...

To get people excited about pizza again, Papa Johns is offering a new spin on the classic, with Papa Bowls that are all topping — no crust.

The Papa Bowl comes in three varieties, Garden Veggie, Chicken Alfredo and Italian Meats Trio. They are available to the company's loyalty members this week and will roll out nationally next, and cost $7.99.

At first, Papa Johns thought the bowls might be well received as a healthier alternative to pizza. But the company learned people still want "the indulgence of pizza," Rodriguez said.

Papa Johns hopes the new item will eliminate the "veto vote," when an eatery gets ruled out because it doesn't have enough options for everyone in the dining party. The idea is that if one person doesn't want pizza, the group can still go to Papa Johns and that person will still find something to eat.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/17/business-food/papa-johns-bowls/index.html

In the days before the January 6 attack on the Capitol, documents exchanged between the Secret Service and other law enforcement agencies outlined “threats of violence” on the 6th, coming “predominantly from right wing groups” with “plans to bring weapons into the District,” according to documents obtained by CREW. The Secret Service knew that Trump’s supporters would be demonstrating around Freedom Plaza and the Capitol with the intent to cause violence, but the agency does not appear to have taken the threat seriously.

While the Secret Service downplayed threats posed by right-wing extremist groups and Trump’s supporters leading up to January 6, the newly obtained documents reveal just how grave and explicit the threats had actually been.



The National Capital Region Threat Intelligence Consortium (NTIC) disseminated these threats in messages and a conference call on the morning of January 4, providing a clear and prescient warning of the violence to come. NTIC alerted the Secret Service, FBI, Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police Department among other law enforcement groups of “on-line communications citing violence in DC on 1-6-21,” which included objectives such as “Occupying the Capitol to influence lawmakers to change election results,” “Call to come with guns,” “Be prepared to battle” and “Exercise 2nd Amendment rights.”





Groups identified as coming with a potential to cause violence included the Oath Keepers, the 3%ers and neo-Nazi groups Atomwaffen and Storm Front. In spite of this warning, the Secret Service noted “There is no indication of civil disobedience” stemming from the right-wing extremist groups involved in the riot. Upon learning of the Proud Boys’ intent to arrive in DC on January 6, the Secret Service released an internal memo that disclosed no indication of concern—despite the Proud Boys stating they will turn out in “record numbers.”

https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-investigations/the-secret-service-knew-about-jan-6-threat-they-dismissed-it/

35-Year-Old Emerson’s Extraordinary Harvard Divinity School Address on the Divine Transcendence of Nature

I have long considered the commencement address the secular sermon of our time — the greatest commencement addresses deliver precisely the kind of well-packaged, eloquent, enchanting advice on what it takes to lead a good life that we used to find in worship services. But on July 15, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803–April 27, 1882) took the podium before the graduating class at what is now the Harvard Divinity School to deliver a powerful and immeasurably beautiful speech that bridged these two traditions — the religious sermon and the secular packet of life-advice — unlike anything before or since, so incendiary in its ideas that it led the Harvard authorities to ban Emerson from campus for thirty years.

He was only thirty-five.

Found in his altogether indispensable Essays and Lectures (public library; free download) — the source of Emerson’s enduring wisdom on the two pillars of friendship, the key to personal growth, what beauty really means, and how to live with maximum aliveness — the speech is notable both for its substance and its place in time: Emerson wrote it in the midst of a deeply religious era, more than two decades before Darwin penned On the Origin of Species and formulated his theory of evolution, and was addressing a graduating class of divinity students. And yet despite that — or, rather, precisely because of it — what makes his speech so extraordinary is that he extolls a sort of secular spirituality nearly two centuries before our contemporary conceptions of it. Emerson admonishes against superstition and dogma, instead championing a “religious sentiment” — the era’s term for spirituality — predicated on moral virtue, a philosophy of presence, and a reverence of nature.

Emerson writes:

In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted with fire and gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay. Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays. Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation. One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which our senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invitation from every property it gives to every faculty of man!

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/07/15/emerson-divinity-school-address/

Dear MAGA supporters ... Feel free to exempt yourselves from the benefits (healthcare, prescription savings, energy rebates, etc.) of all the Biden legislation that will help millions of other Americans. Hypocrites.

MAGA Supporters

Well that would be something - Pence signals an openness to testify before January 6th committee

Former Vice President Mike Pence, asked at Politics & Eggs breakfast in Manchester, NH. if he's willing to testify before the House Jan. 6 committee: "If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it," Pence said.

In July, Michigan state lawmakers, led by northern Michigan’s Senator Wayne Schmidt, included $1 million to advance the Northern Michigan passenger rail Phase II planning study in the State of Michigan’s 2023 Labor and Economic Opportunity budget.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg announced that project partners will be awarded the remaining $1.3 million through the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) grant program to advance the northern Michigan passenger rail Phase II planning study. RAISE is a competitive grant program that supports transportation projects all over the United States.

The RAISE grant was awarded to the Cadillac/Wexford Transit Authority, which will work in partnership with the nonprofit Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities and other community groups and transportation agencies to complete the planning study.

https://www.clickondetroit.com/all-about-ann-arbor/2022/08/15/northern-michigan-passenger-rail-plan-from-ann-arbor-to-traverse-city-one-step-closer-to-reality/