January 6

 Well, the D.C. soap opera continues. The House will be back in session at noon today after failing for the 11th time yesterday to elect a speaker. I wonder what more the dissidents can extract since Spineless McCarthy has given up almost every bit of power the Speaker has. Who ever gets the Speaker's gavel will be crippled.The next two years are going to be VERY interesting. It might even be very painful depending on what, if anything, actually comes out of the House and whether it gets through the Senate and passed the President.

Today is the second anniversary of the insurrectionary assault on the Capital which we watched in disbelief as it happened on TV. And then in the following days were aghast as right wing pundits and politicians gaslighted us with the notion that nothing really happened, that it was simply a peaceful demonstration hijacked by "Antifa", that the rioters were really generally orderly tourists (in a government building closed to visitors), or any other idiotic  dismissal that might get us to disbelieve our "lying" eyes. Those (choose your own epithet) empty heads are still at it. And many of the people on the Republican side of the House of the Representatives egged those rioters on.

Slate has an interesting account of the longest deadlock over a Speaker in 1856.

We got rid of our non-stick cookware because the fourth set in about 12 or 14 years started pealing. We took a step "backwards" and replaced them with stainless and cast iron. Those don't peal and, without much special handling, they are nearly as non-stick as the "modern" cookware. This little piece from Doomberg, which isn't the full article because the rest is behind a pay wall, actually shows exactly what is the primary fault of "capitalism." At least modern Capitalism which is more of a religion masquerading as an economic theory. When profit is the ONLY measure of value companies will sacrifice the health, safety, and welfare of people to continue making profits. That happened with lead in gasoline, with air and water pollution resulting from production, with ozone depleting refrigerants, with DDT, and any number of other things I could cite. And sometimes the companies making the products are aligned with the customers who want/need their products.