Nashville, like most cities, went for the Democrat (Davidson County). Tennessee otherwise -- ugh. As they said in the Middle Ages, "city air frees people."

(1 of 2) Nothing is more annoying than "wars on drugs," without treatment plans for the customer base and high level support for going after the people at the top. Supply and demand. A friend worked in a VA hospital alcohol treatment ward. There were no provisions for drug treatment.

(1 of 2)A number of years ago, a National Police informant made up shit, and a family believed from bad advice to be drug dealers tried to outrun what they believed to be car hijackers and were gunned down.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmJa... I post the link to this scene from time to time.

Since I'm in Nicaragua, I can ignore eating turkey and share a filete de pollo con mi gata, la jefa de mi casa. The Asia Mall had light and dark soy sauces and oyster sauce but not the $16 a bottle. So far, the Chinese are doing department stores, not food stores. I've been in four of them.

The 80 " by 20"by 19.5" 130 gallon fish tank has left the house going to its new home. Luis and I went out earlier for new pillows and a bath mat and found oyster sauce at the Asian Mall. They had small rice cookers but no induction burners. Most of what was on display was Christmas stuff.

www.theguardian.com/world/ng-int... One of my friends in Floyd County, VA., hated the local midwifes trained at The Farm in Tennesee. She did ambulance runs to save lives that the shouldn't have been trying home delivery with non-licensed midwifes.

One reason I love John Keats is he realized women were as smart as men, and his mistrust of them was his fault and something he needed to get over. His fiancee made clothes; he made poetry. She was good at what she did, too.

The fish have left the house and I've been paid what I agreed for the tank and stand when Luis's friend can get a longer truck. The tank is 80 inches long. I suspect my electric bill will go down some since I won't be running two filters full time. I now have space on one wall.

Been thinking about the difference between Nicaragua and the US in terms of sex and sex works. US Embassy in Costa Rica supported a whore retraining class that see old whores as future domestic servants. Nicaragua set up a training program to turn retired sex workers into legal aides.

Sandwich thrower not guilty, per NY Times breaking news alert.

I'm amused to hear on one of the late night shows that using lots of SF and fantasy in training LLMs has created AIs that believe that they're sentient. I'd wondered what sorts the Large Language Models were going to come up with if they were trained on all the samples as if all were real.

This is pretty amazing. Spain added descendants of the Abraham Lincoln Brigades to citizens of their former colonies and descendants of Sephardic Jews to either very quick resettlement on asylum claims or full citizenship. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

My British friend recommended this one and said Andy Griffith surprised her his performance in this. Also, another movie from an earlier time that's still relevant in 2025. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJO0...

Couldn't find Casablanca the whole movie, so started watching DEADLINE USA also with Humphrey Bogart. Newspaper and politics. The importance of a free press and the courage that can require.

Enough of the corrupt criminal conspiracy in the US. I'm going to rewatch CASABLANCA, with some irony. From 1942.

My British friend called today to tell me that some professor wanted to take an abandoned cat and all her recently born kittens. My first question was "Is he a biology professor?" She'd thought the same thing and wasn't going to give him mom and kittens. This is a rough country for cats .

The horror for me is the racism of our projects in other people's countries. Trump wrecking the White House is number two, an obliviousness to the past.

North Carolina, pay attention.

More to think about. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Univers...

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interna... Has the US navy committed piracy on the high seas (in international water)?

Thinking back about Nicaragua 2018. The military announced that it was only going to protect public property and not police demonstrations. The opposition was all over the internet and t.v. trying to claim that the Army was supporting the FSLN government by force of arms.

Discussion on a stock agency forum about tolerating other people's politics,and remembrances of a member of the group who just passed. I can be tolerant this side of death threats or murdering people for what you think they are. If someone wants my kind or my friends' kind dead, I have no respect.

One annoying thing in political life are people who model their utopias over cultures we obliterated (for mostly stupid reasons) and in which we have no lived experience. An ancestors was kidnapped very young by an indigenous group. His mother reclaimed him as an adolescent and "recivilized" him.

