The sewage system in our neighborhood is undergoing some major reconstruction. It is projected to go on through November, luckily not directly involving our street. However, the road blockages are sending a lot more traffic by our house than we are accustomed to. The upside is some nice opportunities for photographs.
The Rio Grande is full of water from mountain snow melt. Many of the trees are fully leafed, and flowering fruit trees are everywhere.
The Atlantic labels the secret-leaker, Teixeira, as a narcissist who mostly wanted to impress his chatroom friends. That may be true, but I think that falls far short of an adequate analysis. Teixeira seems to me to be a pretty typical arrogant libertarian techie who thinks some computer and programming skills implies superior knowledge and wisdom about the world.
That world view was formerly very commonly seen on big tech-oriented websites like Slashdot, but most of those people seem to have migrated over the past couple years to more obscure chatrooms where their faulty logic and ignorance is not likely to be seriously challenged. In fact, Teixeira was the admin of one of those sites, so very unlikely vulnerable to serious criticism.
There are two important underlying issues to the Teixeira incident. One is the failure of the country's education system to impart an adequately broad education to most young people. The other is the resultant gap in knowledge and understanding between generalist institutional administrators and specialist technical workers who are inadequately understood and supervised. One would imagine that national intelligence agencies would have the resources to detect and deal with such issues, but that is obviously not the case.
There are, of course, complicating political components to the story. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, has jumped to defend Teixeira as a white male christian gun culture promoter. So the Private seems to have pretty much all the characteristics required of a Republican presidential candidate.
