Cooperation: The 4 Freedoms for All Human Kind

As we might have anticipated, this episode starts with Betüs trying to tell her mortal family that she and Cilek are fairies. He has a hard time formulating and hesitates to come out with it. Cem gets impatient and is really disrespectful to his stepmother, I find. The other family members (including Firuze) can see that what Betüs wants to say must be hard for her to reveal, and they give her…

Hiroshima et Nagasaki : la construction d’une mémoire (with thanks to France Culture of French public radio transcribed online…) -“…80 ans après, le Japon commémore l’événement, ce mercredi 6 août 2025, aux côtés des représentants de plus de 120 États et régions./…80 years later, Japan commemorated the event on Wednesday, 6 August, ’25, alongside representatives from more than 120 States and…

Pothead neighbors seem to believe that even those of us who are severely allergic to it won’t notice when they smoke out the window at night and it comes in. Misbelief apparently is shared conveniently enough by landlords to stop replying to request for action on it. This is the reason that Phase Four of Project Do Better proposes the 20x20x20 Tiny Condo for every single person so that everyone…

“…the mortality rate from postpartum hemorrhage can be more than 200 times less in well-resourced countries like the United States compared to under-resourced countries…” not to mention in under served parts of even developed countries like the USA. NPR has pointed this out in more than one article on maternal deaths which could have been prevented, and especially regarding Black women who die in…

We are starting with Eda getting ready to bake a cake. She is very excited, prepares everything, puts on a chef’s hat and then … makes a fantastic cake with magic. In self-irony she pretends to wipe away sweat from her forehead. Then we see that everywhere there is a fairy, the mortals around them freeze. At Betüs’s café, at school, where Toprak and Cilek blame each other for it, at Dudu’s…

Dolores Ibárruri ¡No pasarán! / They shall not pass!” was her slogan during the Siege of Madrid. She organized and advocated for the Republic during the Guerra Civil/Spanish Civil War, and even now, still reminds us never to give up hope for our republic. Nia, of Project Do Better…

I wish I had known about that when I lived in San Diego, as I would have loved to have been able to spend some time there, especially if they permit multiple day stays. There are (or were, a couple of years ago…) many excellent free resources for learning Greek on the HAU, the Hellenic American Union, website, with short sound files and transcripts, and I think also even videos, all free, and in…

Hope from the Dead She taught you to sew On that old Singer foot pedal machine  And even to write, Stitching “I Love You” Into the cloth, and into your heart. Stirring grits, breading chicken, Snapping string beans, shucking corn, Even putting salt and pepper on Grandpa’s cream of wheat, Saving the Mini Pages for months at a time, Wrapping your Christmas present in the Funny Pages from…

I decided to keep the blurb mostly as it is, given that the story is one of an escape from slavery, which is common, but not too common as , Willow, a young enslaved woman of 17 is still a girl, but from that time period, 1885, in Virginia, is essentially considered a woman. She must escape the powerful and corrupt antagonist, a man who has held her in slavery her entire life, watching her…

From René Depestre : “Je reste ce poète en danger sous les obus du consumérisme / I remain that poet in danger under the block of consumerism” : épisode 16/11 du podcast René Depestre, éternel exilé, thanks to France Culture of France Inter, French Public Radio. He further says that “…résister à l’appauvrissement du monde et maintenir vivante la capacité d’invention humaine. / resist the…

Experiential people, apparently the majority of human beings, see primarily through the lens of experience, and such phenomenality does not lend itself to more idealistic living, it seems. My cousin once msg’d me about a Greek festival I’d commented, a bit less than happily, about, telling me that I should be glad to have had experiences other people could only dream about. Kind of ridiculous…

Thanks to NPR (and the National Archives…) for this 7/7/26 write-up about the case that said it officially, that we have a two-tiered system in the USA, one for those considered to be White, and another for those of us born free but issued from Negro or Colored parents. The Taney who issued this decision that we “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” led to great shame for his…

We start this episode with a baby crying in the morning, Dudu’s son. She grudgingly takes up the baby to feed him and complains to Taji that none of her children is a pure fairy, they are all half mortal with the inconvenient necessities. Eda is watching her mother with the baby through a mirror, which Toprak finds odd. She reproaches her mother for being jealous of her baby brother, and does she…

Seems I forgot to translate this post, sorry: famous Spanish author Arturo P-Reverte points out that there are no witnesses to the fact that women crossed the river Ebro during a crucial battle. He wrote a novel showing trained and disciplined women who were serious soldiers, rather than the loose dingbats portrayed by Aranda, apparently one of the founding members of the “Barcelona School of…

This story of escape via learning to read and write is comparable to that of Willow (from my completed 79k lgbt thriller PASSING TO FREEDOM: WILLOW AND WEEMS…) needing to learn her letters under similar pressure, not to save only the life of her beloved Anna, but also to prevent herself from also being returned to those Fancy chains… Nia

Thanks again to NPR for reminding us that ‘Gentlemen‘ founding the Jamestown colony arrived on a ship called The White Lion, in 1619, carrying slaves to the Old Dominion the year before the Mayflower landed further North, and (my library does not have this book, yet, so I don’t know if Reynolds mentions the Headright System that they used to gather in money and land grants as they gathered in…