Last Awe of Sentries, 44th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): These are the times dystopian novels used to warn us about. Today, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said there will be "no amnesty" for agricultural workers from the Stable Genius' efforts to deport all immigrants in the country. As to concerns that mass deportation of farm workers would disrupt the U.S. food supply, she suggested some robots and people receiving government aid could replace immigrant workers. "Ultimately, the answer on this is automation, also some reform within the current governing structure. And then also, when you think about, there are 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program. There are plenty of workers in America." 

Let's step back and address a couple obvious points. One, food harvesting is hard work for long hours and low wages, under tough to extreme weather conditions. There's a reason that only immigrants are desperate enough to do it. Second, many people receiving Medicaid are children, the elderly, the handicapped, and the disabled, and are not physically capable of hard, farm work. The majority of Medicaid recipients are not, as has been described, young adults living in their parents' basements playing video games. 

Under Rollins version of the Stable Genius' plans, children and grandparents needing medical care beyond their budget will have to roll up their sleeves and spend 10 to 12 hours a day bent over picking beans in 90° weather under direct sun. Alongside robots. Also, many Medicaid recipients don't live conveniently close to farmland, and may have to leave home for seasonal farm work, find alternate means to care for their children or the elderly while they're gone, obtain some alternative form of lodging and survive on the road on minimum wage, all while recovering from heart surgery, cancer treatment, diabetes, or dementia.

So the plan is apparently to deport all of the immigrant farm workers and replace them with Medicaid recipients and, um, robots. Obviously, 34 million Americans aren't going to show up voluntarily for this new form of slave labor, so will ICE, after they're through with the deportations, start rounding up these "able-bodied adults?" The Stable Genius' Bad Budget Boondoggle Bill gives ICE an operating budget of $37.5 billion (with a "B"). That's greater than the entire military budget of Italy and Israel (or of Brazil, Netherlands, or Switzerland, for that matter).  The Bad Budget Boondoggle Bill essentially creates a new militia to carry out the Stable Genius' political whims, be it mass deportation, "pacifying" restive Democratic strongholds like Los Angeles or New York, and possibly later rounding up slave labor to harvest the fields.

There's your dystopia for you. We are now a massive police state. With Alligator Auschwitz, we now have our first concentration camp on American soil. And the Courts and Congress have ceded all political and military power to the Stable Genius. 

This isn't going to end well for us.

Tremendous and Sheer, 43rd Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor):  The Edwards Plateau of central Texas rises above the adjacent Gulf Coastal Plain along the Balcones Fault Escarpment. According to my old, battered copy of Nevin Fenneman's Physiography of the Eastern United States (1932), the Edwards Plateau, also known as Texas Hill Country, is underlain by the Wichita and Fredericksburg limestones. The Hill Country is notable for its karst topography and tall rugged hills. The landscape is further dissected by many rivers, including the Guadalupe, and the surrounding hills rise 400–500 feet above the surrounding valleys. Throughout the region, a thin layer of topsoil leaves rocks and boulders exposed, making the region very dry and prone to flash flooding, much like paved, urban environments. 

Kerr County (Texas) historian Joe Herring, Jr. notes that Camp Stewart was established in 1926 on the South Fork of the Guadalupe near the confluence with Cypress Creek. A year later, Camp Stewart became Camp Mystic for Girls. In the early days, Camp Mystic consisted of 1400 acres, and the girls were housed in 18 log cabins constructed from cypress logs cut on the camp's property. Today, the camp occupies 700 acres and has been in continuous use except for two years when the U.S. Army took it over during World War II to serve as a center for veterans to recover from war injuries.

The USGS maintains a stream gaging station on the Guadalupe River at Hunt, Texas, near Camp Mystic. Floods there are considered "major" if the stream gage exceeds 22 feet, which has happened three times (1978, 1986, and 2001) since 1966. However, the largest known flood occurred in 1932, before regular monitoring had begun. On July 2 of that year, the gage height reached 36.6 feet and the flow was 206,000 ft³/sec, equivalent to 2.34 Olympic-sized swimming pools every second.

Camp Mystic and other camps along the Guadalupe were hit hard by the 1932 flood. Buildings and property were washed away overnight.  Herring reports that new structures were subsequently built above the flood levels and many campers slept in tents instead of cabins that year, and viewed those accommodations not as a hardship, but as a great adventure.

According to Herring, another flood hit the Guadalupe in 1935, and though most camps had rebuilt above the flood plain, questions arose about the safety of camping along the Guadalupe and attendance at some camps had begun to suffer.

The flood that just occurred this year on the Guadalupe caused the gage at Hunt to rise to 37.5 feet on July 4, almost a foot higher than the 36.6 feet recorded in 1932. However, although the gage was higher this year, the reported discharge, or flow, at 4:35 am was 120,000 ft³/sec (1.36 Olympic-sized swimming pools per second), far less than the 206,000 ft³/sec reported for 1932. I suspect that the stream gage may have been changed or adjusted at some point after 1932 (this is not uncommon), as a higher river level (gage height) means greater discharge (river flow). 

Regardless of the discrepancies in the data, the 2025 flood is comparable to that of 1932. Tragically, this year's flood still managed to wash away campers and counselors at Camp Mystic, despite the buildings having been moved to above the 1932 flood level. This raises the question of whether the camp had reoccupied the lower elevations impacted by the earlier flood, or if new structures (barracks?) were constructed down in the floodplain, perhaps when the Army took over during WW II.

 

Which Past Was Hers,  42nd Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): My heart breaks reading about the 78-and-counting deaths in Texas from flooding on the Guadalupe River. I can't imagine the anguish of the parents who learn their children were swept away from a summer camp by the floodwaters. It's beyond comprehension and well beyond tragic. 

But in these times we live in, everything becomes political and everything is about finger-pointing and blaming others. The left is blaming climate change and government budget cuts, the right is blaming the National Weather Service. As a hydrogeologist, I can't let this incident pass without my own two cents (spoiler alert: I don't blame either side). 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declared today a “day of prayer” for the victims, both surviving and deceased. If prayer helps you get through this, then fine, go ahead and pray, but don't expect it to change anything.

The director of the Texas Division of Emergency Management has faulted the NWS for not predicting “the amount of rain we saw,” even though alerts were issued beforehand and as it became clear the region was facing an emergency.  A flash-flood watch was issued Thursday afternoon that noted Kerr County, where much of the flooding began early Friday morning, was a particularly vulnerable area, along with more urgent flash-flood emergency alerts in the overnight hours as the disaster unfolded. The Emergency Management director should be asking why his agency didn't do more to heed the NWS' warnings and advisories, and work proactively to mitigate the situation by evacuating people in the flood zone while it was still possible.  

