Question of the Day: Do you have a favorite go-to dry breakfast cereal?
A Day of Meaningful Memes
On KLM
(h/t Claudio)
Bullet Points:
*LAS VEGAS (KTNV) — Brightline Florida has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing heavy debt because of lower ridership than what the company initially projected. This raises more questions about what will happen to the Brightline West project. Reports of financial trouble for Brightline are raising concerns about the planned high-speed rail line from Las Vegas to Southern California. Are they lulling investors into a false sense of security? The bullet train from SoCal to Las Vegas has been tried twice before. In the past, prime actors were indicted in federal court. Maybe the third time will be the charm? California has had such good luck bringing high-speed trains into being on time and under budget…
** Gays for Gaza. It’s a party!
** Twenty years after the Al Gore documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, the ice-free Arctic summers never arrived, Manhattan is still dry, Glacier National Park still has glaciers, and children still know what snow is. That film helped turn climate alarmist doctrine into a rolling countdown of predictions that have failed to come true. Claims like the Maldives would be gone by 2018, East Coast beaches by 2020, or Britain turned into Siberia by 2024. A quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands have shown significant greening due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a 2016 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. Using satellite data from NASA, they found that rising CO₂ has helped make large parts of Earth greener than they were a few decades ago, and that is a real, measured effect.
** Shoot first. Ask questions later.
** On Saturday night I had the opportunity to get some eyepiece time at the Lowell Observatory’s 4.3-meter telescope. That means that there wasn’t anything between my Mark 1 Mod 0 eyeball and the center of M-32, a compact dwarf elliptical galaxy located about 2.5 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. It spans only about 6,500 light-years across and consists mostly of older, faint red and yellow stars with virtually no gas, dust, or active star formation. A supermassive black hole at its core with a mass of roughly 1.5 to 5 million times that of our Sun. Black holes such as that one don’t have much spin; thus, the cluster is bound together by gravity from the singularity, but in a ball of sorts. The photos of the cluster available online show it as a bright ball, but the telescope let me see individual stars within that cluster, 2.5 million miles distant. I mention the experience here simply because I found it moving. I also had a few minutes before I had to surrender the scope to look at the Cat’s Eye Nebula because it’s spectacular, and Neptune – blue with Triton (larger than Pluto, smaller than the Moon) visible in the frame. The 4.3-meter telescope is modern by telescope standards and moves very quickly- target-to-target coordinates in about 5 minutes on average. Watching something that big move that fast is impressive.
** Colin Cleanser (left)
** The University of Arizona enrolled 6,111 first-year students this fall, an 18.6% drop from 2025. On-campus enrollment is down at all three state universities. U of A officials say the smaller class reflects a return to more traditional class sizes and a decline in nonresident and international students.
** Modern dating – I’m happy that time in my life is in the r/v mirror.
** (gCaptain) Two of the Iran-linked oil supertankers interdicted by American naval forces early in the war are just weeks away from reaching the US, where authorities have pledged to seize the vessels and millions of dollars worth of crude that they’re transporting. It’s an unusual voyage for Iranian barrels, which have been banned in the US for decades, and attests to the surprising upheavals triggered by the seven-month conflict between Washington and Tehran. Tifani and Majestic X, both boarded by US forces in the Indian Ocean in April as President Donald Trump imposed a blockade aimed at pressuring Iran to end the war, have skirted the coast of Brazil over the past week, according to shipping data compiled by Bloomberg. A third interdicted ship was observed heading west into the Atlantic after rounding the Cape of Good Hope. Claudio notes that prize courts are back in business. The U.S. military has spent an estimated $43.6 billion on the war in Iran according to recent defense figures, while the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported spending of more than $38 billion through August 1, 2026. Another 100 oil tankers and the Ayatollah will be square with the USA. That works. I think that President Trump should require that they pay the cost of the war as a condition of peace. Otherwise, we keep the blockade going.
** Boating with EdB continues as summer ends.
Identify the Ship
One stack, two stacks, three stacks, four.
1
2
3
4
Parting Shot
End
1 is HMS Warspite (battleship) entering Malta.
Right on ship and location. Well done.
(1) RCC has it.
(2) HMAS Sydney.
(3) HMS Pathfinder.
(4) Town class CL (WWI).
– Kle.
IDS-
1. Leander-class light cruiser HMS Ajax
2. HMAS Hobart was a modified Leander-class light cruiser which served in the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) during World War II.
3. HMS Forward, a Forward-class scout cruiser built for the Royal Navy.
4. British Town-class light cruiser HMS Falmouth, which served during the First World War and participated in the Battle of Jutland.
