Post Rain Flowering and General Stuff

We were up and out this morning, I can't say it was before it got hot, because it wasn't.  That beauteous cloud cover you see dissipated rapidly and so we had the merciless sun boring holes into our flesh.  Did I mention it was hot?

This is another mammalaria next to a trail.  The sun was pretty harsh by the time I took the picture.

 This is the same pictures as yesterday, I really like it a lot, so here it is again.



The trichocereus are blooming again.  I would not have predicted this because they put on quite the bloom in the spring.  However, there are many blooming and they are just spectacular.

This is some kind of sage next door.  It's an enormous plant that needs to be trimmed.  It usually blooms in the spring, but here it is mid-summer putting out a spectacular show.

The new plant spike.  The flowers are kind of under whelming, but I like this photo because I got depth of field to work.

So, there you are.  Happy pictures of blooming things.

Have you read the Vanity Fair article on Kushner's testing plan?  It was actually adequate.  The plan called for national leadership, surging supplies to hot spots and not making governors compete for scarce resources.  Then it went pouf.  This is why.

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

FEMA is still confiscating PPE and cleaning supplies from school systems and giving it to PPE vendors, who then sell it back to the schools at inflated pricing.  I believe this is called profiteering.  There is a special place in hell for those people.

For those of you who are indifferent to Oprah, I wanted to show you this.  She's been publishing O for twenty some odd years, and Oprah has always been on the cover, until this one. I hope it aids the effort to convict the police that killed her.

Yesterday on Air Force One, the orange wombat announced that he was going to sign an executive order banning Tik Tok.  I think he's still mad that the Tik Tok teenagers punked him on the expected crowd size in Tulsa.  They were anticipating record turn outs, and got about 6,000 people.  Already the kids have viral stuff up about moving their addresses (I have no idea which ones) to Canada and something about VPNs and they'll still be up on the platform.  Sarah Cooper does not always use Tik Tok so she will continue to be able to mock the wombat.

And finally, if you need help with your upcoming vacation planning, here are the places you can't go.

I don't want to lose the link to Representative John Lewis' final op-ed so I am putting it here.