How do I decide what to blog on each morning? Mostly it's not planned, mostly I just open  for Blogger and start typing what comes to mind, and what appears on the screen in front of me ends up having been my topic. Not always, but mostly. Now and then it gets deleted because it was too personal, not often but sometimes.  Like my extreme fear of 2024 ending with the American people having voted to bring down our form of government and the American way of life. What a downer. Why would people do this? Our extremely fragile form of democracy that has existed since 1776 depends totally on having loyal opposition, and it only works because people honor the rules. It would be extremely easy to bring it down. I have read that a large segment of Americans favor use of force in our government process and way of life, which makes me mindful that there are benefits to finding oneself a Super-Ager, in extreme old age. Too old, I won't do it, but've been scrolling other places to live,...

  Writing nonsense, whatever's in mind to say at the moment, is to me a great thing about blogging. And refraining from offering it as a forum for discussion has been important: I like to say what I will and let it go, not interested in explaining or defending, and if what I write brings on ugly comments I simply take it down, suspend it and delete the link to it. It's not a diary. Although I do enjoy and appreciate YouTube presentations of the daily diaries of German soldiers, sometimes including SS officers, from World War Two, writing a daily diary never appealed to me, especially after I got slammed when caught reading the juicy diary of a cousin some seventy-five years ago, and realized how vulnerable the written record of a diary can make one.  Nor have I liked the idea of journaling a stream of consciousness, especially that someone might come across and read even long after. Having seen how hurtful it can be, destroying trust, to someone if their privacy and dignity ar...

  Under heavy, low clouds, that's all of Beach Drive this early morning, including Harrison Avenue and the downtown marina, Beach Drive from Foster Avenue in St Andrews where it begins to Cherry Street in the Cove where it ends, looking east from 7H.  Especially if I snapped it while one of the red or green channel lights is flashing, usually I prefer to show looking west, across St Andrews Bay toward the Pass and Magnolia Beach to the high-rises on Thomas Drive.  Or straight across St Andrews Bay from Davis Point to Courtney Point, including if a ship passes 7H as she is arriving at Port Panama City's West Terminal  or leaving for ports beyond, the largest ships arriving to load wood pellets for UK or Denmark or Japan; the actual largest is usually Bahama Spirit 615x106 arriving to offload aggregate, which, IDK, is for road construction? Generally the biggest ships of all are traffic for the East Terminal, arriving with lumber, I'm thinking, for the building constru...

  58°F 96% wind NE 14 mph, cloudy, drizzle yesterday, now, today and tomorrow, but it's fall, eh, autumn, no complaints, this is seasonal and Life is Good. I woke up alive again this morning in 7H where Every Day Is A Beautiful Day. Opened the door and looked out but, counter to usual, did not step outside and peer over the porch railing because I don't want to get my socks wet. Yes, Bubba wears socks, my feet get cold. Not tight, soft and easy, these black socks have a white rubber pad on the sole and they come up almost to my knees.  Happy Wednesday dark early o'clock from here, with last sip of tasty coffee club coffee, November issue. Checking news, war news for Gaza-Israel and for Ukraine-Russia, all war news is all bad including it is Hamas not Israel that made hospitals into battlegrounds, and a fighting force so contemptibly amoral as to imperil its most vulnerable by fighting from hospitals is entitled to neither quarter nor mercy. I'm no conspiracy theorist, b...

  Years, decades ago, I remember marveling at the apparent freedom and independence of university campuses in South American countries, where, as I understood it, outside police, law enforcement, military, and other government agencies were prohibited from setting foot, and students were free to demonstrate and riot and grow up into adults without government interference.  It seemed like a good thing. It still does - - I think - - maybe. Tentatively. At least, on campus, not off-campus. College students - - I remember, I have been one, a college student in my late teens into early twenties, and I remember all its wonder in being set free and feeling challenged to think for myself - - college students are singularly, notoriously, spectacularly innocent, foolish, ignorant, immature, naive, sophomoric, biased, opinionated, idealistic, self-certain, self-important & self-righteous, indignant, outraged! College should be their Time for college students to try out their thinking...

  Someone wrote "obscure" but it's not obscure at all, stories in Judges about heroes and villains, including what's coming up next Sunday, a snippet from Judges 4 about Deborah. It's annoying when the Lectionary framers have us read and hear bits and pieces that leave us hanging about the story itself, that will not be finished later. This was something that teaching my adult Sunday school classes those years enabled me to complete. These days I try that with blogposts, which are no where near as much fun as discussion in a group of fellow Bible enthusiasts.  Which, before I go there, leads me offtrack down a primrose path of "life's topmost enjoyable Times" - - Somewhat sequential but in no particular priority, and all outside of family, more or less vocational instead of personal -> - playing in the Bay High band - working as supervisor in the Food Service Division at the University of Florida - my first sea duty, a wardroom officer in the Navy...

We are congenital optimists. Americanism believes that there is a solution to every problem. Including the obvious answer of two states in the Holy Land, Israel and Palestine. But there isn't. To be peaceful and peaceable, any such would require the parties to agree. Each side would have to be confident that the other side is negotiating in good faith. That's not going to happen. Neither side can trust the other. Each side would know that the other side is building up armed might against the other. It would take generations on each side desiring and working to change its population's attitude toward the other side; neither side even wants to do that. The mutual hatred and mistrust is irresolvable.  Except that instances of reconciliation do exist. France and Germany. America and Japan. After the Cold War it appeared that reconciliation between America and Russia was on the horizon, but many things happened and were done preventing that; it still could happen in some future....