Also, the NWS was one of several federal agencies targeted by the Stable Genius' DOGE boys, which had laid off nearly 600 employees, around the same amount of staffers the service lost in the 15 previous years.

But the staffing shortage wasn't the issue, and Monday-morning quarterbacking Emergency Management's decisions isn't the solution. It's not the cause, but the underlaying issue here is climate change, as little as some people want to hear that. To be clear, the flood wasn't "caused" by climate change. This morning, I heard Chris Christie say on This Week that no one will ever convince him that Hurricane Sandy was caused by climate change. Governor, I agree. If someone tells you it was caused by climate change, they don't know what they're talking about and you can safely ignore them.   

Climate change doesn't cause rain, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, or droughts. They're caused by meteorological and atmospheric processes, but climate change does increase the severity and frequency of storms, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and droughts. And it also impedes scientists' ability to forecast extreme weather events.

Flood forecasting is basically a statistical exercise. The USGS has been monitoring the Guadalupe River since October 1941, and has developed statistics on the frequency and intensity of flood events based on the 84-year record. Based on the monitoring history, scientists can calculate the average flow rate (53 ft³/sec) and the maximum flow rate (599 ft³/sec, recorded in 2002). As a 599 ft³/sec flood occurred once in 84 years, one can state that the chance for a flood of that magnitude happening in any given year is 1-in-84, or a 1.2% chance. FYI, the 100-year flood is the flood that has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.

Today, the river is flowing at 872 ft³/sec, shattering the 23-year-old record of 599 ft³/sec. To give you an idea of the volume, today's flow would fill an Olympic-size swimming pool every 90 seconds. 

The available, online data shows the river has flooded eight times between October 2007 and June 2025, meaning the gage level was above 10 feet, and two of those floods were "moderate," with the gage over 18 feet. A flood is considered "major" if the gage exceeds 22 feet, and today the river level topped 37.5 feet, another record. 

From the monitoring data, one can calculate a "flood frequency," i.e., the river floods x number of times per year, and extreme floods occur once every x years. Of course, the frequency alone can't predict when the flood will actually occur, but coupled with rainfall and meteorological data, there is sufficient information to issue flood watches and flood warnings when appropriate.

Climate change, however, throws a monkey wrench into the calculations. With conditions changing so rapidly, the past is no longer a useful indicator of the future, or even of the present. The x number of years extreme floods occur is increasing and increasing rapidly, and if we only consider, say, the last 10 years to calculate flood frequencies, well, that's not enough data to be meaningful. Statistically, the data-point population isn't significant enough for the calculated frequencies to be meaningful. Nowadays, we have so-called "100-year floods" occurring annually or every few years, with each flood more severe than the one before.  

Computer models can simulate the "new normal" and can provide useful statistics of the expected flood frequencies and flood levels in our new climate, but due to climate skepticism and denial, the results aren't trusted and the effort is being rapidly defunded by the government. So the old tools don't work, the new tools aren't trusted, half the country's underwater, and the other half is on fire.

But Gov. Abbott's gonna pray the flood away, so I guess we'll be alright.

Apparent Doorways, 41st Day of Summer, 525 ME (Atlas): I'm old. I'm so old that I've been collecting Social Security for five years now. My communications with the SSA are generally minimal - usually just an annual notice about the cost-of-living adjustment and an occasional warning to be on lookout for fraud and scams.

Thursday, I received an unusual message from them with the heading, Social Security Applauds Passage of Legislation Providing Historic Tax Relief for Seniors. It sounded like propaganda, and in fact that's exactly what it was. The email read:

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill, a landmark piece of legislation that delivers long-awaited tax relief to millions of older Americans.

The bill ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits, providing meaningful and immediate relief to seniors who have spent a lifetime contributing to our nation's economy.

The email falsely claimed the big, bad budget bill includes "a provision that eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries . . . ensuring that retirees can keep more of what they have earned."

However, the Stable Genius' budget bill does not actually eliminate federal taxes on Social Security like the email claimed. The rule, passed through the reconciliation process to avoid a Democratic filibuster, provides a temporary tax deduction of up to $6,000 for people over 65, and $12,000 for married seniors. These benefits will start to phase out for those with incomes of more than $75,000 and married couples of more than $150,000 a year.

Need I point out that a temporary tax deduction is not the same thing as eliminating federal tax on benefits?  

The big, bad budget bill also includes provisions that will strip many people of their health insurance, cut food assistance for the poor, kill off clean-energy development, and raise the national debt by trillions of dollars, but the email doesn't mention that. Further, the bill imposes a new limit on all itemized deductions and makes permanent the termination of most miscellaneous itemized deductions. So whatever savings and gained from the over-65 deduction may disappear due to the limit on all deductions. 

New Jersey congressman Frank Pallone wrote on X that “every word” of the email is a lie. “It’s disturbing to see Trump hijack a public institution to push blatant misinformation,” he wrote. Kathleen Romig, a former senior adviser at the SSA during the Biden administration, told CNN the email “doesn’t sound like normal government communications, official communications. It sounds like – you know – partisan.”  Jeff Nesbit, who served as a top SSA official under Republican and Democratic presidents, went further, posting on X, “The agency has never issued such a blatant political statement. The fact that Trump and his minion running SSA has [sic] done this is unconscionable.”

Vibrant Threshold, 40th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): On this Interdependence Day, I give you the MAGA Prayer, inspired and adapted from a passage I read today in James Joyce's Ulysses:

I believe in ICE, the scourge almighty, creators of hell upon earth, and in the musky DOGE, those sons of a gun, who were conceived of unholy boasts, bored of their Bloody Marys, suffered under Trump and Vance, were calcified, dread, and curried. On the third day, they arose again from their beds, descended to Mar-a-Lago, sitteth on their butt-ends until further ordered, whence they shall ask for a living but shall not get paid. And to the Republicans, if you can stand them, one nation, under guard, with liberties and justice for one.

On this, the 249th anniversary of the founding of this nation, I would wish it well but the joke's on us: amerika's already over, the man who sold the world has exchanged the country for syphilisation (another Joyce-ism).

 

Each Note Felt, 39th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Electra): Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Stable Genius' big, bad budget bill. They made no changes and passed it just as the Senate had sent it over to them. They voted to close rural hospitals, to throw millions off of Medicaid, to kneecap alternative energy, and to add trillions to the national debt. I won't go into all the negative impacts the bill will have on our lives - I haven't read the entire, nearly 1,000-page document, and others describe it in far better detail elsewhere. Do your own homework and read up on it yourself.

