 The cover of the fifth of Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" novels This sorta-review can also be found, with minor differences, on Goodreads.
Dr. Diana Gabaldon's fifth novel in the Outlander series is a sprawling mess, and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. There are literally hundreds of characters with speaking parts, including a collection of settlers playing various roles toward making Fraser's Ridge livable. There are deaths and near-deaths. There are births and breastfeedings and poopy diapers. There are courtships, marriages, domestic bliss, and broken crockery. There are eccentric character moments featuring beasties wild and domestic (when the story gets slow, bring in a pig to liven things up). There are interactions with Native Americans friendly and not-so-friendly, though none as scary as in Drums of Autumn, and the main protagonist speaking the few words of Cherokee she knows. There are moments when you reach page one thousand and something, and a character last seen on page three hundred and something (or in Drums, one is never sure) reappears, and the reader says aloud, "Now who the hell is that again?" The paperback edition's length, 1400+ pages, is one of the reasons I haven't been posting on Goodreads for the last couple of months. I haven't had a lot of time to read lately, so it took a couple of months to get through this one. The other reason is that I've grown to despise Amazon, especially since the Whole Foods acquisition, and thus I try to limit my contact with anything Amazon-related. It was bothersome enough to know that my grocery shopping habits were enriching John Mackie, and then along comes Jeff Borg-zos with more money than even Mackie has ever seen, & BAM! WFM gets assimilated. End of sidebar. We now return you to your regularly scheduled review, already in progress. In case you haven't scoped out other reviews, the title does not refer directly to the Ku Klux Klan, but to the Scottish settlers in the southern colonies from whom many Klansmen descended (emphasis on descended). Back in the Scottish Highlands, lighting a big cross was a laird's signal to the neighbors and kin to prepare for battle.
And now for sports and weather combined. It has been rather interesting and a bit painful to watch baseball playoff broadcasts from Milwaukee and Boston, seeing players and coaches and spectators all bundled up. Here in H-Town, daily high temperatures have continued to hit the 90s Fahrenheit (low 30s Celsius), with no signs of any gradual descent into winter. My jackets and sweaters stay tucked away in a cedar chest.
Well, today, the first legitimate blue norther (not to be confused with Blue October) of Fall 2018 has arrived, complete with rain and brisk winds, dropping the temperature rapidly and drastically. It blew through the Dallas-Fort Worth MetroMess last night, where the US Women's National Team defeated Jamaica 6-0 and qualified for next year's Women's World Cup. The USWNT takes on already-qualified Canada for the CONCACAF Championship Wednesday night, while Jamaica battles Panama for ticket to the WWC (loser faces Argentina in a two-legged playoff for a World Cup berth). ============ Let's get this over with, eh? The following bloggage is brought to you by the Texas Progressive Alliance. TPA: Power to the People...and Stuff Like That. The McAllen Monitor caught up with Beto O'Rourke as he made his latest swing through the RGV, this trip with Rep. Joe Kennedy III, which prompted a predictably shitty joke from Ted Cruz. PDiddie at Brains and Eggs had some unsolicited advice for O'Rourke on how he should be counter-punching the Zodiac Killer. The San Antonio Express News joined the Houston Chronicle and the Dallas Morning News in endorsing Kim Olson for Agriculture Commissioner over the incumbent, Sid Miller. (PDiddie sez: "This is a low bar, considering Miller is hot garbage as both elected official and human being." dbc has seen little evidence to suggest otherwise.)
Hey Facebook and Twitter: What? The? Actual? Fuck?
This is a scary development. Perhaps it's not quite as scary as the revelations in the disappearance and possible murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi by agents of the Saudi royal family, but in some ways scarier considering the number people who have suddenly lost sources of information outside the mainstream.
I don't have a lot to say about it at this time, except that we need to be vigilant and obstreperous in responding to corporate-state censorship of alternative media sources and ideas, whichever quadrant of the political map they call home. You know that chart (and subsequent variations) that your liberal friends have been circulating on Facebook for the past two years, depicting the relative objectivity and accuracy of various information sources? The latest round of censorship has the feel of trying to confine all information into the circles and ellipses in the middle portion, claiming the right to decide which are trash and which are treasure (or at least worthwhile).
