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• Post #4321068

  And, apparently, Canada is still on fire. I don't think I've read anything about all that since the US president played his Tariffs card to try to block the wildfire smoke at the border. Also, since France and Spain started burning.

• Post #4321067

  "The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded than the shouting of a ruler among fools." Ecclesiastes 9.17

• Post #4321066

  "We don’t know what’s going to happen – so live beautifully regardless." Why? Because... "I think we are in a liminal moment: we know the present set-up can’t hold, but we don’t know what’s going to come next. We are basically at the top of this very sharp bell curve, just in the moments before it tips down the other side. Everything that has been going up and up and up – population, wealth, the price of oil – are about to dip." --- Sarah Wilson interview i...

• Post #4321065

  Several neighborhood guys hanging out just down from our house this morning. Acting suspiciously. Probably up to something. (Odocoileus virginianus) #NaturePhotography #White-tailedDeer

• Post #4321064

  Don't know that I ever heard of Ceuta before yesterday. But, wow, for that many people to cross the border that quickly with "nothing but the shirt on their back" -- and, judging from the news photos, often not even that! -- that is really something. Hard to imagine how the situation can be managed justly. #migration #Ceuta #Spain #Morocco

• Post #4321063

  Enter the silence. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/01/opinion/happiness-silent-retreat.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2FA.R3CI.Vm9q96y7ECbz&smid=url-share

• Post #3892415

  Roger Summit, who invented an early online search service, named "Dialog" has died at age 95. You remember Dialog, don't you? You'd have a research question. So you'd go talk to the librarian who has been trained on how to formulate efficient search queries. (You need them to be efficient because you paid by the search. Or was it by the number of hits you got?) The librarian would do all the Boolean operator magic and check the punctuation, then press "Enter." A...

• Post #2993492

  Robert Reich in the Guardian on 1. why Trump and his appointees are a REGIME and not an administration; 2. how Trump should not be referred to as the President; 3. why Trump and his regime’s disregard for law is so monumental that it negates what we have come to understand as a “government of laws”. And that a better word for it is LAWLESS; and 4. that the test of the success at the job is how much better off are the American people and how much stronger is our democracy. And by these measur...

• Post #2993491

  Did I miss something? I'm reading "The Colour of Magic" wherein Twoflower shows up in Ankh Morpork unable to speak the local language, but can converse with Rincewind in another tongue. Then, suddenly, Twoflower can converse with anyone in the story. When did he learn to speak the (apparently) common tongue? #Discworld #Pratchett

• Post #2993490

  Really uneven wear on the soles of my shoes. Am I walking that unevenly? Do I look goofy when I'm walking?

• Post #2993489

  David French opinion piece in the NY Times: "It turns out that there really is a difference between a military led by James Mattis and a military led by Pete Hegseth. One is among our most militarily astute and politically deft battlefield commanders; the other is a former Fox News host who possesses limited military experience and seems to think that defeating wokeness (whatever that means) is a principal part of his job. "But his bench presses are genuinely impressive. I’ll...

• Post #2993488

  I'll tell you what. It's hard these days to read the biblical Book of Proverbs without thinking a lot about national politics. Maybe it's always been that way, I don't know. #Politics #uspol #Bible #Proverbs

• Post #2993487

  Wash Post reports: "Pentagon recruiting troops to watch White House UFC fights, memos show "Internal messages reviewed by The Post stipulate that military personnel must pay their own way and meet strict physical requirements to be eligible." So ... What would the "strict physical requirements" be to watch a fight? Well, "Officials are seeking junior enlisted personnel and junior officers specifically, according to internal messages that mak...

• Post #2514353

  I wonder how many Russians are calling it (under their breath, certainly!) something like "Victory [Just Not in Ukraine By Any Stretch of the Imagination] Day" #Ukraine #Russia #War

• Post #2514352

  Oatmeal is heart-healthy, right? #oatmeal #cardiovascularhealth #beer

• Post #2514351

  News headline: Reflecting Pool Repairs to Cost $13.1 Million. Trump Had Promised $1.8 Million. Nagging question: has Mr Trump ever once announced a number that was later verified to be at all close to correct? Or does he just make up numbers for everything at the spur of the moment?

• Post #2514350

  NPR: "President Donald Trump's plan to put weapons in space — pitched as a "Golden Dome for America" missile defense program — is estimated to cost $1.2 trillion over a 20-year period, according to a new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office, a far heftier sum than the initial $175 billion price tag he gave last year." YET ANOTHER "bait and switch" by the current lame duck president. Has he EVER announced a number -- a cost,...

• Post #2514349

  Washington Post: "The Senate took a key step Wednesday to withhold members’ pay during government shutdowns, a move that some lawmakers hope will give their colleagues fresh incentive to avoid them. .... "Senators voted 99-0 to advance the resolution, introduced by Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana). Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska) did not vote. The Senate still must take several more votes to pass the resolution unless lawmakers agree to speed up the process, but the un...

• Post #2302707

  Caturday Book Club #caturday #bookclub

• Post #1924236

  "What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows!" Merton, Thomas. "Rain and the Rhinoceros." (1959) in Selected Essays. Edited with an introduction by Patrick F. O'Connell. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2013...

• Post #1924235

  What if the cure for the 'epidemic of loneliness' was solitude? "There is a certain real loneliness if you say yes and all your old friends are saying no. So be prepared when your old groups, friendships, and even churches no longer fully speak to you the way they used to. But I promise you that those confusing feelings are far outdistanced by a new ability to be alone--and to be happy alone. One of the great surprises at this point is that you find that the cure for yo...

• Post #1924234

  Rose-breasted Grosbeak at the backyard feeder just now. Always a lovely bird!

• Post #1924231

  Richard M. Ransohoff, writing in the Washington Post: "Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health recently put out a guide for non-scientists who want to read research publications. I’m glad the school did that, if only because laypeople who say they are “doing their own research” often are actually relying on other laypeople trying to interpret the research. If you truly want to make your own judgments, the best way is to read the research yourself. That requires inv...

• Post #1924230

  Gasoline prices sky high at the same time US domestic oil production is also sky high. What gives?? "If a country produces more oil than anyone else in the world, shouldn’t fuel be cheap? Yet Americans frequently face high gas prices at the pump, even during periods of record domestic production. The explanation lies not in a single cause, but in a complex mix of engineering constraints, global market dynamics, and structural mismatches within the U.S. energy system, compounded by Dona...

• Post #1356720

  "When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: and consequently it is held together by a violent and abusive authority. But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate." (Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1958. (pbk ed 1999), Preface, p. xii)