I will say this - some of the worst parts, like the Medicaid cuts, deliberately won't kick in until after the 2026 mid-term elections, so we won't have experience the full impact of this awful legislation until after the Republicans have a chance to try and get reelected. But don't fall for it: it's too late to negate all the ill effects this will have on this nation, but the sooner we begin the long, protracted healing process the better. 

Vote the bastards out of office. In Georgia, this includes Marjorie Taylor Greene (naturally), Rick Allen, Buddy Carter (at what age does a grown man stop calling himself "Buddy"?), Andrew (Day of Peaceful Tourists) Clyde, Barry Loudermilk, Richard McCormick, Austin Scott, Brian Jack and his cheesy siblings, Monterey and Pepper, and Mike Collins and his brother, Tom Collins (just kidding - that one's a cocktail, but I need one after this vote).

So here we go, amerika, the longest I-told-you-so in recorded history. 

 

Pacing and the Unshed, 38th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): I hate to jinx it by saying it out loud, but it's nearly 9:00 pm here in Georgia and the House Republicans in Washington still can't seem to find the numbers to pass the Stable Genius' big, bad budget bill.

They're really in a quandary: if they oppose it, the Stable Genius promises they will lose their House seats to a primary challenger. If they support it, the will lose their seats to a Democrat in the General Election. They lose either way: it's a lose-lose choice. Heads, I win; tails, you lose.

Since they're on their way out either way, may I suggest they vote not to close rural hospitals, throw millions off of Medicaid, kneecap alternative energy, and add trillions to the national debt? Just winging out ideas here.   

Day of Fallacies, 37th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): The Senate approved the Stable Genius' budget bill today. Three Republican senators - Susan Collins (Maine), Rand Paul (Kentucky), and Tom Tillis (North Carolina) - voted against it, and it took a tie-breaking vote by the VP JD  to pass it. It now goes back to the House for reconciliation, where it's expected to pass. 

On top of recent Supreme Court rulings, this is another win for the Stable Genius. "You're going to get sick of winning," the SG predicted on the 2016 campaign trail, and he was right (at least the part about getting sick). The bill will add at least $3.3 trillion to the nation’s debt over the next 10 years, making it among the most expensive bills in a generation, and will also reduce the amount of tax revenue the country collects for decades. Such a shortfall could begin a seismic shift in the nation’s fiscal trajectory and raise the risk of a debt crisis.

To be blunt about it, it destroys this country. But to the oligarchs and billionaires who'll benefit, that's a price worth paying. Who needs America when you can own a second megayacht? 

The rest of us will have to scrape by, tooth and nail, among the increased heat, the police oppression, the pervasive hunger, and the endemic sickness, to survive as best we can. On the positive side, it's been noted that the arts and spirituality tend to flourish during difficult times. 

I think we're in for a veritable renaissance in the arts and spirituality.

 

The Iron Keeled Pentecost, 36th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): These modern times in a nutshell (What's your opinion of the times?):

The Stable Genius has released Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, 38, in order to testify against Kilmar Abrego Garcia. In case you've been blissfully living in a news vacuum, Garcia was wrongfully deported to a notoriously brutal prison El Salvador. The Administration admitted the deportation was a mistake but argued there was nothing they could do about it, what's done is done, and initially refused to bring him back, despite court orders and public outcry. They finally agreed to bring him back, but only in order to face trial for a host of charges from human trafficking to child pornography, charges which had nothing to do with his initial deportation.

The government intends to use Reyes' testimony in their case against Garcia. Reyes has been deported but returned five times, has been convicted of smuggling migrants, and has pleaded guilty to deadly conduct for drunkenly firing a gun in Texas. I have to admit I didn't know that drunkenly firing a gun was illegal in Texas - I thought it was a state tradition, something you had to do in order to get a driver's license. I guess it's illegal when Latinos do it. 

So in order to justify his own mistake, the Stable Genius is releasing a violent felon with five deportations so he can testify against a person with no criminal record they mistakenly deported.

Idiocracy.

 

The Shouts from the Sea, 35th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Atlas): Let's take a look, shall we?, at what's going on in the world today:

Israeli forces are urging people to evacuate eastern areas of Gaza City before planned military operations  there escalate and intensify, displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians in this one offensive alone. Meanwhile, "post-apocalyptic" violence and anarchy among militants, clans, Hamas, and criminal gangs rise as they vie for power amid Israeli strikes and fights over aid and supplies.

Almost forgotten among all the other news items, Russia is continuing its unprovoked war against Ukraine and last night pounded the country with hundreds of drones and missiles in one of the war’s largest assaults. Strikes on infrastructure were reported across the country, including in western Ukraine, which Russia had until now hit less frequently.

Analysis by the NY Times claims that the Republican budget reconciliation, the Stable Genius' "big beautiful bill," will cause 11.8 million people of lose their health insurance, and separately could cripple wind and solar power.

An "explosive increase’ in the number of unusually aggressive lone-star ticks is due to climate change. The ticks, which can cause meat allergies, were common here in the South, but are new spreading to areas previously too cold for them. Also, the Earth is trapping much more heat than climate models had forecast, and the rate has doubled in the past 20 years. Positive feedback loops are leading to the exponential growth.

The University of Virginia has received explicit warning from the Stable Genius that the school will suffer cuts to jobs, research funding, student aid, and visas unless the university's president resigns over his DEI policies. Also, the Stable Genius is threatening to cut off funds to New York City if the presumptive Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani doesn’t "behave." The Stable Genius has accused Mamdani, a self-described "democratic socialist," of being a communist over his campaign pledge to tax the very wealthy.

May we live in interesting times.

 

Eighth Ocean, 34th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): Today is the 15-dozenth day of the year, so even if it wasn't Eighth Ocean in Angus MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar, it ought to be something. So I moved Eighth Ocean from the 22nd day of Summer in the original USC to the 34th in my New Revised USC.. 

Depressingly, Mike Allen of Axios has catalogued all the new precedents conceded to The Stable Genius by Congress this year:

• Presidents can limit the classified information they share with the House and Senate after bombing a foreign country without Congressional approval.


• Presidents can usurp Congress's power to levy tariffs, provided they declare a national emergency.


• Presidents can unilaterally freeze spending approved by Congress, and dismantle or fire the heads of independent agencies established by law.


• Presidents can take control of a state's National Guard, even if the governor opposes it, and occupy the state for as long as the president wants.


