Testing Reality: Diesel in Indiana, Trump & Greenland, Kash Patel

I am supposed to be the demented one, right? Fighting hard not to slip back into a depression that sees the world as disgusting and worth burning down that alters my take on reality, right? Yeah, well, I have got the depression under control and still I think myself standing outside the real world looking in. It's you people who are nuts.

Diesel prices surge past $7 per gallon, squeeze Indiana farmers as harvest begins (Fox 59) 

BOONE COUNTY, Ind. — According to AAA, Indiana hit its highest recorded diesel price average ever at $6.53 per gallon on Friday. Eye-popping prices are now appearing around central Indiana, some topping more than $7 per gallon.

“To me, it doesn’t make sense to go buy a whole bunch of fuel at $7 a gallon,” said Donnie Lawson, co-owner of Lawson Land and Cattle Company. “But maybe that’s the best thing to do because it may be at $8 a gallon here in a week or two.”

Corn and soybean farmers, like Lawson in Thorntown, are making some hard decisions to still turn a healthy harvest profit.

“This is the toughest it’s ever been in agriculture,” Lawson said. “And that’s from top to bottom.”

Thousands of gallons of diesel will be needed to fuel Lawson’s combines, tractors and other agricultural equipment. Last year’s harvest season in Indiana, the diesel average was $3.78 per gallon.

US and Denmark reach security deal after Trump’s threats to take over Greenland (The Guardian).

Even so, a Trump administration insider dropped a hint online that the US side intends to present whatever the deal actually is as an American triumph. Katie Miller, a former White House aide whose husband is Trump’s closest adviser, posted a map of Greenland covered in the American flag, with the caption: “ITS [sic] HAPPENING”.

Trump gets to claim he got a great deal which will probably be what we had before Trump started ranting. The same will happen with Iran. That is what you get when you and reality are not on speaking terms.

Maddow hits the mark: Trump is trying to rally his base. OTOH, more proof he has no concern for our rights.

 Vanity, vanity and we pay the price:

Are we Titanic passengers Having a good laugh about the iceberg?

  Trump voter interviewed. I really do not understand, I see such a gap between Trump's words and actions.

 This ought to be a SNL skit, not reality. Talk about your DEI hires.

Judge Luttig warns about the GOP’s plot to block Democrats from taking control of the House! 

 

sch 9/20

 

Beeves - Those With Four Legs, Those In Black Robes

 Some odds and ends I thought worth considering together.

Trump’s beef import deal: Small Hoosier farm sales boom; Indiana commercial sellers take hit (Fox 59)

However, the anticipated impact across all suppliers, big and small, is more complicated than a quick boost in sales.

Indiana is home to roughly 20,000 individual beef producers. That includes both commercial and local sellers, like RK Cattle Company in Danville – watching its freshly-fed, farm-to-fork flanks, steaks and more – fly off freezer shelves.

“There is a demand and a need and a want for quality, American-raised beef,” said Karissa Wyeth, owner of RK Cattle Company. “I think that’s just very important to people right now. You might not want to go out to a restaurant and eat because it’s expensive, but you’re willing to put good meat on your table for your family.”

Wyeth tracked a 44% spike in sales last week after Trump’s temporary tariff pause announcement. Since then, she suspects consumers are losing trust in grocery store meats.

'Starship Troopers' director confirms Donald Trump's space uniforms are Nazi-inspired (Euronews). Of course they are; Trump does like a man in a good-looking uniform.

John Roberts’ role model shows everything wrong with the Supreme Court.

Reconstruction’s opponents drew a different lesson. They insisted that the president needed a court powerful enough to protect him from “the meshes” of Congress. As the nation abandoned Reconstruction, a generation of politicians and historians recast Johnson as a martyr to congressional tyranny. Their remedy was to articulate and entrench a new doctrine: that the Constitution makes the court supreme over Congress. They encouraged the court to void any statute that hems in presidential power.

It took 50 years for that doctrine to triumph. It arrived carrying a grudge. In 1926, Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote that studying “the injustice that the radical Republicans did to Andrew Johnson” left him “humiliated as a Republican.” He then used a case before him, Myers v. United States, to condemn the Tenure of Office Act and strike down a Reconstruction-era regulation of the presidency. Admirers cheered that the court had at last vindicated Andrew Johnson.

Today’s court has resurrected that project. Just this term in Trump v. Slaughter, the court invoked Myers to shred century-old statutory protections that kept public servants from being replaced with loyalists. Afterward, on Substack, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote admiringly that Taft’s leadership not only protected the president from Congress, but also helped to fend off congressional efforts to rein in the court.

 When I was younger, so much younger, the conservatives were complaining about the liberality of the Warren Couurt. That the unelected court had too much power. Over the years, I have been convinced by the sonceratives that what they really wanted was not a more democratic court but a court that was under their power. This article is just more proof that a strong court is just fine if it is run by conservatives. Where are you now, Alexander Bickel?

Today my mother's mother would have 128 years old.

sch 9/17

Indiana - Keeping Democracy Alive! Vote!

One surprise I had this year was learning that my oldest sister did not know who laws are made. I learned that in high school. That made me want to share these two pieces from the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

Democracy Day: A guide to how Indiana makes its laws

All the information you need to participate in Indiana's democracy

sch 9/16 

Normalization (Sheila Kennedy )

As we prepare to go to the polls, I would suggest that we focus on several that he omits–and especially on the growing normalization of multiple bigotries by this administration and by MAGA and Trumpism generally. We need to understand what that particular area of normalization is doing to America’s civic fabric and to our common understanding of what I’ve called “The American Idea.”

What happens to our understanding of America when certain groups of people are so constantly targeted and marginalized that media simply reports the latest attack on “wokeism” along with other news of the day?

 sch 9/17

Trump Mania

 It is not Iran who is jacking up gas prices, it is Ukraine!

 Trump calls on Ukraine to halt strikes on Russian diesel fuel, citing a global shortage 

Remember this: America's economy is booming & great! 

Trump urges rapid interest rate drop after Fed announces quarter point hike 

What alternate reality? 

How MAGA Bewildered Voters Into Its Alternate Reality 

Plenty of right-wing listeners use these shows as their primary news source. They’re not listening to Ben Shapiro for his “take” on news they already consumed elsewhere. They’re listening to Ben Shapiro to find out what’s happening in the world in the first place. It’s a replacement for mainstream media, not a supplement to it.