-STA LETHAL⚡💀⚡
Dry ceral no favorite.
*****
The banner today is well done.
Favorite “Dry Cereal”?
Bacon, FRIED to crumbles, no milk please, Lots of Coffee.
MSG Grumpy
No wonder you’re grumpy… What about a perfectly fried egg, a piece of golden-brown toast with butter, and a glass of freshly squeezed OJ?
Dry cereal: Captain Crunch…but gotta let it get a little soggy. Alt: Lucky Charms. Hey, gotta have a blast O’ sugar first thing as an eight year old…and we were not fat (or bored), burned it off inside of half an hour because we were allowed to be boys, either doing chores or outside play…like building a ramp then trying to jump our Schwinn over friends laying on the ground….like this: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/372743306661181341/
***
Batman: When do WTP allow Blue Run [into the dirt] cities to their own happy demise and not intervene to help?
Caveat: As long as those causing their own demise STAY in their failing enclaves and not locust the rest of us out here in the hinterlands…which is THE trick.
***
Boating with EdB: Apparently I’m not 18…and for 20 years haven’t had a FB account. I’m sure the ‘Boating with the General Public’ clip was hilarious and a cautionary tale.
Ps…CNN Reporterette, with requisite condescending demanding tone during an official presser to discuss critical geopolitical events: “Mr. President, when you have stopped beating The First Lady?”
Yeah, deny access for these immature agenda-driven adversarial brats until they learn to be respectful to The Office and Our President. Won’t happen as they are out of their collective minds. (ProTip for those who can’t read the room: Access is not a right, it’s a privilege.)
Florida high speed rail is a money pit. High speed rail between Houston, and Dallas, has been in a planning stage for a long, long time. From my perspective, the trip could save money, and time, but the destinations require expensive travel costs to navigate the sprawl of the destinations. It’s a grand idea, but won’t work in the environment of urban America, which is drastically different than other countries. People can plan a few extra hours to travel, use their own vehicle, and save the travel costs needed to visit the spread out urban areas such as Houston and Dallas. Considering how much of the trip between Vegas, and L.A. is in California, I doubt any high speed rail project between the two cities would ever get past the environmental suits that drag construction into years in the future…if ever past the planning stage.
The lawyers would seem to be the big winners.
Not the lawyers.
High Speed Rail is working exactly the way it’s meant to in California.
Somebody is getting the skim.
Passenger rail. If it were profitable, the legacy railrooads would be doing it. Imagine a business meeting where all the permitting costs, cost of risk insurance and government offices at all levels who will have a thumb on the scales have to be accounted for, leading to the conlusion, “F**k that shit”.
Amtrak has never posted an overall net profit since Congress created it in 1970. In fiscal year 2025, it reported an adjusted operating loss of roughly $598 million, though this was an improvement from previous years. High-speed and commuter rail should be required to operate at least with a balanced budget. Why should taxpayers who don’t ride the rails pay for the tickets of those who do?
.
Explain it to me like I’m stupid. How is your high-speed rail project going to turn a profit without government financial intervention?
Why should taxpayers who don’t use E85 pay for the fuel of those who do?
…and government scumbags….err… ‘officials’.
The money for these critical projects gets syphoned off at every level, which is why all the permitting and bureaucracy is built into the recipe, to allow criminal theft of our tax dollars as ‘legal’.
However, this is how it happens when private does the work, not some grifter government network, which works to undermine the private at every turn, including telling the RR to not help…so he built his own rail track siding to offload materials:
Santa Monica Freeway rebuild: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-05-01-tm-52376-story.html
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Incidentally, same will happen with this (as well as the ‘Ivermectin’ testimony that proved government was allowing people to die): https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/09/surgeon-hospital-that-treated-first-u-s-covid/.
Of course today’s PsyOp is – ‘fuel’ – because the Aware Public told these same CL’s to go pound sand when they tried Covid-24/25/26 in order to control the General Public (incredibly STILL hearing Big Pharma ads for ‘the not a vax’.
Ahh, that was supposed to be in response to LL above “… lawyers would seem to be the big winners.”.
As someone who knows, politicians and their cronies buy up the land and rights-of-way before the train is announced. They sell the land at inflated prices. That’s where their profit is. The lawyers oppose everything to save “endangered species, etc.” which is where there angle seems richest.
100%…Denver International Airport…no one but the political elite would put it halfway to Kansas then name the road in after themselves, let alone the land purchase years before.
>Manhattan is still dry
Dry if you discount the urine in the subway stations. And occasionally in the subway cars.