• Presidents can accept gifts from foreign nations, as large as a $200 million plane, even if it's unclear whether the president gets to keep the plane at the end of the term.


• Presidents can actively profit from their time in office, including creating new currencies structured to allow foreign nationals to invest anonymously, benefiting the president.


• Presidents can try to browbeat the Federal Reserve into cutting interest rates, including floating replacements for the Fed chair before their term is up.


• Presidents can direct the Justice Department to prosecute their political opponents and punish critics. These punishments can include stripping Secret Service protections, suing them, and threatening imprisonment.


• Presidents can punish media companies, law firms, and universities that don't share their viewpoints or values.


• Presidents can aggressively pardon supporters, including those who made large political donations as part of their bid for freedom. The strength of the case against the pardoned supporters is irrelevant.

The American government sure is a different thing than what I grew up with, and my old grade-school civics teachers' heads would probably explode if they saw what was happening now.

Republicans had better hope that a Democrat never becomes president. Imagine what an Ocasio-Cortez or a Jasmine Crockett could do with those kinds of powers. Of course, the Republicans will use those new powers, plus whatever else they could come up with, to make sure that never happens, and in the remote possibility that it does somehow, all those new precedents will, poof!, suddenly vanish, like Moscow Mitch McConnel's precedent that a Supreme Court justice can't be nominated in a president's final year in office.

Dream Oven, 33rd Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Elektra): Today, on this very day, the Supreme Court, which can always be counted on to make horrendous decisions, just gave the Stable Genius another gift. Federal courts are now weaker, and the Constitutional checks and balances fade even further.

Of the 100 or so executive orders the Stable Genius signed since January 2025, lower courts have issued 25 injunctions to temporarily stay ("pause") the orders if they were deemed to cause immediate and irreparable harm to individuals. Today, the Supremes (Keg-Stand Cavanaugh, Amy Boney Carrot, Samuel Vergogna, et al) ruled that the injunctions should only apply to the jurisdiction of that particular court, not the entire country. They further stated that this will apply only when the injunction is "too broad," meaning the ruling is highly open to interpretation. Since the case was about birthright citizenship, the ruling will also allow the possibility of a person being a legal U.S. citizen in one state, say Massachusetts, and not in another, say Texas. 

Centralization of power is a common strategy for authoritarian governments, especially if the institutional change is done in the context of nationalist viewpoints where ethnic groups are painted as the root of societal problems. They are also often implemented when the public is distracted by alarming or controversial topics, such a international conflict or polarizing social issues.

If you're looking for Biblical portents of the end of the world, and last month's earthquake in tectonically-stable, trailing-edge Georgia wasn't enough, consider yesterday's meteor in the Atlanta sky. A loud, rolling rumble (I mistook it for thunder), a sudden flash, and a white streak in the sky. It was confirmed by NASA to be a meteor entering the Earth's atmosphere around 12:30 pm nearly 50 miles above Oxford, Georgia, east of Atlanta.

The fireball traveled southwest at roughly 30,000 mph before disintegrating and unleashing energy equivalent to about 20 tons of TNT, possibly leaving scattered fragments in South Carolina. The Guardian reports that a possible fragment pierced a house's roof in Henry County, south of Atlanta, all the way through and cracked through the laminate flooring to the concrete.

Imagine that homeowner having to convince his insurance company that he and he alone was the sole victim in the entire universe of this meteor. Imagine the meteor, after traveling through the infinite vastness of space for hundreds of millions of years, to have the incredible good luck, the one-in-a-trillion chance, of landing somewhere it was noticed by a sentient being. How happy it must have been! Somebody noticed!

Day of the Sickness, 32nd of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): The Guardian ran an article today on the subreddit r/collapse. "The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat," The Guardian wrote. "Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we’re lucky to get hours." But instead of ignoring the distressing events, the redditors of r/collapse look the disasters in the eye and unflinchingly document and discuss the End Times. 

Posts from r/collapse would occasionally pop up in my Reddit feed, but I never officially followed the sub. But after the Guardian article, I popped in and almost immediately saw this:

I don’t think collapse will look like some sudden disaster. It’s already happening, quietly, gradually. Every day, life gets a little harder. Rent rises, wages shrink, apartments get smaller, work hours get longer. I see my friends and family less, and I care less, too.

I’ve started lowering my standards for everything. Jobs, food, relationships. Job security barely exists anymore. People hold onto worn-out clothes, fewer get married, even fewer have kids. Most of us are just buried in our phones, numbing ourselves with distractions, disconnected from reality.

The dreams I once had for my life feel distant now, like echoes. What’s left is debt, exhaustion, and the constant pressure to survive. And yet, every day, we’re told we’re free, safe, and prosperous.

But this is what collapse really looks like. Not fire or chaos, just the slow erosion of meaning, until we forget what it felt like to hope for something better.

We see our lives becoming worse. We see more people dying from violence and drugs. The number of homeless people keeps increasing and we start worrying that if we lose our job or the Social Security program ends, we will be the next ones. Fisheries are disappearing, the corals are bleached, species extinction is a daily event. The worst president to ever occupy the White House got reelected, and this time the Senate and media just follow along with whatever he says.

Another word for collapse is entropy. Another word for entropy is impermanence, and impermanence, if anything, is swift. Our natural environment is crumbling, the social safety net is weakening, and most of us struggle to maintain mental and physical health. To simultaneously heal individuals, society, and nature, these interconnected challenges should be addressed together. There's nothing that can be done about the physical realities of entropy and impermanence, but all things and experiences are interconnected and arise in dependence on other factors. The key to coping with impermanence is interconnectedness.

 

Strand of Names, 31st Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): One year ago today, according to Facebook's Memories, I reposted a quote by the Stable Genius:

And the fake news they go, "he told this crazy story with electric." It's actually not crazy. It's sort of a smart story, right? Sort of like, you know, it's like the snake, it's a smart when you, you figure what you're leaving in, right? You're bringing it in the, you know, the snake, right? The snake and the snake. I tell that and they do the same thing. - June 23, 2004   

I'll offer a quantum of sympathy here, as someone who has read transcripts of my expert testimony in environmental litigations. We all think we're speaking perfectly structured sentences all the time with correct grammar, but the humbling truth is that when we read back the carefully recorded, word-for-word transcript of our testimony, we discover that it's actually full of incomplete sentences hanging in mid-thought, interjections of "you know" and "like" and slang, and occasionally the wrong words, sometimes complete non sequiturs. When we read the questions and comments of the cross-examining attorneys, they're perfectly formed and articulate, because they're used to being transcribed and have considerable practice at structuring well-formed, perfect sentences on the fly.

