• The military may have to make decisions

    … the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics… it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military…

  • Seconds, anyone?

    Auto-generated description: A group of sheep gather around a billboard featuring a wolf in a suit with the caption I AM GOING TO EAT YOU, while one sheep comments, He tells it like it is.

    Paul Noth in The New Yorker. H/T @austinkleon.com

  • Milestone

    It’s a big day in a boy’s life when he gets his very own Medicare card.

  • Texas Harvest

    It never seems like it in August, but there are upsides to gardening in a hot state.

    a bowl of yellow-orange cherry tomatoes

    Sun Gold cherry tomatoes

  • Urgh

    Possible book plate for ““Ex Libris Jim Rain”; I like it, but I’m creeped out that it’s AI generated from a prompt I gave. (Esp. because my daughter is an illustrator. What does this bode for her?)

  • Ya' Got Me

    I’ve become convinced that this election isn’t really about Harris and Trump. But I haven’t figured out what, exactly, it is about. (I mean, I know what it’s about for Trump, but I don’t know about Trump voters. Or the country.)

  • What Makes a Good Citizen?

    Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts creator):

    Sometimes it is the very people who cry out the loudest in favor of getting back to what they call “American Virtues” who lack this faith in our country. I believe that our greatest strength lies always in the protection of our smallest minorities.

    H/T Kottke

  • What’s the Problem?

    Kevin Williamson:

    … you might conclude that this country has a leadership problem. But it doesn’t. This country has a citizenship problem.

  • I Love Astertide

    Purple aster flowers
  • Morning Has Broken

    Auto-generated description: A sky filled with scattered clouds at dusk or dawn

    (That’s Jupiter, I think.)

  • Exhausting, Exhausted

    Before Trump took his golden escalator ride, life was different. Then, even if I thought a candidate would make a terrible office holder, I rarely thought he or she was objectively a bad person. Even LBJ, and he was pretty bad on a personal level, or Nixon, who was pretty bad as a leader. One consequence was, while I might have thought folks who supported “the other guy” naive or misguided, I didn’t think of them as bad either.

    But Trump by any measure is actually a bad, bad man. And he’s bad in many, many ways. So, that makes my response to his supporters quite a problem. In my life, there are folks I love who definitely will vote for that bad, bad man. I know those folks are not themselves irredeemably bad. But I cannot help but wonder, “What is wrong with them?”

    And that is one important reason this is all so exhausting.

  • The Christian Gospel in a Nutshell

    Luke, Chapter 15. Lost sheep, lost coin, lost boy. All wonderful. But the best is at the top in v.2: “… the scribes murmured, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.'” Good news, huh?

  • RepublicBank

    A nice appreciation of Dallas' Republic National Bank building. I enjoyed working there for many years.

  • Tim Walz:

    January 6 was not Facebook ads.

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