George Will thinks straigh and writes pretty. Noble lies without the nobility - Breadcrumbs
George Will thinks straigh and writes pretty. Noble lies without the nobility - Breadcrumbs
In a letter to the editor of The Boston Globe, Mary Skorczeski linked voters’ Democratic turn to Trump’s insatiable need for attention: “What happens when you suck the oxygen out of the room for 10 years? People turn blue.” (Michael Smith, Georgetown, Ky.)
Via Frank Bruni
I love that too much.
I need to temper my prior exultant remark.
An Indy Star account from reporter Marissa Meador noted that the map came caveats: “It’s unclear if this would have actually played out in practice. Bayh wasn’t on the ballot for a U.S. House seat, so he’s presumably meant to stand in for a generic Democrat running for U.S. House in this analysis. But the dynamics of each congressional race are different, and not all Democrats would have necessarily performed as well as Bayh. But Republican performance also would have been poor, it appears, when simply just analyzing congressional race margins. Under the current map, each Indiana congressional race swung an average of 22 points to the left from 2024 to 2026.”
Retired journalist Dave Bangert.
Bangert, a former nemesis, is now my hero. His locally-focused Substack brings news the struggling local Gannet paper doesn’t.
Impeach Pete Hegseth brings the receipts.
Oh, so sweet:
The Indiana Republicans who told Trump ‘no’ last December just saved their delegation in arguably the most underreported story of the cycle. … The gerrymander that was supposed to deliver 9-0 for Republicans would have delivered 8-1 for Democrats
A County-by-County Look at How the Blue Wave Touched Nearly Every Part of America - WSJ
Great maps. My county went from barely red to solidly blue, a 20-point swing.
15. Across wide stretches of the sun-bleached Sonoran desert in Arizona, thousands of retired aircraft sit nose-to-tail in graveyards of metal known as boneyards. Many of their engines haven’t been fired up for years. But America’s soaring demand for electricity to power data centers is bringing them back to life. Several companies are racing to strip the engines out of old aircraft to convert them into electrical generators. And data centers, desperate for power, are snapping them up. (Source: nytimes.com)
John Ellis News Items (a great alt-news source)
“Get off my lawn!” says cranky old man.
an electric engine has 100 times fewer moving parts and than a fuel-driven engine.
If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand time, “100 times fewer” does not compute!
(But thanks for “fewer” instead of “less.")
I’m imagining Biblical scenes where the enemy (Philistia?) is laying siege to Israel when an Angel comes down at night, confuses the enemy and they all kill each other.
Can Republicans, having debased themselves under Trump, keep from “killing” each other with buck-passing for yesterday’s debacle?
I like gadgets and apps, but I’ve never been able to figure out why I should have things like Zelle and Venmo on my phone. They seem to me to complicate, not simplify.
An awfully good 5-minute summary of the election from Anne Applebaum: www.youtube.com/watch
I know Gonzaga beat Purdue last night while I was otherwise occupied, but I’m liking a lot that I’m seeing on the recorded game. 7'4" Daniel Jacobsen has beefed up a bit and much improved, for instance, and while nobody can replace Braden Smith, Omer Mayer is shaping up at point guard.
Recommended:
The East West Series, now known as The Great Christian Divide: East & West (I guess it evolved during production, just as it grew from 24 episodes to 33).
Look at the “Episode Guide” and you’ll see why a long-ago Orthodox convert with intellectual leanings found it irresistible.
Gotta say getting up early to vote as soon as polls open, after a late bedtime, really boogers up my morning routine and concentration.
I imagine I’ll sit up a bit late for election coverage Tuesday night, though I might decide it’s more wholesome to follow my normal routine, and que sera, sera.
I’m usually a blowout skeptic, but I’m having trouble imagining as many voters as fired up for more of the same as for change.
Black Walnuts are the bane of my wife’s existence. She read today that a student once meticulously tracked the production of one (presumably large) tree and it was more than 3700 in a season.
[F]or every far-left proponent of “postcolonial” theologies who is attempting to evacuate the faith of its historic substance, there is a neo-Confederate apologist who styles himself as fighting the incursion of “cultural Marxism” in Baptist seminaries.
John Ehrett, Book Review: “Live Not By Lies” – Conciliar Post
First, we had an adjacent state Senate district where Trump’s lackey sought retribution for incumbent opposing redistricting Indiana mid-decade. (Lackey lost by 3 votes!)
Now, my own mentally impaired incumbent state Senator, caught shoplifting, has pledged to resign after the election so as to let the GOP pick his successor, but is running TV ads as if he intends to serve. It feels - well, surreal.
Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan is on fire, and we’re on precisely the same wavelength (although she, a sophisticate, named a few reasons I hadn’t thought of).
No user review available, but I’m kind of excited by Readwise Books: Step Three of Our Master Plan.
I started building a Claude AI Agent to run some routine morning tasks for me. Then I lost interest. I think I maybe decided I like a little friction.
So Claude is denied a promotion and remains for me a mere fabulous Research Assistant and occasional data analyst.
If James Howard Kunstler didn’t exist, I’d have to invent him to make my own inclinations feel moderate:
Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading—the jive-plastic commuter tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego-block hotel complexes, the “gourmet mansardic” junk-food joints, the Orwellian office “parks” featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle-board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobia-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call “growth.”
James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere
Consider this in conjunction with my recent post about beautiful churches; I guess nothing important happens in our common spaces.
Beautiful church buildings respect the mysteries that occur within, chiefly the transformation of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. If we have a high view of the Eucharist … we will … want to have a beautiful temple in which these sacred mysteries occur. By contrast, a low view of the Eucharist often finds expression in church buildings that proclaim a type of architectural Docetism: God is everywhere generally but nowhere in particular.
Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation