I say YES. YOU say NO....Numero Tre! Enjoy!

Beaverntx

Spookiesmom, yeah, Florida is right up there with Texas! Our county count yesterday was only a few cases short of last year's peak, probably will set a new peak today. And mask mandates are forbidden for schools😕

Spookiesmom

Hospitals around here are canceling elective surgeries again. My gf has a mass on her ovary, she is freaking. We have surpassed our peak from last year. Doesn’t this smuck realize it’s his potential voters that are dieing?

DivineMrsM

IllinoisLady

Do not sell your soul in exchange of anything. This is the only thing you have brought into this world. And the only thing you can take back. ~ Rumi

IllinoisLady

How discouraging for Fla. and possibly TX if they too have to start dropping some procedures/surgeries because of covid/Delta surge. Not only discouraging, but disgusting. So much of this ( of course it started with the orange maggot ) did not have to happen. I read this morning that the number of deaths is almost at 619,000 now. There is Delta and soon to be another likely stronger one.

I say again -- so many of these people are trying so hard to keep the orange loon's voters that they are playing games with the grim reaper. Paying scant notice that they are actually contributing to likely a slew of Reps. from their own party. In other circumstances one might say how great to be focused, but my god when you are so much so that you are doing extreme damages to your own party, father, mother, child, aunt etc. Really -- that is far too focused in my book. That is total idiocy to the nth. degree. It is just hard for me to fathom. Seems to me a great many of these people may never quite wake up. They all deserve to be REMOVED from office asap. Of course, there is the underlying issue of fixing all that got us to this point. One of those fixes would definitely be holding people ( as many as humanely possible ) accountable for not only helping the orange thing get into the WH, but he and all those after that helped him remain and who are contributing to this very moment to what he stood for.

Beaverntx

Oh, it is Texas too, hospitals in my area are cancelling elective surgeries!

IllinoisLady

Do they also celebrate death over life.

Faith isn't much of a vaccination -- it is in fact worthless.

IllinoisLady

IllinoisLady

IllinoisLady

This might be a re-run, but it is a very good one.

IllinoisLady

IllinoisLady

Foresee insult, and make of it compliment, for it is cleverer to avoid insult than to avenge it. It is a great trick to make friends of those who wished to be rivals, and to turn into protectors of your honor those who threatened its injury. . . time for insult is taken from them, who must fill it with thanks giving. It is to know how to live to be able to convert pain into pleasure—what was to have been pain, transform into trust. -Baltasar Gracian

IllinoisLady

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 6

I wrote a letter tonight about the rising radicalism of the Republican Party. But then, sorting through the dark chaos of today's news, I found myself thinking instead about the Battle of Mobile Bay, which happened on this date in 1864.

By the spring of 1864, victory in the Civil War depended on which side could endure longest. Confederates were starving as they mourned their many dead; Union supporters were tired of losing sons to battles that seemed to accomplish nothing. President Abraham Lincoln knew he must land a crushing blow on the South or lose the upcoming presidential election. If he lost, the best Americans could hope for was a negotiated peace that tore the nation in two. In March 1864, Lincoln appointed Ulysses S. Grant commander-in-chief of all the Union armies, hoping that this stubborn westerner could win the war.

Grant set out to press the Confederacy on all fronts. In the past, the Union armies had acted independently, permitting Confederates to move troops to the places they were most needed. Grant immediately coordinated all the Union armies to move against the South at once.

In the East, the Army of the Potomac would hit Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. In Georgia, William T. Sherman's western troops would smash their way from Tennessee to Atlanta. Finally, Grant wanted the U.S. Navy to move against Mobile, Alabama, a port on the Gulf Coast so well protected by shifting sands that it had become the major harbor for the blockade runners that still linked the Confederacy to Europe. Grant hoped this strategy would lock the South in a vise.

By midsummer, the plan had faltered. The Army of the Potomac had stalled in Virginia after an appalling 17,000 casualties at the Battle of the Wilderness, 18,000 at Spotsylvania, and another 12,000 at Cold Harbor, where soldiers pinned their names and addresses to the backs of their uniforms before the battle so their bodies could be identified. Sherman was stopped outside Atlanta. And the navy had run aground up the Red River in Louisiana as it made a feint in that direction before the move against Mobile Bay. Union morale was so low that even President Lincoln thought he would lose the election and the war would end in an armistice.

