Pictures of Protest Signs from the "No Kings" Protest at the California State Capitol, June 14, 2025

Green Valley Theater’s "Summer Camp"

A few minutes before show time at St. John Lutheran's meeting space.

Initial Speculation on the Air India Crash

What pops out immediately looking at the video of the Ahmedabad Air India crash is that the plane's flaps aren't extended. Speculation starts immediately from there. Two quotes from BBC: 

"When I'm looking at this," aviation analyst Geoffrey Thomas said, "the undercarriage is still down but the flaps have been retracted." 

Another expert, Terry Tozer, said: "It's very hard to say from the video for sure, it doesn't look as if the flaps are extended and that would be a perfectly obvious explanation for an aircraft not completing its take-off correctly." 

Airliner crashes have been caused before by the simple failure to have flaps extended on takeoff. In the old days it was usually caused by distraction or forgetfulness. I have trouble imagining that with modern computerized aircraft that such an obvious failure wasn't accompanied by blaring alarms. But who knows? Stranger things have happened.

Where is Jill Stein?

@pearlmania500

🚨 Missing Person Alert 🚨 JILL STEIN

♬ Dvorak-Slavonic Dances OP.72-2 - 中央芭蕾舞团交响乐团

Pigeons Under Stress

A pigeon is down near my feeding spot this evening; the sixth pigeon in about a month. Similar to the others, this pigeon has an intact body, a partly-severed head, and is lightly-scavenged. I don’t know why this is happening: whether it’s disease or an attack. If a pigeon goes down every five days, or so, and nothing else changes, given that the local flock is composed of about forty pigeons, by the end of the year I’ll be out of pigeons. And then where will I be?

Strawberry Moon

An iPhone pic of June 11th's “Strawberry Moon” (apparently an Algonquin term, not a color reference). 

The Moon looks pretty white tonight; not pink. We’ve been at Major Lunar Standstill for the past year, meaning the Moon is swinging as far north to south as it possibly can: north at New Moon and south at Full Moon. Even though the extremities of the swings were reached earlier this year, the Moon is still swinging pretty wide: -29 degrees on June 11th, which is almost as far south as it can possibly get.

Before and After Jasper’s Annual Visit to Anthony Gonzales and His Dog-Grooming Shop

Totalitarian Trump Wants to Turn the American Military Against its People

@cpscott15 #Trump #California #LosAngeles #LA #Constitution #Military #NationalGuard #newsom ♬ original sound - Chad Scott

The Hong Kong Take On Donald Trump

Protest at Tesla Dealership - June 7, 2025

I've been enjoying protesting weekly at the Tesla dealership on Arden Blvd., in Sacramento. A lot of protests are arduous - even hopeless - with little to show for lots of work, but there is palpable movement with this one. Elon Musk has supposedly left DOGE's terrorism and returned to masterminding Tesla's collapse, due mostly to our pressure. Then this week, Musk's and Trump's feud became public. I see our protest goal as separating Musk entirely from Tesla. Even though that's a big ask, I think we've never been closer to success. 

It's fun to see people's reactions when they drive along and come upon our protest. Many honk their horns and wave in support. Others throw middle fingers in opposition. Some people get mixed up, and honk and throw middle fingers, which we pass off as support. Some of these people you have to worry about. Last week, someone let go of their steering wheel in order to throw both middle fingers in opposition. A little worrisome as they weaved along the boulevard. Also last week, a few people wagged their fingers at us, as if we were just being naughty. It made me want to stand in the corner somewhere. 

It's important to update the signs every couple of weeks, because the overall situation evolves with time. My new sign this week has two sides: "Captain Ketamine VS. TACO the Tyrant - PASS the POPCORN!!!" and "WOMP! WOMP! TESLA Batteries Obsolete - Sodium-Ion is the Future." It's too complicated, but whatever. You go to protests with the signs you have. Lithium-ion batteries for vehicles are likely to get decimated by the recent technical revolution in favor of sodium-ion batteries. Goodbye, the boom in rare-earth minerals. 

