The commandeered past

Here's a tangent on the way to my post. 

When caring for my mother was at its hardest, my respite was usually going to movies. I have this list of movies I saw then, where I had thoughts but never wrote about them. I was not able to blog much then. 

Whether I ever get to the rest or not, here is one:

Dunkirk (2017)

It wasn't from the movie itself, but from the articles that were coming out about the subject matter.

What they were saying is that there is this collective English memory of the country's WWII experience as the stiff upper lip and "Keep calm and carry on", but in fact the majority of the people were very against involvement initially.

A large part of that change in mindset is due to Winston Churchill and how he framed his speeches, essentially telling the people how brave and patriotic and good they were more than how good they needed to be.

For some perspective, the United Kingdom and France combined declaration of war on Nazi Germany was September 3rd, 1939, in response to the invasion of Poland.  

The Dunkirk evacuations took place from May 26th through June 4th, 1940, with June 4th also being the day of Churchill's "We will fight on the beaches... " speech.

July of 1940 is when people really started turning on Chamberlain; at least it was becoming more public. 

A lot of that was feeling that they were inadequately prepared for war by his actions. Maybe part of the shift was an acceptance that the war was happening -- maybe it had been inevitable -- so that's why you carry on with the stiff upper lip.

They really didn't give a lot of details on that, but what stuck with me at the time was that a narrative gets shaped, and that is what people remember. Stories are easier to remember, but also, history is written by the victors.

That tangent brings me to what I wanted to get to.

It started with In Defense of Witches by Mona Chollet. 

It wasn't my favorite of the relevant books, but one point it made pretty clear was that we think of witch trials as part of the Dark Ages, but they came after that, related to Renaissance and Enlightenment and all of that growing modernization. 

Much of it was due to economic competition, as men moved into industries typically dominated by women. Some of it was just about control. 

Somehow, "enlightenment" -- such as it was -- came with some serious misogyny.

This was reinforced by The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution by Carolyn Merchant, but it was especially important in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici.

What is more, you can see that it wasn't always that way.

It sent me to another book that had been on my reading list for a long time: The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, An Englishman's World by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

There is so much that we get wrong. 

You might think... Dark Ages; life is "nasty, brutish, and short", right?

Well, that was written by someone in the 17th century. Yes, life could be hard earlier and there were lean times, but there was a calendar that allowed for many holidays and there were resources in the commons, and there are ways in which moving forward was not progress.

Then there was this article:  

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/these-rare-artifacts-tell-medieval-womens-stories-in-their-own-words-180985317

Women had more contributions and more power than we readily acknowledge. 

How did that happen? Men's increased repression was very successful. Then they got to convey the mindset that supported them.

Shockingly, the other changes happening at that time led to a consolidation in wealth and unequal changes in the standard of living, even among men. I suspect this is not a coincidence.

Here's the thing that is so important about it -- and Federici's book is the one I recommend the most -- when we don't look at what is happening with women, we don't truly understand what is happening with the men.

Let me add more to that: inasmuch as there is a dominant race, focusing on them where the oppression of other people goes unnoticed, will eventually spread up to that dominant race. It sure doesn't start at the top top.

There is so much that could be mined here, but this is a long post. 

I believe this topic will be revisited (and I hope to spend some time on artifacts that male archeologists could not figure out until they got a woman's input), but first I am going to spend some time writing about music.

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-witches.html 

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/04/book-messiness.html

How are you coping?

Personally, I am struggling.

The specific thing that is happening is that I will see things, feelings of anger and hopelessness will rise up, and it then makes it hard to concentrate, mostly on schoolwork, but other things too.

Where I am feeling it most is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and that even a unanimous Supreme Court decision doesn't seem to be helping. Do you know how messed up something has to be for even Thomas and Alito to have a problem with it? 

And Trump told Bukele to build five more prisons.

Some people have suggested tuning out the news.

I suppose the argument in favor of that is that there probably isn't a lot I can do about some of these issues.

I have seen that enough time spent angry and hopeless can lead to people becoming hard-hearted and directing their anger at the people suffering instead of the cause of the suffering.

I still can't turn away in good conscience. I may not know if we are going to get to vote again, but if I do I want to do it with full knowledge of the reality; I wish more people had done that before.

Plus, it's not just a horrible government, but you can't see stories about them without also seeing comments from people that are terrible, and often delusional in surprising ways.

That is depressing.

I need to stay grounded.

I also really want to graduate though. I want to read books and get things done.

I will have to find my way to do that.

One thing I have thought about is whether I can get my schoolwork done before seeing any news. 

That is really hard to do. If I open a web browser to look something up, there will probably be headlines. 

If I open any social media, there will be headlines, and more of that than social interaction lately.

I haven't worked it out. 

I do know that there are not going to be Wednesday and Thursday posts this week. I don't know if that will be permanent, but I am making a push to get some schoolwork done, and that is part of my facilitating of that.

I also know that our care for each other matters. We can't lose that.

So yesterday and this morning I wrote out a bunch of cards to touch base with people, and this post is also touching base with you.

How are you doing?

Can I help? 

Spooky Season: Hodgepodge and hereafter

The problem with the hodgepodge part of this post is that there are only two books left: 

Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths by Darren Naish

The Skull by Jon Klassen 

(For quantity, the "hereafter" part will make up for it.)

The Skull is a variation on the story where a traveler needs to spend the night in a haunted house. For younger readers, it's a good bridge between a picture book and a comic book, as well as being spooky but not too scary.

Hunting Monsters is really good, but something that will be hated by its target audience. It turns out that the harder you look at various famous cryptids, the less likely it is that they exist. 

If that doesn't surprise and dismay you (so, if you are more Scully then Mulder), then some of the history and psychology and even zoology can be really interesting. At times the thoroughness borders on pedantic, but overall I was glad that I read it.

(For a story that covers a lot of the same material on the Loch Ness Monster specifically, but with a more believing nature, visit https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-obsessive-life-and-mysterious-death-of-the-fisherman-who-discovered-the-loch-ness-monster?utm_source=pocket_shared.)

Remembering that it took me two years to get to where I could write about this spooky season, it may be foolhardy to predict too much about the next one. I will try anyway.

Sometime around last Halloween (October 2024), teachers of small children were looking at various seasonal but also age-appropriate picture books. One of the coworkers of one of my sisters remembered a book, but not the title.

In it, a girl believes her house may be haunted, but at the end you see shoes sticking out from under a sheet that made you suspect the girl's mother was behind the haunting. Did that sound familiar?

Not at all, but I did try some searches to see if I could figure it out.

While that did not work, I stumbled across another thread that helped someone find Wait Till Helen Comes by Mary Downing Hahn. I totally remembered reading that! Wait, was that the one with the owl with love in its eyes? No! There are some common threads, but that was The Ghost Next Door by Wylly Folk St. John. 

In searching for those, there was this list of best middle reader spooky books. It back some fun memories, but did not answer the original question.

Together, they made me really want to explore both picture books and middle reader books with spooky themes.

There are lists (and memories) for the middle reader books, but I wasn't sure how to choose the picture books. There is still a hope that I can find the one that started all this.

