I went to Taughannock Falls yesterday afternoon with a friend. The falls are 215 feet high, higher than Niagara Falls (but nowhere near as wide!). We're having the last of the fall weather and the trees have shed most of their leaves, but there were still some colors there yesterday. We didn't expect a lot of people there, but there were many people coming and going to the Falls - fortunately, almost all of them were masked and they generally kept socially distanced.
From the Facebook page of Yerushamayim, the Jerusalem weather site -
And the explanation from Boaz (who runs the Yerushamayim site) - translation by Rahel Jaskow
It rained in Jerusalem today - the first rain of the fall, an exciting event in Israel, where it doesn't rain all summer.
The rest of the country was dry, and the rain was not predicted by the forecasters.
Rogue cloud treats Jerusalem to first surprise shower of season
A freakishly hot summer in Jerusalem is being capped by a freak rainstorm that has swept across the city, bringing showers and joy to the capital.
The rainstorm is freakish not for the time of year — in fact it’s a bit late for the first rain of the season — but because it appears to have come out of nowhere.
Forecasts for Tuesday called for unseasonably warm weather and partially cloudy skies. The storm appears to be the result of a single large cloud that sneaked across the city.
“One cloud (the sky is clear nationwide) throws off all the models,” tweets the amateur meteorologist behind the popular Yerushamayim weather site, which crashes thanks to the storm.
“Fine, you caught me with my pants down. You don’t need to bring down the site,” he adds.
The first rain of the season is always an event in Israel, where the dry season lasts from mid-spring until early fall.
The first death of a person from Covid in Tompkins County just occurred today. The person was 95 years old. The name hasn't been released. May their memory be for a blessing for family and friends.
No man is an island,Entire of itself,Every man is a piece of the continent,A part of the main.If a clod be washed away by the sea,Europe is the less.As well as if a promontory were.As well as if a manor of thy friend'sOr of thine own were:Any man's death diminishes me,Because I am involved in mankind,And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;It tolls for thee.--- John Donne
Here in Ithaca, NY, on August 22, a beautiful Black Lives Matter mural was painted on Plain Street, at the intersection with State/Martin Luther King Street), by a whole group of people. I still haven't had a chance to look at it but I have seen photos of it. (See here for a photo series of the mural painting).
This is what the mural looked like soon after it was originally painted on the street (photo taken by a drone):
I hope there won't be any more attempts to deface it and take away the important message that Black lives do matter. This statement doesn't exclude people of other races or ethnicities, but asserts that in the United States, where Black lives have for so long not mattered, it's necessary to work against racism and for racial justice.
Articles about the vandalism and the repainting:
https://www.14850.com/100416036-vandals-mural-2010/
https://www.14850.com/100416060-mural-restored-2010/
The #ProudBoys have released a new logo/graphic. In case you had any doubts as to who’s secured the overt white supremacist vote. #PresidentialDebates2020 pic.twitter.com/Z0lEASrXc9
— Raquel Evita Saraswati (@RaquelEvita) September 30, 2020
'Stand back': to take a few steps backwards
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) September 30, 2020
'Stand by': to be or to get ready to act #Debates2020
Are the Proud Boys antisemitic?The refusal of the President of the United States to denounce white supremacists on nationwide TV when asked to do so directly, launches us into a new and very, very ominous place.
— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sifill_LDF) September 30, 2020
The phenomenal @BenjaminSales wrote this in 5 minutes! No, seriously, it's not a case of Trump inadvertently boosting a story Ben's been working on for a week! https://t.co/LL1AYYCVnJ via @jtanews
— (((Ron Kampeas))) (@kampeas) September 30, 2020
President Trump refused to categorically denounce white supremacists on Tuesday night, diverting a question about right-wing extremist violence in Charlottesville, Va., and Portland, Ore., into an attack on “left-wing” protesters.
“Are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and groups to say they need to stand down and not add to the violence and number of the cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland?” Chris Wallace, the moderator, asked the president.
“Sure. I’m willing to do that,” said Mr. Trump, quickly adding, “Almost everything I see is from the left wing. Not from the right wing.”
When Mr. Wallace pressed on, the president asked, “What do you want to call them?”
“White supremacists,” the moderator replied.
“Proud Boys, stand back and standby,” he said, apparently addressing the far-right group, then added: “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you what. Somebody has to do something about antifa and the left. This is not a right-wing problem. This is left wing.”
Mr. Trump highlighted left-wing violence when asked to condemn white supremacists, despite racist extremists’ committing more lethal attacks in recent years. Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, said days later that “when white supremacists act as terrorists, more people per incident are killed.”
When Mr. Wallace pointed out that Mr. Trump’s own F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, had said that antifa is an idea, not an organization, the president replied, “You have to be kidding.” (The director also said this month that “racially motivated violent extremism,” mostly from white supremacists, has made up a majority of domestic terrorism threats.)
More on the Proud Boys from the SPLC - https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/proud-boys.
Today is the 19th anniversary of the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. I've written about them here over the years, but my feelings this year have almost been overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disasters afflicting our country and the world now: the almost 200,000 dead of coronavirus in the US (and over 920,000 deaths worldwide), the corrupt and near-fascist Trump regime, the ongoing protests for Black Lives Matter and against white supremacy, the rise of violent right-wing gangs, increasing antisemitism and anti-Black racism, and now the apocalyptic fires in the American west (about 10% of the population of Oregon has had to flee for their lives). Seeing the photographs of the orange sky in California really shook me. (Below photos are screenshots of San Francisco from the New York Times article linked above).
