William Bennett

@wirab.bsky.social

793 Followers 685 Following

Retired physician. Reading “Defying Hitler” by Sebastian Haffner (Raimund Pretzel). Somerville, Mass.

A cover shot of Melvin Patrick Ely’s book “A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South” with a photograph from the 19th century of an expressionless white man, appearing prosperous, holding a little white girl, behind him a young Black enslaved (one has to assume) woman with an expression that looks frightened and sad.
Red orange sun in a gray sky over trees.
A father and his toddler by the duck pond in the Public Garden, Boston.
New York Times headline: “Mental Health Can Complicate the Decision to Have Children”
The butt of a bumble bee (note correct spelling: two words) entering a flower of foxglove beardtongue.
A wheel of tubular flowers, pale pink petals spotted with darker pink.
A small statue of a young boy and girl, revealed from a melting pile of melting snow.
A hawk perched on a tree branch as seen from my back porch.
Woman protester with sign that says “SUPER CALLOUS FRAGILE RACIST SEXIST NAZI POTUS.”
Two snow-draped Cryptomeria japonica trees forming a V through which snow-covered deciduous trees can be seen in the distance. Above, a patch of blue sky.
An evening demonstration in Boston. One placard rising above the heads has a picture of Stephen Miller and the caption “American Eichmann.”
An 18th-century still life of brown plums tumbled in front of a white ceramic pitcher and a golden loaf of bread, with a few green figs in a corner.
Puppy in a light green halter, holding a white chew toy. The puppy has a dark nose and coarse brown fur.
Late-blooming garden chrysanthemums with simple, daisy-like blossoms, pale peachy color, in front of a deep red Japanese maple.
A few kacecap hydrangeas, a bluish red, with a stem of prairie bluestar at the lower right.
Many pale yellow, tubular flowers of brugmansia above bright red begonia flowers nestled in light green ipomoea foliage.
A single white night-blooming cereus, technically Epiphyllum oxypetalum, a large white flower with a halo of pointy petals behind a group forming a cup, with many yellow stamens in the center. Photograph taken at 10:40 p.m.
A cluster of orange dahlias with warm yellow in the center petals.
Clusters of small purple berries on an American spikenard.
Two dahlia blossoms in a range of peach/orange tones.
A cardboard caricature of Trump: large orange face, smaller body with blue suit and red tie. The mouth is wide open and “LIES” is printed in yellow. “VENOM” appears in that space in the second photo.
A large, four-sided sign shaped like a milk bottle with “Missing Person” panels on the sides. The two in this picture have “SUPREME COURT’S CREDIBILITY” and “DEMOCRACY” as missing. Picture from Boston Common.
A photograph taken in Murray Hill, Manhattan, of a sculpture of a woman wearing a bathing cap; in front of her is a car stopped at a light. It looks as though the woman in the sculpture is sunning atop the stopped car.
Two people standing at a big intersection in Somerville, Massachusetts, and holding a mostly orange banner sign: “The Trump Fascist Regime MUST GO NOW!!!” At the top is a URL: RefuseFascism.org.
View of a garden, mostly container plants in the foreground, a couple with purple foliage, a bright orange begonia blossom low in the field, red cardinal flowers in the distance, a range of textures in the foliage.
Text from HCR’s newsletter describing ICE abuse of firefighters in Washington state.
A mostly black, rather chunky wasp with three yellow stripes on her butt, sipping water from a brown concrete birdbath.
Red male cardinal in birdbath next to a stand of red cardinal flower.
A picture of a small posy, with one white daisy tucked into a cloud of pale purple and soft greens.
A bronze statue of a jackrabbit, a grave marker.
Small, bulbous brown flowers with three petals held by green bracts, nestled in twigs of sugi (Japanese cedar), with a few bright green, kidney-shaped leaves above them, like awnings.
A Facebook post parody of the anti-vaxxer’s reasoning. In part it goes: “Thousands of people choke every year while eating, and hundreds of those people die . . . If you choose to give your kids potentially deadly food, that’s your problem, but as a parent, I don’t think that the government has any right to tell me that I need to feed my kids.”
Excerpt of Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack, quoting a Russian close to Putin saying Trump has obligations to Putin that he must fulfill.
Beginning ofNew York Times article about Senator Tillis’s craven flip on the Hegseth vote.
A large white flower, petals arranged in several circles, broad and overlapping at the front, but narrower and more separated at the back.
Cardinal bird in turquoise-colored ceramic bird bath sitting on a rock wall.
Winslow Homer: The Fox Hunt