🇺🇸U.S. corn and soybean conditions were steady on the week after last week's cool, wet weather, but spring wheat ratings eased slightly.
Winter wheat harvest progress has reached 40%, the date's fastest pace since 2012.
Something good is happening at this World Cup.
The Scots turned up. The English turned up. The Norwegians turned up. They sang their songs, got stuck in, and the Americans loved them for it. Glasgow and Boston are getting twinned off the back of it.
For 30 years we’ve been told to view the US as some sort of Great Satan — all imperialism and orange-man clichés. Not everyone buys it of course, but enough do.
And then Europeans actually go, and find a place that feels familiar. Makes sense to them. A bit richer, a bit further ahead, but recognisably ours. Settled by Europeans, still deeply European in its bones.
There’s a gathering-of-the-clans feeling to it. Old neighbours discovering they still like the same songs, the same drink, the same daft humour, and genuinely enjoying each other’s company.
None of it’s a surprise, really. It’s just been buried under so much politics that we forgot we were allowed to enjoy it.
Good to be reminded.
Caitlin Clark’s signature shoe arrives in October, nearly four years (and five seasons) after Nike first signed her.
Why, even as its stock and revenue cratered, did Nike sit out the Clark phenomenon for so long?
“It is one of the biggest failures I’ve ever seen.”
https://t.co/KKTIhhxEH5
Walking with Jesus doesn’t guarantee an easier life, it doesn’t guarantee that things would always go our way. Sometimes God may send us into a storm, sometimes He may lead us into a valley. But it’s in those moment where we learn to trust Him and we learn to surrender, which isn’t easy. It’s in those moments where we can see how weak we are without Jesus and how much we need Him. God doesn’t abandon us in the storm or valley and He’s not working against us. He’s with us in every moment and He’s for us. In those moments, sometimes it’s hard to see what He’s doing, but we have to walk by faith and we have to hold on to His promises. The storms and the valleys that He takes us through at times are not meant to destroy us, but it’s to draw us closer to Him and to build us up into the man and the woman He’s calling us to be. Don’t let go, keep holding on!
“But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
2 Corinthians 12:9
Walked 6 miles in Florence today with my favorite people.
Have a blister the size of the Duomo.
Never been happier!
Forever blessed and grateful to see another birthday❤️ Grazie Firenze
If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it.
But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it.
This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.
This is Noah Shannon, model citizen, slated to be Hawkeye senior defensive captain 2023. He had guilt pangs for having bet $10 on the Iowa Women's Basketball team in the 2023 NCAA tournament. The only bet he ever made. He turned himself in to coaches for the transgression who forwarded it to the NCAA.
They ruled him inelligible for the entire season, effectively ending his career. If the NCAA allows someone else to play after making thousands of bets, including many on his own team, I am going to fucking riot