Jul 4, 2026
Belle
While Trump has no problem packing a room with uniformed service members, his taint-licker SecDef will gladly come down on Maj Watson with both feet.
250 Years Ago
Number one rule - hard and fast:
The government works for us, not the other way around.
When you notice government no longer belongs to you, it's time for some big changes.
Neil's Prophesy Revisited
(originally published Jan 9, 2025 - so, did it all fall down? Is the YouTube short still a thing?)
2026 is the year the internet dies.
As legacy media fades into the distance of the receding past, people who now denounce "mainstream news" as fake or untrustworthy, will come to know that their favorite fringe sites, and their "alternative" news is what's actually fake. But instead of changing their minds and either moving to resurrect the old ways, or searching out credible new sources of information, they'll just dismiss it all as totally unreliable - and the entire internet will implode, grinding The Information Age to a halt.
Seems a bit silly, but hey - ya heard it hear first, kids.
I didn't know when in 2026, Dr Tyson meant, so here it is, about the time we start to gear up for the 2026 mid-terms - assuming we still have elections.
This is really scary, typing this in January 2024, under what most people think are credible threats to American democracy, and the free flow of information.
Today's Today
Bates was a professor at Wellesley and had traveled west to teach a summer course in Colorado Springs. Bates and the other professors decided to "celebrate the close of the session by a merry expedition to the top of Pike’s Peak." They made the ascent by prairie wagon.
At the top, Bates later wrote, she was inspired by "the sea-like expanse of fertile country . . . under those ample skies," and "the opening lines of the hymn floated into my mind." Those opening lines—"O beautiful for spacious skies, / For amber waves of grain, / For purple mountain majesties / Above the fruited plain!"—would eventually become the lyrics of one of the best-known songs in American history.
Bates finished writing "America the Beautiful" before leaving Colorado Springs but didn’t think of publishing it until two years later. The poem was first printed in a weekly newspaper, The Congregationalist, on July 4, 1895.
Bates finished writing "America the Beautiful" before leaving Colorado Springs but didn’t think of publishing it until two years later. The poem was first printed in a weekly newspaper, The Congregationalist, on July 4, 1895.
Bates’s patriotic words were soon set to music, most popularly to composer S. A. Ward’s "Materna," the tune to which we sing it today. Celebrating "country loved" and the "patriot dream," the song resonated with Americans from all walks of life and became enormously popular. Within twenty years, Bates (after revising some of the lyrics in 1904) had "given hundreds, perhaps thousands, of free permissions" for "America the Beautiful" to appear "in church hymnals and Sunday School song books of nearly all the denominations; . . . in a large number of regularly published song books, poetry readers, civic readers, patriotic readers . . . in manuals of hymns and prayers, and anthologies of patriotic prose and poetry . . . and in countless periodicals."
While Bates was initially surprised by the poem’s success, she later reflected that its enduring "hold as it has upon our people, is clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood."
While Bates was initially surprised by the poem’s success, she later reflected that its enduring "hold as it has upon our people, is clearly due to the fact that Americans are at heart idealists, with a fundamental faith in human brotherhood."
Jul 3, 2026
Maj Watson Update
I understand the need to separate Military from Civilian law, and I think Watson knew what he was getting himself into before he undertook what is essentially an insubordinate stance. I think I'm clear on that.
What remains unclear is how we can accept the concept of permitted and unpermitted "free speech areas". Either we're allowed to speak our minds about politics and politicians without fear of government reprisal, or we're not.
This is - and likely will remain - the proverbial sticky wicket.
Kleptocracy
It's hard not to think that our government has become a criminal enterprise, not unlike the old-style Mafia, siphoning tax dollars into their own pockets through the machinery of war and 50,000 pages of IRS tax code filled with loopholes, exemptions, and shelters - all while a corporatized media cartel spins up stories of noble and benevolent hard-woking plutocrats who supply all the jobs and stoop to drop a few pennies in our beggar's cups, but threatening to take that away from us too if we don't shut up and stay in line.
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