By late summer, the pressure was on Admiral David G. Farragut to deliver a victory in Mobile Bay. After weeks of waiting for reinforcements, on the morning of August 5, Farragut ordered the captains of the fourteen wooden ships and four ironclads under his command to "strip your vessels and prepare for the conflict." At 5:40 a.m., with the wooden ships lashed together in pairs and the ironclads protecting them, the vessels set out in a line to pass the three forts and four warships that guarded the harbor above water, and the minefield that guarded all but a 500-yard channel below. The admiral's flagship, the Hartford, was in the second pair in line, behind the Brooklyn and its partner.

As the ships proceeded under heavy fire, going slowly to stay behind the lumbering ironclads, the foremost ironclad hit a torpedo, turned over, and sank instantly, taking all hands with it. Aware he was on the edge of the minefield, the commander of the Brooklyn hung back, throwing the whole line into confusion under the pummeling of the land batteries. Farragut ordered the captain of the Hartford to take over the lead. As the Hartford passed the stalled Brooklyn, the Brooklyn's captain warned that they were "running into a nest of torpedoes."

"Damn the torpedoes!" Farragut allegedly shot back. "Full speed ahead!"

By 10:00 a.m., the U.S. Navy had taken Mobile Bay, cutting off all Confederate contact with Europe. It was the victory the Union needed, and others followed in its wake: Atlanta fell on September 2, and the Army of the Potomac began to gain ground in Virginia. Finally able to believe that victory was near, voters rallied behind Lincoln's determination to win the war and backed his administration in November. They gave him 55% of the popular vote and gave the Republicans supermajorities in both the House and the Senate.

Damn the torpedoes, indeed.

Spookiesmom

IllinoisLady

Jen Psaki has just shone in her position hasn't she !! The Fox news ( fanciful news ) people end up being schooled almost every day by Jen. One would think they would get tired of the public dress down but they don't seem to realize that she is not one who falls into a 'gotcha' mold and routinely walks right out of their tainted trap. Easier to do when you have the 'sinister' motive of having sworn to tell the truth. They seem incapable of figuring out that they are likely to be on the losing end always.

IllinoisLady

IllinoisLady

IllinoisLady

IllinoisLady

IllinoisLady

This is so painful to look at.

IllinoisLady

DivineMrsM

I do love Jen Psaki!

Also true that prayer does not eradicate disease.

Prayer does not reduce same sex attraction, either. This week, I watched the Netflix documentary, “Pray Away." *Description: “The film chronicles the rise and subsequent fall of Exodus, a conversion therapy organization that began as a Bible study group in the 1970s consisting of five evangelical men who were looking to help one another leave the "homosexual lifestyle." At its peak, the group reportedly had 400 local ministries across 17 countries. But years after rising to stardom in the religious right, many of these "ex-gay" leaders, whose own same-sex attractions never went away, have since come out as LGBTQ and disavowed the very movement that they helped to grow.”

The damage done by conversion therapy is heartbreaking. The slogan was something like “pray the gay away." I cannot believe in this day and age, 2021, that some still believe homosexuality must be, can be somehow reversed.

I recommend the film. Very insightful.

DivineMrsM

A meme I saw on FB today....I’m including some of the creative comments it received!

IllinoisLady

A person's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild; but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall therein,
and will continue to produce their kind.
Just as gardeners cultivate their plots, keeping them free from weeds, and growing the flowers and fruits which they require, so may a person tend the garden of his or her mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts, and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts. By pursuing this process, a person sooner or later discovers that he or she is the master-gardener of his or her soul, the director of his or her life. -James Allen

IllinoisLady

I like Patrick Edwards best which is the one towards the end.

exbrnxgrl

Divine,

I just watched Pray Away last night! I remember hearing about Exodus years ago but this documentary was eye opening. Cruelty in the name of G-d is the most perplexing concept ever.

pingpong1953

IllinoisLady

IllinoisLady

I believe you Ping-Pong.

IllinoisLady

A little hard truth.