The viral chart supposedly depicting the relative partisan bias and reliability of various news sources.
For numerous reasons I won't explore here, the chart and its variants are, themselves, trash. The primary reason, however, is that the entities in the the "mainstream" and "skews" columns are loaded with pro-establishment propaganda. They made not be made entirely thereof, but they spew plenty of it, both in the form of repeating military-industrial-governmental viewpoints without a counterpoint and of "analysis" from their own hired opinionators.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than what the NYT and WaPo deem worthy of printing. Ho-hum. Kayleen and I have lost another friend, both on Facebook and in real life, due to his advanced Trump Derangement Syndrome. He wasn't a close friend, but I'll miss his humor-laden political posts and his keen insight on soccer for someone who's relatively new to the game. I wish him well in the new, improved life he is currently undertaking. His occasional post-midnight drunken rants, however, I shall not miss.
In this man's mind, all of us who voted for Jill Stein and Gary Johnson in 2016 are responsible for throwing the presidential race to the Republicans. We purposefully ignored Democrats' warnings about how a Trump presidency would alter the Supreme Court irreparably, now giving us Justice Brett "Devil's Triangle" Kavanaugh and possible lifetime appointments for more accused pussy-grabbers. When reminded that a) those votes weren't stolen from Hillary Clinton because they didn't belong to her in the first place, and b) third-party votes in Texas did not affect who won the state's 38 electoral votes, this fellow busted out some hyperbole about Stein "getting the 0.000001% of the vote that she deserved" or words to that effect, thus defeating his own argument. It's rather startling how this little episode has brought certain things into sharper focus:
More on both of these later in this post. A big Indigeous Peoples' Day shout-out to Water Protectors everywhere, particularly the Houma and others fighting the Bayou Bridge Pipeline in Louisiana. By whatever term they wish to be called—Native Americans, Indigenous, Autochthonous, First Nations, or their tribal/national membership—remember and celebrate them today. By whatever name history calls him—Colombo, Columbus, Colón—remember him for his atrocities, not his "discoveries."
Meanwhile, the Astros take a two-game advantage to Cleveland and may sweep the Indians this afternoon. FWIW, the team's choice of nickname in honor of a popular Native American player from in the late 19th century is probably a myth—or at least not entirely accurate. ============ With the deadline to register to vote in the November midterm elections tomorrow, the Texas Progressive Alliance encourages you to double-check your status if you have already registered to be certain you are ready to cast your ballot. The state's voter rolls have surged to 15.6 million Texans, surpassing the 14 million registered voters since the last midterm election (2014). More than 400,000 have signed up to vote since March, and Harris County led the way with over 55,000 of those. The state's website link to request a voter registration application (within the first link above) crashed and stayed down for several hours this past Saturday. dbcsez: We're about four weeks away from finding out whether, and to what extent, this 11-12% increase in registrations will correlate with midterm turnout numbers. ============ On to the roundup of lefty blog posts and news from around the Lone Star State from last week! The Texas Tribune collects everything you need to know about voting this autumn. Texas Standard says that the Brennan Center will be closely watching Texas again for indications of the kind of voter suppression tactics--excessively strict application of the voter id requirement, voters illegally purged from the rolls, and the like—the state has long been guilty of. Thank you, Jordan Chariton, for reminding me of what I wanted to say in Part II of this series. The main thrust of Chariton's video entitled "In Defense of Jimmy Dore" is, y'know, defending Jimmy Dore. It addresses the recent Twitter kerfuffle involving Dore, Mother Jones contributing editor Shane Bauer, and Francesca Fiorentini (newly of The Young Turks). In it, he takes pains not to take sides specifically against Sam Seder or David Pakman, both of whom he claims not to know personally; however one might argue that siding with Dore is equivalent to siding against those two (and, by extension, Bauer), if one is inclined toward such binary thinking.
Wow. I'm kinda conflicted about this, and not for the reasons you might think.