And now the landscape is shifting again, in ways that should alarm everyone who cares about a free press and its role in American democracy. The tech oligarchs who built our dominant social media platforms—the distribution mechanisms where people go to discuss politics—are consolidating power in ways that are explicitly hostile to old-media ethics like rigorous fact-checking, fidelity to the truth, and avoidance of partisanship.

Americans can’t rely on mainstream media to hold the lines of democracy anymore. Not because mainstream media is bad, but because it’s actively being captured, or hollowed out, or reconfigured by people who do not share its traditional mission.

sch 9/18 

 

Washington Irving; A Movie Review; Chuck Todd About 9/11

What I was doing on 9/11, other than reading and researching and working on my research project. 

Starting off with a film review: ‘Hope’ Review  by Sonny Bunch (The Bulwark). 

Washington Irving is making a slight comeback. Preparing to be Forgotten: On Philip Lopate’s “A Washington Irving Sketch Book”  (Cleveland Review of Books) is the second review I have seen of this book. I first knew of Washington Irving from the Authors game. Looking back, it was an antique game when I was a kid. My mother's mother gave it to us. It seems it was a game she had played when young. Anyway, I did read The Knickerbocker Stories while in prison. All I can say is that I prefer Irving to James Fenimore Cooper - Irving has more humor. As to this review:

Lopate’s A Washington Irving Sketch Book is the tribute of one minor writer to another. It’s a collection of essays examining individual facets of Irving’s life and work in roughly chronological order. Each of Irving’s major works is given a chapter, but so are disparate topics like his bachelorhood, his affinity for painters, his melancholy temperament, his forays into paraliterature, and the house he built in the Hudson Valley. I don’t call Phillip Lopate a “minor writer” in order to demean him. It’s a phrase he applies to Irving in this book: “I am not trying to promote Irving to the top levels of the American pantheon. I agree, Irving is a minor writer.” And it’s a phrase Lopate has applied to himself, for instance in an interview in Tablet Magazine in 2023: “I didn’t imagine [as a young person] being a successful ‘minor writer.’ I have my place in the culture, not a huge place, but it’s respectable.” He is known as a personal essayist and anthologist of personal essays. He considers Irving a model. So what makes them both minor writers? 

 The Man Behind the Myth: Should We Question the Hero’s Journey? (Los Angeles Review of Books). I tried reading Campbell while in prison. He was one of the few books I did not finish. There was something about his thesis or his writing that I found tedious. It is good to find my dissatisfaction is shared by others.

Like many tales of compulsion, Campbell’s Hero brings dangers to those who put their faith in it. The first is a serious misunderstanding of how myth works. Myths and traditional stories function in specific environments for reasons bounded by time and place. Common traits are interesting, but the differences — what we might call variations or multiforms — cannot be ignored.

The second is the existence of an ideal form in myth. How we talk about and choose to accept differences is important. Calling one version of a story a “variant” implies, wrongly, that there is an authoritative and original form. This is a top-down version of storytelling that often misses the significance of the differences themselves. Famous things we think we know about ancient myths are mere possibilities contingent on their time and place. In many stories, Medea did not kill her children. In a majority of tales, Oedipus had children with someone other than his mother.

The Monomyth is the ultimate example of this simplifying of narrative patterns. It reminds us in a way of the Greek myth of Procrustes, the criminal hotelier who cut guests up or stretched them out to fit the bed of his choosing. Campbell started with a thesis and a fictive metric and then cut global myths to fit his Odyssean bed.

Another challenge comes from what audiences know and expect. As defenders of Campbell will argue, much of what he suggests is meant to be allegorical. The hero’s journey is not supposed to be a simple narrative pattern; it is instead a psychological, even mystical, exploration of the self. But his language, which is derived from myth, is slippery — and due to its outsize influence it affects how people understand ancient traditions. Modern notions of the word “hero,” for example, assume essential goodness or imply selfless deeds on behalf of others. Ancient heroes and figures from myth are anything but essentially good. Within ancient myths, heroes are young people in their full strength; they are part of a generation before the “iron” age of modern humans, marking the transition from a time when gods and people shared the earth. They can also be exceptional figures who follow a pattern of withdrawal and return to their communities, suffering pain and inflicting suffering in turn.

 Twenty years after 9/11, Chuck Todd asks if we have harmed ourselves.

 sch 9/11

Competing For the End Of The World!

 Trump downplays the need to check AI development, second federal judge freezes Trump mail ballot order (AP News)

President Donald Trump told reporters Sunday that the United States is leading China in the development of AI. He added, “frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins.” While Trump acknowledged the need for some regulation, he provided no specifics about potential rules. Read more. 

Er, what do we win? The ability to destroy humanity? This AI thing makes nukes look like a sorry excuse as a means for human extinction. After all, somewhere a human being decides to start a nuclear war. AI takes away human choice.

AI Is a Test of Our Maturity. *Gulp* (The Bulwark)

Mike Johnson says AI companies should ensure safety, not Congress 

Who then should ensure the safety of Americans? AI? It makes me wonder who is paying off whom.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said that artificial intelligence developers, not Congress, bear responsibility for ensuring their products are safe and rejected a national moratorium on AI buildout during a Sept. 13 appearance on CNN's "State of the Union."

The Louisiana Republican said there was an "obvious corporate responsibility" but pointed to competition with China as a reason to keep Congress from imposing regulations.

"We cannot put a moratorium on this because China will overlap us, and that’s the challenge," Johnson said. "If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American."

The very people who designed this monster that cannot be controlled and are making big bucks from it are to be trusted with the safety of the country? 

 Think about it. The Republicans are blithely leading the charge into AI that may bring about the end of the species. No way not to see a vote for any Republican other than as an endorsement of irresponsibility and mass suicide.

sch  

 

Politics - Indiana, Gold, Ukraine

I am thinking these will be self-explanatory. Maybe changes in Indiana. So much money for providers and Hoosiers being kicked off Medicaid and SNAP.

There is voting at elections and then there is voting by moving one's feet - or in moving a country's gold. If the US isn't safe for the other country's gold, what is it for us?

