(no subject)

[shadowkat]

1. Beautiful day. Felt like spring, finally. In the 70s, clear blue skies, and soft breeze. Trees in bloom. Sprigs of soft yellowish green, white, pink, purple, and red flowers.

Had a lovely brunch with U and her boyfriend at a place in Brooklyn Heights. Was considering seeing the movie Batman vs. Superman afterwards, but chose to pick up food instead. Besides no time.

Me: Was considering Batman vs. Superman, but it's far too pretty a day to sit in a movie theater-
U: Why? Why would you want to see that movie? Why do that to yourself?
Me: Well, yes, it would most likely give me a headache.
U: It's had horrible reviews. As much as I love Caville, he's horrible as Superman...
Me: True. (We'd seen Man of Steel together and despised it.)

My mother asked me the same question on the phone.

Methinks I'll watch it on demand or HBO or something instead.

Proud of myself for nixes the Gluten-free Buckwheat pancakes with maple syrup and whipped butter and blueberries, and opting for the healthier burger and lettuce instead. I'm on a no grains, sugar, dairy, soy, potatoes, chocolate...diet for the foreseeable future. It gets easier every day. Just have to deal with it, with a sense of humor.

2. Once Upon a Time

This show at times feels like I'm watching cross-over slash fanfic for children's stories. This week's episode focused on, of all things, a romance between Red Riding Hood and Dorothy (yes, that Dorothy from OZ). Darn, I was shipping Red Riding Hood aka Ruby and Mulan. Although admittedly she had better chemistry with Dorothy. The Wicked Witch puts Dorothy under a sleeping kiss and Ruby aka Red Riding Hood, kisses her and she wakes.

So...so far, we have the following cross-over romances:

The Evil Queen from Snow White/ Robin Hood
Captain Hook/Emma Swan (daughter of Snow White/Charming)
Belle/Rumplestilskin
Wicked Witch/Hades
Red Riding Hood/Dorothy...

3.Haunting rendition of the Simon and Garfunkle Song - "The Sounds of Silence"

Watch on YouTube

Also, oddly apropos...for what is happening at the moment in NYC and other urban areas...

4. Interesting New Yorker article on how Northern Europe views Bernie Sanders views. He gets his ideas from Northern Europe of the 70s and 80s, but even Northern Europe has drifted away from those policies towards a more pragmatic system. (Also, Northern Europe doesn't have the same cultural, economic, and government that the US does. This is important. There is a huge difference between a centralized parliamentary/constitutional monarchy and a joint federal constitutional republic with three balanced branches of government plus individualized and separate state governments. Trying to pull the socialist policies of Northern Europe, which didn't entirely work for Northern Europe into a country that is governed like the US is...

Bernie Sanders has been campaigning in New York, where he grew up, but in a real sense his gaze remains focussed on Northern Europe. In his effort to make American society fairer, he has looked, throughout his run for the Presidency, at countries whose welfare states were built by Europe’s Social Democratic parties. But there’s an underlying oddity: while Sanders’s calls for a redistribution of wealth and for state intervention—in health care, education, the financial system—echo what the Social Democrats of Europe were up to in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, his views often clash with the policies of those parties today. “What Sanders is saying has not been said in Europe for decades,” Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist at the University of Georgia, whose specialty is European political movements, said.

In the Netherlands, for example, where I lived for seven years, and where the existing system was largely shaped by Social Democrats of old, a steely pragmatism now rules. Since 2012, the Social Democrats have been part of the governing coalition, under the conservative Freedom and Democracy Party; because the Social Democrats are in government, “they are heavily influenced by the role they play on the European stage,” according to Chris Kijne, a prominent Dutch journalist. That means taking stands that might have been anathema to their predecessors. “They’re involved in the austerity plan and budget control,” Kijne said. “Leaders of the Party also engineered bank bailouts.” As far back as 1995, Wim Kok, then the leader of the Dutch Social Democrats, described “the shaking off of ideological feathers” as “a liberating experience.”

Throughout Europe, Social Democrats have long since shifted from the kind of stalwart ideology that Sanders now pushes toward what Germans called the Neue Mitte (New Center) and those in other countries referred to as the Third Way. Some on the left look at the shift as a straight-up sellout to capitalism. Others describe it as a realization, driven home by electoral defeats, that things like free tuition and free health care have costs that eventually need to be paid. What most struck me about living in the Netherlands as its welfare-state model evolved was its sophisticated mixing of public and private. While Americans tend to think of European systems as involving vast government-run social-service programs, health care in the Netherlands has been, since 2006, mostly in the hands of private insurance companies. But the government has a prominent role: it is responsible for covering long-term conditions, and has oversight of both insurers and individuals. As Kijne notes, “the system has been privatized with the tacit approval of the Social Democrats.”

The pragmatic approach of the Dutch Social Democrats was brought home to me a few years ago, in a conversation with Carolien Gehrels, a member of the Party who was a deputy mayor of Amsterdam at the time. She had just returned to the Netherlands from a tour of American cities, and she expressed amazement at how weak city government was in the U.S. Her main point was not that government ought to run all or most aspects of municipal life but that it had to be strong enough to be an effective mediator between nongovernmental entities, such as developers and large landowners. Stripped of much of their power, she felt, American cities were being eaten alive by corporations.

The prevailing pragmatism of Europe’s Social Democrats brings many of them into alignment with, of all people, Sanders’s opponent, Hillary Clinton—and makes Sanders seem, to some on the Continent, like a throwback. One Dutch politician told me that Sanders reminds him of Michael Foot, the head of the British Labour Party in the early eighties, a socialist at heart who struggled against Margaret Thatcher, and who wanted to bring back government control of industry and enhance the power of labor unions. Karin Pettersson, the political editor-in-chief of the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, told me that Social Democrats there are split between Sanders and Clinton. The U.S. Presidential race, she said, “has become a proxy for the internal debate between ideological purity and pragmatism.”

This has been the impression that I've been getting from my European flist...which is that the US has gone insane. They aren't sure what to make of us between Sanders and Trump...who both appear to be throwbacks to an earlier time.