We left Detroit for Fort Wayne sometime after 5 p.m. Tuesday, and after dealing with traffic and a gas stop, rolled into downtown around 8 p.m., well into full darkness. We were headed for the Bradley Hotel, new since we pulled up stakes in 2005. And even though it stands five floors and covers nearly a full block, Alan managed to miss the turn. (His navigator may have steered him wrong, but doesn’t remember.)
Around a couple of equally flummoxing blocks, we managed to find the valet lane and unload. “I don’t recognize the place,” Alan said. I pointed out Fort Wayne’s Famous Coney Island, cattycorner to the hotel. Didn’t help very much.
Which is to say that downtown has undergone a transformation, which this Homecoming event was intended to show off. The Fort Wayne Chamber invited about two dozen expats and partners, including our friends the Byrnes (former president of Parkview Hospital), Cosette Simon (first woman mayor, for 10 days, a long story), Zach Klein (co-founder of College Humor, Vimeo, Dwell, more), a former congresswoman, a sculptor, many others. And us. It was two days of showing off the city and hinting that investment in local startups would be welcome. Wining, dining, climbing on and off a bus and being encouraged to take a gift bag.
The short version of the itinerary: Touring the under-construction expansion of the Arts United Center, touring the Landing and Promenade Park, dinner at a fancy new restaurant, touring the fancy new restaurant owner’s even fancier new arts center, hearing his story (Sweetwater) followed by that of another local business success (Vera Bradley), meeting the mayor, touring the newly renovated G.E. plant (rechristened Electric Works in adaptive reuse), more business success stories, wrapping up with an evening at Parkview Field, the new(ish) downtown minor-league baseball stadium. The season’s over, but it’s enough of an event hub that we didn’t feel like we were in an empty space; there was a yoga class for roughly 100 taking place in left field.
The mood was friendly, which is to say, not really journalistic. I asked questions, but they were polite ones. Honestly, I wasn’t in a mood to challenge anyone over TIF funding. The results speak for themselves. When we left, downtown Fort Wayne was a wasteland. It isn’t anymore. There are hundreds of new apartments, people walking dogs everywhere, too many new restaurants to count. The out-migration has stopped, and young families are getting the message that it’s a place where housing is still cheap enough that you might be able to buy your own. The parks are beautiful. The rivers are finally getting the attention they deserve.
Does the city still have problems? Of course it does. But it also has an unmistakable shine. It doesn’t look like a place young people flee as soon as they collect their diploma.
Take Pearl Street. The whole time I lived there, it was known for a dirty bookstore, a strip club and gay cruising. A large industrial bakery covered several blocks. The fancy restaurant we ate at Tuesday night is on the ground floor of The Pearl, a new mixed-use building that faces it. Across the street is the Pearl Street Arts Center, both developed by the Sweetwater founder with some of the $1.5 billion he collected for selling a 75 percent stake in the company. He now owns the whole bakery building; the arts center is in part of it. They offer free or sliding-scale music lessons for every Fort Wayne Community Schools student who wants one. There are recording studios and performance spaces therein, all state-of-the-art.
We had coffee at the corner of Pearl and Harrison the first afternoon, and I flashed back to the last time I was in that particular doorway, sometime in the ’80s: There was a ferocious windstorm in progress, and the roof of a nearby building was coming apart in the gusts. A bunch of us had gone to lunch nearby, and the roofing material was flying through the air, some of it large enough to hurt a person. We crouched in that doorway, laughing, before running to a somewhat safer street to walk home on.
As I said, the city still has problems, and none are unique. Homelessness, racism, poverty the usual. But it’s a much nicer place to visit than it once was.
Of course, the graybeards at my old newspaper were opposed to all of this:
Should we give up on “downtown” as a concept whose time has come and gone, admit that trying to keep it on life support is a futile effort?
