that ate specifically for that:

https://www.lettersagainstisolation.com

https://www.postcrossing.com

https://loveforourelders.org/letters

Feed people. Join a food bank, volunteer in a soup kitchen, find a chapter of Food not Bombs near you.

Find something you can do. The government isn’t going to help.

It never was.

Art, Climate, Monday Musings

Monday Musings — 16SEP24

That’s appropriate for my theme this week. Climate change and Capitalism. LOL

Greta’s Growth – by Joshua P. Hill – New Means

Greta hasn’t been in the news a lot for a few years. That’s because she’s not a teenager anymore and has learned that Capitalism is probably the leading cause of the climate “crisis”. (Yes I put that in quotes, because while it’s a real thing I sometimes think that crisis is the wrong word for it.)

As Greta’s politics have grown and evolved, they reached a point where they now make billionaire media owners, milquetoast executives of major non-profits, and more than a few politicians a little uncomfortable. All she’s done is follow the science, but over time the science has led her to see that the climate crisis doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are massive monetary incentives to destroy the planet in this capitalist system. ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP made over $100 billion in profits in 2023 alone. And those numbers were down from 2022. So, naturally, in following the science Greta had to start examining the capitalist system if she wanted to really get down to the root of the climate crisis. After all, as Chico Mendes said, “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.”

Source: Greta’s Growth – by Joshua P. Hill – New Means

Speaking of capitalism and the climate thing, here’s good news.

Challenges for Samsung

While the specs on Samsung’s batteries sound impressive, they’re not a breakout product, and similar batteries exist.

For example, Chinese battery makers already have a 150 kWh battery pack with a semi-solid electrolyte that can power EV cars for a staggering 650 miles on a single charge.

Also, Samsung’s 9-minute charge promise probably refers to the time it’ll take to go from 10-20% of battery life to 80%, and not from 0 to 100. It’s well worth noting that charging speed slows down significantly after 80% to protect the battery.

Now, considering that the 9-minute charge is in fact for going from 10-20% to 80% battery life, Chinese rivals are already offering 5C or 6C charging speeds.

Furthermore, other battery makers, such as CATL, are also developing batteries with longer life spans ranging up to 20 years. So, it’s fair to say that competition is very stiff and Samsung doesn’t hold a distinctive advantage.

Interestingly, though, the biggest hurdle—for all the companies involved, by the way—is the limited availability of charging infrastructure. Such impressive technical advancement is of no use if they can’t come up with the necessary infrastructure to support it.

And more good news:

Pacific islands submit court proposal for recognition of ecocide as a crime

Three developing countries have taken the first steps towards transforming the world’s response to climate breakdown and environmental destruction by making ecocide a punishable criminal offence.

In a submission to the international criminal court on Monday, they propose a change in the rules to recognise “ecocide” as a crime alongside genocide and war crimes.

If successful, the change could allow for the prosecution of individuals who have brought about environmental destruction, such as the heads of large polluting companies, or heads of state.

Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa have proposed a formal recognition by the court of the crime of ecocide, defined as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”.

Is This Climate Tech Start-Up Going Rogue?

Make Sunsets’ sulfur dioxide strategy has academics and NGOs fuming.

I’m kinda laughing a little at this one. People are up in arms because it’s not something that’s “officially” sanctioned. Like permission is required to do anything. Of course, it seems like techbros just playing, with no clue. So there’s that.

Another day, and another weather balloon ascends gracefully into the clear blue skies above Northern California. But this balloon isn’t headed up to the stratosphere to predict the weather—it’s going there to change it.

Make Sunsets is a tiny start-up headquartered in South Dakota that is using balloons to release small quantities of sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere, in the hope of reflecting some of the Sun’s energy away from the earth. Each gram of SO2, says Andrew Song, one of Make Sunsets’ founders, offsets the warming from one metric ton of carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels. Not everyone is convinced by Make Sunsets’ methods, however—and many researchers and environmentalists worry the startup’s unregulated operations are disrupting more responsible research into geoengineering, including a prominent effort at Harvard.

So how about some non climate related news? Here’s an interesting article on heart health, and an intervention that has been and is used all over Europe but not so much in the states.

“Game-Changer” for Your Heart

But there is a cutting-edge, FDA-approved natural therapy that I call a game-changer for your heart…

I’m talking about enhanced external counterpulsation, or EECP.

Most cardiologists continue to ignore this treatment because it doesn’t fit the traditional image of what they do. They consider heart disease a “plumbing” problem. And the solution is to simply fix the blockages.

But if that were true, why do heart attacks happen after these blockaGes have been cleared or bypassed?

The real causes of heart disease are damaged blood vessels that inhibit blood flow and inflammation. That’s where this life-saving therapy comes in.

