Too Much News

 We got home after an almost 2-week road trip to New Mexico, with stops at Santa Fe, Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, Taos, and Albuquerque. Highlights were seeing Georgia O’Keeffe’s home and studio in Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, where I grabbed a shot of Kitchen Dome from where she painted it numerous times.



It is in this link as My Backyard. New Mexico is an interesting state with great views, indigenous culture, non-Anglo history, and great food. We enjoyed the trip immensely.


We did keep up with current events. It was a very, very bad, awful, horrible week for Donald Trump. The January 6 Committee subpoenaed him as well as provided a chronologic recap of his involvement with the attempted coup. Trump will of course continue to lie, obfuscate, and delay but the rebuke from SCOTUS regarding his illegal possession of classified documents (a single sentence sufficed) and AG James’s motion to stop the Trump Organization from moving assets to avoid liability (to the Trump Organization II, a name not chosen wisely) added to the J6C findings seems to have him cornered. As Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) said during the Committee meeting, “Democracies are not defined by our bad days. We’re defined by how we come back from bad days. How we take accountability for that." Now DoJ and Merrick Garland have the awesome responsibility of indicting the biggest traitor since Benedict Arnold.


There was other news. Alex Jones, the hateful conspiracy theorist who profited immensely while putting the families of the Sandy Hook mass murder through hell, now faces over $1 billion in defamation charges from his first two trials – with another to go. While he, like Trump, huffs and puffs and bullies, experts doubt he will salvage his ill-gotten loot from his media empire. Schadenfreude abounds. Meanwhile, malignant miscreant Stephen Bannon will be sentenced this Friday on his conviction of two counts of contempt of Congress. At least his podcast will go away while he sits behind bars.



I need to prepare for our next Current Events session here at Montecedro. I will look at the Stoneman Douglas HS shooting and the trial of the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, and the reaction to a jury decision sentencing him to life in prison without parole instead of the expected death sentence. I personally do not believe in the death sentence but the jury’s decision prompted much angst and discussion. Hopefully, it will prompt much discussion at our session on the 25th of October. And we still have to face a war in Ukraine with a totalitarian threatening the use of nuclear weapons. I cringe for the survival of my species.

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