W
I love this time of year, too!
I love berry season, which has started here. Been grazing on serviceberries for the last week. Bumper crop. Also looks like I'll have good raspberry and black currant crops. There was severe dieback on one of my two red gooseberry bushes, so that crop will be much smaller than usual.
Here are some tomato recipes. We need to get ready for those pups! I have tons on the vine.
https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/photos/tomato-salad-recipes
Corn and tomato salad:
Here's a recap of the damage. Several EF-3 tornados.
So they didn't have tarps up to hide what the workers were doing when they put Trump's name up there, but they did last night when they took his name down.
Waste of (more) taxpayer money.
edited to add (I missed that they used cherry pickers to put the name up back in December):
Workers spent hours Friday slowly putting up scaffolding in front of the Kennedy Center to reach the letters. Several commentators noted that when the letters were installed back in December, cherry pickers were used to do the job much quicker, leading to speculation the scaffolding was ordered to create additional delays and give Trump’s appeals more time.
A US district court judge has ordered the Trump administration to reinstate any history or science materials it removed from the nation’s public monuments, finding that the White House’s actions “set a dangerous precedent of censorship and sanitization”.
In March 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “restoring truth and sanity to American history”, calling upon the secretary of interior to examine monuments, memorials and statues to see if they had been altered after January 2020 to represent a “false construction of American history”.
“Under the guise of promoting American dignity, this administration seeks to share a limited history by ordering the removal of all signs, displays, and interpretive exhibits at national parks that do not align with its preferred narrative, thereby telling half-truths,” Kelley wrote in her decision.
Alan Spears, senior director for cultural resources at the NPCA, said in a statement after the ruling: “Americans count on national parks to help us understand our full, rich history. Stories of triumph and tragedy alike deserve to be told out loud at parks.”
Emily Thompson, executive director of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, a fellow plaintiff in the suit, echoed the sentiment. National parks “exist to preserve and interpret the full American story, not just the parts that make some politicians comfortable. This ruling will help ensure that remains the case,” she said in a statement.
The Trump administration has 21 days to comply with the order.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/12/judge-national-park-trump-displays
Man, they don't miss a beat, do they?
In a last-ditch effort to halt the judge’s order, the Kennedy Center sought to block it late Thursday. The judge denied that request Friday, hours before the deadline for removing Trump’s name.
In a filing to a federal appeals court seeking to block the judge’s order, the center argued for the first time that taking Trump’s name off the building would result in having to return hundreds of millions of dollars that the center has raised for renovations due to a previously unannounced change to the center’s bylaws.
“All of this money, hundreds of millions of dollars, will have to be immediately returned, or not received by the Center,” the filing said.
The filing said the “reason for this clause is that people and companies, who have given, or will be giving, millions of dollars to the Center were only willing to do so with the name ‘Trump’ on the Building.”
It does not say how, when or where the change was made to the center’s bylaws. The Kennedy Center did not respond to inquiries about when the changes were made and exactly how much money might be at risk.
The appeals court on Friday night denied the Kennedy Center’s request for a pause.
The New Deal project that preserved Kentucky’s recipes
The natives are not happy.
Anyone who works at Meta or knows anyone who works at Meta will tell you the same thing: It is not a happy place, particularly given the seemingly endless layoffs the company has executed over the last few years — cuts that have only accelerated as the company funnels billions into AI.
Now, a new report in Wired suggests the company’s Applied AI team is on the verge of revolt.
The drama kicked off when someone hijacked a livestreamed, employee-only presentation this week with an expletive-laden meltdown, demanding that attendees tell a senior Meta AI executive that he was “a piece of sh*t.” One presenter reportedly covered their face with their hands.
That outburst, Wired reports, reflects simmering rage inside the three-month-old unit of roughly 6,500 engineers and product managers who have been tasked with supporting the company’s AI research ambitions.
Or, there is a fungus among us.
Earth's underground fungal network is so massive, it would span 10% of the Milky Way, map reveals
The first global map of subterranean fungi networks reveals how massive its reach is worldwide.
American politics is deeply divided along partisan lines – and for many Americans, the choice between the two parties feels stark, even existential.
But beneath that familiar red-blue partisan divide is a much more nuanced picture: Many Americans hold a complex mix of values and beliefs that don’t always fit neatly into either major party.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/06/10/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/
Big line of storms came through. Tornados south of the metro Chicago area. I think there were some pretty big storms up near the Wisconsin border. My area, northwest of the city, just got some rain. Last night was worse, with some pretty significant winds. Some nice weather coming our way for the next few days.