So, I put on my black Ukrainian Tryzub T-Shirt, festooned it with anti-Elon buttons, put on my orange "Impeach Both!" cap (from the Bush/Cheney days of 2005, and also noting that orange is a color of Ukrainian support, given the Ukrainian Orange Revolution of 2004) and headed over. 

The ketamine angle was unfamiliar to people, and it sparked conversation. A fellow approached in dress clothes and wearing a tie - evidently either a Tesla salesman or a man on a religious mission - or both! He asked about ketamine (an unfamiliar term) and asked why we were protesting. I mentioned, 1.) the attack on US AID that has killed so many refugee children around the world, 2.) the attack on Medicaid in order to fund billionaire tax cuts, and 3.) the attack on Ukraine. The man seemed mostly sympathetic to the battle for Ukraine. Then he started asking questions with a religious angle. He asked if I hated Elon Musk. I said no. Musk came out of Silicon Valley. He's basically a technical person and someone I could sympathize with, since I come from that background too. I want Musk to stop his attacks, but if he repented and relented, then my job would be complete. I wouldn't carry hatred of Elon in my heart. The fellow really liked this angle and cited Bible verses in support. 

Later, about 1 p.m., three women in a car stopped in order to turn onto Arden Blvd. There was something about their manner that made me think they were nightclub habitués just starting their day. The woman in the back seat rolled down her window and asked about the ketamine. I explained Captain Ketamine is Elon Musk and TACO the Tyrant is Donald Trump. "Ah, fuck Trump," she replied. "Yes," I replied. "I'm on ketamine," she said. Surprised, I asked "You're on ketamine? Do you like it?" "Yes," she replied. I guess I'm going to have to learn more about this ketamine. Right now, I know nothing about it. 

There's another fellow protester who is like me. He's a dead-ender, willing to be the last one standing when everyone else has gone home. We watched a teen girl and her mom shop for a Cybertruck, and poke at the finish of a vehicle. I repeated to them what one of the other protesters had said to me about Cybertrucks: "You can just peel the skin right off." (A bad glue job, apparently.) They looked at me with disdain, as if I had just crawled out of a manhole. A Good Humor truck drove by. The driver shouted, "Get a life!" Like, you call what you do a life? Then, a passing driver slowed for the traffic light and leaned on his horn for a full minute in support of our protest. Good times! 

After three hours in the sun, I went to the ice cream parlor, to order a treat. The clerk said, "I like your buttons!" I told her, "I took one off before I entered the parlor because I worried it might be offensive." I showed her the button (it said "Fuck Elon Musk.") She said, "That's the best one of all!" So, when I picked up the treat, I gave her the button. 

Now, it's time to rest the feet. Next week, we'll have the anti-Donald-Trump-military-parade-on-his-birthday "No Kings" protest at the California State Capitol building (with similar protests at many other places around the country).

Tesla dealership on Arden Blvd.

Captain Ketamine VS. TACO the Tyrant - PASS the POPCORN!!!

Resist! (Do Not Co-operate With Them!)

It's Musk Or Us!

Tesla Funds Fascists.  Fight!

WOMP! WOMP! TESLA Batteries Obsolete - Sodium-Ion is the Future.

Pigeon Pall

I'm worried about the pigeons that gather to eat the bird seed I lay out. Over the last month I've collected five bodies. Something or someone is killing them - probably a hawk - but I haven't seen or heard the hawk; just the scavenging crows. Silent death from the skies above. 

Disease?  Poisoning? Something is happening....

Still, the birds entertain. There was a crow I hadn't seen before that was frantically trying to get my attention as it got dive-bombed repeatedly by an ill-tempered Northern Mockingbird. I could almost understand the crow as it cawed. "Hey! Remember me? I'm your favorite crow. *OW!* Do you have any of that prime bird seed? *OW!* Stupid lunatic bird! Any - anything for me?"

