“People can face any misfortune with fortitude and buoyancy as long as they are convinced that those in charge of their affairs are not deceiving them, or are not dwelling in a fool's paradise.” — Winston Churchill 🌱📷

I look up and sigh, tapping into a rapture that eons of ancestors have known. 📷

i desperately want everyone involved in the destruction of USAID to have to, st the very least, answer to the american people for the suffering and misery they have caused apnews.com/article/myan...

"That community is already in the process of dissolution where each man begins to eye his neighbor as a possible enemy, where nonconformity with the accepted creed, political as well as religious, is a mark of disaffection.... 🌱📷

Nonbinary by nature. 🌱📷

My brilliant friend Joe, a retired U.S. diplomat, has a dire warning: "Some of my old buddies worry about communism, where the government suppresses dissent, controls universities, uses the military against civilians it deems its political enemies, intervenes in commercial activities...

"Prejudice is the child of ignorance." — William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830) 🌱📷

Timeline cleanse. Take as needed. 🌱📷

"It's said that power corrupts, but it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable." — David Brin 🌱📷

Monochrome Monday. 📷

"When guiding questions are future oriented, as in 'What’s possible?' and 'How do we create it?' people are mobilized to focus on more transformational change. Focusing on problems is limiting; focusing on possibilities is liberating." — David Ehrlichman 🌱📷

Everything by Trump and Miller right now is weakness. They know they've lost the majority and their policies are unpopular and they've F'd up the economy. So, they'll use the military and threats and unleash their Reeks. But, they don't have the numbers. All hands on deck resistance.

"It hurts too much to laugh, but I'm too old to cry." — Adlai Stevenson quoting Abraham Lincoln.

Where are the commanding officers of those sailors in the background. How are they letting this happen?

Every time I really look at the Licualas, I see new tricks of lines and light. I'm relieved, though, that color remains a constant. 🌱📷

"The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly and struggles to the light amid the thorns.” — George Santayana 🌱📷

The big plumerias here, the rubra variety, are packing it in for the winter, but my obtusa at the driveway keeps on truckin'. It suffers regular bouts of rust disease, but after a certain age, don't we all? 🌱📷

"Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back." — Gore Vidal 🌱📷

These birds were at eye level when we put them in, and now I need the neck of a crane to spot them. Onward and upward. 🌱📷

That's unbelievable. This is the world we live in.

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries." — James Madison 🌱📷

"I seen the little girl come around the corner, because they was bringing the kids down, too, had them zip-tied to each other. That's all I kept asking. What is the morality?... One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, 'f*** them kids.' "

#tbt: Reynolds Street Pier. 📷

From 1939-1945 German officers also listened to speeches from civilians about how the laws of war didn’t apply to them. And then they participated in the Holocaust, starved millions of prisoners of war, destroyed villages and cities, and were defeated.

My $.02: If you've been critical of Democrats for not fighting hard enough and you're not shouting your support from the rooftops as they take this stand on healthcare, then I'd argue that you are not meeting the moment right now. They are doing what we demanded of them. Let's have their backs.

"We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism and love.... Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?" — Jane Goodall 🌱📷

“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept and celebrate those differences.” — Audre Lorde 🌱📷

Harry Truman desegregated the Army in 1948, the same year it admitted women for regular service. The next year, the U.S. ratified the Geneva Conventions against war crimes, and our War Department became the Department of Defense to put more emphasis on keeping the peace....

It's bad enough that he posted a deepfake — a clip altered by AI to put false, inflammatory vulgarities into the Senate opposition leader's mouth and making it seem real. He frosted that toxic cake with racism, showing the House opposition leader in cartoon Mexican drag. Takes lying to a new level.

Trees within trees: a Licuala palm seed stalk. 🌱📷

"The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos." — Stephen Jay Gould 🌱📷

Monochrome Monday. 📷

"Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming." — David Bowie 🌱📷

It's a veritable hellscape.

I love the way they shimmer and dance when the breeze runs its hand over them. 🌱📷

"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them." — Assata Shakur 🌱📷

Ya think the Comey case might get bumpy?

Midnight lace: palms in the streetlight. 🌱📷

The more I think about it, it's not a ballroom. It's a throne room.

"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization." — Franklin D. Roosevelt 🌱📷

Must be pumpkin spice season. 🌱📷

"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the Earth would do this, it would change the world." — William Faulkner 🌱📷

WHERE ARE THEY? Google this, you find EIGHT outlets covering it. This one, Miami Herald, Miami Hurricane, Esquire, Irish Legal News, El Pais, Latin Times, & Democracy Now. NO major media appears to be covering it. WHY? They’ve disappeared TWELVE HUNDRED PEOPLE. san.com/cc/more-than...

“What you want to ignite in others must first burn inside yourself.” — Charlotte Brontë 🌱📷

The mussaenda says goodbye for a while. 🌱📷

Sounds like an incredible romance for the ages. bsky.app/profile/acyn...

In armor she dresses (Extensions for tresses) For innocents sent far from home. She tries hotsie-totsie But comes off full Nazi, The monster they call Kristi Noem.

"A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one's own ignorance." — Niccolo Machiavelli 🌱📷

Fall, fallen. Time for most plumerias to shed blossoms and leaves, getting naked for their seasonal nap. The little red ixora flowers laugh at the calendar, coming and going all year. 🌱📷

“It is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying.’ ” — Sen. Ted Cruz 🌱📷