Trump likes Putin. Putin is locked in a futile war with Ukraine. Is this why Trump has us in a futile war with Iran - Putin-envy? 

What's the Lincoln Party? Ballard's secretary of state run could expand Indiana ballot access • Indiana Capital Chronicle

$68 billion is up for grabs in Medicaid. Who wants it? • Indiana Capital Chronicle  

 

Why are European countries moving their gold out of North America?

 

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, Sept. 8, 2026 | ISW  

sch 

Trump the Socialist, The Turks & The Israelis, American Regionalism.

 My youngest nephew when we last spoke of the Democrats as socialists, and he was having no part of them. He, like his mother, is a Trumper. And now Trump is calling Democrats Communists. I wonder if that old world still holds many in its superstitious awe. Then I consider my youngest nephew. I wonder if he considers Trump's own warming to socialism.

 Why Trump’s ‘golden shares’ are enticing progressives (POLITICO)

Starting with Trump’s surprise moves to take a “golden share” in U.S. Steel and then a 10 percent share in Intel more than a year ago, the administration is approaching $30 billion in equity stakes, warrants or similar plans in U.S. companies by most estimates, a fairly radical departure from orthodoxy outside of times of financial crisis — like the massive government bailouts of 2008-2009 — or world war.

That’s not counting some international arrangements, like the Trump administration’s Aug. 28 announcement that it would take a stake in the Venezuelan oil industry, which it said will be engineered by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital.

The new approach has sparked a mixture of support, criticism and confusion across both parties, with libertarian conservatives pointing out the irony of Trump’s attacks on Democrats as communists and some elected Democrats pledging to investigate equity stake arrangements involving ties to Trump family or allies if they win back power in the midterms. Critics dispute the administration’s authority to take equity stakes in private companies at all.

***

Todd Tucker, the group’s director of industrial and trade policy, says that Trump’s early move to demand some corporate governance power in U.S. Steel amid its takeover by Nippon Steel – not an equity stake, but still a highly unusual degree of influence in a company – was “pretty ingenious” and mirrored concepts that had been debated in the early days of the Biden administration, and in proposals from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Meanwhile, back at the ranch: Trump Says to Vote for Ken Paxton Even Though He’s Dumb and Ugly (The New Republic)

Decades ago, a friend of mine who was a Marine captain often talked about the Turks and the Israeli armies as being on parity. He wondered what would be the outcome if they met. Too bad he died eleven years ago.

The coming Turkish-Israeli struggle for supremacy (Engelsberg ideas)

That the Middle East is hurtling towards a catastrophic Turkish-Israeli conflict has been apparent for a while. Nothing is inevitable in history, but the dynamic leading towards conflict has been gathering momentum at a pace that is startling. Israel is clearly a shark that cannot stop swimming, and the collapse of Iranian forward-positioned proxies is setting the region up for the ultimate showdown between the only two actors with hegemonic ambitions. ‘As Iran weakens, that vacuum will be filled by the natural candidate with imperial ambitions in the Middle East, and that is Turkey’, former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said recently. He isn’t the only one. The sentiment now shapes Israeli strategic doctrines, from the Netanyahu government to opposition leaders such as Naftali Bennett. In sum, the potential for conflict remains, regardless of who is in power in Israel. And Turkey isn’t the only actor with hegemonic aspirations in the region.

Turkey is, however, the other remarkable actor in this tango: the only power and former imperial entity in the entire Eurasian landmass (with the exception of, possibly, China) that appears to simultaneously possess a sense of a residual imperial greatness, a vision of an overarching historical longue durée (unlike contemporary Europeans) and a cold, calculated grand-strategy unimpeded by democratic processes. Turkey isn’t affluent by most western measures, and yet, for a country that was strategically isolated a decade ago, Turkey has since positioned itself as the most influential actor in the region.

***

A recent addition has further empowered the Turkish hand: an emerging Saudi-Pakistani security relationship that potentially brings Pakistan’s nuclear deterrence into the wider strategic matrix. From the American strategic perspective (even without considering the steadily declining support for Israel among both younger generations of Democrats and Republicans), it is understandable why this coalition might appeal. The Americans have been unable to extricate themselves from the region, partly due to their internal strategic incoherence and an absurd democratic system that alters US grand strategy every eight years or so. A Saudi-Pakistani bloc under Ankara’s hegemony, on the other hand, could contain both Russia and Iran in the region.

***

The United States will, of course, continue to be immensely powerful and splendidly isolated in the Western hemisphere. But, inevitably, American retrenchment, either due to imperial exhaustion, debt, generational change or strategic defeat, will translate into a mad dash for localised regional hegemony and space for imperial powers with capacity and ambition. An Israeli attack on Turkey, or an all-out Turkish-Israeli war over expansionism in Syria or Cyprus, therefore has the potential to destroy NATO as we know it. But from a strictly historical perspective, it will be a new hegemonic cycle in a region that has seen many such cycles before, with an older imperial entity returning to form.

David Hackett Fischer’s “Albion’s Seed”: Revisiting a revisionist blockbuster. (The Hedgehog Review)

Detached from their ethnic and regional origins and attached to class-based cultures, the British-American traditions Fischer identifies may endure, as nonwhite immigrants and their descendants assimilate to multiple melting pots along educational and occupational lines. Already in the US, college-educated Hispanics tend to share the liberalism of other college-educated Americans, reflecting the New England roots of today’s academic culture, while working-class Hispanics are more socially conservative, and many convert to evangelical Protestantism, with its Scots-Irish influences.

Meanwhile, the nativism of today’s “Heritage Americans” on the right is much more inclusive than that of the Anglo-Protestant nativists of a century ago, with Irish Americans and German Americans now considered “Heritage Americans.”

I wonder if there is not a bit of the regionalism mentioned above in the regionalism of Soft Secession? (Sheila Kennedy). 

Nearly two dozen Blue states have filed joint lawsuits to block Trump administration vendettas. Blue state coalitions have sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and FEMA over rules that tie disaster and emergency relief money to voter citizenship checks and local immigration enforcement, and they have mounted coordinated responses to political assaults on state universities, non-profits, and local municipal funds. Local and state jurisdictions in those states have worked to strengthen local laws that limit ICE access to public property and data.