— State Representative Danny McCormick (@McCormick4LA) September 2, 2020
He deleted it, but this is the screenshot.
 |
| "I am Charlie," photographed in Bochum, Germany, in early 2015. |
French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the target of a massacre by Islamist gunmen in 2015, said Tuesday it was republishing hugely controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to mark this week's start of the trial of alleged accomplices to the attack.
"We will never lie down. We will never give up," director Laurent "Riss" Sourisseau wrote in an editorial to go with the cartoons in the latest edition.
"The hatred that struck us is still there and, since 2015, it has taken the time to mutate, to change its appearance, to go unnoticed and to quietly continue its ruthless crusade," he said.
Twelve people, including some of France's most celebrated cartoonists, were killed on January 7, 2015, when brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi went on a gun rampage at the paper's offices in Paris.
The perpetrators were killed in the wake of the massacre but 14 alleged accomplices in the attacks, which also targeted a Jewish supermarket, will go on trial in Paris on Wednesday.
The latest Charlie Hebdo cover shows a dozen cartoons first published by the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten in 2005 -- and then reprinted by the French weekly in 2006, unleashing a storm of anger across the Muslim world.
In the centre of the cover is a cartoon of the prophet drawn by cartoonist Jean Cabut, known as Cabu, who lost his life in the massacre.
"All of this, just for that," the front-page headline says.The trial starts tomorrow at 8:00 am GMT. "The suspects ... are accused of providing various degrees of logistical support to the killers."
The court in Paris will sit until November 10 and, in a first for a terror trial, proceedings will be filmed for archival purposes given public interest.
National anti-terror prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard dismissed the idea that it was just "little helpers" going on trial since the three gunmen were now dead.
"It is about individuals who are involved in the logistics, the preparation of the events, who provided means of financing, operational material, weapons, a residence," he told France Info radio on Monday.
"All this is essential to the terrorist action."My blogposts on Charlie Hebdo from 2015 -
May 9, 2020
Heather Cox Richardson
If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But “Mothers’ Day”—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern society.
The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what mass death meant in the modern era. Soldiers who had marched off to war with fantasies of heroism discovered that long-range weapons turned death into tortured anonymity. Men were trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, or transformed into emaciated corpses after dysentery drained their lives away.
The women who had watched their men march off to war were haunted by its results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons. The men who did come home were scarred in body and mind.
Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.
But out of the war also came a new sense of empowerment. Women had bought bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed farms, harvested fields, worked in war industries, reared children, and nursed soldiers. When the war ended, they had every intention of continuing to participate in national affairs. But the Fourteenth Amendment, which established that African American men were citizens, did not include women. In 1869, women organized the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and the American Woman’s Suffrage Association to promote women’s right to have a say in American government.
From her home in Boston, Julia Ward Howe was a key figure in the American Woman’s Suffrage Association. She was an enormously talented writer, who had penned The Battle Hymn of the Republic in the early years of the Civil War, a hymn whose lyrics made it a point to note that Christ was “born of woman.”
Howe was drawn to women’s rights because the laws of her time meant that her children belonged to her abusive husband. If she broke free of him, she would lose any right to see her children, a fact he threw at her whenever she threatened to leave him. She was not at first a radical in the mold of reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, believing that women had a human right to equality with men. Rather, she believed strongly that women, as mothers, had a special role to perform in the world.
For Howe, the Civil War had been traumatic, but that it led to emancipation might justify its terrible bloodshed. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 was another story. She remembered:
"I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, “Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?”
Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder.” But women did not have to accept this state of affairs, she wrote. Mothers could command their sons to stop the madness.
"Arise, women! Howe commanded. Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”
Howe had her document translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish, and distributed it as widely as her extensive contacts made possible. She believed that her Women’s Peace Movement would be the next great development in human history, ending war just as the anti-slavery movement had ended human bondage. She called for a “festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines” to be held around the world on June 2 of every year, a date that would permit open-air meetings.
Howe organized international peace conferences and American states developed their own Mothers’ Day festivals. But Howe quickly gave up on her project. She realized that there was much to be done before women could come together on such a momentous scale. She turned her attention to women’s clubs “to constitute a working and united womanhood.”
As she worked to unite women, she threw herself into the struggle for women’s suffrage, understanding that in order to create a more just and peaceful society, women must take up their rightful place as equal participants in American politics.
Perhaps Anna Jarvis remembered seeing her mother participate in an original American Mothers’ Day when she decided to honor her own mother in the early twentieth century. And while we celebrate modern Mother’s Day in this momentous year of 2020, it’s worth remembering the original Mothers’ Day, and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must make their voices heard.
The forecast is at odds with remarks made Sunday evening by President Trump, who said the United States could eventually suffer as many as 100,000 deaths. At 3,000 deaths per day and rising, the national total would quickly outstrip that number if the new report is correct.
A senior White House official said the document would not change the White House planning on reopening.
White House officials have been relying on other models to make decisions on reopening, including the IHME model and a “cubic model” prepared by the Council of Economic Advisers, led by Trump adviser Kevin Hassett.
People with knowledge of the “cubic model” say it currently shows deaths dropping precipitously in May — and essentially going to zero by May 15.The IHME projection is incorrect, and has been incorrect for quite a while. They are currently projecting a total of 72,433 deaths in the US by August 4. There will most probably be 72,433 deaths by this Wednesday. I simply do not understand why they have not redone their model to come more in contact with reality.
