StephanieKMerrill

I dream of you
and wake up
as a cloud
#haiku #poetry

Black and white photo of Carl Sagan's face and shoulders, a backdrop of stars behind him.

"They should have sent a poet."
(Ellie Arroway, observing the magnificence of the universe in CONTACT, written by Carl Sagan. Today is his day.)

No one has yet given a satisfactory answer to how ICE continues to operate in a 'shut down', given that, far from being essential workers, they are unneeded by anyone at any time

Great Birnam Wood is approaching The White House.

All the folks who've never been to NYC, who never intend to visit NYC, whose voice in NYC will never count being worried about NYC is a testament to the rot and propaganda the bot farms bought by the oligarchs have rendered.

To balance the glut of articles interviewing New Yorkers who claim they’re going to leave the city if Mamdani wins, someone should interview my wife and I who want to move back if he wins.

The billionaires can buy the newspapers and buy social media and buy attack ads, but they can't buy their way out of how much we fucking hate all of them.

a large road sign with the text fuck ICE located on a corner of an intersection in chicago

shout out chicago.

I think a thing we'll learn tonight is that people fucking hate what is going on and they will straight ticket vote against anyone involved in starving people while pillaging the country and kidnapping their neighbors. I don't think it matters at all who that person is.

One of my favourite shots I have taken. A beautiful Great Grey Owl flying straight towards me.

#wildlife #wildlifephotography #birds #birdphotography #photography

Wow, we really are in The Divine Comedy.

Ruskin and the Struggle of Revelation by Jack B. Bedell

"He had no doubt the mountain range
along the horizon held a message"

"Ruskin and the Struggle of Revelation" by @jackbedell.bsky.social

psalteryandlyre.org/2025/11/03/r...

For any unfamiliar with the quality of journalism at Teen Vogue, it's well known for hard-hitting stories on "politically sensitive" topics including climate.

Then there's CBS: the only major network to increase climate coverage in the last few years. They just axed nearly their whole climate team.

Time to unfollow Teen Vogue.

If you’re seeing a surge of MAGA accounts commenting everywhere, take a closer look. Bot activity has spiked since Saturday evening the goal is to sway tomorrow’s elections. Click on their profiles and you’ll often find the same accounts posting identical comments across hundreds of posts.

Outside Chicago—

State police and sheriff's officers at Broadview detention center are out in riot gear.

A large Halloween demo is being prevented from doing a Jericho walk through the intersection.

Arrests of protesters ongoing. Troopers have also assaulted multiple reporters already.

📸 : Denise Dresbach

Witches on Morro Bay, CA

Matthew J. Parker: AI is Stupidity’s BFF My real life encounters with AI, however, mostly on plagiarized student papers, have proven that when it comes to inventive and even fantastical falsehoods, today’s AI not only surpasses our curren…

"The tragedy then is not so much that these students are cheating their way through college, but more that they are cheating themselves out of college..."

Matthew J. Parker: AI is Stupidity’s BFF voxpopulisphere.com/2025/10/31/m...

Three witches dressed in black robes dancing in a circle. Photo from the play, MACBETH.

You know who comes out splendidly at the end of MACBETH? The Witches. Today is their day.

"But as the regime grows more brazen in its vulgar displays of power...so too grows the need to truly address what it means to be living in a country led by a mashup of King George III, Caligula, and Hans Christian Andersen’s infamously naked emperor."

Short poem by Sylvia Plath with the famous lines "The blood jet is poetry, / There is no stopping it."

"We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you." -Sylvia Plath (Today is her day.)

The consent of the governed is something people are going to need to get very very comfortable with. As well as how the framers understood our natural rights as humans.

soybean blossoms
teaching the same lesson
as the sacred texts
#haiku #poetry #zen

Julie L. Holcomb: 177 years ago, the Seneca Falls Convention kicked off the fight for women’s suffrage – an iconic moment deeply shaped by Quaker beliefs on gender and equality Real change, Lucretia Mott believed, would require going to the root of the problem: “mindless tradition and savage greed.”

Julie L. Holcomb: 177 years ago, the Seneca Falls Convention kicked off the fight for women’s suffrage – an iconic moment deeply shaped by Quaker beliefs on gender and equality voxpopulisphere.com/2025/10/23/j...

WOW: "Covid-19 vaccines... set off a powerful alarm that rallies the human immune system against cancer and nearly doubles the median survival length of patients, according to a new retrospective study by researchers at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center & the University of Florida."

It flies under the radar because it is overwhelmed by the sheer repulsiveness of the physical destruction of the east wing, but there is no way that a president should be allowed to use private money to change public property. It circumvents the power of the purse.

In addition to everything else, Tariffs on other Countries SAVED our Cattle Ranchers!

War is peace

Mike Johnson has not heard anything about the entire East Wing being demolished and cannot speak to that.

It’s hard to convey just how much Chicagoans are mobilizing against ICE. Don’t want to downplay the harm, or make it seem like a fair fight. But in neighborhoods across this city, ICE is getting chased by people blowing whistles and shouting. People are running TOWARD ICE to protect their neighbors.

Black and white photo of Doris Lessing smiling at the camera.

"Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born."
- Doris Lessing. (Today is her day.)