"[Yahya Sinwar] was found with two other terrorists. One of them was a senior commander of Hamas terrorists in the Khan Yunis area. The other, according to Israeli news website Ynet, was a teacher employed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)."
My husband and I have been struggling with horse upkeep for what seems like months now. In fact, it probably has been months. We’ve gone from lameness issues to digestive problems, and suddenly our once very easy to keep equines are putting us through our own paces!
One problem is they need to be kept off pasture, and the alternative is keeping them on sand. Horses can have issues with sand building up in their intestines, which then causes them to colic (a really bad stomach ache), which can kill them because of a twist in the gut and/or a blockage. Hay is actually a good answer for that, but hay has a lot of fiber, and that can cause other problems.
One solution is to slow down their eating, so we have been spending time trying to figure out the best way to keep them from gobbling down their hay, and keeping it off the sand. We tried a large poly stock water tank for holding the hay, jut to keep it off the sand, only to see my horse flip the hay out so he could get to the finer stuff on the bottom. And of course, they both ended up flipping the tank over. We might just as well have thrown the hay on the ground in the first place.
We think, however, we’ve finally come up with a solution that seems to be working. We already had what is called “slow feeder” hay nets, and it suddenly occurred to me that if we pulled the draw strings through the drain hole in the bottom edge of the tank, it would prevent them from pulling everything out AND slow their eating down. The problem was finding a way to secure the strings. We tried wrapping them around a piece of wood that was large enough not to go back through the hole in the tank. I knew it wouldn’t last long, but it worked for at least an hour. Then I thought about finding a chunk of rubber, and having my husband drill a large hole through it so we could pull the strings (basically nylon rope) through and then tie around the rubber piece.
We didn’t know where to find a rubber block, but then I saw a dog toy made by Kong (if you’ve had a dog, you probably know that Kong makes rubber toys that are exceptionally dense, hard rubber). This one was shaped like a tire, and it works!!! The only problem we’re having now is getting that nylon rope to tie tightly. It’s especially hard when it’s so cold in the morning, and my fingers are stiff/numb. But, we’re making progress.
Now, it’s about finding the right supplement to help with digestion issues caused by the medication I give my horse for lameness. They are 21 and 23, so we’ve had a long run of pretty easy times with them. I wish we weren’t going through this, but if we are fortunate enough to have animals we enjoy, then this is part of it, too.
Believe it or not, grass has a lot of sugar in it, and this can cause laminitis in some horses (mine!). Here’s an explanation of that from Wikipedia:
Laminitis is a inflammation of laminae that affects the feet of ungulates and is found mostly in horses and cattle. Clinical signs include foot tenderness progressing to inability to walk, increased digital pulses, and increased temperature in the hooves. There is also swelling in foot in some cases.Severe cases with outwardly visible clinical signs are known by the colloquial term founder, and progression of the disease will lead to perforation of the coffin bone through the sole of the hoof or being unable to stand up, requiring euthanasia.
Thank you. I’m pretty good at figuring things out. My husband says I’m a micro manager, and he’s right. It’s just hard to keep my mouth shut when I see him attempting something I already know isn’t going to work! When he’s not feeling stressed, he appreciates me. 😊
We have some Kongs for the doggos. One is larger than the others, so of course I named it King Kong.
When we need the doggos occupied for a time we fill a Kong with peanut butter, and they'll spend an hour licking it clean.
Although simply leaving the dishwasher door open (with dirty, not clean dishes) also occupies them an hour or so, licking everything. Katie will shoo them away, but they come back like bugs to a bug zapper.
😂 I have photos of one dog that would get up on the dishwasher door when he was a pup, and just stick his head in from there!! And, the peanut butter trick is a good one, especially when they like to chew things.
Sorry I missed this. IncG just pointed it out to me. Yes, I've had some experience with this sort of feeding, though laminitis hasn't been a problem for us so far. Will try to fill you in a bit later.
That would be great. I think you can message me within Substack, but not sure how that works. Otherwise, I’ll check back. This morning my husband discovered that same horse in the pasture!!! He’s managing to get under a chain we have across the indoor door!!!
It's amazing what they can get past, over, under or around sometimes. Have to go out to feed mine here shortly, will try to get back to this when afternoon chores are done...
OMG, thank you so much Doug. I’m sure you’ve been through stuff with your herd! I hope all are doing well, and it continues that way for years to come!!
