Megan P

View from I-40 in western New Mexico.

View from I-40 between Grants and Albuquerque with sunlight and storm clouds.

View from I-40 between Grants and Albuquerque with sunlight and storm clouds.

View from I-40 between Grants and Albuquerque with sunlight and storm clouds.

Made it to Santa Fe today to visit our daughter, who is a freshman at St. John’s College. Stopped by my uncle’s old house outside Grants on our way east. Gorgeous skies, stunning landscape, beautiful crisp fall air. I love being back in New Mexico!

Mixed breed dog on the highway to Amboy with grey clouds in the background.

Walking down a lonely desert highway—just a dog, a long strip of road, and stormy clouds overhead.

The fact that no one in the room stood up for her says a lot about how we got here bsky.app/profile/pale...

Took our 14yo and three of his friends zip lining in the rain in the redwoods today to celebrate his birthday and it was awesome. The teens had a blast and didn’t mind that we tagged along. Coasting through the air, feeling the wonderful rain on my face, gazing out at a gorgeous 2nd growth forest—😁.

Reaction to the FDA Announcement on MHT Removing the Black Box Warning was Served with a Side of Serious Misinformation

My thoughts on the FDA announcement today about MHT vajenda.substack.com/p/reaction-t...

Contributor: Gen Z can't save the planet while doomscrolling it dry As U.S. data centers drink up more than 200 billion gallons of water per year, young peoplea are no longer willing to wait for someone else to step up.

Good advice for all generations: “Log off and act.” www.yahoo.com/news/article...

I Want You to Understand Chicago Politics Chicago 2025-11-08 I want you to understand what it is like to live in Chicago during this time. Every day my phone buzzes. It is a neighborhood group: four people were kidnapped at the corner drugstore. A friend a mile away sends a Slack message: she was at the scene when masked men assaulted and abducted two people on the street. A plumber working on my pipes is distraught, and I find out that two of his employees were kidnapped that morning. A week later it happens again. An email arrives. Agents with guns have chased a teacher into the school where she works. They did not have a warrant. They dragged her away, ignoring her and her colleagues’ pleas to show proof of her documentation. That evening I stand a few feet from the parents of Rayito de Sol and listen to them describe, with anguish, how good Ms. Diana was to their children. What it is like to have strangers with guns traumatize your kids. For a teacher to hide a three-year-old child for fear they might be killed. How their relatives will no longer leave the house. I hear the pain and fury in their voices, and I wonder who will be next. Understand what it is to pray in Chicago. On September 19th, Reverend David Black, lead pastor at First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, was praying outside the ICE detention center in Broadview when a DHS agent shot him in the head with pepper balls. Pepper balls are never supposed to be fired at the head because they can seriously injure, or even kill. “We could hear them laughing as they were shooting us from the roof,” Black recalled. He is not the only member of the clergy ICE has assaulted. Methodist pastor Hannah Kardon was violently arrested on October 17th, and Baptist pastor Michael Woolf was shot with pepper balls on November 1st. Understand what it is to sleep in Chicago. On the night of September 30th, federal agents rappelled from a Black Hawk helicopter to execute a raid on an apartment building on the South Sho…

Kyle Kingsbury is not a journalist. He is not an op-ed writer.

He is a computer safety researcher.

And he has written one of the most compelling, comprehensive accounts of the ongoing hell in Chicago that you could possibly imagine.

In under 1600 words.

aphyr.com/posts/397-i-...

Senate reaches deal on ending the shutdown Democrats are coalescing around a bipartisan agreement to fund the government.

This is not a deal — it's an empty promise.

Trump and his Republican Congress are making healthcare more expensive for the middle class and ending it for working families.

Time for Democrats to stand tall for affordable healthcare. www.politico.com/news/2025/11...

Photo of southern Ukiah valley with oak woodlands in foreground and grapevines in background.

A beautiful day in the neighborhood. #ukiah #mendocino #autumn

Photo of ripe persimmon on persimmon tree with yellowish green leaves and more persimmons in the background.