If you search the Washington County library system for picture books with the keyword "ghost" there are 272 results. 

When I found that out, I saw that there were also about 27 weeks until Halloween. I could do ten a week.

No, I am not going to read every single one. There are some that are familiar and some that are parts of franchises that I am not really interested in. It will still be a lot.

I am not adding them all to Goodreads. Many of them are fine, and I may pass many of them on to my sister, but I will only be reviewing them in Goodreads if there is something memorably good or bad about them.

So far that is mainly Ghost Cat by Kevan Atteberry, which hit home hard so I made both of my sisters read it and we all felt that one. 

I don't know if it will work for finding that one; that will depend on whether it is in the Washington County library system.

I do know that there will be lots of ghost books coming in and out. 

Boo! 

(There will also be the continuations of the series mentioned in https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/03/spooky-season-series.html. So if it does take me another two years, that will be why.)

Dire

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. -- Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

The articles heralding the return of the dire wolf are already being replaced by articles saying that they aren't really dire wolves, so that is interesting, but not really my issue.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/colossals-de-extincted-dire-wolf-isnt-a-dire-wolf-and-it-has-not-been-de-extincted-experts-say/ar-AA1CBYQB?ocid=BingNewsSerp 

The story did originally make me think of Jurassic Park, and not just as a matter of whether or not someday these cubs will kill someone. 

Yes, I thought about the could/should thing, but there was also something in the first article I read about how they might eventually be helpful with current endangered species. That was treated when Hammond found the scientists less than enthusiastic and said if it had been California condors they would have been fine with it.

No, hold on. This isn't some species that was obliterated by deforestation, or the building of a dam.

That particular conversation also mentioned them not knowing enough about the ecosystem. That part might be less of an issue with the dire wolves, who existed much more recently than dinosaurs. It should not be an issue at all for currently endangered species. However, the reasons for them being endangered are generally habitat loss. Poaching and over-hunting played factors, and toxins in the environment that concentrated as they went further up the food chain... those have played roles, but you cannot minimize the importance of habitat loss.

When we got to a situation where the last male white rhino died, that might be a situation where cloning could be beneficial. It being beneficial would still require the issues that led to the sever habitat loss being resolved.

Here's something not from Jurassic Park:

‘Nobody ever saw anything like this before. The first day, 25 September, I saw 10 river dolphin carcasses. That was a shock. Then two days later I saw 70 carcasses along the lake.’ One dolphin, swimming in circles, was in agony and struggling to survive. ‘We didn’t know what to do or how to help it,’ he told me. ‘If you try to rescue an animal that is already hurt, it can die from the extra stress.’

https://aeon.co/essays/we-can-still-get-out-of-the-climate-hellocene-and-into-the-clear 

That is about Amazon pink dolphins not doing well with the rise in river temperature. Let's say you clone them, where are you going to put them?

That requires a completely different kind of effort. Amazing scientific knowledge can be helpful, but not nearly as necessary as people actually becoming committed to the health of the planet and the value of species, sometimes at the cost of not maximizing profits.

I suspect they don't really care so much about restoring endangered species as they care about doing something cool; that was probably just something they said to sound better. 

What does this give us?

First of all, you have pack animals who don't really have a pack or parent animals to teach them how to behave. 

Apparently the process is really hard on the mother. I imagine that has to do with issues of size and anti-immune responses, and I don't like the thought of that. There may be animal research that has enough of a benefit to be justifiable, but we need to be really careful and ethical about how we treat living things. I can't imagine that those criteria can possibly be met here.

Introducing them into the wild sounds like something that can only go wrong, so what do you do with them?

There will certainly be people who would pay for the exotic pets, imagining themselves as Stark children I suppose. Bound to go badly.

I imagine there will also be people who would pay a lot to hunt them. Gross.

Theme park attraction? That just sounds revolting.

No, it's not the cinematic levels of mayhem that were imagined with an island full of dinosaurs -- I guess we can be grateful for that -- but it still feels wrong.  

Nature loving us

Going back even further than the 2013 ICAF, there was a 1994 movie that captivated me: The Secret of Roan Inish.

Set in Ireland after World War II, war-time evacuation took a family away from their island home. In the process, one of the children was lost. 

During the evacuation the gulls and seals were very upset to have the family leaving; that is why they took Jamie and kept him with them. Of course, there was a selkie ancestor, so the seals are really all kin and Jamie was a "dark one", so more seal-ish.

Okay, that is fiction, and folklore. What struck me at the time was the strong sense of connection to place. The people were tied to the land and the sea in a mutual way that seemed lost for our time and place.

I remember discussing it with a friend. Part of it seemed to be that these were people whose living was more tied to nature. Jamie's family were primarily fishers, so were going out onto the sea all the time, needing to be aware of the weather and changes and how it works. 

You could have similar ties with hunter-gatherer societies, and even farmers, but there are different ways of farming. If you are sowing genetically modified corn that goes straight into High Fructose Corn Syrup, it might be hard to feel connected to that.

(King Corn from 2007 could be relevant here, but that is a very different movie than The Secret of Roan Inish.) 

Here are things that I am thinking about in conjunction with the movie:

There are some plants that do better when harvested, which may include wild populations. This includes sweetgrass, as mentioned in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, and camas, as mentioned in the following article:

https://www.vox.com/climate/377249/climate-solutions-traditional-indigenous-foods-water-potato

While selkies themselves are from Celtic and Norse lore, various Native American groups have many stories of people being adopted by or marrying or spending time living with animals, as well as other stories focusing on the relationship between them and plants or animals that are a food source. It would be easy to write them off as folklore, but that would be missing the point: different lifeforms are intimately connected and we need each other.

Some of the recent reading has been about economic changes and the rise of capitalism, where we also see the trend toward urbanization. In some ways, the estrangement from the means of production was really estrangement from nature.

Now, this probably seems like a good launching point for just going off on capitalism. I am not ruling that out.

However, there is a really recent story that is all kinds of wrong, and I think I am going there first.

Connected to nature

This is going to be one of those times where I am going to tell a lot of different stories that may not feel cohesive. You will have to decide for yourself the level of relevance.

Twelve years ago the International Comic Arts Forum held its gathering in Portland. I was able to attend quite a bit. I wrote several posts on it at the time.

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2013/06/international-comic-arts-forum-source.html

While there were people who traveled to be there, Portland has a wealth of local comics creators (largely because of the presence of Dark Horse). One vivid memory that wasn't really about comics was a panel of writers who lived locally but were transplants, talking about coming to the Pacific Northwest.  

I remember someone talking about how beautiful it was, but also the coldness. That was not as a matter of temperature, but that nature doesn't care about you.

I believe a big part of the reason that stuck with me was because other people were nodding along, while I was like, "What are you talking about?"

I didn't contradict anyone there. I am not sure how I would have. It didn't sound right to me, but trying to argue that nature does care about you would also be weird. I don't think I could convey verbally a logical explanation for why I feel that is wrong.

(This is where you will need to figure out relevance and meaning for yourself.)

I will tell you another, kind of similar story.

