Open Thread

mago
Continuing the line of thoughts from the Maduro Kidnapped post. Sorry, Ian. Got carried away and didn’t see the open thread link.

Was just over at the Ran Prieur blog. He seems to agree with me. His thoughts echo my eternal optimism, reproduced in full:

**January 2, 2026. The year that just ended was the worst year ever for the American federal government, and this video is a good summary, “What This Year Looks Like to a Historian.” I would say it like this: In 1980, the economic right wing took over America and has been ruling it ever since. Even Clinton squeezed the poor and enriched big business. Inevitably, some of the rich got so insane with power that they fell under the spell of Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt, who believed that raw power works better than the rule of law. They got their guy elected president, and with control of congress, he could have passed laws for many of his policies, but that’s not his style. He just did it through illegal executive actions that nobody stopped on the top level. But on the level of states and cities and lower courts, there were a lot of actions to slow him down, and now the biggest power trippers are on the brink of losing power, which makes them more dangerous than ever. 2026 is going to be scary, but I think whatever happens, we will be in full recovery mode by 2030.**

The video “What This Year Looks Like to a Historian” is from Heather Cox Richardson. Admittedly, she has also been described as an eternal optimist. It’s linked here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSEV5uuzbq8

Worth watching … she’s pretty bright.

I watch more political videos than is good for me, just in terms of time not spent on other things. Maybe I will cut back, maybe I won’t.

I watch quite a few made-in-Africa political videos for their re-videocasting of Black American video content. They have done the work of gathering and assembling so I don’t have to. It would be impossible to find any American Black political videos on line in any systematic indexed table-of-contents way, because the social video-media platforms are not made to allow that. They are made to prevent it and control what they show you in just such a way as to keep you watching watching watching so you will watch more ads. I endure the ads and click “skip” whenever it is presented as a choice, but I still sit there and endure the ads and see-hear the names of the businesses involved. I will claim that I have bought not a single thing because of any of those ads but I cannot prove that claim.

How about the “liberal” and “DemParty-adjacent” political videos? And even the soft-surface ( as against hard-core) lefty videos? Most of them deter and repel me just based on the titles alone. Watch ( insert target here) get destroyed by ( insert DemVideo guy her)! And so forth.

I watched a minute of Sam Seder once. It promised to be as sensorially unpleasant as trying to look at Daily Kos. So I used the slider bar to skip ahead and see if there was any sampled content of particular interest. There appeared to be 20 seconds of such. Otherwise it was just Seder’s talky head talking . . . talking . . . talking . . .

The Rachel Maddow experience can be a little more interesting on rare occasion. I can start watching and after a couple of minutes I feel like I have been huffing nitrous oxide while being very drunk. Not that I would know what that feels like . . .

I won’t be watching any more “George Conway” videos. Between Carborundum pointing out how wrong “George Conway” could be on the subject of Canadian Wheat Exports through just-where-exactly combined with Guard The Leaf’s warning that he had been sent an AI-video of “George Conway” on some subject or other, I have realized I had better just stop watching.

Header: dry land gardening without supplemental irrigation . . . (Southwest desert focused)

Website is called “Dryland Corn”. Here is copy of homepage top.
” Dryland Corn
Home Dry FarmingGardening Recipes Computing Contact About
Sustainable Production of Staple Crops in an Arid Environment Without Irrigation
https://drylandcorn.com/future-dryland-farming-experiments.php

And for the Dry Northcountry . . . .
“North Frontier Farm, Inc.”

Corn breeder Dave Christensen’s own micro-business and website, from which one can get Painted Mountain corn, Montana Morado corn, etc.
https://www.northfrontierfarms.com/

As we go deeper into the age of climate d’chaos decay.