Saturday, August 15, 2026

Deliver us from evil


The phrase
"deliver us from evil," according to Google, "is the final petition in the traditional Lord's Prayer" as is found in the Bible. "It is a plea asking God to rescue, protect, and guard us from spiritual harm, the power of sin, and the influence of the devil."



For those faithfully reciting the Lord's Prayer, it appears that their prayers are now going un-answered. The devil seems to have now been unleashed on humankind in the persona of Donald J. Trump. This is simply evil.
So folks, these days whatever Trump and his underlings recommend, just do the exact opposite. At least, that's my best advice until we can get this erratic crazy guy completely out of office--get him gone, gone, gone. Never mind that future history books may well judge him to be one of the very worst American presidents ever, maybe even worse that Ulysses S. Grant. But in the here and now, even just today, we are actually living under his direction and that of his pernicious buddies, suffering right here in the present moment. So we need to immediately stop this raging fever, this acute illness, this terrible calamity, just the result of a really big mistake that US voters have made. Many are sorry now, but it's already too late, as Donald Trump is our current president and still has more than a year left to go. 

Trump's national approval rating hovers between 32% and 41%, hitting record lows for his current term. Aggregators and individual tracking surveys show his disapproval 
rating sitting near 58% to 61%.


AI Overview
President Donald Trump's national approval rating sits between 32% and 41% in 
mid-August 2026, with major tracking aggregators like RealClearPolitics placing his 
approval around 39%. Disapproval ratings actually register higher, ranging 
from 58% to 62% across multiple prominent national surveys.

How unpopular is Donald Trump?

The president's net approval rating is -27,
down 0.9 points since last week.
34% approve, 61% disapprove, 4% not sure.
"More fake news!" Donald Trump would scoff. He's not worried at all, no, not even one little bit. He considers those polls simply wrong, as he is actually convinced that he is the most popular president ever in American history, in fact, the very greatest, most admired, most revered US president of all time, except perhaps for Abraham Lincoln. 

Trump has also depicted himself as a wonderful spiritual healer with almost divine curative powers. emitted just from the touch of his hand on a sick person's brow.


But he is still mortal, and as a mortal, Donald Trump still loves to eat, especially McDonald's fare.
The Hill, RFK Jr. says he’s seen ‘boxes and boxes’ of McDonald’s on Trump plane Apparently, Donald Trump likes McDonald's food and he's sure that it's safe. That has provided good advertising for the whole McDonald's chain. 

So now what about Trump's current vaccination plan. requiring millions of individual shots, a system last used some decades ago?  https://apnews.com/article/vaccines-trump-mmr-drugmakers-5a1d91e149feab99b18dd916412523ee?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=share The biggest obstacles to President Donald Trump’s order on vaccines may be the logistical challenges it poses for parents, health providers and drug makers. 

It would be really hard now to change back to that older system.

So why even consider reviving the old cumbersome, less efficacious, more costly vaccination system when the new one is now working so much better? Just ask Donald Trump and RFK Jr. to explain. 
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BBC  Trump signs order to limit childhood vaccines and split MMR shots

This strange order now backtracks several generations by no longer providing state-of-the-art care and jettisoning the more optimal current vaccine schedule, thereby putting children unnecessarily at risk. But Trump and RFK Jr. are both apparently still hellbent on harming, not improving, actual citizen health care. They are in charge now, so are calling all the shots, deciding to no longer optimize health, rather to optimize illness and disease, erasing recent health gains, thus enabling the spread of more sickness and deaths. So RFK Jr. has actually become the anti-health czar. Is there some sort of profit motive or other obvious reason for RFK Jr. and Donald Trump to actually be doing all this? It's hard to see what's behind these blatantly counterproductive and very risky decisions. Trump is like a rampaging bull in a china shop, destroying everything willy-nilly.


Can implementing this change now be delayed until Trump is out of office? Show him nostalgic images of warships designed like those of World War II, but don't actually start building one yet. 

And let's elect both a Democratic president and Congress next time to stop all this nonsense. 

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Fox News

Virginia State University shooting: At least 5 injured, one critically


More victims again of the NRA's "right to bear arms."

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AFP

Iran fires back at Trump's threat to declare Hormuz a US territory


Not so fast, Iran officials say, "It's ours."

Aljazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/

Iran war live: Tehran says Hormuz under its control, Lebanon slams Israel


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Associated Press

Wife of US soldier is removed from deportation flight and released from federal immigration custody


She was being deported back to her birth country, Brazil, but was rescued just in time. Trump is on a raging deportation rampage, rounding up people willy-nilly, sending many to countries they've never even heard of.  What is it that folks born elsewhere are supposed to be inflicting on those born here? What does he think immigrants are doing to the rest of us? Aren't we all, even Donald Trump himself, the descendants of immigrants? 


Reason

Ohio's Republican Governor Says Haitians 'Played a Major Role' in Springfield's 'Economic Comeback'

Gov. Mike DeWine's recent essay in The New York Times makes the case for a more open legal immigration policy.


Voters, you chose Donald J. Trump as our president, so your mistake started right there. You didn't want Kamala, a woman, so now we are all paying the price, from oldsters like me to our very youngest citizens. Trump's term doesn't end for another year and half, so he and his acolytes can inflict even more damage in the time still remaining. 

It would be best in most cases for us as citizens to just do the very opposite of whatever Donald Trump and his health and other advisers now recommend.

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I'm not sure quite why I thought this was important. but for what it's worth, here it is, so I hope it will prove useful for some blog readers.

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Now here's a completely different subject.

Postpartum psychosis is a rare, severe mental health emergency affecting 1 to 2 out of every 1,000 women after childbirth. It strikes suddenly—usually within the first two weeks—and causes a major break from reality. Symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, extreme confusion, rapid mood swings, and severe insomnia. It requires immediate hospital care.


Yes, I've felt post-partum depression myself, though not in its most severe form, but severe enough, very scary, just feeling like tossing my baby out of a second-story window, then jumping out myself. It comes on with no warning and may take quite a while to abate. Why does it even happen? It doesn't seem like something adaptive that would have developed to aid in overall human survival. 

Human females estrogen and progesterone levels spike during pregnancy. They then drop back to normal in the first 24 to 72 hours after delivery, which can alter brain chemistry and mood. That may be the key to this malady. 

Even new animal mothers, specifically mammal motherscan apparently experience these mood changes as well, which can only be inferred from their behavior. 

None-the-less, these post-partum changes continue to occur in both humans and animals and somehow all have survived and have continued on as species. 

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We all like to feel that we are doing something useful. When I worked for the Occupational Therapy Association, we observed that people typically seek out tasks that help them achieve a meaningful goal--that is, a meaningful to them. and helping clients do that was the a goal meaningful to the therapists themselves.  

Here is what it says on an occupational therapy website: Occupational therapy intervention uses everyday life activities (occupations) to promote health, well-being, and your ability to participate in the important activities in your life. This includes any meaningful activity that a person wants to accomplish, including taking care of yourself and your family, working, volunteering, going to school, among many others.

Many people volunteer because they want to help achieve goals they consider important, even when they are not being paid for their service. 

For example, a former work colleague, now living out west, tells me she volunteers regularly with Catholic Charities. She now focuses her efforts locally, avoiding involvement with the broader political fray. She tells me:

I started volunteering at St. Francis House, a Catholic charity that provides services to those who need them: simple meals, clothes and shoes, household items, etc. So far, I really like the work..

                                       So, here she is now on-site, organizing the daily workspace.
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Post retirement, I also have spent considerable time volunteering myself, first as a Peace Corps health volunteer in Honduras, then returning there annually for health-related gigs. I began also 
doing part-time work as an on-call Spanish medical interpreter while also volunteering locally at various sites in Washington, DC, often speaking Spanish there or just doing whatever was needed.
 
Now that I live out in West Virginia's rural countryside, not many volunteer opportunities are available to me here, as I no longer drive.  And as for using Spanish, very few Spanish speakers live nearby, so the only chance I have to speak Spanish is at the local Mexican restaurant, whose proprietors are from Guadalajara.  



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¿How come Spanish is the only language using inverted question marks and exclamation points? ¡I don't really know! Even closely related languages like Portuguese and Italian don't have them. It seems like quite a mystery as to how this unique usage ever came about. 


The Real Academia Española (Royal Spanish Academy) introduced inverted question marks (¿) in 1754 and later added inverted exclamation points (¡), to help readers spot the start of long, complex sentences where the word order does not change. This serves as a visual guide to help readers adjust their voice tone and mindset from the very beginning of a long sentence. 
Why Spanish Needed Them
  • Same Word Order: Spanish statements and questions often look identical, unlike English which inverts the subject and the verb.
  • And now I find this image, not sure what it means,
  • .

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