I should explain

Hello Everyone. As everyone knows my blog means a lot to me, I have used blogging the friends it brought me as a help against all the bad memories I have in my life. But for the last three weeks I couldn’t really do the blog and today at nearly 1 pm, after being at the computer since 3:30 am, I am just now starting to get to the comments I love.

I went to bed yesterday after a grand meal of a steak and large salad. Even though I did not finish all the steak but did eat the entire salad is because I just don’t eat like I use to, I now eat like an older person. But it was great and grand. But after, I went to bed about four pm.

I woke on and off until 1:30. I tried to go back to sleep but at 3 am Ron’s rescue cat tummy feed me alarm went off so I got up to feed him. At 3:30 I got to my computers. Then I went to the Male survivor site. I found I had several private messages and a bunch of replies to what I wrote before. Plus there were 20 more posts. I read them and replied to those I had something to add to the thread. Plus it is not just one person, every person is adding their thoughts and we all add our responses to them. It took me until 10 am this morning to clear it all out. Then I had to lay down and I slept for an hour and half.

When I got up, I went to the admin on my blog and checked the posts from Ali and Randy. I set them up in tabs to like, add comments to, or just read. I love that both Ail and Randy are adding their thoughts here. First it makes sure there is content when I can not get to it, and second what they both post is their ideas, their concerns, and different from what I might post. As Ron says it broadens the blog to give a far more diverse reason for people to come visit. Not to steal from the Christian or other holy books, but I looked on it and find it good. 😛😀😁😍😎

I have been feeling dragged out and tired. But I am hoping as the cold fades and I have more energy I can do better at handling both the blog and the other sites. I hate the feeling that there is simply not enough of me, and both Ron and Randy are worried about the time I am spending on the abuse site, immersed in others abuse and reliving mine. They are afraid it will cause me a relapse into depression on my own abuse. Yes it is possible I have already had bad dreams and been fighting that at night.

One guy was abducted at age 7, tortured and abused to be made a sex toy for a cult leader. Scary stuff, after a few years he was rescued, but still finds himself hitting himself if he doesn’t refer to the guy who abused him as master. He hits himself before he can stop it. Then he simply gave himself to anyone who demanded it or told him to please him. As a teen and young adult he simply lived in a house with no clothing thinking he had a boyfriend who loved him, but instead the guy would invite friends over and they used him when ever they felt like it. He got to the point that no matter what he was doing guys who were friends with his “boyfriend” simply would grab him and fuck him or tell him to drop down to suck them off. I understand the trained behavior, I was trained to it also. But most of mine stopped when the hell spawn left the house, only the adults were left to use me and occasionally the hell spawn came back or took me to their home to service them. One took me out in his semi and forced me to “please” him when he parked in a truck stop. I was an adult maybe 26 and still had not learned to tell them no. I never went out in his truck again no matter how much he tried to get me to.

The victim and I spend hours talking, writing back and forth. He wants more like a video call or phone call, but I have explained to him those things trigger me. Even now at 61 there are only two people in my life I feel comfortable / OK talking to on the phone, I still resonate with the beatings to never touch a phone as a child. I do much better on a computer or video app on the phone like FaceTime, because I don’t have to look like I am holding a phone to myself, getting open for an angry beating. But with ear buds it works also.

So right now I am tired. Again, I am going to lay down a few minutes because I can not finish this, my eyes are crossing. Yhrrn —————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Several hours later … I just got up. What happened is along with my normal medication I took a med my doctor wanted me to try that is also given to MS patients. Ron has it at a much smaller dose. He wanted me to try it with my other when my muscles hurt or spasms more than I could stand with my regular medication. I took a half one. When it kicked in, my eyes crossed and I felt so tired, needing to lay down. Once the med cleared my system after a few hours I feel fine again but I will say my pain and spasms are much better. I got so foggy I wrote the last above the line before I went to bed. I decided to leave it in.

So the day is gone by, I have not posted or replied to comments, I have not helped Ron much around the house. I plan to make a sauce tomorrow. I did not even post my meme post this week, but I have not added to it in four days until today. So I think I will hold it a few days, or at least until tomorrow afternoon.

I thank everyone for hanging on here, to listening to me, Ali, or Randy. I feel so much better since I got up, I am going to go to the blog and reply to comments that are there I have not lost yet. As always to those who posted a comment I missed, reposted it or use my email listed to get my attention to it. Know I love you. This is a minor hiccup that is going to work itself out soon. Hugs. Scottie

Peace and Justice History for 7/27:

July 27, 1919

The Coroner’s report on the riot described the events as follows: “Five days of terrible hate and passion let loose, cost the people of Chicago 38 lives (15 white and 23 colored), wounded and maimed several hundred, destroyed property of untold value, filled thousands with fear, blemished the city and left in its wake fear and apprehension for the future . . . .”
The city’s booming economy, especially jobs in the stockyards, had drawn many blacks during the Great Migration from the South, more than doubling their population in just three years. Only one policeman died in the chaos, Patrolman John Simpson, 31, an African American working out of the Wabash Avenue Station. (Read more: https://www.newhistorian.com/2015/07/29/chicago-race-riot-1919/

July 27, 1953

After three years of bloody and frustrating war leading to stalemate, the United States, the People’s Republic of China and North Korea agreed to a truce, bringing the Korean War—and America’s first experiment with the Cold War concept of “limited war”—to an end (South Korean President Syngman Rhee opposed the truce and refused to sign). U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower had taken office six months earlier, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin had died that March.

There were four million military and civilian casualties, including 16,000 from countries which were part of the U.N.-allied forces; 415,000 South and 520,000 North Koreans died.There were also an estimated 900,000 Chinese casualties. 36,516 died out of the nearly 1.8 million Americans who served in the conflict.

July 27, 1954

The democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, after receiving 65% of the vote, was overthrown by CIA-paid and -trained mercenaries. There followed a series of military dictatorships that waged a genocidal war against the indigenous Mayan Indians and against political opponents into the ’90s. Nearly 200,000 citizens died over the nearly four decades of civil war.

More about Arbenz https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKarbenz.htm

The real coup story through official U.S. documents https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB4/

July 27, 1996

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjuly.htm#july27

How Brazilian Women Challenged Slavery and Patriarchy Through Food

Hope I’m not pushing the feminism too hard. But seriously! Feminism, food, successful resistance, with food, what’s not to love? Enjoy the article.

BEATRIZ MIRANDA AND ÍRIA BORGES

LAST UPDATED JULY 24, 2024, 9:18 AM

n the quaint district of Milho Verde, it’s impossible to go without hearing about Geralda Francisca dos Santos and her biscoito de polvilho (a cassava flour and cheese puff). At 81, Dona Geralda is one of the region’s traditional cooks of quitanda, pastries typical of Brazil’s food culture, especially in the state of Minas Gerais.

Ahead of festivities like the Three Kings’ Day and the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, her daughters and granddaughters — even those living in other districts — join her in the kitchen, surrounding the termite mound, clay, and tile shard oven that Dona Geralda built. They aim to help the matriarch meet the extraordinary demand, but these gatherings always mean something else.

“When my mother and I cook around her oven, she tells me stories of Milho Verde and our family that I didn’t know about,” Silvana Aparecida Santos, 38, who learned the quitanda alchemy from a very young age by watching and listening to her mother, tells Refinery29 Somos. “When we cook quitanda together, we shorten distances between us.”

“Quitanda goes beyond the kitchen. Before the dish became a local culinary symbol, it helped fuel a resistance movement.”

BEATRIZ MIRANDA

For many women like Aparecida Santos and Dona Geralda, quitanda goes beyond the kitchen. Before the dish became a local culinary symbol, it helped fuel a resistance movement. The tradition of cooking these pastries has crossed generations of women workers (predominantly in Minas Gerais), with the food continuing to represent the means to a better living. Quitanda is the technology through which artisanal cooks build their self-esteem, identity, community belonging, financial autonomy, and female networks of mutual support.

According to scholar Juliana Bonomo, quitanda originated in the 18th century when lords sent women enslaved workers to the nearest urban centers to generate complementary income. The word “quitanda” derives from the Kimbundu language, alluding to the tray where one sells food. But back in those days, it referred, as Bonomo explains, “to everything from haberdashery items to snacks.”

PHOTO: NEREU JR.

To this day, despite industrialization, most quintandeiras use no artificial ingredients. These snacks blended local ingredients (such as coconut, corn, peanuts, and cassava) with Portuguese recipes (cakes, biscuits, and pastries) and African techniques, rites, and beliefs. “Quitanda is a multicultural food,” Bonomo adds. “Pastry would often be prepared in silence. One couldn’t hit the pan with the spoon because it would bring bad luck.”