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Colorado Governor Jared Polis launched a private initiative to encourage Blue state resource pooling–a project in which states will share staff, legal expertise, and operational strategies to protect state institutions and coordinate contingency plans against federal pressure. The initiative is modeled on previous reproductive rights compacts in which states shared and stockpiled abortion medication.

The movement toward state-level action can also be seen as a response to a longer-term fiscal reality: Donor states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts send far more money to Washington than they get back. The Rockefeller Institute estimates that New York’s net outflow in 2019 was $142 billion, and that California’s in 2021–22 was $83 billion. Meanwhile, states like Alabama, Mississippi, and West Virginia are net recipients.

Midterms are but 9, 10 weeks away. Maybe we end this silly season of American politics, maybe we can restore American greatness, but I think rejoicing needs await January if the Democrats take enough seats they take over Congress.

sch 9/3 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Small Man's Delusions Diminish Us All

Is America Now an Imperial Populist Oligarchy? - Paul D. Miller (The Dispatch) had to be written long before Trump told us the Department of Defense was buying into Venezuelan oil. It does not undercut the essay.

Remarkable US oil deal puzzles analysts - and angers many Venezuelans (BBC)

The Nobel Peace Prize winner and presidential hopeful, María Corina Machado, may choose not to publicly criticise President Trump, whose support she needs if she hopes to come to power. Others, though, have been more forthcoming.

"You chose to use the power of the United States not to liberate Venezuelans, but to ally yourself with our oppressors," said Venezuelan economist, Ricardo Hausmann, on social media, directing his comments at the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

"You opted to push through an asset seizure, an unconstitutional agreement with an illegitimate and oppressive government, instead of using the leadership of the United States to first restore constitutional order and democracy," he said.

The lack of an imminent election in Venezuela – or, indeed, any clear plan towards one – strikes many opponents as a betrayal.

Democrats concerned over Trump's massive Venezuelan oil deal 

Untested in court, Trump's new tariffs on Canada raise legal questions 

Pentagon Erupts Over Report on Classified Warnings Against Iran War (The New Republic).

 

How Trump Uses Dormant Laws to Amass Power  (The New Republic) both scares me and makes me pause at the efforts made by the Administration's lawyers to find obscure laws to bend to their purposes.

 The Trump administration’s enthusiasm for reviving moribund laws to accomplish its policy goals should inspire Congress to consider repealing or revising them. Trump and his allies have inflicted plenty of harm by violating federal laws during his second term. Another important problem is when he abuses and misuses existing laws. If Congress is interested in restoring its own primacy in our constitutional order, it should reconsider its own past missteps, as well.

Both of the court revivals illustrate the problem. While federal law authorizes the use of prize courts, they have not meaningfully existed since the Civil War. The Union Navy blockaded Southern ports throughout the war and seized military and civilian vessels alike. Once captured, the ships were typically brought to Union-held ports for disposal by prize courts. In 1863, the Supreme Court rejected legal challenges to the Southern blockade and upheld President Abraham Lincoln’s authority to seize and sell ships and goods acquired from it.

As Bloomberg noted when it reported on the prize courts’ revival earlier this week, the courts fell into disuse after the Spanish-American War ended in 1900 and were moribund after World War II. They reflect a nineteenth-century understanding of naval warfare where both a nation’s navy and private citizens acting as privateers could capture vessels on the high seas. The changing nature of naval warfare helped render these tactics obsolete: The average American boat owner these days would have an easier time sailing to the moon than capturing an armed enemy warship.

A Congressional Research Service report in 2024 noted that Congress abolished prize money for private citizens in 1899, and any proceeds from prize court cases now go into the Treasury’s general fund instead. The Trump administration’s plans, though still vague, appear to be centered on creating a faster, easier legal pathway to sell captured Iranian oil. This may be riskier for the administration than it looks, since it will give federal courts an opportunity to directly consider whether the ships and goods were lawfully seized. As Lincoln’s own experience showed, such cases can allow judges to consider legality of the war itself. The sixteenth president prevailed; the forty-seventh might not.

 Mark Carney: Why I Rejected Trump’s Trade Deal (The Walrus) left me thinking Carney is doing more to save us from MAGA stupidity than American voters.

We’ve been under no illusions. We recognized, from the start, that America has changed. Early last year, I observed that the decades-long process of steadily increasing integration between our economies was over. Our government understood before many that America would transform all of its commercial relationships, that it would put a series of tariffs on its closest allies, and use economic integration as a weapon. We recognize that sometimes its signature was written in pencil.  

Why do we have a President who has no respect for free speech? Trump vows to report NBC's Kristen Welker to the FCC over endorsement record report. Even more urgent, how did we let a man with such thin skin and gross self-regard into the Presidency?

Trump wrecked everything he ever touched; now he is doing to America's economy what he did to our standing in the world.

Convulsion in credit markets (Kitco News)

 

 No single solution exists for the mess we have created. There will be work, and there is no gain without pain.

 sch 9/2

Indiana The Cost of Living, Religion & Politics, Reliable News Sources, A Clueless General Assembly

Why do we put up with how the Republicans run this state? Ask Sheila Kennedy wrote, time for a change. Before they sell us off entirely.

Mapped: The Cost of Living in Every U.S. State (2026) makes me wonder why it is so cheap to live in Indiana that everybody seems to be having a hard time making a living.

The hardest-working states in the US, ranked 

CONTESTED HISTORY: League of Women Voters’ event examined meaning behind ‘separation of church and state’ (THE INDIANA CITIZEN) embarrasses me because I had no idea it was happening in Muncie. People are not buying Christian nationalism, and the least interested seem to be Christians.

Is Indy news biased? Here’s my advice for finding reliable sources (Indiana Capital Chronicle )

Indiana asked about new SNAP rule. Here’s what people said. (Free Press Indiana).

Indiana’s abortion ban has ‘chilling effect’ in the ER. 

Doing Business (Sheila Kennedy)

A legislature at war with education sends a signal to potential employers that they will have trouble finding a skilled workforce. Siphoning money from public schools that teach accurate science and introduce children to the diversity they will encounter in the workforce in order to fund religious academies is one bad sign; waging war against once-storied public universities by insisting that vetted scholarship is really “liberal indoctrination” ensures that intellectually curious students will either depart Indiana upon graduation or avoid the state entirely and enroll elsewhere.

