September 11, 2025

Best summation on the irony of Charlie Kirk's death that I've seen

“Charlie Kirk has long argued that the epidemic of gun violence in America is the regrettable, but acceptable, price of liberty. In his words, the trade-off is a “prudent deal,” a “rational” sacrifice to preserve the Second Amendment and protect what he calls “God-given rights.” (He said these cruel and heartless words at a speaking event in April 2023 — I'm just the messenger.)
When children are slaughtered in their classrooms, when congregants are gunned down in churches, when families are erased at grocery stores, Kirk’s response is not grief but calculus. The deaths are tragic, he says, but worth it. A necessary toll paid at freedom’s gate. “Thought and prayers.”
And so, when he himself was shot at a speaking event in Utah, the hypocrisy was deafening. Here was a man who minimized other people’s agony, suddenly forced to taste the violence he once dismissed. This is what I mean by Second Amendment justice: not that the shooting should be celebrated, not that violence solves anything, but that the logic he defended has folded back on him like a tesseract.
He declared that mass shootings were an unfortunate but tolerable part of liberty. Then he became a victim of the very “tolerable violence” he worked so hard to normalize.
It is not justice in the sense of moral balance or divine retribution. It is justice in the way a mirror delivers justice: cold, impartial reflection. The gun culture he championed did not exempt him. The bullets he waved away in theory found their way into practice. He is not immune. None of us are.
The asymmetry here is staggering. When Nashville lost six lives, when Buffalo buried grandmothers and fathers, when children in Uvalde were executed one after another, Kirk’s sympathy was withheld. He hardened his rhetoric. He doubled down. His “deal” demanded that others bear the cost, while he collected the political dividends of defiance. They are some sweet economic dividends, I tell you. Charlie Kirk gets paid for his support of the Conservative agenda.
But compassion is a muscle. Fail to exercise it for others, and you cannot expect it to be exercised for you. If he offered no tears for the slain, why should the public be compelled to offer them for him?
This is not schadenfreude. It is a reckoning. It is the exposure of a brutal dissonance at the core of American politics: leaders who protect the idea of rights while sacrificing the reality of lives. Leaders who worship an amendment more than they grieve for the children whose bodies become its sacrament. Leaders who declare that freedom requires blood, and then recoil when their own blood is drawn.
Let me be clear: the shooting of Charlie Kirk was a crime. It was not noble resistance. It was not an answer. Political violence corrodes democracy; it breeds escalation, not resolution. But understanding the irony is not the same as endorsing the act. Recognizing the karmic symmetry does not mean cheering it. What it means is this: when cruelty is normalized, when violence is rationalized, when deaths are rendered acceptable by ideology, eventually the logic boomerangs.
That is the lesson here, the harsh and unsentimental truth. You cannot unleash a culture of violence, bless it as liberty, and then feign shock when it arrives at your own doorstep. The Second Amendment, as interpreted by Kirk and his allies, does not discriminate. It devours indiscriminately.
That is the justice of it. Not divine, not poetic — merely inevitable.”
- Thaddeus Howze

September 10, 2025

Map of COVID 19 updated shots availability

I got my shot here in NC yesterday at a Walgreens near me. I was required to get a prescription, but managed that easily by contacting my primary doc on her office website over the weekend. My 39 yo son had to talk his primary doc into writing a prescription for him--also NC--but was able to get his shot on Monday. The county health department--here in Durham, NC--where I got most of my COVID shots in the past, is struggling with how to make this happen so that shots will be available without cost as they were in the past.

It's all over the map, folks, but I grabbed screenshots of this information--and map--from Facebook.

August 25, 2025

The brain drain hits my family.

I had dinner last night with my youngest son-- who holds a doctorate--and his partner who is a tenured associate professor at UNC Chapel Hill. My son had been on the phone with one of his cousins recently. The cousin ( who is my nephew and youngest son of my very Republican brother and wife) is a Johns Hopkins PhD, associate professor at a major, well known public University in a Midwestern state. His wife is a Caltech PhD who works in research. My nephew has been recruited to a university in the UK, and his wife already been found a research position with room for her to advance. They have a 3 year old daughter and will be relocated to the UK before the end of the year.
I am so pleased they are getting out.

August 23, 2025

$2.1 billion and 9000 jobs would be lost to the Triangle

under proposed cuts to the research budget of the NIH for 2026.



Triangle at the epicenter of proposed cuts to federal funding for medical research https://share.google/7L6vLEd4upRmaGJ2i

August 1, 2025

Wordle Aug 1 SPOILERS

Wordle 1,504 4/6

⬜⬜⬜🟨⬜trial
🟨⬜🟨⬜⬜awoke
⬜🟨🟨⬜⬜soapy
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩banjo

NY Times average 4.3 and Wordlebot in 4.

July 30, 2025

Wordle July 30 SPOILERS

Wordle 1,502 3/6

⬜⬜⬜🟩⬜trial
⬜⬜⬜🟩⬜pecan
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩assay

NY Times average 4.2 and Wordlebot in 3.

July 27, 2025

Wordle July 27 SPOILERS

Wordle 1,499 3/6

⬜⬜⬜⬜🟨trial
🟨🟨⬜⬜🟩loupe
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩whole

NY Times average 3.6 and Wordlebot in 3.

July 22, 2025

Beware of a new scam

which involves hotel reservations being hacked through the website Booking com

This afternoon I received an email from Booking com advising me of a message from one of the hotels I booked for a trip to Scotland I'm planning in October. The message from the hotel indicated it wanted to confirm a credit card by charging a small amount to the card which it would then reverse. I had never run into a hotel in that site doing such a thing, but it was on Booking.com's website. So I completed the form and a screen came back with an error message to call my credit card company. I did and talked to the fraud department. The charge had been denied, credited not to the hotel, but to a payment processing app called PAYZY, owned by a Greek bank. Talk about a red flag. I called the hotel in Scotland and only got voicemail. So I sent an email inquiring what time I could call and speak to Reservations about confirming the credit card. Then I sent the hotel another message via the messaging center on Booking.com.
About an hour later I had a response from hotel management indicating this was indeed a scam and they had reported it to the IT department of Booking com.
This was probably the most professional looking scam I have seen because the scammers had hacked into Booking.com to use their software to access reservations which asked for a credit card to be charged, and unless you called your card company or checked your credit card account online, you'd never see the charge against the strange app, rather than the name of the hotel.
I called my credit card company back to tell them the hotel confirmed the scam. The agent told me credit card companies are experiencing billions of dollars monthly in fraudulent charges.
Two days ago--on another credit card-- I got a text alert inquiring whether I'd authorized a $9. charge to some store in Missouri. I hadn't. That card is being replaced.
What a world.

July 17, 2025

For Solly Mack

Spotted this morning next to my driveway.

I have several of these little guys in my side yard. One runs along the top of the back fence, jumps off, and then runs along the retaining wall every day. At least one or two others run up and down the drain pipes from the gutters.

They are fun to watch.

July 11, 2025

Site selected in Apex for new NC Children's hospital

which is a joint project between UNC and Duke.

Guess what? Development has been predicated on Medicaid funding-- and is a pet project of State Senator Phil Berger--who has now shot himself in the foot supporting the orange a$$hole.

Following is actually a very good article: https://www.wral.com/story/new-nc-children-s-hospital-projected-to-bring-8-000-jobs-to-western-wake/22081573/