The French name Fou de Bassan sounds cuter that Northern Gannet.

The Extremes of Israeli Public Opinion Israeli voters are against a ceasefire with Iran, and think Benjamin Netanyahu has not gone far enough.

Deeply depressing analysis of internal Israeli politics www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a...

Heart of Glass - Bright Wall/Dark Room Isabelle Huppert is foremost an actress of maturity.

"Isabelle Huppert is foremost an actress of maturity."

peony.

You watch Jon Ossoff speak like this about the actual stakes & then you watch Andy Beshear speak about Funny Words, & the abject poverty of the latter approach to Democratic politics in 2026 is so stark that you don't know whether to laugh or cry about the latter.

Green leaves and a single red flower of a bush in front of the yellow-painted slats of an outdoor chair.

Green over yellow
San Francisco, CA

A park filled with people lounging around beneath a bright blue sky. Beyond the green of the park are the grey-white buildings of downtown San Francisco.

Dolores Park
San Francisco, CA

Interesting bit from a speech Cory Booker gave yesterday at the Michigan Democratic Women's Caucus in Detroit: (Full speech here: www.c-span.org/program/camp...)

Test from Part 3, Chapter 31 of Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman, Transtalted by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler. The image is the cover, showing the title and author and translators and a German soldier walking ahead of a tank in snow. In the full cover the flag can be seen on the tank.

#Booksky #SundaySentance "For Hitler, strength was a matter of violence - one man's ability to exercise violence over another" Stalingrad - Vasily Grossman.

EMROD | Emrod gears up for wireless power transfer field demonstration Emrod partners with Ara Ake and Power to deploy a field demonstration of its wireless power transfer technology in Taranaki early 2022.

This point to point wireless electricity transfer field demonstration follows successful in-door trials of Emrod’s technology in Auckland and will see power sent wirelessly over a distance of at least 200 metres.

Pete Hegseth Nailed It. No Really. talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/pete-...

peony.

'There we go...watch the pop, clear the hand!'

How many AI billboards are in San Francisco? We visited every one to find out We visited nearly 500 billboards in S.F. and found that nearly half advertised artificial intelligence companies. Our survey shows how AI is reshaping the city.

Good for @sfchronicle.com in cataloguing all the Ai billboards in SF. There are so many all so offensive & anti-life. Also many of them read like total nonsense to someone who doesn't already know what the product is - impressive lack of creativity while they're at it...

Calexico - "The Ballad of Cable Hogue" Touch and Go Records YouTube video by BlankTV

I was today years old when I learned there's a video for Ballad of Cable Hogue by Calexico

www.youtube.com/watch?v=w89r...

An elevated panoramic view of the Golden Gate Bridge taken from the Marin Headlands, looking southeast toward San Francisco. The bridge's two iconic rust-red towers and suspension cables stretch across a calm, blue-grey bay. The San Francisco skyline rises in the soft-focus distance under a partly cloudy sky with patches of pale blue. The Marin Headlands' dry grassy hillside and shrubs are visible in the lower left foreground, and Fort Point can be seen nestled beneath the south tower on the right. Several small sailboats dot the water below.

San Francisco from the Hills
9-2025

Looking down on the Golden Gate Bridge from the Marin Headlands — one of the best views in the world on a moody Bay Area Afternoon

#UrbanGaze #HumansOfBlueSky #Skyline #BayArea #California #Landscape #Photography #Bridge #NorCal #Travel #Scape #SonyAlpha

Grotesque: In a dispute over a will, two brothers including a retired Alabama state trooper now working at a federal courthouse, appear to have gotten their mother-in-law arrested by ICE.
Using the state to remove disfavored family members is the sort of thing that happens in totalitarian regimes.

Satellite images reveal scale of Israeli demolitions as Lebanese villages destroyed BBC Verify analysis found more than 1,400 buildings had been destroyed since 2 March.

"Satellite images reveal scale of Israeli demolitions as Lebanese villages destroyed"

After he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, Albert Camus wrote a letter of thanks to his favorite childhood teacher, whom he'd never forgotten. It's beautiful.

He became acquainted with creole music—through Chabuca Granda, of course, her song "José Antonio," which he thought was popular when Lalo was a boy.

- Mario Vargas Llosa, I Give You My Silence
Tr: Adrian Nathan West

Of the Jewish senators, 7 out of 10 voted to block a sale of bulldozers to Israel.

Michael Bennet
Jon Ossoff
Bernie Sanders
Brian Schatz
Adam Schiff
Elissa Slotkin
Ron Wyden

NO: Blumenthal, Rosen, Schumer

Says a lot about the political shift happening

Leo, former head of the Augustinian order, visits the site where Bishop Augustine (future saint) developed foundational texts to catholic just war theory, about which convert JD Vance is trying to popesplain right now.