Posing as an AI

When there's a need, there's a way:

Builder.ai, once touted as a revolutionary AI startup backed by Microsoft, has collapsed into insolvency after revelations that its flagship no-code development platform was powered not by artificial intelligence—but by 700 human engineers in India. 

The company marketed its platform as being driven by an AI assistant named “Natasha,” which could supposedly assemble software applications like Lego bricks. But recent reports and commentary have revealed that behind the scenes, customer requests were manually fulfilled by developers, not machines. 

Commenting on the unraveling, Ebern Finance founder Bernhard Engelbrecht described it in a widely circulated post on X: “Customer requests were sent to the Indian office, where 700 Indians wrote code instead of AI,” adding that the end products were often buggy, dysfunctional, and difficult to maintain. “Everything was like real artificial intelligence — except that none of it was.”

Arkansas' Experience With Medicaid Cuts

Arkansas has experience making work requirements more stringent for Medicaid recipients. What happens is that eligible recipients are unable to figure out the complicated paperwork and online reporting process, and they get pushed completely out of Medicaid. As designed. 

And because billionaires insist that it must be so, that is what is coming for the rest of us:

Props to Meteorologist John Morales

Much respect to Florida meteorologist John Morales for calling attention on the air to how DOGE cuts degrade weather forecasts and will get people killed and cause needless economic damage, especially in Florida. 

Morales worries most about missing the phenomenon of rapid intensification, like what happened with Hurricane Otis in Acapulco. It’s a huge concern. 

I worry more about the missed balloon launches. The sub-tropical pressure gradient is sometimes so flat that distant events, like the presence or absence of thunderstorms in Venezuela, or the speed of storms coming out of the Canadian Rockies, can affect the paths of hurricanes. Implemented by DOGE morons, the balloon deficit is not evenly spread across the U.S., but is concentrated in the Great Plains. Missing those balloon launches means uncertainty. You poke yourself in the eye and you blow the hurricane path forecast, which costs money and lives:

"As you've grown accustomed to my presentations over my 34 years in South Florida newscast, confidently, I went on TV and told you, 'It's going to turn. You don't need to worry,'" Morales said on the air. 

Then he dropped the bombshell: "I'm here to tell you I'm not sure I can do that this year. Because of the cuts — the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science, in general, and I could talk about that for a long, long time and how that's affecting the leadership and science over the years and how we're losing that leadership, and that is a multi-generation impact on science in this country."

Toilet Paper in the Trees

This must be the work of squirrels. No wonder Jasper gets so mad at them!

"Hetty Feather" - Green Valley Theater Company - May 31st

This was a really excellent show! Five actresses managed to capture the world of childhood - a feral childhood.

Line Dance Master Class At Step One With Nia and Marcia

I wasn't initially going to go, but I ran into Nia and she persuaded me to go. Learned how to deal with those big fans.

Pop Muzik Perfection!

Just a shoutout to Molly Long and her Project 21, and this team of dancers (ages 12-14), having the best year of their lives.  The dance life is rarely better than this!  

Multiple videos of this dance routine, as seen from all angles and at numerous venues by many different people, and as posted on TikTok, have enabled this 2025 dance phenomenon to rise to the pinnacle of visibility on the American competitive dance circuit.  Certain moments are wonderful.  "Talk About" at 0:50 is precious! (According to an interview with Molly Long and the dancers on TikTok, their faces when they face each other are evolving and becoming more expressive with time and multiple performances).

And, of course, "Pop Muzik" came out in 1979, just about the best year ever for dance music.

As bad as 2025 is for some people, for others, like these dancers, it's perfection!

