LIFE AND NEWS NOTES FROM AN ELDERLY CHILDLESS CAT LADY WORKING AWAY IN THE SUB-BASEMENT OF THE MINISTRY OF SNARK

Friday 7 March 2025

Well, after being up once at 6 AM, feeding the cats (wet and dry food) and drinking a cup of coffee, I went back to bed.  I’m up again and it’s 11 AM.  My podcasts won’t download – there’s a constant swirling thingy on my blank screen and it says “updating library.”  The problem is that it has been updating the library since yesterday.  I’ve tried everything.

I found on the internet that ‘many people have this problem” after uploading to IOS 18.  Now you tell me?  Did I have a choice?  Why would you tell me I need to upgrade to IOS 18 for my system to work effectively and not tell me that my Podcasts were not going to load?   Why the f..k would you do an update that makes Podcast libraries not load?  I’ve spent about two hours now tring every trick recommended by everybody on the internet to make it work.  Nothing. 

So, here I sit, propped up in my bed, off and on listening to Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough yelling out of the television.  Keith Olbermann thinks that MSNBC has plans to put Chris Matthews back on the air.  I  wouldn’t doubt it.  They took Matthews off the air because he claimed that he was the kind of person Bernie Sanders would have taken out into Central Park and assassinated.  Seriously.  That’d what got him kicked off.

(Note: This was during the awe inspiring movement by MSNBC to keep Bernie from winning the nomination.  I will talk about that in length at some time.  Mimi Rocha was one of the regular guests at that time who said that Bernie Sanders made her “skin crawl.”  I thought that was a particularly unprofessional and cruel comment, more unprofessional and cruel than some of the things Joy Reid said.  I wonder sometimes if these people who worked so hard to keep Bernie off the ticket now see what a disastrous pick Joe Biden was.  There would have been no Project 2025 without that four years of planning the Republicans received between Trump administrations.  One of the other disastrous effects of Biden was his selection of Garland as Attorney General.  Biden either picked Garland because he wanted somebody who wouldn’t “further polarize the country,” by prosecuting Trump or he is so stupid and naïve as to think Garland deserved to be Attorney General as a consolation prize.)

Mimi Rocha is back on MSNBC as is Matthews, as is that slick haired reporter who chaired a session at CPAC.  A “reporter’ who chaired a session at CPAC?  Would they have allowed a reporter of theirs to come back on the air after she chaired a session at the Communist Revolutionary Conference?  Or the Families and Workers Party Conference?  Or the Progressive Caucus?  I doubt it.   

Anyway, here I am.  It’s lovely outside.  The cats have mostly come back inside.  I have  the two fattest cats, the brothers we call the “Roly Pollies,” at the foot of the bed with me.  No bed in this house gets made up before the cats get up from after their mid-morning nap.  Short Change (named after a lyric in a Tom Waits song: “Short Change got rained on with his own .38, says to Mike: “She has the best blankets.  They get warm.  Who knew?  And she’ll give you one of those Seaside Picknick treats every once in a while if you stay up there with her.  It’s great.” 

We have a family of cats plus some of their relatives or some of their fellow travelers in the cat colony.  They are all former ferals.  That’s another long story I will tell at a later date.

Podcasts are essential in my world.  Every minute I am not watching the news or writing, I am listening to podcasts.  Painting, walking, washing clothes, vacuuming, cleaning up the kitchen, folding clothes, drying clothes, cleaning down cabinets, everything.  Podcasts are the best source of information since the legacy media turned into People Magazine.  A lot of the information that winds up on this blog comes from different podcasts I listen to and make notes from during the day.  If you’re interested in news, you have to listen to podcasts.

But, here I am.  My podcasts won’t load and my sinus won’t drain.  That just about sums up the day when you’re 74.  If your podcasts won’t load and your sinuses won’t drain, that’s just about you for the day. 

Back to the various solutions about how to fix the podcasts. 

Later: you aren’t going to believe this but Apple has a number you can phone and talk to a REAL PERSON, A NICE PERSON, A PERSON WHO SEEMS TO LIKE HER JOB. Wonderful.

Later:

Ukraine: Trump

• Trump plans to revoke the temporary legal status of around 240,000 Ukrainian refugees.  But, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claims this is “fake news.”