Star Trek First Season, 24th episode..."This Side of Paradise".... I'm not a Trekkie, nor did I watch much ST, but this particular episode made a lot of pot smokers sit up and notice... In (very) short...the crew gets stoned on a love drug that makes everything wonderful, but they stop doing everything they should be doing. Kirk discovers that the effects of the "drug" are overcome by violent emotional states. There's a few nuggets in there....including Spock claiming being under the influence was the only time he'd ever been happy.
My husband came across archive.org years ago, and it was fun looking through it. Now, it no longer takes me directly to the archives, and it seems that some things are no longer available. Oh well.
I haven't turned on the furnace yet, but decided last night to build a fire in the wood burning insert. I got the fire started, and as I am wont to do, let the door open a crack so that it draws more air, so that it will catch into a greater fire.
I went upstairs, when I heard a bloodcurdling scream, followed by a long "jay", the type of Jay which means "I screwed up badly". But I had fed the doggos, taken them out, they were snoozing. I'm scrambling down the stairs when Katie, tears in her eyes, tells me "you can't leave the door open; the stinkbugs got in!"
They had gotten in via the chimney. BTW, roasted stink bugs don't smell too bad, their death doesn't have them release the stink. I grabbed a cup, then began following katie as she pointed to (eventually over 15) a stink bug. I didn't notice most of them at first. One is the color of a log, and it landed on a log, and she could see it across the room. She asked if it was time to get my eye prescription updated. Every 2-3 stink bugs I carried them outside and released them.
After 20 minutes or so, I had removed all the stink bugs we could find, when one flirted with Katie, trying to land on her nose. Her scream scared the doggos, but not the stink bug, I waved my arms at the bug, who eventually landed on the mantle, where I scooped him into a cup. I carried him outside, hollering "Die Jedi scum, die!". I hope a bat got him; I like bats, outside the house.
20 minutes later Katie had calmed down. I apologized, but explained I never thought they'd invade via the chimney. Katie agreed it was a new approach on their part, and soon she was laughing about it. She did enjoy the fire, it warmed her up, it helped her relax.
I worked until about 1am on research. I have all the pastoral names looked up. I have three where I will go to Earlham to look for clues about the three--all three have at least two distinct identities who it could be. James A Parish: was he born in 1862 or 1874? 2 separate people there. The oddest one was Jennie Cosand. Her name had been misspelled in the records, so when I tried a "Quaker variant" (Cosand is in my records a dozen times), she appeared. Except, in findagrave.com, she appears twice, in the same cemetery, same husband, different death dates. An hour of research later, Laben Cosand married Jennie Boyd, who died. He buried her. He then married Jennie Holaday. When she died, she was buried in the same cemetery. Quaker records don't give enough clues which one it is, but the timing of the deaths suggests probably the second one, but it's an educated guess.
Not the most unusual in my data. Two brothers married two sisters; that was unusual, but the weirdest was a man who was widowed, then married his step-daughter (she was an adult by then). Ewwwwww!
I then spent an hour recording if the first pastor hired was male or female, for 206 meetings. 71% male, 22% female, 5% were hired as couples (e.g Jay and Katie Janney). There are a few where it is still tbd.
Believe me, if there’s a way to get in, they’ll find it. Our stinky Asian ladybugs seem to be coming in through the light cans in the ceiling of our sunroom. I’m not sure why they’re getting in there, and not the rest of the house, but obviously, something isn’t sealed tightly enough. I think I’m going to pull the furniture out on the first day warm and sunny enough to bring them out, and then try one of those bug bombs!!! Right now, I don’t see any because they’re cloistered together around those light fixtures, just above the ceiling.
Stink bugs: one year a coworker had his furnace shut down in the middle of the winter. When the HVAC tech took a look, he found the furnace filter was totally clogged up by stink bugs.
Stink bugs are kind of a mystery to me. They all want to be inside your house, but there is no way for them to survive without food. Apparently they eat vegetation which is found outdoors.
On Digital Dark - it doesn't seem such a bad thing to me. At least in the retirement of URLs. Maybe historians will care that pundits screeds will disappear, but I don't. I'm optimistic the worthy literature will continue to be available in print form for posterity.
On the positive side of digital, it's wonderful to be able to scan (with my phone, in seconds), things I think I should keep (financial/legal) and drop them on dropbox.
As digital storage gets cheaper all the time, we collectively accumulate mountains of it in ever greater detail. But that implies there’s no distinctions drawn between what’s worth keeping and what isn’t. The criteria for sorting and valuing it are opaque.
No comments on the big Baier/Harris interview? I thought she was terrible but there’s not much I like about her to begin with. She didn’t say anything to win me over last night.