Multiple studies reveal that EECP is the safest and most effective reliever of angina chest pain available. It has been shown to have huge benefits for patients with coronary artery disease and heart failure.

Why is that? BIG PHARMA. Doctors would rather take the drug money than use something that actually works.

So not climate change but more capitalism.

Damn, I might be a socialist. Whoops. (No the proper term is anarchist.)

Letters Against Isolation

Here’s something good that you can do for a “senior”. It’s called Letters Against Isolation. They have a giant list of nursing facilities where you can write letters to a senior there, to help brighten their day. You sign up, go to their portal and pick a facility (or up to 200 per campaign) and write a nice letter to someone who lives in them. No names are exchanged because of privacy regulations, so the letter have to be fairly generic.

https://www.lettersagainstisolation.com/faq

That is just one of a few penpal/letter writing sites I’ve found, I’ll probably do a post on it sometime soon.

Rocco Buttliere

Rocco Buttliere makes landscapes with RoBlox. Above is one of them. See more here: https://www.roccobuttliere.com/portfolio/landmarks

Monday Musings

Monday Musings –9SEP24

Let’s start the week off with a glorious cover of Devo’s Gut Feeling:

From Ted Chiang. Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art: https://archive.is/uTnxC

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

This is a fairly long but good article on why AI isn’t going to make art for us anytime soon.

Well that’s it for today. I’ve been sleeping most of it for some reason. I hope this finds you awake ,and feeling good.

Monday Musings, Music, my art

Monday Musings — 2SEP24

Well Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds newest album dropped last Friday. It’s beautiful and haunting. You can stream it In many different places. Like here: https://open.spotify.com/album/0TRr4JGEPJ4eAb5QKRaunf

and here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIN5F5UNw5E

Or buy the damn thing, you won’t regret it.

I’ve been in the studio more this past week. Working on the (long delayed) comic, and I’m making headway. I belong to a zoom group that meets between 9am and 11am weekdays, that is helping me keep up with the script writing, which I was having problems with. The group keeps me kinda accountable, but of course, there are days I have appointments and can’t join in. Most afternoons are spent in the studio, penciling pages, which sometimes goes well, and sometimes: not so much. 🙂

Today is Labor Day in the US and Canada.

Labor Day is a federal holiday in the United States celebrated on the first Monday of September to honor and recognize the American labor movement and the works and contributions of laborers to the development and achievements in the United States.[1][2][3]

Beginning in the late 19th century, as the trade union and labor movements grew, trade unionists proposed that a day be set aside to celebrate labor. “Labor Day” was promoted by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor, which organized the first parade in New York City. In 1887, Oregon was the first state of the United States to make it an official public holiday. By the time it became an official federal holiday in 1894, thirty states in the U.S. officially celebrated Labor Day.[4]

Canada’s Labour Day is also celebrated on the first Monday of September. More than 150 other countries celebrate International Workers’ Day on May 1, the European holiday of May Day. May Day was chosen by the Second International of socialist and communist parties to commemorate the general labor strike in the United States and events leading to the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago, Illinois, from May 1 – May 4, 1886.[5][6]

Contents

The best union is the Wobblies (IWW), you can join them even if your workplace isn’t organized.

You don’t need to be already organizing with the IWW at your job to join and help build our union. Join today and connect to other workers in the IWW in your area’s closest General Membership Branch. You aren’t alone in the IWW!

That’s it for today. Check out my other posts from last week to see some cool art.

Remember that you have good days and bad days. With help from others the good days can outnumber the bad ones. Find those people who can help you to make them good.

Monday Musings

Monday Musings — 29JUL24

Wow it’s Monday again. I do have some stuff for you today. Looky here.

First off, Micheal Moorcock on how to write novel in 3 days.

Michael Moorcock is a highly influential English writer. His career has mostly specialised in fantasy and sci-fi, and whilst some of his novels have been highly literary, he was a firm exponent of sword-and-sorcery, particularly in the sixties and seventies.

He has often commented on the craft of writing, but one of his most unique and interesting techniques is his plan for writing a book in three days. He was talking about sword-and-sorcery at the time, the fantasy inheritor of pulp fiction, and the books in question were typically 60,000 words, but even so, there’s a lot to be said for his methods. Despite the general medium, the power of his work has been huge, and his best-known character, Elric, is one of fantasy’s great standouts.

Next David Graeber lets you know that you really are an anarchist, or well could be in his essay Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!

Chances are you have already heard something about who anarchists are and what they are supposed to believe. Chances are almost everything you have heard is nonsense. Many people seem to think that anarchists are proponents of violence, chaos, and destruction, that they are against all forms of order and organization, or that they are crazed nihilists who just want to blow everything up. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Anarchists are simply people who believe human beings are capable of behaving in a reasonable fashion without having to be forced to. It is really a very simple notion. But it’s one that the rich and powerful have always found extremely dangerous.