A legislature that ignores both medical science and women’s rights by banning abortion (and effectively criminalizing medical assistance for emergency pregnancies) sends a message to doctors and women considering employment in the state. In the wake of that travesty, even companies that are already located here are finding it difficult to recruit workers–male or female–from families still in their childbearing years.

Flooding devastated swathes of Indiana but response is hampered by politics  (The Guardian) 

 sch 9/2

 

Politcal links for the day

 Don’t Be Fooled: America Hates These Toxic Right-Wing Gasbags | The New Republic

Are we losing our freedom of speech? • Indiana Capital Chronicle

 

ECB official warns climate crisis poses growing threat to ‘core financial stability’ | Economics | The Guardian 

 

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Catering

Just going to drop this idea of mine with the hope someone finally comments.

 I like my group sessions for meeting and hearing guys younger than me. Especially the leader who appears to be educated (he likes to be discreet about his background), who gets his news from TikTok, does not like history, thinks Will Ferrell's career has imploded due to his political views, and dresses like a Yuppie. As for my peers, they are all working class and do not seem to have any experience with newspapers; they are all in survival mode due to their status and educational background does not offer much in the way of work. 

The leader gives me an opening into the online bros.

My peers provide an insight into the people who are MAGA's bedrock, their street level crew.

What I am seeing in the wider world when I am at the grocery, elsewhere, and what I am getting through my political news also factors in what follows.

 And it comes down to catering.

Catering in the sense that people think they should be given whatever fulfills their lives.

Psychological counseling emphasizes the psychological well-being of the person. Ethics are denigrated. I am not sure if it even includes character. Why not? Standards of character depend on social, not psychological, standards. Society, the community, does not appear in what I have seen or heard.

 Character Is Countercultural - by Mark Hertling 

The private sector “uniforms” are different, the language is different, and the tasks are different. But the essential requirements of character and leadership remain unchanged. Competence is expected in every profession, in every industry. Great organizations define what competence looks like and usually train and teach it well. What separates good organizations from exceptional ones is their understanding that competence alone is insufficient. Character—one of the key attributes of any leader—determines whether knowledge is used with wisdom, whether authority is exercised with humility, and whether success is measured not only by achievement but also by service.

Looking back across that journey—from family and school to coaches and scoutmasters, from West Point to the Army and eventually the private sector—I realize that none of those institutions believed character development was someone else’s responsibility. Each accepted a share of the task. Each expected young people to become a little more than they had been the year before. Most importantly, each reinforced lessons that had begun elsewhere.

Most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, still admire leaders whose actions consistently match their words, whose integrity survives public pressure, and whose decisions reflect something larger than personal ambition. We may disagree passionately about policy or ideology, but few would argue that honesty, humility, courage, and responsibility are obsolete virtues. 

 This is not a left/right thing; albeit the left talks about community, the right depends on its online communities. It seems generational. It seems to deny responsibility to a community.

Either we have a severe educational deficit in this country from the street to the highest echelons of power, or we have a poorly educated population manioulated by politicians who should know better. 

Now Bicycles Are Woke? (Sheila Kennedy) a nation of idiots or a nation besieged by idiots?

I have never quite appreciated (liked) The Sun Also Rises; only after reading The Sun Also Rises at 100 (First Things), I wonder if I should not think more highly of Hemingway.

Hemingway conceived his signature prose style as a way to reckon with suffering. A man who knows his worth does not bare the painful underside of his soul; he keeps his agonies to himself. He is on familiar terms with death and has learned to contain his fear. And while he enjoys the good things in life more than most others do, he is laconic in even his most extravagant appreciations: He knows pleasures are not made to last. As Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1926 of his failing marriage, “Our life is all gone to hell, which seems to be the one thing you can count on a good life to do.”  

What I feel as underlying this demand for being catered to is that those being catered to expect a good life without an end to their pleasures. No more “no pain, no gain”. Just give us what we like, bury what we do not like.

Have we all gone mad?

Call It What It Is (Sheila Kennedy)

It isn’t just dementia due to aging, although that condition is clearly worsening the problem.

There’s ample reason to worry about Trump’s longstanding mental defects: frequent statements that are, at best, detached from reality — the repeated false claims about crowd sizes, election results, and other easily verifiable facts; his
erratic and/or contradictory statements made within short periods (sometimes within the same speech); the constant
grandiose rhetoric (his self-comparisons to historical figures); and his assertions of victimization by nefarious “others”…The evidence is overwhelming. 

Mental health professionals have argued for years that he demonstrates narcissistic personality traits. (Several even wrote a book in 2017 titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”) 

Where to now?

sch 7/30 

 

WTF Politics

 Since no one comments, I assume the hits are also runs. Meaning you are looking without reading. Therefore, I have decided to spend less time exploring our politics.

The push to reduce the Supreme Court’s power (SCOTUSblog ) has some good ideas, some stupid ones, and not a sense of a comprehensive reform of comprehensive problems.

How much tuition does an Indiana voucher cover at Indianapolis private schools? (Chalkbeat ) - not enough to keep it from looking like a scam.

In 2016-17, the state reported that almost half of all voucher students had their full tuition and fee amounts covered by the voucher. By 2024-25, that figure had dropped to 28%.

Iran Has Figured Out How to Overwhelm U.S. Air Defenses 

 The U.S. and its allies burned through more than 11,000 munitions, including large amounts of defensive missiles, in the first 16 days of the war alone, according to a March analysis by the Royal United Services Institute. The report predicted then that U.S. forces were about a month away from running out of THAAD interceptors. An April report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that “diminished munitions stockpiles have created a near-term risk.” A follow-up report the next month warned that it would “take three or more years from today to return to prewar inventory levels” of Patriot and THAAD missiles.

Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesperson, said that “Patriot systems have been weakened to such an extent that Iranian missiles and drones are reaching their targets without being intercepted.” He said that during a flurry of attacks from July 8 to July 22, Iran struck numerous air defense and radar installations, including six “Patriot air-defense radars.”

CENTCOM did not reply to a request for comment on the claims by the U.S. official or Mohebbi.

I thought we had destroyed their military months ago. That's what Trump has been telling us, right? 

 I went to Walmart today and spoke with the bus driver. He is certain Fauci's diaries convict Facuci of all sorts of evil-doing.

