Obsidian Wings

Feinstein

by liberal japonicus

I tend to think that the transactional nature of politics, particularly in the US House and Senate, makes it a certainty that the people who end up there never seem like the person they were when they started. Reading the Guardian's obit of Feinstein underlines that. Whether it reveals their true nature or changes them is the question.

In the decades after, her steady centrism left allies at times soothed, and sometimes seething. Feminist groups celebrated her political rise, and lamented that she refused to ally herself with women’s rights groups. She supported programs to fight the Aids epidemic, but as mayor vetoed domestic partnership legislation, confusing and frustrating LGBTQ+ rights activists. She was an ardent gun control advocate; she was booed at a state Democratic party convention for supporting the death penalty.

 A thread for anything related to this.

 

A slow motion train wreck

by liberal japonicus

With Janie faithfully putting up open threads (greatly appreciated), I'll try to alternate with some more focussed posts and for this one, I'll let all of you give your predictions about the Supreme Court, using this vox article to prime the pump. Predictions and links appreciated!

Gone Fishin'

by JanieM

This little guy has been contemplating the universe, and sometimes fishing, at the Mount Vernon town beach for as long as I’ve been going there to take pictures. He moves around a bit now and then, perhaps wanting a slightly different view of the water in different seasons or weathers, or to stay in the shade on hot days. But amazingly enough, though it would be easy to carry him off, he remains as a sort of guardian spirit of the north end of tiny Minnehonk Lake.

This may be an obscure place in the grand scheme of things, but the beach is next to a busy road (relatively speaking), right on the edge of the little cluster of buildings that constitutes Mount Vernon village, next to the community center and across the road from the fire station and the post office.

Pre-covid, I sometimes went to to the community center for the regular Saturday public breakfast, and usually to the annual poetry reading in August. Mount Vernon is not my town, but I have good friends there, and all are welcome at community events.

Bigger version of the picture here.

Open thread.

 

Modern Life

by JanieM

The picture is of a section Water Street, the main street of Hallowell, Maine, on the Kennebec River just south of Augusta. (Bigger version here.)

Signs of modern life: a brew pub next to a cannabis store.

My topic is a different feature of modern life, perhaps the most characteristic of all: the mobile phone.

The first person I knew with a cell phone had one in their car, probably in the late 1990s. The first person I knew who carried a cell phone around with her used it to coordinate with her husband when their two kids had basketball games in widely separated towns. That would have been in the early oughts.

Despite earning my living as a techie of sorts, and being quite comfortable with technology, I was a relatively late adopter of the cell phone, the last of my social circle to give in and get one. That would have been in about 2004 or 2005, when my kids were off to college and I was on the road a lot.

Almost twenty years later, it’s hard to imagine life without cell phones. Sometimes, especially when reading mystery novels set in earlier times, I find myself wondering why one character or another didn’t just make a phone call…

But I still use my phone mostly as just a phone. Well, also as an alarm clock, a timer, and a camera. Okay, and sometimes to write notes to myself. But almost never as a means to get access to the internet when I’m away from home. I’m on the internet for hours every day when I’m at home, and I’d just as soon pretend it doesn’t exist when I’m out in the wider world.

So I’m out of synch with how most people use their phones these days, and in particular I’m apparently way out of date as to how secure phones are. I’ve spent a few weeks during each of the past two years in a place where there’s no phone signal, and I was surprised to find that one of the financial institutions I deal with will not send a security code via email. Digging deep into their help pages, I find that they consider email to be so much less secure than phones that they will only send a code via text or voice.

I get that email is insecure, but I didn’t realize that phones were significantly better.

Can anyone (I’m looking at you, Michael, if you have time….) offer an up to the minute assessment of the safety of phones for, especially, banking, or for that matter any other kind of financial transaction?

Or: what’s an app?