Arthur Holquin • Follow 9h • 0 When the Neophyte Corrects the Vicar of Christ On JD Vance, Theological Hubris, and the Gospel He Has Yet to Learn There is a particular arrogance that takes root in the newly converted - the zeal of the autodidact who, having just discovered the tradition, mistakes enthusiasm for mastery. JD Vance, who received baptism into the Catholic Church in 2019 at the age of thirty-five, has now committed the singular error of instructing the Bishop of Rome to "be careful when he talks about matters of theology!" We should sit with the full weight of that sentence. The Vice President of the United States - seven years a Catholic, formerly an evangelical, before that a self-described atheist - stood before a Turning Point USA audience in Georgia and publicly admonished Pope Leo XIV about theological precision. "If you're going to opine on matters of theology," Vance informed the successor of Peter, "you've got to be careful, you've got to make sure it's anchored in the truth." The audacity is breathtaking. The irony is almost comic.

While Vance was dispensing theological warnings from a stage in Georgia, Pope Leo XIV was standing at the archaeological site of Hippo in Algeria - the episcopal see where St. Augustine served as bishop until his death in 430 A.D. Vance, who claims Augustine as his patron saint and frequently invokes him in speeches, was lecturing on Augustinian just war theology to a political rally audience. The pope he was lecturing - who served as Prior General of the Order of St. Augustine for more than a decade and holds a doctorate in Canon Law from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas - was planting an olive tree at the very ground where Augustine lived, prayed, wrote, and died. If God governs history with a sense of irony, this moment surely pleased Him. The occasion for Vance's correction was Pope Leo's statement that "God is never on the side of those who wield the sword." Vance responded by invoking the thousand-year tradition of Just War theory as if the pope were unaware of it. But Leo did not say war is never permissible. He said God is not simply enlisted as a combatant on any nation's side. That is not a negation of Just War doctrine. That is its foundation. The Catechism at §2309 is unambiguous about the conditions that must all be simultaneously met for a war to be just. Archbishop Broglio stated plainly on Easter Sunday that the war against Iran does not meet those criteria. Cardinals Cupich, Mcelroy, and Tobin, along with Archbishop Coakley, have spoken with notable unanimity. Cardinal Tobin put it plainly: Pope Leo "will continue to speak clearly against war and other offenses against human dignity and to call for authentic dialogue, because the Church's witness is grounded in the peace of Christ, not in partisan interests." That is episcopal fidelity. What Vance offered was its precise opposite.

The deeper problem is not merely that Vance is wrong about just war. It is the ecclesiological framework he is importing from American Christian nationalism into a tradition that explicitly rejects it. Vance told Fox News that "in some cases it would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality, to stick to matters of what's going on in the Catholic Church, and let the president of the United States stick to dictating public policy." Let that formulation stand naked for a moment. The pope — who holds a universal pastoral office precisely because the Gospel speaks to every dimension of human life — is being instructed to confine himself to the sacristy, while the president is assigned the role of "dictating" the political world. This is not a Catholic understanding of faith and public life. Catholic Social Teaching from Rerum Novarum onward has always insisted that the Gospel is not a private spiritual comfort but a public moral claim. When Vance tells the pope to stay in his lane, he is not defending Catholic doctrine. He is betraying it.

JD Vance's forthcoming book on his Catholic faith is titled Communion. Its cover features a United Methodist church. I do not say this merely to mock. Symbolism matters in Catholic theology, and the symbolism here is telling. A book about Catholic unity, bearing Protestant ecclesial architecture on its cover, written by a man who publicly contradicts the pope on Just War doctrine - this is not communion. This is confusion dressed in piety. Archbishop Coakley said it plainly: "The Pope is not Trump's rival, nor is the Pope a politician. He is the Vicar of Christ who speaks from the truth of the Gospel and for the care of souls." Communion, in Catholic theology, is not a feeling of spiritual warmth. It is a participation in the Body of Christ that carries radical obligations — to the poor, the stranger, the enemy, to peace. It is a table the powerful do not preside over. They are guests at it, like everyone else. A seven-year Catholic who tells the pope to watch his theology, while defending an administration that posted an Al image of the president as Jesus Christ and refused to apologize, is not in communion with the tradition he claims to be writing about. He is in communion with power. And that, as Augustine himself understood deeply, is a very different thing.

A pretty comprehensive takedown of JD Vance by a Catholic priest, Msgr. Arthur Holquin

open.substack.com/pub/liturgya...

Chabuca Granda - José Antonio YouTube video by rgsmusicargentina

José Antonio
- Chabuca Granda

Trump’s Corruption Is What’s Tanking the Economy It’s the Corruption, Stupid In the aftermath of Viktor Orbán’s defeat in...

Important stuff here from @davidkurtz.bsky.social. Trump isn’t a normal president getting upended by business cycles and trends outside his control. All the challenges/crises facing the US economy today are unequivocally the results of Trumps actions talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo...

V&A censored catalogues after demands by Chinese printer Exclusive: Victoria and Albert Museum has deleted maps and images deemed sensitive by Beijing censors from exhibition publications

The Victoria and Albert Museum has agreed to requests by the Chinese printing company to delete maps and images from at least two recent exhibition catalogues
- Matthew Weaver

In a First for the U.S., Renewables Generate More Power Than Natural Gas In March, for the first time, renewables supplied more power to the U.S. than natural gas, a milestone in the transition to clean power. However, rising power demand is complicating the shift away from fossil fuels by extending the lives of many aging coal power plants.

In a first last month, renewables supplied more power to the U.S. than natural gas, a milestone in the shift to clean energy.

if a sigh were a flower…. cream poppy in late stage of unfurling