But it’s this move from the private to the public sphere that transformed this slave lord-run business into something revolutionary.

“As these women left their lords’ houses to work on the streets, they started learning and sharing ideas about freedom with other quitandeiras and their own customers — many of them also enslaved workers,” the researcher says, pointing to Luiza Mahin, a quitandeira from Bahia State who played a pivotal role in the Revolta dos Malês (1835), the biggest uprising of enslaved workers in Brazil. Once authorities perceived them as a threat to the slavery system, the first quitandeiras faced persecution.

JULIANA BONOMO

However, quitandas ultimately emancipated many women. “By finding a way to sell quitanda, they were able to buy manumission for themselves and their relatives,” Bonomo says. The food ensured dignity for women in the 18th and 19th centuries, something that resonates in the lives of quitandeiras even today.

“The selling of quitanda helped me raise my 10 children,” says Dona Geralda, who grew up in the Ausente quilombo, a community that descends from enslaved workers who fought the system. Even though Aparecida Santos runs a bar in Milho Verde, she cites quitanda as a major source of income.

PHOTO: MARCELO RAMOS.

In the historical village of Congonhas (home to Minas Gerais’s biggest quitanda festival), Raquel Ramalho tenderly recalls her first memories with the pastries. “When I close my eyes, I can visualize my grandmother making biscoito de polvilho for us in the wood-burning stove before we went to school,” she says.

While quitanda has always been intrinsic to her identity, Ramalho’s life changed 15 years ago when she established herself as a professional quitandeira. “I used to be a housewife and felt excluded from social life. As I started working with quitanda, I started traveling to promote my work in other places, meeting new people, and conquering my own space,” she says. “It raised my self-esteem and gave me autonomy.” The 47-year-old now has a dedicated YouTube channel to share her quitanda knowledge with the world.“

“By finding a way to sell quitanda, they were able to buy manumission for themselves and their relatives.”

JULIANA BONOMO

Quitanda is also a protagonist in the life of 60-year-old Angela Resende, who wakes up every day at 4 a.m. to cook. In the last 20 years, she has spent many of her mornings preparing quitanda in the Minas Gerais city of Paracatu, where she serves customers a homemade breakfast in her yard. In spite of the hard work, Resende asserts she wouldn’t choose any other profession.

“People used to think that we were quitandeiras because we had no option because we didn’t go to university,” she says. “There used to be this prejudice.”

For Bonomo, this misunderstanding of quitandeiras stems from the patriarchal work division that prevails in society. “Professions that have historically been connected to domestic work (like cooking) are still seen as not real work,” she says, pointing out how empowering the role is. “[With her income], the quitandeira is responsible for buying her son’s school uniform, for example, or helping pay the family’s food expenses.”

PHOTO: MARCELO RAMOS.

Being a quitandeira can also be a lifeline. “When my grandfather became physically disabled, my grandmother became the breadwinner,” says Mariana Gontijo, 40, a culinary school professor born in Moema. “By selling quitanda and washing and ironing clothes, she provided for a family of seven people.”

After years of working as a lawyer, Gontijo returned to her roots. “My first source of research was my mother’s cookbook, where I reconnected to recipes that have accompanied me through my whole life,” Gontijo says. An advocate of local traditional cooking, she now runs O Tacho, a food consultancy company, and Roça Grande, a restaurant in the capital of Minas Gerais that celebrates the food of her land.

For Gontijo, quitanda is a tradition that has long represented a means of survival and emancipation for many women. Or simply put, “quitanda is an act of resistance.”

“Quitanda is an act of resistance.”

MARIANA GONTIJO

It also requires a profound knowledge of nature and themselves. “By using corn flour, banana tree leaves, and even their own arms to measure the temperature of the wood-burning stove, they ensure the food preparation is on point,” she says. “These are purely empirical and poetic techniques that shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Gontijo continues: “Before we look to international cuisine, we need to understand, respect, and value what we have here — like the quitanda culture. If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where to go.”

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/black-women-resistence-brazil-quitanda

Replying to Donald Trump Jr’s Nonsense

Let’s talk about shifting opinions on Project 2025….

Nothing more American than that

Refuse to Shut Up …

Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson’s history Substack is just a treasure of information and connections between history and current times. Here’s a copy today, because there are fine talking points in favor of the Dem candidate for US President.

