Sunday, October 30, 2022

Lula da Silva Wins Run-Off Presidential Election In Brazil

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Saturday, October 29, 2022

October 2022 - Abandoned Places

 The month of October 2022 has sped by with most of the narratives of last month shambling on, with the impending US elections - only nine short days away - aggressively perp-ing its way into the lead of our national horse race that our collective news chain subsists on launching full-throated into some explosive, fiery unknown. The war in Ukraine drags on blindly with Putin still insulting millions with life and death and promising still millions more with no heat this winter. China's Xi Jinping takes another unprecedented term for himself and had Hu Jintao ejected from their politburo seeming to promise other future autocratic movements. Unlike France in April, Italy elected far-right nationalist Giorgi Meloni to their top post late September. Meanwhile the pandemic has been ignored in the US by its forgetful many though overall cases in the US decreased in this last month. Brazil holds a crucial run-off election this weekend.

It's all so tiresome, unnecessary and insulting. Everything seems broken or in only partial, hoped-for repair, with the snide broadcasts of future destruction on every other person's lips. As if winter has already come and we have only the uncertainties of climate change to depend on instead of the dim light of some far-off spring. Dejection and apathy reign over any chance of light or hope around any corner. Elon Musk closed the deal on his Twitter acquisition yesterday. He's appointing a new board to oversee things there regarding content. No one knows what that may mean. Who knows, maybe the fascists will blow up the market tomorrow or the elections next week. Who but the innocent bystanders will notice anyway?

Any arguments or answers on how we got here have been daily erased for so long now by nearly every next random 'news story', the twists and turns of the tumult have caused 'national concerns' to normatively blur. "What does that mean?" has become a national obsession and no one has any answers. Everything just falls apart. Nothing to do but count the ways affairs have gotten more bleak. 

Still there remains things to see and talk about. So here's a few from this month. With the prevailing mood so full of uncertainty and fear, abandoned places have some allure. 



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Monday, September 12, 2022

later early September 2022

 Things are moving so fast over the last few days it seemed important once again to get some of it set down ... at least as a snapshot of several moving parts. 

... 

Advances in the last week by Ukrainian troops in the southern Donbas region of Ukraine and the quick retreat of Russian forces there give rise to much acclaim in the west. Meanwhile in now both St. Petersburg and Moscow reports of deputies and ministers in various bodies there have asked for Putin's removal. It's now Wednesday morning there and verifiable reports - in a war zone - should of course be treated with more than the usual extreme scepticism regarding sources and frames and basic veracity. 

With that caveat, an article from yesterday's Moscow Times (moscowtimes.ru) has stated that Putin has cancelled a meeting with his generals overseeing the war in Ukraine. By evening there electrical power generation and distribution has been cut in Kherkov region, the scene of the heaviest fighting in the last few days. 

________________________________________ 


In the US a video has surfaced of the former US President purportedly from May 2022 boarding a plane that includes aides delivering boxes to the plane on the runway with him in attendance and boarding. Said plane took the former President from his club at Mar-a-Lago in FL to his club in Bedminster, NJ, where most recently, in July his former wife, and mother of his most known children, Ivana Trump was buried. Calls in the press for investigations into these matters stem from the recognition this week that some of the classified materials kept by Trump and then seized last month by the FBI have to do with foreign nation's nuclear secrets. This last poses all sorts of problems for the US and the world in ways that range from bad to worse in ever increasingly bad, but yet untold ways. The worst frightening dramas of course are the ones you can't predict how they might turn out. 

Granted a Special Master to oversee the 11000 plus set of documents seized last month by the FBI, the former president is now reportedly in negotiations with the US Department of Justice over who that person might be and who will pay them to oversee the many kinds of materials stolen and then kept hidden at Mar-a-Lago by the Trump team. The lawyers representing his various cases are reportedly again having trouble finding lawyers of their own to represent themselves. 

Last Thursday, on the 8th of September, Steve Bannon turned himself in to NY prosecutors over charges of fraud, money laundering and conspiracy. He was paraded before the press in handcuffs. 

DJT himself left Florida and went to his golf club in Virginia and met with a number of men on the fairway of his golf course there, the Trump National Golf Club, outside Sterling. Although he mentioned on his own social media network that he would be travelling to DC on a 'working trip', members of the press were surprised to find him deplaning at Dulles looking dishevelled and in golf attire. This prompted some to guess he was instead coming to DC having been called out of his normal routines to appear in court or answer some legal summons. Instead he just met a bunch of associates at the golf course and they talked yet no one seemed to be carrying golf clubs. 


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