David Baca

Stalin's ghost looking at Trump: "You idiot, first you take away their vote, then you starve them. In my regime totalitarian control was done right".

I don't think messing with food stamps before Thanksgiving was the smartest move politically for Trump and the republicans.

Albuquerque Police seeks an independent review of Black man's hanging death The Albuquerque Police Department is seeking an independent review of the hanging death last year of a Black man following a rally by community groups Monday night.

A similar case in Albuquerque New Mexico was reopened due to protest. www.kunm.org/2025-10-07/a...

I have an ugh, puke reaction to Sabine. I tried one of her videos and cut it off at around 60 seconds. The quote on the book cover is so right wing echo chamber which confirms my initial reaction.

The unforeseen consequences would be planetary not solar system wide but it would still have a cooling effect on the earth. The energy beams would likely cause ozone damage and otherwise be hazardous. And the plausibility is arguable especially if cost/benefit is taken into consideration.

In high school, we had a substitute science teacher who proposed building an artificial ring around the earth to collect solar energy and beam it to the surface. Unlike Dyson, I think he was serious. I'm also reminded of Edward Teller wanting to use atom bombs for construction projects.

Baby king snake.

A baby king snake showed up in my yard this morning, not all that much bigger than an earthworm. A baby with an attitude.

Gotta love the cartoon universe with its infinite supply of anvils, safes and dynamite.

I had a full memory card in my camera, mostly photos of dogs. I've built a nice portfolio of dog photos and I'm an experienced dog photographer at this point. Here are a few.

There's a reason old tech is so fashionable these days. For dealing with newer tech, I use Linux and dumb down my android smart phone as much as possible and use F-Droid instead of Google Play.

Crimson moon rising over Taos mountain. It turned more yellow as it rose. I wasn't expecting anything like this last night so I just grabbed a 500mm mirror lens and bumped up the ISO to shoot it hand held. It came out alright.

Rainbow over Taos Valley.

Rainbow over the Taos Valley. An almost perfect shot but I didn't have a wide enough lens to capture the full double rainbow. Shot at 17mm, f8, 250 shutter speed for those interested in such details. Both exposure and focus were set manually.

The only code question I ever asked AI was for some regex rules to block Youtube ads with a Pi-hole. I got a complete run around. I thought of trying Grok but opening an account on a toxic platform wasn't worth the trouble. Like going to a biker bar in a bad neighborhood to buy drugs.

The Clash's London Calling. This record turned up rummaging through my stuff. I bought it sometime around 1984. It was in a $2 discount bin at Skaggs drug store. It was a great score at the time and I still enjoy listening to it after all these years.

The weekend's yard sale haul, 4 books for a dollar, all serious scholarly material. I could have bought the whole box for $4 or 5 but I already have enough books that I'm never going to read so I restrained myself to books that actually interested me.

A little doggerel for no kings day, my apologies to the Sex Pistols.

God screw the wannabe king,
he's not a human being.

We don't need no F***ing kings
It's a goddamn fascist regime.

God screw the wannabe king
And his goddamn fascist regime.

I watched a short news segment on the LA protests and when it went to Trump I quickly shut it off with a "Shut the F up, you lying sack of shit" reaction. It's the same reaction I always have to him, my anti Trump credentials are impeccable because my bullshit detector just as impeccable.

With all this TACO talk, here's another TA, TAFUM, Trump Always Fucks Up Mail. I ordered a couple of things Monday. It will be a miracle if they arrive to New Mexico from California by Saturday. This is almost as slow as ordering from China. USPS was so much better under Biden and Obama.

Dogs chilling in the early morning.

Nothing, I read several languages I don't speak but if you want true fluency, you have to deal with people, not tech. There are lot of subtleties you miss otherwise.

I question Duo Lingo even without AI. Having learned several languages in my life, it's one a matter of hard work and persistence, and two mixing with the people who use that language. Without the human interaction, you just have a concept of the language, not the actual language.

Irises blooming in the desert.

Barrel cactus blooming in my back yard. I caught it right at the beginning of the bloom cycle with the buds just starting to open.

It's been in my collection for a long time, between 30 and 40 years, I can't exactly remember. I certainly listened to it a lot in my 20s.

Grazing Horse

I had some excitement on Sunday morning. Some horses got loose and came to munch the wild grass in my yard.

The far right likes LOTR for the wrong reasons, like they never grew up. I read it several times between ages 8 and 14 but I've long since moved on. I'm currently reading some of Tolkien's sources in Latin and Old English along with Borges in Spanish who's a fantasy author of a different sort.

When the maga influencers called the new pope woke, I knew that the right choice had been made. He's a fellow Romance Language polyglot and I have a serious love for all the languages he knows. Study and travel make for an enlightened mind and woke means enlightened.

My dog friend contemplating the view. I'm really pleased with this photo, it's the combination of the dog's expression and the wood grain.

The first rainbow of year in Taos, the valley of rainbows. This one lingered through the late afternoon until it merged with the sunset.

I'm back to citizen journalism. None of this matters to anyone outside my immediate community but if I didn't write about it, nobody would know about it.

tresorejas.org/2025/05/08/q...

Astronomy and astrophysics are the sciences I follow with fanboy enthusiasm just because there's so much that's new and exciting coming out daily. Yeah, a lot of it is just the images from Hubble & JWST but every now and then I do a deep dive into astrophysics and it's just as mind blowing.