A former coworker was with her family, and they noticed a flower child type of person literally hugging a tree. 

Her brother went up and hugged the tree too. He asked "Doesn't it have the best energy?" 

The flower child was all in agreement, but it was a funny story for them. I don't believe it was mean-spirited, but the brother was nonetheless teasing the flower child.

I have hugged trees. It's not something I do often, but there have been times when I have felt connection and closeness, and like maybe with that embrace we could share strength.

Now, I would also like to point out that I have never felt I needed to hug multiple trees. With what I know now about how they connect through the ground and canopy, maybe I was onto something.

Okay, I sound hippy-dippy. Well, the more I talk about fighting this administration, the more hippy-dippy I sound; that may just be what it takes.

I don't know why I feel that connection. Sure, we camped and hiked fairly often in my childhood, and a lot of my early jobs were picking berries and weeding and things, but I am not sure that's how it works.

I am currently reading Lost Woods, a collection of lesser-known writings by Rachel Carson.

She always felt that interest in nature, and she expresses her fascination with it beautifully, 

I can say that for me there was always that desire to know what that sound was or what that plant is named, so there was looking and observing and wondering. Maybe that's how the connection was built.

I'm not saying the plants were looking back, but maybe there was just an openness on their end, and if you stepped into that you became part of it. And if we're talking animals...

Here's the other thing I remember from that panel. Back when he was new to the area, one of the members remembered talking to someone who was saying it was pretty good out here, but "every now and then, a woman goes missing."

I think the timing would have put it around the height of the Green River killings. Of course that wasn't the only serial killer to hit the area, and there are women who disappear in less notorious ways all of the time.

I suppose I remember that because there seemed to be a coldness to the way the guy said it that perhaps matched the perceived coldness of nature.

Let me close with this from Carson when she addressed the Sorority of Women Journalists in the spring of 1954: 

Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, with steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water. Perhaps he is intoxicated with his own power, as he goes farther and farther into experiments for the destruction of himself and his world. For this unhappy trend there is no single remedy -- no panacea. But I do believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

Book messiness

In case it was not obvious, I am usually reading from multiple lists at a time. While I have been reading for Spooky Season, I have also been reading for Native American Heritage Month.

There have been three NAMH books that could be considered a little spooky, two of which seem to be series.

Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger

Moon of the Crusted Snow by Waubgeshig Rice

Bad Cree by Jessica Johns

Now, Moon of the Crusted Snow is the only one that actually has a sequel out (Moon of the Turning Leaves), though Elatsoe has a prequel, and I believe there will be others.

Moon was something I read specifically during this time, because I had seen it described as Native horror and I thought it would fit. 

If I were writing about these books now for real, I would argue that Bad Cree fits the category better, and that Elatsoe does not, despite the presence of ghosts and vampires.

I am not writing about them now because there are different things I want to say about them. Besides, there is one viewpoint from which it might makes sense to treat Bad Cree and Moon of the Crusted Snow with Braiding Sweetgrass

I mention this because I had thought that Native Horror could be the bridge for ending Spooky Season and moving into Native American Heritage Month. It could, except that there are ways in which there is an equally good bridge between Native American Heritage Month and some science reading I have going on.

That seems like it could work too, except part of that relates to the reading associated with Caliban and the Witch. Okay, I already wrote about that, except there are aspects of it that sent me down paths I didn't expect. I had not expected to be looking at any medieval studies, yet there I was.

This is a big part of why I am always behind in my reading, but that isn't just me being easily distracted by potential knowledge.

It is also how much of this knowledge connects to other knowledge. It is the patterns that we are constantly repeating, with not nearly as much variation as you would hope and certainly not the desired learning.

Next Friday I am pretty confident that I will write about the last couple of books that were read for Spooky Season.

After that, well, I could start with Science or things we misunderstand about the past or I might take some time to berate James Comey, though with those last two they might end up escaping the Friday posts and happening as part of the earlier writings in the week.

I will probably not start writing about Native American Heritage Month until I do some of those, but I am not positive. 

There will be more writing about music too, so there's that.

Permaculture

When I wrote about messiness, one reason I had been thinking about the term was an article I had read about how cities did not want to deal with fruit trees, because then you have fruit falling and rotting and it takes more work. Of course, then there is a missed opportunity for a food source. 

In fact, I do remember an Italian prune tree on my way to the bus stop that scattered plums all over the sidewalk each year, where they would turn to fruit leather.

They are a fruit I like a lot, but it didn't feel right to pick them off of someone else's tree before they fell, and it was not desirable to pick them after they fell.

What puts the "perma" in permaculture is that there are members of the system that fill multiple different roles in the cycle so that it can be self-sustaining. That does tend to eliminate waste, but it can be messy.

About the time I went to Outdoor School (many years ago), there was this process going on of moving away from the concept of a food chain to a food web. They were beginning to understand that it wasn't linear.

Having ground cover of native species does mean that there should be local pollinators and probably soil compatibility and maybe that your ground cover acts as a source of food and housing for local fauna.

To get it so that there is food and shelter for the fauna at different stages of life, and something handling the decay so that nutrients are put back in the soil, that becomes more complicated, but at the same time it becomes sustainable. It can continue.

Yes, it produces food -- lots of food -- but not all of the food is for you. Then you have lots of healthy living things around you that contribute as part of the web to the part that is for you. 

It's beautiful, and something that takes place naturally all the time, but something that our interference can make really difficult.

I admit that if you are looking at trying to set that up it can feel overwhelming. You need to start looking at different layers and interactions. What's going on in the roots? It will take time to grow a canopy.

It also shows us a path for healing and making things better.

One of the most beautiful books I have ever read was Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture by Toby Hemenway.

It not only helped me understand some things that I had already observed, but also gave me hope for things I would not have expected, like a permaculture area in Arizona that was always 5 degrees cooler than the rest of the area.

Five degrees may not seem like much, but when we are talking about climate change, we are talking about one or two degree increases overall. If we could expand the area, and if we could heal polluted ground, and strengthen endangered species... there are a lot of things that we can do.

I recommend the book, no matter where you are in having a yard and what to do with it.

And it looks like next week -- instead of starting on one of the six areas I was already looking at -- I am going to go in a completely different direction.

These things  happen. 

Planting native species

Let's say you are still pretty much looking at a ground cover -- maybe with some shrubs and flowers bordering the house -- but you want them to be plants native to your area; what then?

Obviously, it will depend on your area. I will focus on mine, but "area" can also be kind of a loose term.

One potential starting place is PNW Native Plant Exchange:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1723453557818882

Nurseries in your area will almost certainly have some native plants, but they will also be selling them. 

With the exchange you will literally see people saying that something they have is splitting off and they may be giving away or trading. You can also ask questions and get tips, so it can be helpful with knowledge and with a sense of community.

Extension services remain a good source of information. For Washington County in Oregon, that's https://extension.oregonstate.edu/washington. 

Many years ago I became a Master Food Preserver through an extension program. I would team up with a Master Gardener at the Hillsboro Farmer's Market and we would answer questions and distribute information.