July 23, 2024

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 24, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris continues her momentum toward the 2024 presidential election since President Joe Biden’s surprise announcement on Sunday that he would not accept the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.

Today more than 350 national security leaders endorsed Harris for president, noting that if elected president, “she would enter that office with more significant national security experience than the four Presidents prior to President Biden.” As vice president, she “has met with more than 150 world leaders and traveled to 21 countries,” the authors wrote, and they called out her work across the globe from her work strengthening partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region to her historic trip to Africa and her efforts to expand U.S. relationships with nations in the Caribbean and North Central America. In contrast to Harris, the letter said, “Trump is a threat to America’s national security.”

Those signing the letter included former Central Intelligence Agency director Michael Hayden, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, national security advisors Susan Rice and Thomas Donilon, former secretaries of defense Chuck Hagel and Leon Panetta, and former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

In a New York Times op-ed today, former secretary of state Clinton praised Biden for his “decision to end his campaign,” which she called “as pure an act of patriotism as I have seen in my lifetime.” She went on to say that Vice President Harris “represents a fresh start for American politics,” offering a vision of an America with its best days ahead of it and, rather than “old grievances,” “new solutions.”

Clinton noted that her own political campaigns had seen her burned in effigy, but said, “It is a trap to believe that progress is impossible” and that Americans cannot overcome sexism and racism. After all, she pointed out, voters elected Black American Barack Obama in 2008, and she herself won the popular vote in 2016. “[A]bortion bans and attacks on democracy are galvanizing women voters like never before,” Clinton wrote, and “[w]ith Ms. Harris at the top of the ticket leading the way, this movement may become an unstoppable wave.”

Today, Harris held her first campaign rally, speaking to supporters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where the Republicans held their national convention just last week. The energy from the 3000 people packed into the gym where she walked out to Beyoncé’s song “Freedom” was palpable.

She began by thanking Biden and touting his record, then turned to noting that in her past as a prosecutor, California attorney general, U.S. senator from California, and vice president, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds—predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So,” she said, “hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.” She went on to remind the audience that Trump ran a for-profit college that scammed students, was found liable for committing sexual abuse, and “was just found guilty of fraud on 34 counts.”

While Trump is relying on “billionaires and big corporations,” she said, “we are running a people-powered campaign” and “will be a people-first presidency.” The Democrats, she said, “believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by but to get ahead; a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every worker has the freedom to join a union; where every person has affordable health care, affordable childcare, and paid family leave. We believe in a future where every senior can retire with dignity.”

“[A]ll of this is to say,” she continued, “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency. Because…when our middle class is strong, America is strong.”

In contrast, she said, Trump wants to take the country backward. She warned that he and his Project 2025 will “weaken the middle class,” cutting Social Security and Medicare and giving “tax breaks to billionaires and big corporations,” while “working families foot the bill.” “They intend to end the Affordable Care Act,” she said, “and take us back…to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions…. Remember what that was like? Children with asthma, women who survived breast cancer, grandparents with diabetes. America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back. We’re not going back.”

“[O]urs is a fight for the future,” she said “And it is a fight for freedom…. Generations of Americans before us led the fight for freedom. And now…the baton is in our hands.”

Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans are still scrambling for a plan of attack against Harris. One of their first angles has been the sexism and racism Clinton predicted, calling her “a DEI hire.” House Republican leaders have told fellow lawmakers to dial back the sexist and racist attacks.

MAGA Republican representative Andy Ogles (R-TN) has taken a different angle: he introduced an impeachment resolution against Harris, while others are demanding that the House should investigate Harris and demand the Cabinet remove President Biden under the 25th Amendment. The Republican National Committee has decided to make fun of Harris’s laugh.

But concern in the Trump camp showed today when Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio shared with reporters a “confidential memorandum” trying to get ahead of polls he says will show Harris leading Trump. He said he expects to see a “Harris Honeymoon” that will end quickly.

Trump has continued to post angrily on his social media feed but is otherwise sticking close to home. His lack of visibility highlights that the Republicans are now on the receiving end of the same age and coherence concerns they had used against Biden, and there might be more attention paid to Trump’s lapses now that Biden has stepped aside. CNN’s Kate Sullivan noted today, for example, that “Trump said he’d consider Jamie Dimon for Treasury secretary, but now says he doesn’t know who said that.”