I'll excuse a person for a "you know" or the occasional incomplete sentence, but a politician, certainly the President of the United States of America, should have had enough experience giving speeches and talking to the press not to utter the nonsensical word salad above. But that was a whole year ago. Certainly the Stable Genius has gotten better by now, right?

“I want to buy icebreakers, you are very good at icebreakers,” he said today in response to an unrelated question from Finland during a press conference at the NATO Summit in The Hague. ”You're the King of Icebreakers, you make ‘em good, really good, that particular country, and they know what they're doing." 

"I actually made 'em an offer," he continued,

I didn't go to Congress, they'll try and impeach me for this, but there's an old, it's not old, it's fairly new, but it's used icebreaker, and I offered them about one third of what he asked for, but we're negotiating.

We need icebreakers in the US and if we can get some inexpensively, I'd like to do that actually. They'll fix it up, make it good. . . And so we're negotiating with them for about 15 different icebreakers, but one of them is available now. It's old and it's old. It's five, six years old now. We're trying to buy it. I'm trying to make a good deal. All I do, my whole life, that's all I do is make deals. Yeah."

Assuming he wasn't inebriated while speaking, the words suggest a shocking level of cognitive decline. But where is the Jake "I Dated Monica Lewinsky" Tapper coverage of the SG's senility, his garbled speech, his incoherent thought?    

Just as alarming, during the same icebreaker conference, the SG admitted that he gave Iran permission to launch its missile attack on the US base in Qatar. “They said, ‘We're going to shoot them. Is 1 pm okay?’” he claimed. The fact the the U.S. Commander in Chief gave a foreign nation permission to launch missiles at one of our overseas bases should be reported much more widely in the news than the scant coverage it's getting.

Day of the Millrace, 30th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Picture him: a bully, all meat and mass, jailhouse tattoos, armpits' oniony sweat, fishgluey slime. The terror of the neighborhood, starting fights with everyone, encouraging others to fight even when he's not around. Few friends, many enemies, complicated relationship toward women.

Finally, someone stands up to him, a much smaller man but with a sinewy build and a feral, ferret-like swiftness. He gets in several punches in rapid succession before the bully can hit back, but then the bully braces himself and comes back with a couple shots of his own. Despite that, the bully, surprised and caught off guard, is soon reeling, dazed and confused. 

By that point, a crowd has gathered to watch the fight and out of the mass of people pops a bystander who walks up to the bully and punches him square in the jaw and then immediately falls back into the surrounding crowd again. Disappears. The bully is hurt, badly, but still has some fight left in him, and he and his original opponent exchange a few more punches.

"Cut it out, you two!,"  the bystander shouts from the safety of the surrounding crowd. "Stop it!"

Both the bully and his opponent are dazed and exhausted. They trade a few more blows, weak shots more for show than to cause any real damage, and then walk away.  

Back in the crowd, the bystander, Donald J. Trump, demands the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the fight.

 

Through the Thin Words, 29th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Atlas): So now I'm apparently liveblogging the end of the world. Was that old expression, "That's the end-of-the-world news" or "That's the end of the World News?" Our father who art not in heaven. . . 

"Iran Fires Missiles at U.S. Base in Qatar" in retaliation for Trumps' bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities,  the Times reports. "Al Udeid Air Base, the largest American military installation in the Middle East," they tell us, "was the target of the strike. Qatar said its air defense systems intercepted the missiles. There were no reports of injuries." 

Of all the conspiracy theories I've seen of the internet about the U.S./Iran conflict, the one that seemed most far-fetched at first but is now sounding more and more plausible is that this whole thing was jointly staged by the U.S. and Iran, military theater for the mutual political benefit of both sides. 

Were the Iranians told in advance that the bombs were coming and given the time to remove their enriched uranium?  

According to Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), as unreliable a witness as any, U.S. intelligence has found that Iran did not move nuclear material from the Fordo site ahead of the attack. However, Israel, an equally unreliable source, says Iran did indeed move uranium stockpile before the strikes. The Economic Times reports that Iran claims it secretly moved 400 kilograms of enriched uranium to an undisclosed location before the attack, and some reporting claims "unusual activity" and trucks lined up at Fordo prior to the attack. We may not know the truth for some time.

But now I'm hearing that satellite images of the Al Udeid Air Base taken this morning shows it was nearly empty of aircraft immediately ahead of the Iranian missile attack. However, the images showed dozens of aircraft at the base through early June, before Israel began its bombing campaign against Iran on June 13. And now we learn that Iran gave the U.S. notice prior to attacking the airbase, and Trump publicly thanked Iran thanked for giving advanced notice, adding, “I am pleased to report that NO Americans were harmed, and hardly any damage was done. Most importantly, they’ve gotten it all out of their ‘system,’ and there will, hopefully, be no further HATE.”

So we may have told Iran that we were going to make a show of bombing their facilities, giving them time to prepare, and they gave us notice they were going to "retaliate," giving us time to more planes and get the Qatari air defense ready. Nothing suspicious in any of that, right?

 

Day of Fur Gale. 28th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): Trump bombed Iran last night.

America didn't bomb Iran. I certainly didn't bomb Iran.  Our tinpot wannabe dictator, disappointed at the lackluster response to his birthday military parade, embarrassed about leaving the G7 meeting early because the other world leaders weren't kowtowing to him, and feeling emasculated by Israel's aggression toward Iran without his involvement or approval, decided to jump in on his own and ordered the military to drop multiple 30,000-pound bunker-busters from B2 bombers on three Iranian nuclear development sites. 

Trump bomber then. We're one step closer to Armageddon. Time to reset the Doomsday clock a few seconds closer to midnight.

Look, I'm no fan of Iran, and can see nothing good coming from a nuclear-armed Iranian regime. Fuck Iran. But intervening in an Israeli-Iranian conflict doesn't seem to advance American interests. Sure, it's in American interests for Iran not to have nuclear weapons - it's in the world's best interests for Iran not to have nuclear weapons. I get it. But how do we know Iran was close to having the bomb? Because Netanyahu says so? He's been saying that since the 1990s - it's his mantra, it's his thing. Tulsi Gabbard says they weren't close, but why would I believe anything Tulsi Gabbard says one way or the other? Part of the problem with hiring a Russian asset as the Intelligence Chief is that we now have basically no reliable intelligence.