Who doesn’t love persimmon season? #persimmons #autumn #yum

Elections in democracies determine who administers the government; they do not alter whom the government is for. Under any administration, Republican or Democratic, the United States government exists to serve the people of the United States, regardless of their partisan affiliation. Besides, Americans are not as easily divided as Trump might think. Millions of Republican voters live in New York, just as millions of Democrats live in Texas. He cannot tell whom he is punishing by glancing at an electoral map. But even if he could, Trump’s acts of extortion have no place in a democracy. They belong in a protection racket: If you support Trump, you are protected; if you do not, you are vulnerable. If you donate enough cash to Trump, you may receive favorable treatment, including immunity from the law. If you oppose Trump, you may be prosecuted.

This is not how a representative government works. It is how the Mafia works.

Went back to the history of the Sicilian Mafia to illustrate something obvious but worth stating explicitly: The Trump administration behaves like an organized crime syndicate running a protection racket, not a representative government www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Wonder why this scene looks so familiar...
#WildlifeWednesday 🐦🐕

AOC: We have a future to fight for, and we're either going to do that together or you're going to be left behind. It's not about Progressive. It's not moderate, it's not liberal. This is about do you understand the assignment of fighting fascism right now? And the assignment is you come together…

Two mixed breed dogs in the way back of car resting their heads on the backseat.

Are we there yet, @darthbluesky.bsky.social?

Photo of fallen apples on the ground.

It’s a beautiful fall day in Northern California. In a counseling session yesterday, a high schooler brought up the state of our nation. I asked him how it feels to be a teen during these times. He said, “Well, every day is a gift so I’m just trying to focus on appreciating each one.” Wise words! 🍎

😂 Perfect. And now can we all please retire 6-7? 🤪

Best metaphor I've heard is that using AI is like bringing a forklift to lift the weights at the gym. The point is to build YOUR muscles, not to make the weights go up and down.

nobel peace prize nomination application:

1) sent us troops into us cities

2) murdered 51 people (so far)without due process or any attempt of actual legal explanation

3) nuclear bombs

This is the sound of candidates losing the struggle against the crushing weight of partisan gravity.

This is nationalization and polarization and presidentialization swallowing everything else.

This is the dangerous collapse of dimensionality, in one chart
leedrutman.substack.com/p/the-modera...

“Tell your children who the cowards were.”

I remember writing a letter to the president for an assignment in 3rd grade. I decided to include a quarter because I wanted to support the government. A few weeks later, I was surprised to receive my quarter back, with a nice letter explaining that our government couldn’t accept personal donations.

Random thought: many good articles are behind pay walls, while misleading or false content is free. As the economy deteriorates, access to information and facts can become a matter of disposable income.

I keep hoping I’ll still be around when they finally return to inland Mendocino County, either from the south or from the north. 🤞🙏

Free speech is when conservatives can say what they want and when you can say what they want. bsky.app/profile/donm...

The team from Screenagers Movies recently launched the #ScreenFreeSleep campaign to reverse the youth sleep crisis.

Devices at bedtime steal kids’ sleep. 51% of teens get less than 7 hours of sleep most nights, and 36% wake at least once during the night to check notifications.

screenfreesleep.org

[Exit King.]

Salmon clear last Klamath dams, reaching Williamson and Sprague rivers Just a year after four dams were removed, a group of fall Chinook have migrated nearly 300 miles into the Upper Klamath Basin.

For the first time in more than 100 years, Chinook salmon have been spotted at the confluence of the Sprague and Williamson rivers in Chiloquin, the government seat of the Klamath Tribes in Southern Oregon.

This is a powerful post by Laurene Powell Jobs on what is means to be a philanthropist and, more importantly, what it does not. Kudos to her for saying it so plainly.

As you may have noticed, white supremacists want to stop the influx of hardworking young people (aka immigration) while somehow forcing white women to have lots more babies to compensate, but they refuse to make having kids more affordable and less arduous an experience.