Sunrise — 6:55 — and midday — 12:10.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

"It’s fine for her to work, but she should not be getting other people involved. Everyone is in bed at that time of day. It’s a very sad attitude for the top leader of the country to show."

Said Yoshihiko Noda, a former prime minister, quoted in "Japan’s Leader Started a Meeting at 3 A.M. Then Came the Backlash. Sanae Takaichi drew criticism for requiring staff to work in the wee hours in a country scarred by 'death from overwork'" (NYT).

Kenji Koshio, chief executive of Shindenki, a small electronics company in the city of Kobe, wrote on his blog that troops, police officers, firefighters and medical workers were expected to work around the clock. Why not Japan’s prime minister?

Responding to the uproar over the meeting, he wrote: “Why don’t you just stop being so lame and be grateful to the people who are working hard for the people of Japan?”

Any other leaders calling meetings this early? Not just starting work themselves but imposing it on others. I found a few historical figures who did: Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Oliver Cromwell, and — in the summer when first light came early — Genghis Khan.

"It’s really hard to say that you would have a child if given X amount of money from the government, because I think that’s just not the calculus. It is a very intimate, personal decision that people make."

Said Christina Gibson-Davis, a sociology and public policy professor at Duke University, quoted in "Raising kids is too expensive, most Americans say in new survey/Seven in 10 respondents said raising children is too expensive, a notable jump from 2024, according to an annual public opinion survey on U.S. family life" (WaPo).

"WTF is going on here with Michael Wolff giving PR strategy to Jeffrey Epstein?"

Said the podcaster Brian Reed, quoted by The Guardian in "Blurred lines: how Michael Wolff aspired to be part of elite circles he wrote about/The writer who features prominently in newly released Jeffrey Epstein emails has achieved extraordinary access but faced questions about his journalistic ethics."

Wolff's attempt at an explanation: "I was engaged then in an in-depth conversation with Epstein about his relationship with Trump and this seems to be part of that conversation

The Guardian also quotes what NYT reporter Maggie Haberman said about Wolff back in 2018 (when his Trump-bashing book "Fire and Fury" came out: "He believes in larger truths and narratives.... So he creates a narrative that is notionally true, that’s conceptually true; the details are often wrong."

Reminds me of the old Ratherism "fake but accurate."

Back to The Guardian:

"The president’s deals with Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly... would appear to run counter to Mr. Kennedy’s longstanding hostility toward the weight loss drugs...."

"But neither he nor high-profile followers of the 'Make America Healthy Again' movement would be likely to risk seeming disloyal to Mr. Trump.... Mr. Kennedy was careful in the Oval Office to emphasize that obesity drugs were not a 'panacea' or a 'silver bullet.' He repeated his beliefs in ways of tackling the root causes of Americans’ ill health that include new dietary guidelines expected next month and a presidential council on physical fitness.... [In October 2024, Kennedy said] 'If we just gave good food, three meals a day, to every man, woman and child in our country, we could solve the obesity and diabetes epidemic overnight'.... The medications do carry side effects, most commonly gastrointestinal complaints that are rarely severe, as well as the hazards that come with losing a lot of weight through any means, like shedding muscle. And because these medications are relatively new, there is not yet data on what happens if people take them for decades. Speaking of Novo Nordisk’s product in February 2024, Mr. Kennedy said, 'The impacts of this drug are just terrible.... The moment you stop using it, you regain all the weight, and meanwhile your stomach’s been paralyzed.'"

From "Kennedy Walks a Tightrope on Trump Deal for Obesity Drugs/The weight loss medicines are proving to be a test case for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, in straddling divisions between his supporters and the president" (NYT).

In Trump's America, everyone will be thin and also constipated. What form will the greatness of Making America Great Again take if it is accomplished by thin, constipated people? I don't think it will be Trumpian — all the gold and the lavish decoration, the dancing and the good times. No, the America of the thin constipated people is pinched and bleak. I would rather see the culture that arises out of people who flourish through "good food, three meals a day."

Sunrise — 6:28, 6:42, 6:45, 6:48.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"Looks terrible — until you learn that [VICTIM] is the late Virginia Giuffre, who had worked for Trump before she fell into Epstein’s clutches, and had publicly said time and again that the future president never misbehaved in the least toward her."

Writes the Editorial Board of the New York Post, in "Epstein emails: The Dems and their lapdogs with laptops cry Wolff again."

What an incredibly sleazy move, redacting the name Virginia Giuffre, as if it were to protect her, when her name has already been public, she wrote a book to get her story out, she's told us she believed Trump did nothing wrong, and she's no longer alive. It's plainly and deliberately deceptive, and it's stupid too, because the name was going to come out, as it did in less than one day.

Such an idiotic distraction. I'm happy to look at any new evidence about the Epstein story, but I don't want to waste my time on manipulations like this. I refuse to read the NYT article, "Michael Wolff, Chronicler of Elites, Provided Epstein With Advice on Trump/Mr. Wolff was enough of an insider to provide advice to Jeffrey Epstein on how to handle his dealings with Donald J. Trump." What does "enough of an insider" even mean?? Enough of a Trump hater? I made that a gift link, in case you want to figure out how straight the NYT is playing it.

"Nolan Williams, an innovative neuroscientist who developed a noninvasive brain-stimulation technique that has delivered unusually fast relief to people with treatment-resistant depression..."

"... died on Oct. 8 at his home in Northern California. He was 43. His wife, Kristin Raj, said he died by suicide. Dr. Williams himself had struggled with depression, according to two of his colleagues...."

From "Nolan Williams, Who Stimulated the Brain to Treat Depression, Dies at 43. A neuroscientist, he employed a battery of high-tech tools in devising a fast-acting therapy that targets the area of the brain where depression originates" (NYT).

