I feel as though the blog has a theme this morning and this belongs in it.

Maybe you can help me refine the concept:

👮‍♂️911 operator: "911 what is your emergency?"

😳Caller: "I'm calling to report a bear on top of a light pole." pic.twitter.com/8g07ibZupQ

— 👮‍♂️🚒 Tales of Badge & Blaze™ (@ScottEnlow) July 21, 2026

Sunrise — 7:04, 7:20.

There was a 100% cloud cover this morning. And it was a full moon, the wolf moon, but we saw nothing of it.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

It was a theme day on the blog today. Did you notice?

"I should not be treated like a terrorist for traveling within my own country by an agency that’s trash at its job anyway."

Tweeted Evita Duffy-Alfonso, the daughter of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, about the "absurdly invasive pat-down" TSA subjected her to after she, on behalf of her unborn child, declined to submit to the body scanner.

The agents were passive-aggressive, rude, and tried to pressure me and another pregnant woman into just walking through the scanner because it’s “safe.”... Perhaps things would have gone more smoothly if I’d handed over my biometric data to a random private company (CLEAR). Then I could enjoy the special privilege of waiting in a shorter line to be treated like a terrorist in my own country. Is this freedom? Travel, brought to you by George Orwell....

This blog has a theme today: sitcoms.

The first post is about "And Just Like That" (and mentions "Leave It to Beaver" and "Seinfeld").

The most recent post is about "The Cosby Show."

And the only other post... well, I've got to shoehorn it in, but think about it. Everybody into the Oval Office. Maybe you think that's not funny, but I was raised on "Dr. Strangelove."

"In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me"/"And guess what, we broke them and now they’re whining like little children"/"Hitler knows that he will have to break us...."

This blog has a theme today.

The quotes in the post headline are from the first 2 posts of the day, below. The Bannon article has 2 more quotes about breakage:

• Spoken in a new interview: "Somebody’s got to break the system so somebody else can come in and build it. People have roles in life, right?"

• Spoken on January 5, 2021: "All hell is going to break loose tomorrow."

"Voters prefer Harris’s agenda to Trump’s — they just don’t realize it. Take our quiz."

You're not in reality until you're for Harris, The Washington Post informs you before you've even taken the quiz. 

But I'll supply you with a free link anyway: here. Let them prove to you what you really want.

Is it anti-democratic to believe that voters don't really know what they want? There's some higher knowledge of what is really wanted that is beyond the reach of the voters... but not beyond the reach of The Washington Post.

Hey, this quiz is 5 days old! Why is it in the top right corner of the WaPo home page?

Is there so little new news that can work to encourage readers to vote for Kamala? Searching the entire front page, I find "See how people like you vote," "Polls are tied, voters dig in and Harris, Trump scratch for any advantage," "Michelle Obama implores men to support Harris to protect women’s health," "To understand the U.S. economic success is to love Harris’s plan," and — my favorite — "Harris talks increasingly about her faith but walks a careful line."

"You know how polls are done. Oh, I'm gonna get myself in trouble, but, so I really don't believe too much in 'em...."

"These pollsters, they charge you a lot of money... half a million bucks to do some stupid poll. They interview like 251 people. I don't think they interview 'em in many cases.... I think they sit there, they make a deal, they get a half a million bucks and they say, Trump's leading 51 to 49. They announce it and everybody says, oh oh.... I think that they probably don't always poll. Some of them probably never poll.... I don't know of one person in my whole life that ever got called by a pollster...."

Said Donald Trump, talking to Joe Rogan the other day.

"But I shouldn't say that 'cause I'm doing very, you know, really well in the polls..... But no, I honestly believe that there's probably a lot of fraud. I had a poll Washington Post/ABC in the Hillary thing on Wisconsin. They had me down 17 points the day before the election. I knew it was wrong because I had a rally. I had 29,000 people at a racetrack. And it was like zero degrees. Wisconsin.

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality."

Wrote C.S. Lewis, quoted by David French, in "Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being 'Never Trump'" (NYT).