Through Arlington school board candidate Hunter Crow's post on the GPTX Facebook page, I learned this morning that apparently Jesse Ventura wants to run for president as a Green. The key word is "apparently," because it isn't self-evident that Ventura had anything to do with the creation of the website. Still, The Governing Body has recently spoken in speculative terms about a presidential run. As of now, the Jesse Ventura 2020 site is a bit rudimentary:
This Facebook page looks even less legitimate. Our Revolution Harris County informs us that the guest speaker at this Saturday's monthly meeting will be none other than Sema Hernandez, proudly socialist Democratic candidate for US Senate in 2018. She is starting the process toward challenging John Cornyn for his seat in 2020, and she embodies the maxim that democracy does stop at voting. Sema is a daughter of immigrants, oldest of 7 siblings and first American born child in her family. She grew up in a migrant working family and she understands the struggles of people who are burdened by crushing debt, job insecurity, and lack of healthcare coverage, among the other struggles of the working poor. Sema is a passionate Human Rights advocate, activist and organizer who made a historic run for U.S. Senate in the 2018 primary election. WHERE: Havens Center, 1827 W. Alabama St., 77006 (just east of The Chocolate Bar)
WHEN: 2 pm, Saturday 6 October. RSVP: click here.
This entry is kind of a sequel—or a coda, if you prefer—to last Wednesday's rambling examination of why the so-called two-party system in the United States should die. Yes like Part I, it's kinda long-winded, so buckle in and read it if you dare.
***** What a drag it is getting old: I had a pretty good angle in mind for this post, but I seem to have forgotten it. Fortunately, Eleanor Goldfield inspired me with something she said in this week's Common Censored podcast. (Oops, sorry, that should be Eleanor Fucking Goldfield.) The Context About an hour in, instead of answering an earnest question from a listener as usual, Lee Camp reads a recent comment, posted in tortured English, about how he and Goldfield criticize Clintonites, Democrats, and liberals in general but do not criticize Donald Trump as frequently or forcefully, and concluding they must be Trump fans (or at least Trump apologists). The discussion winds its way to Goldfield reminding listeners that those millions of votes in 2016 Jill Stein and Gary Johnson allegedly "stole" from Hillary Clinton were not hers to begin with, similar to the way nobody is stealing the Supreme Court nomination from Judge Brett Kavanaugh because it isn't his yet. Goldfield also invites the Clintonites to STFU about 2016 and Russiagate so they can turn their attention to the horrific policies the current administration is implementing—often with help from Democrats in Congress. Democrats, she adds, should furthermore quit kvetching about Ralph Nader "stealing" all those predestined Gore votes in 2000. Correct me if I'm deluded, but I'm told we have an election coming up. Actual Election Day is, y'know, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November (or maybe you don't know—it's surprising how many otherwise knowledgeable Americans don't); early voting for many counties in Texas begins three weeks from today, Monday 22 October.
Democracy does not begin or end with the ballot, however. The weekend before the start of early voting, there will be some real democracy going on: the Women's March on the Pentagon. Cindy Sheehan and friends will make an earnest and unarmed effort to occupy the Pentagon, or at least its parking lot. Last I knew, Green Party of Texas co-chair Joy Davis plans to be there. ============ The Texas Progressive Alliance soldiers on to November—and beyond—as one of its original members has summarily and without announcement ended his participation. (Sidenote from dbc: For years now, Chuck Kuffner's posts have been progressive only sporadically. As I've stated previously, I still find his blog valuable for his willingness to crunch electoral numbers and identify trends.) Socratic Gadfly broke down the motivations of Kavanaugh and interlocutor Jeff Flake, as the confirmation process paused for the FBI to conduct an investigation into some of the allegations against the nominee. Bonddad's thought from yesterday is that Trump is stomping all over the economic message that Republicans are trying to run on in 2018. After the second debate between Beto O'Rourke and Ted Cruz got postponed due to the machinations associated with the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, Beto scheduled a rally in Austin with Willie Nelson. And it was huuuuge. RG Ratcliffe was there and filed a report. Lupe Valdez got the best of Greg Abbott in their debate Friday evening, but RG wondered if their fundraising difference would be an insurmountable obstacle for the challenger. |
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