On the early-released Ink-Stained Wretches, Mr. Stirewalt and Eliana were talking about the prospective interview as well as other recent media appearances by Harris.
I don't think she's trying to get me to vote for her. I think she's trying to increase turnout among more typical Democratic voters.
May give it a try on your recommendation —depending on how my patience holds.
Based on the commentary so far, she simply declines to present any substantive agenda, clearly for fear of turning off one single voter.
My Fox experience is strictly third-party summaries these days. Jonah and co. Even Matt Drudge is mainly critical, not really pushing their content via linkage.
On the subject of TDS: I believe there is also Type II TDS: the reaction to watching someone you know to be a moral, ethical person adopt opinions and positions that were anathema to them in earlier times.
Yes. I found this on YouTube if you want a walk down memory lane, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E8zmaOiCVw . So silly, so wonderful! There is even something there for cat lovers!
45 F here this morning. The big news is that our son is transitioning from a job that allowed him (ahem) to stay up until 3 AM to one that requires him to be at work at 7:30 - for a 13 hour day. He was up and cheerful and out the door on time. This will get him through election day and hopefully open doors to something new and interesting.
And the NC State Fair opens today. If you happen to be in Raleigh, come on by the Heritage Forge for blacksmithing demos and interesting iron objects both decorative and useful. Ask for Kathy.
Good morning. We have frost this morning. Waiting for that hard freeze which is supposed to be followed by Indian summer.
The mothership is featuring what amounts to an explainer on how Iran, with help from China and Russia is evading sanctions and selling oil. And someone at the FP just got TDS.
I almost always see something that interests me at the FP, but not today.
TMD's piece, while informative, was annoying to me because the Biden-Harris administration seems to believe sanctions "work," which I guess they do, if your goal is a nuclear-armed Iran.
Regarding TMD - I had the very same thought. I guess no one felt like being witty today. I like the humor of TGIF - that's the most healthy approach to politics today.
Here's a Golden Oldie from the TSAF Secret Archive:
Today’s special animal friend is the Velociraptor (Velociraptor mongoliensis), in honor of Velociraptor awareness day, which happened yesterday on April 18th. Velociraptors, which as a scientific name has to be capitalized each time, are a predatory dinosaur that lived in the late Cretaceous period, about 75 to 71 million years ago. Velociraptors were about the size of a present-day turkey, in contrast with the 6½ foot tall versions in Jurassic Park, which were actually based on the related dinosaur species Deinonychus.
A Velociraptor fossil was first discovered by Peter Kaisen during an expedition to the Gobi Desert by the American Museum of Natural History in 1923. The specimen consisted of a crushed skull and a single claw. In 1924, museum president Henry Fairfield Osborn designated the fossil as a new genus, Velociraptor. Earlier that year, Osborn mentioned the fossil in a magazine article, calling it Ovoraptor djadochtari, but since the name was never mentioned in any scientific article, it never stuck.
Velociraptors had large hands with three fingers, each of which had a very large claw to use for hunting. The second toe on their feet was 2½ inches long and was used to tear into or restrain struggling prey. All of this is very useful to know for when they inevitably take over the planet someday. Velociraptors, as you should already know, had feathers, mostly on their arms and tail. In 2007, scientists in Mongolia found quill knobs on an especially well-preserved forearm specimen. Scientists aren’t in complete consensus as to why Velociraptors had feathers, but the main theory is that their ancestors used them to fly and Velociraptors, which were flightless, hadn’t evolved them away yet.
Velociraptors probably ate other, smaller dinosaurs. There is lots of evidence that Velociraptors ate Protoceratops (a dinosaur similar to Triceratops), including a very famous fossil that shows one in combat with a Protoceratops. Scientists theorize that they were fighting as they were buried by a sandstorm. There is little to no evidence that Velociraptors, or any similar dinosaur, hunted in packs as they do in the Jurassic Park franchise.
The closest present-day animal to the Velociraptor anatomically is the kiwi. Both animals have similar anatomies, feather types, bone structure, and behaviors, other than the fact that kiwis aren’t carnivorous and don’t rip animals apart with their 2½ inch long claws. Other than that, they’re basically the same animal.
A little-known fact is that the Earth is actually shaped like a Velociraptor. The reason you might not know this is because corrupt government agencies, especially NASA, are trying to cover this fact up to advance their round-earth agenda. What can you do about this, you might ask? The simplest things you can do are to spread awareness and to not buy any NASA-themed merchandise.
