In Summary: * Listening now to the Nationals vs Phillies MLB game, currently in the 3rd inning. The game should be over by 20:00 CDT or so, at which time I'll finish what night prayers remain unsaid, and send myself to bed, hopefully to find a restful sleep.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 229,83 lbs. * bp= 127/78 (76)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:40 – bread and butter * 12:15 – 1 banana * 15:45 – home mmade beef and vegetable soup. * 16:50 – small piece of cheese cake

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:20 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:10 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 04:55 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 12:10 – service guy just arrived to check my a/c unit. Sure hope he can fix it quick; it's hot in here! * 15:15 to 15:45 – watch old game shows and eat a quick lunch at home with the wife. * 16:10 – listening to general sports talk on WJFK The Fan 106.7 FM ahead of tonight's MLB game between the Nationals and the Phillies

Chess: * 10:30 – moved in all pending CC games

Well. Shit. Valdez is not happening. That's all the bandwidth I have at the moment.

When I woke this morning ~03:00 the temperature in this house was 80 degrees and rising. The a/c unit was blowing air through the vents, but it wasn't cold air.

Called the landlord at 09:00, he called an a/c company and a tech guy was here shortly after Noon. The very old compressor in the central unit is dead and is so very old it's unlikely a replacement unit can be found.

There are several old window units in some of the rooms here, and we got two of them working: one in the wife's room, and one in a spare room we use for storage. That storage room may become my room temporarily.

Sitting here in my room now, with the ceiling running as fast as it can, my desk thermometer shows 92.8 degrees F. I may be dealing with this situation for awhile.

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus! Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

The apiary be Scottish run to mute Late December this hugger And seeing simply rise What time in Hearst for Will Enough of oak And seeming simpler For five octet and lane And pasture by the law Economy forever- and nines to the Moon Giving ray to God And night shall let us be- the end of war.

Boss Under The Radar (A Time Appeal)

And so it rained The sympathy of curious men First in flash Lights under for the camera of Win’ This is what year again For the peaceful day Russians knew and capitulated We were all with God under the Sun And in Victory Day And seeing this warmth A golden kite- flew in his memory And apocalypse then- hit our pay

For peace to begin at near Rights to be able And sending this day A successful and special computer Life is art And capitulation And Ukraine will last- a Lifetime.

🇺🇦 💛💜🩷

Personal log: Experimental

I LOVE pebble ice! I've been experimenting. So far, my favorite way to crunch and munch on them is with a sprinkle of electrolytes. Not just any electrolytes. Oh, no, no, no, no. Hibiscus electrolytes with a tiny dash of ground freeze-dried rosehips. The latter isn't necessary. It's just additional happy yum.

The air pockets in the ice end up wicking the liquified powder up into the ice via capillary action, so every morsel of crunch is an explosion of flavor! There's so much crunch! So much cold! I'm getting quite the dopamine hit, and my oral fixation tendency is pretty happy right now.

On the plus side, having zirconia teeth means I can crunch my happy little heart out.

On the negative side, canines go ouch when I bite wrong. Also, I should probably slow down on the crunching because my tongue is numb enough that I sound ridiculous trying to speak.

I am in a very happy place, sensory-wise. It only takes a tiny sprinkle because the cold amplifies the tart sweetness. My trigeminal nerve is all brrrrrrr. Which is admittedly a wee bit euphoric. And I am shivering with delight though it is currently 101°F outside.

I have always been a sucker for this type of tea. Preferably iced. Having it sucked into the ice with the addition of electrolytes... holy moly! I can only think of one thing that would make this better right now. Alas, it's not something that is going to happen. One day, I shall ensure that it will. I'm not sure I'd be capable of handling such bliss, but I'm definitely up for the challenge!

Okay. Enough of that. I do recommend an insulated tumbler so that the glass doesn't sweat. My preference is my 12 ounce Simply Modern Voyager Series Lunar Iced Coffee cup. I don't know if they're still available. Black stainless steel with embossed crescent moons and stars. I normally rarely use it because I don't like coffee and it's rarely cool enough for hot cacao. I shall now use it every single day!

This...This is euphoria!

I should probably research if there's a safety limit on ice crunching. It is sooooo good. It's like sour punch straws whisked into frozen, liquidy, hydrating, goosebumps producing ambrosia. I'm so happy.😹

My intoxicated mouth and I now return you to my normally darker scribbles. Maybe. Or maybe not. It could be, dear journal, that my writing is heading down a much more zany lane until I get accustomed to this sensory high. I think all living quarters should come with this delicious concoction. Wars would surely end.