I can tell you that the most common question for the Master Gardener was about blossom end rot on tomatoes, which was related to not enough calcium in the soil. The favored solution was egg shells, which I believe gets recommended for roses too, but it was always the tomatoes.

On a possibly related note, the most popular food preservation publication was the one on making salsa.

At the time, I thought I wanted to later go through the Master Gardener Program, as well as two other programs; I would be master of it all!

I did not end up doing that. Programs have changed over the years, mostly for the better. 

That being said, it is possible that there is a program out there that will teach you a lot and that you will love. However, you do not need to become a master to be able to do things.

(And even mastering something... I have never canned fish, and it is not going to happen.)

The point is that there is information out there and people that are interested. If you need a slow learning curve or are ready to plunge right in, there should be options.

There was also a book I enjoyed:

Real Gardens Grow Natives: Design, Plant, & Enjoy A Healthy Northwest Garden by Eileen Stark.

In fact, that book goes a little beyond the ground level, as does the author, who is based in Portland and does landscaping consultations: 

https://realgardensgrownatives.com/?page_id=6376

Regardless, the book describes local plants that would makes sense as part of local ecosystems.  

Messiness

Last week I did not post on Thursday. 

I planned to, but I got busy with school. Besides, the topic was not fitting right.

I am writing about bigger things now, so it takes more time; I have accepted that.

There has still been this feeling that if I can cover something in one week -- so three posts, not counting the Friday post on media or the Saturday and Sunday blogs -- then there is still at least a semblance of order.

It just wasn't going to work. 

For school, I did finish the one course, but then I just started another one. It's going to be that way through the end of the year.

Bless this mess.

As it is, I can incorporate the theme of messiness into my Friday media post. 

It's fitting that it happened on this writing section. As you garden or work with nature or try and impose your will on nature, you will find a fair amount of mess. 

Things are really working out.

I believe the next two posts are going to be about native plants and permaculture, but that next week I will move on. That will probably be to one of six topic areas that I have been thinking about, but it can be hard to say.

There is so much to think about.

If you also feel like a mess, pulled in too many directions and not able to do nearly as much as you would like... hey friend!

Value what you do.

Let's support each other in good ways.

Spooky Season: Witches

While most of the books did not have "witch" in the title, it was still something that came up.

First of all, there was some fiction that was not great. 

The best of those was The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna.

I saw it on a library post for the Shameless Romance Book Club. 

That in itself would tend to put me off, but I decided to go for it. It was at times too cute and I was amazed at how awkward the unnecessary sex scene was, but I didn't hate it; that was a win.

In this world, witches are born and have to learn how to use their power. Fear often gets in the way of connection. I thought the relationships in that area were handled well.

With Spells For Forgetting by Adrienne Young, I believe I saw that someone else read it and was curious about the mystery. That resolution was actually pretty satisfying, except that you have some people who don't seem to be unusually evil doing some pretty twisted things, while other people who should be really motivated just let things go for years. 

I could have liked the book more if the people were more compelling.

The better fiction was The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent, from my Daughters list.

I kept getting it confused in my mind with Gallileo's Daughter, also on that list, but about a different heretic.

This is based on the story of Martha Carrier, executed during the Salem Witch Trials and written by one of her actual descendants. While a fictionalized account, it draws from a fascinating family history. 

Relationships are hard here, as is life, but you can appreciate the struggles and the choices.

Then there was a non-fiction book that was not great, but it led me to a book that was amazing:

In Defense of Witches:The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial by Mona Challet

There are good points, but then there are attempts to be cute. Some of it could be the translation. 

The premise of looking at the types of women accused of witchcraft and why was interesting, but another reviewer wrote that all of the good points were in the introduction. Well, the introduction was written by Carmen Maria Machado.

However, in reading In Defense of Witches -- and reading about it -- there kept being references to Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici.

The funny thing about that was that it was already on my larger to-read list. It did come up with the word searches, but since it seemed to be more statistical I was going to hold off on it. The various references convince me otherwise.

There is so much in Federici's writing that is interesting and that points to other things to study.

The title is a reference to Caliban from The Tempest and his mother, whom is referenced in the play, but not seen.

The play was written at a time when slavery was expanding, along with persecution of "witches". That becomes the theme of what was going on in society, largely driven by the rise of capitalism.

That actually led me to yet another book (which wasn't as good), but that kind of becomes something else.

We will get there, but I will take one more week to wrap up Spooky Season. 

Increments

Let's say that at this point you are committed to dumping the lawn, but you can't see your path beyond that.

That's still a good start.

There are many directions you can go, and none of them have to be the final destination.

The suggestion you will probably see the most is creeping red thyme. I see stories about it shared a lot, though I don't think I have ever seen someone who has done it.

I am not against it. It will be lower maintenance than grass, it is more interesting to look at, and it is more fragrant, though there could potentially be objections to that. 

It is better for pollinators, in that you do get blossoms before you cut it down, unlike grass.

It is native to Greenland, Europe, and Turkey, so there is a good chance it would not count as a native plant.

That might mean that it feeds some pollinators in their adult form, but may not be good for the larva or eggs or other parts of the ecosystem. It is still a step forward, but it might not hurt to research native ground covers.

One year I got volunteer clover that just spread. I loved it. It was so much springier to walk on than grass. 

Then the heat dome killed it, and it didn't recover quite right. I planted some white clover, and I have some, but I could not recreate what nature had done on its own.

Regardless, it doesn't hurt to check native ground covers for your area. If all you want to do is go away from a lawn, ground covers is the right category to search.

I remember being confused when I would keep seeing various strawberries coming up as a ground cover; wouldn't they be too squishy? Because I was thinking that if it's a ground cover, you walk across it. Then I visited the Willamette Heritage Center. 

The parking lot is two levels, with a pretty steep grade in between. The soil in between is anchored by strawberry plants. It is a ground cover, but not for walking. 

Think about the desired function for your area.

I am going to give you three more ideas.

If this is a holding place, where you think you will want to do more planting next year, you could consider a green manure. That would allow you to use the time in between to build up nutrients in the soil:

https://www.thespruce.com/what-is-green-manure-1761842

If you like the idea of the creeping thyme, but maybe not that much red, you might want to consider a tapestry lawn. This could be a chance to mix in some native and non-native plants. If there is something you don't like, it's no longer the whole area:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/tapestry-lawns-why-you-need-this-low-maintenance-grass-alternative  

And maybe if you don't like one patch, you replace it with a bush, adding to the complexity.

Maybe it will be a berry bush.

Finally, to get a broader range of ideas, try reading Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn.

There are many contributors for writing, but the artist and architect is Fritz Haeg. 

I promise there will be ideas that would never have occurred to you. Even if they are not for you, it can open your mind to what is possible.

You can find more information at https://www.fritzhaeg.com/edible-estates-book.html.  

Sheet mulching and humanity

I am going to be spending a bit more time on yards than initially intended. That is at least partly because it relates to greater issues.

A few years ago I sheet-mulched a small section of our front yard.

If you are not familiar with the term, you lay down sheets of cardboard or newspapers (if newspapers, six pages thick) and then cover them with mulch and water well.

