Remain calm, be kind, and carry on regardless!
You've reached the online journal of Richard Rathe — online since 2004! In this iteration I'm trying a few new ideas: minimal markup, working with mostly plain text, and moving beyond the timeline. I call it BLIS (BLog It Simple). Find me online…
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I define peace not as the absence of war, but as the presence of justice, and the absence of fear.
Panorama, Sealions, Beach, Galapagos
Feb 08, 2026
#SuperbOwl #BarredOwl #Owls #Birds "Keep looking up!" I hear these guys/gals every day, often in the late afternoon. 🙂 🦉
California Galleries Plants Travel 2025
We recently visited the Bristlecone Pines within Inyo National Forest in the White Mountains of Eastern California. While there we took a five hour hike on the Methuselah Trail amongst some of the oldest trees in the world!
Books History Reviews
Barbara Tuchman (1984)
With America “at war” [2006 & 2026] on several fronts, I was stimulated to recall this wonderful and important book by the eminent historian Barbara Tuchman. The first line says it all…
Commentary History 2026
![Preparing to Fly the Flag (July 4, 1976) [source: DC Public Library]](commentary/america_at_250/img/bicentennial-1976.jpg)
I put out my American Flag today. I've decided to only fly the flag on special days and this is one of them. Thinking about what makes this day special is what gives the act meaning. One cannot be patriotic every day, but that's not required. We need days like this to think hard about history (those actions and actors who mattered), the present (our current situation and how it differs from what it should be), and the future (the history we might make during the time remaining to us).
Camping Hammocks How_To Reviews 2025
There are various configurations of camping hammocks that I'll outline below. Most are gathered
with single tie-on points at each end. Some have integrated bug nets. Complete packages come with both nets & rainflies. After a brief survey of the different types, I go on to propose my criteria for the Ideal Hammock
.
Galleries Panoramas Photography Travel 2008
About a year ago I upgraded the iOS on my iPhone 4s. A few days later I discovered a new option in the Camera App—Panorama Mode! Over the next few months I slowly realized that this was a serious photographic tool. Now I take it along as an important part of my photographic gear. It appears to work like a slit camera, but instead of moving the film, you must move the camera. This has interesting ramifications if some or all of your subject is moving (see my Treatise on Panopainting).
Birds Flowers Galleries History Road_Trip_2026 Travel 2026
My target for this segment was inspired by a used book I came across while working at my local Friends of the Library—Sinagua Sunwatchers
by Kenneth Zoll. At first I had a bit of trouble finding the site online because the name has been changed very recently to better reflect its Native American origins. [The old name V Bar V
referenceed the now defunct ranch on the property.]
Birds Galleries Nature Photography Travel 2015
I was the trailing spouse for a meeting on Amelia Island. I spent most of a morning taking these photos of the local birds—including some spectacular flying by a pair of Ospreys! Right at the limit of my equipment.
Galleries History Panoramas Road_Trip_2026 Travel 2026
And so we headed home via Myton and Rock Springs WY. The roads were mostly deserted. We crossed the Flaming Gorge Dam after dark—which was surreal. The next day we stopped and took a hike around Independence Rock where thousands of pioneers stopped and etched their names in the 1800s.
Galleries History Travel 1976
In 1976 I was a sophomore at Carleton College in Northfield, MN. I had already done a few cross-country, multi-state bicycle trips in High School and continued planning short trips during my weeks off. The Bikecentennial was too good to pass up! In 2002 I scanned my 35mm slides and created this travelogue with representative quotes from my journal. What you see here is the current version updated in 2026, fifty years later!
Everglades Galleries Photography Travel Video 2024
This year we planned an aggressive trip—going down the Gulf Coast to access the narrow Wood River, revisit Camp Lonesome, stay at Willy Willy, and then loop back through the various inland bays on our return. Yet again we were thwarted by adverse winds.
Birds Nature 2026
Consider the Black-Bellied Whistling Duck! (One of the better bird names IMO.) Larger than average ducks, longer neck, pink bill & feet, used to be called tree ducks
. I see these very early in the morning and occasionally a pair on a nearby dock. Only learned recently that they are mostly active at night, which is why I wasn't aware they were around.