I watched the Sunday news shows this morning. Republican pundits were wistfully speculating that based on the bombings, the Iranian people will realize that the ruling regime can't protect them and may rally to overthrown them. When in history has that ever happened in the Mideast? All a foreign nation ever accomplishes from invading or bombing another nation is causing that nation's people to rally in defense of their homeland. The Iranians, who were never reluctant to chant "Death to America" before this, now will only hate us even more.

What's the end game here? We may not have totally eliminated Iran's nuclear program but, especially with Israel's targeted attacks on scientists, leadership, and infrastructure, we certainly set it back several years. We may  have set it back by 20 years - back to when Netanyahu was saying Iran was mere weeks away from having the bomb. 

There's now a whole new generation of Iranians who have whole new reasons to hate America even more. Just like there's probably not a single Palestinian left surviving who hasn't lost family or a limb to Israel's genocidal campaign, who isn't suffering from a combination of PTSD and malnutrition, who doesn't hate Israel and Israelis with a white-hot passion. This will come back and haunt Israel for generations, just as our actions in Iran, compounded by all the bad karma from Iraq and Afghanistan, will haunt America for generations to come.

Now the world is waiting to see how Iran will respond (pro tip: it won't be "unconditional surrender" or regime change). This morning, they launched a new round of missiles into Israel. On Meet the Press, J.C. Vance said that Iran wouldn't close the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 20% of all the world's oil passes. It will cripple their own economy, Vance said, it's not in their self-interest to do that and he doesn't expect them to. 

Headline: Iran Parliament Votes to Shut Hormuz Strait in Response to US Attack, Raising Fears of Oil Price Shock. The first thing I did on seeing that headline was hop in my car and top off the tank before prices surge. The way I drive (which is to say, not very much at all), that should last me at least a month, probably longer if I'm careful. But still, it just goes to show that Vance, and hence this stupid administration, doesn't know what he's talking about. As if we needed more proof. The incompetent ruling regime can't protect the American people - perhaps it's time for the people to rally and overthrow them.

Spirit Woman, 27th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Electra): I have to hand it to Midjourney. In the time since I joined back in October 2023 (version 5.2), they've constantly improved their model from 5.2 to the current 7.0, offering greater realism, more imagination, and more faithful interpretation of prompts. Last week, they added video generation and even in the only four or so days since then, they've tweaked the video model with different download options - "raw," and "optimized" after they noticed that many of the videos were getting overly compressed when uploaded to social media.

Yesterday, I noticed that they also offered the option to download the vids as animated gifs, which work better on this Blogger platform. No more arrows to click to start the video, no more awkward Blogger frames around the video. The gifs function here just like photos, except they move.

Cool.

Look, say what you want about AI - and there's a good healthy debate to be had around its long-term effect, its carbon footprint, and its potential to go rogue. But I like the image generating possibilities of models like Midjourney, and despite what critics say - many of whom never generated a single image - there's more to it, or potentially more to it to be precise, than just typing in some words and getting a picture.

The image above wasn't an instant, random result. It took several iterations and selections from a variety of initial choices, then tweaking one of them to bring out some of the preferred aspects and to suppress some of the others. It wasn't the precise realization of an image I had in my mind, but it wasn't just being handed what the AI decided to come up with. It was a collaboration between a human mind and a virtual mind, and while I wouldn't claim it as "my" work, my fingerprints aren't absent from the final form.

If you go to any one of the many online galleries of AI art, you'll quickly see that some folks consistently produce better, more interesting, and more visually appealing images than others. It's not all the AI, it's also the human collaborators. 

There's an argument to be made that photographers don't "create" their images either - they point and shoot, and the pixels produced in the camera generate the image. Anyone can aim a camera, press a button, and take a shitty photograph. But a skilled photographer carefully frames the subject and composes the image, manipulates the light and exposure, works with the depth of field, etc. The human collaborators in AI art (at least the good ones) work with a different set of controls - skillfully using prompts, culling from several alternatives, enhancing the selection, etc. - to produce their imagery. As we weave and unweave our bodies from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image.

I'm not claiming I'm an artist. The best pictures I've created were flukes, luck not skill, and even then don't even belong in the same league as the best AI art I've seen on line. But ditto the photographs I've posted, and my writing, and my thinking. 

But despite all of these thing's shortcomings, I don't believe anyone can reasonably say it isn't self-expression.

Instead and Else, 26th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): The summer solstice occurs today, 10:42 pm Eastern time, officially starting the summer season for many. But in the Universal Solar Calendar, or my New Revised USC, summer began 26 days ago, although we will acknowledge that today is the infamous "longest day."

All those weeks and weeks or rain finally ended today, and the forecast for the next week is all blue-sky, sunny days. Summer has indeed arrived.

I got my walk in today, a Harrison along the river and on into the Cochran Shoals and Sope Creek woods (a fool i'the forest). I didn't walk last Wednesday because the forecast called for an increasing likelihood of rain all day, although in fact it never rained. I kept getting tempted to go outside when the sun temporarily broke through, but then I'd look at the forecast on my phone and decide not to. As it turns out, though, I could have gotten my steps in and returned home dry. Oh well, no such ambiguity today - 0% chance of rain. I hadn't seen that in months. 

And in this way, the languid days and nights of my retirement continue. Each day, I awaken, make coffee, and measure my blood pressure and weight. I do the Times' Spelling Bee over the first cup of coffee to awaken the brain, and then read my assigned pages of Ulysses over the second cup. The rest of the morning usually finds me falling down one musical rabbit hole or another as documented on sister blog Music Dissolves Water. On alternating days, I either sit or walk - today was a walking day. I shower after my walks. By the afternoon, I'm usually playing some video game or another - I'm currently wrapping up Watch Dogs 2. As the evening approaches, I either continue the game or watch whatever's on television - usually Netflix, Max, Prime, MSNBC, or sports. Sports is a biggie, as documented on the brother blog, Sweat Dissolves Water. I'm following this doomed Red Sox season right now, as well as the Arctic Ocean solo circumnavigation of sailor Ella Hibbert aboard the Yeva. Somewhere between all that, I'm posting to this blog and generating the images on Midjourney. The days typically end with The Daily Show and Colbert's monologue, and then an hour or so of reading in bed (not Joyce but contemporary books). And then to sleep.

Who knew life could be so good, amirite?

The Millstone Lure, 25th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)  Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey has revealed that out of 263 early galaxies observed, 66% spin clockwise while only 34% spin counterclockwise. In a universe with no preferred direction, one would expect a 50-50 split. This unexpected bias raises the question of whether this phenomenon is a leftover imprint from the birth of the universe.

