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.
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
I’ve installed Kalshi, not to trade (bet), but to browse and see whether markets really are more accurate predictors than experts.
TIL
TUR (Transurethral resection) is passé. PVP (photoselective vaporization of the prostate) is now the cool kid.
Having cared for many post-op TUR men 55 years ago, I’m glad of the change.
I heard this read on a podcast a few hours ago and it blind-sided me in the best possible way. When I Am Asked | The Poetry Foundation
Having left the Protestant religious world 29 years ago next month, I nevertheless remain interested in its goings-on — sometimes horrified, sometimes filled with schadenfreude, occasionally pleasantly surprised — because America is deeply Protestant and I cannot entirely escape that fact short of, perhaps, getting me to an Orthodox monastery and forever eschewing news and political involvement.
But I’ve become increasingly aware that, in David Foster Wallace terms, because Protestantism is not the water I deliberately swim in, there’s not only things I’m better equipped to see but important currents I’m oblivious to.
My version of Protestantism has scarcely been updated since 1997 and a lot of it is shaped by my idiosyncratic experiences in the 1960s and early 1970s, when I was caught in a backwater of Wheaton-style evangelicalism — a strongly dispensationalist milieu adjacent to a broader mainstream. So I’m still tending to beat a dispensational premillennialist horse, though I see glimpses that it’s virtually dead.
But I’m updating my version through reading The Protestant Mind, a blog-like project of First Things with a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.
In this epoch when “Evangelical” is almost synonymous with “MAGA” in the popular press, *The Protestant Mind*’s principal author, Dale Coulter, helpfully provides a taxonomy of the Christian Right in America 2026 (“The Two Evangelical Rights”). The major rubrics are New Protestant Right” and “new evangelical populism”, but there are substreams of each.
It helped me clarify a lot. I was tempted to speculate about which one I’d likely be in were I still Protestant, but that’s just a counterfactual too far.
Is There Anything BPC-157 Can’t Cure? - The Atlantic.
Who else remembers DMSO, the liniment that left a garlic tasted in users’ mouths and cured everything? (It’s still around, somewhat to my surprise.)