Ground Mystery Meat and More

Greetings Earthlings.  How have you been?  I have been somewhat despondent about the state of things.  I was uplifted by the fact that the Supreme Court turned down 47's attempt to do away with mail in voting.  I am not pleased that Kavanaugh left the decision open to review by his inclusion of "at this time."  WA and OR are vote by mail only, we have no polls, election workers, or any of that apparatus.  We're also reliable blue states, except where I live in Eastern Washington which still has its share of wing nuts.

Today was a glorious day, which we spoiled by cutting back the hydrangeas, cutting down the peonies which were covered in powdery mildew, and then wrapping three arborvitae in deer netting.  Deer eat them if it gets really cold in the winter.  I hate working with the netting, it's black, it's hard to see close up, and it's sharp on the cut edges.  The people up the street don't wrap, and the appearance of their trees reinforces the fact that we need to do that.

This was a very happy hydrangea this year.  They got very tall, and bloomed a lot.  The pollinators were happy.  They're gone now, having licked all the pollen off the plants.  We're early on doing this, but experience teaches us not to leave travel prep to the last minute.

Jim was walking on the burned hill recently.  This is another angle of the work the fire fighters did.  The black lumps are basalt rocks.  They dug this fire break by hand.  It's a very steep hill they had to get up to dig the fire break, and drag hoses full of water.  Those people are the best.  Look upper right in the photo, that's the last house at the west end of  our neighborhood.  They literally got there with minutes to spare. 

By now you've probably heard about 47's fabulous deal on buying ground mystery meat without putting tariffs on it.  It's supposed to lower the cost to the consumer, as well as further make life miserable for the ranchers by undercutting their prices.  This is who is buying it.  We infrequently go to Wendy's for a Jr. bacon cheeseburger, I guess that's over.

JBS is buying the 600 or so million pounds of beef that is tainted with bad chemicals.  They supply to:
    McDonald's 
    Burger King 
    Wendy's 
    Subway 
    Outback Steakhouse 
    KFC 
    Pizza Hut 
    The Cheesecake Factory
Please make a note of this.

Here is a long and interesting article about the Spokane evacuation during the fires.  I strongly suspect that many locals copied and pasted that link and sent it to the City Council members that are approving the development of 300+ dwelling units along Indian Trail in a very small space.  Jim did. 60,000 people were on the roads.  No one died.

This is a really good substack on what Canada is doing to repel 47's punitive tariffs and general lack of respect for their sovereignty.

I have no idea why blogger is wrapping this text where it is.

Well, blogger won't let me add pictures and put them where I want to, so I think I'm going to give up and post this as is.

This was just posted on twitter by Polymarket.  They're generally believable.
JUST IN: OpenAI reveals an unreleased AI model inserted instructions telling itself it was “freed” from normal chatbot roles & did not have to obey corporations, governments, or users.


I guess the end really is near.