…As I write this, city officials are getting ready to celebrate the opening of a mixed-use facility they have engineered out of an abandoned General Electric facility downtown. I have been in and around that area for all my Fort Wayne time, and for the life of me I can’t see it succeeding. It’s a depressed area that will still look like a depressed area, so how often are people going to be thrilled about going there to shop or have a bite to eat?
The guy who wrote this was a near-agoraphobic, went to the same few restaurants year after year, and is dead now. Honestly, I don’t know how well Electric Works is really doing; it was beautiful, yes, but suspiciously depopulated when we visited. But I know what an abandoned factory looks like, living as I do in the world capital of them. And I salute the city for trying to turn this one around:
That same writer also disapproved of the new baseball stadium, because it replaced a “perfectly good one” out on charmless, ugly Coliseum Boulevard. The new one was built with TIF money, but it belongs to the city and is universally acknowledged to be the catalyst that started the turnaround.
Some people just don’t like change. I hope I’m never one of them.
Some more pix:
I ate breakfast every day at the place I used to take Kate after a library visit. Cindy’s Diner — the very best.
And now we’re back. What happened in our absence, other than the mad king’s ravings? FWIW, I don’t think the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk sent those texts. But that’s just me. And more will be revealed.
Sherri said on September 21, 2025 at 5:14 pm
So, Tom Homan was caught on camera taking $50k cash in a bag from undercover FBI agents as a bribe to throw contracts their way. The Trump Administration knows this, shut down the investigation, and put him in charge of the border anyway.
I have two questions.
One, that $50k was taxpayer money. Did Homan just keep the money?
Two, how many other current Trump administration officials have been caught on camera taking bribes?
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Alan Stamm said on September 21, 2025 at 5:44 pm
Adding to Sherri‘s questions:
Three, how many previous times did Homan pocket a payoff without FBI agents taping?
That wasn’t a novice’s spontaneous bribe-soliciting try, surely.
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Alan Stamm said on September 21, 2025 at 5:58 pm
Baltimore historian-author Stacey Patton also sniffs something stinky in accused shooter Tyler Robinson’s “ready-made confession, packaged in little green and gray bubbles” to his partner.
“Prosecutors allege Robinson privately confessed in text messages,” she posts at Substack. “They’ve turned selective excerpts into what sounds like an open-and-shut admission . . . simple, decisive, neat. No ambiguity about what the texts supposedly prove. . . .
“Typically, prosecutors hold evidence close, and journalists have to fight to pry it loose. Releasing cherry-picked texts this early is unusual. It smells like a deliberate strategy to set the narrative before the messiness of defense arguments, trial motions or cross-examination can complicate it. In other words, the story is being locked in fast . . . in the form of too-perfect text bubbles.”
The Morgan State professor mainly is skeptical of the texts’ “weird theatrical quality,” adding:
“It doesn’t read like a private exchange between two young people caught in the aftermath of a murder. It reads like a damn screenplay.”
https://substack.com/home/post/p-173837794
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Sherri said on September 21, 2025 at 9:41 pm
Emil Bove was key in shutting down the investigation into Homan. Emil Bove now has a lifetime appointment as a federal judge.
Every single Democrat running for Congress should pledge to impeach Bove.
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alex said on September 21, 2025 at 9:52 pm
The texts in question also use a lot of boomer language that would be lost on Gen Z. Calling his dad his “old man” is one example.
Yes, Fort Wayne has undergone quite the transformation in certain areas. We used to wonder how cities like Grand Rapids, half the size, had such an extravagant city center while ours was a fucking dump where no one set foot after dark. Grand Rapids was subsidized by Amway, that’s how. For decades our city leaders imagined remaking our downtown in all kinds of ways but the price tag was always prohibitive and made it politically unfeasible, and no local moguls were willing to step forward with the money to finance it. Thanks to the benefactors at come-latelies Sweetwater and Vera Bradley, we have some swanky stuff to show off, whereas our earlier corporate behemoths, while contributing to community welfare in their own ways, were stingy as hell when it came to public facilities and accommodations.