Since I’m temporarily signed up for the Bloomberg morning news roundup email, this bit:
> Legalize pot, Lisa Jarvis writes. But also study it. We’ve racked up decades of evidence demonstrating how smoking and alcohol hurt our health, yet the data on cannabis are shockingly thin. That leaves consumers, medical providers, and policymakers to guess at what kind of consumption to consider harmless and what to worry about. <
I always wondered how that squared exactly. It seemed like a similar set of people were militantly anti-tobacco (Big Tobacco) due to their lies about the health risks *and* in favor of legalizing pot smoking everywhere, all the time, because surely there’s no health issue involved in an industry that doesn’t have a Big Industry name in menacing capital letters associated with it.
The place where change is needed the most, in my opinion, is in the availability of marijuana to scientific researchers. The fact that it is on Schedule 1 after all these years and has not been downgraded to a level where it can be made available legally to researchers, means no one is going to be able to figure out if it has any medical benefits, and if so, what they are, and what cannabinoids produce which effects, when it’s bioavailability is in various vehicles and dosages, etc.
Researchers do have access to marijuana, but they have to jump through an incredible number of hoops to get it.
Right now, people are taking all kinds of edibles, vaping all types of liquids, which may or may not have what they say they have in them, and with no better guidance than what some nobody in a health food store provides. The available research is shamefully scanty.
That’s just for health and medical applications. Before legalizing it widely and with no restrictions at all for recreational use, there should be more research on its effects on the brain and functioning.
I’ve always been concerned that there isn’t at present any technology for roadside testing of people who are driving erratically for cannabis intoxication as there is for alcohol. Even the current technology for urine drug screening does not indicate current intoxication as THC levels can remain elevated for weeks after the person has been smoking/vaping/consuming edibles.
Do not legalize pot (unless you want to pander to black men.) I have a research subject sleeping down the hall. I can attest pot is addicting and harmful. Thank God he’s been THC free for 6 months.
One of my brothers smokes pot all the time. He’s in his 60s, and he’s been doing this since HS. I wonder how different he’d be if he wasn’t doing this?
Can you believe we have a shop on the square that sells those gummies?! Someone told me they were giving out free samples one day. It’s crazy that it’s so easy to get now, and eating it is a lot more potent than smoking it!!!
It probably depends on where you are. I don’t think I’ve ever smelled it around here, even in Madison. But, that might be different if I got closer to downtown and campus.
It’s reaching a point of going too far. The majority of people who drink alcohol, don’t go wandering around town, AND unless you get close enough to smell their breath, it’s pretty much odor free.
"[Yahya Sinwar] was found with two other terrorists. One of them was a senior commander of Hamas terrorists in the Khan Yunis area. The other, according to Israeli news website Ynet, was a teacher employed by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)."
I could recycle my comments from last week (or whenever) about Nasrallah.
https://www.commentary.org/abe-greenwald/sinwar-is-gone-hamas-isnt-far-behind/
Some well justified dancing on the grave from our favorite voice of doom and gloom, "It's worse than that" Abe Greenwald.
My husband and I have been struggling with horse upkeep for what seems like months now. In fact, it probably has been months. We’ve gone from lameness issues to digestive problems, and suddenly our once very easy to keep equines are putting us through our own paces!
One problem is they need to be kept off pasture, and the alternative is keeping them on sand. Horses can have issues with sand building up in their intestines, which then causes them to colic (a really bad stomach ache), which can kill them because of a twist in the gut and/or a blockage. Hay is actually a good answer for that, but hay has a lot of fiber, and that can cause other problems.
One solution is to slow down their eating, so we have been spending time trying to figure out the best way to keep them from gobbling down their hay, and keeping it off the sand. We tried a large poly stock water tank for holding the hay, jut to keep it off the sand, only to see my horse flip the hay out so he could get to the finer stuff on the bottom. And of course, they both ended up flipping the tank over. We might just as well have thrown the hay on the ground in the first place.
We think, however, we’ve finally come up with a solution that seems to be working. We already had what is called “slow feeder” hay nets, and it suddenly occurred to me that if we pulled the draw strings through the drain hole in the bottom edge of the tank, it would prevent them from pulling everything out AND slow their eating down. The problem was finding a way to secure the strings. We tried wrapping them around a piece of wood that was large enough not to go back through the hole in the tank. I knew it wouldn’t last long, but it worked for at least an hour. Then I thought about finding a chunk of rubber, and having my husband drill a large hole through it so we could pull the strings (basically nylon rope) through and then tie around the rubber piece.