Fauci Diaries Expose Depths of Katie and Stephen Miller’s Hypocrisy (The New Republic )

Indiana state agencies turning to AI for behind-the-scenes work (Indiana Capital Chronicle )

Agencies using or planning to use AI submit a readiness assessment, which officials then review for the tool’s “objectives, efficacy, and risks.” Once approved, the agency can proceed but must provide followups either annually or after substantial changes to the AI tool or its use.

Many of those approved proposals sought to aid workflows. Several agencies planned to use AI voiceovers for videos and presentations or for parsing and analyzing data. 

But others outlined more extensive use. The attorney general’s office received approval for a Thomson Reuters-owned tool that “provides attorneys with AI-powered legal research tools to generate answers to complex legal questions, draft initial documents, summarize case law, and identify relevant statutes.”

The New Old Middle East (Foreign Affairs)

The United States and Israel cannot bomb their way to a better region. A truly changed Middle East, one that could be the basis for a more stable regional order, would be defined by stronger central governments in Arab states such as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Today, those places are plagued by civil war or domestic unrest, and the region will remain volatile as long as those governments are not able to police their borders and prevent nonstate actors in their territories from pursuing their own foreign and military policies. Weak states, after all, cannot make durable peace.

A transformed Middle East would also see an end to the efforts of regional and outside powers, most notably but not exclusively Iran, to encourage or fund militias. It would include a diplomatic process, broadly supported internationally and accepted regionally, focused on working toward a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would ensure Israel’s security and the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. And it might involve genuine regime change in Iran, carried out by the Iranians themselves and resulting in a government that respects its neighbors’ sovereignty and drops the ideological crusade against Israel.

But Trump and people I have met here far from the nearest gears of power think big explosions and a big display of force should be enough to bend the Iranians to our will. I cannot help but think of this old song I first heard from Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes:

 

Commerce Dept. quietly announces 7 new equity stakes in private companies  (The Hill)

The announcement comes nearly a year after President Trump announced the federal government would take a 10 percent stake in Intel, one of the nation’s largest chip manufacturers, for roughly $11 billion in federal subsidies the company received.

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The practice has drawn criticism from Trump’s Republican base. Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who drafted the foundation of the CHIPS and Science Act, said at the time the law never intended to let the federal government take a major stake in Intel or any other major company.

 The real WTF moment of the day.

 

 

 

 

Indiana Politics & Government

 The more time I spend in the Nineteenth Century, the more I am convinced that Indiana needs to change how it is governed.

It is past time that we had the recall. That belongs to the Progressive Era and still has not arrived in 2026.

It is time that we had access to the referendum so that we could bypass the oligarchy that is the General Assembly.

'Middleman': Former Indiana ag director backs removal of LG's leadership duties (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Beckwith makes me like this idea. The thing is, it also makes practical sense. Indiana's governor/lieutenant governor relationship has not been closely looked at, at least by me. Indiana's governor has no great political power; his veto can be overturned by a simple majority. And it appears that it used to go to whoever came in second in the gubernatorial election. That changed in the Sixties; only the Lieutenant Governor still has great responsibilities. 

“We believe it is critical that the Indiana director of agriculture be elevated to a cabinet-level position with a direct line to the governor — a full secretary of agriculture, if you will — to ensure that agriculture, as a foundation of our state’s economy, has an advocate at the highest reaches of state government,” said Alan Dunn, president of the Indiana Corn Growers Association.

Dunn said the Indiana Corn Marketing Council supported the research of an emerging startup into a corn-based acrylic acid, which is used in adhesives, coatings, paints and more. Despite that Hoosier involvement, Illinois won the pilot production plant.

“While (the council) can invest in research and promotion of new uses of corn, what it can’t do is provide economic development incentives for locating production facilities,” Dunn said. “… This is an example where collaboration at the cabinet level of leadership may have been able to keep this opportunity in Indiana.”

***

Rep. J.D. Prescott, R-Union City, said the change would present a “demotion” for the industry.

“Right now, our secretary of agriculture is … our No. 2 elected official in the state of Indiana,” he said. “I would actually view that as demotion, moving into a secretary position.” 

Perhaps a more technocratic than a political approach would be helpful. Especially since Beckwith's bigoties do motivate him so.

 No Surprise: Most of us get our news from scrolling on our phones (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Indiana’s newest statewide nonprofit newsroom, Free Press Indiana News (FPI News), debuted in June and first launched entirely on social media, because they know younger audiences get their news primarily from their social feeds. At the start of reporting each story, the newsroom staff discusses how best to tell stories on social channels and their website.

“Our Instagram, Facebook, X, Threads, Bluesky and Substack accounts launched June 15, while our website launched July 15,” said Lindsey Erdody, FPI News editor-in-chief. “We’ve already seen great traction with our Facebook and Instagram accounts in particular.”

In a little more than a month, FPI News has gained close to 4,000 followers each on Facebook and Instagram. FPI News is owned by Free Press Indiana, the same parent company of Mirror Indy.

“Reaching younger audiences has been a conundrum for as long as I can remember,” said Oseye Boyd, editor-n-chief of Mirror Indy. “I don’t know that anyone has it figured out, but we are intentional about working to serve this demographic.”

From a comment made during one of the Friday sessions, the leader gets his news from TikTok. That makes me  suspicious of his knowledge. Not many in the group have online access. What do they do for news?

I do like it when Todd Rokita gets reminded that he has to obey the law: Indiana attorney general loses appeal in Haitian trafficking investigation (Indiana Capital Chronicle); Indiana's attorney general is not the head of Indiana's prosecutors. Our forefathers spread power around. 

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita can’t compel an Evansville manufacturer and migrant support group to cooperate with a human trafficking investigation in the absence of a specific allegation, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled Monday.

The three-judge panel’s opinion affirms an earlier ruling from the Vanderburgh Superior Court denying Rokita’s petition to enforce civil investigative demands against Berry Global Group and the Haitian Center of Evansville in a 2024 trafficking investigation.

Judge Nancy H. Vaidik, who authored the opinion, found the attorney general’s demands were “unauthorized, invalid and unenforceable” due to a lack of particularized evidence.

