caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

Welcome to Friday Night Photos everyone. Your once a week break from the daily madness of the crazy world we live in. Post any photos, memes, music, or whatever else you find of interest that helps you escape the madness.

Orlbucfan often comments about how the photos everybody posts on FNP look like paintings so I thought I'd post some actual paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art and the Timken Museum of Art, both located in Balboa Park.

Emanuel De Witte (Dutch 1617-1692)
Interior of the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, 1657

An humongous surprise in the "news" hit me upside the head this morning as I stumbled across some breathless talking heads on Fox News showcasing highlights of the Oval Office Pissing Match between Trump and Vance against Zelensky. Trump went so far off the reservation that the Fox experts would not go there with him. Their first "expert" was some thick necked guy in a suit who was the former CIA station chief in Moscow.

There have been many great societal changes down through history. I think it's inarguable that we are in one of those great changes at the present. How we got here is debatable, but I note a pattern to the trajectory, an oscillation, a swing from one extreme to another, like a pendulum.

Instead of rushing headlong into a rapid change, we're being marched incrementally to whatever it is that's been long planned for us. To me, it's been obvious the last few election cycles as we bounce from one amplitude of the pendulum to the next, ala Edgar Allan Poe's tale of a massive blade that's lowered ever so slightly upon each swing back and forth until society is broken and divided.

Riding Donkeys!

I started reading a new book (published in 2024) a couple of days ago. It's called Hoof Beats - How Horses Shaped Human History by William T. Taylor. It's about the relationship between humans and horses as discovered recently by archaeologists and historians. It's very good. I'm only a little under half way through it, and am looking forward to the rest of the book. But it's already taught me some new and interesting things which I thought I'd share.

Da Book! From bookshop.org, link above

Federal questionnaire with 5 bullet points for last week:
1) I came in late for work to test my boss to see if he would dock me. He hadn't got there yet. I made a note in my log.
2) I spent an hour in the bathroom playing games on my phone and he didn't know I was even gone. Then I noticed he come out behind me. I made another note in my log.