They just don’t get it. Well-intentioned? I’m sure they think so. Or maybe it’s just more of the heavy-handedness that has become a trademark of religious conservatism.

The Ten Commandments will be displayed in all classrooms in Texas public schools, if a new law passes. I guess it could be worse, but that’s not the point. The separation of church and state has been part of the fabric of this country from the beginning, because the founders desired that people have the right to choose for themselves, and they were likely to have known a bit about what had happened in Europe when the church got involved in politics and governance: it often didn’t go well.

The church does its best work when it is a voice on the periphery, and not at the center of attention in the town square. This doesn’t mean its members can’t be faithful and follow Jesus and try to be like him. It does mean that the church– or any religious body– can’t be calling the shots in state legislatures across the land.

And let’s make sure we know which “church” is being talked about. It’s the God-fearing, mostly white men and women of conservative Christian churches across the land who carry on as if the New Testament doesn’t exist, and who think everyone must believe as they do.

No, thanks.

It’s something I’ve often wondered if we’d ever see—California lifting its water bans and declaring that reservoirs are nearing capacity for the first time in a long time. Drought for years on end seemed to be the new normal in California, adding to the long list of natural disasters to befall the state from season to season. But, finally, amazingly, not this season.

Oroville is approaching full, Lake Shasta is at 94% capacity and rising, the San Joaquin Valley and other agricultural and municipal segments will receive 100% allocations for the first time since 2006.

And the snow pack is just starting to melt. May this windfall be managed well.

It might make a difference to hospital staff if they know a bit about the people they’re taking care of.

My mother is still in the hospital for treatment following a stroke that happened over a week ago. My wife wrote a one-page bio, an introduction to Mom, and my sister added a nice border with hearts and flowing lines that make it look kind of like a frame, and they taped it to the wall next to the O2 outlet.

People are reading it, and while it wouldn’t surprise me if some staff really don’t want to get to know their patients even on a superficial level, I’m wondering if it hasn’t made a positive difference in Mom’s care. In little ways, perhaps, but at least she has become more than a difficult patient who can’t always cooperate or converse, except in nonsensical phrases, because she had a stroke last week.

I’m pretty sure this effort to humanize Mom has made a difference in the way her caregivers are seeing her.

The wrong house, the wrong driveway, the wrong car, and the price paid is being shot, maybe killed over this costly mistake.

No such thing as an innocent mistake. Just insanely costly ones.

My teams are both in their respective playoffs—Celtics and Bruins. They’ve had pretty decent seasons, especially the Bruins. Guess we’ll see how far they can go. It’s hard to believe they’ll still be playing hockey in June, though not that hard.

Oh, the wonders of modern refrigeration. What’ll they think of next?

The Dominion v Fox suit is on tap for today, though it sounds like maybe a settlement is in the works. So it really is about the money, as always. It’s not about company pride or libel or whatever—it’s just making sure the settlement is big enough to make people happy, and small enough to avoid bankruptcy.

What I wonder is if a settlement is expected to make the whole thing go away. Like it never happened? Like Fox News can just get on with its paranoid, alternate universe approach to news?

The powers that be at Fox were so worried about market share they just made stuff up and tried to drag a reputable company through the mud in the process.

So that’s journalism? Find another word.

The Boston Marathon happened yesterday, on a cool, cloudy, foggy, and rainy Monday morning along the route from Hopkinton to Boston. I watched the start of the wheelchair racers and just missed the start of the elite groups going off for both men and women.

These athletes are truly in a class by themselves. The eventual wheelchair winners were so far in front that they had multiple-minute leads only a few minutes into the race. They were racing against the clock because there were no other racers in sight who could give them any kind of competition. The elite men were running 4:37 miles consistently for the first few miles, which, for the lack of a better word, is sick in an impressive way.

Marathon athletes are just a special breed.  

More profound than the discovery of fire or electricity.

This is how the CEO of Google described the advancements in artificial intelligence—AI. Will it all be useful? Needed? Or is it unfolding because we simply can do it?

I’m sure there are medical advancements and other applications that will enhance human health and general living conditions, if we can embrace them. But we already have a sense for what can happen when this kind of technology gets into the wrong hands. It has the potential to be misinformation and disinformation gone wild, uncontrollable.

Has the point already arrived, or will it soon arrive, when AI’s development will move beyond human attempts to manage it? Sometimes it seems like grown-up kids just playing around, seeing what they can come up with.

But there are echoes of Ian Malcolm, a fictitious character, yes, but also vessel of caution and wisdom who issued a warning: just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

Seems like that train is always leaving the station.

Our experience with my mom’s current hospitalization is doing little to bolster our confidence in the condition of healthcare in this country. We’re fully aware that there are staffing issues, that present staff feel overworked and underappreciated, perhaps residue from Covid-19. Blame it on Covid.

We have experienced this malaise and stress firsthand the last three or four days—miscommunication, lack of familiarity with Mom’s situation leading to incomplete and inaccurate info being shared with whoever is there with her, and a disappointingly prevalent atmosphere of short tempers and complaining. It’s enough to get one wondering just how competent some of the staff are—how thoroughly they’ve been trained or vetted, if vetting is something hospitals can even do (you’d think it would be).

Stepping back from the critique for a moment, Mom’s current roommate is like someone out of a textbook chapter describing coping skills and how to deal with difficult patients—loud, complaining, offering up her own opinions and diagnoses, though, in this case, also frightened by her own condition and prospects for getting better.

I realize the expectations placed on hospital staff—especially doctors and nurses- are high. They’re supposed to remain cool, calm, and collected even as some patients and their families act like complete assholes. And they’re supposed to know what they’re talking about! I can see how, after days on end of dealing with people for whom hospitals are by nature not a place they want to be, the staff feel the need to go on the defensive, to get chippy and give patients a taste of their own medicine. Or just stop caring. That’s one ugly spiral. Professionalism gets thrown out the window.

In my mother’s case, the stroke she’s had has rendered her incapable, as far as we can tell, of understanding much of anything. It has affected both her speech, and her ability to process information in her own head, to comprehend what others are trying to say or tell her. She appears to be employing some muscle memory in her responses, and she has basic motor function in her limbs. But within that, there is some loss of the same—she’s having to relearn how to drink from a straw and properly use a spoon and fork. And her stock response to practically every question is “good,” or “uhhuh.”

So… one might think that the hospital staff assigned to Mom might be aware of all this. And sometimes it seems that they’re not. Or, more discouragingly, that they just don’t have the time to give someone whose world has been turned upside down and inside out in the blink of an eye.

There’s just so much about MTG that I find disturbing—her willingness to stir things up, her penchant for speaking before thinking—if thinking is something that she does. Her language, her opinions, her general demeanor…

She comes to the aid of “Jake” Teixeira, holds up his male, Christian whiteness, says he must be an enemy of the Biden administration because of these characteristics.

Who is she talking to? Who is her audience? What are her objectives, the points she’s trying to make?

How did she get elected in the first place?