Morning Update: 07/13/24

Holy Hopping Bullfrogs, Batman! The fog is so thick this morning that I could barely see the fence from the living room window. Thankfully, it’s Saturday, which means most people don’t have to leave for work until this mess burns off. Today will be what one expects from summer: HOT. I’m thinking of spending some time looking at cameras I can’t afford. You know, just so I can pretend I’m still in the game.

Yesterday’s highlight was getting to introduce Tipper to a new friend. The friend and their Dad picked us up, we went to a park, and the two kids went off climbing and hiking and roaming for the better part of an hour, talking up a storm. Any concern I had about Tipper being social went right out the window. The kids were chatting in the back seat of the car before we got out of the neighborhood. I greatly appreciate friends who help us do things like this with/for the kids. This friend will be in Tipper’s class this fall, so it’s nice that there will be another face that she recognizes when classes start in two weeks.

The pain eased up some yesterday afternoon, but then, in the middle of the night, it hit the center of my right tibia out of nowhere. No reason. Nothing changed to cause the pain. Just WHAM, like getting hit in the leg with a ball-peen hammer. That ruined the night’s sleep. I was up and down several times trying to get the pain to go away without waking up anyone else. This is when chemo sucks the most. I’m sure this will affect my ability to get around today. I’ll take a cane with me just to be safe.

Don’t be surprised if I’m a little grumpy today. There’s just so much that I see as danger lurking in front of us and I’m not sure enough people realize the extent to which their lives could change significantly for the worse in the next eight months. AP published this video attempting to explain Project 2025, but they did such a poor job that the end result waters down the severe danger that the plan presents. Here it is:

Meanwhile, NATO leaders are defending the President because they absolutely do not want the Orange Felon to return to power. They understand the danger he presents not only to the US, but to the entire world. The United Auto Workers boss blasted the Orange Felon and supported the President in a speech yesterday, but at the same time, the UAW is outlining a plan of action in case the anti-union Felon and his GOP cronies take over. They understand the significant danger that awaits if Democrats are not victorious in November. Hundreds of thousands of jobs could be on the line.

Looking in other directions that Republicans are likely to ignore, a Brain imaging study in children shows sex and gender operate in different networks of the brain. This means that sex and gender are not the same and should be considered and studied separately. We’ve been saying this for a while, but the new evidence makes the matter more critical.

There’s also a slew of new information about pre-human history. Our last common ancestor lived 4.2 billion years ago—perhaps hundreds of millions of years earlier than thought. Take that in your 6,000-year-old-planet mythology and stuff it. Genomes of diverse microbes point to the early evolution of a rudimentary immune system. The most ancient human genome yet has been sequenced—and it’s a Denisovan’s. 200,000-year-old DNA from a Siberian cave shows our elusive, extinct cousins mated repeatedly with Neanderthals. This makes our own DNA more complex than we’d realized. We’re also realizing that Neanderthals and modern humans mingled early and often. Ancient DNA study gives a Neanderthal-eye view of prehistory and offers clues to how our cousins vanished. So no, there was no Adam & Eve, no Romulus and Remus, no Prometheus the Titan, no Swayambhuva Manu, and no Mashya and Mashyana. The history of human evolution is unquestionably billions of years old and it’s time we started making sure our children understand that.

Oh, since I’ve been up and down this morning, I went ahead and created a new meme I’ll introduce to social media later. Here it is:

Feel free to do a screen capture and share it wherever you can. If they can pressure Joe, we can pressure the Orange Felon. Seems like a no-brainer to me.