That's a free-access link, so you can see for yourself what 4 lessons French learned.

But I liked the C.S. Lewis quote in the abstract. It's so abstract! The "highest reality," eh?

And now, this blog has a theme today: reality. This is only the second post of the day, but the first post was about a NYT column called "Could Eminem Snap Gen X Voters Back to Reality?"

Is there a sense — at the NYT and elsewhere — that reality is at stake, that it's out there, eluding us, and we need to struggle to get a grip on it, and we are losing?

I am reminded of Trump's saying — on the Joe Rogan podcast — that when he became President, "it was very surreal." But: "When I got shot, it wasn't surreal. That should have been surreal. When I was laying on the ground, I knew exactly what was going on. I knew exactly where I was hit.... I knew exactly what happened.... With the presidency, it was a very surreal experience.... And all of a sudden I'm standing in the White House, and it was very, very surreal...."

I am reminded of Elon Musk's "There's no truer test than courage under fire."

And: "Reality, what a concept!"

This blog has a theme today.

So far anyway. Unlikely to last, but I wanted to use my "blog has a theme today" tag while I could. Hadn't used it in almost a year.

"This simple two-by-two truthfulness matrix is a powerful tool for understanding politicians and how we react to them."

From "The Lies We Like: Voters Prefer Transparency to Honesty, but Should They?/We don’t have to start supporting honest people who transparently hold values we don’t share. But we do need to stop supporting transparent people whose commitment to honesty is lacking" by Robin Koerner (Foundation for Economic Education). 

The post was instigated by Lem, who commented on my last post — a post that got the tag "the blog has a theme today" — "Two posts a theme does not make." Now, there are 3.

You don't need to click through to the article to figure out that the person Koerner thinks we need to stop supporting is Trump. But whether you support Trump or not, it's useful to think about why we might like someone whose lies are transparent.

By the way, I see the words "Duplicity" and "Integrity," each on a corner of the matrix. But what words belong on the other 2 corners? "Boring" and "Exciting"? And too bad the words "Untruthful" and "Truthful" are misplaced in the vertical blue rectangle. That's confusing!

"Jamaal Bowman Charged With Setting Off False Fire Alarm/The congressman from New York set off the alarm in the Cannon House Office Building last month as Democrats were stalling for time to read a spending bill."

The NYT reports.

Mr. Bowman will plead guilty to the single false fire alarm charge, and has agreed to pay the maximum fine of $1,000.... Mr. Bowman was accused of intentionally pulling the alarm to cause a delay, but he claimed it was accidental.... 

“I am embarrassed to admit that I activated the fire alarm, mistakenly thinking it would open the door. I regret this and sincerely apologize for any confusion this caused,” Mr. Bowman said at the time. “But I want to be very clear: This was not me, in any way, trying to delay any vote. It was the exact opposite — I was trying urgently to get to a vote.”

I see the blog has a theme today: transparent lying.  

"[I]t’s almost awe-inspiring how little actually happens. In the first episode, Carrie learns, via YouTube, how to poach an egg."

"In the second, Miranda loses her phone on the beach. In the third, Carrie pretends she has COVID to get out of recording her own audiobook. The stories are breathtakingly small, as though the original show has been shrunk down into a vivid maquette. A substantial portion of the fifth episode is dedicated to Charlotte and Harry dressing up as Philip and Elizabeth Jennings from The Americans for Halloween and getting frustrated that no one gets the reference...."

Writes Sophie Gilbert in "The Ghost of a Once Era-Defining Show/In its second season, And Just Like That seems constrained by its fear of being conventional" (The Atlantic).

Ooh... just by chance, following my usual blog practice, I seem to have stumbled into a theme day. The theme is: Nothing happens. I haven't used my "blog has a theme today" tag in a long time.

This feels propitious. Things fall in place. Anything falling in place for you? Can you poach an egg? No?! Well, then, pay attention at 0:16 to 0:24 of "Levi eats Green Eggs and Ham Benedict":

It's one of those rare mornings when — quite by chance — a theme appears on the blog.