We didn’t know where to find a rubber block, but then I saw a dog toy made by Kong (if you’ve had a dog, you probably know that Kong makes rubber toys that are exceptionally dense, hard rubber). This one was shaped like a tire, and it works!!! The only problem we’re having now is getting that nylon rope to tie tightly. It’s especially hard when it’s so cold in the morning, and my fingers are stiff/numb. But, we’re making progress.
Now, it’s about finding the right supplement to help with digestion issues caused by the medication I give my horse for lameness. They are 21 and 23, so we’ve had a long run of pretty easy times with them. I wish we weren’t going through this, but if we are fortunate enough to have animals we enjoy, then this is part of it, too.
Believe it or not, grass has a lot of sugar in it, and this can cause laminitis in some horses (mine!). Here’s an explanation of that from Wikipedia:
Laminitis is a inflammation of laminae that affects the feet of ungulates and is found mostly in horses and cattle. Clinical signs include foot tenderness progressing to inability to walk, increased digital pulses, and increased temperature in the hooves. There is also swelling in foot in some cases.Severe cases with outwardly visible clinical signs are known by the colloquial term founder, and progression of the disease will lead to perforation of the coffin bone through the sole of the hoof or being unable to stand up, requiring euthanasia.
Why do they need to be kept off pasture?
I'm impressed with your inventiveness. Like watching "The Amazing Dr. Pol", this all makes me glad we never got any farm animals.
Thank you. I’m pretty good at figuring things out. My husband says I’m a micro manager, and he’s right. It’s just hard to keep my mouth shut when I see him attempting something I already know isn’t going to work! When he’s not feeling stressed, he appreciates me. 😊
We have some Kongs for the doggos. One is larger than the others, so of course I named it King Kong.
When we need the doggos occupied for a time we fill a Kong with peanut butter, and they'll spend an hour licking it clean.
Although simply leaving the dishwasher door open (with dirty, not clean dishes) also occupies them an hour or so, licking everything. Katie will shoo them away, but they come back like bugs to a bug zapper.
😂 I have photos of one dog that would get up on the dishwasher door when he was a pup, and just stick his head in from there!! And, the peanut butter trick is a good one, especially when they like to chew things.
Where’s Trosino when you need him? 😂
Off somewhere doing something of not much value probably. The deadbeat.
I know! He and I have had some lengthy equine discussions in the past. He also has older horses, so I’m betting he can relate on some of this stuff!
Sorry I missed this. IncG just pointed it out to me. Yes, I've had some experience with this sort of feeding, though laminitis hasn't been a problem for us so far. Will try to fill you in a bit later.
That would be great. I think you can message me within Substack, but not sure how that works. Otherwise, I’ll check back. This morning my husband discovered that same horse in the pasture!!! He’s managing to get under a chain we have across the indoor door!!!
It's amazing what they can get past, over, under or around sometimes. Have to go out to feed mine here shortly, will try to get back to this when afternoon chores are done...
I wish you all the best Anne.
OMG, thank you so much Doug. I’m sure you’ve been through stuff with your herd! I hope all are doing well, and it continues that way for years to come!!
Star Trek First Season, 24th episode..."This Side of Paradise".... I'm not a Trekkie, nor did I watch much ST, but this particular episode made a lot of pot smokers sit up and notice... In (very) short...the crew gets stoned on a love drug that makes everything wonderful, but they stop doing everything they should be doing. Kirk discovers that the effects of the "drug" are overcome by violent emotional states. There's a few nuggets in there....including Spock claiming being under the influence was the only time he'd ever been happy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Side_of_Paradise_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)
My husband came across archive.org years ago, and it was fun looking through it. Now, it no longer takes me directly to the archives, and it seems that some things are no longer available. Oh well.
It's being reported by not-quite-reliable sources that Yahya Sinwar is dead. WSJ says "maybe." May it be true!
🙏
First reaction: prayer.
Second reaction: "Ding dong, the witch is dead. . ."
You’re a good Christian, Phil. Apparently I’m not because I have no prayers for these terrorists, only for their demise.
Israel has confirmed it. Excellent.
Thanks for letting me know, Cynthia!! ❤️
I haven't turned on the furnace yet, but decided last night to build a fire in the wood burning insert. I got the fire started, and as I am wont to do, let the door open a crack so that it draws more air, so that it will catch into a greater fire.
I went upstairs, when I heard a bloodcurdling scream, followed by a long "jay", the type of Jay which means "I screwed up badly". But I had fed the doggos, taken them out, they were snoozing. I'm scrambling down the stairs when Katie, tears in her eyes, tells me "you can't leave the door open; the stinkbugs got in!"
They had gotten in via the chimney. BTW, roasted stink bugs don't smell too bad, their death doesn't have them release the stink. I grabbed a cup, then began following katie as she pointed to (eventually over 15) a stink bug. I didn't notice most of them at first. One is the color of a log, and it landed on a log, and she could see it across the room. She asked if it was time to get my eye prescription updated. Every 2-3 stink bugs I carried them outside and released them.
After 20 minutes or so, I had removed all the stink bugs we could find, when one flirted with Katie, trying to land on her nose. Her scream scared the doggos, but not the stink bug, I waved my arms at the bug, who eventually landed on the mantle, where I scooped him into a cup. I carried him outside, hollering "Die Jedi scum, die!". I hope a bat got him; I like bats, outside the house.
20 minutes later Katie had calmed down. I apologized, but explained I never thought they'd invade via the chimney. Katie agreed it was a new approach on their part, and soon she was laughing about it. She did enjoy the fire, it warmed her up, it helped her relax.
I worked until about 1am on research. I have all the pastoral names looked up. I have three where I will go to Earlham to look for clues about the three--all three have at least two distinct identities who it could be. James A Parish: was he born in 1862 or 1874? 2 separate people there. The oddest one was Jennie Cosand. Her name had been misspelled in the records, so when I tried a "Quaker variant" (Cosand is in my records a dozen times), she appeared. Except, in findagrave.com, she appears twice, in the same cemetery, same husband, different death dates. An hour of research later, Laben Cosand married Jennie Boyd, who died. He buried her. He then married Jennie Holaday. When she died, she was buried in the same cemetery. Quaker records don't give enough clues which one it is, but the timing of the deaths suggests probably the second one, but it's an educated guess.
Not the most unusual in my data. Two brothers married two sisters; that was unusual, but the weirdest was a man who was widowed, then married his step-daughter (she was an adult by then). Ewwwwww!
I then spent an hour recording if the first pastor hired was male or female, for 206 meetings. 71% male, 22% female, 5% were hired as couples (e.g Jay and Katie Janney). There are a few where it is still tbd.
Believe me, if there’s a way to get in, they’ll find it. Our stinky Asian ladybugs seem to be coming in through the light cans in the ceiling of our sunroom. I’m not sure why they’re getting in there, and not the rest of the house, but obviously, something isn’t sealed tightly enough. I think I’m going to pull the furniture out on the first day warm and sunny enough to bring them out, and then try one of those bug bombs!!! Right now, I don’t see any because they’re cloistered together around those light fixtures, just above the ceiling.
Stink bugs: one year a coworker had his furnace shut down in the middle of the winter. When the HVAC tech took a look, he found the furnace filter was totally clogged up by stink bugs.
Stink bugs are kind of a mystery to me. They all want to be inside your house, but there is no way for them to survive without food. Apparently they eat vegetation which is found outdoors.
They, along with Asian "Ladybugs", are seeking warmth. It's that time of year.
On Digital Dark - it doesn't seem such a bad thing to me. At least in the retirement of URLs. Maybe historians will care that pundits screeds will disappear, but I don't. I'm optimistic the worthy literature will continue to be available in print form for posterity.
On the positive side of digital, it's wonderful to be able to scan (with my phone, in seconds), things I think I should keep (financial/legal) and drop them on dropbox.
As digital storage gets cheaper all the time, we collectively accumulate mountains of it in ever greater detail. But that implies there’s no distinctions drawn between what’s worth keeping and what isn’t. The criteria for sorting and valuing it are opaque.
No comments on the big Baier/Harris interview? I thought she was terrible but there’s not much I like about her to begin with. She didn’t say anything to win me over last night.
*shrug*
On the early-released Ink-Stained Wretches, Mr. Stirewalt and Eliana were talking about the prospective interview as well as other recent media appearances by Harris.
I don't think she's trying to get me to vote for her. I think she's trying to increase turnout among more typical Democratic voters.
I went no farther than the Drudge cover and headline, “CAT EATS FOX”. I’m just not in the market for the content, is what it boils down to for me.
I’m sure if I saw more of Harris, I’d come to dislike her with greater intensity. That’s what happened to me with Obama and Hilary and John Kerry…
Nonetheless, Fox deserves to be chastised for being such mindless MAGA toadies.
I don’t watch Fox at all so can’t comment on the “MAGA toadies” allegation. You really should watch it, it will take only 20 minutes of your time.
May give it a try on your recommendation —depending on how my patience holds.
Based on the commentary so far, she simply declines to present any substantive agenda, clearly for fear of turning off one single voter.
My Fox experience is strictly third-party summaries these days. Jonah and co. Even Matt Drudge is mainly critical, not really pushing their content via linkage.
On the subject of TDS: I believe there is also Type II TDS: the reaction to watching someone you know to be a moral, ethical person adopt opinions and positions that were anathema to them in earlier times.
Ahh, The Wayback Machine, that takes me back a ways.
Mr. Peabody and his boy Sherman. What date should we set it for today?
I loved that show!!! Wasn’t it part of Rocky and Bullwinkle?
Yes. I found this on YouTube if you want a walk down memory lane, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E8zmaOiCVw . So silly, so wonderful! There is even something there for cat lovers!
Thank you!
45 F here this morning. The big news is that our son is transitioning from a job that allowed him (ahem) to stay up until 3 AM to one that requires him to be at work at 7:30 - for a 13 hour day. He was up and cheerful and out the door on time. This will get him through election day and hopefully open doors to something new and interesting.
And the NC State Fair opens today. If you happen to be in Raleigh, come on by the Heritage Forge for blacksmithing demos and interesting iron objects both decorative and useful. Ask for Kathy.
Thank you to Phil H and CynthiaW for saving me some reading time this morning
You're welcome!
Good morning. We have frost this morning. Waiting for that hard freeze which is supposed to be followed by Indian summer.
The mothership is featuring what amounts to an explainer on how Iran, with help from China and Russia is evading sanctions and selling oil. And someone at the FP just got TDS.
I almost always see something that interests me at the FP, but not today.
TMD's piece, while informative, was annoying to me because the Biden-Harris administration seems to believe sanctions "work," which I guess they do, if your goal is a nuclear-armed Iran.
Regarding TMD - I had the very same thought. I guess no one felt like being witty today. I like the humor of TGIF - that's the most healthy approach to politics today.
Here's a Golden Oldie from the TSAF Secret Archive:
Today’s special animal friend is the Velociraptor (Velociraptor mongoliensis), in honor of Velociraptor awareness day, which happened yesterday on April 18th. Velociraptors, which as a scientific name has to be capitalized each time, are a predatory dinosaur that lived in the late Cretaceous period, about 75 to 71 million years ago. Velociraptors were about the size of a present-day turkey, in contrast with the 6½ foot tall versions in Jurassic Park, which were actually based on the related dinosaur species Deinonychus.
A Velociraptor fossil was first discovered by Peter Kaisen during an expedition to the Gobi Desert by the American Museum of Natural History in 1923. The specimen consisted of a crushed skull and a single claw. In 1924, museum president Henry Fairfield Osborn designated the fossil as a new genus, Velociraptor. Earlier that year, Osborn mentioned the fossil in a magazine article, calling it Ovoraptor djadochtari, but since the name was never mentioned in any scientific article, it never stuck.
Velociraptors had large hands with three fingers, each of which had a very large claw to use for hunting. The second toe on their feet was 2½ inches long and was used to tear into or restrain struggling prey. All of this is very useful to know for when they inevitably take over the planet someday. Velociraptors, as you should already know, had feathers, mostly on their arms and tail. In 2007, scientists in Mongolia found quill knobs on an especially well-preserved forearm specimen. Scientists aren’t in complete consensus as to why Velociraptors had feathers, but the main theory is that their ancestors used them to fly and Velociraptors, which were flightless, hadn’t evolved them away yet.
Velociraptors probably ate other, smaller dinosaurs. There is lots of evidence that Velociraptors ate Protoceratops (a dinosaur similar to Triceratops), including a very famous fossil that shows one in combat with a Protoceratops. Scientists theorize that they were fighting as they were buried by a sandstorm. There is little to no evidence that Velociraptors, or any similar dinosaur, hunted in packs as they do in the Jurassic Park franchise.
The closest present-day animal to the Velociraptor anatomically is the kiwi. Both animals have similar anatomies, feather types, bone structure, and behaviors, other than the fact that kiwis aren’t carnivorous and don’t rip animals apart with their 2½ inch long claws. Other than that, they’re basically the same animal.
