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Happy Earth Day, Mom!

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Earth, from 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away. Photo by Voyager 1, 14 February 1990. Dear Mom, You’ve nurtured life on you for eons. We’re late arrivals and from the way we behave toward you and each other, I rather get the feeling we’re not going to be around forever, maybe not even for much longer.  That’s okay. It’s not just that we’re “unruly children who won’t settle down”, we have been actively engaged in matricide for much of the latter half of the the twentieth century all the way up to right now.  It’s not like we haven’t known. I remember as a kid the warning signs we’d hear about on TV. I also very much remembered waking up to orange skies and burning eyes from the effluents belched into the air by the refineries along the East Texas coast. Hell, the complex near the Houston Ship Channel looked like something out of Blade Runner .  A funny thing happened, though. Much to the chagrin of the petroleum industry, the National Environmental Policy Act wa...
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What we are given to hold

Every day, my inbox, as I’m sure yours, is replete with articles, substack posts, notes about the various hells being unleashed at any given time, more now than ever. It is easy to begin to believe that light is receding at, well, lightspeed. However, a few caveats may be helpful in dispelling, if not the darkness itself, than its seeming power to render us dispirited or despairing. As I mentioned elsewhere, whenever you find yourself confronted with the questions of what good is it? What can one person do?, you can pin a reminder in your mind that it’s never about just one person. There are many doing many good things. Some in concert with one another, some individually here and there. However, it is important not to succumb to doomscrolling out of habit.  I’m not sure that I completely agree with Janus Rose’s thesis in her 2025 article You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism , that more time spent posting about injustice and the latest outrage takes time away from actually doing t...
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The Madman and the Moral Arc of the Universe: An Epistle

I just finished this email to some friends and family members. I wasn’t planning on using it for this purpose, but maybe, in this hour before we find out where we stand in relation to threats of rendering us parties - unwilling, to be sure - to genocide or not, this may prove helpful for some. ####### I know some of you are concerned, perhaps even worried, about the pronouncement of the Occupier in the White House’s words threatening to wipe out an entire country. I know some of you have children and grandchildren, and you’re no doubt wondering what kind of country, what kind of world they’re coming into. I’m not going to say everything’s going to be fine. I’m not about to assume that nothing’s going to happen. Even if the madman pulls back from the abyss, the heart of what this country was has been forever blackened.  Idiots will complain that Trump’s erratic and errant words and behaviors will harm the markets, but they overlook what those words and actions actually do. We have n...
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My No Kings March 2026 Scrapbook

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I really enjoyed the third No Kings Day this past Saturday. Saw some folks I know, heard some good speeches, and enjoyed the march. I'll only caption a couple of photos toward the end, but also note the video I'm embedding! The song is "Forged in Fire" by Crys Matthews a remarkable singer-songwriter out of Nashville whose work I heartily recommend. If you participated this past weekend, I hope your day was as enjoyable. A large part of dissent is just showing up and helping others feel less alone, and laying the foundation for greater engagement.  For what it's worth, once again Houston deployed a ton of police for a modest sized crowd and honestly, I don't see the police as "the enemy". Sure, they work for the state and I can't say I trust them, but some honestly believe they're protecting and serving; for them, I offer support. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder how quickly things would turn should habeas vanish overnight. Also, I did ge...
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Memes in the Time of Trump 2.0: No Kings 3 edition, Part 2

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Memes in the Time of Trump 2.0: No Kings 3 edition, Part 2 Part 1 here . Epstein, Epstein, Epstein!!! Don't let this die. Jeffrey did, but his legacy and Trump's is intertwined and we are in a world of pain and lies because of it. Have some memes and share accordingly. One more for the road and see you all in the streets tomorrow! If you want to go back to part 1, here's the link . Or copy and paste: https://dimensionallybarrett.blogspot.com/2026/03/memes-in-time-of-trump-20-no-kings-3.html
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Memes in the Time of Trump 2.0: No Kings 3 edition, Part 1

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I could have also called this The Kitchen Sink Edition because I'm also throwing in elements from Facebook on Bluesky and even some Stuff2Do.  No Kings happens tomorrow with over 3,000 actions planned across the U.S. I'm cautiously optimistic that this will be the largest turn-out and more people get involved afterward in their local communities and at different levels of engagement. Consequently, this is less about celebrating the specific day (though it is that), and more about seeding ideas for perspective, engagement (be it talking points or signing up to register voters or organize protests or writing letters to representatives, and so on), and spreading some ideas the results of which we may not know, but that might galvanize a change for the better in the electorate. Last outing, I attempted to organize a kind of structure for the entry and it sort of worked. This time, I'll see what happens because I did not have the files set up in any particular order or with any ...
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