Did I mention it turns the ice a gorgeous pomegranate color? No? It does. My senses don't know what's beguiled them, but they are a most willing and amorous supplicant.

Written August 6, 2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought.

El Instituto Latinoamericano de Terraformación fue invitado a participar en una audiencia pública en la Comisión de Ciencia, Tecnología, Innovación e Informática del Senado Federal de Brasil para discutir el Proyecto de Ley n.º 3018, de 2024, por el que se regula la actividad de los centros de datos de inteligencia artificial.

En la ocasión, partimos repasando un panorama general de los diversos, crecientes y aún desconocidos impactos socioambientales de los centros de datos. Por tanto, mostramos que el principio precautorio -como una regla de protección ambiental y de salud pública- parece ser el indicado como política pública para enfrentar los crecientes y aún desconocidos impactos de estas infraestructuras.

Luego, hicimos un panorama de América Latina que nos permitió afirmar que:

• Los gobiernos del continente tienen una deuda sobre la sostenibilidad de la IA.
• La autoregulación no funciona para la sustentabilidad de los centros de datos.
• El desafío requiere marcos regulatarios específicos con una serie de condiciones.

Asimismo, revisando el caso chileno, transmitimos al Senado que debido a la falta de salvaguardas legales y claras que regulen los impactos socioambientales de estas infraestructuras, los proyectos de centros de datos en Chile muchas veces terminan judicializados, lo que implica un amplio costo de capital y de incertudumbre para las empresas y las comunidades impactadas.

Lo anterior puede ser útil en Brasil para aprender que la falta de marcos legales y políticas públicas adecuadas y participativas ha hecho que se retrasen los planes de desarrollo de centros de datos, y que, consecuentemente, no puede haber desarrollo de estas infraestructuras sin que las comunidades estén involucradas en todo el proceso de evaluación ambiental.

Entre nuestras sugerencias para Proyecto de Ley 3018/2024, están:

1. Planificación socioambiental estratégica y participativa como rol de Estado: Sobre todo para evitar lo que pasa en Estados Unidos, donde los Estados compiten agresivamente por atraer centros de datos de hiperescala y las decisiones se trasladan desde espacios públicos hacia acuerdos privados y decretos ejecutivos. Este modelo privatiza beneficios y control, mientras socializa riesgos económicos y daños ambientales. También debilita la rendición de cuentas democrática y la resiliencia frente a los límites ecológicos (Kollar, J.. 2026).

2. Obligación de someterse a procedimientos de licenciamiento ambiental participativo y especifico en los territorios.

3. Exigencias de métricas y mecanismos de rendición de los impactos socioambientales.

4. Asegurar mecanismos de justicia energética.

5. No perder de vista temas de fondo para la política pública, como son el poco valor social que tiene la IA en poblaciones como la estadounidense, el bajo impacto laboral de los centros de datos, y los riesgos de una burbuja económica y fananciera de la IA, que dejan la pregunta abierta de cómo Brasil debiera legislar para responder a estos peligros y blindar a su economía y población.

Puedes leer nuestra intervención completa en este link.

#Spanish

---

I had a dream today. a nice one, actually, but only for about five minutes. we got married, not somewhere ordinary either. a castle, a pretty one. a place rich people rent because normal buildings isn’t dramatic enough. it was really beautiful ill admit that. stone everywhere, high ceilings, light coming through the window. i remember walking towards her, angel. she looked. i dont know, there arent enough words for that part, or too many words i cant put together. i just remember stopping for a second because she didnt even look real. like someone had accidentally put an angel in the wrong room, she just looked. majestic. she smiled. i reached for her face. i remember crying before i even spoke. which is embarrassing considering i was unconscious and still somehow managed to lose composure. and suddently. out of nowhere, my hands, they werent hands anymore. they started falling apart into maggots. no blood in between, no cuts. just worms, hundreds of them. then my arms, then the rest of me, everything. like my whole body had already died and nobody had bothered telling me. it wasnt strange that i was falling apart. angel was strange. she didnt scream, she didnt panic either, she just looked at me, disgust. ive seen that dream before, worms. In different ways, usually the people i love become the dead ones. they rot, they become the maggots. this time, it was me. and she stayed exactly the same, she didnt even try to help, as if i was nobody, she just looked at me like i had become something filthy. the warmth disappeared from her eyes so quickly i remember that more clearly than the maggots themselves. then i woke up, sweating as always, breathing like I’d forgotten how. same routine as always, i went to work. bad day, nothing special happend, i just couldnt stop thinking about the dream. every quiet moment my head decided to replay it. then replay it again, then ask me twenty questions it already knew i couldnt answer. if this, if that, what if. why, just pointless thoughts. angel texted me today, she was happy. i dont know how to explain it without sounding ridiculous, but she seemed brighter. happy in a way that makes you forget whatever you were about to complain about. i almost told her about the dream. then i thought maybe she deserved to stay happy for one afternoon, one evening. she needed to sleep anyway, so thats fine. ill keep the dream, ill keep the bad day, ill kep the jealousy from something i wish i hadn’t noticed. ill keep my thoughts, thats what i thought i was good at, im clearly not, otherwise i wouldnt be writing about it. but anyway, hopefully tomorrow gives me something less dramatic to complain about.