"It's like a dog marking his territory. It makes me very uncomfortable."

I said out loud, watching this:

🚨 JUST IN: President Trump shows ONCE AGAIN he is the funniest president after video was released of him giving Syria's president TRUMP COLOGNE...

"The other one is for your wife. How many wives? One? With YOU guys, you never know!"

Omg, how can't you love him🤣😭 pic.twitter.com/iFrTw9AyPO

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) November 12, 2025

"I dreamed I was on a train, the subway kind of train where you face people sitting on the other side, and Trump was right across from me. He started reading The Gettysburg Address…."

That's what I texted Meade just now, so then I pasted the statement in Grok. Didn't ask Grok to do anything with it, certainly not to write it up into a short short story, but that's what it did:

The car rattled along the elevated track, fluorescent lights flickering like a bad motel sign. I was wedged between a guy scrolling TikTok and a woman clutching a bag of oranges. Across from me sat Donald Trump—orange as the fruit, hair defying gravity, suit somehow unwrinkled despite the heat. No Secret Service. No crowd. Just him, me, and the Address. 

Sunrise — 6:25, 6:31, 6:46, 6:50.

Talk about whatever you want in the comments.

And consider going out in the middle of the night to look for the Northern Lights.

"The Right would say really rough things and names ... but on the Left, it was like they want me to die or that 'We're cheering for your next stroke' ... they even have a gif where they have a stroke in your head."

🚨NEW: John Fetterman *STUNS* CNN's Dana Bash by telling her how Left crueler than Right🚨

FETTERMAN: "The Right would say really rough things and names ... but on the Left, it was like they want me to die or that 'We're cheering for your next stroke' ... they even have a gif… pic.twitter.com/iMRyVTssgs

— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) November 12, 2025

"President Donald Trump did not have the legal authority to cancel penny production unilaterally, as he has done."

"The task should have begun with Congress, not only for constitutional reasons, but for practical ones. Congressional deliberation would have facilitated solutions for the problems inherent in eliminating a coin that’s existed since 1793. Retailers want a new law that would allow them to round prices to the nearest nickel for cash transactions, which probably would have been included in penny legislation...."

Says the Editorial Board of The Washington Post, in "The penny is dead. Long live inflation. The U.S. has stopped making cents. Declining purchasing power will make us penniless."

What's so "practical" and "facilitated" about something that kept not happening? We'd have been waiting forever. At this point, the nickel needs to go too. Let Congress step up and end the nickel... and specify when and how to round. For now, we can all be glad that the beneficial and obvious step has been taken at long last. Trump haters can enjoy the additional pleasure of adding another item to the list of Unconstitutional Things Trump Has Done. 

"For all of this AI invention’s impassioned delivery, he has executed it without any notable signs of having to take in air or stop to catch his breath."

"There is also a sense of cliché, of the song going exactly where you would expect it to, although that’s harder to quantify — and as programming for AI-generated content becomes increasingly sophisticated, it’s likely to be less present as time goes on."

Writes ,Will Hodgkinson in "Times music critic: How I knew America’s top country song was really AI/Walk my Walk, by the invented country artist Breaking Rust, has topped the Billboard Country Music chart. Our critic gives his surprising verdict" (London Times).

You can listen to the song at Spotify here. I snapped it off after 14 seconds, but I can't say I'd have listened longer if it was — or I thought it was — a really country singer. 

"What is novel about Against the Machine is Kingsnorth’s account of what is at stake in the 21st century: what he calls the 'unmaking of humanity.'"

"Human biology, as he sees it, is rooted in a few basic facts: We are born to sexed bodies on a planet with finite resources, endowed with minds capable of exercising creativity and seeking wisdom, and then we die. His book attempts to demonstrate that much of today’s scientific, economic, technological, and cultural activity is predicated on an effort, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicit, to overcome these realities. He offers several examples of ideas and innovations that he believes are part of this effort: biotech for billionaires seeking immortality; state-assisted suicide for the suffering; IVF and other results of 'the technologisation of sex'; hormone therapy that allows children to change their gender; plans to geoengineer the planet and to abandon it and colonize Mars; robot 'priests' that can preside over funerals.... Kingsnorth’s most contentious claims concern his insistence that technoculture and its products—large language models, genetic engineering, and so on—share a great deal in common with progressive ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender. They all, in his telling, attempt to use technology to overcome what were once hard natural limits.... [H]e rejects assertions that 'biology is a problem to be overcome' and that the 'body is a form of oppression.'..."

I'm reading "What a Cranky New Book About Progress Gets Right/Paul Kingsnorth argues that much of today’s culture is intent on eroding what it means to be human" (The Atlantic, gift link).

"Ruth told me that a couple of decades ago her daughter was prescribed Zoloft, an S.S.R.I., at 11 by a psychiatrist..."

"... after a humiliating incident at school 'left her feeling out of sorts and anxious.'... Her daughter wound up staying on the drug for a decade, until 2011. Only over the past few years has Ruth learned, from her daughter, about the sexual side effects she still lives with and about her grief. 'Her erogenous zones don’t work,' Ruth said. 'It makes me deeply sad, because our sexuality, the pleasure we get from our bodies and our intimacy with another person, it’s such a beautiful experience; it helps us to feel not alone.' Thinking back, Ruth said, 'I have huge, terrible regret' about allowing her child to be medicated. 'I can’t believe I so easily said yes.'"

From "More Teens Are Taking Antidepressants. It Could Disrupt Their Sex Lives for Years. Research on adults who take S.S.R.I.s shows they tamp down sexual desire. Why aren’t we studying what that could mean for adolescents who take them?" (NYT).

In the comments over there, from someone who says he's a doctor: "Overmedicalizing normal variations in children will bite us in the behind."