Obsidian Wings

Multiple lessons from a heartwarming story

by liberal japonicus

I don't know about y'all, but I've been pounded into silence by the torrent of news, goverment shutdown, Brexit, tsunami. It is enough to turn me into a cat picture person.

However, I felt like I needed to post an end of the year post, so there was this story, about an unlikely friendship that some of you may have seen

https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/12/14/lin-wang-charles-barkley

which is also an NPR podcast that I caught later, which has recordings of the quoted telephone conversations that make the story even better

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2018/12/17/charles-barkley-lin-wang
(I love Charles Barkley's North Alabama pronunciation of 'bothering' and the twists of the English of Lin Wang's father (My dad held on to his Hawaiian pidgin till the end, so strong that every girlfriend I ever had was baffled by it on first encounter.))

An overly microscopic view below the fold.

NC-9 – An Open Thread About the Folly of Accusing Others of the Things You Do Yourself

by wj

I find myself repeatedly amazed by what is going on in North Carolina. First, as we have all noticed, the state legislature has been in a long effort to combat “voting fraud” – that is people voting who shouldn’t be. They have been undeterred by a lack of evidence that there was really a problem.

But now we discover that North Carolina (at least part of it) has a major real problem with election fraud. That is, people breaking the law to impact the results of an election. Oh yeah, and it’s the party of the folks who have been exercised about “voter fraud” which seem to have been engaging in it. Oops.

Initially, there was some concerned about the statistics around absentee voter results in one county of one Congressional district: NC-9. But as people dug deeper, they found more and more . . . oddities. For example, the number of applications for absentee ballots was substantially higher than in neighboring counties. And the percentage of ballots returned was higher. And the distribution of votes on those absentee ballots was utterly unlike that in other counties. Not only did the one candidate get enough votes to account for all of the registered Republicans, he would have had to get all of the independents and some of the Democrats besides. Hmmm.

Then, it turned out that a lot of people had been asked to give their (unsealed, and often incomplete) absentee ballots to other people to turn in. In North Carolina, its illegal to do that with unsealed ballots, and even illegal to have someone else turn the absentee ballot at all in unless they are a close relative. Then, it developed that an amazing number of the returned absentee ballots were signed (as witnesses) by the same two people. And then, a number of the folks who had been doing the collecting of those absentee ballots started talking about what instructions they had received by the person who hired them.

It gets better. The law says that mail ballots cannot be counted until the polls close. The whole point being to avoid giving anyone a look at results when there is still time to act. But in Bladen County it appears that they had been counted well ahead of time, not just hours, but possible a day or two early. And the results shared with one campaign.

The operative who hired them, one Leslie McCrae Dowless, was an ex-con, with a prior conviction for fraud. And he had, apparently, been doing this for some time. Always good to hire someone with experience, right?

The initial reaction, by the Elections Commission, was to refuse to certify the results. The losing candidate, not surprisingly, demanded a new election be called. Meanwhile the winning candidate argued that, even if there were irregularities, there weren’t enough to effect the results.

As things developed, turns out that the operative had been hired indirectly, that is by a consulting firm hired by the campaign. But now we find that the consulting firm hired him at the direction of the candidate. Oh.

And it gets better again. Turns out that, two years ago, that candidate had lost the Republican primary to someone who had hired that same operative. And with the same kind of odd results in absentee ballots. So this time, he hired the guy for his own primary campaign – and it worked!

For more, see https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-fight-over-election-fraud-in-north-carolina-could-drag-on-for-months/ and https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-been-more-than-30-years-since-the-house-reversed-an-election-outcome/

P.S. I cannot refrain from noting that the candidate is, apparently, an “evangelical pastor.” I know a lot of evangelicals, and they are uniformly good people. But it sure seems like a lot of their supposed spiritual leaders have sold their souls. Including this guy.

Tossing two foxes in the henhouse

by liberal japonicus

Don't really have a lot, so two things that crossed my desktop.
Kevin Drum offers a commonsensical view on dealing with the deaths of public figures.

(Doing the above was) considered common courtesy, and does not mean that (a) nobody is ever allowed to say anything bad about the establishment, or (b) everyone has forgotten what a bad person this was. It just means that out of respect for a grieving family, we lower the howitzers for a few days.

Seems sensible.

The second thing, which I got from other places, but will link again to Drum (because Mother Jones is trying to raise money to keep going) about Rex Tillerson's recent remarks about Trump.