While this observation would cause me to wonder about the accuracy of the observations and the statistical likelihood of a 66-34 split versus that of a 50-50, some have made the quantum leap that this could mean that the universe lies within a massive black hole in another, “parent” universe. 

Let me explain. In physicist Nikodem Poplawski’s torsion theory, matter doesn’t collapse into a singularity - it gets spun and twisted by extreme gravity, forming an entirely new universe. The Big Bang could have been matter rebounding from collapse inside a black hole. The spin of that black hole may have left its fingerprint on the rotation of galaxies in our universe, explaining the JWST’s puzzling spin imbalance. The notion that our universe lies within the event horizon of a black hole in a parent universe is consistent with an model called Schwarzschild cosmology. 

If verified, this could change not only how we think black holes work, but about how our own universe came to be.

Not everyone is convinced. Some researchers suggest the anomaly might be caused by the Milky Way’s own spin influencing the JWST’s readings. If that’s true, we may need to rethink how we measure the cosmos. That might also help address big questions like the Hubble tension or the existence of unexpectedly mature galaxies in the early universe

It also raises the possibility that if our universe exists in a black hole within a larger, parent universe, that universe might also exist within an even larger universe, and black holes within our universe might contain universes of their own. 

Imagine a whole set of universes all nestled within one another like a set of Russian Matryoshka dolls. A black hole forms in a universe, and matter collapsing into that hole creates a Big Bang, and a new universe is formed. A black hole forms in that new universe, matter collapses, and yet a third universe is formed. This could go on infinitely. Something to think about.     

Day of the Beachhead, 24th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): As you can see, the AI image generator Midjourney has just released its new video mode. I'm excited about the creative possibilities, but my god, brace yourself for the incoming wave of celebrity fakes, disinfo, agitprop, and bullshit. I'm not going to be the one to do it, but I can't wait to see the inevitable videos of Trump getting pegged by Putin, of feral dogs attacking Christi Noem, of J.D. Vance and Lindsey Graham flirting with bears in a gay bar.     

The supreme question about a work of art, Joyce tells me in today's reading, is out of how deep a life does it spring. Art has to reveal to us ideas. A computer, no matter how sophisticated, has no life at all and no ideas of its own, so can art sprung from a machine even be called "art"? Or is the art, Suches it is, not in the generation of the image, but in the prompts, the editing, the selection, and the sequencing?     

Today's post is as much a test as anything else - to see how the Midjourney model actually handles videos, what it does with my Sun Girl summer avatar, how the animations look, and how well they upload and behave on Blogger. So far, so good, or so it seems. I'm going to use this technology in service of whatever it is I'm trying to say each day (which is to say, rubbish) and try to avoid misuse and evil. That's my vow, that's the precept I'll follow. At least until I inevitably break it. 

Any ideas, suggestions, advice, or requests will be duly considered. 

Day of the High Lists, 23rd of Summer, 525 M.E. (Atlas): Look at them. Men in blue jeans and sport shoes, wearing baseball caps (some backwards). No uniforms, no insignia, not even lanyards with identification, claiming they are ICE agents as they manhandle and arrest the New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate at an immigration courthouse as he was escorting a migrant they wanted to arrest. 

Who the fuck are they? Should we believe they're ICE agents just because they say so? Are they truly ICE as they claim, or are they vigilantes? Or members of the Proud Boys or Oathkeepers or something? Last weekend, four Minnesota politicians were shot by a gunman, two fatally, by a man disguised as a police officer. It seems a bit naïve these days to just accept who they say they were based on their words alone. 

In fact, according to the press reports, the comptroller, Brad Lander, was asking for just that kind of identification when he was arrested.  He asked to see a warrant and told them, “You don’t have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens.” Then they manhandle him and frog marched him to the courthouse. 

ICE agents, typically wearing masks and carrying no identification, have become a regular presence as the arrest of migrants showing up for routine court hearings has become a common occurrence. Politicians, including members of Congress, have shown up at immigration courthouses in recent weeks to protest these tactics, but now the goons are turning on the pols, too.

Last month, federal agents arrested the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, and Representative LaMonica McIver in connection with a clash outside of an immigration detention center. In April, FBI agents arrested a Milwaukee judge on charges that she had shielded an undocumented immigrant from federal agents.

This latest assault and arrest of a Democratic politician comes not only after the Minnesota assassinations and the arrests mentioned above, but also after Senator Alex Padilla of California was shoved to the floor and handcuffed by federal officers after he had tried to ask Kristi Noem a question during a press conference.

It's particularly unfortunate that Padilla's mistreatment diverted attention from what Noem was actually saying during that conference. “We are not going away,” she was warning, referring to the presence of armed National Guard and U.S. Marines in Los Angeles. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor (Newsom) and that this mayor (Bass) have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

She's flat out saying that the Trump administration is using the military to overturn the duly elected representatives of the people. That statement alone should cause millions to march in the streets and protest this fascist power grab. 

Trump, Noem, Homeland Security, and ICE are using unidentified, masked thugs to rough up and arrest Democratic politicians, and using the military to overturn elections if they don't like the outcome. This isn't "drifting toward fascism" - this IS fascism. The Nazi's are already here and they're already reaching out well beyond the undocumented immigrants they're supposedly after.

This fascist Trump regime has got to end now.

 

Bloomsday, 22nd of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): Flayed glasseyed sheep hung from their haunches, sheepsnouts bloodypapered snivelling nosejam on sawdust. As you might have guessed based on certain words and phrases dropped in italics in recent posts, I've been reading Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922) since the beginning of June. About 10 pages a day (it's pretty dense stuff; any more would be overwhelming), along with an online reading group. Not that the group is offering much insight on the text, but they are providing needed moral support to keep soldiering on, as well as suggesting just where to start and stop in the reading each day.

I find it very helpful to follow along with the RTE Players' 1982 theatrical reading of Ulysses. Joyce doesn't use quotation marks in his text, and the podcast helps to distinguish between the characters' spoken words, their inner stream-of-consciousness monologue (which famously occupies much of the novel), and the author's narration.   

After each day's reading, I then have to turn to Patrick Hastings' online Ulysses Guide to tell me what I just read, as I'm not clever enough to figure it all out myself. While Hastings give a broad overview of what's happening in the book, I also turn each day to John Hunt's annotations in The Joyce Project, which provides excellent line-by-line notes on dramatic, historical, and linguistic implications of the text. 