A little-known fact is that the Earth is actually shaped like a Velociraptor. The reason you might not know this is because corrupt government agencies, especially NASA, are trying to cover this fact up to advance their round-earth agenda. What can you do about this, you might ask? The simplest things you can do are to spread awareness and to not buy any NASA-themed merchandise.
Last paragraph...Kinda snuck up on me...."round Earth agenda" made me laugh. Bravo, Son E.
He's a clever young man. He was 15 when he wrote that.
Sly. 🙂
It was composed by Son E.
Thank you.
The near-zealous faith in the carrot-and-stick approach where we rule out using sticks and only offer carrots: it’s 🤯.
Also, the belief that our enemies are just friends with self-esteem problems who will come around once we gift them enough, or something.
If we stick with the “can’t we just be friends” strategy for just a little longer, they’ll come around. You’ll see.
The Iranian regime does horrible things to its own population as well as attacking the rest of the world. Why do we want to help them stay in power?
Is it infectious? Like TWA?
Should I ask what TWA is, on the assumption that it's not Trans World Airlines?
Three-word acronym.
🤣
https://abcnews.go.com/US/exotic-wild-cat-native-africa-asia-found-home/story?id=114843603
An animal friend story from the Chicago area.
Since I’m temporarily signed up for the Bloomberg morning news roundup email, this bit:
> Legalize pot, Lisa Jarvis writes. But also study it. We’ve racked up decades of evidence demonstrating how smoking and alcohol hurt our health, yet the data on cannabis are shockingly thin. That leaves consumers, medical providers, and policymakers to guess at what kind of consumption to consider harmless and what to worry about. <
I always wondered how that squared exactly. It seemed like a similar set of people were militantly anti-tobacco (Big Tobacco) due to their lies about the health risks *and* in favor of legalizing pot smoking everywhere, all the time, because surely there’s no health issue involved in an industry that doesn’t have a Big Industry name in menacing capital letters associated with it.
The place where change is needed the most, in my opinion, is in the availability of marijuana to scientific researchers. The fact that it is on Schedule 1 after all these years and has not been downgraded to a level where it can be made available legally to researchers, means no one is going to be able to figure out if it has any medical benefits, and if so, what they are, and what cannabinoids produce which effects, when it’s bioavailability is in various vehicles and dosages, etc.
Researchers do have access to marijuana, but they have to jump through an incredible number of hoops to get it.
Right now, people are taking all kinds of edibles, vaping all types of liquids, which may or may not have what they say they have in them, and with no better guidance than what some nobody in a health food store provides. The available research is shamefully scanty.
That’s just for health and medical applications. Before legalizing it widely and with no restrictions at all for recreational use, there should be more research on its effects on the brain and functioning.
I’ve always been concerned that there isn’t at present any technology for roadside testing of people who are driving erratically for cannabis intoxication as there is for alcohol. Even the current technology for urine drug screening does not indicate current intoxication as THC levels can remain elevated for weeks after the person has been smoking/vaping/consuming edibles.
Do not legalize pot (unless you want to pander to black men.) I have a research subject sleeping down the hall. I can attest pot is addicting and harmful. Thank God he’s been THC free for 6 months.
One of my brothers smokes pot all the time. He’s in his 60s, and he’s been doing this since HS. I wonder how different he’d be if he wasn’t doing this?
Can you believe we have a shop on the square that sells those gummies?! Someone told me they were giving out free samples one day. It’s crazy that it’s so easy to get now, and eating it is a lot more potent than smoking it!!!
I’ve heard delta 9 is legal in WI, I guess there is some weird loophole. That’s probably what the gummies contain.
I don’t know what delta 9 is, but I know they have THC. The whole thing is obnoxious, and must be horrible when you have a kid you’re worried about.
That's good. Apart from the usual physical problems of smoking and having drugs in your system....pot has a profound de-incentivizing ability.
I’m amazed by how often I smell it in public. All kinds of places. It makes me wonder how many people are moving through daily life in a haze.
It probably depends on where you are. I don’t think I’ve ever smelled it around here, even in Madison. But, that might be different if I got closer to downtown and campus.
I walked past a car at Kwik Trop yesterday and whoa, someone was smoking!
It’s reaching a point of going too far. The majority of people who drink alcohol, don’t go wandering around town, AND unless you get close enough to smell their breath, it’s pretty much odor free.
You don't have to wonder. Absent specific numbers, I'll just say "a lot".
We sometimes ask whether we're smelling marijuana or a skunk.
There's a reason they call it "skunk weed".
Could a general attitude of "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes," be worse than the expensive and faux-scientific regime we have now?