Unsurprisingly, he described Trump as:

pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just says this is what I believe, and you can try to convince me otherwise, but most of the time you’re not going to do that. (emphasis Drum)

There are some other remarks floating around that I leave to the commentariat to highlight. What have y'all come across recently?

Just in time for the holidays!

by liberal japonicus

Laura mentioned that she had a new book, proceeds of which would go to fund animal rescue, so I asked her to give us some more details. I'm sure that other folks have interesting things that are hopefully coming to fruition for this holiday season, either for themselves or for others, so put them in the comments or send them to me and I'll append them to the post. Don't hide your light under a bushel!

====
“Odd, gentle, beautiful, weird… enchanting, light tale of discovery, change, and dubious redemption; all wrapped into the tale of a block party like no other.”

Alyse died and she isn’t happy about it. She finds herself stuck in a ghost town occupied by dead souls with whom she has nothing in common. Lonely and depressed, she decides to throw a neighborhood block party for her little outpost in the afterlife. In the course of her party-planning, Alyse experiences a series of revelations about herself and other people—lessons she had failed to learn while alive—which leave her happier and wiser at the end of the story.

From Booklife (Publisher's Weekly):
"Koerber weaves a slow, captivating exploration of life, death, and the place of kindness and forgiveness in the salvation of the spirit."

From a reader:
“The story is simply an odd and gentle book. I loved the characters. This is a book to read when you want to get away from the noise and anger of current events and politics. Somehow I felt lighter at the end of the book even though I would have liked it to continue on.”

From Diane Donovan of Midwest Review:

"Readers seeking an uplifting afterlife saga that offers a winning brush against life's ironies and inconsistencies, and an attention to building characters who face Limbo in different ways, will enjoy this enchanting, light tale of discovery, change, and dubious redemption; all wrapped into the tale of a block party like no other.”

Purchase of this book will help support
https://www.safehavenkennel.com/about-us.html A rescue that rehabs fearful and feral dogs
https://www.myaarf.org/ A rescue that sued a hoarder to rescue a pitbull
http://lionelslegacy.org/ A rescue that focuses on old dogs.

Darkness

by JanieM

When I was a kid I went through a phase when I wanted to be an astronomer, using the word loosely. What I probably really meant was cosmologist. Odd, then, that I went to a college without an astronomy department. But I thought I could solve the deficiency by majoring in physics and eventually concentrating on astrophysics in grad school. I took what was essentially a half-credit course in planetary astronomy freshman year and found that I had almost no interest in it at all. It was black holes and baby universes this kid wanted to understand.

Heh. I hit the wall fairly quickly, though in hindsight I think I was defeated partly by the fact that I didn’t know how to work hard when things didn’t come easy.

But really, this isn’t a memoir, it’s about how long it took me to notice that the earliest sunset and the latest sunrise don’t come at the time of the winter solstice. I have once or twice given myself a literal headache trying to picture all the motions that underlie that fact (this is related to why I didn’t enjoy the planetary astronomy class….). My daughter took an astronomy class in college and gave me a handout that explained the whole thing – but from the vantage point of looking at the sky from the surface of the earth. I kept – and keep, now and then – trying to visualize it from a vantage point outside the solar system, looking in. (Maybe this is a commentary on the impossibility of my life in general, but again…no more true confessions, at least for tonight.)

This is the time and date dot com page for Augusta, Maine, which isn't too far from where I live. If you play around a bit with the slider in the middle of the page, or scroll down to the chart, you can see that sunset came at 4:00 o’clock today. (Although that didn’t make much difference, the day was so dim and rainy already.) We have 4:00 for four more days, then five days of 3:59, and then back to 4:00. So the earliest sunset is coming right up, presumably on December 9, although with the math of planetary astronomy being what it is, who can say for sure?

Anyhow, the turning point is fast approaching when the days start to get longer at the only end I care about; being a night person, I never see the sun rise unless something very weird is going on. For those of you who care more for morning, the latest sunrise isn’t until after New Year’s Day. The latest sunset and earliest sunrise are offset from the summer solstice as well (though IIRC not in the way you’d predict from knowing what happens in December). Also, the offset is different depending on how far north or south you are, and whether you’re north or south of the Equator.

Okay, I’m giving myself another headache.

Despite the fact that we here in the north country are staring down the barrel of winter – in fact, it came early this year – I’ll be glad when the afternoons start to get longer again, however microscopically.

Holidays are coming. What’s everyone up to?

Open thread.