Ukraine: World: Speech before the French senate by Claude Malhuret.

• After being posted on social media, it has been viewed over hundreds of thousands of times.  These are just excerpts.  You owe it to yourself to listen to the entire speech.
• “Washington has become the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a jester high on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.”
• “This is a tragedy for the free world, but it is first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, he will impose higher tariffs on you than on his enemies and will threaten to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.
• The ‘king of the deal’ is showing what the art of the deal is on his stomach. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down in front of Putin, but Xi Jinping, seeing such a submissiveness, is probably accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan.
• Never in history has a US President capitulated to the enemy. Never has any one of them supported an aggressor against an ally … trampled on the US Constitution, issued so many illegal executive orders, dismissed judges who could have prevented him from doing so, dismissed the military senior staff in one fell swoop, weakened all checks and balances, and taken control of social media.
• This is not an illiberal drift, it is the beginning of the confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only one month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its Constitution.
• “…in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator, now we are fighting a dictator backed by a traitor.
• Eight days ago, at the very moment that Trump was rubbing Macron’s back in the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.
• Two days later, in the Oval Office, the military service shirker was giving war hero Zelensky lessons in morality and strategy before dismissing him like a groom, ordering him to bend or resign.
• Tonight, he took another step into infamy by stopping the delivery of weapons that had been promised. What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: confront it.
• And first of all, let’s not be mistaken. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic States, Georgia, Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to Yalta, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.
• What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with as its first principle the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.
• This idea is at the core of the United Nations, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the attacked, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries.
• “Give me Greenland, Panama, and Canada. You can get Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe. He can get Taiwan and the China Sea.”
• In the dinners of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago, they call this “diplomatic realism.”
• So we are now standing alone. But the idea that Putin cannot be confronted is false. Contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, Russia is in bad shape. In three years, the so-called second largest army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country three times less populated.
• Interest rates at 25 percent, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves, the demographic collapse, all show that [Russia] is on the brink of the abyss. The American helping hand to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made in a war.
• The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.
• Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that it holds out, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation.
• This will be costly. It will be necessary to end the taboo of using frozen Russian assets [and] circumvent Moscow’s accomplices within Europe itself by a coalition of only the willing countries, which includes, of course, the United Kingdom.
• Second, demand that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, prisoners and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.
• Finally—and this is the most urgent because it is what will take the most time—we must build a European defense, too-long neglected to the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and scuttled since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
• It is a Herculean task, but it is on its success or failure that the leaders of today’s democratic Europe will be judged in the history books.
• Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. This is a way to recognize that France has been right for decades in arguing for strategic autonomy.
• It remains to build it.
• It will be necessary to invest massively, strengthen the European Defense Fund outside the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate the entry into the [European] Union of Ukraine, which is today the leading European army, rethink the place and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, relaunch the anti-missile defense and satellite programs.
• The plan announced yesterday by Ursula von der Leyen is a very good starting point. And much more will be needed.
• Europe will only become a military power again by becoming an industrial power again. In a word, the Draghi report will have to be implemented. For good.
• But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.
• We must convince public opinion against war weariness and fear, and especially in the face of Putin’s cronies, the far right and the far left.
• They argued again yesterday in the National Assembly, Mr Prime Minister, before you, against European unity, against European defense.
• They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of “de Gaulle Zelensky” by a “Ukrainian Pétain” at Putin’s beck and call. The peace of the collaborators who have refused any aid to the Ukrainians for three years.
• Is this the end of the Atlantic Alliance? The risk is great.
• But in the last few days, the public humiliation of Zelensky and all the crazy decisions taken during the past month have finally made the Americans react.
• Polls are falling. Republican lawmakers are being greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News is becoming critical.
• The Trumpists are no longer in their majesty. They control the executive, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social networks.
• But in American history, the defenders of freedom have always prevailed. They are beginning to raise their heads.
• The fate of Ukraine is being played out in the trenches, but it also depends on those in the US who want to defend democracy, and here on our ability to unite Europeans, find the means for their common defense, and make Europe the power it once was in history and that it hesitates to become again.
• Our parents defeated fascism and communism at great cost.
• The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century.
• Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

Listen to this marvelous speech.  Slava Ukraini.