 

People Being Supportive at the Weekly Tesla Demonstration (May 31st)

I'm Not Poor Yet

Today (June 2nd) Would Have Been My Father’s 100th Birthday

A Warning To Climate-Change Skeptics

Today was an emotional day. I finally unfriended someone I’ve known for fifty-one years; from way back in Tech days. I will tolerate his climate-change skepticism no longer. After all, I have a Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences. It comes in handy at times, like when I authoritatively tell someone they are full of shit. 

If you come at me with climate-change skepticism, know that we can never be friends. Ever. I’ve known climate scientists from my grad school days and I trust them. I am right (as are they) and you are wrong. I follow science and you follow superstition. 

And that, is that.

Bumper Stickers, And Other Signs

Slow down!

Jasper needs to focus on the message.

On the south wall at Sacramento's Flame Club, 16th and V St.

At the Montessori School.

At the Montessori School.

Fiona Hill Knows How The World Works

This is an interesting article about diplomat Fiona Hill:

How did Mr Trump fare? “Terrible. Let’s give him a pass for effort,” she said, matter-of-factly, as if marking the president’s report card. A former Harvard researcher who serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an influential foreign policy think tank, Hill is a career academic with the manner of a firm but fair head teacher.

“What Trump is doing is answering the wrong exam question,” Hill added.

“Trump thinks it’s just about real estate, about trade and who gets what, be it minerals, land or rare earths,” she explained. What the president doesn’t understand is that “Putin doesn’t want a ceasefire”.

“[He] wants a neutered Ukraine, not one that is able to withstand military pressure. Everybody sees this, apart from Trump,” she said.

You Don't Want To See Me Angry

I'm getting increasingly frustrated and angry with MAGAts and conservatives of all stripes. Last time I got angry I ran for Governor. You don't want to see me angry. 

Charli XCX's song best expresses my growing irritation:

 

A Few School Stories From The Spring

Wednesday is the last day of school for the Montessori folks, so unless I'm called in for the summer, it'll be the last of my school stories as a substitute teaching assistant, until fall.  Still, I have a few remaining stories from the spring semester.

After I allowed an older student to climb a short distance into a tree, I noticed she still gravitated to the tree.  She repeatedly jumped up, grabbed hanging branches, and systematically collected greenish-looking berries from the tree.  Then she stomped on the berries, reducing them to a pulp.  I looked at the mess and said, "Well, I suppose you can now make wine from these berries," I said.  "You're crazy," she replied, "you make wine from VINES!"

As usual, though, it's the TK and regular kindergartners who make for the most fun stories.

On the way to recess, our group of kindergartners passed through a classroom.  A little girl (who seems to have a knack for music) placed her hands over her ears and shouted, "It hurts!"  I listened, and, indeed, she was right.  The high-pitched shouts of little kids shouting echoed harshly off the cinder block walls, even though the walls were covered with posters and other objects that should have muffled (and probably did help muffle) the harsh sounds.  We must have been in some kind of audio node in this part of the room - maybe a whispering corner, or something.

The kids were playing in the playground, and several came up to me.  "Teacher, teacher, what is this?" they said. They handed me a silica-gel desiccant packet, probably from a package of food.  I looked at it, held it up for all to see, and announced, "It says, 'Do Not Eat!'"  The kids all said, "Ah!"

A couple of months ago, there was a problem that I found interesting for what it reveals about schools and their dependence on rules.  Teaching assistant staff were managing the kids in the Big Room used for afterschool activities.  I noticed one of the kindergartner boys looked distressed.  As sometimes happens for kids this young, he had peed his pants.  "Would you like to go the bathroom?"  He nodded yes, and so I escorted him to the boys' bathroom.

The boy went into the bathroom stall and removed his underwear and pants.  Then the problems became apparent.  He had no other clothes to replace them with and he didn't want to wear his stained pants.  I was beginning to feel uneasy.  I had accompanied the little boy into the bathroom, but as unschooled as I am in the rules of the school, I did know that staff members are not supposed to use the same bathrooms that the kids use.  I wasn't going to abandon the boy, but still, I wasn't supposed to be there.  And we were now stuck.