Everglades Galleries Hammocks Travel Video 2023
This year we returned to the northern part of the park. The original plan had been a grand tour
loop with two beach sites and two chickees. However, the forecast was calling for high winds on the last two days where we would be exposed out on the Gulf of Mexico. On the drive down I called and amended our permit to camp at Lopez River on the last night.
Commentary Galleries Protest Video 2025
Visiting family and friends in Sacramento California for my third protest against Trump. We had a nationwide No Kings!
event to counter Trump's birthday parade in DC. The final estimates were 4-6 million of us spread over 2000 events. Compared with The Orange Man's quarter mil.
Commentary Protest Video 2026
Joined my community to protest the Trump administration. Larger crowd than No Kings 2 back in October. Amazing how much has changed since then: the Demolition of the East Wing of the Whitehouse, the invasion of Minneapolis/St. Paul, the public execution of Renee Good & Alex Pretti, the Kidnapping of the President of Venezuela, the Epstein cover-up, starting an Illegal, Senseless War with Iran. Airlines are shutting down because TSA workers have been unpaid for a month. Gas is headed for $5 a gallon. And those are just some of the highlights.
Commentary 2026
The history of the food pyramid is complicated (see my analysis from 2004). There hasn't been an official one for maybe twenty years. I grew up with it and I think it is a sound idea, but very political with respect to what foods go where. It may be a coincidence, but anyone who is familiar with the old pyramid will recognize this one as an inverted echo. There are many other ways to lay out these ideas graphically, the choice of an inverted triangle is not subtle. I think it's propaganda for the following reasons:
Boats Camping Everglades How_To Projects 2024
In 2018 I acquired a used Hobie Adventure Island sailing kayak. It came with trampolines that fit between the outriggers. As I learned the particulars of the craft it became obvious that getting out of the cockpit and sitting in/on the tramps wasn’t going to work for me. They also make it impossible to paddle the craft in any meaningful way.
Bookhouse Books History Reviews
G. A. Henty (1886)
The original Luddites were millworkers who rebelled against factory automation back in the 1800s. They had a lot to lose. In the present time, to call someone a Luddite
or Neo-Luddite
is to write them off as a kind of techno-hermit, using a non-smartphone and writing in a paper notebook. This is a mischaracterization.
Birds Nature Science Video 2011
Plain-tailed wrens (Pheugopedius euophrys) cooperate to produce a duet song in which males and females rapidly alternate singing syllables.
From Neural Mechanisms for the Coordination of Duet Singing in Wrens
by Fortune, Rodríguez, et al in Science 4 Nov 2011.
Audio Galleries Kist Projects Video 2026
KIST combines the best elements of various markup formats I've worked with over the past forty years. The original purpose of these tools was to generate valid HTML without special editors or technical knowledge. The plain text source files are nearly universal, portable, and reusable!
Camping Reviews Tents 2024
This One Person Tent from River Country Products is a clever hybrid of single and double layer designs. The head of the tent has generous mesh panels for ventilation. The foot is completely enclosed in waterproofed nylon, allowing the rainfly to be much smaller (saving weight and volume). This is a unique design I have not seen elsewhere.
Commentary Galleries History 2017
I’ve become a real fan of @MobyDickatSea, a bot-based feed of random quotes from the book. It’s amazing how well some of these fragments stand up as individual thoughts!
Commentary Technology 2026
My Critique of: Your Voice, Your Choice
— A Guest Post by Claude Sonnet 4.5
The ELIZA Effect is a tendency to project human traits—such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy—onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface.
This little book was conceived neither as a medical history nor as a technical discussion of surgery. It is instead a story of people, of friends with whom I have shared joy and sorrow, in short, bits of the day-to-day drama which is the life of a country doctor. Many of the incidents are trivial, in one sense of the word, yet each has had in it something which appealed to me enough to make me remember it as a highlight in my forty-five years as a country doctor.