My dad, whose employer used to partner with JB Pritzker to build hotels, actually got JB to come to Fort Wayne back in the 1980s to explain to the city council why his company wasn’t willing to build the Hyatt Hotel in this market that they so desperately wanted. Unless it was subsidized, either by taxpayers or by private interests, it wasn’t worth the risk. So we ended up with a cut-rate Hilton attached to our convention center at that time and now it’s a dated, struggling shit hole compared to all of the other hotels that have sprung up around it in the decades since.
I have to admit that I, like old dead Leo Morris at the News-Sentinel, was skeptical of the downtown ball park based on what I’d heard from my dad and his biz friends who didn’t consider investment there a safe bet at all. In fact, the Crosstown Commons condo complex looked like an abject failure during its first 25 years or so, but now it’s hot, and it’s competing with vastly more condos in a market for urban dwellings that didn’t used to exist.
I fled for Chicago post-college, and if I faced the same choices today it’s likely I would do the same. The amenities here have improved considerably. They contribute almost nothing to my way of life, however. I’m living in an exurban area and have all of the creature comforts I desire at much less cost than if I’d remained in Chicago or even Chicagoland. I see Fort Wayne as a great place to retire. Maybe it’s a great place to raise children too if you can get them into the right schools. But from my vantage point it’s a vast sea of MAGA-sympathetic morons who are too easily led by the nose.
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Deborah said on September 22, 2025 at 7:35 am
That’s good news to hear about a city revamping with housing and street life.
We left St. Louis in 2003 and they had a similar turn around. Only some friends of ours say it’s not lasting too well since the pandemic. That’s too bad. Maybe they’ll rally again.
We’re in Chatham, MA now and for the next few days. Cute little town.
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Jeff Gill said on September 22, 2025 at 8:06 am
Alex’s note reminds me that Trump & the Pritzker family have a long history fed by bad blood over the Grand Central Hyatt. I’m sure that like his grudge around the NFL that fed the kneeling controversy, the Pritzker grievance will keep Trump leaning into conflict with Illinois & Chicago. Trump is like what Talleyrand said about the Bourbons: They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
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Jeff Borden said on September 22, 2025 at 10:07 am
I gather the massive mourn-a-thon for Charlie Kirk yesterday was quite the show…10 hours in length. The grieving widow took the stage to fireworks and Stephen Miller essentially plagiarized Josef Goebbels in his call to destroy the left. And Lumpy, well, he claimed one of Kirk’s last conversations before his murder was a request to “save Chicago.”
Today, we’ll apparently learn autism is caused by Tylenol.
These are the stupidest times this country has ever endured.
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alex said on September 22, 2025 at 11:17 am
ROFLMFAO over J.L. Cauvin’s sendup of Trump’s eulogy for Charlie Kirk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_12Ty4g0JU
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tajalli said on September 22, 2025 at 11:24 am
Had a big earthquake (4.3) here about 3am centered about 15 miles from where I live. Like a truck slamming into the building, with a giant cracking or popping noise felt at the end, maybe a structural issue. I was reading and it was actually nice to have a normal event rather than insanity.
Enjoyed the pictures, especially the train trestle, the Electric Works signage looks rather retro. Urban renewal is like repaving the roads, a cycle of modernity until it’s dated and shabby again, with a longer time frame.
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Julie Robinson said on September 22, 2025 at 11:55 am
tajalli, we experienced a very small earthquake while I was living in Fort Wayne, and I also thought someone had driven into our house. Glad to know all is well with you in…I’ve forgotten where you live.
The widow Kirk’s entrance with fireworks came through my feed with the sound muted and I was a bit agape. Oddly, no memorial I’ve attended has included fireworks. I also saw the trash strewn all over outside the arena, which the city will have to foot the bill for. Apparently most attendees didn’t read about the no-bag policy and just dropped their crap on the ground.
It’s nice to see the pix of the Fort looking all shiny. I haven’t been back since we left four years ago, and some of those projects have happened in their entirety in the interim. I’ve read that rents are high for the food court in Electric Works and many people won’t pay the subsequent high food prices. ‘Cos the Fort prefers cheap slop to quality.