For example, in today's reading, Leopold Bloom is absorbed in memories of an early romantic liaison and thinks, "Flowers her eyes were, take me, willing eyes. Pebbles fell. She lay still." I needed Hastings' help to realize the liaison was on Howth Head, "a lovely hilly peninsula overlooking Dublin Bay. . . north of the city."  Of course, I recognize the penisolate location from the "Howth Castles and Environs" mentioned in the opening paragraph of Finnigan's Wake (from swerve of shore to bend of bay, etc.). I've been stuck on the first page of Finnigan for 50 years now, but that's another story for another post.

I recognize Howth Head, but without Hunt's annotations, I would not have realized that "pebbles fell" was an allusion to King Lear, when a blinded and despairing Gloucester wants to commit suicide by jumping from the cliffs of Dover. His son tricks the old man into believing that he is standing at the top of a cliff, far above the beach, telling him, "The fishermen that walk upon the beach, appear like mice. . . The murmuring surge, that on th' unnumb'red idle pebble chafes, cannot be heard so high." Hunt goes on to identify other instances when Joyce alludes to pebbles as a portent of danger and death that recur throughout the novel. Indeed, Molly is laying still, corpselike, and Bloom's reverie is both triggered by and interrupted by the buzzing of flies, those avatars of death and decay. 

But despite all these resources, I'm still convinced I'm missing at least 50% of what's happening on the pages. But that's okay, all my online resources inform me. The novel's intended for multiple, repeat readings, and by design no one gets everything the first time through. 

I'm not sure this old man will ever read this novel again - this may well be my one-off. I once breezed through the book back in my early 20s, flipping through the pages and just skimming the text - probably searching for the "dirty bits" that famously got the novel banned upon it's publication. But that hardly counts as a "reading," although I frequently claimed otherwise over the years ("Ulysses? Yes, I've read it once, back in the '70s"). My copy of the novel, both back then and now, is a 1942 Random House edition once owned by my grandfather and somehow passed on down to me. In fact, it's probably my having owned the book for so many years, schlepping it from one home to the next, one apartment to the other, over all those years that encouraged me to finally take the plunge and read it through   

Anyway, I'm old now and this reading of one of those books one is supposed to have read before you die seems like a worthwhile post-retirement project to fill my late and languid days. For all its intricacies and eccentricities, I'm quite enjoying it.

 

Day of Suffering Night, 21st of Summer, 525 M.E. (Electra): A U.S. Senator wrestled to the floor and handcuffed. Minnesota politicians assassinated in their homes, along with their spouses. A mad president, sitting in the rain among a paltry crowd, watching a squeaking tank roll down a Washington street, imagining it to be some great display of military strength. Goose-stepping forces on the streets of L.A., with foodheated faces, sweating helmets, patting their truncheons. The Hebrews and the Persians exchanging missile barrages over Israel and Iran. 

There were well over 2,000 events during yesterday's No Kings demonstrations. The vast majority of the events were peaceful and most of the non-peaceful actions were from counter-demonstrators or the police. A demonstrator was shot and killed in Salt Lake City in crossfire between the so-called peacekeeping team and a man who allegedly drew a pistol and fired. In Virginia, a man intentionally drove an SUV into a crowd of protesters, injuring at least one person. Police in Los Angeles hit protesters with batons and fired tear gas as they ordered a downtown crowd to disperse. Tear gas was also used in Seattle and Portland. Here in Atlanta, members of the Proud Boys walked through a crowd of protesters near the State Capital in an unsuccessful attempt at provocation. And a group of protesters were tear-gassed and arrested near Doraville, Georgia after they tried to march onto Perimeter Highway I-285.

Scrolling through pictures of the local No Kings events on social media, I noticed there were a lot of comments posted and almost all of them were negative, mocking the event or outright hostile. The pro-MAGA comments outnumbered the No Kings comments by at least ten to one, probably closer to twenty to one, and many of them said the same things. It looks like the snarky remarks were either posted by bots, or were a coordinated effort by the Trumpists, or both. 

"We already have a day to celebrate no kings," many of them said, "it's called the Fourth of July," as if Independence Day addressed the same concerns as yesterday's events. "I'll be at home celebrating the American military today," many boasted, as if we didn't already have an Armed Services Day to celebrate the military. And a Veterans Day. And a Memorial Day. And opening ceremonies at most major sporting events. Halftime shows, too. Not to mention a college football Military Bowl and a separate Armed Services Bowl. But yeah, let's co-opt Flag Day and make that a celebration of the military-industrial complex, too.  

Another recurring theme in the comments focused on the word "King." Some tried to suggest an anti-Christian bias to yesterday's protests by pointing out that their Jesus was the King of Kings, and that their (white) Christian nationalist country did indeed have a King and his name is "Jesus." (What? A Mexican is king? Do tell.) Maybe that's why the Westboro-Baptist types were out at the Atlantic Station event yesterday.      

The comments protesting the protests were so frequent and so ubiquitous that it tells me yesterday really got under the skin of MAGA Nation and we must be doing the right thing.            

The Offside Mysteries, 20th Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): Despite rain still in the system, I got my walk in today but only 4.7 miles, a Madison. But no complaints, most of the walk was to and from the 17th Street overpass near Atlantic Station, one of the 2000 or so No Kings protest sites across the country today. I made it back home just as the day's thunderstorms were starting to pour down in earnest.

I was proud of Atlanta's behavior at the protest today. The chanting was heartfelt and loud, the crowd was diverse in gender, race, and age, and everyone behaved peaceably. There was a very small Westboro Baptist-type group, really only about three or four people, that seemed to enjoy trolling everyone, proclaiming through bullhorns that "homosexuality is a sin" and "Atlanta is a den of iniquity." But the other protesters pretty much ignored or just laughed at them, and no one took the bait and got outraged. There was no violence.

During the 2016 Trump protests, a fairly sizable number of protesters played cat and mouse with the police, making a sport of trying to block the roads and shut down the interstate, and then running away when the cop cars came over. People today stayed on the sidewalks and let the traffic pass by, most of which honked their horns and gave thumbs up in approval and agreement. 

I saw a post on social media "warning" people that paid outside agitators were coming to the protest sites, that they were instructed to cause maximum chaos, and that pallets of bricks had already been delivered at strategic points to throw at the police. Obviously bullshit, and the crowd that I saw today behaved in such a polar opposite way that no one could take such spurious claims seriously.

But make no mistake: a LOT of people showed up, and they were all fed up with the Trump administrations, the tariffs, the deportations, the military presence, the grifting, the deadlocked, do-nothing Congress. There was no mistaking the anger and the outrage, but it didn't need to express itself with violence or vandalism. 

Pics or it didn't happen: