February 25

 Good morning, all. Clear skies at the moment but it is a very early morning. And I have already been busy with small tasks. I am about to get my second cup of coffee and putting dishes in the sink to soak for a bit before I wash them. No we don't have a non-human dishwasher. In fact, after years of having one that never seemed to work well and finally ignoring it for a couple of years, we asked the landlord to take it out and put in a cabinet to expand our limited storage. Hey, only two of us elderly women here. We don't use enough dishes to make a non-human dishwasher useful. I generally fill the sink once and use that water all day. Sometimes I skip a day because there are so few dishes to wash. I remember laughing when I saw ads for the new lines of machines that supposedly use so much less water and energy because they wouldn't actually save us anything. Like so much technology which over promises and underdeliver in our situation.

I love little stories like this one from Joyce Vance. Some knitters are making a different kind of "red hat" to counter the MAGA red hat. It is based on the Norwegian red hat protest against the Nazi occupation during WWII. The Nazis were so afraid of any show of resistance they outlawed the red "elf" cap Norwegians often wore that often appeared on the characters in Christmas stories and cards. The Norwegians found ways around the ban to still express their displeasure. That is the latest in a long history of people, usually women, finding ways to express their opposition to what ever repressive force they faced. I saw a series on George Washington's spy net work which included a woman who hung her quilts on the clothes line which signaled British movements and plans. During the decades before the Civil War slave women made quilts which were actually maps to safe houses along the underground railroad. During WWII the U.S. government banned the mailing of knitting patterns because they could be used to pass coded messages as one of the Allied operatives did in occupied France. For years after the US repressed any demonstration of defiance after the annexation of Hawaii and removal of their queen. What they didn't realize was the defiance was expressed in the symbols Hawaiian filters incorporated into their quilts. And of course, the pink pussy hats. Where there is a will there is always a way.

Corbin Trent at AMERICA'S UNDOING recounts a history which is all to familiar to me. Parts of my family have lived it also and I can see it any time I might go through Gary, Indiana (which I go out of my way to avoid). Gary's population history followed the same one Trent described in Detroit. And the causes were much the same: industry moved out, wealthy white residents moved out and taxes dried up. No new jobs moved in. Trent warms the tech workers that they are on the same trajectory and AI will accelerate that change. And the costs for maintaining a "middle class" life style keep going up.