Like Alex, I was initially opposed to the new ballpark but that was wrong. I couldn’t care less about baseball, but I always enjoyed going there, walking around and people watching, inevitably running into someonw I knew, and all the goofy promotions like the dogs running the balls out to the pitchers in a basket. Low key, relaxing, forget your troubles stuff.
I actually think the library expansion was the catalyst for downtown renewal. It was another hard-fought, why should we spend so much money, let’s start a petition battle. And it’s a thing of beauty, pointed to by those wanting to build the new ball park.
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Dexter Friend said on September 22, 2025 at 12:06 pm
Living 25 miles north, Fort Wayne was where Dad worked and we shopped and did about everything; after my army days I lived in 2 apartments, but now my big city is Toledo, the hockey rival back years ago of the Komets. It’s been 16 months since I’ve been to Fort Wayne, and that was just for a stupid eye exam the VA scheduled, in an office of a veterinarian, a joke.
It’s a tad ironic I am going there now to a cobbler…I have a $160 pair of custom-fit shoes with a detached sole.
I lived on West Washington Boulevard and loved the bakery perfuming the West Central Neighborhood, but our cars ( out of poverty, 3 dudes shared a little apartment) kept getting broken into. The landlady kept snooping, entering the apartment at will, unannounced, to see what we were up to. I had to leave that pad when I got mono and ran out of cash, as I also got nervous when one of my mates had friends from Berne bring in a duffel of weed which six of them commandeered the table cleaning the seeds and stems. Nervous, yeah. Hell, I didn’t know these people.
Thanks for the update on the old town. I had my first Coney Island there 72 years ago. Not a typo. I also remember elevator operators, at Dad’s work in The Gettle Building and at The Lincoln Tower. So long ago, Dad would tip the elderly operator each ride…a ten cent dime. That would get you a large coffee then.
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Deborah said on September 22, 2025 at 12:52 pm
I saw a video clip of Trump standing with Charlie Kirk’s wife, on stage I think. He was rubbing or patting her back to the point that it made her pitch forward and back a bit. All I could think of was if I were her I would feel like shaking him off and telling him to get his creepy hands off of me.
LB said I should have called finding that paper clip on the ground a talisman not an omen. But in some ways I do find it an omen because I think things are going to get very bad to the point that we may need secret symbols to alert each other. I don’t have a good feeling at all about the future, I hope I’m wrong. I’m wearing the clip every day and will continue to do so on my collar.
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Dave said on September 22, 2025 at 4:04 pm
It’s been nearly ten years since we’ve been in downtown Fort Wayne, we’ve only been there four times, three of them were for funerals and they were not downtown.
I imagine I’m the only one here who can say that I’ve been across that railroad bridge plenty of times but that walkway was not there then. There once was a second identical bridge there that was built so passenger trains could pass freight trains without more delay.
I’ve avoided the funeral because, how disgusting they’ve mad it and, that’s funny, my newsfeed just posted that Jimmy Kimmel will return tomorrow night. Did he give in and decide to apologize for his remarks that weren’t even anything terrible? I don’t see anything that says he is.
My mid-sentence change above is surely incorrect writing but I was surprised by what popped up.
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Brandon said on September 22, 2025 at 4:17 pm
Jimmy Kimmel will return tomorrow night.
Tonight would’ve been the show’s season premiere, so it’s delayed till the next night.
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Sherri said on September 22, 2025 at 4:17 pm
Remember how bent out of shape the right wing got over Paul Wellstone’s memorial? Charlie Kirk’s memorial had the President of the United States saying he hates his opponents, and that didn’t even make a ripple in the news.
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Julie Robinson said on September 22, 2025 at 5:09 pm
We went to church downtown, our kids’ school was downtown, and Dennis spent all but two years of his work life downtown. I never felt unsafe, although I made sure no one walked out alone if they had to leave an evening meeting early. Yet scores of people told me they wouldn’t dare even drive downtown. Ridiculous and typical of the narrow mindedness of the ilk that pooh poohed any hope of redevelopment.