I've written 2 posts: 1. "The strongest case for noncitizen voting today is representation: The more voters show up to the polls, the more accurately elections reflect peoples’ desires," and 2. "'People get very wrapped up in the idea of spontaneously desiring sex,' Dr. Nagoski said, but, especially in women, it’s fairly rare." 

In the presence of this blessed convergence of the Forces of Blog, I perform the ritual of deliberately searching for more manifestations of the day's theme. You see what it is, don't you? 

A reader sends an email at 7:29, commenting on the first post of the day, but it seems to fit even better on the post I put up at 7:33.

There are thematic convergences today, and I'll celebrate the phenomenon by making this a new post.

Here's what George just sent me, a propos of the mention of Howard Dean in the first post of the day, and with no awareness that I was working on a post about the monetization of the legalization of cannabis:

Former Gov. and physician Dean sits on the board of Tilray, a publicly traded company affiliated with Anheuser-Busch that bills itself as a "global cannabis-lifestyle and consumer packaged goods company" that sells alcoholic beverages and hemp-based foods, i.e. dope itself in the form of mints, chocolates, etc. (Vodka, by the same way of thinking, would be a 'grain-based beverage.') 

So, here is a family medicine practitioner selling booze and pot, which is far, far, far, stronger than anything he may have used as a teenager and causes scromiting, the mysterious new condition that causes screaming and vomiting in a third of dope users, according to a 2015 (!) study reported in Health.com. 

“Then it became pretty obvious that poor kids of color with bad educations, they already had three strikes against them and the fourth was having a joint,” said [family medicine doctor] Dean [in 2019]. “Which after all is probably not as bad as alcohol.”

The body of Christ, the semolina pilchard, the Mona Lisa, the Duracell batteries...

Oh, I see it now! The blog has a theme today: Things to be eaten.

"In the words of the popular American yoga teacher Shiva Rea, namaste is 'the consummate Indian greeting,' a 'sacred hello' that means 'I bow to the divinity within you from the divinity within me.'"

"Deepak Chopra... says namaste means 'the spirit in me honors the spirit in you' and 'the divine in me honors the divine in you.'... When you bow to another, you are honoring something sacred in them. You are acknowledging that they are worthy of respect and dignity.... Some claim that the greeting has been infused with a religious meaning that doesn’t exist in Indian culture....  Most Indian religions agree that there is something divine in all individuals.... Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, the influential philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, in dialogue with a number of other thinkers, invented a form of spiritual practice that encouraged Americans to actively address the divine soul in others every time they spoke.... One need not be a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a yoga teacher, to say namaste.... What matters most [is]... Do you truly recognize them as a fellow human being worthy of dignity, bonded in shared suffering and capacity for transcendence?"

From "Why 'namaste' is the perfect greeting during the pandemic/An ancient Indian contactless 'hello' is replacing the handshake. It's not just safer but it affirms our inter-connectedness with one another" by Jeremy David Engels (The World).

I thought the recommendation was going to hinge on the social distancing of bowing as opposed to a handshake or a hug, but it was about spiritual connection. That took me by surprise, and of course, I am delighted that it fits the "divinity" theme established on the blog (and the podcast) today.

"I know why the Nicolas Caged Bird sings extra loud."

Overheard at Henhouse... I mean Meadhouse.

The point is: Maybe this blog has a theme today. And throw in last night's café last post from yesterday, in which the sandhill cranes have large talons. 

Bacchanalia... Saturnalia... a theme begins to form on the blog this morning.

Like the ice on the lake as the temperature drops to 6°, there's a light crystallization of a theme. I like that, themes, forming early in the morning on the surface of the blog.

I said "Bacchanalia," referring to the traditional drunken rowdiness of a University of Wisconsin football game, writing at 6:32, in the second post of the day.

Meanwhile, in the previous post — the one where Matthew Dowd testily queried Scott Walker ("You do know that trees were stolen from a pagan holiday? And Christ wasn’t actually born on December 25th? It was a day celebrated by Roman pagans and taken over by the church in the fourth century. And that many faiths put up trees that aren’t Christians") — the commenter Michael P retorted:

Does Matthew Dowd know that Saturnalia was never on December 25th? It was on the 17th, later extended to be through the 23rd. The 25th was chosen for Christmas as allowing an easy excuse that they were merely extending Saturnalia. Does Matthew Dowd know that the people who prefer "Christmas" to "holiday season" are going to [be] spectacularly unreceptive to the argument that Christianity culturally appropriated a pagan Roman holiday?

Bacchanalia... Saturnalia... what's the difference? Well, obviously, there's Bacchus and there's Saturn. They were originally different festivals. You can use either word figuratively. Since the 1600s, "Saturnalia" (with or without the upper-case S) has meant "A bout or period of unrestrained revelry, overindulgence, licentiousness, or the like; an orgy; an orgiastic or extravagant display or celebration of something (cf. orgy n. 3b). In early use also: †a situation or period in which conventional norms are suspended or inverted (obsolete)" (OED). "Bacchanalia" has meant "Drunken revelry; a tippling bout, an orgy" since the 1600s.

Here's the Wikipedia article, "Bacchanalia." And here's the Wikipedia article "Saturnalia":

Saturnalia was the Roman equivalent to the earlier Greek holiday of Kronia...

The Romans stole it!

It held theological importance for some Romans, who saw it as a restoration of the ancient Golden Age, when the world was ruled by Saturn. The Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry interpreted the freedom associated with Saturnalia as symbolizing the "freeing of souls into immortality". Saturnalia may have influenced some of the customs associated with later celebrations in western Europe occurring in midwinter, particularly traditions associated with Christmas, the Feast of the Holy Innocents, and Epiphany. In particular, the historical western European Christmas custom of electing a "Lord of Misrule" may have its roots in Saturnalia celebrations.

Lord of Misrule! I click on that link:

"I hate the news right now. Everyone seems to think the thing to talk about is Donald Trump, which strikes me as profoundly stupid."

"I watched 5-and-a-half Sunday morning talk shows yesterday, and I heard the same thing over and over. Trump has lost some unregainable portion of the women. He can never get them back, but he could never have won anyway, and really what he is is America's expression of anger. We're an angry, angry America, and this lout is, apparently, an embodiment of our collective id."

That's something I wrote on August 10, 2015. I'm encountering it now because I clicked on the "sunrise" tag in the previous post. I wanted to compare my sunrise photographs. I was stunned to see a post — "Dawn walk thoughts" — with exactly the theme that had arisen on the blog this morning, there plain as day 4 years ago.

The old post is a list of 6 "dawn walk thoughts," and what's quoted above was #3.

"The Trump Voters Whose ‘Need for Chaos’ Obliterates Everything Else/Political nihilism is one of the president’s strongest weapons."

Headline for a NYT op-ed by Thomas Edsall. I'm blogging this because an order-and-chaos theme has happened to emerge on the blog this morning and also because I think it suggests that Trump voters are not fascists. I'm assuming fascism is grounded in an excessive need for order.

Let's read:

Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the winner of the best paper award in the Political Psychology division was “A ‘Need for Chaos’ and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies.”... [Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux argue] that a segment of the American electorate that was once peripheral is drawn to “chaos incitement” and that this segment has gained decisive influence through the rise of social media.

I don't know about "decisive," but otherwise this seems like a good observation. But I'm going to resist Edsall's idea of making the problem specific to Trump voters.

The circulation of [conspiracy theories, fake news, discussions of political scandals and negative campaigns] has been “linked to large-scale political outcomes within recent years such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”

But that doesn't mean that only the winner's voters were susceptible to that sort of material! Also, I wouldn't limit the problem of "chaos incitement" to social media. Mainstream media does it too.

The authors describe “chaos incitement” as a “strategy of last resort by marginalized status-seekers,” willing to adopt disruptive tactics. Trump, in turn, has consistently sought to strengthen the perception that America is in chaos....

That sounds like an appeal to people who don't like chaos! Does Edsall even notice this blatant contradiction?