Or maybe my wrist restraints have started controlling my dreams now. at this point i wouldnt even argue with the diagnosis. they already keep me from scratching myself awake, might as well start directing the nightly entertainment too.

Sincerely, Perhaps i should stop sleeping.

Institutional Capacity and the Clocks of the Republic

Republics do not fail for lack of formal power alone. They also fail when rule-bound institutions cannot convert lawful authority into competent performance—or correct failure before distrust hardens into constitutional disloyalty.

Writing in The Washington Post on July 13, as Iraq’s prime minister prepared to visit Washington, David Petraeus offered a line that reads like a diagnosis of something much larger than Baghdad’s troubles:

“Institutions ultimately derive legitimacy not merely from legal authority, but from performance. Courts must administer justice fairly. Ministries must provide reliable public services.”

Governments, as Petraeus put it, earn confidence through competence—not through the mere fact of having been elected, established by law, or endowed with formal powers. 

For a growing number of liberal republics, that confidence is no longer merely eroding. In some places it has already collapsed.

Viktor Orbán spent sixteen years reshaping Hungary’s courts, media, constitutional structures, and electoral machinery before voters removed Fidesz from power in April 2026. The new government’s difficulty is not simply to replace one political leadership with another, but to recover institutions whose personnel, rules, and informal loyalties were altered over many years. Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) reached a record 28 percent in an April INSA voting-intention poll. In France, Marine Le Pen again leads presidential polling after an appeals court upheld her conviction for misuse of European Parliament funds but shortened her electoral ban enough to allow her to run in 2027. The V-Dem Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report identified the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy among ten new autocratizing countries and described the speed of democratic deterioration in the United States as unprecedented in its modern data. 

This is not a problem confined to unstable states or the democratic periphery. It has reached countries long treated as anchors of the postwar liberal order.

The standard explanations reach for ideology, polarization, disinformation, corruption, economic insecurity, or cultural conflict. Each explains something important. Nor should democratic decay be reduced to administrative malfunction. Some institutions are not merely weak; they are deliberately captured. Some delays are not accidental; they are useful to people who profit from institutional paralysis. Some political movements do not wish to make constitutional government perform better; they wish to use its failures as grounds for replacing constitutional restraint with personal authority.

Yet grievance and ideology explain the fuel better than the ignition. They do not fully explain why distrust has become so politically potent, or why constitutional governments so often appear unable to correct failures that almost everyone can see.

For that, one has to look at the machinery underneath—at what might provisionally be called institutional capacity.

Institutional capacity is the durable ability of a rule-bound governing system to recognize collective problems, establish lawful priorities, mobilize and coordinate resources, perform public purposes reliably and fairly, absorb credible feedback, defend its rules against strategic abuse, and revise or retire failing arrangements in time.

The last words matter: in time.

An institution that eventually identifies a failure but cannot correct it before the harm becomes entrenched is not fully capable. An institution that produces a commission, an audit, or a lessons-learned report but leaves the underlying practice untouched has collected information without learning. An institution that can create programs, regulations, and offices but cannot terminate any of them has growth without metabolism. And an institution that preserves every existing procedure while losing the ability to accomplish the purpose for which those procedures were created may remain formally intact while becoming practically hollow.

The Framers understood that republican government required both restraint and energy. They did not simply fear concentrated power more than incompetent administration. Madison described energy, stability, liberty, and dependence on the people as principles that had to be combined in difficult proportions. Hamilton called energy in the executive a leading characteristic of good government and warned that feeble execution amounted to bad government in practice. 

They nevertheless designed legislation to be difficult. Bicameralism, presentment, the veto, federalism, staggered elections, divided powers, and judicial review introduced friction because coercive public decisions should not be made as quickly or unilaterally as private ones. Legislative delay can permit scrutiny, amendment, compromise, minority protection, and the cooling of temporary passions. In that sense, slowness was not a design error.

But the constitutional order they established now governs an administrative state of a scale, technical complexity, and social reach they could not have anticipated. Congress delegates broad objectives to permanent agencies, which develop the rules and procedures through which much public policy is actually experienced. Yet the legislature has become increasingly unable to maintain, review, reconcile, or retire the accumulated machinery it has authorized.

Fiscal year 1997 remains the last year in which all regular federal appropriations were enacted by the October 1 deadline. Since then, continuing resolutions, consolidated packages, delayed appropriations, and occasional full-year stopgaps have become normal instruments of government finance. The machine continues to operate, but increasingly on inherited instructions, temporary extensions, and emergency deadlines rather than sustained legislative supervision. 

At the same time, a digital information environment broadcasts every failure immediately and nationally. Institutional performance still unfolds through investigation, budgeting, rulemaking, litigation, implementation, and appeal; public judgment now forms at the speed of a phone notification. The constitutional order and its political environment operate on radically different clocks.

That temporal mismatch is not the sole cause of democratic decay. It is, however, an underexamined condition that makes decay easier to exploit.

It also compounds corruption rather than standing apart from it. Legislators, officials, regulated interests, and beneficiaries who profit from an obsolete program, loophole, subsidy, jurisdiction, or procedural obstacle have little incentive to spend political capital removing it. Inertia is not always the unintended product of a cumbersome design. Sometimes it is a preference, quietly held by precisely those actors best positioned to correct it.

None of this means that the answer is simply to move faster.

The DOGE initiative in Washington offers the cautionary counterexample. It treated rapid personnel reduction as though subtraction were itself evidence of reform. But a serious capacity review would first have asked which missions were failing, which processes were duplicative, which skills were essential, which functions could be automated or consolidated, and what capacities would have to be preserved or rebuilt after reorganization.

By May 2026, the federal civilian workforce had declined by more than 272,000 employees from its January 2025 level. At the Office of Personnel Management, staffing fell by 35 percent between December 2024 and March 2026; ten offices disappeared, and 57 percent of those leaving had more than eleven years of service. The Government Accountability Office described the result as a significant loss of institutional knowledge, while OPM’s inspector general identified immediate operational-capacity gaps. GAO also found that the Defense Department had reduced its civilian workforce by more than 78,000 employees without consistently analyzing the effects on workload, cost, or mission performance and without a plan for assessing lessons learned. 

The point is not that every abolished position was indispensable. It is that head count is an input, not a measure of capacity. Removing people and offices without a demonstrated redesign of how the public mission will be performed is speed without diagnosis. It is not agility but demolition.

Agility does not mean velocity. It means temporal competence: the ability to move at the speed appropriate to the task and to change tempo without sacrificing legality, quality, rights, or accountability.

Different public functions properly operate on different clocks.

A police response to an emergency call should be measured in minutes. Disaster response may require decisions within hours. Benefits and permits should move within declared service periods. Major infrastructure planning may require months of technical and environmental review. Ordinary legislation should remain deliberative because legislative friction protects interests that administrative efficiency alone cannot protect.

Not every delay is incapacity, and not every institutional friction is a defect. Delay becomes failure when it no longer serves deliberation, evidence, legality, or minority protection, but instead prevents correction of demonstrated harm—or permits organized actors to exploit the lag indefinitely.

A capable republic therefore needs more than one institutional clock. It needs a disciplined and narrowly bounded pathway for recurring cases of demonstrated failure: a statutory loophole repeatedly identified by courts, a program discredited by years of evidence, contradictory regulations that prevent implementation, an administrative process producing persistent unlawful disparities, or a formerly informal norm that bad-faith actors have learned to violate with impunity.

Such a pathway should not permit automatic enactment or emergency government by decree. A documented finding by a court, the Government Accountability Office, an inspector general, or a genuinely bipartisan oversight body could instead trigger mandatory expedited consideration. The legislature would retain authority over the response, but it could no longer bury the problem indefinitely.

The safeguards would have to be stringent. The triggering finding should establish a recurring pattern rather than one politically disputed incident. The proposed correction should be publicly explained, prospective rather than punitive, narrowly tailored to the identified failure, and applicable generally rather than to named persons or disfavored groups. Ordinary judicial review should remain available. Temporary measures should expire automatically unless reenacted after evaluation under ordinary procedures.

