Victor Hugo
Dayle in Limoux – Day #8
July 12, 2022
Si Français.
Annie leaves for the U.S. tomorrow at 3 am through Toulouse, Amsterdam, Salt Lake City, and then Sun Valley. Magical she was here in France the same time as her maman.
ℒℴved.
Serendipity. Synchronicity. Symmetry. The Universe’s most special gifts to me. Merci merci merci. I will miss you, Annie Glenn.
Another gift from the Universe today, although captured eons ago, we get to gaze upon her magnificence now.
NASA wrote:
Better together. International collaboration gave us the most powerful space telescope ever made, and the deepest infrared views of the universe ever seen. With our partners, together we #UnfoldTheUniverse.
From VOX:
“Think about that: In every pinprick of sky, there are thousands and thousands of galaxies, at least.”
And then, the Universe gives again. The moon in Limoux.
La lune. She’s almost full. And the swallows murmur.
Readying for Bastille Day! As called in France, ‘Fête nationale française,’ and legally le 14 juillet.’ THURSDAY! I should be able to view fireworks from my balcony. Going to immerse myself in the splendor of love for country. It’s been awhile.
“An enormous fortress of prejudices, privileges, superstitions, lies, exactions, abuses, violences, iniquities, and darkness still stands erect in this world, with its towers of hatred. It must be cast down. This monstrous mass must be made to crumble. To conquer at Austerlitz is grand; to take the Bastille is immense.”
―
Collecting maps now. :) The Tour is getting closer to Limoux. Too many dropping because of COVID. Mask up. BA.5 is real…and here. Viva Le Tour!
À bientôt.
❀
Vaccines, Variants, Vacations
April 13, 2021
Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is my heart — Victor Hugo
Response Ability | Vaccines, Variants, Vacations — and what do I think about the new J&J issue.
by, Jordan L. Shlain MD
Welcome to Dispatch #18, which falls on the anniversary of my New York volunteer effort at a hastily-built FEMA tent on the cold sidewalk outside of Columbia’s Washington Heights Emergency Room where I was asked to triage who was sick enough to be admitted to the overflowing ER and who should go home. All I had was a cheap, disposable plastic stethoscope, a pulse oximeter, a blood pressure cuff, a thermometer, and an iPad that had live translators. I had no ability to do a COVID test — at the time they were reserved for healthcare workers in the other tent. The whole episode was eerie. I’ve added some video clips and photos at the end if you’re interested.
It’s April and we’re now vaccinating a few million people per day. This is great! Full stop. It was only 5 months ago we were in the global doghouse — and now we’re back. The US is on track to have all adults immunized by summer. While there is much to be grateful for, we can’t turn a blind eye to the access disparity and the greater issues that it represents. If you want to read the details of the vaccine section, know this: get any of the three vaccines being offered in the US — they all prevent severe disease and death. On J&J — what you need to know is the risk of dying from COVID (Covid has already killed 1,712 out of every million Americans) is much greater than the risk of a blood clot (6 in 6,800,000 or 1.13 out of every million Americans). This is real, yet it must be taken in context-see Vaccine section.
Lots of new questions and answers as we trundle through what I hope is the penultimate act of this pandemic. We are seeing rising cases in certain states with a dark cloud of variants obscuring a clear path to herd immunity. Kids are now the major focus of a vaccination effort — and if we want their buy in, politicians and public health professionals need to get on TikTok or Snap! Most Gen Zs want to wait and see what happens.
Cases are starting to rise in the US and there is a real possibility of a fourth wave, albeit not as gnarly as our summer wave, but real enough to strain the healthcare system — and with a younger demographic.
I’m more optimistic about the US than I have been in a long time, but we’re not there yet. We likey have a few more months of mask-wearing for those vaccinated in the U.S. The rest of the world will likely not be vaccinated for years — and this is a problem. The United States has a unique opportunity to show our magnanimity and help less fortunate countries get vaccinated. If we want to be the leaders of the free world, we have to act like it. Generosity is the most powerful form of influence.
OK — let’s get to it.
https://tincture.io/response-ability-vaccines-variants-vacations-dispatch-18-387e1a413b8f
Radical social change.
February 21, 2021
Radical Tea Towel
The Manouchian Group
by Pete Morgan
77 years ago today, Missak Manouchian and twenty-one comrades were shot at Fort Mont-Valérien, on the outskirts of Paris.
‘Missak was an intellectual and a radical. He read his way through the libraries of the Latin Quarter, and developed a real talent for poetry, as well as translating Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud into Armenian, all while working to survive and organizing for revolution!
He was a trade unionist in the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), and in 1934 he joined the French Communist Party (CPF) – a popular home for interwar radicals, from Sartre to Camus.
Under constant threat of arrest, torture, and execution, these anti-fascist heroes were the cutting edge of the Resistance to Nazism and its French collaborators.
77 years ago today, Missak Manouchian and twenty-one comrades were shot at Fort Mont-Valérien, on the outskirts of Paris.
After the executions, the Nazis circulated a propaganda poster in France denouncing the Manouchian fighters as an “army of crime” and emphasizing their foreignness and Jewishness. It was a desperate attempt to turn the French people against their own liberating forces.
As a measure of its ineffectiveness, many of these posters – which showed photos of all the executed Manouchian group members – were graffitied with “MORTS POUR LA FRANCE”.’
They died for France.
Author Victor Hugo may have lived a century before Missak but he too used his position to fight for radical social change in France.
Joy within me.
May 1, 2018
Joy has come to live with me. How can I be sad?
I do so love Thy presence, which is joy within me.
-Ernest Holmes
Be like the bird
That, pausing in her flight
Awhile on boughs too slight,
Feels them give way
Beneath her and yet sings,
Knowing that she had wings.
-Victor Hugo
Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your
grasp, but which if you will sit down quiet, may alight upon you.
-Nathanial Hawthorne
Joy is the realization of the truth of one-ness, the oneness of our soul with
the Supreme love.
-Ravindranath Tagore
Happy May. Happy new birth. Happy love.