Kinda.

(Probably been reading too much, but not enough comics, yet. Miss Scarlet’s Mysteries and Sherlock are helping. Enjoy.)

C’est la Vie by Jennifer Babcock for January 04, 2025

C'est la Vie Comic Strip for January 04, 2025

Any Excuse to Crank Up Muse

or no excuse at all, really, but they’re a fine accompaniment for this!

5 black holes stories to muse about

January 2, 2025 Imma Perfetto

There was no shortage of mind-bending new science about black holes this year, these are just 5 of our favourites.

Blast “Supermassive Black Hole” by English rock band Muse and enjoy!

Scientists take even crisper images of supermassive black holes

The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration made the highest resolution black hole observations ever from the surface of Earth, capturing M87* and Sagittarius A* at the centres of the Messier 87 and Milky Way galaxies.

Black hole “starving” galaxy to death

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) identified a black hole that confirmed the theory that some supermassive black holes can starve their host galaxies of the fuel needed to make new stars.

Black holes are getting caught in “traffic jams”

The complex dynamics of black holes in the centres of galaxies, including how they slow down and interact with each other, were revealed in a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Largest stellar black hole in the Milky Way discovered

The European Space Agency’s Gaia mission found a massive stellar black hole, named Gaia BH3, just 2,000 light years away in the constellation Aquila. It is 33 times the mass of our Sun, more than 50% bigger than the next biggest stellar black hole – Cygnus X-1.

First black hole triple system discovered

A black hole was discovered with two orbiting stars for the first time. One star orbits the black hole, V404 Cygni, every 6.5 days. The other orbits at a significantly greater distance and makes the same trip every 70,000 years.

Originally published by Cosmos as 5 black holes stories to muse about

Representation: People who received Presidential Citizens Medals Today

They won’t get nearly the jabber that Liz Cheney’s and Bennie Thompson’s medals are getting, and all are good people. I emboldened a bit especially pertinent to this blog.

Biden Giving Liz Cheney A Fancy Medal Today, So That’ll Make Trump’s Butt Itch by Rebecca Schoenkopf

Every 2024 Presidential Citizens Medal winner is a better human than the bastard who’s about to be president again. Read on Substack

The first time Donald Trump was president, one of the ways he absolutely beclowned the office and rendered it meaningless was who he’d pick to give the Presidential Medal of Freedom and other similar honors.

Historically, such awards went to people who had done something important. Under Trump 1.0, it was more like “Here is the presidential medal of excellence in giving me money!” It went to Miriam Adelson, AKA one of Trump’s big bucks no whammies donors. (That’s the one where he got in trouble recently for saying Adelson’s award was better than Medal of Honor winners, AKA the military’s highest honor.)

Trump gave the Medal of Freedom to Rush Limbaugh, before that guy waddled off to hell. He gave it to Devin Nunes and Jim Jordan, for excellence in doing congressional coverups for Trump or something.

We are sure Trump 2.0 will make those recipients look like American patriots.

The Presidential Citizens Medal is the award just below the Medal of Freedom, and Trump didn’t seem to give much of a shit about it during his first term. He awarded it in 2019 to a 9/11 first responder, posthumously. But that appears to be it. The award is given to someone “who has performed exemplary deeds or services for his or her country or fellow citizens,” so you can see why it might not get Trump very excited.

President Joe Biden is big on giving it, though. In 2023, he gave it to people like Capitol Police officers Michael Fanone and Aquilino Gonell, who protected Congress during the terrorist attack Trump’s supporters committed on January 6, 2021. (He awarded it posthumously to former Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died after he was assaulted by Trump supporters at the Capitol that day.) Also to Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the Georgia election workers Rudy Giuliani owes all his money to, for repeatedly lying about and defaming them.

In all, he gave it to 12 people who in various ways defended American democracy from Trump’s attacks in 2020.

Now, today, Biden is giving another set of 20 of these medals for 2024, and damn, they are just more people Donald Trump could never ever fucking be, not in a million years, not if he went to the Emerald City and grabbed the Wizard by the pussy and begged him for a soul, or for integrity, or decency, or goodness. (In this mental image Elon is in drag as Dorothy, obviously.)

Liz Cheney is getting one for her work on the House January 6 Select Committee, and all the ways she’s stood up to defend democracy the last couple years, so that’ll piss Trump the fuck off.

Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who co-chaired the January 6 Committee with Cheney, will also receive the medal.

We are sure Trump will have some sort of hallucinatory conniption about how they deleted all the evidence that TOTALLY EXONERATES him, because once Trump gets an incorrect conspiracy theory mangled up inside that big ugly head of his, he never gets free of it.

On top of those types of folks, there’s Mary Bonauto, who argued Obergefell v. Hodges, AKA the marriage equality case, before the Supreme Court. Plus Evan Wolfson, perhaps the single most important activist over the decades of that fight.

You can check out the whole list here. On top of a number of former politicians like Bill Bradley and Chris Dodd, it’s full of people with bios that read like that of Diane Carlson Evans, who “founded the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation to ensure female service members received the recognition they deserve.” Plus civil rights leaders and more women’s rights leaders, and so on and so forth.

And this posthumous award, which seems to contain a pre-emptive rebuke for the incoming Hitler wannabe administration:

Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi

In a shameful chapter in our Nation’s history, Mitsuye Endo was incarcerated alongside more than 120,000 Japanese Americans. Undaunted, she challenged the injustice and reached the Supreme Court. Her resolve allowed thousands of Japanese Americans to return home and rebuild their lives, reminding us that we are a Nation that stands for freedom for all.

The entire list is a rebuke of Trump, really. American heroes, all.

But yeah, the Liz Cheney part is the part that’s gonna stick up Trump’s ass and give him sideways bowel movements. Bet those sting REAL bad. (snip-comments on the page)

Good Morning, Scottie’s Playtime

All Roads Lead to People (First Sonnet of 2025) | Abhijit Naskar | Azad Earth Army: When The World Cries Blood

Some Poetry on New Year’s Morning

It is about war. It is a beautiful piece of work about war. Click the title to get the background.

All I can see is nothing Sahar Muradi

^{If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness.
Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence.
—Thomas Merton, from “New Seeds of Contemplation,” 1961}

^{I swear to God, mom, I am exhausted, but praise be to God in all circumstances.
—writing, translated from the Arabic, on the Al-Shifa Hospital walls, April 2024}

All I can see is nothing
Fields of

Hollow
The O that escapes

A pasture of
Mouths

An apartment building
Of locked jaws

The silent weeping
Of rocks

I hear nothing
In the bags of soft limbs sighing

Milk teeth
Sharpening a father’s heart

The cone hat on the small head
Singing to plumes

Iftar in the tents
Flapping pages off the moon

But Your name over and over
On the hospital walls

But Your name stilling
The fire that does not cease

But Your name everywhere
Everything all at once

I see nothing
From this distance

This deepest night
This longest darkness

Fumble at fajr
To loosen my gasps

I repeat Your name
Over and over

Then bow to Your wisdom
To the terror of Your liberation

O that I may not see anything
More

Copyright © 2024 by Sahar Muradi. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 31, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.