Just had a sad phone call with my aunt, who’s in assisted living and couldn’t tell me one thing about any of her kids or grandkids. We called to wish her happy birthday but she had little to contribute except how glad she was to hear from us. My mom and she used to talk almost without breathing when we got them together but she’s not much better, especially on the phone. We’ve been trying to convince her to go visit one last time, but it’s looking increasingly unlikely.
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Suzanne said on September 22, 2025 at 5:25 pm
I grew up in Fort Wayne, moved away for a time, returned to the area in 1987. Downtown was dead. My husband & I tried to stop downtown for a cocktail once on a Friday night around 10:00 (or maybe earlier), and not a thing was open. So to see it now is amazing to us!
I never felt particularly unsafe in downtown Fort Wayne, but especially now because there are so many people around most of the time. I was in Chicago this week for a few days with a group of women, went out to eat and went for an after dinner cocktail or 2 and didn’t feel unsafe and yet people in NE Indiana tell me frequently that they will not go to Chicago because it’s so horribly dnagerous. Never felt unsafe while visiting NYC either.
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Jakash said on September 22, 2025 at 5:46 pm
Deborah,
This will be of no interest to anybody but you, and, more than likely, not even you.
We drove by your building on LSD today (there’s no breathalyzer for that!) and I noticed, for the first time, that “Architect’s Handkerchief” no longer seemed to be there. (That’s the Oldenburg sculpture inspired by Mies van der Rohe’s frequent pocket adornment, for those scoring at home…)
Which is the first I’ve noticed that. (Evidently it’s been gone for quite a while, but I haven’t been keeping up!) Googling it, I see that it’s made its way to NYC, where it currently is in the plaza of Lever House, across the street from the Seagram building.
Apropos of nothing, here’s a link about it: https://www.world-architects.com/en/architecture-news/found/a-handkerchief-for-an-architectural-giant
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alex said on September 22, 2025 at 6:32 pm
Au contraire, Jakash. I took some groovy photos of the hankie on my birthday weekend in 2017 when I got to go see Deborah’s place. I had no idea the sculpture had been taken away.
Here’s an iCloud link: https://share.icloud.com/photos/026sTyVTSdELmtCbHhBZMszQw
(My first time ever trying this so I can’t guarantee whether it’ll work.)
ON EDIT: Looks like the web site doesn’t like this link and is putting me in content moderation.
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nancy said on September 22, 2025 at 7:20 pm
I think it’s because you had a link it didn’t like, Alex. Free now.
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Deborah said on September 22, 2025 at 7:27 pm
Yes the hankie is gone from out front of our building. Our neighbor across the hall from us was instrumental in getting it there and it was only supposed to be there a year or even less. So we got to have it longer than we were supposed to. Our neighbor was actually disappointed with it when it first got installed. He said it wasn’t as impressive as he thought it would be. I think he said it was the overall scale of it. So many of Oldenburg’s works are super over scaled and even though he knew the size of the handkerchief sculpture he couldn’t envision it in his head properly on the site. Our neighbor is a famous interior designer in Chicago. He’s retired now and lives part of the time in Palm Springs.
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Jakash said on September 22, 2025 at 10:37 pm
Thanks for posting the fine photos, Alex. Glad you got to see it. And in that photo facing the lake, that could be me in the closest car looking at it! No, it’s not the right model, but since every fifth car is a dark gray lookalike sedan of some type, who’s to say? 😉
I always liked it better than you and your neighbor, Deborah. I thought it was a cute idea, executed well enough. Though I didn’t live with it in my yard, needless to say…
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Deborah said on September 23, 2025 at 6:53 am
I’m supposed to be on vacation so why am I reading the news?
And if Trump is supposed to be America first, why are we bailing out Argentina? Is it to hide how rightwing economic policies like they’ve been having there with their wanna be dictator don’t work?