The way it was supposed to work was that in six weeks I would have a pretty good soil base and it would take out any weeds or grass underneath it.

The positive part of that is that it is still a good piece of ground. Many of the bird and bee-friendly things I planted were perennial and still growing with very little care.

The somewhat flummoxing thing is that it was more like twelve weeks after the start that things actually germinated. I don't know if that was because of the method I used or some other factors.

The unfortunate thing was that it was so much work for such a small patch of ground that I have only tried it one other time, and that was with mixed results.

That means that even though it is much more disturbing for the soil, I am having someone till it to mix in the mulch, and there might even be some spray involved. I am not proud of that, but as someone who is neither physically strong and energetic nor rich, I do have to be practical.

There could be other options that would be somewhere in between in terms of how environmentally friendly they are, but they would also be much more expensive. Back to that not rich thing...

(Plus, most landscaping companies want you to have a lawn, with or without other plants, that they will come regularly and tend to. Even trying to describe what I want gives them the impression I am deranged.)

Regardless, there are two other things I want to mention about sheet mulching, if you are so inclined.

First of all, it used to be much easier to come up with old newspapers. The last time I tried it, I was only able to because someone else had collected some papers when they meant to try it, didn't get around to it, and then were moving and clearing out their garage. The first time, my sisters had ordered some bookcases and I used the cardboard boxes.

You can purchase paper specifically for it, but times have changed and it affects things in ways you don't always expect.

The other thing is where we get to the humanity.

When I was researching sheet mulching, there were things that made sense. For the cardboard packaging, I needed to remove the packing tape. For the newspapers, I didn't use the glossy inserts.

There were comments that all of it was unnatural and bad, that even if the paper was from trees the ink wasn't.

I was worried about that, but it was part of an overall trend that I have seen before.

Some of us will remember Sarah releasing curls to the wind after cutting hair so they could be used in birds' nests in Sarah, Plain and Tall. I once found a post railing against that; that hair is not appropriate material and would tangle the birds feet!

Since some birds do use animal hair -- sometimes longer -- and long grasses, I was not completely sold on that, but I had also seen that you could compost hair and dryer lint. 

No! With your hair dye and shampoos it is all chemical and bad.

You will see similar things about feeding birds and bee houses and pet ownership.

There are things that I am sure are right. I do believe that bees are better off feeding on flowers than leaving fruits out and that leaving food scraps by the road side puts animals in danger of cars. That's completely logical.

I have seen the pictures of angel wing and I know not to feed ducks bread. 

However, if the main theme of the communication is that humans are disgusting sources of contamination... it's not even necessarily that a case can't be made, but that it's not helpful.

What I know how to do better, I will. I will also remain open to learning more and changing how I do things.

I am still here, and I want to be here. I want other people to be here. 

We can work out how to make that better if we have the will. 

That will should not be confused with despising each other. 

I should also note that the warnings about angel wing say what you can safely feed the ducks. The article about not leaving fruits out for bees explained why and talked about how to set up a watering station, which could be helpful.

Some people only have anger and contempt to offer. They are not the best sources. 

Spooky season: From the other side

There were two books that fit in especially well with the theme:

Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead by Christine Wicker

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife by Mary Roach

I had read an article in Smithsonian about Lily Dale that referenced the book. It took me about fourteen years to get to the book, but I did it.

When I was reading about death, trying to be ready for something that still hasn't happened, I read Stiff by Mary Roach. I realized that she had some other books that I was interested in. When she is interested in a topic, she goes all in, and I can appreciate that.

Stiff was about what happens to the body, while Spook is about what science says about the soul. That was partly what experiments they do to try and understand near-death experiences, but there was also a section about mediums.

Lily Dale is about a whole town of full of them.

I had already known something about the topic -- and how to fake it -- from reading about Houdini, especially in David Jaher's The Witch of Lime Street. Reading Lily Dale and Stiff so close together gave some different thoughts.

Wicker and Roach both took classes on how to receive psychic messages. Yes, they have those. 

It is probably easier to take one in Lily Dale than anywhere else.

Lily Dale is a town in New York that started as a spiritualist community. It started after the movement started after the Fox sisters started using "rapping" to communicate with spirits.

One of the sisters -- with another present -- later admitted it was a hoax, but recanted after pressure and continued to provide services. Somehow the community continues. 

There is an organization, but there is not a strict dogma. Therefore different residents may claim to get their messages from fairies or the dead or various other sources.

When I was younger, my tendency was to think that such things were either fake or evil. After more years and experiences, I think there can be many ways of receiving information.

There were two things that were interesting about the classes. 

One is that while you are in one, it can really feel real. I believe it was Wicker who wrote about being in a session where they levitated a table. It was exhilarating, and she was amazed, but something someone said later caused her to wonder. She realized it was a trick. The participants did not know it was a trick -- at least not in the moment -- but what about the person leading the session?

That was unclear. Perhaps they believe they have something to offer and consider some showmanship to be a fair selling point.

They are getting paid for their offerings.

Wicker told many stories of people hearing life-changing things that they needed to hear that could not always be explained by tricks or guessing.

There was something else from Roach's account:

People were more interested in the messages they got for others than the messages others had for them.

That obviously can't be the case all of the time, or there would not be people making money on it. However, that tendency to get inebriated on the thrill of having a message for someone, rather than wanting to know what you can know about yourself, seems like a problem of human nature.

But yes, sometimes you might feel or think or realize something that would be important for someone else.

I bet you could even more reliably -- and more helpfully -- figure out things about yourself.

I also watched a lot of Tyler Henry (the Hollywood medium) clips on Youtube.

Honestly, I appreciate that he is so caring with the people he reads for. Is there something to it? Probably. Would it be something they could hear for themselves? Probably.

Then, at some point -- after I was done and stopped clicking on links for Tyler Henry clips -- Youtube started suggesting clips from the US version of Ghosts.

It looks pretty funny, but with a good heart. 

I could imagine watching that.

Feeling fruity

Although I do not buy from them exclusively, I do like looking at Territorial Seed Company:

https://territorialseed.com/ 

In addition to being family-owned, they are very much focused on this area and heirloom varieties. That is important for me.

Recently they had an offer for your own blueberry patch. You could get six each of three different varieties for under three hundred dollars.

I did not question the value of the offer or the enjoyment my household would get from having a blueberry patch in the backyard. However, berry bushes take a while to establish. We would not get a great harvest this year.

My efforts this year are largely being inspired by this disaster of a government and all of the many things that can go wrong, without knowing which things will go wrong and how soon.

There is some speculation that Trump will declare a state of emergency on April 20th to cement his control, kind of a Reichstag Fire scenario.

I don't know that I really expect that. Mainly, I think about how some people celebrate April 20th; talk about harshing their mellow!

If it does happen, it does not matter what I plant, nothing would be ready to harvest then. 

It would also not hurt that I had planted it. It might make it even more valuable that I planted it.

My point is not to depress or discourage you, but to remind you that we don't know the future; we somehow have to make peace with that.

If we are looking at fruit trees or bushes, expect those to take longer to establish. 

