Tonight, a mom joined the grieving parents FB group I belong to. Her son was killed 22 mass shootings ago. He was killed in a mass shooting last week.

This is an actual ad from the FBI.

We are a failed state

From this week in #RoysRedwoods: I have a backlog of photos from May 2-9, so this is gonna be a long thread. First, let's look at some new growth on plants, shall we? This lil curlicue is the fresh frond of a Western Sword Fern (Polystichum munitum).

Elon Musk Matthew Yglesias So under your system it’s total free speech until the local strongman tells you to do literally anything and you comply. Awesome. This is why the 1st amendment t is about state power, because state power is always the real threat to free speech.

I was watching a tiny conura wasp flit around sampling palmetto flowers, and noticed I wasn't the only creature watching the wasp with interest. A completely different interest. Shots taken from the same perspective, different focus 😄 5/13/23. N. Florida

One of my oldest comics is going around. A gentle attempt to poke fun at English common names.

As I walk along streets with no sidewalks, with speeding drivers who’ve been told since birth that only their individual needs & desires matter & that community is evil, as I watch the divisions & selfish anger literally built into our culture & infrastructure, I keep walking.

We don’t have to be this way. We can teach community skills from kindergarten through high school. Teach conflict resolution. Encourage & empower empathy. Spend on people and not prisons. Stop glorifying guns & anger & promote cooperation. And calm lives. We can. We must. Or not

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Decoration Day,” published in The Atlantic in June 1882, pays tribute to what was then a new form of civic observance: a day set aside to commemorate those who had perished in the Civil War—a custom that gradually gave rise to our modern Memorial

No, Trump didn’t follow the Presidential Records Act. No, Obama and the Bushes didn’t take millions of papers. No, the feds couldn’t have just asked nicely. No, 1,850 Biden boxes haven’t vanished. Fact check on Trump’s blizzard of documents dishonesty: cnn.com/2023/06/08/pol…

#EspionageAct Let it sink in. Reality Winner got 5 years for ONE document. As I said last August …

My views on United States v. Trump, the 1st indictment of a former President ever: 1. Its a sad moment–not sad because Trump is being targeted or treated unfairly – but sad b/c it underscores the extreme damage he has done to the institution of the presidency&country as a whole

And across the nation the grifters did call for more and more money, did scream for more and more money, did cry for more and more money. And the easy marks did open their wallets.

Worth remembering that Trump is the leader/inspirer of the great majority of domestic terrorists in the US. So decent chance we’ll see an uptick of violence from Trump supporters.

At first light we take ⁦Waffle House⁩

I wanted to share some of my thoughts on today's Supreme Court decision on affirmative action:

Remembering the first time I knowingly encountered the befuddling thing I would eventually know as MAGA. It was 2008, on Facebook. It was my old college buddy, Stove Minivan. (Names have been changed to mock the guilty.) (Link at the end of the thread to avoid throttling)