Sunday, April 29, 2018

listener's Sweetie is 63 today!


21 comments:

  1. Happy HAPPY, Wil! N minny mo!

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  2. I figure that the natural human lifespan being 125 years, Sweetie has officially reached middle age; it's a good start!

    Alan

    P.S.: For reference, here are articles from the Chicago Tribune[Click] and the https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/29/world/a-120-year-lease-on-life-outlasts-apartment-heir.html>New York Times[Click] on Jeanne Calmet!

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    1. I've just calculated: I need to see three more US presidents to tie Ms. Calmet's record. Assuming we get Trump out of office in 2020, it looks doable.

      And BTW, happy birthday, youngster!

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  3. Yesterday I managed, thanks to the Internet and genealogy websites (notably including the free LDS website familysearch.org), to track my paternal grandfather from my father’s birth in 1911 to his (the grandfather’s) passing, then his son, who did not have any male offspring. Then I worked backwards and discovered that my grandfather had three brothers, and that was the end of that work for the day. It considerably increases the chances of there being another living male in a male line of descent from my great grandfather, who might be willing to (or have already had) a DNA profile done. That would be the finishing and absolutely definitive end to a search that has gone on for about a century. There were multiple missing and confused documents along the way, but it is hardly conceivable that the story I have winkled out could be mistaken. There was a scandal, my father’s parents separated, both moved out of state, and my grandmother invented a fictional father to satisfy her son’s questions. My father ached all his life for never being able to contact his father; he confused him with another man who had lived with (or married? It isn’t clear) his mother and promised to write when he left. In later years he discovered the man HAD written, but his mother had destroyed the letters.

    Alan

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    1. Goodness! Sounds like quite a detective story!

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    2. It is. Today a cousin I correspond with discovered a photo of my paternal grandmother (I think it is the first I have ever seen) with her sister, about 18 or 19 years old and probably married. Rooting around on ancestry.com I discovered my father's birth certificate, which his mother affirmed under oath did not exist. I also hear that there was a divorce and custody dispute, which means there are public records of that somewhere. Sooooo...somehow on my family tree at Ancestry.com I should indicate that while married to her husband, my grandmother had a child by her brother-in-law, and later created a fictitious father for her son (in an official Delayed Notice of Birth filed with the state). I suppose that people accustomed to dealing with the genealogy of royals would have lots of practice with that sort of thing, but not I. ARRRRRGH!!

      --Alan

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    3. While chatting with a technical rep for Family Tree Maker (the genealogy software Ancestry.com uses), it occurred to me that they must be set up to handle polygamous marriages; and if so it should handle polyandrous marriages the same way. And so it does. One can list as many spouses as desired, and annotate them (e.g. husband, father of son, fictitious father of son). Easy-peasy.

      Alan

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    4. It is not a problem I ever anticipated. Believe me.

      Alan

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  4. Friday evening, the categories were announced for the upcoming (May, 2018) 31 Day Song Challenge.* By this afternoon, my list was complete. Would have finished last night, only I couldn't remember the title of one of the songs I wanted, which made looking for it just a tad difficult. Fortunately, it came to me. Also, I rethought entries for a couple of categories. But now I'm all set. Usually, I'm still fiddling with the list well into the challenge month. *shrug* Guess these were easy categories or something.

    If anyone's interested, I could post the category list here, with or without my selections. Since this is a closed group, surely it wouldn't do any harm.

    *In a Facebook group

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  5. Snippet gleaned from The Hill's FB page:

    Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Sunday that he is "still a Republican," despite rumors that he may mount a presidential bid as an independent, saying: "I didn't leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left me." (emphasis added)

    Ain't it the truth? I should imagine a good many ordinary, sensible, more or less moderate folks feel much the same.

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    1. Yeah, take it from an Ohioan though. He is NOT moderate. He's signed law after law restricting women's right to choose their own healthcare. And, like Pence, he "just can't understand" why *everybody* is not a Christian. He doesn't rave and throw his arms around, but moderate? No.

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    2. But that's sort of my point. If someone like that, someone you and I would consider far right, feels that the Republican Party has shifted so far as to have "left him," that gives a pretty vivid picture of how extremely (dare I say insanely?) far the party has gone.

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    3. It seems that the GOP nowadays occupies what we called during my callow youth "the lunatic fringe." And the official Democratic Party has pursued the GOP, occupying those parts of the political spectrum that the GOP has abandoned.

      Alan

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    4. Sounds about right.

      In a perhaps not unrelated note, I see the DNC continues to undermine candidates supported by DFA, the PCCC and Brand New Congress. Discouraging, that, if unsurprising.

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    5. As we were saying...
      From the inbox:

      Dear Brothers and Sisters,

      Since announcing that I’m running as an independent, we have received a groundswell of support both in my district and from around the country.

      We didn’t have to wait long for vindication. In the past week, the Democratic Party establishment has again shown its true colors. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed a civil lawsuit pushing its Russian conspiracy theories while ignoring the issues that truly matter; and Rep. Steny Hoyer, the number 2 Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives, got caught trying to push a Progressive out of a Democratic congressional primary.

      First, we learned that the DNC filed a civil lawsuit against the Trump campaign, Wikileaks, and Russia – all but guaranteeing the party, MSNBC and the rest of the liberal corporate media will continue to put all its chips on one wager – while all but ignoring the issues that truly matter to most Americans. This total fixation on Russia has conveniently allowed the party to avoid any real post-mortem.

      The DNC’s explanation for everything is Russia. Yet, the party was losing elections well before any allegations of hacks or leaks. The 2010 and 2014 midterms fiascos – while Debbie Wasserman Schultz was DNC chair – were part of an enormous Democratic meltdown, losing nearly a thousand legislative seats across the country. The party is now in its weakest position in the House, Senate, state legislatures, and governorships since 1920 – some 98 years ago. Donald Trump provides the painful exclamation point!

      Our campaign remains hyper-focused on the issues that actually matter to most Americans. Please donate to our campaign now, we are independent of party hierarchies and independent of corporate influence. Our agenda addresses the ongoing depression in jobs, income and savings, an ongoing crisis for most Americans; standing for a green and solar New Deal with public works and national civilian service programs; reforming our terrible health care system with a universal single payer system; rebuilding our infrastructure, especially our public schools K-12, providing pre-K and day care; providing tuition-free higher education; ending the drug war and mass incarceration; and protecting our environment.

      For the Democratic establishment, the Russian “conspiracy” has become the largest part of the party’s entire message. Yet, they won’t discuss real solutions to real or imagined hacking threats to our election system. If a foreign or domestic power can hack into our voter lists and electronic voting machines, then the one real solution is to have 100 percent paper ballots counted by hand in public by the American people and reported immediately on election night at the local precinct level — much as it was done in this country for two hundred years.

      While the DNC is fixaded on Russia, it ignores actual evidence of its own conspiracy to get Donald Trump the Republican nomination. As revealed by the DNC leaks, the party conspired with its liberal media allies to promote three “pied piper” Republican candidates — Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson. Trump got billions of dollars in free media coverage, dwarfing any damage the Russians could have ever done. And Bernie Sanders, even subject to a mainstream media blackout, still would have won, and probably in the biggest Democratic landslide in generations.

      [Continued below]

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    6. Rather than take any responsibility for its own failed grand strategy, the Democratic leadership throws the blame onto Wikileaks and Julian Assange for doing what the New York Times did by publishing the Pentagon Papers.

      The DNC also still ignores other evidence of rigged Democratic primaries. For instance, it’s been months since the New York City Board of Elections admitted to illegally purging more than 200,000 citizens from its voting rolls in the hours before New York’s 2016 Democratic presidential primary. But apparently, there’s no need for an investigation of these actual, rather than imagined violations of people’s most sacred right to vote.

      Likewise, the Democratic party hierarchy -- from the DNC to the Broward County Democratic Party -- refused to call for any investigation into the illegal destruction of all the paper ballots in our 2016 Democratic primary against Debbie Wasserman Schultz – even after we released footage from the videotaped deposition of the Broward Supervisor of Elections, and Wasserman Schultz ally, admitting she illegally destroyed the ballots in violation of federal law.

      When it became all too apparent that the Broward Democratic machine can more easily rig a closed primary than an open general election, I decided to run as an independent and be on the ballot in November. It’s disturbing that so many in the Democratic Party and corporate media establishments have no problem with the destruction of ballots when it’s Democrats doing it to Democrats. Their hypocrisy would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

      Our campaign has walked the walk on election integrity. We brought a lawsuit against election officials and pushed it forward when no one else would. We stand clearly for 100% paper ballots for transparent and verifiable elections. But we need your help. Please donate to our campaign so we can respond to corruption with integrity in action.

      Finally, there’s the news of Steny Hoyer pressuring Levi Tillemann, the progressive grassroots candidate, to quit his campaign – all to clear the field for a corporate lawyer with corporate funding. Unfortunately, this is what the Democratic establishment does all the time as step one in fixing elections. The past Florida Democratic Party chairman tried to convince me to drop my challenge against his friend Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The party routinely gets behind corrupt incumbents who avoid debates, showers them with corporate money, and excludes progressive challengers. These establishment Democrats fear democracy within their own party.

      But we are undeterred. We led the way two years ago in demanding reform within the Democratic Party by challenging Debbie Wasserman Schultz when she was at the height of her power as DNC chair. Today, progressive candidates are stepping up to challenge corporate-funded incumbents across the country. We support those efforts both within and outside the Democratic Party!

      Thank you for standing with me to demand a new kind of politics for our country.

      In solidarity,
      Tim Canova

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  6. Oh! And also, Happy Birthday, Will!

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