Then, by good fortune, the little boy's Older Brother came to use the bathroom.  We informed him what had happened.  Older Brother said it was likely their Mother had placed replacement clothing in the little boy's backpack, which was stored somewhere in the Big Room.  "Oh, that's great!" I said.  "Can you find that backpack and bring it to us?"  To my surprise, Older Brother flatly refused.  His teacher had given him permission to use the bathroom, but it would be a few minutes yet before he would have permission to enter the Big Room.  Older Brother left.

And so, Little Brother and I had to figure out what to do next.  We decided to go to the Big Room together.  I placed my jacket around his shoulders to cover his nakedness, and we left the bathroom.

Then Older Brother came up to help.  He had just received permission to enter the Big Room.  He found the backpack, and Little Brother and I returned to the bathroom with the backpack, in order to search for the clothes.

But, no clothes could be found in the backpack!  What to do next?  Again, I placed my jacket on Little Brother's shoulders and we started to return to the Big Room.

"This can't be right," I thought.  There MUST be some clothes somewhere!  We dropped the backpack on the tarmac and began looking harder for clothes.  Older Brother finally found some pants, wrapped in a tight ball, and stashed in a side pocket.  No underwear, but that's all right.  Mother had come through after all!  Little Brother went back to the bathroom to put on his pants.

And so, with fresh pants, Little Brother headed off with his backpack for kindergarten recess.  I remained behind in the Big Room.  I'm thinking the bathroom distress wasn't too traumatic for the boy, since he had never been left alone at any point.  It was all a bit traumatic for me, but that's how it goes in substitute teaching-assistant land.

MAGA Imagination Can't Be Beat!

Tesla Needs To Be Paying Attention To Business

Advancements in battery technology, particularly the commercialization of sodium-ion batteries, will quickly revolutionize Electric Vehicle technology, making EVs much cheaper and maybe making lithium-ion batteries obsolete. 

Right now, there is no indication Tesla is even paying attention. Under CEO Musk, Tesla is busy foisting fascism onto the United States and the world. Tesla needs to lose Musk as CEO, like, yesterday. 

And so, I will continue protesting Tesla, until it either separates itself from Musk, or goes bankrupt.

Despite incurring a higher tariff rate than Tesla, Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD sold more pure battery electric vehicles in Europe for the first time ever last month — a “watershed moment” for the region’s car market, according to a report from JATO Dynamics.

New car registrations data from the automotive intelligence firm shows that BYD’s Europe volumes rose 359% in April from last year as the company continues its global expansion efforts.

Over the same period, Tesla reported yet another monthly drop, with total volumes down 49%, JATO said. That follows protests against CEO Elon Musk and the company in the region. JATO’s data comes from 28 European nations.

Just Funny!

@knowyourlatvians @Life in Latvia by Gokul ♬ original sound - True Latvian

Blinding The Weather Service With a Stick

Hurricane season is almost here too! The way that DOGE has crippled the Weather Service is really disturbing. It's systematic blinding, like jamming a stick in the eyeball. The Weather Service won't know what it doesn't know, until a hurricane enters the room.

"Sentimental Journey" - Woodland Opera House - May 24, 2025

“Sentimental Journey” - wonderful show Saturday tonight at the Woodland Opera House! I really loved the detail and execution. The popular songs of World War II.

Protesting Again

Kick these Tesla motherfuckers in the teeth!

 

Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder.

It's Pretty Straightforward Science

I've decided I'm going to have to systematically destroy the reputation of good old Techie, Kennard W., and his evil shilling for Big Oil. I've absolutely had it with his utter bullshit. Climate scientists are correct!:

"Scientists have been publishing climate models since ~1970.

A good way to evaluate their skill is to compare what they expected to happen in the years after the model was published to observed climate changes. 

It turns out most models were pretty spot-on"