As Tim Alberta noted Sunday in The Atlantic, the Trump campaign tapped J.D. Vance in an attempt to harden the Republican base, only to find now that he cannot bring to the ticket any of the new supporters they suddenly need.

According to Harry Enten of CNN, Vance is the first vice presidential pick since 1980 who has entered the race with a negative favorability rating: in his case, –6 points. Since 2000, the usual average is +19 points. Vance won his Senate seat in 2022 by +6 points in an election Republican governor Mike DeWine won by +25 points. Vance “was the worst performing Republican candidate in 2022 up and down the ballot in the state of Ohio,” Enten said. “The J.D. Vance pick makes no sense from a statistical polling perspective.”

Sarah Longwell of The Bulwark, who specializes in focus groups, noted that swing voters groups “simply do not like” Vance. “Both his flip flopping on Trump and his extreme abortion position are what breaks through,” she wrote.

The 2024 election is not consuming all of the political oxygen, even in this astonishing week. Today, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that eight large companies must turn over information about the data they collect about consumers, product sales, and how the surveillance the companies used affected consumer prices.

“Firms that harvest Americans’ personal data can put people’s privacy at risk. Now firms could be exploiting this vast trove of personal information to charge people higher prices,” FTC chair Lina M. Khan said. “Americans deserve to know whether businesses are using detailed consumer data to deploy surveillance pricing, and the FTC’s inquiry will shed light on this shadowy ecosystem of pricing middlemen.”

The eight companies are: Mastercard, Revionics, Bloomreach, JPMorgan Chase, Task Software, PROS, Accenture, and McKinsey & Co.

In the House, Republicans have been unable to pass the appropriations bills necessary to fund the 2025 U.S. budget, laced as they are with culture-wars poison pills the extremists demand. Today House members debated the appropriations bill for the Interior Department and the Environment which, among other things, bans the use of funds “to promote or advance critical race theory” or to require Covid-19 masks or vaccine mandates.

According to the European climate service Copernicus, last Sunday was the hottest day in recorded history. The MAGA Republicans’ appropriations bill for Interior and the Environment calls for more oil drilling, fewer regulations on pollutants, no new regulations on vehicles, rejecting Biden’s climate change executive orders, and reducing the funding for the Environmental Protection Agency by 20%.

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/07/23/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-a-political-event-10/

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/politics/kfile-jd-vance-believed-donald-trump-sexual-assault-allegations-2016/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/23/politics/video/jd-vance-data-ebof-digvid-enten

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/23/gop-race-comments-harris-00170735

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/07/23/kamala-harris-foreign-policy-endorsement/

Tennessee Republican files articles of impeachment against Harris

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/republican-leaders-urge-colleagues-steer-clear-racist-sexist-112216267

Click to access 7-23-24-harris-honeymoon.pdf

Trump pollster predicts ‘Harris honeymoon’ in upcoming polls

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/07/ftc-issues-orders-eight-companies-seeking-information-surveillance-pricing

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/23/ftc-launches-probe-into-surveillance-pricing.html

https://apnews.com/article/hottest-day-climate-change-heat-wave-warming-71e3e9d1fbfdc8503ef36eabec9390bd

https://appropriations.house.gov/news/press-releases/committee-approves-fy25-interior-environment-and-related-agencies

https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/kamala-harris-biden-trump-election-07-23-24

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/trump-campaign-biden-dropping-out/679183/

SarahLongwell25/status/1815724143939084597

MacFarlaneNews/status/1815841590964892159

RNCResearch/status/1815818534200697037

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/july-23-2024?r=1pk2l&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Sec. Buttigieg makes short work of Rep. Greene

Let’s talk about Harris and constitutional requirements….

Set up for fail

The Democratic Party attacked and ate their own while the Republican Party celebrated and endorsed their convicted molester and criminal authoritarian thug candidate who is demonstrably cognitively impaired. Need any more be said. One party says reality be damned we just claim what we want and threaten those who disagree, the other party worries that they may hurt their own chances and doesn’t back their candidate out of fear. Guess who will win in a war. One party doesn’t give a shit what people think, doesn’t care one bit about reality, ignores and vilifies the press, the other party cowers and tries to please every interviewer with an agenda that won’t listen to their replies. The media was desperate for a horse race, for more media clicks and interest in their posts / shows. The democrats gave in to them. The democrats caused tRump to win. Hugs. Scottie