I have grown strawberries from seeds, once upon a time. I got strawberries in the second year. 

That can be fine, but starting with strawberry plants is much faster. Consider what you are doing. 

If you are planting a tree, you probably are waiting at least three years for fruit. You will probably also reach a point where it produces a lot of fruit for a long time without too much maintenance. That just doesn't happen with asparagus.

You also need to think about location. Roots will extend and might cause sidewalks to buckle or branches might mess with your gutters, based on location. You need to make sure there are no pipes or lines underneath before you even get started.

I would gladly plant blueberries in the ground; now they say you don't even have to do too much with augmenting the soil acidity (which I would definitely research more before doing). However, if I am am going to grow blackberries, I know how those spread and they are going to have to be contained. As a harvesting preference, I would not want strawberries in the ground, but on a pyramid or gutters or something.

You also need to think about pollination. For example, there are three categories of blueberries: ones that bloom early, mid-season, and late. Mid-season can cross-pollinate with any, but if you have one early bush and one late bush, there's a good chance you are not going to get any berries.

That means there are things to think about that don't come up with a vegetable patch. There are adorable things too, like learning that there are Romeo cherries and Juliet cherries and the reason they have those names is that even though the fruit is different, both trees produce better when they are planted near each other.

(Which may not be that faithful to the play, but that's a completely separate issue.) 

I don't mind that sometimes you are doing things that take work and planning and time to pay off. If I couldn't handle that, I would drop out of my Master's program.

However, sometimes there are things you are ready for and things you are not ready for.

This year I am only planning on planting annuals, where I should be able to expect everything to die after a good frost. It is lower stakes and lower commitment. I will figure out the next year after that.

It is wonderful to have many options. Trying them all at once is not as wonderful.

And you still need to be okay with the possibility of failure:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/02/right-action.html

Lots of vegetables

Part of my leaning toward permaculture is creating a better ecosystem. 

Such a system does produce a lot of food, but eating the food you are used to does not necessarily fit into that structure.

A lot of what we eat was developed and bred into something bigger and perhaps with a preferred flavor.

If you want to eat corn on the cob you grew yourself, you are probably going to need to plant the corn into rows; the teosinte that corn is (probably) descended from was more of a grass, and quite small.

You are going to need cages for tomatoes and bell peppers, because the fruits were bred to be bigger without the stalks being bred to be like trees. 

That's just how it is, and it isn't necessarily bad. 

It doesn't even have to be a conflict because it is very common that people with a permaculture food forest will still also have a fairly typical garden patch in addition.

Since we have tended to default to lawns, which are pretty sterile, if you want to convert that to a garden patch it is going to take some work.

That might be part of why square-foot gardening was so popular for a while. It didn't matter what your soil was like, you were putting chemicals in a box. 

I personally do not like that, but I get it. Honestly, if I were to decide to grow carrots I would probably need to do something like that. My area is known for it's heavy clay soil, and carrots don't do well in that.

I don't mind that so much, because the sandy soil where carrots do well is prone to liquefaction in an earthquake; who needs that? However, carrots are a popular and tasty vegetable.

Carrots are special in many ways. Usually with the square-foot gardening method, your boxes are 1 foot high, but carrots require 2-foot high sections.

Still tasty, and another way you might combine things. You could have some boxes with a mix and some things planted in the dirt. 

I can recommend books for either or both of those.

All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew

Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades: The Complete Guide to Organic Gardening by Steve Solomon.

Solomon goes over many, many varieties; when I first read it I did  not know how you would ever choose. 

I realized that you don't get it all at once. So you try some varieties one year, and then you keep the ones that you like and that grow well, and you try new things the next season.

One thing I will mention tomorrow is native plants, and those generally get planted in the fall. You could try a vegetable garden, decide it's not your think, and fill that area with native plants.

There are a lot of options.

Some of them will definitely fail, and that is discouraging. 

There should also be some successes that feel amazing.

You can find resources through your local extension office:

https://extension.oregonstate.edu/washington

Spring planting

My sisters have a friend who has been overly influenced by Doomsday preppers. Many of the things she mentions would not be bad on their own, even if her understanding is a little off. 

I still think the approach is wrong.

She was talking enthusiastically about planting food and how much you can get with permaculture, especially Jerusalem artichokes.

Ye-es, kind of.

I love permaculture, and should be thrilled to hear people talking about it. It can grow lots of food. It is certainly a better approach environmentally. 

Those things don't necessarily overlap the way you would want.

That's not bad; it just means that you need to consider your goals.

If you do not have any land, this may not be the most useful post, and I am sorry for that. 

There is a lot to be said for growing your own food, especially in times like these. I expect supply chain issues.

One important thing to remember is that a lot of US agriculture is very corporatized and may not involve things that are good to eat. It is not ideal to depend on imports for any type of product. If it's one that's essential for life and you need it all the time, that is all the more reason why local supplies are good.

Permaculture is great for how it can be self-sustaining, environmentally friendly, and healing. Permaculture can benefit all of the flora and fauna, not just the humans. That is wonderful.

Lawns are also incredibly destructive. To really have them looking right tends to take fossil fuels for trimming, chemicals for fertilizer, and it doesn't provide much in the way of food or shelter for any of our pollinators.

Lawns first became popular with the aristocracy in the Middle Ages... does that sound like something that everyone should have? 

You may also have seen people encouraging planting creeping red thyme or tapestry lawns. Possibly also a good idea, though not one that would add to your food supply. 

In January I did write a little about gardening; that post focused on all of the things that can go wrong. 

I have not finished planning what I am going to do this year.

However, the weather is warming up, and the ground along with it; this is the time to think about it.

I will post about different options over the next two days, recommending books and links as applicable.

The starting point is to think about what you have and what you want. If your yard is a play area for children, grass does work pretty well for that.

Otherwise, there are much better options. Some of them are low maintenance once you have them, but they all require getting there first.

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/01/three-things-gardens.html 

https://preparedspork.blogspot.com/2025/03/mindset.html 

Spooky Season Series

Last year I ended up reading the first books in four different series that kind of fit into my Halloween-themed reading, though in different ways.

I had not initially known that I was getting into series, but since that happened and I didn't hate any of them, I decided to go ahead and read the second books this time around.

Next year (which is now this year) I will go ahead and read the third, and then probably let them go. That's not necessarily anything against them, because it looks like some of them could keep going on and on.

We'll see. For now, let's just explore.

Ghost Roads by Seanan McGuire

I have a fondness for ghost stories, especially the ghostly hitchhiker. I first saw one telling in a movie, and my biggest surprise was when it showed up in an episode of Maverick (though it was a con; she was not really a ghost).

I saw the title for The Girl in the Green Silk Gown, and knew that was related. Great. It was, but that was also book two, so I started with Sparrow Hill Road.

In fact, McGuire has created a very complex world of ghost and witch lore, including a soundtrack you can find online. For the first book I found that kind of exhausting; it wasn't that bad here. Also there are some issues here that could be glossed over but are not, which I appreciate. 

The Forge & Fracture Saga by Brittany N. Williams

Someone recommended it on Twitter when the series was new with the release of That Self-Same Metal.