At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions. Odd though this may seem, in most important ways you are probably already an anarchist — you just don’t realize it.

Let’s start by taking a few examples from everyday life.

Here’s some artwork from Soojin Choi:

I think that’s it for today. I’ve been puttering along in the studio, doing some commissions for the wife, and laying out more pages in the comic. I’ve been working on the script and have made some progress on it finally, thanks to Mason Curry’s “Worm School” and it’s morning Zoom meetings.

Monday Musings, motivation

Monday Musings — 24JUN24

Wow, it’s Monday already. Had a terrible weekend due to chemo side effects, and have nothing reallly prepared for today.

So let’s talk about procrastination. Which I have been doing a lot of lately. I talked about this with my palliative care docs on Friday an basically everyone agrees that that I need to stick to a plan and do something daily. But how to do that and be accountable is the problem. Maybe putting it out there for everyone to see is a start.

I belong to a Zoom meeting group that meets every week day morning, and that is helping me get some rough work done, if I keep it up.

Ha ve you got tips for not procrastinating? Leave them in the comments.

That’s today’s story.

Monday Musings

Monday Musings — 17Jun24

Let’s start with a poem, about crows.

ABOUT CROWS

by John Ciardi

“The old crow is getting slow; 

the young crow is not. 

Of what the young crow does not know, 

the old crow knows a lot. 

At knowing things, 

the old crow is still the young crow’s master.

What does the old crow not know? 

How to go faster. 

The young crow flies above, below, 

and rings around the slow old crow. 

What does the fast young crow not know? 

WHERE TO GO.”

Beautiful paintings and sculpture from McCreery L. Jordan

And just for the heck of it Micheal Moorcock’s advice on how to write a novel in 3 days.

  • “If you’re going to do a piece of work in three days, you have to have everything properly prepared.”
  • “[The formula is] The Maltese Falcon. Or the Holy Grail. You use the quest theme, basically. In The Maltese Falcon it’s a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Black Bird. In Mort D’Arthur it’s also a lot of people after the same thing, which is the Holy Grail. That’s the formula for Westerns too: everybody’s after the gold of El Dorado or whatever.” (Cf the MacGuffin.)

    • Love you all. Have a great productive week–if that’s what you want. Don’t let me tell you what to do.

    Monday Musings

    Monday Musings — 10JUN24

    What happened last week.

    Well another week has gone by. I didn’t get to last weeks MM because i had cataract surgery on my right eye. WOW! Just doing that one eye, which had the worst cataract (I could barely see anything out of it.), made a big difference in my vision. Colors are brighter, and text is sharper. A book I had to put away because the size of the text made it impossible to read, was clear as day now. I’m having the other one done in a couple of months. I’m pretty excited.

    Next

    Well I found Tubi. Free movies and TV shows. Lots of art documentaries that can’t be found on YouTube, or other streamers.

    Health

    My health is better. I’m feeling a little stronger, and am eating better. I’m still not sleeping great. I sleep until about 1:33 -2:33 and then can’t get back to sleep. I can nap during the day so it’s not that bad. I just wish I didn’t feel cold all the time. It drives the wife crazy that I still have the heat on.

    Some art to start your week.

    https://www.juxtapoz.com/news/painting/nicole-eisenman-moves-between-materials-and-forms-in-with-and-of-on-sculpture

    Art, Monday Musings

    Monday Musings — 27MAY24

    There’s more great stuff (not political) here: https://www.saatchiart.com/neozero

    His statement:

    I am from Portland, Oregon and I am an artist here in the Pacific Northwest. Most of my work is figurative in nature but extends into abstract expressionism with a focus on portraiture, faces and geometric shapes.

    Here’s Geir Opdal: http://geiropdal.com/inks-2/

    This is my online museum and store.  You can wander from room to room and listen to conversation between paintings.  You may also buy a signed print or an original work.

    Wolff Land is the geographical state of my imagination. In my mind it is an actual place where islands are limned in gold as the sea tongues up fantastic shores.
    Sphinxes wade through clear golden water among huge fields of grass (Sphinxland), hybrid dream creatures have multi canvas adventures (Catspider) and sometimes faces of friends show up (Portraits). The stories are driven by movement and color: stars unfol)d in vertical clouds over a mountainside
    of blue thistles (The Mermaid’s Feet), a man wanders through a falling down house as birds fly through his heart (Waltz). But always I try to paint the
    impossible: Light—light of the sun on objects, on water, the light of stars, the light around an amazing event; the light of love.

    MIA WOLFF

    And, finally, here’s something from me:

    https://www.etsy.com/listing/1737681557/missionaries