This is not a proposal to eliminate constitutional friction. It is a proposal to distinguish friction that protects republican government from delay that disables it.

Petraeus’s account of strategic leadership offers a useful organizational analogy. His command operated through a disciplined “battle rhythm”: daily operational assessments, weekly specialized reviews, continuous field observation, and periodic strategic reassessment. Different questions were addressed on different clocks, but the clocks were connected. Information moved from operations into evaluation and from evaluation back into strategy. A lesson was not considered learned merely because it had been documented; it had to produce a change in doctrine, training, organization, or practice. 

Civilian republican institutions cannot be commanded like a military theater. They contain divided authority, lawful opposition, federal relationships, independent courts, competing constituencies, and rights that cannot be suspended for administrative convenience. But the underlying principle remains transferable: evaluation must feed correction, and correction must occur on a clock appropriate to the harm.

Performance itself must also be measured more carefully than DOGE-style personnel totals or political claims of success. A public institution should be assessed against declared standards of effectiveness, reliability, legality, fairness, accessibility, timeliness, resilience, and responsiveness. Agency self-reporting should be tested through independent audit, front-line evidence, professional evaluation, and authenticated citizen experience. Faster processing accompanied by more errors is not improved capacity. Lower cost achieved by excluding eligible citizens is not efficiency. High aggregate performance that conceals regional or demographic failure is not reliable public service.

Institutional capacity also includes the ability to stop.

A capable state must be able to retire obsolete mandates, merge duplicative bodies, reconcile contradictory statutes, simplify accumulated procedures, and remove requirements whose administrative cost has overtaken their public value. New regulation should therefore be accompanied not by a crude one-rule-in, one-rule-out formula, but by a published regulatory-burden assessment and a requirement to identify existing provisions that should be consolidated, amended, or repealed. Major programs and rules should undergo retrospective review on a fixed schedule rather than persist indefinitely because no political coalition can be assembled to revisit them.

The relationship between capacity and legitimacy then runs in a loop:

Authority → capacity → performance → evaluation → correction → confidence → renewed legitimacy

Run backward, it becomes the mechanism now visible across multiple republics:

Authority → weakening capacity → poor performance → distrust → evasion and noncooperation → further capacity loss → delegitimization

When repeated failures remain uncorrected, declining public confidence weakens voluntary compliance and constitutional loyalty, creating a self-reinforcing cycle in which populist and authoritarian movements can present themselves as more effective alternatives to rule-bound republican government.

They are not the only beneficiaries. Technocrats may claim that democratic deliberation is too cumbersome. Oligarchs and patronage networks profit from complexity ordinary citizens cannot navigate. Executive leaders can argue that only personal command can cut through institutional paralysis. Each offers a different escape from incapacity; all diminish the citizen’s role in constitutional self-government.

Political theory has immense literatures on legitimacy, republicanism, constitutional structure, and democratic backsliding. Public administration and organization theory contain powerful but dispersed accounts of Weberian professionalism, bureaucratic autonomy, policy capacity, institutional integration, organizational learning, dynamic capabilities, resilience, and high-reliability systems.

What remains underdeveloped is their integration into a republican theory connecting lawful authority, differentiated institutional time, measurable performance, correction, integrity, organizational renewal, and renewed legitimacy.

Such a theory would have to explain not merely how an agency performs its assigned tasks, but how a constitutional order recognizes that its institutions are failing; how it distinguishes necessary restraint from disabling inertia; how it accelerates correction without inviting arbitrary power; how it learns without becoming captive to transient opinion; how it preserves professional autonomy while enforcing accountability; and how it removes obsolete machinery without destroying capacities that may be difficult or impossible to recover.

This essay is not that theory. It is the claim that the question deserves one.

The unfinished business of republican government in the twenty-first century is not simply to demand that citizens trust institutions that have disappointed them. Nor is it to demolish those institutions in the name of speed. It is to construct the lawful mechanisms through which institutions can perceive failure, correct it in time, and repeatedly demonstrate that constitutional government remains capable of governing.

I am often asked, directly or indirectly, why my essays stop where they do.

Why, after exploring a question from multiple directions, do I resist the final step? Why not advocate more clearly? Why not propose a solution? Why not tell the reader what ought to be done?

The answer is neither uncertainty nor reluctance. It is a matter of sequence. We live in an age that prizes opinions. We are encouraged to take positions rapidly, often before a question has been fully understood. Public debate is increasingly organised around answers.

