It is not quite the murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, but the Dems just knifed in broad daylight the last pretense Americans had that our votes are meaningful, and our elections sacred.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/04/27/bad-democracy-new-york-board-elections-removes-bernie-sanders-primary-ballot

The months-long deliberative process of choosing candidates and forging platforms and getting out the vote, and coalescing around a unifying message, is now entirely silly and moot. Really, it’s plain as day that the DNC is nothing more nor less than a private corporation, with self-selected officers that let some join and exclude others, and which exists, like most other private corporations, for the personal enrichment of the functionaries in that corporation. The DNC brand competes in the same arena of grifting Wall Street, and swindling the common folk, and loot-a-tarian Pentagon contracts, as every other corporation on Earth. Dems don’t care anymore if they get votes, or if they remain the non-opposition forever, never winning another election. They don’t care if American lives dissolve completely. They’ll still be around to draw in the desperate few who think there must be a way to change all this. Nothing will kill these parties. “What choice have we got?” Especially when we haven’t got a choice, eh?

As long as the same billionaires who write the checks to the Red Team also write the checks to the Blue Team, it really doesn’t matter which team wins, does it? Especially since it is a pre-ordained rule that the Red Team will always get the most checks, but that if the Blue Team ever gets momentarily ahead, they will still never do anything to challenge the primary dominance of the Red Team, or do anything while in power, to make laws or re-envision the country, or repair the destruction of the Red Team’s mis-governance.

The Moreton Bay Figs of Santa Monica

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ONE YEAR AGO DEPT.

Before choir practice in Santa Monica one night, I turned down La Mesa Drive, north of San Vicente, and found an accidental paradise. Apparently the story is that these trees were sold to the developer as magnolias — which are excellent street trees for SoCal. But they turned out to be these majestic ficuses, imports from Australia, outsized giants with a prodigious thirst. One of the oldest and most famous of these trees is in the courtyard of the Miramar Hotel (remember folks?) The story is that an Australian sea captain had no money to pay his tab at the rooming house, and so gave the fig to the alewife in payment. It’s possibly true — the Long Wharf at Santa Monica might indeed have attracted an Australian merchantman in the 1880s. Anyway here is the LA TImes feature on the trees. It seems as rain-forest dwellers, they want a bit of help from the homeowners to thrive in our dry climate. But if anyone can afford to nurture exotic trees it’s the Santa Monicans; and thrive these trees certainly do.

As a feat of urban arboriscaping, now 100 years old, the street is marvelous. As the article says, these trees have had to make their own microclimate to survive. Haven’t we all?