For nearly four years, Ken Salazar — the U.S. ambassador to Mexico under former President Joe Biden — grew increasingly frustrated with the White House’s border plan.
Salazar says he begged for a “border czar” to run point on interagency coordination; he never got one, and instead, the moniker was inaccurately and problematically affixed to then-Vice President Kamala Harris. He asked for the White House to openly call it a border “crisis”; the designation came too late.
Salazar became so distraught that by July 2024, three weeks after Biden’s disastrous presidential debate performance, he decided to take matters into his own hands: “I should run for president,” Salazar told himself, according to his forthcoming book, a copy of which POLITICO obtained before its July 28 release date.
“There was political failure to understand the reality of the crisis at the border, and the political consequence it would have on Democrats in the 2024 election,” Salazar told POLITICO.
Salazar doesn’t want his party to repeat the past. His book, Borderlands: My Fight for an Inclusive America, is part-memoir, part-manifesto. Salazar — the former Interior secretary, Democratic U.S. senator, and Colorado attorney general — makes a case for what he calls “a new North American alliance,” in which the U.S., Canada and Mexico integrate their supply chains, jointly patrol their shared borders and promote cultural and educational exchanges. He sees it as a revival of former President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.
But the book is also a warning to future 2028 Democratic presidential candidates.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/06/11/ken-salazar-biden-border-security-2028-00958607
The U.S. Department of the Interior said on Thursday it is investigating what appeared to be a large tracing of "8647" into the grounds of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
A Reuters photographer atop the Washington Monument saw the apparent marking in the grass near the World War Two Memorial shortly before authorities arrived at the scene. It shows the numbers eight, six and seven, but a four is not clearly defined.
The most powerful factors affecting a child's brain development involve socioeconomic opportunities, according to a study in the journal Science.
The analysis of more than 2,300 9- and 10-year-olds found that environmental factors ranging from household income to education to neighborhood quality are associated with brain differences that can clearly be seen in MRI scans.
The researchers also found that preteens who'd grown up in neighborhoods with lower incomes and limited social support had brain differences associated with less sleep and more stress.
"Something is going on in these neighborhoods," says Scott Marek, the study's first author and an assistant professor of radiology at WashU School of Medicine. "We need to find out how socioeconomics is becoming biologically embedded."
Will Rahm Emanuel run for president? New Hampshire bike ride fuels speculation
While Emanuel hasn't made any formal announcement about his plans, his New Hampshire bike ride gave him a chance to introduce himself to the state's notoriously picky voters before the rest of the field swoops in after the November midterms.
Every kilogram of hydrogen doing useful work in America right now came out of a factory. Most of it gets cooked from natural gas in industrial plants, the cleaner kind gets split from water with electricity, and both routes share the same basic problem: somebody has to build the molecule before anybody can sell it. So the idea that you could skip all of that and simply pump hydrogen out of the ground, the way Texas pumps crude, has spent years living in the “sounds great, call me when it’s real” folder.
It now has a date on the calendar. HyTerra, an Australian-listed explorer drilling in rural Kansas, and Prometheus Hydrogen, an Illinois company that stores the gas in solid form, signed a collaboration agreement in late February to run a complete geologic hydrogen supply chain from one end to the other: out of the rock, through purification, into storage, onto a truck, and into the hands of a commercial end user. The target, according to Hydrogen Central, is completion before December 1, 2026. Nobody anywhere has ever billed a customer for purified hydrogen that came out of the ground. If these two pull it off, that sentence stops being true before New Year’s.
I'm also wondering about the younger kids in primary and middle school. Maybe @dolmansaxlil can weigh in with that perspective.
As Gen Z ditch books at record levels, students are arriving to classrooms unable to complete assigned reading on par with previous expectations. It’s leaving colleges no choice but to lower their expectations.
One shocked professor has described young adults showing up to class, unable to read a single sentence.
“It’s not even an inability to critically think,” Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor of great books and humanities at Pepperdine University, told Fortune. “It’s an inability to read sentences.”
Americans’ faith in Trump will decline if he cannot bring the Iran conflict to a sensible conclusion, while the loyalty of congressional Republicans is being tested by his solipsism.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Let’s not exaggerate: Yeats’s lines do not yet describe the Trump administration and its foreign policy. But the direction now, in the 17th month of his second term, is toward confusion and failure.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/06/in-trumps-second-term-things-start-to-fall-apart/
Non-paywall version:
