Kathryn

Reader, traveler, tea drinker. I check in now and again.
Don't want to be followed by businesses! Following more people now. Don’t want to lose track of them

[John Ziegler @Zigmanfreud]

I showed my 14 year old daughter this amazing chart illustrating the progression of best-selling musical artists during the 1970s and 80s, so that she would get some sense of how insane Michael Jackson’s run during the 1980s was.

And now in 2026 he’s back near the top again…😱

[Covie @covie_93]

trump's DOJ is asking the courts to let his name remain on the Kennedy Center and investigating seashells while meeting in the Situation Room to discuss how to protect a pedophile.

[Blue Georgia @BlueGeorgia]

Susan Rice absolutely schools Bill Maher on Iran.

[Terry Moran 🇺🇸 @TerryMoran]

It’s not about arguments. It’s about facts.

I know one great fact about American elections, and I know it because the Republican Party has proved it to me:

There is no election fraud of any consequence anywhere in the United States.

The Republican Party and its allies, FOR DECADES, have been searching high and low, in every corner of our country, for evidence of election fraud.

This effort has been made with vast sums of money and other resources, and with some of the greatest powers in our nation at the party’s disposal:

A presidential commission under President Donald Trump.

The Department of Justice under President Donald Trump, armed with the resources of the FBI, and the powers of subpoena.

Committees of Congress under Republican control, also armed with the powers of subpoena and the investigative resources of the first branch of government.

State legislatures under Republican control, also with subpoena powers, have launched similar efforts to find evidence of election fraud.

Republican-controlled states have set up special commissions and task forces, some with subpoena powers, all well-funded and with access to the state’s electoral systems.

Conservative academics and think tanks have launched projects seeking out evidence of election fraud.

Fox News and the rest of MAGA media have dedicated significant resources to finding evidence of election fraud.

What is the result of this enormous Republican effort to find election fraud?

Ask The Heritage Foundation.

For nearly a decade, Heritage has maintained an “Election Fraud Database.”

The database contains “proven instances of election fraud.”

It covers elections going back nearly fifty years.

That’s billions and billions of American votes.

Right now, the total number of proven instances of election fraud that Heritage can document is:

1620.

That’s an infinitesimal number, vanishingly small, and it is solid proof of two things:

1. Some individuals commit election fraud.

2. There is no evidence at all of systemic or even widespread election fraud anywhere in the USA.

The election-fraud panic is the Big Lie of our time.

It is peddled by people who know better. Their own investigations over decades demonstrate that.

Stop trying to subvert our democracy.

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

[ESPN @espn]

A PLAY NEW YORKERS WILL REMEMBER FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES ‼️

[𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐫 @ThePreserverofU]

THIS WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE ONE DAY:

1) Sudden panic attack → Touch something cold (water, phone, metal). Your brain switches from fear to safety mode.

2) Heart beating too fast → Cough 2–3 times forcefully. It resets your heart rhythm.

3) Can’t breathe properly → Put your hands on top of your head. Your lungs open up instantly.

4) Feeling dizzy → Focus on one spot and tense your legs. Blood rushes back to your brain.

5) Stuffy nose → Hold your breath and nod your head up & down slowly. Open blocked airways.

6) Sudden anxiety → Splash water on your face – it activates the calm reflex.

7) Can’t sleep → Exhale longer than you inhale (4–7 breathing). Your brain goes into sleep mode.

[Olena Tregub @OTregub]

Apocalyptic bird nest.

A Russian glide bomb knocks down a tree in Donbas. From the shattered branches rolls out a tiny bird’s nest.

Made of drone fiber-optic cable.

Source: Oleg Malchenko

[Michael T. Lester @MichaelTLester]

Yesterday I told you the government is pulling 900 ocean monitoring instruments out of the water.

Here is the part that should make every American angry, regardless of where you stand on climate.

Congress voted to fund this network. Not once. Twice. The Trump administration proposed cutting it by 80 percent in 2025. Congress restored the money. Proposed the same cut in 2026. Congress restored the money again.

So the administration labeled it a "descope" and ordered the instruments pulled anyway.

That is not a budget disagreement. That is an executive branch telling the legislative branch that its votes do not matter. The public paid for this infrastructure. Congress protected it. One office in Washington decided the public should not have it.

This is the pattern I document in 𝑾𝒆 𝑨𝒓𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑩𝒂𝒅 𝑮𝒖𝒚𝒔. It is not about left or right. It is about who decides what Americans are allowed to know about their own planet.

Who should make that call?

[Miles Taylor @MilesTaylorUSA]

Yesterday Donald Trump tripled the size of his personal political army inside the government. Illegally. And almost no one noticed.

Here's what happened:

He signed an order converting ~8,000 of the most senior career officials in government into employees he can fire for any reason, or no reason at all.

These aren't rando's. They're the directors, chiefs of staff, and the people who write the rules or decide who gets federal money, i.e. the lieutenants right below his political appointees.

Until yesterday, they answered to the law. Now they answer to him.

A president normally gets ~4,000 political appointees. People he can bring into government and fire at will. I was one of them at DHS. You serve at his pleasure, full stop -- so if you're gonna speak truth to power, you're prepared to quit (or get fired if he doesn't like it).

The rest of the federal government is PROTECTED from firing if they tell the truth.

But Trump just stripped those protections. Adding 8,000 more people to his personal army. Overnight. Without asking Congress.

With the stroke of a pen, those people now serve at the pleasure of the president. They're "his" people, whether they like it or not.

And the chilling effect is real. An official who can be fired this afternoon for "subversion of presidential directives" (the order's own words) doesn't need to be hand-picked to know what's expected of him or her.

The threat does all the work.

By the way, this order is illegal. The law only lets Trump reclassify jobs when "necessary" in exceptional circumstances. And this blows an 8,000-person hole in the merit hiring / firing system created by Congress.

Without permission, Trump has created a whole new category of stormtroopers inside the Executive Branch.

If this doesn't get challenged in court, you're going to see the U.S. government become a very different place.

Here's the full story: https://t.co/mJzrvzhxGR

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

The federal government just banned bison from public land in Montana.

Not cattle.

Bison.

Interior Secretary Burgum revoked grazing permits for 950 bison
on 63,000 acres of federal land in northeastern Montana.

The reason?

Bison raised for conservation don't count as livestock
under a 1934 law.

Bison raised for meat and milk? Fine.

Bison raised to restore a native species to its native land? Get out.

Meanwhile, cattle ranchers across the West keep grazing on your land.

For $1.69 a month.

One cow. One calf. Thirty days. $1.69.

On land that belongs to every American.

The Cheyenne River Sioux. The Coalition of Large Tribes —
50+ Native nations. Defenders of Wildlife.

They all filed formal protests.

They called it exactly what it is.

"DEI for cows."

The bison have until September 30 to be gone.

Who decided cattle belong on public land more than bison do?

#DemsUnited

[Joyce Alene @JoyceWhiteVance]

Trump is trying to use a federal court to hand himself $1.776 billion in taxpayer money—and call it a "settlement." 35 former federal judges just asked a court to reopen the case and investigate whether it was a fraud on the court. The judge responded fast. Here's what's happening: https://t.co/vW78ht42NU

[Tom Nichols @RadioFreeTom]

It wasn't a secret, even then, who he was

[Don Winslow @donwinslow]

I'm thrilled to see this video we made reach 16.3 million views.

[George Wallace @MrGeorgeWallace]

In the end we were just his latest casino and whatnot.

[Scott MacFarlane @MacFarlaneNews]

ALERT: 35 Former federal judges file motion in Florida asking court to *re-open* Trump's $10 billion lawsuit vs. his I.R.S.

Filing: "This court was deceived"

"The 'settlement' commandeers the contrived sum of $1.776 billion from the U.S. Treasury"

https://t.co/7qY5gCTtYU

[Alexander @Mdkhurshed76417]

99% of people delete the wrong things when Gmail storage gets full.

They remove emails.

But Google hides the biggest storage hog somewhere else.

I freed 18GB without touching a single important email.

Here’s the first place you should check 👇

[Ten Thutty @thenotoryousone]

The last survivor from the famous A Great Day in Harlem picture 🙏🏾

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.

Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.

The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.

Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.