...is worth remembering.
Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong - April In Paris

I still like the oldies. Hope you do as well.

See you around the site!

@humphrey

More oil, coal, and profits!

In reality it it for big oil and the coal industries.

Trump administration's halt of the 165 onshore wind projects was explicitly attributed to national security concerns raised by the Department of Defence, primarily radar interference from turbine blades and towers that could affect military operations.

— MIKEQP3.0 (@M3G3MIKEQ__17) May 3, 2026

@humphrey manipulation. Again.

In reality it it for big oil and the coal industries.

Trump administration's halt of the 165 onshore wind projects was explicitly attributed to national security concerns raised by the Department of Defence, primarily radar interference from turbine blades and towers that could affect military operations.

— MIKEQP3.0 (@M3G3MIKEQ__17) May 3, 2026

@on the cusp

...suggesting that there is substantial opposition to Putin for failing to take direct action against Europe.

MSM seldom mentions the Ukie conflict, other than unsubstantiated claims that Putin is weak, Russians do not approve of him, and Ukie is destroying Russia's refineries. Trump gets to declare victory, and if things so south, it is Europe's fault. He doesn't have anyone to blame for a loss in Iran other than Israel, and that would be tantamount to burning Bibles.
We voted in a special school board election yesterday that had a proposal to support a property tax increase for a 50 Mill dollar loan to upgrade school campuses. We have a large but sparsely populated school district. We would be paying the interest on that loan for years before we even began paying the principal.
The proposal failed by over 60%, so they will have to figure something else to try. They had a $45 mil proposal in the recent election get voted down by a huge margin.
I hope your coconut cake was a hit, friend!
Thanks for the WW.

influence the stock market on Monday morning.

@Lookout

Things are happening this last 24 hours.

#3
I'm sorry to say. Ain't it funny how an ego or two can shape the whole world?

@humphrey
I'm sorry to say. Ain't it funny how an ego or two can shape the whole world?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/trump-says-irans-latest-off...

Trump says Iran’s latest offer is ‘not acceptable to me’.

Today, 9:24 pm
Share
US President Donald Trump tells Kan’s Nathan Guttman that Iran’s latest proposal for resolving the regional conflict is “not acceptable.”

“It’s not acceptable to me. I’ve studied it, I’ve studied everything — it’s not acceptable,” Guttman quotes Trump as saying in a brief phone call, in a post on X.

In further comments reported by Kan in Hebrew (the original English is not provided), Trump says the campaign is going “great.”

He says that “the Iranians want to make a deal, but I’m not satisfied with what they’ve offered,” adding that “there are things I can’t agree to.”

On his repeated demands that Israel’s President Isaac Herzog give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a pardon in his criminal trial, Trump says: “He’s a wartime prime minister. Israel wouldn’t exist without me and Bibi, in that order. You need a prime minister who can focus on the war and not on nonsense.”

@ovals49 The universe is maybe 13.82 billion years old. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. The human species is 300,000 years of age. The Neanderthals, who were a lot like us and who we think interbred with us, went back another 100,000 years before that. Agriculture is maybe 12,000 years old, so for the vast spans of time, 288,000 years or so, there was no organized agricultural society. My parents died at ages 83 (Dad) and 82 (Mom), so that gives me an idea of the scale of the thing.

Capitalism, on the other hand, is at most 600 years old, dating back to the Portuguese colonization of Madeira. This is the argument made persuasively by Jason W. Moore and Raj Patel in their book "A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things." Though there is, I suppose, some credibility to the argument made in Sven Beckert's "Capitalism," there were for some time (Beckert focuses upon what was once fashionably called the "12th century Renaissance") capitalists without capitalism. So that pushes the phenomenon of capitalists back to 900 years ago. I think it's fair to call the reality before that time "normal," and the reality after that time "anomalous."

If you want an even more profound anomaly than capitalism, there is always industrial capitalism. Industrial capitalism is, arguably, a product of the invention of the steam engine in 1712, although industrial capitalism became a lot more industrious and thus anomalous with the inventions of the automotive assembly line and of the large-scale power plant in the 1880s. Our version of this scene, then, is about 135 years old.

How is this "anomaly" status important? I see a lot of arguments that begin with the statement that "History shows that" or, even worse, "Human nature shows that" blah blah blah. Whereas, in fact, there hasn't been a whole lot of history to "show" much of anything about our time, or about the human species as it has existed in our time.

So, yes, capitalism is an anomaly. Capitalist life is new, and thus, malleable, vulnerable to collective feats of imagination. It isn't the normal of human existence.

#1
it is simply an expression of Self being selfish, without consideration of the larger context of the mystery human life itself. Of the many civilizations that may have been hosted by this planet, ours is certainly not looking like a sterling example. (Pun intended)

Our planet Earth is uniquely equipped with a reset button that has been activated many times in the past, like clockwork. And the next iteration is expected soon. The downward slide of our Democracy may come to an end, much sooner than you may think possible.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/trump-says-irans-latest-off...

Trump says Iran’s latest offer is ‘not acceptable to me’.

Today, 9:24 pm
Share
US President Donald Trump tells Kan’s Nathan Guttman that Iran’s latest proposal for resolving the regional conflict is “not acceptable.”

“It’s not acceptable to me. I’ve studied it, I’ve studied everything — it’s not acceptable,” Guttman quotes Trump as saying in a brief phone call, in a post on X.

In further comments reported by Kan in Hebrew (the original English is not provided), Trump says the campaign is going “great.”

He says that “the Iranians want to make a deal, but I’m not satisfied with what they’ve offered,” adding that “there are things I can’t agree to.”

On his repeated demands that Israel’s President Isaac Herzog give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a pardon in his criminal trial, Trump says: “He’s a wartime prime minister. Israel wouldn’t exist without me and Bibi, in that order. You need a prime minister who can focus on the war and not on nonsense.”