So last night my wife and I tried to go to a Christmas service at a historic church here in town. This is one of those traditional old New England churches. Like, picture a New England church. That’s what this looks like. Protestant church. One room, wooden pews, this one has tin ceilings. This particular church, they only have one service a year, to maintain their tax-free status. It’s actually not great for regular use because there’s no plumbing. There’s electricity, just no bathrooms.

So they have a Christmas service, although they canceled it last year. We’ve been several times in the past, so we wanted to go last night. And when we got there, we saw there was a sign on the door that read, “face masks required.” So, we went home.

The following is a letter, apparently from Nathan DeGrave, who is a political prisoner being held at a jail in Washington, DC. He has not been convicted of any crime, but he says he has been held for over nine months because he entered the US Capitol, along with a film crew, through, he says, an open door, while making a documentary film on January 6.

The letter, released October 29 via the Twitter account of a criminal defense attorney named Brad Geyer, contains disturbing allegations about the inhuman conditions experienced by prisoners in the facility, including physical and mental abuse by Department of Corrections Officials. Some of DeGrave’s allegations seem to have been confirmed already by the US Marshal Service, which, according to the Washington Post, recently conducted an investigation that found “unacceptable conditions” at the jail. The US Marshals are now moving 400 federal inmates to a different facility in Pennsylvania. But not the January 6 political prisoners.

Join us this evening from 6PM ET / 3PM PT on to talk with your fellow members about the election in a Ricochet Live Chat. Then at around 9PM ET / 6PM PT we will start a Zoom broadcast (on the live chat page) with Bethany Mandel & Jon Gabriel, with visits from Peter Robinson & Rob Long, and other Ricochet friends and alum, and we’ll hear from Ricochet members who want to share their thoughts as well.

So gird your loins, grab your favorite beverage, and strap in for a history night with friends at Ricochet.

My sweetest Henrietta died on Friday morning in my lap. I hope that my touch in her last conscious moments was comforting to her. She was attached to me as no other cat has ever been, and I to her. I found her in an actual trash pile in Brooklyn, NY, on October 17, 2011.

We had thought that she had arthritis since January of this year, and I had been giving her medication for that three times a week. Once a jumper who spent most of her time on top of the refrigerator, she had slowly relinquished her former heights until she spent most of her last few months on our bed, which is only 18 inches off the ground.

About a month ago we took her to the vet’s because she was having difficulty breathing. We saw that from about that time on her mobility was quickly declining.  I began to have to carry her to the litter box because she couldn’t get into it on her own. Last Monday we took her in again and our vet realized that her mobility issues were neurological, likely due to a tumor somewhere on her spine. The vet gave her a steroid shot, which helped her for several days. Thursday she began having trouble breathing again, and that night I lay on the floor of the bathroom, where she had retreated, and thought that she would die there. I looked in her eyes and slowly blinked, the cat way of saying, “I love you.”