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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What we think, we become.
Slitscan, Bristlecone, Pines
Sep 18, 2026
Just learned about this from a podcast interview... Phoebus (Lightbulb) Cartel "The Phoebus cartel was an international #cartel that controlled the manufacture and sale of incandescent #lightbulbs in much of Europe and North America between 1925 and 1939. The cartel took over market territories and 👉 lowered the useful life of such bulbs👈 , which is commonly cited as an example of #plannedObsolescence." Good to know corporate greed hasn't changed in 100 years! #SSDD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel #Corporations #Collusion
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!
Commentary Protest 2026
Visiting the Iowa branch of my family for the fourth No Kings Protest against Trump and his Lickspittle Poltroons in the GOP. The Orange Man is more unpopular than ever. It is very important that we get out the Vote!
Commentary
Frank Wilhoit (2018)
There is a quote from a few years ago that adds political framing I find useful. I propose using it as a test or razor
(à la Occam) when evaluating political actions and legislation:
Books Commentary History 2026
I've reworked these extended quotations from The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman (1986) for today's wannabe King
Trump. In a few pages she describes the bad policies and attitudes of the French King Louis XIV. I was struck by the deep parallels with the policies and attitudes of the current administration and the flock of Lickspittle Poltroons that compose the current GOP. Tuchman's words speak to greater truths. My words are my own and speak for more immediate truths in desperate times.
Birds Flowers Galleries Iowa Travel 2026
Late Fall excursion to Pikes Peak (the original!) for a bit of color and a long walk in the woods. In the panorama below, the city of Prairie du Chien is in the upper left, north of the Wisconsin River outlet near the center. Wyalusing State Park is on the opposite bluff. The sumac in the foreground is near its peak. There were White Pelicans down on the river (too small to see here).
Commentary Science Technology 2026
Forty percent of America's corn crop — 36 million acres — goes to producing ethanol, a fuel that barely breaks even on energy and may be worse for the climate than gasoline. Billions in subsidies keep the machine running.
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!
Kist Projects 2026
Kist.pl renders documents as plain vanilla
HTML by default. Generated pages will degrade gracefully
to the degree possible. These pages contain a minimal set of CSS styles and javascript in the <head> element. (This helps make each kist-generated document self-contained.) Authors are free to override these styles with their own custom styles (using the -s flag).
Galleries History Panoramas Travel Turkey_2016 2016
Here is a gallery of all the panoramas from our 2016 trip to Turkey and the The Turquoise Coast. We started in Istanbul and ended at Ephesus. Best viewed on a large screen!
Books Commentary History Reviews 2016
I was on a short business trip recently and had a chance to view three new movies about real conspiracies that affect us all. This prompted me to go back and re-watch some documentaries from the recent past. Talk about dark night of the soul! Here are my brief reviews in no particular order…
Commentary Medicine
T.R. Reid (2008)
This PBS Frontline Documentary from 2008 explores the healthcare systems of the U.S. and several comparable countries.[1] The corespondent T.R. Reid visited five capitalist countries that provide affordable, nearly universal coverage for their citizens. How do they do it? He observed that here in the U.S. we have the British model for veterans (socialized medicine), the Taiwanese model for seniors (single payer), the German model for some workers (private insurance), but for the rest we are just another poor country
. His conclusions…
Birds Camping Everglades Galleries Hdr Travel Video 2013
Just back from the Everglades with highlights too numerous to relate them all here. For a start I think we’ve hit on the perfect mode of transportation—pedal kayaks with sails! The only downside compared with a canoe is getting on/off the chickees. In every other respect they were superior to canoes and even other types of kayaks. We especially noticed how wind and waves were much less of the threat, and the wind could often be put to good use! Unlike the sail canoe rig I’ve used in the past, the kayaks are much safer if they capsize.
Galleries Nature Photography Science 2025
I was visiting friends in northern Minnesota and had just finished a good meal. We were all fading fast so I said good night
and headed for my hammock. As my eyes adjusted to the dark I noticed that the sky looked kind of strange—like city glow from a nearby town. Then, on the edge of the glow, I saw the tell-tale green curtains of the Northern Lights!
Bwca Camping Galleries Travel 2018
On this trip we planned to visit part of the central BWCA that had been ravaged by the 2011 Pagami Fire. Our goal was to reach Malberg Lake and take day trips from there. We entered at Kawishiwi Lake and proceeded down a small river maintained by a huge beaver dam.
Books How_To Projects Technology 2026
I first encountered this delightful self-publishing format while visiting family in Sacramento. The city has many older neighborhoods with small houses and small yards. The locals take great pride in their sidewalk-facing gardens, including pro-social embellishments like little library
boxes and such. One house had a dispenser with these little pamphlets. I was impressed and intrigued.
Galleries Hdr History Panoramas Travel Video 2023
After braving the nearly washed out road from the north I arrived around 9am. I had to walk
my Prius diagonally over piles of gravel and exposed rock faces. This was my third attempt over twenty years to visit this important site. (The first two failed because the roads were completely washed out!)
Camping Everglades Galleries Travel 2005
After driving down from Naples, we reached the put in at Coot Bay Pond around 11am. We were on the trail by 11:45. There was a ten mile per hour breeze out of the north, so we had a headwind most of the day. We headed directly into Whitewater Bay for the first few hours before turning up the side bay leading to Roberts River.
Medicine Medinfo 2017
The History of Present Illness (HPI) has not changed appreciably since the introduction of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record in 1968. Until recently most medical documentation was created via dictation or handwritten notes. Narrative was the natural format for the HPI. This is no longer true in the era of online forms and computer-generated text.
Apostle_Islands Birds Camping History Plants Travel 2021
We made an amphibious landing to offload our gear and then moored the boat about a mile away at the pier. I pitched my hammock tent right on the beach between mature white and red pines. The level of Lake Superior had recently gone down so there was a more normal amount of beach exposed.
Bwca Camping Travel 2002
My Siblings and I took a three night canoe trip in 2002. We also brought along two of my Niblings (it's a word, look it up!). We started with a canoe from my parents house, then rented a car and took a side trip to pick up a second canoe from my place in Brimson. We had a layover in Two Harbors before proceeding up the North Shore to the Gunflint Trail. We did a loop starting and ending on Poplar Lake. The highlight was an almost perfect day camping on Winchell. On the way back we were forced to use the same campsite on Horseshoe Lake because all of the sites on Gaskin were taken.
Birds Camping Everglades Galleries Hdr Travel 2010
This is a quick-and-dirty gallery of my Everglades photographs. Only a placeholder for now while I work on converting my older sites. See my Everglades Wilderness Guide for more trips, maps, & photographs.
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.
