The planet is on fire

So hot
Tomorrow will be worse
If I didn’t have Samuel I would just stay inside. 

My short blips don’t mean anything is wrong, it means I blip too late and fall asleep or that I don’t have anything clever to say. Endless_Weekend noted the connection between short blips and my not being in a great place so, for the last however long there has not been that connection. 

Had a lovely conversation with a young woman who will graduate from college soon. My friend thought international development might be good for her. She is shy and nervous and young and female and from a very rural area. I realized one concern she would have would be going off to some foreign country all by herself so I explained that on her first trip she’s not going to be off on her own. There will be a team there. They will tell her what to expect, help her get around, take her out for fun. She won’t have to go from 0 to 100. By the time she’s entirely on her own she’ll have decades of experience and go from 75 to 100. This was in fact something she was scared of and my words were very reassuring. 

I hope she does, she’s a delightful and good person.

There is a lot of assumption that the young generation is sitting this election out. I am not sure that is right. She is voting. Her friends are voting. Their issues are abortion, gun control, and the environment and they don’t really care who the candidates are, they care about who will help them get the future they want. They also are under the mistaken impression that the economy is really bad which drives me nuts. 

There is a CNN article that says the arrival of Western military aid is making a huge difference. Russia was on its way to taking the second largest city and they aren’t now. This possibility is a big part of why the west agreed to let Ukraine use their weapons to attack inside Russia. 

Latvia said an initiative to deliver a million drones to Ukraine by next February is moving ahead. They have commitments of nearly $600 million. 


Two jaguar cubs were born in the Kharkiv zoo. They were named in a contest. A girl proposed them. They will be Nik and Vic. Victoria is the goddess of victory in Roman mythology, and Nika in ancient Greek.