In the time of Shakespeare there are many Black families with strong ties to various Orisha, and whom have been instrumental in keeping the faeries at bay. The fracture there is letting more through, and so faeries keep eating people. Also, there is a pretty strong thread of pansexuality and polyamory. Things get much more complicated in Saint-Seducing Gold.

The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club by Theodora Goss

I had read a good review of The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter and it ended up on my Daughters list. 

Shortly after the death of her mother, Mary Jekyll discovers that her father had another daughter in his Hyde form, Diana. She also encounters Beatrice Rappacini, Justine Frankenstein, and Catherine Moreau, as well as making the acquaintance of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Many more familiar names come up in European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman.

They are interesting. I suppose my big conflict is that I loved Dracula, but not Dracula, and I don't really care for the Holmes stories. So when she makes Seward and Van Helsing terrible people and Dracula a romantic hero, maybe it's just conflicting tastes. 

I'll read the third anyway.

Witchlings by Claribel Ortega. 

Ortega was also the writer for Frizzy, which I thought was great. It was a bit more grounded in reality.

I think Witchlings can be good for Harry Potter fans looking for something less hateful. In ways it is more modern. Sometimes there are things where I remember I am not the target age -- probably for tweens -- but there were some surprises. 

This might be the one that I might be most likely to keep up with, though, because there is less of that sense of things growing increasingly more complicated where it feels like too much effort for something that is made up.

Finally, in the realm of keywords leading to other books, when I was looking for "witchlings" this picutre books came up:

The Witchling's Wish by Sarah Massini 

Why not be complete? 

This witchling wanted a friend and found one, though not the way she expected.

In sheep's clothing

If yesterday's post was inspired by other people's concerns, today is about my concern about other people.

I'm going to link to a Clickhole article. You can read it if you want to, but it's not a great site and the headline gives you the gist:

Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point

https://clickhole.com/heartbreaking-the-worst-person-you-know-just-made-a-gr-1825121606/ 

My worry is not so much terrible people making great points, but that people with good intentions are going to grow more reliant and trusting of these terrible people.

You see, I have not completely given up on us regaining some congressional control in 2026, still being able to have an election in 2028, and that we might once again have a government that is not trying to kill us.

I've always been a dreamer.

As terrible as Republicans have been, a lot of us getting to this point has been the counter-efforts of progressives and leftists who have been sabotaging Democrats at every turn instead of paying attention to Russian interference, often repeating the propaganda.

So I see people re-posting Ryan Grim and articles about Bernie Sanders becoming the leader of the resistance and I feel distinctly less hopeful.

I am aware there is some danger in naming Bernie, as he has loyal fans. I have also been clear about him from the beginning.

The bigger danger is the worse people gaining an outsize influence.

The people who thrive on criticism and strife are going to be making hay now. They have targets and can tap into the anger and ride that wave. They can profit off of it. 

Don't buy it.

Sure, I could list names not to trust, but I would certainly miss some and there will also be more. There were politicians and journalists who seemed to start out pretty solidly back before Trump was a candidate, and some of them have changed. We have seen voters make the same transition.

For someone already named, Ryan Grim popularized Tara Reade's accusations against Biden, despite many indications that it wasn't true. He was also the first to release infromation about Christine Blasey Ford's letter accusing Brett Kavanaugh, which seems like something that could have been good, except that he seemed to be trying to discredit "#MeToo.

Yesterday talked about how some news sources may not always be reliable, but still not always wrong. People are going to be like that too.

As it is, there are people whom I consistently follow whom I disagree with pretty regularly. They are right enough about other things sometimes that it is worth following them, though I generally don't repost them even when I agree. Maybe there is an understandable anger that gets in their way, or a specific issue that overrides everything else for them, but there will be times when they are destructive so I don't want to do anything to popularize them. Is it a perfect system? None of this is.

That one issue that overrules everything else is one of the danger signs. Leftists whose care about Israel's genocide against Palestinians made them fine with selling out transgender people were suspect anyway, given that the current federal stance is much worse. I question their sincerity, then and now.

However, even if they were completely sincere, and Trump was actually going to be better for Palestine but with the same level of destruction for everyone else, should that issue override all others?  Someone who won't even acknowledge nuance is not a good source of wisdom and ethics. That would be true even if they were completely sincere.

That's why I worry about pundits capitalizing on this anger and building loyal followings. Once you decide someone is on your side it is easy to start making excuses for things that shouldn't be excused. If they do disappoint you the fall will hurt much more.

You are better off not having heroes, but accepting people as human with good and bad points. 

There are signs, but if you just post things that make you feel strong emotions, it is easy to miss those signs. 

If someone sounds a lot like the fascists -- so with an authoritarian bent, but about the issues you like -- that is still a bad sign. 

They tend to be racist and sexist, probably ableist and maybe transphobic. It's not that they say it that way, but somehow they are really good at discounting the voices of marginalized people. They maintain the marginalization.

Did I mention that Ryan Grim had this whole thing about how Kamala Harris is so bad at public speaking and must be anxious or maybe drugged came up in the thread, because she referenced a scripture that got hearty "amen"s at Essence Fest?

This goes along with many of the potential action items -- thinking about what you want to share, giving credit to others -- living in a state of constant anger can change your personality and cloud your judgment. Think about it.

It may not matter so much whom you are reading if you are critically engaging with the content.

However, if you want to get a better idea on the people who are more likely to be destructive in this manner, a good keyword search might be "ratfucker".

Related posts:

https://sporkful.blogspot.com/2025/02/check-in-with-yourself.html 

Information gathering

Since the inauguration, I have heard multiple concerns about how to keep up and whom to trust. I will also often be asked about a specific news source and whether they are reliable.

There is no one answer for that. 

There are sources that print some good things and some bad things, where in this case "good" and "bad" conveys a mix of accuracy, importance, and usefulness. 

Sometimes the bad things are more clearly editorial in nature where they at least aren't going to lie, but what if they are posting accurate information but leaving crucially important things unreported? 

The first thing to note is that this is an exhausting situation. Don't think that there is something wrong with you if you are finding it untenable.

The next thing becomes finding what works for you. Different people have different needs.

A lot of people love Heather Cox Richardson, a historian at Boston College who has started publishing a newsletter on the health of American democracy. In addition to being up-to-date on the current situation, she uses her knowledge of history to provide context, allowing for a deeper understanding.

https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/ 

I personally find her posts too long, but part of that is because so much of it is familiar. Some of that is probably a bit of an attention deficit on my part.

If she works for you, embrace that. If not, don't fret.

I will also note that Timothy Snyder has a substack. He is especially solid on Ukraine, Nazis, and Soviets:

https://substack.com/@snyder

Something new that interests me is Musk Watch, introduced today by Judd Legum. It is specifically focusing on what DOGE is reporting and the reality.:

https://www.muskwatch.com/p/introducing-the-musk-watch-doge-tracker  

So far it seems to be focusing on the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the claims, not whether or not any savings would be worth the proposed cuts. That's important information, but not everything. You are not going to find a single source for everything.

