Enough, For the Seventh Time

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Photo: Tim Wilson, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

I’m not a highly emotional person. It has nothing to do with my being male. I say that because the stereotypical man is stoic in his manner. No, all men are not the same just as not all women. Not all people of one race are alike either. That said, I have to say I am exhausted over the “Charlie Kirk Investigation”. Yes, it’s still being “investigated” (if you can call spreading rumor and innuendo as investigating). But more than that, it’s those that are telling me how sad I should be for a person I didn’t know, and didn’t care about one way or another while he was alive, was “suddenly taken from us.”

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You Reap the Whirlwind

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A Love's truck stop price sign in Cheyenne, Wyoming, showing diesel at $5.149 a gallon and unleaded at $3.979 a gallon.
A Love’s truck stop price sign in Cheyenne, Wyoming, July 2026, with diesel at $5.149 a gallon. Photo: Tony Webster, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve listened to the post-election analysis for two days now, most of it decent, and here is what it keeps walking around. The Republicans didn’t lose because of a bad ground game or a messaging problem. They lost because the president started a war.

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Older Than We Thought (4): Australia Was Settled 65,000 Years Ago

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Anbangbang rock shelter in Kakadu — the same Arnhem Land country as Madjedbebe. Photo: Dietmar Rabich, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Getting to Australia was never a matter of walking. Even at the lowest sea levels of the ice age, the continent — then joined with New Guinea as a landmass called Sahul — was cut off by open ocean. Whoever got there first had to cross the sea on purpose, in something that floated, with enough people aboard to found a population. For years the textbooks put that crossing at 47,000 to 50,000 years ago, which was impressive enough.

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Black Thursday in France

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A Paris protest march during the 2023 pension-reform demonstrations. Photo: Jules*, via Wikimedia Commons [CC BY-SA 4.0]

France largely stopped work today. The country’s trade unions called a nationwide strike and hundreds of demonstrations over wages and the cost of living. The high school and university students who have been protesting their schools since September marched alongside them. And the government put some 70,000 police officers and gendarmes on the streets, determined that today would not become a repeat of October 17, when rioting and looting caught the police unprepared and, by the interior minister’s own later admission, overwhelmed them.

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