“The record makes clear that the Attorney General is at most trawling for evidence of wrongdoing — looking for information that might eventually trigger an investigation, based on his alleged concern that someone, somewhere might be involved in labor trafficking,” she wrote.

Rokita has a problem differentiating between reality and what politically motivated blather comes out of his mouth:

Instead, the attorney general’s office claimed it had reasonable cause because Berry Global “is a large, sophisticated employer that actively recruits refugees and migrants and works with various migrant resettlement nonprofits” and support groups like the Haitian Center, according to the opinion.

Asked in trial court, state attorneys could not identify a suspect or act of human trafficking either, according to the opinion.

The court held that allowing Rokita to enforce CIDs in the absence of a specific suspect or allegation would violate First and Fourth Amendment protections and burden business.

Indiana law “authorizes the issuance of a CID only if an ‘investigation’ is being conducted,” Vaidik wrote in her opinion Monday.

“For an investigation to exist, there must be a factual predicate — an articulable reason to suspect that particular wrongdoing may be afoot. A mere hunch will not suffice. Here, the Attorney General has not shown that he has information of any sort, he is searching for something to investigate. Therefore, the CIDs issued to Berry Global and the Haitian Center were unauthorized, invalid and unenforceable.” 

Voter subpoenas denied in recount of narrow Indiana Senate Republican primary (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Republican member Paul Mullin supported her motion to question 11 voters who disclosed in social media posts or to news reporters that they had cast Republican primary ballots in Senate District 23 to support Deery despite being Democrats or self-identified “progressives.”

Morales saw his reelection bid fail last month at the state Republican convention after losing the support of top state party leaders. That included U.S. Jim Banks, whose political organizations spent millions of dollars to support Copenhaver and other primary challengers to Republican senators who opposed redistricting.

Morales said in voting against the subpoena request that it wasn’t proper to question voters after they had cast ballots.

“This is the right thing to do, to make sure that we reject the motion to subpoena any voters because I don’t believe that’s the right thing to do,” Morales said. “I believe everybody has the right to go and vote, but they need to do it the right way. And the right way, again, is I encourage the General Assembly next session to close our primaries so we can avoid all of this.”

Every so often the wrong person, for the wrong reasons, does the right thing. Depose voters and ask them who they vote for? Not the business of any politician. Morales is a bum, what we get from the political inbreeding in Indiana's Republican Party.

 Indiana inspector general discontinues publication of investigative reports (Indiana Capital Chronicle) 

Former Gov. Mitch Daniels created the Office of Inspector Genera in 2005 to investigate allegations of waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement and wrongdoing in state government.

Investigative reports, which generally do not include the names of uncharged persons, are publicly available online dating back to the office’s founding — except for the years 2006 and 2026.

The OIG released nine investigative reports last year summarizing investigations into contingency fee contracts, falsified case management entries, improper gifts, falsified time sheets and other allegations.

This year: None.

The OIG issued two news releases when criminal charges were filed against a former case manager from the Department of Child Services and an employee from the Indiana Veterans’ Home.

Court records and State Ethics Commission reports remain public record, offering at least partial access to information the OIG used to release.

But if criminal or ethics charges aren’t warranted the public won’t know of key allegations or findings. For instance, in 2023, a report showed that the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration lost dozens of laptops, worth thousands in the chaos of setting up and winding down a statewide vaccination hotline during the height of the pandemic.

This sounds too much like Trump firing inspector generals at the federal level. It is the people's government, not Governor Braun's and not any political party's.

Speaking of Trump, this sounds like it has more to do with Trump's agenda than what Indiana needs: Braun directs state to revisit coal power plant closures (Indiana Capital Chronicle).

Gov. Mike Braun directed his energy and natural resources secretary to revisit settlements that closed or sought to close coal power plants in Indiana.

Settlements identified in a Friday executive order include those that would close a plant before 50 years of service — described as the average age of retirement for electric generation units in Indiana — or where there was no allegation or finding of wrongdoing. 

The secretary should also revisit agreements between plant operators and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, justice department or environmental groups where the State of Indiana was not a party, the order said. 

“These consent decrees and settlement agreements should be re-evaluated in light of the current and future need for energy to power existing demand as well as future economic development in Indiana,” the order stated.

The order noted a projected 7 gigawatts-plus of Indiana coal electricity generation retiring or transitioning to another source across the next 12 years, as well as an assessment from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation determining Indiana may not have the electricity resources to keep pace with upcoming demand.

Braun aligned the need to revisit these closures alongside recent federal backing for coal plants in the state. 

Ball State has the Digital Civil Rights Museum for Indiana. You should check it out.

And what is it Li am learning about nineteenth-century Indiana? That we feared the blacks, that we kept them down, that systemic racism is a real thing.

My evidence? Read the following:

Cory v. Carter, 48 Ind. 327 (Ind. 1874)

State v. Gibson, 36 Ind. 389 (Ind. 1871)

School Desegregation (Encyclopedia of Indianapolis)

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Looking Out At The World From Muncie

 It doesn't look so good sometimes. It feels like my thinking is divorced from the main currents out there. Frankly, I like my thinking better. When I was getting sucked down into nihilism by my depression, I could not understand why thinking diverged from what everyone told me about reality. I thought I was crazy. Not so sure about not being crazy, but it is my life, and I am happier living with what I think is right. I just stay amused about it all.

Proof that Indianapolis is multi-cultural and how much that recognition is in danger: Indy’s Global Village Museum facing funding troubles.

The Real Reason Elon Musk Keeps Insisting DOGE Cuts Killed “Zero” Kids (The New Republic) leaves me wondering why certain ideas do not die. Are our egos so frail? Is our empathy illusory?

All this pushback from Kristof and Beddoes—who nonetheless indicated some “sympathy” with Musk’s claims about USAID—constitutes important work. But on some level, these fact-checks miss the point. We don’t think Musk intends claims like these to be debated on an empirical level. Rather, Musk is communicating in  subterranean tropes that his far-right global audience will instantly find intelligible: He’s advancing the generalized sentiment that due to DOGE cuts, nobody died for whom we need to feel any passing responsibility. Nobody died who’s worthy of our concern. 