Good at being succinct while still backing up her claims is Rachel Maddow at MSNBC.

https://www.rachelmaddow.com/

We love https://ourparks.org/altnps. 

Honestly, we are not at a great point in time for US news. Be open to seeing what organizations based in other countries say. 

https://www.aljazeera.com/

I have previously been pretty happy with The Guardian UK, but I have this vague sense that they are slipping. I am still not outright dismissing their work, but I am not quite comfortable recommending it.

I would say don't listen to Russia Today, but it would allow you to notice how aligned Trump and Musk are with the Kremlin, which seems important. 

I am probably going to have to be changing my methods soon, as a lot of my sources are leaving Twitter.  

There are things that I will look at as I evaluate different stories.

• Are the sources credible? Are there named sources? Are the sources in a position to know?
• Are any other outlets carrying the story? If not, why not?
• Are they showing bias based on the phrasing or images used? Is there an agenda showing?
• Does it contain any obviously false or misleading information?
• Does the headline match the story? 

Often the headline is done by the paper; if you see a crummy headline on a good article, that is not enough of a reason to discount it. However, if you notice one news source keeps using rage-baiting headlines that don't accurately reflect the content, that may be a good reason to avoid that source, if for no other reason than to lower your blood pressure. 

Also, remember that under white supremacy, perspective varies greatly based on your privilege. Make sure that you are hearing from people more marginalized than you.

Habits: Good, bad, and indifferent

As promised, I posted my first letter yesterday.

It was to Amazon. At this point I am only going to post them on Facebook, but if you have questions or want to see any, that can be arranged.

In writing it and drafting the one to Google, I was struck by the power of habit.

I haven't thought of Amazon as a particularly ethical company ever, but I didn't stop using them until Bezos kept the Washington Post from endorsing Harris.

Google used to be great, but their search result quality had been going downhill for a while. 

I found that frustrating, but I didn't actually stop using them until they starting displaying the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

I have actually started doing my searches in a different browser because changing the Firefox automation was more effort than using Microsoft Edge for Bing searches and Firefox for everything else.

Yes, Microsoft is not a great company, and I am sure there is a way I could change the settings and keep doing everything in Firefox. In fact, I am going to try checking out some other search engines to see if anything works better. I know what a good search engine was like, and it was great.

The point is that we easily keep doing the same thing, choosing the path of least resistance, even when we might be happier changing.

Breaking those habits takes conscious effort.

I mention that because I have been meaning to write about things that are going to be harder asks. The potential action items in February were not that disruptive.

One of the things was going to be about reconsidering your 401K, like maybe contributing less to it. Today there is buzz about the stock market crash sinking the value; should I have written that one earlier?

If people were going to read it and decide to cash out their 401K, they may wish they had done that sooner.

There are also reasons for people to not trust my financial expertise, but I might still have some points.

I am going to write things that will sound pretty non-conformist. They can lead to actions, but I am not sure that I will even put potential action items in them. You should draw your own conclusions.

The topics covered are going to be more complex, so any application is going to be very personal. 

However -- before making any decisions, including writing the whole post off -- it's a good idea to think about why you are doing something the way you do it, and whether that makes sense for you. 

February songs

It's really all Mel and Tim's fault.

Sometimes after I go through a round of listening, a song that I had not consciously noticed will start coming back to me. In this case, it was their "Backfield in Motion", a football-themed song.

I knew that with the attacks on diversity, it would really be the wrong month to stop celebrating Black history. I knew I wanted to make it last 30 days instead of only 28. I just didn't have a theme.

"Backfield in Motion" coming back to me sent my thoughts in two directions. 

The first was that after going over all of these years of hits, it might not be bad to go back through. I was only choosing ten out of a hundred, and there were always songs that I liked but did not use.

Also, I could have a football-themed song of the day on Super Bowl Sunday.

I decided to focus on Black artists, which was not a problem. It took a little longer to decide on the other parameters.

In January I had just gotten to 1966, working backwards from 1979 (after having worked forward from 1980 through 1999). I decided to look forward, reviewing old ground. That could start from 1967, where I had just been.

It still had to fit within thirty days.

Although I can imagine a really great review of lesser-known R&B from the 80s and 90s, I ended up decided that I would just go forward for ten years, using three songs per year. Unfortunately, that pushed me past 1969 ("Backfield In Motion's year) by Super Bowl Sunday if I was going in order. 

I wanted to go in order. I ended up giving 1968 an extra song and cutting a song from 1971, which I was okay with.

One kind of fun thing about that is it allowed me to fit in both the 1968 (Hugh Masekela) and 1969 (The Friends of Distinction) "Grazing in the Grass".

As I was working on the list, I saw an article about the first television theme song to hit number 1, 1974's "TSOP (The Sound of  Philadelphia)" from Soul Train. I had just happened to place it on the list. I know I would have listened to it before, but I did not know it's significance.

There are some other interesting things going along with it that are more a part of the overall experience, where it may make more sense to write about them later.

For now, the great thing is that there are so many cool and interesting and good and cheesy and emotional and every other type of song out there. 

It's worth finding more.

Daily songs:

1/31 “Soul Man” by Sam & Dave (1967)
2/1 “Sweet Soul Music” by Arthur Conley (1967)
2/2 “Gimme Little Sign” by Brenton Wood (1967)
2/3 “Slip Away” by Clarence Carter (1968)
2/4 “Dance to the Music” by Sly & The Family Stone (1968)
2/5 “Hold Me Tight” by Johnny Nash (1968)
2/6 “Grazing in the Grass” by Hugh Masekela (1968)
2/7 “Grazing in the Grass” by The Friends of Distinction (1969)
2/8 “What Does It Take (To Win Your Love)” by Jr. Walker & The All Stars (1969)
2/9 “Backfield in Motion” by Mel & Tim (1969)
2/10 “Band of Gold” by Freda Payne (1970)
2/11 “Everybody is a Star” by Sly & The Family Stone (1970)
2/12 “Ball Of Confusion (That’s What The World Is Today)” by The Temptations (1970)
2/13 “Want Ads” by Honey Cone (1971)
2/14 “Smiling Faces” by The Undisputed Truth (1971)
2/15 “Lean On Me” by Bill Withers (1972)
2/16 “Oh Girl” by The Chi-Lites (1972)
2/17 “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right” by Luther Ingram (1972)
2/18 “Love Train” by The O’Jays (1973)
2/19 “Stir It Up” by Johnny Nash (1973)
2/20 “Drift Away” by Dobie Gray (1973)
2/21 “TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)” by MFSB featuring The Three Degrees (1974)
2/22 “Until You Come Back to Me (That’s What I’m Gonna Do)” by Aretha Franklin (1974)
2/23 “Show and Tell” by Al Wilson (1974)
2/24 “Fire” by Ohio Players (1975)
2/25 “Walking In Rhythm” by The Blackbyrds (1975)
2/26 “Express” by B.T. Express (1975)
2/27 “Something He Can Feel” by Aretha Franklin (1976)
2/28 “Give Up The Funk (Tear The Roof Off The Sucker) by Parliament (1976)
3/1 “Walk Away From Love” by David Ruffin (1976)