Blog
COMMENTING: Click title or date to see options. IMAGES: Most can be enlarged with a click. TOPICS: See the archive page for categories, and use the search page.
Sometimes I hate my state: “NH’s new ID requirements send some would-be voters home to grab passports, birth certificates,” www.nhpr.org….
Joe Stieb has posted some good history recommendations to help counter Hegseth’s bizarre scrubbing of Department of Defense webpages of race, gender, sexuality, and other content verboten by Trump. https://archive.ph/zLEcs
The pictures of Putin in Kursk wearing military garb instead of the suit we’ve been seeing him in lately were interesting. It’s almost as if he were taking his cue from Zelensky. Or putting on a show of manliness for his friend in the White House.🤣🇺🇦
Too many clocks around here that need resetting after a time change, and I forgot that someone born a few decades before me might be using any one of them. Open question whether we’ll make it to her appointment on time.
Blog categories again: One overarching theme seems to be justice, although I haven’t made it explicit. Maybe it’s time to change that. Merely adding the word as a category won’t work, but perhaps I could start by reflecting on the theme and how it manifests in a number of past posts.
Tata Kepler, a Ukrainian volunteer and activist, gave a powerful address to the European Parliament on International Women’s Day. She centered it on the stories of individual women and girls she’s worked with and can’t forget. youtu.be… (13 min.) 🇺🇦
I’ve been tweaking the blog’s categories again, and not all posts are caught up with the changes. This happens with living documents like the weblog or the digital garden.
An explainer for journalists that the rest of us can benefit from: “Understanding Information Disorder” by Claire Wardle, September 22, 2020, First Draft, firstdraftnews.org….
At First Draft, we advocate using the terms that are most appropriate for the type of content — propaganda, lies, conspiracies, rumors, hoaxes, hyper-partisan content, falsehoods or manipulated media. We also prefer to use the terms disinformation, misinformation or malinformation. Collectively, we call it information disorder.
Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, July 18, 2015:
Members of the Native American Women Warriors, a Pueblo, Colorado-based association of active and retired American Indians in U.S. military service, at a Colorado Springs Native American Inter Tribal Powwow and festival in that central Colorado city.
Credit: Gates Frontiers Fund Colorado Collection within the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Further details, including names and ranks, at https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2015633463/.
Enjoyed a Ukrainian concert tonight that Jerry Heil gave in Kyiv last March. Lots of kids in the audience who knew the words, youtu.be….🎵🇺🇦
“Trump Says Recession Unfortunate but Necessary Step to Get to Depression,” The Onion, March 10, 2025, theonion.com….
Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat offers valuable, but concerning insights into the current disordered information spaces we live in: conversation with Chris York, Kyiv Independent, youtu.be….
Warm enough to eat outside today!
Ukraine has been proving the value of U.S. arms these past three years. Now Trump is using Ukraine to demonstrate the achilles heel of high-end American arms. Their effective use depends on the U.S. political system, which is proving vulnerable to malign domestic and foreign actors.
This is bad: “US to stop participating in future military exercises in Europe, Swedish media reports,” Kyiv Independent, March 8, 2025, kyivindependent.com. Talk of a pivot to Asia is all well and good, but who there will trust us?
📺 I’m in the middle of “The Eastern Gate” [Przesmyk], TV miniseries (Poland, 2025), a gripping and topical spy drama involving the Suwałki Gap. Its star, Lena Góra, is spellbinding as Ewa Oginiec.
Women and Children Working in New York City Tenement Homes, 1908
Photographs of women and their children doing piecework: Lewis Wickes Hine took these for the National Child Labor Committee in New York City in January and February 1908. See individual captions below.
[1] 122 Sullivan St. 2nd Floor rear. Leveroni family. Earn 4 cents a gross making violets. Can make 20 gross a day when children work all day. Father has work. Mrs. Leveroni; Tessie Leveroni, age 9; Stephen Leveroni, age 6; Margaret Leveroni, age 7; Josephine Cordono, age 10. These children work on Saturdays on afternoons after 3 o’clock, and evenings until 8 or 9.
[2] Mrs. Finkelstein, 127 Monroe St. Bessie (age 13), Sophie (age 7). Girls attend school. Making garters for Liberty Garter works, 413 Broadway. Mother, a widow, earns 75 cents a day by working all day until 12 at night. Bessie works until 10 P.M. Sophie until 9 P.M. They expected to work until 10 P.M. to finish the job, although they did not know when more work would come in. Witness Mrs. Hosford.
[3] Widow & boy rolling papers for cigarettes in a dirty N.Y. tenement.
[4] Late at night. Sewing tapes on gloves. The boy helps. Family of five sleep in room where the work is done.
These photos are part of the National Child Labor Committee Collection held by the Library of Congress.
The title of this cover from a prominent German news weekly borrows from a famous Ronald Reagan quote: “Axis of Evil” (Die Achse der Bösen). Only this time a Republican president is casting the United States on the side of evil. The remaining text points to the “danger of war in Europe” and asks “what Trump’s betrayal of Ukraine means for us."1 The cover also mentions a statement by Joschka Fischer in an interview: “Germany needs conscription again."2
POSTSCRIPT: See comments for connection to 1939
-
“Us” could refer to Germany, given the magazine, but note the European flag that the two bowing men are standing on—with the corpse of Ukraine laid out face down between them. If the corpse is hyperbole, the betrayal and its geopolitical consequences are very real, ↩︎
-
Fischer was a politician in the Greens who served as Germany’s popular foreign minister and vice chancellor from 1998 to 2005. ↩︎
A New Era for Women Workers, Minority Women and Lesbians. 1976 poster by a Seattle organization called Radical Women.
Via Library of Congress, Yanker Poster Collection, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016649885/.
Does Felonious Husk even think about the probable consequences of his reliance on self-dealt government contracts come the midterm elections? Do his investors and boards? Add to that the destruction of his cars' reputation, and he is poised to fail hard.