One thing the "deport them all crowd" forget is that a number of people got 2 year Parole visas, which allowed them to work while they applied for asylum, but Trump decided to revoke those. The US should have some legitimate ways to be vetted for moving to the US besides the Green Card lottery.

When I was a high school kid failing Latin, my pro-Nazi Latin teacher, decided I was a Slav: my high cheekbones and dark hair and stupidity (at not joining the professors' kids who were cheating their way through the class).

Another history lesson from The History Place on Hitler, his generals, and Munich. www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/tr...

www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/tr... Hitler and his generals. Not Trump's delusions about them. Also, crazy dictators don't care about the truth 20th Century version G 1. Stalin was the Russian version. Hitler wrecked Germany as the Generals predicted.

Newsom is spot on. There won’t be a 2028 election. Probably not even a 2026 election unless Americans wake up. Republicans are planning for every possibility including how to null and void any democratic wins if they do allow elections to happen. youtu.be/xixWODj3-UE?...

Something to see where the unitary executive theory came from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sh6o...

The argument made is that without religion, people would have no moral brakes on their behavior but forgiveness of sins allows a lot of sinning. Safest states in the US are not the most religious ones. Safest countries are the secular ones (Scandinavian ones). Canada is safer than the US.

I remember a sadistic bully teacher in 5th grade who decided to make me her chew toy. Much of what she used as attack, I knew were rhetorically dishonest, but didn't have the verbal skills to counter her then.

The current regime in the US is the troll and flamer army escaped from the Usenet they collapsed.

The whole problem with white guys is a third of them are incompetent but want the same jobs that men and women who are competent have. The more guys don't know what they're talking about, the more they insist on giving women advice.

I've always been aware that women tend to be underrepresented in various fields. Recently, I found out that the University of Iowa MFA program only had two female students in Alice Notly's first year there, and only one in her specialty. 1967.

We would be extremely upset if USAnos were killed for evading a traffic stop when they were undocumented in Nicaragua, say, and there are a number of them all over Latin America, including here. And much more likely to be criminals than the average Hispanic in the US.

Had the health department foggers in and yeah, the roaches were getting thick again. Got the fish tank covered before waving the guy running the fogging machine in. The health department uses something toxic to insects mixed with may motor oil. Hadn't had the foggers in recently.

One of the things I have been thinking about was a difference between people who throw out rhetoric -- "Death to the Klan," not meaning it as literal and not expecting anyone else to take it literally, not even people who don't read the Bible allegorically.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horst_W... Some striking parallels here.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmJa... Miami Vice had some interesting moments. I wonder what the people in favor of murdering suspected Latin Americans would do if the real distribution system was in the US, run by bankers and bought and paid for politicians.

Some trials of DxO 9: animals and flowers.

So BlueSky is allowing AI advertising, especially to people who have posted against it and want some of the A|/LM people in prison.

The world is full of people who love blaming the wrong people for some genuine problems that people less easy to rant at without consequences are really responsible for.

One thing I like about Nicaraguan culture is that being a writer, poet, or artist is respected about as much as being a lawyer here and some of those drive cabs, too. And there are no MFA programs. You take a journalism course as an undergrad, and you write for a living -- ad copy, whatever.

Luis came by to borrow my three function floor machine (dry vac, floor scrubbing, and wet vac) to get water up at a friend's place. Started making coffee and a handy man I know came by, hired by my landlords to clean the gutters, so that's done. My new kettle works fine for pour overs.

I remember one of Jane Goodall's reports a young chimp male on the lower end of the troop's pecking order finding two steel containers and rolling them down a hill, hooting, and ended up terrorizing the troop into accepting him as the alpha male. That's basically what we have in the US now.

Working on WRITING'S WRITING AND OTHER WRITING for Aqueduct Press. First pieces date back to my twenties, last one was written in 2025. Some of the pieces were published by Telephone Books, Maureen Owen's small press in NYC. Memories are strange things.

Another photo: Belle on the Uninterrupted Power Source, for the warmth. Belle has also claimed a bath mat for her sleeping spot in my bedroom on the other side of the courtyard.

Blocking people is helpful. I'll post something visual to clean the eyeballs of the political crud.