“They cannot cite a single name of someone who died,” Musk recently posted. “Not a single name!” That’s false, as Kristof demonstrated, and of course it’s absurd to demand single names when we’re talking about enormous numbers of deaths. It’s beyond contestation that USAID’s destruction unleashed fresh humanitarian horrors. But the key event here is Musk continuing to assert otherwise in the face of an escalation of human suffering that’s amply documented: You can’t name these people. They never existed. 

As the two of us have detailed, Musk’s rhetoric has grown ominously more oriented around the idea of global race war. Last month, after an immigrant stabbed a white man in Northern Ireland, Musk used his X platform to viciously stoke anti-immigrant anger and helped incite days of far-right riots and pogroms there, often using stark invocations of global racial armageddon to do so.

 The Media (Sheila Kennedy)

Then Krugman gets to what he calls the shaping of the information space, the promotion of ideas and ideology that serve the interests of the very wealthy with “zombie” ideas that experience should have debunked. (Tax cuts for the rich have never stimulated economic growth. Climate science is not a hoax.) The takeover of the legacy media is one way of promoting those “zombie ideas” 

The Ellison family has already acquired CBS and installed Bari Weiss to corrupt it. Ellison’s proposed takeover of Warner will effectively destroy CNN as we now know it. (Krugman says “It will almost turn into Fox News. Now, that won’t be a profitable venture. There’s already a Fox News, and so creating another one is not going to actually produce a lot of profits, if any, but that’s not the objective. This is buying influence.”) Look what happened to Twitter when Musk took it over.

Krugman says this takeover of the general information environment by a handful of billionaires will continue, and the only “fix” is to bring the concentration of wealth at the top down

 A New Take on Homer’s Epic: “The Odyssey,” the Movie (Thornfield Hall) why Musk failed to stop The Odyssey: he has no art in his bones.

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Recuperating, Not Spry

 Healing but not doing much more.

I made it to group on Friday. My legs got wobbly. I took the bus there and back, as little walking as possible. I stayed put for the rest of the day. Did some reading, watched shows on Netflix. Right now I cannot recall what it was! Thusday Murder Club. 

Got a rejection. 

Thank you for sharing "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984" with A Public Space. We regret that we are unable to use this piece for the magazine, but appreciate the opportunity to consider it.


All our best,

A Public Space 

I keep having these intense moments of insomnia. Those I have used to work on my research project. 

CC called again on Friday. I spoke with KH, too. Joel C called with compliments for “Ahab in the Moonlight”. That is now published. I need to get a link here to it. 

Saturday, I went to Payless and the convenience store twice. A little more walking, a little more of my research project.

I started watching Orphan Black on Netflix. I like it. Oh, I started Bugonia and just could not take its deepness or weirdness. Looks good, though.

I decided against church. Not enough energy, pain is more a low-level discomfort. 

 One thing decided: a different working schedule. I need to get some books read.

Things read over the past few days that I want to share:

The Eyes of Athena and the Disenchanted World of The Odyssey (Reactor) 

The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding  (Reactor) 

Zardoz: …What the F*ck Did I Just Watch?  (Reactor) 

You Must Remember This’s Karina Longworth on ‘The Bisexuals’ 

Exclusive: In a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer has some regrets (AP News)

How America’s newspapers lost their voice 

Pennsylvania roads are being coated in radioactive wastewater − here’s why 

From author to anime hero: the unlikely revival of a Japanese literary star | Fiction in translation (The Guardian)

No Longer Human comprises a series of notebooks by a formerly “handsome young man”, who declares his incompatibility with the human race. For him, the world is “a place of bottomless horror”; he concludes that “living itself is the source of sin”. The narrator of the title story of Schoolgirl takes a similar view: “the problem is that I’m corrupt. I’m a bad girl.”

The relentless pessimism in Dazai’s work risks seeming overwhelming or indulgent but, as Barton puts it, Dazai “leans into [the self-loathing] with a kind of exuberance”. Indeed, his appeal in part lies in this “unashamed emotional quality, but also tempered with enormous intelligence”.

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead review – final part of the Harlem Trilogy is freewheeling fun | Fiction | (The Guardian) 

Whitehead initially envisioned the Harlem Trilogy as a jaunty entertainment, a break from the serious Pulitzer-winning business of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. Cool Machine specifically covers the New York of his youth, a scene he experienced first-hand, which only adds to the air of vivid, freewheeling fun. Whitehead maps the streets, labels the landmarks and dips in at intervals with handy background information. He takes a dark and dangerous corner of history and makes it feel illuminated, magnified, even borderline family-friendly.

A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thomson review – a brilliantly eccentric history of the movies | Film books (The Guardian)

 Revisionist? Well, it certainly takes us to wintry and sombre ponderings on the movies’ (perennial) tendency to coarsen and to cheapen, to enforce cultural mob-rule. He cites King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd, starring James Murray, a former extra plucked from the ranks and groomed for glory but whose awful destiny was to descend into alcoholism and homelessness – back into the crowd. He emphasises movies’ amazing populist-democratic power and reach, their power embodied by the fact that, unlike in the theatre or concert hall, a film’s action could not be stopped or affected by the crowd in front of it. Like a theologian dragged by doubts to the foot of the cross, Thomson wonders if the movies will always lack literature’s way of allowing us to enlarge our imaginations, as opposed to forcing a submission to the screen.

The Rest Is History (Lapham’s Quarterly )

Who Cares? (Sheila Kennedy)

The American Prospect, among others, has reported on the crisis in what we call “Care work.”

As the report notes, immigrants from countries like Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Uganda, Jamaica, the Philippines, and dozens of others make up the majority of people who serve the aging, frail, sick, disabled and dying. These immigrants “bathe their clients, change adult diapers, supervise medications, and provide companionship in relationships that are intimate as well as professional.” And they are the targets of Donald Trump’s hatred.

How civilisations fall, according to Gibbon (Engelsberg ideas)

5th Circuit ‘answers the call’ from Clarence Thomas on gun law

4 little-known Google Calendar tricks I use to plan my workweek - and save time (ZDNET)

The Problem With Middle-Class Socialism (The New Republic)

Secret Service Agent Put on Leave for Alleged Leaks About JD Vance (The New Republic)

Trump Prepares to Attack Eighth Country of His Second Term (The New Republic)

Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon (The New Republic)

What Do You Have to Hide? - by Jared Henderson

WNAP-FM | Listen Online - myTuner Radio

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton

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