Yet many of our deepest disagreements are not disagreements about answers at all. They are disagreements about the questions to which those answers are addressed. When two people argue over immigration, education, taxation, climate change, religion, or identity, they often assume they are debating solutions. More frequently, they are operating from different understandings of the problem itself. Their disagreement lies upstream from the conclusion.

In such circumstances, further advocacy rarely helps. It merely adds another answer to a conversation that lacks a shared question.

My own instinct as an essayist has therefore been to proceed differently.

The essay, at least as I practise it, is not a vehicle for resolution. It is a means of attention. It begins with a tension, a puzzle, an ambiguity, or an apparent contradiction. The task is not immediately to dissolve that tension but to inhabit it. To examine it from multiple perspectives. To remain with it long enough for underlying relationships to become visible.

This approach owes much to an early lesson I learned in education. Like many students, I entered discussions believing that achievement consisted in arriving at the correct answer. What I gradually discovered was that the most transformative moments often occurred before the answer. They occurred when an unexpected question revealed that the problem itself was not what I had assumed.

Once the question changes, everything changes.

A solution that appears obvious from one perspective can seem inadequate from another. A conflict that appeared irreconcilable may reveal previously unnoticed common ground. What looked like competing truths may turn out to be partial descriptions of a larger reality.

Understanding begins not with agreement but with perception.

This has important consequences for democracy. Agreement, consensus, and genuine democratic outcomes require more than the aggregation of opinions. They require some degree of shared understanding. Before citizens can move forward together, they must first know what it is they are moving forward from. They must possess, however imperfectly, a common view of the question before them. Without that shared understanding, calls for action become little more than competing assertions. The result is not deliberation but collision.

The essay can play a modest but important role here. Not by deciding matters in advance, but by helping to clarify the terrain on which decisions will eventually be made. Not by instructing readers what to think, but by helping them see more fully what is at stake.

This is why my essays so often stop where they do.

I do not withhold advocacy because I believe conclusions are impossible. Nor do I imagine that every question can remain permanently open. Decisions must ultimately be made. Judgements must eventually be formed. Action is unavoidable.

But action that precedes understanding is often premature.

The task I set myself is therefore a limited one. It is to contribute, where I can, to a richer perception of the question. To bring hidden relationships into view. To make visible some dimension of reality that may previously have gone unnoticed. Only then, I believe, can meaningful disagreement occur. Only then can genuine agreement emerge.

The essay ends where collective judgement begins. It is not the final stage of public reasoning. It is the stage before that. Its purpose is not to tell us where to go, but to help us see where we are.

And perhaps, for now, that is enough.

David Marshall Dublin

This is a place of mystery and miracle.

Originally published 2025-12-15 04:32:47

Morning came timely today and dawn gloriously welcomed me. I wanted to find wonder the world. To discover every lost fascination.

The best seat in the house.

I am breaking fast in a very fancy shmancy restaurant here at the torel avantgarde. Morning dew glistens on the ancient tile roofs below me. Amidst the old homes is a striking derelict. Roof collapsed, stucco walls are bald and crumbling. The iron terraces, once striking in their ornateness, are now just rusted calligraphy. A record of once better times.

It's hard to see but there the grand old dame sits.

Isn't that true of all of us though? The older we get, the more the flesh slides into disrepair. We call it character because time does make us more interesting. But given the choice, I know we're rather stay ravishing and boring looking.

White Christmas drifts out of a speaker nearby.

A church up the hill rang me awake some hours ago and now sits a silent sentinel over its subjects.

An orange tree pregnant with winter fruit is my breakfast companion this luscious morn. It is not much for conversation, but I find it enthralling nonetheless.

Between my fruited neighbor and me, a flowing hedge row of sage contributes visually and aromatically to our scene.

And in front and below, stone houses cascade down ancient cobblestone where the streets splash into a finger of the Atlantic snaked its inland.

Jealous more of my eggs and ham than my reverie. A massive gull has landed on a nearby handrail and does a circus balancing act in hopes that my appreciation will deliver it a boon.

I am sorry, bird-friend, there I’ll be no scraps left for thee. You’ll have take your shoe on the road.

Winter in Porto is a very pleasant affair, especially the days. The sun warms as the breeze crisps. And pedestrians everywhere celebrate their holiday. Everyone is happy and festive. The faces and countenance seems altogether different from home. Even frustration here seems less like loss of control or being overridden with emotion and more like a natural expression of circumstance.

The Dura below

A sailboat is pushing up the river in the dancing sunlight. I wonder how the captain feels this Sunday morning.

He is living his dream. Is he content? Is he striving for more? Is he single and hoping for a wife? Or married and praying for children or grandchildren. Or that the ones he has be successful and happy. Perhaps he just longs for a bigger sailboat.

Everyone wants something they don’t have.

Aspiration.

Many just long to be struck and moved to make a great work. Work to move minds and hearts. To evoke tears or longing. Perhaps anger. Artists in particular want material things secondarily. What we really hope for is the ethereal. The midsummer’s dream that solves all woes.

And so, the artist works. What else is he to do? What appears luxurious and opulent to a mortal Is tortuous existence for the creative mind.

This moment, like ever, is passing too quickly. I wish only I had a companion with which to share it. Mine is still socked in sleep, stuck on that old clock. So, you, oh reader mine, are my shared memory today.

At some later time she will stir and then we will laugh together, eyes dancing inte sunlight as I tell her about boats and oranges and birds.

And one day, long from now, I'll say ‘remember when?’

Got my trusty composition notebook from Target, my Musgrave Tennessee Red pencil, My Pencil cover, and whatever sharpener is available.

I’m going to write it on paper first before typing it out. We’ll see how it goes.

#writing #composition #notebook #pencil #sharpener

JOURNAL 6 août 2026

On s'est amusées comme des folles. Nos professeurs sont très bons, ce soir on tient debout. Bon moi il ne m'a pas fallu longtemps, après tout je travaille l'équilibre depuis si longtemps… On va voir, si on reste on va louer des planches et des combinaisons, mais on va d’abord continuer à prendre des cours ! 😄😄 Ce soir on est un peu fatiguées quand même. On va se coucher tôt. Du coup j'avais complètement oublié la date. D'habitude je pense toujours à Hiroshima mais pas d'écran de la journée on s’est beaucoup amusées. Ça me contrarie j'ai un peu honte.

#surf

'Adem in' ; Droogte Jaarrapport 2026

Aanleiding

De Droogte dankt dit jaar alvast de volgende belangrijkste sponsoren ; De Agrarische Sector, De Verenigde Luchtvaartmaatschappijen, Het Ministerie van Financiën en Economie, De banken, Accountants, Bouwondernemers, De FIFA voor het WK in de VS, Mexico en Canada, Diverse andere Grote Sport Evenementen, Internationale Culturele Festivals en Exposities, Bullshitbaan International, De bosbrand industrie, Diverse Oorlog Voerende Naties, Good Ole Brandstof Raffinaderijen, Het Bureau van Wereld Toerisme, De Scheepvaart, De auto industrie, De IT bedrijven, Alle Supermarkten, De chemische, medische en wapen industrie, De Ziekenzorg en Ziekenfondsen. De complete lijst van sponsoren kunt u als bijlage S05 vinden achterin dit verzengend hete Jaarrapport, Wij danken u wederom voor u niet aflatende inzet, het was een bijzonder jaar. Dat de vonk die het heilig vuur zo levendig houdt ook in de komende jaren druk mag blijven overspringen. Nogmaals zeer hartelijk dank voor alles wat u heeft gedaan om dit mogelijk te maken, zonder jullie was ons dit nooit gelukt, dan hadden we zeker dit werk niet zo grondig kunnen verrichten.

P.S. Wilt u dit rapport verder niet lezen beste Lekker droog bijzittende Aandeelhouders, blader dan meteen door naar pagina 101 voor de dit boekjaar geboekte progressie en of behouden welvaart. De echt tellende resultaten van onze aanwezigheid op de door ons allen enorm geliefde markt.

'Adem uit' (zo goed als op dit moment mogelijk is)

I’d like to share some of the differences in raising turkeys and chickens. Our experience with chickens is with the breed Plymouth Rock. We have had the barred, white, partridge, and silver penciled variants. We mostly have white and barred and they are intermixing so we are getting some neat new blends. In the turkey world years back we raised the Bourbon Red turkey, which is delicious and a good looking bird. However they were fairly challenging to manage. They loved to just go roost in the trees and adventure around. After they slept at our neighbor’s up in a tree we changed our tactics. We didn’t let them out every day, only let them out pretty hungry to go forage, and then bribed them back in with grains and feed early evening. We wanted to try a new type and now have the Narragansett breed. So far these have been very impressive. They are great foragers but don’t wander as far and so far stay out of the trees. They don’t fly as well as the Bourbons, which is great in our view. The Narragansett also put on weight quicker than the Bourbons. They both taste great in my view. The Bourbons were a little stronger being a little closer to the wild turkey taste with the Narragansett being a bit more mild but stronger than the typical grocery turkey.

With our turkeys right now we only have six females and one male that are a year old; four of the females have gone broody so far. We may have one more going broody, which would be five out of six. So far we have 13 turkey babies with one mom sitting on some right now, we’ll see how successful she is pretty soon. Not bad for their first year of breeding. Our plan is to keep no more than 12 females and 2 males as our breeding stock and eat up and gift all the excess. The hens have a live weight of about 14-18 lbs with the toms being 22-28 lbs (larger weight being full grown, many butcher at the lower weight for feed efficiencies). Hanging weight would be about 80% of that. They lay quite a few eggs in the spring and early summer but taper down mid summer and stop completely once they have gone broody and raised a batch of chicks. I’ve read you can get about 50-60 eggs a year from each hen each year and that seems about right. The eggs are pretty great, not very noticeably different from chicken when mixing in recipes for baking but some differences fried and hard boiled. They are larger than the largest chicken eggs I’ve seen but not too massive, maybe about the same as one large and one medium chicken egg combined. The shells are also very different, a lot thicker and the membrane inside holds it together so it’s more difficult to open the cracked egg (like my imagination of dinosaur eggs). Fried the whites are a little thicker and chewy in texture, and the yokes are creamier (more like duck eggs in my opinion). They aren’t really worth raising for eggs alone, but as a side product they are worth eating for sure.

The Plymouth Rock hens are said to lay 4-5 eggs a week or 200-280 eggs a year. I think ours are close to this but probably on the lower end. I’m guessing to get the higher range you’d need to keep them a little warmer and/or extend the light some in the winter. We don’t like to push our birds and just let them have a winter break. The hens weigh around 5.5-7.5 lbs and the roosters 7.5-9.5 lbs. They aren’t a lot of meat but not bad. We raise them primarily for eggs but use the excess (primarily roosters) for meat and broth. It takes two roosters to really give the family as much meat as they want for a meal with some leftovers. With one rooster there usually isn’t much of anything leftover. One of our children gets very ill anytime she has chicken and it’s gotten worse as she ages so we don’t try anymore. That is one of the big reasons we got turkeys and we are so glad we did. The turkeys are primarily for meat but give some eggs, the chickens are primarily for eggs but give some meat. The combination of the two is pretty great. I asked the kids what they would pick if they could pick just one, and they said turkeys. I don’t know what I’d pick; I’m glad we don’t have to.

There was a little wave a while back that people were saying that the USA has a “rape culture.” I’m not going to dig into that really, but man chickens sure have a rape culture. The poor hens. Right now we have about 18 full grown hens and three full grown roosters. We need to cull one of those dudes, the girls are being harassed too much. With the turkeys they have a completely different mating ritual. It’s not about chasing and attacking the women and forcing them to submit like chickens. In the turkey world, at least with the Narragansett breed, the toms put up a fancy display and the hens lay down in front of the tom to show she accepts his fanciness. When we had two toms they would both try and take turns and the guys would fight some but not too bad. But two toms were too many for only 6 hens so my wife watched them for a while and picked the better man to stay around. We appreciate their style though, the chickens are insane compared to the civilized turkey ways.

As a sustainable option I think both of these breeds are top notch. They both are good at raising their own young, the chickens are very good layers and decent for meat, the turkeys grow pretty quick to butcher weight and taste great, both are pretty docile and easy to take care of. Both are winter hardy, but some of the chickens have lost some of their combs to cold. Both are good at foraging; I’d say the turkeys are better. Both are fun to watch and the children have fun with them. I think both of these are a great beginner breed choice for chickens or turkeys if you’re looking to get turkeys or chickens. Oh and you may want to be warned that the turkeys are a bit louder overall than the chickens. The roosters will make some noise now and then but the turkey hens can be very talkative at times and are sort of goose-like in their chatter. If you are trying to have a more quiet situation the chicken hens are the quietest.

Anyways thought it was about time to make another homestead post. My wife pays a bit more attention than I do, I always like the recent bird news. Lots of drama revolves around the chickens and turkeys. Right now they all share the same home, we are going to split them up and put the turkeys over in our sheep area and the chickens will stay in the cow area. We’ll likely put excess roosters over in the turkey area to give relief to the poor hens living in a brutal culture.

Resources:

https://livestockconservancy.org/plymouth-rock-chicken/

https://livestockconservancy.org/narragansett-turkey/

Many hatcheries will carry these breeds.