...with some here. It's not about you, really.

We don't know what they know until they print it, or pontificate on tv, but we do know that journalists from the Washington Post, New York Times, MSNBC, and CNN have all been hard at work ferreting out the corruption and pulling the threads to get to important stories. Rachel Maddow has commented that all the best work of bringing the story into daylight for the public to look at is being done by journalists. She feels it is the best of the First Amendment.

In all this mess many DUers have been speculating that Melania's disappearance has solely to do with vanity (nips and tucks) and they feel we all have a right to know the details. Has anyone checked the National Enquirer?

Personally, the longer this goes on the more I think of Martha Mitchell, and it's not a happy thought.

Each in her own way has given a lifetime to social justice and the Democratic Party. They are firey women -- but tiny, and now older.

They were egregiously disrespected by the young white males filling the ranks of the Sanders campaign. Bullied, physically intimidated, shouted down.

Our Revolution and Sanders need to recognize what's wrong with this picture before they gain the respect of Democrats.

...threw our Rx meds in a basket, woke my husband again, insisted he come outside and look at the sky for gods' sake, so he shuffled slowly down the hall, after which he grabbed the big binder with all our financials in it, and we took our two old cars and headed out of the canyon.

Other than that, the clothes on our backs. The quick action and their sequence were reflexive after a lifetime of mental preparation.

We are very fortunate on many counts: first, I was awake. The wind was up, the dog and I were both edgy, and the last thing I read on FB before the lights went out was a post from a friend in Santa Paula saying there was a fire there. I went down the hall in the dark and woke my husband to tell him that -- he said no worries, it's 10 miles away. Less than an hour later it was practically in our backyard. Our new home has double paned windows -- I did not hear a damned thing when the cops drove up and down the street with their loud-hailers. Instead, in the corner of one window I saw blue and red flashing lights, went out on the front porch and hailed a passing civilian car to ask what was going on.

Second, we had someplace to go to, namely hubby's brother and wife who live only a few miles away in a flatlands tract and not in the foothills -- tho it was iffy for awhile everywhere, and the fire came right to the back door of City Hall. We stayed with them for two weeks.

Third, our neighborhood was spared, all except one house. The first night the fire passed over, and the next day when it came back from the other direction the water-dropping helicopters were able to do their job. The surrounding hills, tho, were black for months. We looked at a lot of houses last Spring, and many of them are gone.

Well, that's all for now. We all have our stories...

"Benign" in this context just means non-cancerous.

My burst appendix was not cancerous. Most people are out of the hospital in 24 hours after an appendectomy, but I was in for 5 days. I actually almost died.

People can die of "benign" brain tumors -- a college roomie of mine did; she wasn't even 30. It wasn't cancer, but it kept growing despite multiple surgeries from high school onward, and she died a lingering death.

We are not being told what the deal was with Melania's kidney, but it's serious enough that she is being kept a week (or 4 days, depending on your newscaster). Not saying that she is at death's door -- just that it was a serious matter. The "embolization" wouldn't have been for a stone (which is painful as hell, just ask my BIL), but maybe she was peeing a lot of bright red blood.

Her husband is a pig. That's not really her fault.

We don't have to like her to be humane enough to wish her a speedy recovery. Our reactions to her illness say more about us than they do about her, regardless.

...so I read it.

It took awhile for it to sink in that no matter what he only had 3 female characters -- My BIL says: "Only one woman, made of very thin cardboard," but I am willing to grant him the Maiden and Mother and Mistress. The creepy thing in retrospect is that the Maiden is always 12 years old, and he gallantly waits for her to grow up. Usually. The Mother is a wimpy dweeb who knits socks for her son going into Space Academy, or (as in FF) a toxic wreck who must be replaced. And of course there are no Crones.

Part of my discontent that had no name was explained when Schmidt wrote his Telzy Amberdon stories. Suddenly there was a girl! A self-activating, very bright and inquisitive 17-y.o. iirc. I must have been 15 or 16 when those came out. Then the author abruptly died.

So much of what I was looking for was simply not yet written.

But back to RAH, sis-boom-bah. Since I was very clear in my mind that what I was reading was fiction, I was somewhat aghast to discover there was a literal cult springing up around Stranger in a Strange Land. In college, someone told me he was going to emigrate to New Zealand with his water brothers and form a nest. I wondered what the actual residents of that country would think of that.

I read Farnham's Freehold with a straight face, whenever it was it came out. It feels like I was in high school. Satire? I saw nothing humorous in it whatsoever. I saw that he killed off the unsatisfactory daughter and her bastard child, disposed of the unsatisfactory wife, and literally castrated the unworthy son. He seemed to be of the opinion that it was all their mother's fault. I thought he was also maybe trying to hold a mirror up to contemporary racism, but it didn't exactly work for me.

I grew up with Heinlein -- and then I simply outgrew him and moved on. If I were to be assigned to write a paper on him at this point in my life (70) it would be scathing.

He was in his own way a very good writer -- there are things that have stayed with me all these years, and things that became catchwords among my sibs. The cat who is looking for The Door Into Summer is one of those. Anyone who has ever owned a cat knows about that, even if they never heard of RAH. So I picked up a copy at a used book sale a couple of years ago, and discovered that while Pete the Cat (Petronius Arbiter, in full) was much the same, the entire rest of the book had been -- you guessed it -- visited by the Suck Fairy.

Both Governor Howard Dean and President Barack Obama are out of office, in case that escaped your notice.

The events in question -- and the investigations that are bringing them to light -- were either discovered or happened after they left office.

Howard Dean was governor of Vermont, and not in a position to arrest anybody. In fact, neither Presidents nor Governors are in a position to wave their scepters and tell their private police forces to arrest and jail anyone -- this being the US and that being a separate function of government from theirs.

Donald Trump only wishes it worked that way, but so far, he is wrong.

When I was a kid I used to think living to a hundred or even 200 would be fabulous. But now I am 70, and realize that everybody gets the same number of "youth" years, and nowadays some extension of "middle age" years -- but after that, old age is what you've got.

Whether your personal old age is two decades or ten decades (as in, living to 150) what you are living with is an increasingly frail body with all its bits faling off or breaking, and a near inevitability of dementia at some point, because the brain is just another body part.

We have 7 billion people on this planet. When we have sorted out that problem, get back to me about extending life indefinitely. Then get back to me about "curing" old age.

I'm not in any hurry to shuffle off this mortal coil just yet. But there is a lesson in Greek mythology:

I met the Sibyl at Cumae, quotes TS Eliot in his epigraph to The Waste Land.

"I saw myself, with my own eyes, the Sibyl of Cumae hanging in a bottle; and when the boys asked her: "Sibyl, what do you want?" she responded: "I want to die."
Petronius, Satyricon

The god Apollo asked his faithful prophetess what gift he could give her, and she asked for eternal life. Unfortunately, she neglected to ask for eternal youth, which Apollo could not afterwards grant her, so that she shriveled and withered over the years into an insect husk of the woman she had once been, living a wretched eternity in a glass bottle.
The poet T.S. Eliot used this passage as the epigram for his great poem "The Waste Land," and indeed his work is filled with prophets living on the edge of chaos: the Sibyl of Cumae shrinking into nothingness...
http://www.deepthought.org/~efulton/sibyl.html

Both China and NK have been hacking and sending us malware for years and years. China has been graciously allowing Americans to actually pay them for this privilege by purchasing electronics from them.

Have these people been under a rock?

Oh right, if I were inclined to look up the folks most vociferously against President Obama's attempt to rein in China via the TPP, I might find a bit of an overlap.

...they are both patriarchal cultures with no social safety net for old people aside from sons. Female infanticide was always fairly common, as girl children were a drag on the family economy, needed a dowry, and moved off to their husband's homes at marriage. Given the opportunities offered by modern medicine, i.e. ultrasounds and safe abortions, selecting for sons was a given, and the current crisis was predictable.

In India, where the whole notion of manhood is deeply tied to marriage and family, millions of young men are not imagining that they are being denied that status (and the sex that goes with it). Unlike American "incels," who suffer most from palpable personality defects and focus on the denial of the sexual act, these young men have good reason for their rage at a situation created by their parents' generation's personal selfishness, although most probably cannot see it quite that way. All they see is that they and their very large cohort are being denied a basic human social need (wife and children) -- and the easiest target to lash out at is anyone female.

She was a vey foolish young woman, naively believing she could pull the same tricks with the leader of the free world that she had pulled on her college deans -- even boasting about her plans to her college friend. Naive, but not innocent. Young, but over the age of consent by quite a few years.

He was an older man at the vortex of world power, surrounded by people who had already spent years trying to destroy him and his wife. Brilliant, really brilliant, but driven by inexplicable (to me) impulses more suited to a teenage boy. She came on to him, flashing her thong at him in the office, and he was too self-indulgent to ask her to leave and tell his people to reassign her ass to the political equivalent of Siberia.

Victimhood? Oh, please. She asked. He answered.

Both of these fools -- and Hillary, who did nothing wrong -- ended up being victimized by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and Kenneth Starr.

The POTUS survived, barely. The Intern was damaged for life, by her account. Some behaviors have consequences far beyond what you would imagine -- kind of like drinking at a party and driving afterward. It was fun while it lasted, but then there was the pileup in which someone was killed and someone was crippled for life, and people end up before a judge saying they didn't mean for any of that bad stuff to happen.