Doreen Michele

Some years ago, I had an Iranian boyfriend. This post is not about my personal life. That detail is to say I knew a man well and talked with him a lot and he was likely a student protester involved in the Iranian Revolution where they kicked the US out. I'm not going to bother to look up whatever politically correct bullshit Wikipedia says about why the US went into Iran and installed a puppet government or turned existing leaders into their puppets.  This man was substantially older than me. Those political events occured when I was a child, probably ten years old or less. I neither paid attention to the news about Iran at that time nor would I likely have understood it had I done so. But somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty years ago, Iran kicked us out. And to this day the US -- the country routinely called the most powerful country in the world -- has sanctions against Iran. Our relationship to Iran is like an abusive parent continuing to fuck with the life of their abused ch...

Yeehaw, Assad has been ousted. The world might get better! Oh, wait. Donald Trump hasn't even been inaugurated and is making noises about peaceably taking over Canada . I wonder how the Canadians feel about that? Anyone up for global thermonuclear war? Or do you want to wait until America brings "freedom" to your country before you protest this shit? Planet Earth is already making moves towards a legitimate world government via regional coalitions like the European Union and ASEAN. Most likely a world government will be an emergent phenomen the grows naturally out of such coalitions. I'm pretty sure Trump tampered with all three elections he ran in. I believe he tampered more when running against women because he counted on sexism making people not question those wins by providing plausible deniability. AKA "He's a misogynist." AND "He was never legitimately elected to office." No big, I guess. This country elected a man we CONVICTED of more th...

The war in Ukraine needs to end to bring down grocery prices. That would, in fact, be hard to do. Maybe this guy could be more neutral. Please note I dislike ALL American politicians. I'm neither FOR nor AGAINST Trump. I spent the entire election joking Vote None of the Above . It looks to me like Trump tampered with this election but he also apparently tampered with the election in 2016, has more than 30 felony counts related to that and the Republican party ran him anyway as their presidential candidate AND those trials wrapped up recently or are still ongoing eight god-damned years later, so I'm not holding my breath that anyone will actually stop Trump from being president. Nor do I actually know enough about the other candidate to say with confidence she would be a better president. I mean if Trump intends to actually pursue a goal of becoming dictator of the world, which I vaguely have the impression is the goal, people in OTHER countries should be discussing how they f...

I have earlier today deleted my two accounts on the White supremacist platform formerly known as Twitter. Hi, Elon, we are not friends, FYI, just in case you or anyone else was wondering about that. Insert bullshit justification like "This is an ode to my late, great mother who grew up in Germany during WW2 and its aftermath." a la the poem that boils down to "I said nothing when they came for other groups because I wasn't one of them. By the time they came for me, there was no one left to speak." Whatever reason you want to believe: Fuck Elon Musk and the horse he rode in on.  The title of this piece is a blurb from one of those two deactivated accounts. It's the only thing I care to keep from it. I also recently removed at least a dozen blogs of mine, many of which had six or fewer posts. Some pieces got moved to eclogiselle.com, my placemaking/urban planning/community development site that has recently languished. I'm on my own. I don't have an ag...

This is a colloquial word that basically means preferences.  It's your laundry list of what you would rather  have IF you can get it and I believe it most likely comes from saying "I'd rather..." (probably with some kind of rural or regional accent) and then the S on the end means you've listed out multiple things you would rather have or multiple reasons why this specific detail matters to you. To my mind, it implies a stigmatized out group that gets insufficient respect speaking to preferences that are not merely "nice to have." They are important for reasons this individual is familiar with due in part to being a part of a stigmatized out group but they also are being realistic and know that odds are long against getting it because it will be counterintuitive to the people in power and the rules and laws they write up and still enforce. It is rooted in my father using such expressions. He grew up on a farm and was a high school drop out (in an era whe...

I just now searched for "sacrifice definition" and it pulled up an assortment of different meanings, none of which are wrong per se but none of which say what I think the word really means. The closest was this: The act of giving up something highly valued for the sake of something else considered to have a greater value or claim: Searching for "sacrifice etymology" gets me this: Latin sacrificium The word sacrifice comes from Latin sacrificium, which means "a making sacred". It is composed of the Latin words sacer, meaning "sacred" or "holy", and facere, meaning "to do" or "to make". The word sacrifice originally referred to the act of offering something to a deity as a sign of respect or appeasement. And that agrees with what I think of the word. Sacrifice is making a choice which honors and invests in something you value so much you "hold it to be sacred." If you feel like giving up something is a painfu...