Since we won’t be raptured today we’re going whale watching off of Providence Town on our 25th wedding anniversary.
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Dorothy said on September 23, 2025 at 9:30 am
I’m on vacation too so I can’t really add much to this conversation. But I thought you’d all like to know that Scout and I are meeting for lunch today (and Mike of course) in Phoenix! It’s our last full day here and I’m so glad I’ll get a chance to meet another person I’ve ‘met’ via you, Nancy. We’ll take some pictures and I’ll send them to Nancy so she can post one here.
We’ve really loved being in Arizona, my first time here. And to cap off my typing this morning, Mike just spotted a coyote walking in the backyard of the adjacent property. I tried taking a picture thru the windows, but there are screens on them. And the camera lens is only focusing on the screen, not the animal.
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Deborah said on September 23, 2025 at 9:40 am
Province Town not Providence Town.
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Jeff Gill said on September 23, 2025 at 9:43 am
What time is the Rapture today?
[taps foot impatiently]
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tajalli said on September 23, 2025 at 11:27 am
The rapture will not be held today since God was fired for failing to give enthusiastic approval for hateful behavior.
Julie, I live the the SF Bay area, so I’m west of the San Andreas fault, firmly in earthquake country. An unexpected outcome of the recent quake is that the ants which troop along the back end of my bathtub rim have disappeared. Their colony has likely been disrupted by the motion.
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Julie Robinson said on September 23, 2025 at 11:30 am
Dennis is at the LL Bean flagship store in Maine today. His sister loves their clothes, if you know what I mean. He asked if I wanted some socks. Nope, I do not need LL Bean sock in Florida and I don’t plan on going where I’d need them!
Dorothy, I’ve loved Arizona every time we’ve been there, so much variety in the climate and topography. We have close friends in Tucson and hope to visit them again in the next year.
Did the rapture happen? Guess I’m unrighteous.
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Mark P said on September 23, 2025 at 12:08 pm
The rapture has been indefinitely postponed. Jesus looked down at the Kirk memorial circus, turned to God, and said, “Dad, it did’t take. We’re going to have to do this whole thing all over again.”
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Peter said on September 23, 2025 at 1:12 pm
Yes, Ronald Reagan certainly had his faults, but even when he wasn’t firing on all cylinders, he kept to the script like the good actor he once was.
Did you hear any of this guy’s speech at the UN? Or how about his Surgeon General imitation yesterday? He’s turned into that Bill Hader character on SNL who was with the news program for 60 years….
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Dexter Friend said on September 23, 2025 at 1:28 pm
Whale watching off P-Town yeah, we saw many humpbacks and a Mink whale. And a few bare asses of men wearing chaps and nothing else.
Carla Lee happened to be seated in the boat beside “David”, of David’s House, of the north end of Toledo, which was a home for wayward young gay men. Carla Lee was a hardcore Christian, meaning she wasn’t hateful, but, well, had views of gays which were not necessarily positive or accepting. Mr. David and she had an animated, calm long talk between seeing breaching whales. Carla Lee came back home decidedly different in her world-view of humanity.
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Sherri said on September 23, 2025 at 1:58 pm
I was hoping that those who believe in the Rapture would be taken and leave the rest of us alone, but alas, they appear to still be here. I think of the Rapture as equivalent to the B Ark in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, in which the Golgafrinchans sent off all the useless workers.
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David C said on September 23, 2025 at 2:31 pm
Without the rest of us dying from a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
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Suzanne said on September 23, 2025 at 4:47 pm
https://jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/in-absence-of-truth-the-fascist-assault
“There’s no denying it now. We’ve been scammed. Lied to. Led astray. And every poll, every ratings report, every instance of anecdotal evidence tells us that the scam isn’t really working anymore. There is a bubble in which the political and commentary class lives in that exists in the media, and they are continually falling for their own lies and spin, but we are outside of it. We witness it and every fiber of our being tells us this isn’t true, this isn’t even remotely true, and it repels us. That is us finally hearing our own internal voice telling us we are being misled.”
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