… Letters From an American… today’s letter covers debt relief for farmers, the DOJ moves to enforce antitrust laws causing seven directors of corporate boards to resign… U.S. District Court Judge David O. Carter for the Central District of California forced the release of emails Trump lawyer John Eastmen had been trying to hold back… these emails appear to confirm:a that:

Trump appears knowingly to have lied, in writing, under oath, to a court.

… and in Ukraine war news…

… Russian president Vladimir Putin declared martial law in the four regions of Ukraine he has claimed illegally to annex, undermining his argument for annexing them: the idea that their inhabitants want to join Russia. He has also given Russian regional governors emergency powers.

… the debt relief for farmers sounds as though it is needed but also timed and intended to help Democrats in the midterm elections and undermine Repbulican arguments against student loan debt relief… farmers are a Republican constituency and it seems unlikely that Republican legislators would howl over the farmer relief the way they have over student debt relief… rock and a hard place on that one…

… Maria Popova offers encouraging words from C. S. Lewis… do not procrastinate, the past is tumultuous, the present is tumultuous, and from that we can gather, the future is tumultuous… make as you feel compelled to make…

There are always plenty of rivals to our work. We are always falling in love or quarrelling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come. (C. S. Lewis via Maria Popova)

… an article on two curious works, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus by Signe Gjessing, a poem based on Whittgenstein’s Tractatus… as described in this article, Tractatus is a rather austere view of organizing the world, the basics of which were worked out in the trenches of WWI… interestingly he kept, in the same journal he was working out the Tractatus a private journal, written in code, which revealed his reactions to the actual messiness of himself and the war torn world he was deeply imbedded in… it strikes me as a valiant effort to make sense, order, out of the absolute chaos of world and self…

All that Wittgenstein sought to expunge from philosophy in the _Tractatus_ — ethics, aesthetics, the “mystical” — appears in abundance in the agonized pages of the _Personal Notebooks_.

… Signe Gjessing’s Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus strikes me as a response work that is free of the tumult of war and, consequently, able to be in awe of the beauty of an unpredictable universe, rather than needing to cope with a viciously wild and unruly one… i wish i had more time to read… i build up books on my wishlist that are far more than i can read in my available life time…

… and on the book banning, censorship front… Nora Roberts has Pitched in $25,000 to save another library at risk… citizens in some states and cities have taken to defunding the library as a tactic to force them to remove objectionable (to them) materials or displays… while book banning and censorship of content does cut both liberal and conservative ways, it is more prevalent from the conservative end of the spectrum right now… a new battlefront of the culture wars…

… and in Georgia, citizens are voting in record numbers during the first two days of early voting…

As of Wednesday morning, more than 268,000 Georgians had cast their ballots during early, in-person voting—a 75.3 percent increase from the day two totals for the 2018 midterms, and a 3.3 percent increase from those for the 2020 presidential election, according to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office. The turnout is especially impressive in light of a 2021 law aimed at restricting the right to vote in Georgia.

… there is no opinion in the article about which side might be favored in such a turnout, but my impression is that early voting favors Dems, as Republicans like to vote on election day… fingers crossed…

… David Corn on the whimpering conclusion of the Durham investigation into the “deep state Russia hoax”… spoiler alert, it was a largely legitimate investigation that had some flaws, but overall, not sinister… there were real concerns and those concerns appear to have been justified as demonstrated by a bi-partisan Senate investigation and the Mueller investigation…

Durham has not been Trump’s savior. He lost both cases that he brought to trial, and he ended up showing that Trump has been conning the American public about one of the most serious events of recent years: a foreign adversary’s attack on the United States. Acting as Barr’s henchman, Durham, though, has helped to divert attention from how Trump betrayed the United States. That has been a grand service for Dear Leader. Nevertheless, in the Danchenko case, Durham demonstrated that Trump’s claim of a hoax has itself been a hoax. That’s a far bigger story than the small-fry cases Durham prosecuted and botched.

… that Trump lied?… of course he did… and does… and always will…

… on the climate change front… protestors toss cans of tomato soup over Van Gogh’s sunflower painting (which was protected by glass, so no harm was done to any art in the making of the protest), and then glued themselves to the wall beneath the painting… the article tells us we can expect more in the weeks to come in countries around the world… art museums are the high temples of capitalism, so it makes sense as a place to call attention to the climate crisis facing the world… as long as art is not actually harmed…