—
Less sarcastically, last week I saw more homeless “nests” (occupied) [1] on the sidewalk between Penn Station and Koreatown than I have all summer. This is NOT counting the St Francis of Assisi (7th x 31st) which always has homeless camped outside. It’s nowhere as bad as Portland, OR (which I have not been to for a couple of years, so not sure of current status) but still not great. Then again, Manchester, NH an hour north of me has literally dozens of people staggering around downtown doing the “opioid lean” [2]. Sigh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRcQb9Qyu-o
[3]
—
[1] Pile of blankets or occasionally a foam camping pad. Plus/minus cardboard (or a blue tarp) for wind protection, additional insulation, and of course privacy.
[2] I am behindhand on my street slang. Just looked it up: Apparently what I knew as the opioid lean is now called the “fentanyl fold”. And “lean” now refers to some sort of codeine drink (“purple drank” type stuff).
[3] We know how it came to this. We just can’t talk about it.
“Manhattan is still dry”
The only “Dry Manhattan” I know is the one my OL drinks with WhistlePig 10 and Dolin Dry.
“urine in the subway stations”
I can still remember my first trip, around 1946, my Dad took me down to his office/lab; the first time I can remember travelling on a subway – the #4 as it is today with no changes all the way from 161st & River (the Yankee Stadium stop today), the “El” (short for elevated) down to Union Sq (Park Ave S & 14th).
I sat next to my father and was expected to get up and relinquish my seat to any lady on the way. It was summer, woven cane seats, and open windows (no A/C). When we arrived at the station and got out, the vile, pungent stench assaulted my nose. This was 1946; the bums, as we called them then (not to do with the team from Brookyn), urinated, defecated, slowly decayed and died in the subway stations they called home.
If it was nice out you’d find them begging and/or drinking along the Bowery from Delancy to Houston (pronounced “Howston”) Streets.
Nothing has changed much.
Cereal, dry or wet, nope. MSG Grumpy is on the right track. Sausage and/or CRISP bacon, hash browns, eggs over easy. Our five year old grandson will occasionally choose Grandma’s Corn Chex for a snack.
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Colin Cleanser. Lad looks a bit shit faced in his photo. (Yeah, yeah. Softball over the plate, and I have no self control).
Colin decided to be a turd in life.
** Dry Cereal: Cheerios
** IMHO: the Iran thing. y’ can keep wacking off this head and that one, but until you get to the heart of the matter (China? Russia? Saudi? Islamabad? Pyongyang? the bankers?), you’ll just keep wasting lives and money. It’s a Hydra.
I’ll second Cheerios for dry cereal of choice. I was allergic to cow milk as a child, so Cheerios were either dry, with water, or occasionally goat milk. So I learned to appreciate the oat taste, not sugar-coated versions.
My option for a while, before teeth started wearing down, was Grape Nuts. Another unsweetened treat and very filling.
Nowadays, I’m trying to eat better and will make oatmeal, Malt-O-Meal, grits, Cream of Wheat, etc. Very little sugar though, thankyouverymuch.
Does that make me a Cereal Killer?
Al Gore the Climate Failure? So many predictions. If the models were so good, take historical data and project into the present day and see if the model actually predicts our current temps and weather. Sarah Hoyt won’t speak to me about borrowing her Shocked Face ™.
Love the header pics, please keep them up.
My go-to is Honey Nut Cheerios with a cut-up banana & whole cow’s milk. I reach for it on days when I need something quick. Not a favorite breakfast, but a little less sugar than some other options
Half a banana a day is your friend.
Breakfast is oatmeal.
Unless we go out.
But Wheat Chex makes for a good snack.
I make my own with the goal of promoting healthy gut flora. Raisins, walnut pieces, pecan pieces, flax seed meal, chia seeds and milk. Made in the evening and placed in the frig overnight to soak the chia seeds. Occasionally replaced with bacon and poaced eggs with cheddar cheese.
WSF, you’re a chef!
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I follow Ed with Chex as a snack while driving in the car.
Chex mix is awesome road food.
.
The randomly craved dry cereal, though, would be cinnamon toast crunch.
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When I have the time to make a parfait, it’s chia seeds, almond milk, and blueberries. Soak overnight, top with greek yogurt, walnut pieces / almond slivers, drizzle with honey, sprinkle with dried lemon zest.
Wow!
That trip to the Lowell sounds _way_ cool, LL!
– Kle.
Two over medium, bacon, home fries, biscuits and gravy… ‘That’ is my go to…
I visit this site daily, an old guy, just understand most of the stuff, but absolutely love the banter. LL is the best, thank you sir.