I probably will write something about Trump’s attack on Iran. I have lots of opinions, none of which are that interesting or well-informed or important. More later.
The acclaimed Iranian director is interviewed on the Daily Show (note: through a translator). Offers perspective of what it is like to try to make movies in a country that forbids him from doing so. (I haven’t seen JUST AN ACCIDENT, but hope to do so in the next week or so). (YT, 20 minutes)
The 1990s TV comedy show provides alternate endings to Gone with the Wind. (YT)
“Donald Trump said he was going after criminals. He said he was going after people who were dangerous to Americans. Well, how is it that these two young men were good enough to perform at the United States Capitol at the invitation of their congresswoman? They were safe enough to tour the White House. And yet, the Trump administration has them sitting in a prison.” (Congressman Joaquin Castro about the detention of two prize-winning teenage mariachi musicians, whose family had applied lawfully on an asylum claim and were arrested when they were required to do a routine check in with ICE). Souce NYT.
PRO PUBLICA REPORT: In 2025 Trump officials dismantled a program to help the US military avoid civilian casualties. “Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.”
QUOTE: “Iran was able to advance its nuclear programme to the point where it was before the 12 Day War last June not because of the JCPOA, but because President Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA,” (Laura Rockwood, disarmament expert and former IAEA official). (From Factcheck.org’s analysis).
I spent a good hour reading and re-reading the Wiki article about JCPOA and reminded just how senseless Trump’s withdrawal was. Actually though I think a lot of Republicans and even some Dems deserve blame for not passing a law approving of it. Charlie Rose had two excellent interviews with Iranians about the Iran nuclear deal (here and here)
Here’s a brilliant staging by Jerome Robbins of the opening number (YT) (“Comedy Tonight”) to a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Roman Forum. Bonus: It’s sung by Jason Alexander). The whole YT channel is replete with classic clips of Broadway numbers, often by the original performers.
Related: Here’s the Hello number from the Book of Mormon (YT)(original cast).
2025 presentation by Mark Z. Jacobson about the hows and why’s of transitioning to Wind Water and Solar (WWS). (YT, 40 minutes long, start at minute 4:30) In one slide, Jacobson estimated based on current trends the year at which each country will achieve a 100% WWS solution. Shockingly, the expected date for USA was the slowest and longest (2148) while China was expected to achieve it in 2048. (These estimates were based on pre-2025 data before Trump even had taken office). Jacobson estimates that the cost for USA to transition 100% to WWS by 2050 was about $6 trillion, but that is dwarfed by the extra cost of Business-As-Usual and the social cost of fossil fuels. The energy-cost-savings payback time to make the WWS transition was 6 years, while the social cost payback (savings resulting from improved mortality from air pollution) was only about 1 year. Startling, fascinating analysis.
BILL MCKIBBEN: “If you’ve been to any of the No Kings protests that have happened so far, you’ll see a lot of people with hairlines like mine, which is to say, scant. People of all kinds are outraged by what’s happening in the country right now, but older people have a particular role to play here…. There have been plenty of presidents in my lifetime I didn’t much like or didn’t agree with politically, but there’s never been any that I thought were fascist, and I think that that’s very clear what we’re now starting to deal with in this country.”
Actually I was at a No Kings protest earlier today.
Today, I heard GOP Senator Lankford say on TV that Iran has been attacking Americans for 47 years, so I asked Gemini AI to compare and contrast the scope and severity of Iranian attacks against USA with American attacks on Iran. Here’s a summary — and the actual verbatim answer here.
When some Trump supporter commented on my photo saying that I was ignoring Sleepy Joe’s inflation (a canard, not important now), I replied: “Wow, over the last decade you have explicitly approved of a lawless lying racist tax cheat as president, and the best you could come up with is that “gee, sometimes inflation can be bad”!? Or do you genuinely believe that there is value in ignoring depravity?” And that was my polite response!
About a month ago, I predicted to someone that Venezuela would be Trump’s Iraq War. There are some differences. For one thing, Venezuela had a presidential election where the presumed winner was never allowed to assume that office. (Hopefully Machado and Gonzales will be able to assist in this transition). Also, the political power of petroleum interests is substantially weaker than it was in 2003. Finally, Trump has much lower international legitimacy than George W. Bush had in 2003. Even if Trump acted honorably in this case, the international community will treat Trump’s words and actions as both dishonest and corrupt. Maybe a President Biden or a President Harris or even a President Haley might have been able to convince the world that this military intervention would restore democracy and benefit the world, it is doubtful that anyone would believe a U.S. president who lies about even the most stupid of things. Nobody will or should believe that Trump/Rubio/Hegseth will play a constructive role in restoring democracy and justice in Venezuela. Instead the rest of the world will be wondering about what corrupt deals Trump made with opposition leaders to further Trump’s private autocratic interests.
(When I said that Trump had lower international legitimacy than George W. Bush did in 2003, that’s saying a lot because most of the world opposed Bush’s 2003 intervention. Sure, oil interests (Halliburton, etc.) was driving that narrative, but at least Paul Bremer and Colin Powell and even Bush himself could “talk the talk” about democracy, freedom, etc. I doubt that Secretary of State Rubio could even do that..)
ELECTORAL-VOTE has compiled a useful (but very long) reference to all the wrong or criminal actions by the lawless lying racist tax-cheat.
What strikes me today is that many Venezuelans are probably happy to have Americans intervene in their country. They have suffered greatly under Maduro and would welcome outside assistance and investment. But unlike Bush’s flawed intervention in Iraq (where Bush still sent lots of economic assistance to restore civil society and rebuild infrastructure), I expect the Trump Administration to send absolutely nothing. Trump is probably the stingiest man alive; as a businessmen, Trump took pride in shortchanging vendors whenever possible; as a politician, Trump took pride in dismantling foreign aid programs and funding for education, science and health care. What happens when Venezuelans realize that the US government under Trump will do absolutely nothing to help rebuild Venezuelan civil society (other than to help American companies buy land and take advantage of the country’s natural resources)? Perhaps V’s neighbors will deliver this kind of assistance; perhaps EU or China will step in. Perhaps nobody will step in, and Venezuela’s society will continue to deteriorate. Regardless, it seems inevitable that Venezuelans will view U.S. actions towards its country with a combination of disillusionment and anger.
The fixation on “wokeness,” however, obscures a much larger and more consequential transformation reshaping the humanities at Harvard and elsewhere. The most serious pressure on Western history—and on the humanities more broadly—comes not from ideological capture, but from the economic priorities of academic institutions.
Over the past decade, student demand for the humanities has cratered. Nationally, the share of undergraduates majoring in humanities disciplines has fallen by roughly 25 percent between 2012 and 2020. The number of English majors declined by about one-third between 2013 and 2023. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, humanities degrees fell from 16.8 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in 2010-11 to 12.8 percent in 2020-21—a sharp contraction both in absolute terms and as a share of overall enrollment.
Harvard has not been immune. As of 2022, just seven percent of Harvard freshmen intended to concentrate in the humanities, down from 20 percent in 2012. (Because Harvard must be different, it calls majors “concentrations.”) That figure stood at 30 percent in the 1970s. Harvard’s history department has felt these pressures especially acutely: its number of concentrators plunged by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020.
“I do not understand why you would mass-pardon people who assaulted police officers. I don’t get it. I never will.” (SPECIAL PROSECUTOR JACK SMITH about Trump’s action to mass-pardon 1500 convicted criminals, 33 of which have committed additional crimes — including murder, sexual assault, burglary, aggravated kidnapping, stalking, making terrorist threats) (Source. Also this).
TRULY SHOCKING. An NBC report about the Minneapolis shooting mentioned that last year Trump cancelled Biden’s 2022 executive order to require that federal law enforcement officers wear body cameras. I looked it up — it’s true and horrifying. It’s now clear that the Trump Administration is restricting the gathering of evidence about encounters with federal officers so that citizens must accept unquestioningly whatever version of the truth that these officers provide.
SIGN ON BONUSES FOR ICE?! Wow, did not know that the federal government was using US tax money to pay up to $50,000 as a sign on bonus for people who join ICE. I wonder how much of a sign on bonus you need to offer these people to persuade them not to shoot law-abiding citizens. Update: It looks like the bonus is paid in $10,000 installments over several years(source).
“What my mom taught me, basically, was who, what, where, when, and how. She also taught me that everyone has a story–you just have to find it. And, most importantly, she taught me that it’s the interviewer’s job to make the interviewee excited to be there.”
Michael Barrett on Elaine May’s 1971 movie, A New Leaf starring herself and Walter Matthau. It was originally a 3 hour movie significantly cut by the studio (eventually resulting in a lawsuit which May lost). Despite this, it was beloved by critics and audiences aslike. Barrett asks:
It’s fair to ask: would a woman executive have tolerated a three-hour comedy? And what about the males who turn in overlong cuts? If Mike Nichols had turned in a three-hour version of The Graduate, it would have been taken away from him. It seems more likely, in this and other films she directed, that May belongs to that list of otherwise male creative geniuses who naturally clash with the commercial system, including Erich Von Stroheim, Orson Welles and Otto Preminger. Rather than demean May’s abilities, such a view pays her a higher compliment when assessing her career as a director, as opposed to a woman director.
Recently it was pointed out to me that David Bowie played Pontius Pilate in Scorcese’s Last Temptation of Christ. Here is that chilling scene where he appeared (YT)
The Guardian: British Grandmother on tourist visa locked up for 6 weeks after husband’s work visa had expired. In unrelated news, the “US saw 4.5m fewer visits from international travellers in 2025; visits from Canada were down by more than 22%, from Germany by more than 11% and from the UK by 15%. The World Travel & Tourism Council, the global body representing the industry, estimated that the decline in international tourism last year cost the US $12.5bn in lost revenue.
I would hardly call myself a world traveler, but I have enough experience in Eastern Europe to know that it’s easy for travelers to mess up on visa regulations. The rules are often confusing and opaque. Once I relied on the English language portion of the Slovak embassy as a reference to that country’s visa policies. Apparently, the rules had changed, but the Slovakian government had not bothered to update the English-language portions of their website. Too bad, foreigners! (That one day delay it caused to my trip still makes me angry 20 years later — I curse the Slovakian government still!)
In the case of the British grandmother, she didn’t have any problems understanding the language. But it often can be difficult to decipher the visa rules even if you do know the language — especially if the foreign government is doing everything to trip up foreign visitors.
HILARY’S SPEECH (reposted verbatim by satirist Andy Borowitz) makes clear what a mockery the GOP subpoena of her was.
As Secretary of State, I appointed a former federal prosecutor, Lou CdeBaca, to ramp up our global antitrafficking efforts. I oversaw nearly 170 anti-trafficking programs in 70 nations and directly pressed foreign leaders to crack down on trafficking networks in their countries. Every year we published a global report to shine a light on abuses. The findings of those reports triggered sanctions on countries failing to make progress, so they became a powerful diplomatic tool to drive concrete action.
I insisted that the United States be included in the report for the first time ever in 2011. Because we must hold ourselves not just to the same standard as the rest of the world but to an even higher one. Sex trafficking and modern slavery should have no place in America. None.
Infuriatingly, the Trump Administration gutted the Trafficking in Persons Office at the State Department, cutting more than 70 percent of the career civil and foreign service experts who worked so hard to prevent trafficking crimes. The annual trafficking report, required by law, was delayed for months. The message from the Trump Administration to the American people and the world could not be clearer: combatting human trafficking is no longer an American priority under the Trump White House.
This contains my random/unclassifiable links found about politics, pop culture, etc. See also: my bio page and music reviews. By the way, blogging will be light in November because of my 1965 Project.
The Curious Case of Kacyee Nicole by Mimi Lamarre about a controversy about whether a young person with cancer is actually the person she says she was. The article talks about John Halcyon Styn , a nice and colorful man whom I talked to several times at South by Southwest.
I suggest that we could take a big step forward by distinguishing free speech from just access. Access to the general public, granted by institutions like television networks, newspapers, magazines, and university lectures, is a finite resource. Justice requires that, like any finite good, institutional access should be apportioned based on merit and on what benefits the community as a whole….
The invincibly ignorant and the intellectual huckster have every right to express their opinions, but their right to free speech is not the right to an audience.
Here’s a compilation of John Lennon’s recorded statements about the Beatles and the breakup. (YT) Here’s another compilation of Paul’s statements (YT)
Here’s a terrific behind-the-scenes video about the making of the Once More with Feeling episode of Buffy. (YT) That episode is absolute magic.
In a weekend with an ongoing war and several mass shootings, it seems almost irresponsible to point to the murder of a celebrity couple. Rob Reiner was one of a kind. He was great in my favorite show, “All in the Family” and he was recently interviewed by Ted Danson on his “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” podcast about his movie career, AIIF, Spinal Tap, his family, etc. (also on YouTube). It’s a must listen!
DREW CAREY SHOW ON YOUTUBE: I have been waiting 20 years to rewatch one of my favorite shows (which didn’t make it onto DVD or streaming for various copyright reasons). Now though, every single episode is on Youtube — plus there are some great discussions about making the show.
It seems strange to focus on Ukraine on Christmas Day, but this harrowing report about Russia’s bombing on the port city of Odesa (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) is a grim reminder that the people who suffer the consequences are those least able to flee to somewhere safer. The Internet says that the current temperature of Odesa is -7C (20 F), and in my own city of Houston, the temperature is 26C (80 F), and kids are actually swimming in the neighborhood swimming pool (on Christmas!) One can only hope that the new year will bring positive changes.
Three personal notes. First, the Facebook suspension continues. From what I read, it could take months to get restored. It doesn’t affect me, but I think a lot of people upload photos there and don’t store them elsewhere. So a ban could be devastating. Update: It got reinstated 4 weeks later.
Second, I am happy to report putting together a table/spreadsheet of reviews I have written about music albums. I created a Google Form for inputting data, but the raw spreadsheet was so hard to read and search through that I rarely consulted it. I didn’t even realize that I had accidentally written 20+ reviews multiple times. I never had the time to look into how to create a read-only table that was user-friendly. I even included several tabs offering different ways to sort data.
I have a backlog of technical tasks to work on. Frankly, if this Facebook ban lasts more than a month, I’m going to have to email Facebook friends to let them know what is going on. What a pain.
Third, I have started a new series called “Political Pulse.” I really haven’t posted anything substantive about politics on my blog (aside from the usual linkdumps), but I feel that it’s useful to include unvarnished snapshots of my feelings towards current politics.
I eventually cancelled my Washington Post subscription. Their reporting was really good, but in the last year or so the editorial pages is overrun with conservative viewpoints, and of course WP failed to endorse Kamala Harris. The main thing about the subscription I enjoyed was having access to their book review archive. I will miss that.
********
If you think science and public health are expensive, try ignorance and pandemics. (NYT commenter on an article about CDC and Kennedy).
(M)odels that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. … show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later.
The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models….
The new results are “quite shocking, because I used to say that the chance of Amoc collapsing as a result of global warming was less than 10%”, said Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who was part of the study team. “Now even in a low-emission scenario, sticking to the Paris agreement, it looks like it may be more like 25%.
“These numbers are not very certain, but we are talking about a matter of risk assessment where even a 10% chance of an Amoc collapse would be far too high. We found that the tipping point where the shutdown becomes inevitable is probably in the next 10 to 20 years or so. That is quite a shocking finding as well and why we have to act really fast in cutting down emissions.”
I haven’t done it in a while, but maybe I will try to use an RSS reader again.
Comment I posted in response to a review of Wizard of Oz remake in Los Vegas’s The Sphere:
It’s important to remind everyone that the Wizard of Oz movie would have normally gone into the public domain in 2015 — were it not for the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, which extended copyright ownership of all works in the USA by 20 years. A movie like Wizard of Oz properly should belong in the public domain already, and it should be easier for people to repurpose and recontextualize the work, as the Sphere people have done. That’s the entire point of the public domain — to provide artistic elements for people in the future to play with. Sure, when that happens, it’s a different work and should be treated as such. Frankly, I’m grateful that the corporation owning the movie copyright allowed this reworking to occur, but just imagine what other works might have been created if the copyright were allowed to expire in 2015 (as originally intended).
On a YT clip about the 1990s show A Different World, one commenter wrote, “It was September 1992. It was a weekday night my freshman year at college and my roommate, a friend, and I were watching this show when I spoke up and said “We are a bunch of young college students living in a dorm watching a TV show about young college students living in a dorm.”
Sourcewatch page about Turning Point USA, the organization that slain conservative leader Charlie Kirk ran. That group is amply funded by Koch, Donor Trust, etc. The wiki article about Charlie Kirk gives a rundown of his controversial positions. I’m sure that many will whitewash Kirk’s extreme positions, but he was involved in Professor Watchlist, climate change denialism, the Great Replacement theory, COVID misinformation and in initial organization of “stop the steal” Jan 6 protests. (He wasn’t involved on Jan 6, but had helped arrange buses to send students there; he even testified at the Jan 6 hearings about his role). Propublica and others have reported on wrongdoing at Turning Point, but this had little to do with Kirk — even though he drew a handsome salary from the organization.
I have nothing against proselytizing, but it seems that organizations like Turning Point funnel lots of conservative money into funding a blowhard to go around campuses to spread the gospel of conservatism. There is no real equivalent funding source on the liberal side; not even George Soros of Bill Gates are funding proselytizing missions. If anything, the liberal side funds speakers who are actually qualified to talk about certain subjects.
Also, it’s worth asking whether public debates result in meaningful discussion or are just ways to allow certain rhetorically-skilled people to knock down people who aren’t really that schooled in argumentation. One technique that Kirk uses is to note a contradiction in the other side and keep hammering it and then to go off on Gish gallops while the other side is too polite or diffident to stand up.
I’ve been fascinated by this Cambridge debate between Charlie Kirk and Tilly Middlehurst (YT). Here’s a discussion between a Cambridge debate coach and Middlehurst about how she did it (YT). First, it’s a great discussion about how to handle blowhards.
Here’s a 13 minute discussion by Roshan Salgado D’Arcy of the climate change misinformation that Charlie Kirk spread in public debates about climate change (YT). The speaker is a climate scientist, and he made this video 4 years ago. Says a commenter, ” one lesson … from watching those kinds of “debates” is to never try and counter argue someone at a podium when the audience is behind them. You can be overwhelmingly correct and you will still lose.”
It’s probably no surprise to anyone that fossil fuel interests funded Mr. Kirk’s foundation. Emily Atkin wrote about that (btw, her climate change substack is a must).
To address the YouTube comment cited above. I guess public debates are not a bad idea per se as long as you have two people who have knowledge or experience about the subject. In these walk-up-and-ask-question public debates, Kirk and his crew control the setting and what kind of people participate. It seems more like a venue for Kirk to land his talking points and Gotchas which seem to impress the easily impressed.
ROBERT REDFORD ON THE TWILIGHT ZONE. (It was great — no exhilarating! — to watch the 1962 episode, NOTHING IN THE DARK (Season 3, Ep. 16) where Robert Redford plays a wounded officer which an old woman treats suspiciously. Uncommonly good acting; Gladys Cooper was a stage and movie veteran whose first movie was in 1913 (and had been in Rebecca (1940) and My Fair Lady (1964). It’s amazing that Robert Redford had continued making movies 111 years after Cooper’s first movie.
To my delight, I realize that Cooper had been in two other Twilight Zone episodes, including the equally haunting Night Call (1964).
Gisela Salim-Peyer on the similarities between US autocracy and Venezuelan autocracy:
The word autocracy conjures images of police officers violently crushing protests and dissidents going to prison for their ideals. Those things do happen, but for many people, the experience is more passive: Living through the rise of a dictatorship just means inhabiting a space that is gradually shrinking. There’s no point in resisting, not at first. You just make do with whatever breathing room you still have—until you lose that too…. There is a lag in time between the abstract threat of authoritarianism and its concrete realization, between hoping that your fears are mere paranoia and seeing them fulfilled.
Louis CK on why people don’t appreciate technological progress (YT)
Did you know the TV show Lost had a (legitimate) epilogue which never was aired? (YT) Blows my mind too (and actually it’s terrific in its own way). Also, the two Lost writers did a wonderful spoof of alternate endings on Jimmy Kimmel (YT). Really well done. I love the cast of that show.
Reality Chex is a news aggregator site run by one woman Marie Burns. I’ve been following her site for over a decade. She personally summarizes all the big stories from major news sources — as well as major substacks (Heather Cox Richardson, etc) and social media. Added bonus: gifted article URLs to the premium news sites!
NEWS SITES I LIKE This is Not Cool is a climate change & energy blog run by videographer Peter Sinclair. A decade ago he made incredibly informative vids about climate change & climate change denials. This blog contains the latest news & video reporting about climate change, with lots of interviews.
Guardian (voluntary $60) is a special category unto itself. It asks for a $60 donation, but doesn’t put anything behind a paywall. Reporting & commentary is generally first rate. (who knows?!)
NEWS SITES I LIKE. The CNN Lite text-only is a great place to read full CNN stories without ads or multimedia. (PS, NPR also has a lite text-only site as well).
NEWS SITES I LIKE. Electoral-vote has daily news and commentary by two California professors, with reader questions and commentary on the weekend. Initially it focused on election news, but now it covers all aspects of national politics and the Trump legacy. BTW, the site looks atrocious on mobile devices; there is another link specifically for mobile readers.
NEWS SITES I LIKE David Corn is a journalist & author whose substack includes lots of interesting reports & commentary. I generally avoid following reporters on social media, but DC’s bluesky feed always has interesting stories & commentary. (He also has an Our Land newsletter which has a free trial. But even after it expires, it still sends regular commentary via email twice week.
NEWS SITES I LIKE Deceleration is a blog/newsletter run by Marisol Cortez. She is a San Antonio journalist/intellectual/writer who focuses on environmental and social justice stories which affect Texas.
NEWS SITES I LIKE Atlantic Council provides commentary about foreign policy issues (including outstanding analysis about Ukraine). It’s a newsletter, and you can choose the countries or topics which interest you. Voila! You will receive articles via email.
NEWS SITES I LIKE Sri Preston Kulkarni is a foreign policy expert who ran for Congress (and lost) in my congressional district. In his Seeking a Better Future Substack he writes eloquently about the latest political events. FUN FACT: Sri is the son of Venkatesh Kulkarni who was a distinguished Indian-American novelist who taught at Rice University in Houston.
NEWS SITES I LIKE . Clive Thompson is a tech reporter & geek who digs up the most amazing things. He drops a lot of cool things on his Mastodon account and every few weeks or so he publishes a summary of his favorite links on his Linkfest — which is really fun to read!
NEWS SITE I LIKE . I used to like BoingBoing for my unusual/geek news until it went behind a paywall. Still haven’t found an adequate replacement even though Cory Doctorow’s feeds are everywhere. Metafilter is a geek link-sharing site which was really cool 20 years ago, but it’s still semi-cool. PS, there is a $5 fee to become a member, but you can just lurk — as I have done for a long time. For other link sharing/commentary, check out HackerNews , and Slashdot) and certain subreddits.
Paywalled journalism. Slate.com (120$), Vox.com ($40), Atlantic Monthly $80), New Republic ($20) are all excellent, but pricey. I mean, how many premium news & commentary services do you really need (i.e., can you afford?). NYT is still essential reading, but who the hell knows what the annual cost is– there are so many opportunities to get discounts — especially when you call their customer service line to cancel.
Other people on Substack, etc. Worth mentioning that almost all of them have active bluesky feeds.
Heather Cox Richardson. (BS) Believe it or not, I have not subscribed to her substack yet, but her pieces are linked to so often that I feel as though I already do.
FACEBOOK CLASS ACTION SUIT: FYI, the privacy class action suit has concluded and payments for people who signed up for one will start going out in August 2025. https://facebookuserprivacysettlement.com/
In this 8 minute comedy sketch, an Australian comedy writer asks two comedians to read aloud sight unseen from an absurd cop drama script. Lots of hilarity and surprises. Perpetrated by Australian comedy writer Rob Hunter. (YT) Hunter is selling vids of some of his Late O’Clock comedy shows on Gumroad . But there are generous clips from the shows on YT. (YT) Rob Hunter was on the writing team of Rosehaven for Season 5, making an already great sitcom to be greater. Here’s a YT playlist of episodes from Season 4 and Season 5. (YT) I note with horror that the series is impossible to stream in the US. I was able to watch Season 1-3 on the rare times they were on streaming. Comedian Celia Pacquola is the star of the show, but the characters are all great. The two main people select their favorite show moments. (YT)
QUOTE: “If this is how they treat someone with a title and a national platform, imagine how undocumented members of our communities — without cameras or microphones — are being treated when no one is watching. This is not just an abuse of power; it is a reflection of an administration increasingly comfortable with authoritarian tactics.” (Congresswoman Nanette Barragán from California about the handcuffing of Senator Padilla).
Sri Kulkarni about the “threat” of undocumented workers:
It would be reasonable to assume, based on how many stories about cartels and gangs we see, that murders by undocumented people are a huge problem, right? Well, according to DHS, the total number of homicides (including manslaughter) by undocumented people last year was 29. (Not 29,000 murders. 29 total homicides in all of America.) To put that into perspective, there were more murders (31) in Kristi Noem’s home state of South Dakota (pop. 924,000) than there were by illegal immigrants in a country of 340 million people. Dakotans are more dangerous than undocumented people. Overall, illegal immigrants commit FEWER crimes than US citizens, so you are probably safer around them than they are around you. (Sri Kulkarni Facebook post).
Wait — what? Did Trump just declare war against Iran? Did he just indicate that he was thinking of assisting in the assassination of Iran’s supreme leader? Trump’s ill-considered tweets reveal the sheer depth of incompetence of our public diplomacy and the sort of kingly powers that Trump likes to believe that he has.
I, a private U.S. citizen, call for the unconditional surrender of the Israeli government until it discloses 100% of its hidden nuclear weapony and agrees to be subject to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and to IAEA monitoring.
PBS SCIENCE VID ON HOUSTON WEATHER. (YT) Wow, I am blown away that PBS is producing top-quality education vids on earth science and global warming. Well-spent tax dollars! This one is about Houston’s 2017 and how the urban topologies of megacities like Houston amplify weather events. I can’t wait to watch the other vids from the PBS Terra series.
QUOTE: “Things aren’t just getting worse. They’re getting worse faster… We’re actively moving in the wrong direction in a critical period of time that we would need to meet our most ambitious climate goals. Some reports, there’s a silver lining. I don’t think there really is one in this one.” (AP Report on 2025 IGCC report). Here are key messages from the 2024 data and an outstanding infographic poster (PDF) from the 2024 report
EPISTEMIC CLOSURE. 1)Trump has been duped many many times before becoming president and after he became president, i.e., “Obama is a Muslim,” “Climate Change is a Hoax,” “Election was stolen,” etc. 2)Trump values absolute loyalty over expertise or science. He simply refuses to believe experts whenever they contradict his naive notions of reality. In fact, in the face of criticism, Trump makes it a point to double down on his mistaken beliefs and denigrate the views of experts so that he (and his flock) can feel superior to those experts. Then he surrounds himself with YES MEN who reinforce his biases and ignorance. 4)The modus operandi of Trump has been to create crises out of his paranoid beliefs, and then to “solve” them by trying some simplistic “brute force” solution. During these times, it is vital not to rely on Trump’s version of reality and instead use news sources that are completely independent of Trump’s corrosive ambit.
RIP Bill Moyers. Besides his politics and his early work organizing the Peace Corps, Texan Bill Moyers was always one of the best interviewers ever. (I’ve been collecting books of his interview transcripts). He always had provocative questions and unusual guests. Here’s an interview he did in the 1980s with philosopher Martha Nussbaum (who gave a lecture at Trinity at about the same time).(YT) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWfK1E4L–c
LOCKING THE INNOCENT: Out of the 59,000 people detained by ICE this year, 47% lack a criminal record and fewer than 30% have ever been convicted of crimes. (source)
Israel’s secret nuclear weapon program has been common knowledge among people who follow foreign policy, and yet no U.S. president — famously, not even Obama in a press conference when asked by Helen Thomas — had ever brought it up publicly. Yet politicians and critics on all sides have raised the issue of Iran’s nuclear proliferation repeatedly. But Iran has generally cooperated with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and for a while has been allowing IAEA monitoring. Why the double standard? During this week’s discussion on CNN/MSNBC, I almost never heard experts or commentators even mention Israel’s nuclear program, and barely in online media (except here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/17/world/middleeast/israel-nuclear-weapons.html ) .
If Israel says it has the pre-emptive right to attack Iran to degrade its nuclear weapons program (and the U.S. Government explicitly reaffirms this rationale), isn’t Israel basically conceding that other states have the pre-emptive right to attack Israel to degrade its own secret nuclear weapon program?
Israel’s secret nuclear weapon program has been common knowledge among people who follow foreign policy, and yet no U.S. president — famously, not even Obama in a press conference when asked by Helen Thomas — had ever brought it up publicly. Yet politicians and critics on all sides have raised the issue of Iran’s nuclear proliferation repeatedly. But Iran has generally cooperated with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and for a while has been allowing IAEA monitoring. Israel has done none of these things.
Here’s my list of top 10 movies (in alphabetical order) for the 21st century which I submitted to the New York Times. Below these ten are some OTHER MOVIES which I also found to be remarkable and noteworthy:
AI — Stephen Spielberg (2001)
Big Short — Adam McKay (2015)
Downfall — Oliver Hirschbiegel (2004)
Europa Report – Sebastián Cordero (2013)
Fourteen — Dan Sallitt (2019)
Frances Ha — Noah Baumbach (2012)
Happy-Go-Lucky – Mike Leigh (2008)
Monsters — Gareth Edwards(2010)
Primer — Shane Carruth (2004)
Travelers and Magicians — Khyentse Norbu (2003)
************OTHER MOVIES****************
Avé — Konstantin Bojanov (2011)
Brooklyn — John Crowley (2015)
Flatland — Ladd Ehlinger Jr (2007)
Founder — John Lee Hancock (2016)
I’m Still Here — Walter Salles (2024)
It Follows — David Robert Mitchell (2014)
Junebug – Phil Morrison (2005)
Man From Earth — Richard Schenkman (2007)
Napoleon Dynamite — Jared Hess (2004)
Problemista – Julio Torres (2023)
Tetris — Jon Baird (2023)
I actually have about 20 other titles to mention. Here is some commentary. Europa Report is the most pro-science movie I have ever seen; it’s about the drive and sacrifices people will do for the sake of science. It makes me emotional whenever I think of it. Monsters is a beautiful masterpiece about alienation (and alien nations). Downfall is an engrossing story about true believers of a failed ideology. Travelers and Magicians has a wonderful surreal and fairy tale quality. It is totally unexpected and very beautiful and Buddhist. Frances Ha is utterly whimsical and silly and about the futility of artistic pursuits. Big Short is a great study in irony, outrage and satire. Fourteen is a quiet tragedy about losing people to addictions. Happy-go-lucky is a story about hope and resiliency and not being dragged down by the world’s problems. Primer is a great allegory about the follies and paradoxes of technological innovation. Founder is an all-American story about the ugly side of American business.
MCDONALD’S IN KIEV. Delighted to read this article about how the fast food joint is taking over Ukraine (& maybe horrified?!) I remember visiting the first McD in Kiev in January 6, 1998 — a few months after it had opened. It was located in probably the busiest place in Kiev across from the main train station. Even though I barely spoke Russian/Ukraine, I confidently said my order to the cashier, “Big Mac Menu — Тут!” — it was one of the busiest most remarkable McD’s I’d ever seen..
I assume that many have already seen this amazing music vid with Saoirse Ronan, but it’s absolutely great (with the Talking Heads note that “We LOVE what this video is NOT—it’s not literal, creepy, bloody, physically violent or obvious.” (YT)
Spoof of How I met Your Mother (YT) The kids are sick of being strung along with this story.
if you took a dementia test and thought it was an IQ test you failed both the dementia test and the IQ test. (BSKY by Sal Gentile) (Referring to Trump’s ludicrous statement, “”AOC — look. I think she’s very nice. But she’s very low IQ, and we really don’t need low IQ. Between her and Crockett, we’re gonna give ’em both an IQ test to see who comes out best. I took a real test at Walter Reed medical center and I aced it. Now it’s time for them to take a test.”)
US GOVERNMENT HATES TOURISTS. Here’s a case of an Irish citizen visiting his girlfriend on a 90 day tourist visa and staying 3 extra days because of a serious medical issue. After being mixed up in a police action, ICE took custody of the tourist and imprisoned him for 100 days. Says his American-born girlfriend, ” “It’s not an option for him to come here and I don’t want to be in America anymore.”
Even more shocking, there are cases of U.S. citizens being wrongly captured by ICE. This one was wrongly incarcerated for 3 days.
In response to Trump’s posting of a stupid/offensive AI-generated video of Obama getting arrested, satirist Andy Borowitz writes an appropriate fake response.
Trump’s accusations against Obama, but let’s not forget that Trump was one of the earliest ones who hyped the “Obama is not American” conspiracy theory. For more than 5 years (2011-2016), Trump repeated the untrue charge that Obama wasn’t a U.S. citizen; doing so only increased Trump’s popularity among conservatives. Now that Trump is democratically elected and his administration has enormous financial resources to investigate/hype whatever stupid things he wants to, Trump has potential to sow distrust in the US justice system that has already found him guilty or liable of tax fraud, falsifying business records and sexual assault.
Right-wing propaganda is the result of decline of commercial journalism,Karl Bode writes.
Netflix Recommendation: PERNILLE is a wonderful Norwegian-language family dramedy about an overworked divorced social worker who has to manage both her child welfare cases and the ordinary dramas of her complicated family (BTW, her two daughters are hilarious). You the viewer are thrown into all this chaos and have the opportunity to share the grief, surprise, laughter and love. Gosh, it almost makes me want to move to Norway tomorrow.
Among the many wonderful things about the show is the killer soundtrack — a mixture of Europop and occasionally American songs. Here’s the 60s hit You’ll Never walk alone by Gerry and the Pacemakers (YT) Also, the intro briefly samples a famous cover version of You Don’t Own Me by Australian Saygrace( YT)
DOGS ENJOYING HAUTE CUISINE. The next time your favorite Italian restaurant is already booked up, here’s the reason why. (YT) At first glance the Chocodogger vids seemed to be AI, but no, it’s just elaborately staged nonsense. Here’s a lobster dinner (YT).
REACTIONS TO TRUMP-ZELENSKY PRESS CONFERENCE: 1. Trump surrounds himself with a lot of “YES MEN” journalists who parrot his talking points. 2. Trump never loses an opportunity to insult Biden or people who disagree with him. 3. Trump can get distracted by all sorts of irrelevant issues. He totally lacks focus. 4. Trump has an exaggerated sense of his power and his presidential record. Trump’s ludicrous statements raise the question of whether he is afflicted by “confabulation” (something at least Biden never seemed to have done).
***
“I decided this morning about the difference between movies and documentaries. A movie is where a woman gets attacked by a monster and men come and save her. A documentary is where a woman gets attacked by a monster and then makes that monster pay $83 million.” (E. Jean Carroll on agreeing to have a documentary made about her life).
Journalist report about how power providers are expanding their capacity to meet demand of AI companies — and passing on these expansion costs to consumers. (YT)
MISTAKEN ICE RAID: The most shocking things is that it took days for Department of Homeland Security to admit its mistake and still hasn’t returned the family’s belongings.
Renewable energy companies that can’t pass costs onto their customers might shut down projects instead.
In fact, 15% of the existing wind fleet in Texas could shutter, according to a recent analysis of HB3356 and SB715 from the consulting firm Aurora Energy Research.
The two bills exempt natural gas and coal-fired power plants. In other words, if fossil fuel power plants aren’t reliable enough per a certain standard, they wouldn’t have to acquire backup power like their renewable energy counterparts.
However, “the retroactive nature of the bills is something that could send a chilling market signal to anybody wanting to do a long-term investment in Texas,” said Walt Baum, CEO of Powering Texans, a trade association representing the largest companies developing gas-fired power plants in the state.
Here’s an advocacy video by energy analyst Doug Lewin (YT).
Wow, here’s an unaired pilot (YT) of the failed attempt to adapt the British scifi comedy Red Dwarf to US TV. Highlights: Jane Leeves (aka Daphne Moon from Frasier) plays Holly the computer. Kryton is included from the very start, and Broadway actor/dancer Hinton Battle played the Cat. It’s a shame that it wasn’t picked up.
Update: They did a second partial pilot, this time having CAT played by a female (Terry Farrell — yes, that Terry Farrell who went on to play Jadzia Dax in Deep Space Nine). Of course, the British version (and its actors) can’t be beat, but the Americanization of it was still amusing, and plus I generally like efforts to adapt UK shows into American versions.
Be open minded and be willing to alter your beliefs with new evidence.
Strive to understand what is most likely true, not just what you wish to be true.
Science is the most reliable way of understanding the natural world.
Every person has the right to control their body.
God is good for those who believe, but is not necessary to be a good person or to live a full and meaningful life.
Be mindful of the consequences of your actions and take responsibility for them.
Treat others as you would want them to treat you and as you expect them to want to be treated.
We have the responsibility to consider others, including future generations.
There is no one right way to live.
Leave the world a better place than you found it.
DISHONORING MEMORIAL DAY: Trump Administration shows contempt for US veterans and the rule of law by wrongly arresting a female Australian police officer who had married a US soldier. What’s so contemptible is not merely that this wrongful arrest occurred but that US border officials illegally prevented her and her mother from communicating with her husband and pressured her to sign unnecessary statements. Also, I expect that DHS will publish a press release this week containing ludicrous and unsubstantiated statements justifying this arrest.
In this 8 minute comedy sketch, an Australian comedy writer asks two comedians to read aloud sight unseen from an absurd cop drama script. Lots of hilarity and surprises. Perpetrated by Australian comedy writer Rob Hunter. (YT) Rob Hunter was a writer for that hilarious Tasmanian/Australian show, Rosehaven. (Oops, didn’t realize I posted this for next month as well).
This month started with the terrible Oval Office abandonment of Ukraine by Trump. It’s really embarrassing. If there’s any silver lining in this, it’s that Trump has completely discredited his ability to broker any kind of solution. Even honest conservatives in the USA will find this assholery hard to rationalize…
THE DELIGHTFUL JOHN LITHGOW: Lithgow reads lines from characters he has played and tries to recall which movie or TV show they were from. (I enjoyed playing this game a lot). (YT) . Here he picks his favorite Criterion Collection movies. (YT)
I first discovered Lithgow from Third Rock from the Sun. Even though the entire cast was stellar, Lithgow particularly stood out. I was actually shocked at how many serious roles he had played before and after Third Rock.
WHO HAS THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS? Here’s a letter from Mahmoud Khalil whom the Trump Administration wrongly and unfairly labeled as a “radical anti-American and antisemitic foreigner.” “For decades,” Khalil writes, “anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted.”
“Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit. Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts. The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense…
(From Bill McKibben’s Substack). WOW! Chinese Car Maker BYD announce that their new $30,000 model due in April will charge in 5 minutes and go 400 miles. Luo Hongbin, BYD senior vice president, said the motor “not only significantly boosts a vehicle’s speed, but also greatly reduces the motor’s weight and size, enhancing power density.” McKibben wryly comments,
“BYD did not waste its time giving Nazi salutes. It didn’t buy a social media platform so it could make obscure marijuana jokes and make fun of poor people. It didn’t devote itself to helping a nincompoop win the presidency and then decide it would be exhilarating fun to fire a bunch of government workers. Instead, BYD did, you know, engineering. It must sting for Musk to watch that kind of progress, especially on a week when he had to recall all 46,000 cybertrucks (and thus disclose for the first time that he’d only sold 46,000 cybertrucks) in order to keep them from dropping parts on the road.”
“Being the genius I am I left Fox soon afterwards for the relative safety and sense of mutual trust I could find at NBC.” (Conan O’Brien talking about why he left his writer’s gig on the Simpsons). (YT)
Frankly I am enraged every single day at actions by the Trump Administration. I already knew how bad it was going to be if Trump won, and still remain a constant state of fury. Even Facebook seems to have a lot of shares of anti-Trump news.
It is both shocking and horrifying how many international graduate students have been forcibly detained by ICE officials for the flimsiest of reasons. The Trump Administration quickly is establishing itself as a force for anti-intellectualism and lawlessness. International students have always enriched the lives of college campuses. We should be encouraging them to visit USA and be candid in their opinions. In contrast, the voters that supported Trump and his party have endorsed lawless behavior, bigotry and intolerance. They commit crimes and pardon people who commit (sometimes very serious) crimes. The Founding Fathers would probably have been more comfortable with a country full of Rumeysa Ozturks and Mahmoud Khalils than Donald Trumps and Stephen Millers and Paul Manaforts and Steve Bannons. What happens when international students decide that studying in America is too trouble? They forget about USA and bring their research and innovations to freer countries which can benefit economically from their contributions.
Tim Snyder on THE BIGGER SCANDAL: “Using Signal enables American authorities to violate the rights of Americans. Signal is attractive not because it is secure with respect to foreign adversaries, which it is not, but because it is secure with respect to American citizens and American judges. The autodelete function, which Mike Waltz was using, violates the law. But what is most essential is the purpose of that law: to protect the rights of Americans from their government. The timed deletion function allows American officials to be confident that their communications will never be recorded and that they can therefore conspire without any chance of their actions being known to citizens at the time or at any later point.” The Guardian concludes, “”The leak exposes a system of broken accountability, where high-ranking officials can spill military secrets with apparent near-total immunity. Despite potential violations of classification protocols, federal record-keeping laws and promises of operational security, the leaders look to face no meaningful legal consequences.”
I confess, I find the news story about the US Secretary of Homeland Security having her purse stolen in front of Secret Service workers the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. I hope SNL, Daily Show and Stephen Colbert have a great time with it…
“But her equally bizarre cash stash looks much more explicable when you consider two other peculiar items she had in her handbag: her passport and a set of blank checks. If it’s strange to bring $3,000 to a burger joint, it’s completely incomprehensible for a government official to be carrying her passport around D.C. on a family visit. And who uses checks for anything but rent these days? Taken together, the contents of this stolen purse sound less like what you might find in an average pocketbook and more like what someone might store in a go-bag. Does Noem fear the possibility of an impending indictment—or, dare I say, a coup—that would force her to flee the country at a moment’s notice? Could be! With her meds, her cash, and her makeup bag, she’d be ready for life as an official in exile. But with all the vigilance and forethought it takes to prepare for such an eventuality, you’d think she’d keep a closer eye on her purse.” (Snark from Christina Cauterucci (Paywalled).
To be fair, I have no idea if the person who did it was some person with nefarious or sinister intentions — maybe to blackmail or publicly embarrass the politician. Let’s assume it’s just a bandit with ordinary motives. But if the director of homeland security can’t manage her own purse, that suggests a level of incompetence we have never seen before. Also, the most shocking thing is that they STILL have not caught the thief.
TEXAS UNIVERSITIES ARE COWARDS! As of this morning, 403 university presidents have signed a public statement speaking out against the “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” Out of those 403, there are ZERO presidents from universities (public or private) in Texas. RELATED: The Trump Administration has continued to “Pinochet” various graduate students and professors in Texas.
TRUMP V. UNIVERSITIES: Between 2000 and 2014, more than 1/3 of the Americans who won Nobel Prizes in science were immigrants. In 2019, almost 40 percent of all software developers were immigrants. And in the major cancer centers in 2015, the percentage of immigrants ranged from around 30 percent in Fred Hutchinson to 62 percent at MD Anderson. But this is changing fast. Students are being rounded up to be deported, and graduate students and researchers from China now face the prospect of constant FBI investigations. China has created generous incentives to welcome its best and brightest back home. Many others are choosing to go elsewhere. From Europe to Canada to Australia. Last month, “Nature” magazine asked its readers who are American researchers, whether they were thinking of leaving this country. After more than 1,600 who responded, a stunning 75 percent said that they were.(Fahreed Zakaria)
All this should alarm Texas taxpayers whose hard-earned money helps fund higher education and whose children attend our universities. As one of Texas’s two flagship institutions, alongside Texas A&M, these actions mark a troubling decline and a predictable loss of reputation that will be challenging to reverse if this agenda continues to gain traction. We cannot allow the Monopoly Tycoons who are ideologically vested in this takeover to continue trampling over students’ free speech and faculty’s academic freedom.
Ironically, in allegedly wanting to minimize so-called bias in the university curriculum, anti-DEI censorship is itself a demonstration of bias, against Latinos and Latinas and others. In education, a subject that I teach, one can never stand outside of either bias or the politics of education as the entire enterprise is inherently subjective, comprised of value judgments, ethical and moral dilemmas, sociocultural factors, power dynamics, and so on.
Here’s a fun panel discussion of open source, GPL and how WordPress got started. (YT) I think I mentioned already that I was one of the earliest adopters of WordPress (back in its b2/cafelog days), and by sheer coincidence, ran into Matt at a local geek meeting in 2003 after I installed it. (My mind was blown that this UH student was the brains behind it). BTW, I recently have renewed my WP enthusiasm after deploying 2 WP sites with 2023 and 2025 themes using the block editor. Semi-related: Photomatt dissects a negative article written about him and his company.
Speaking of WordPress, I filed a bug about the 2025 theme. Even though the support thread I raised did not resolve it, eventually someone came along and proposed a workaround.
I am feeling really good working with the bundled WordPress themes. I totally redid my Personville Press home page and the book page template. At first glance, these web pages look pretty unremarkable, but they are mobile-friendly, and doing that with two columns is no easy feat. I had been putting off that home page upgrade forever — I even put together a single static page a year ago which I thought was a massive improvement. But I was spending way too much time making web pages and had to admit that despite my commitment to ebook quality, the website looked like crap. That said, just having a good web page for a book isn’t enough to drive up sales.
Part of the problem is that I wanted a more sophisticated content management system with content types. (I had been playing with Drupal, etc). But that seemed a lot of trouble, and eventually I just opted for the convenience of WordPress. Learning how to design web pages with the default themes was a major accomplishment. A lot of people pick a theme for their website and then find themselves locked into a set of plugins which limit your ability to upgrade and extend.
Recently I’ve been enjoying Big Girls Blouse, a wacky Australian comedy show from the 1990s starring the women who made the great Kath & Kim in the 2000s. Here’s Patty Stacker (a 60s feminist parody), The End, Gay Olympics, Medieval Girls,
Gosh, I miss blogging. This is not really blogging — just linkdumps which sometimes were already on social media, but occasionally I spit out something substantial. I’m busy with family affairs or for certain periods my publishing projects. Keeping up a weblog is something I do mostly out of obligation, but out of passion.
QUOTE: “I lived in Hungary for a long time. I also lived in Russia for a long time. And this is the third time I’ve ridden this escalator from democracy into someplace very dark. And unfortunately, what we’re seeing here is so similar to what happened in Russia and particularly to what happened in Hungary. And part of the reason why it’s so alarming is that Americans have this idea that when democracy fails, it’s going to fail with tanks in the streets, it’s going to fail with some radical rupture, it’s going to fail with normal ceasing to be normal. And when you look at how autocracy works these days and the rest of the world, it almost always comes in on the backs of a free and fair election. So somebody who is called a populist …. charismatic leaders who promise to shake things up — they get elected often fair and square. The first time you go back and you look at the election monitor’s reports from when Hugo Chavez was elected in Venezuela or when Vladimir Putin was elected the first time in Russia, or when Viktor Orban was elected the first time in Hungary. The election monitors all said, free and fair election, no problem. And then as soon as these guys come to power, they start to just take over and disable all of the checks on executive power. And they do it while their cover story is a lot of inflammatory rhetoric that causes pain to people. So now we’re seeing immigration, we’re seeing attacks on people with gender fluidity, we’re seeing attacks on affirmative action, we’re seeing attacks across the board on vulnerable groups and people who have really never been treated equally. But behind the scenes, what’s that disguising? This was also true in Hungary, it was true in Venezuela, it was true in Turkey. It’s in all these places, inflammatory rhetoric disguises the real work of autocracy. And what’s the real work of autocracy? Removing all checks on executive power. And a lot of that is happening in a very unsexy way in laws that are buried deep beneath the surface that only a technical lawyer could love. And that’s where you start to see chipping away at every single constraint on what the president can do.” (PRINCETON SOCIOLOGY & LAW PROFESSOR KIM LANE SCHEPPELE, ON YESTERDAY’S AMICUS PODCAST)
STUPID NEGOTIATIONS: (Quote) “There’s a school of thought that, in tangling with adversaries, it’s sometimes wise to seem unpredictable—to tip them off balance. But zigzagging has no upside in dealing with allies, especially when it comes to the partnership’s leader. Alliances depend crucially on steadiness and trust. Yet when Trump threatened to impose tariffs on two of America’s closest allies for no real reason (the Wall Street Journal editorial page deemed it “The Dumbest Trade War in History”), he stepped on the brink of violating the trilateral trade agreement that he himself had initiated and signed during his first time around in the White House. In other words, he was telling not just Canada and Mexico but every other country in the world, “Don’t believe anything the United States says, not even in writing.” (Fred Kaplan, Paywalled link)
A roundup of the crazy stuff Republicans are doing that is crowded out by bigger crazy stuff. Interesting how the egomaniac who claims to want to enforce immigration law better does it by firing immigration judges — the very people who actually can do so. (more) Then, again, TCF wasn’t very adept at listening to judges.
PATHOLOGICAL LIES. I never ceased to be surprised at how often Trump lies about basic facts. Starting from the crazy lie that Obama wasn’t born in the US, the recent lies about Zelinsky and Ukraine fill me with horror. Call me naive, but is it unrealistic to expect that politicians should be held accountable for the lies that they tell and repeat. It is one thing to occasionally mistake or exaggerate a fact (as long as it is walked back later). It is quite another thing to buckle down and keep repeating the same lie in the hopes that voters can’t tell the difference.
NYT did a deep dive about Elon Musk’s claim that millions of people over 100 were collecting Social Security. SUMMARY: After SSA’s Inspector General unearthed that in 2023, they concluded that “almost none” of them were receiving Social Security payments, which is why the Agency argued that it wasn’t worth the expense to try to clean up information about people who largely died before the advent of electronic records. (NYT Gift Link)
ARTICLE ABOUT MY CELEBRITY CRUSH. I’ve been a rabid fan of the actress Parker Posey. Imagine my delight to find this very long profile about her. (NYT Gift Link). It is always a delight to discover that Parker Posey has a role in a TV show or movie. She was outstanding in The Clockwatchers and Daytrippers and Fay Grim. Parker Posey is known for her meltdowns; my fave is in the underrated Price Check. It’s nice seeing that she can play straight roles (like Thelma, Irrational Man, Columbus) and dramatic roles (Louie). Don’t forget her online sketch comedy (“Genie on Hard Times,” “Emmy Speech Master Class,” “Mary Phelps Jacob Invents the Modern Bra.”) I would love some way to watch her ill-fated sitcom “Return of Jezebel James.” Yes, I’m a rabid PP fan!
AP and UPI reporters were excluded from today’s White House press pool, but … a Russian state agency was included?! Is anyone really surprised that Trump is afraid of being around honest domestic reporters and yet perfectly comfortable around propaganda makers from a foreign adversary?
Jeez! What an asshole! (about Trump and Vance’s yelling at Zelinsky). If there’s any silver lining in this, it’s that Trump has completely discredited his ability to broker any kind of solution. Even honest conservatives in the USA will find this assholery hard to rationalize…
“THE HARDEST THING IN THIS WORLD IS TO LIVE IN IT.” If you are a BUFFY fan, you already know that actress Michelle Trachtenberg (1985-2025) had a role which was ontologically terrifying, but she played it with panache (and hilarity). Here’s her lovely dance number in the amazing “Once More with Feeling” musical episode. (YT)
That quote comes from what the Dawn character says after Buffy’s “show-stopping number” in the same episode (probably Joss Whedon wrote these words, but to have the Dawn character utter it really resonated at the time — and even more so today). I must admit being totally shocked when it became clear who the Dawn character turned out to be. Hope to have an opportunity to see Trachtenberg’s other appearances in her other grown-up roles before she passed.
Update: Turns out that Dawn’s line was repeating Buffy’s farewell line Buffy said to Dawn before Buffy’s “death.” The full quote is here: “Dawn, listen to me. Listen. I love you. I will always love you. But this is the work that I have to do. Tell Giles … tell Giles I figured it out. And, and I’m okay. And give my love to my friends. You have to take care of them now. You have to take care of each other. You have to be strong. Dawn, the hardest thing in this world … is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me.” I admit I have been listening and rewatching some of the songs from Once More with Feeling… All are brilliant, and it turns out that the wonderful actor who played the demon Sweet (Hinton Battle) passed away this year. I just love the song’s reprise later on.
I am still convinced that Trump (and Musk and friends) will sell ALL their shares of DJT stock on election day (November 5) or the day after. We’ll see how right …or how wrong I was.
LAUGHING WITH TREVOR NOAH. Noah is making the rounds on the talk show circuit to promote his new podcast. (YT)
UNFORTUNATE DEATHS: This week Pro Publica reported on 2 tragic cases of TX pregnant women who died unexpectedly after hospitals refused to provide adequate treatment for their life-threatening sepsis. Medical experts blame these deaths on the state’s abortion restrictions and the failure to provide better guidance on when doctors can intervene. “Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” commented one health law expert. Here’s the case of an 18 year old pregnant Houstonian who died because of hospitals refusing to get involved. Here’s the other Texas case. I’m sure there are much more.
BROAD CITY BROADS BRING COLBERT SOME BAGELS: The chicks who did the great “Broad City” sitcom let Stephen Colbert know about what’s cool and the secret to Rainbow Bagels. (YT)
ODD/AMUSING AMPHIBIAN DRAMA. You may already know about the viral 30 second vid showing a frog playing video game on a mobile phone (It’s great!). Here is a wonderful and compelling 9 minute video (YT) by a pet/aquarium freak named Dr. Plants about how he raised a frog for the specific purpose of teaching it how to play video games. I love this guy’s YouTube channel; it’s a new take on teaching people about the population of creatures outside our own.
I have many strong reactions to Trump’s near-landslide victory in Texas and nationally. (It might warrant a separate post). That said, my reactions are probably not that unique; you can probably find the same sentiments expressed elsewhere.
“This time, it was not a fluke…. This time we don’t have that distraction, or that consolation. The electorate of our country has had a good, clear, years-long look at Donald Trump. His braggadocio and his decline. His corruption and his vulgarity. His resentments and his threats. The warnings about what he would do from the most senior people who had ever worked with him, starting with his own vice president. And, with eyes wide open, with the evidence before them, most of our fellow-citizen voters decided: Bring him back…. “
I already mentioned it a few weeks ago, but I HIGHLY recommend Anne Applebaum‘s Autocracy in America podcast (which actually only has 5 episodes). Applebaum recently published AUTOCRACY, INC. and has spent a lot of time trying to imagine the unimaginable.
Here’s an NBC exit polls about the presidential election. Looks like older white males and Christians voted for Trump. Shit, even white male college graduates voted for Trump (50-47). 58% of Catholic voters, 61% of white Catholic voters,
BAD WITH MONEY. I realize that everybody is more focused on the (masterful) debate performance by Harris in exposing DJT’s empty cynical lies. But today I am more interested in how quickly the value of DJT’s scam stock will fall over the next week. I imagine that the kind of people who think DJT stock will retain its value are the same kind who believe that immigrants are stealing your pets or that Kamala Harris is a Marxist.
HORRAY FOR GANDER! There are many ways to remember 9/11 today, but let me mention the wonderful and heart-warming musical production “COME FROM AWAY” (streamable for free on Apple+) which tells the unconventional story of air travelers diverted to a small Canadian airport on that day because all American airports had been closed. The original cast were brilliant and entertaining, and the story itself so strange and funny that you would never think it could capture the chaos of that week. Yet it does so, and still manages to be entertaining. Here’s a reunion of the original cast singing a few of the songs (YT)
ALSO: It can be hard to find on streaming networks because of the boring title, but the defining documentary about that day is without a doubt “9/11: FIFTEEN YEARS LATER” (streamable on MAX) directed by and starring the Naudet brothers. The Naudet brothers were two French filmmakers in NYC to film a documentary about the life of their firefighters. They filmed almost everything about 9/11, including footage inside the Twin Towers after the planes had hit the building. Tastefully done and absolutely riveting! (The film is actually called “9/11”, but on MAX its title is “9/11: FIFTEEN YEARS LATER”)
Electoral-vote says that “Fundamentally, Trump’s strategy is to lie about everything on the assumption that his base doesn’t realize that he is lying. When a neutral moderator calls him out, Trump goes bonkers because that upsets his whole strategy.”
missed the debate so I watched an hour of clips from late night and political shows and realized I had to watch the actual debate in full.
Trump floods the zone with so much disinformation even MSNBC and The Daily Show can’t capture most of it.
Rewatching it, I was amazed at the unhinged things he said that no one even quoted last night because there were so many bigger absurd things he did.
She played him like a fiddle. It was great to see a lawyer draw a witness into self-incrimination.
FYI, I’m all over mastadon and haven’t visited Twitter more than once a month. The problem is, Mastadon still doesn’t have a lot of regular posters. Also I haven’t quite grasped how to quote people without being too self-promotional. But at least the people on Mastadon are honest, intelligent and not dominated by bots or shitpostings.
INSURER FRAUD IN FLORIDA. I was shocked to watch this 60 minutes report about how some insurance companies in Florida have been rewriting damage reports by insurance adjustors to significantly reduce the amount paid. It’s unclear how widespread this practice is in Florida — or anywhere else — but it points to the need to have better oversight — and perhaps have criminal as well as civil penalties. (YT)
MUST READ. Progressive columnist Nick Kristof criticizes Biden for continuing to send weapons to Israel without conditions. QUOTE: “Biden’s failure to apply enough leverage — or perhaps even uphold American law — has damaged other interests the White House cares about, including support for Ukraine. Hypocrisy alerts go off in foreign capitals when American diplomats hail the ‘rules-based international order’ and simultaneously provide the bombs that destroy Gazan civilian infrastructure and induce starvation. ”
AUTOCRACY IN AMERICA podcast is an excellent look at how Trump and Company have been following the autocracy playbook from other countries. (The latest episode talks about how autocrats repurpose the word “freedom” to make it serve their purposes). Applebaum recently published AUTOCRACY, INC . which I’ve started recently.
SPREADING HATE: Quite apart from the fact that it is un-Christian and offensive to demonize and denigrate transgender people of all ages, GOP’s reliance on anti-transgender ads during this election campaign reveals just how intellectually vapid their political ideas are. Just to name a few off the top of my head Climate change, health care, economic growth, immigration reform and strengthening foreign alliances strike me as much more important to the American people than the specific nature of some people’s genitals.
Colbert did a great roundup of the political appearances of Harris and Trump. Pay special attention to the woman at the 9 minute 45 second mark (that’s destined to go viral, I’m sure). (YT)
On that same night, Colbert did a great sketch about youth slang. Yes, it drives me crazy too! (YT)
On Slate’s Amicus podcast, there’s an interview with Matthew Seligman, an election law expert about the various ways that bad actors could bring about a victory of their presidential candidate. Seligman has been talking about a conspiracy theory rampant on Fox News and other conservative outlets that illegal aliens will be stealing the November election.
Amazingly, this chart is already out of date; Texas just added 200,000 more voters to the voters roll in the last few weeks, making the total 18.6 million. (Source: Houston Chronicle/Off the Kuff)
23 Nobel-winning Economists Prefer Harris’s Economic Plan over Trump’s. ““While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we believe that, overall, Harris’ economic agenda will improve our nation’s health, investment, sustainability, resilience, employment opportunities, and fairness and be vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump,”
ODD/AMUSING AMPHIBIAN DRAMA. You may already know about the viral 30 second vid showing a frog playing video game on a mobile phone (It’s great!). Here is a wonderful and compelling 9 minute video by a pet/aquarium freak about how he raised a frog for the specific purpose of teaching it how to play video games. I love this guy’s YouTube channel; it’s a new take on teaching people about the population of creatures outside our own. (YT)
NO POLITICS ON FACEBOOK — WHY?! I realize that I’m more politically dialed in than most people, but I am struck by how rarely politics are mentioned on FB on the WEEK BEFORE A CRUCIAL NATIONAL ELECTION!! Instead I see ads and the usual “Facebook Slop” (random anonyously written articles that seems curiously targeted to my demographic). Contrast this with MASTADON (more of an academic/intellectual social media network) which brings my attention to lots of articles and opinions — and other cultural things posted by ACTUAL LIVING PEOPLE. As recently as 2 weeks ago, my FB feed was flooded with lots of political ads, but now it’s flooded with SEINFELD memes and random trivia about celebrities. Thanks, but no thanks.
RECOMMENDATION: LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (Netflix) is not a horror movie … or is it? It’s a mystifying movie about something strange. Outstanding cast, and it will keep you on your feet. I enjoyed watching this weird and unpredictable movie. Days later, I figured out a flaw in the plot which I won’t mention, but it’s still a great Halloween or (pre-Halloween) watch. P.S. Don’t watch the trailer — it’s better to be surprised!)
TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN: I predict that Trump (and Musk and friends) will sell ALL their shares of DJT stock on election day (November 5) or the day after.
When I posted that remark about DJT stock on social media, I included this video (YT) which is a Precious Roy sketch from my favorite 1990s show Sifl & Olly (W). I compiled a YT Playlist of almost all the Precious Roy sketches. You’re welcome.
“I am a retired Command Sergeant Major in the Minnesota National Guard and, after years of firing artillery, I sustained severe inner ear damage. Because I have good health insurance provided through my employer, I was able to have surgery on my ear. As my ear healed, my hearing was gradually restored. One morning, several weeks after the surgery, I awoke to a sound I couldn’t identify. I asked my wife what I was hearing and she told me: ‘That’s your 4-year-old daughter Hope.’ You see, Hope wakes up singing every morning but I had never heard that sound until that day. I am running for Congress because I believe we as a country have a moral obligation to ensure that every father can hear his daughter sing, that every citizen receive the best care our medical community has to offer.” (TIM WALZ, 2006, radio ad when he first ran for Congress).
MY SECRET GUILTY PLEASURES: Whenever I want to relax, I confess I watch random clips compilation from Will & Grace. Outrageously fun…
Texas has recorded a death on its roadways — motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists — every day since Nov. 7, 2000, with an average of 12 deaths per day, according to the Texas Department of Transportation. In Houston, a lack of protected bike lanes and the crumbling sidewalks make cyclists and pedestrians more vulnerable. Some say road rage and fast driving has also contributed. (Source)
I officially retired from my illustrious JUST DANCE career 12 years ago (after being totally bested at the game by my niece Abby but I found this video of wacky Just Dance routines to be hilarious.
QUOTE: Texas has recorded a death on its roadways — motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists — every day since Nov. 7, 2000, with an average of 12 deaths per day, according to the Texas Department of Transportation. In Houston, a lack of protected bike lanes and the crumbling sidewalks make cyclists and pedestrians more vulnerable. Some say road rage and fast driving has also contributed. (washington POST)
This 6 minute report by NBC details the difficulties with obtaining homeowners’ insurance in Texas.
If you’re looking for a great movie to watch on July 4th, try BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946), the Oscar-winning drama about WW2 soldiers coming home to USA and finding that the society they remembered had changed. It’s a long old-fashioned story full of drama and heartbreak, but still great! FREE TO STREAM ON KANOPY, AMAZON PRIME, PEACOCK, HOOPLAH.
MOVIE RECOMMENDATION: “Problemista” (on MAX) is a surreal comedy about an El Salvadoran immigrant with dreams to design toys in NYC. While awaiting word on his internship (and work visa), he works for a crazy woman (played by Tilda Swinton!) trying to get her husband’s paintings at a major art gallery. It’s crazy and surprising and hilarious — stylistically it reminds me of AMELIE and BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. Swinton will surely get an Oscar nomination for this one, and the writer/director/star Julio Torres is an amazing talent. Former SNL writer, he’s also done comedy specials and has two comedy series on MAX. I was laughing the whole time.
FLED TO AUSTIN! Just wanted to say that Mom and I survived the Houston hurricane. We live in Katy (West Houston), and Monday morning we were in the direct path of the hurricane. As it happens, it was somewhat bad for 5 hours, and then everything was fine. Weather was good and cool, no damage really. But power was still out – and unlikely to return for a while. Also, irritatingly, cell phone coverage was nonexistent – although a few miles away (I was later to learn), it worked perfectly. With little chance of electricity returning, we decided to visit my sister in Austin and to wait for power to come back. Frankly this hurricane was not that bad, and it’s astonishing that Houston (considered the energy capital of the world or at least the USA), can’t figure out how to make their electric grid more reliable for a hurricane nowhere near as bad as it could have been. 6-9 hours of no power – sure we can tolerate that during a weather event(barely). But when you talk about 1 or maybe 2 days – or who knows?! – I stop blaming the weather event and start blaming the political apparatus.
STRANDED DAY 2 IN AUSTIN. Killing time while waiting for electricity to be restored back home in Houston. Mom and I go out for breakfast … AGAIN! We went to the same place as yesterday, wearing shirts gifted to us by my sister Maureen (who had just returned from NY). Mom had French toast; I had an egg frittata and coffee. We spent 50% of the time complaining about Centerpoint Energy, 20% talking about the hot weather, 15% talking about Mom’s grandchildren, 10% talking about national politics and 5% talking about the other customers. Luckily we had time to snap this photo while Mom was talking to a native New Yorker who admitted that she was finally getting used to the hot Texas weather. Mom and I have been here for decades … and still have never gotten used to the high summer temperatures — (sigh!)
NETFLIX RECOMMENDATION: “Big Eyes” is a fascinating story based on the life of painter Margaret Keene who painted pictures of expressive children who had big eyes and how her husband ended up taking credit for her paintings and commercial success. Interesting plot and characters – and a terrific final scene. Also, topnotch acting by Amy Adams – who always excels. I was pleasantly surprised to find the movie directed by Tim Burton, and I was struck by the compositional beauty and radiant colors in almost every scene. Every scene of this movie could have been a painting. No spoilers, but I was also pleasantly surprised to learn that the real-life artist herself appeared in a scene near the beginning of the movie. She was the old woman sitting at a park bench relaxing….. and looking at nobody in particular.
Every time I watch this funny nutty song in the Popeye movie, I fall in love with Olive Oyl all over again. RIP Shelley Duvall. I haven’t seen all the things Duvall has done — but I wanted to mention the Faerie Tale Theater she started in the 1980s — where A list actors reenact satirical versions of fairy tales. It’s great fun for the entire family! By the way, HE NEEDS ME and other songs in the Popeye movie were written by the great Harry Nillson. Here’s another gem from the movie.
MOVIE RECOMMENDATION (Apple+ Only) TETRIS (2023) tells the crazy and entertaining story of the race by a game company to obtain a license for the Tetris videogame from the Soviet government in the 1980s right before Gorbachev lost power. The movie captured the uncertainty and chaos and deception of trying to do business in the late Soviet world and how suspiciously the Soviets viewed Western businesses (and vice versa). Actually a lot of the backstabbing occurred between the two Western companies competing to get an exclusive license. Never did I imagine that a movie about business negotiations would be so exciting, so sad and so hilarious.
STILL IN AUSTIN, STILL WAITING. 4 days have gone by since we left West Houston after losing power at the house. Still no electricity. I guess that power outages lasting 2-4 days has become the new normal..
THINK OF THE TREES: This comment (found on a longer blogpost about the power outage) offers a lot of insight about how managing trees properly can reduce the amount of power outages.
I’d like to offer you my husband Frank Thompson’s unique perspective as the owner of a tree service in NW Houston. (Interestingly, Ike was the inception of our business back in 2008!) Here are his ideas about why such a “wind-friendly” hurricane as Beryl (compared to Ike) has caused so much tree damage and subsequent power outage: 1. 10+ year history of extreme weather conditions has weakened the region’s trees, especially the older ones: The severe droughts of many years back, Harvey’s flooding that covered trees with water for days, the extreme freezes of recent years, more floods, and most recently last summer’s extreme heat/drought conditions have all contributed to weakening the area’s trees and their root systems. Declining trees are also more susceptible to disease, destructive insects, and fungus. Ike did a lot of damage from high winds and twisters, but trees in general were stronger then than they are now. 2. Recent heavy rains of May and June have soaked the ground, and Houston’s tall trees with poor root systems and dense interior canopies became prone to tipping. That’s why we’re seeing so many huge trees down roots-and-all during Beryl. That was not as much a problem with Ike. I wonder what the devastation would have been this week had Beryl been a Cat 3? I shudder to think. 3. Fewer and fewer people are taking care of their trees because of our inflationary economy. It is expensive to: thin trees to reduce wind sail, to trim them back well away from power lines, and also to remove them entirely. People just don’t budget for trees, and when they have a need, it’s unaffordable. And as living things, tree problems always get worse with time. If our current economy continues, trees will be more and more problematic during storms, and power outages will increase. Comparing Ike and Beryl, trees were very likely better-maintained during Ike than what we are seeing now in preparation for the 2024 hurricane system. 4. So where do energy distributers fit into all of this? They need to know the facts above and increase their own tree-maintenance of power lines accordingly. They need to be MUCH more pro-active. With so many trees in decline, they need to increase their distance requirements for tree lines from power lines. And yes, underground lines would solve the tree problem. We’re no scientists over here, and the opinions above are purely based on experience, so you can take them with a grain of salt if you like; but if we’re going to have more storms this summer, we believe people will see more of the same (and worse) when bigger winds come our way. Yes, a lot of trees are gone, but the one’s still standing have suffered the same
His last column was about the incompetence of Centerpoint Energy for managing the power outages during Beryl hurricane. I look forward to catching up on his column archives on Culture Map. I’m afraid I haven’t really been paying attention to Culture Map (which looks like a well put together news and entertainment website).
CONFESSIONS OF A GEOGRAPHY NERD: Here’s an entertaining & inspiring 30 minute speech that Minnesota governor Tim Walz recent gave about geography and GIS tools. Walz (a former high school geography teacher) genuinely believes that a better understanding of maps and geography makes for better government. Walz made this speech a week before Biden withdrew from the race … and now he’s being seriously considered as a vice-presidential candidate! I’d love to see it happen!
RARE MONTY PYTHON: I only recently learned about this hilarious comedy sketch — where the pope gives artistic feedback to Michelangelo for his unusual painting of the Last Supper.
I confess: I am hopelessly addicted to Will & Grace compilation clips on Youtube. Not linking for fear of promoting bad behavior.
This delightful video essay (produced for a PBS series) explains the social and biological purposes of using swear words. Wow, who knew that PBS could produce such highbrow infotainment?
NANCY PELOSI’S BIG MISTAKE: In 2022 Pelosi threw her weight around to endorse veteran TX congressman Henry Cuellar (instead of progressive opponent, Jessica Cisneros, who had been endorsed by practically every other major Democrat). Cisneros was a young, smart and popular candidate. Cuellar was a conservative Trump-friendly Democrat (who as of today is under indictment for taking a $600,000 bribe from foreign oil interests). Cuellar won the primary by 250 votes; wouldn’t it have been nice if Pelosi had not intervened in 2022?
Lots of people commented about the university protests on electoral-vote. Here’s one insight:
First the “outside agitators” characterization is really a way of delegitimizing any protest at all. White officials in the South were quick to blame “outside agitators” and “communists” for the demonstrations led by Black people. There were two implications: The first was that absent any outside influence, Black people were perfectly happy to tolerate the daily indignities and horrors (things like lynchings and rape) that white citizens had no qualms about visiting on them daily. The second implication was that Black people were so stupid that they could never protest themselves or advocate for themselves. In the current moment, there’s this idea that students of any stripe “don’t know enough” to be protesting, as though “wars of ethnic cleansing are bad” is some kind of super-complex policy wonk argument. It isn’t. And many students are taking a principled stand that what the Israeli government is doing now and has done in the past is wrong, especially given that the U.S. has been complicit in it for decades. This includes, by the way, a very large number of Jewish students, and Jewish people, who have said that this is not something to do in our name. And let me cut off one line that I hear far too much of: “Why weren’t they protesting Hamas/Russia/[insert here] before?” Well, Hamas isn’t getting any money from my taxes. The Israeli government is. Hamas wasn’t getting aid and support from any government that I, as a protester in the U.S., can affect. The Israeli government is. That Hamas is a bad organization for a lot of reasons doesn’t make a war of ethnic cleansing in my name a good thing.
Imagine the fossil fuel industry as a cartel of confectioners, that have grown absurdly rich selling sweets. But now the entire world is teetering on the edge of diabetes (that would be climate change). They could deny diabetes exists, or that it causes any problems; eventually, after enough people lose their legs, that gets harder. Coal is the equivalent of, I don’t know—cotton candy, or candy corn, something so absurdly sweet that that even addicts recognize it might be problematic. So they’ve come up with something else: cookies and muffins sweetened with something that has half the sugar! But wait, it turns out to be sweetened with something else, that causes lots of cancer. (I hope you’re getting the carbon and methane references here). So maybe they invent an expensive therapy to remove some of the sugar from your bloodstream—that would be carbon capture. The one thing they simply won’t do is stop producing candy.
But their real problem is that some competitor has discovered this thing called fruit. Tastes great, and you can eat it without medical difficulty. It’s good for you.
That’s the situation the fossil fuel industry finds itself in right now. Here in this auditorium, utility lobbyists are insisting that you can only run a modern economy on fossil fuel; one fossil fuel proponent is holding up a light switch and arguing that without hydrocarbons it will be useless. But California, this spring, has been running the world’s fifth largest economy on windpower, hydropower, and solar power, backed up with batteries, as a result, natural gas usage hit an eight year low; this morning comes the news that globally renewable energy generated a third of the world’s power last year, and the momentum to install more is so strong that greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector almost certainly peaked last year. Last week roofing giant GAF opened a mammoth Texas plant devoted to making solar shingles that you can nail down; as Heatmap reports this morning, even historic European buildings with terracotta roof tiles can now have matching red solar panels.
It’s cheap, it’s clean, people like it—but it is deeply dangerous for the fossil fuel industry and their friends in utilities worldwide, who are desperately trying to get gas locked in for another few decades. That’s why the outcry was so fierce when President Biden paused new permits for LNG export facilities in January: the industry knows that every quarter it gets harder to make the case that overseas utilities should build the power plants that use the fuel, when they could just put up panels and batteries instead.”
Terrifying article about Zombie Mortgages coming back to the life to bring foreclosures to homeowners. Apparently during the subprime crisis, some applicants took two mortgages — one to make the initial down payment. When the homeowners negotiated with the bank to reset their loan, they were erroneously told by the banks that they didn’t have to pay back the second loan. Recently, these worthless loans were resold to collection agencies, and so they attached punitive late fees and filed foreclosure papers against these homeowners.
My cinephile friend from college Michael Barrett was a guest on the FILM BY NUMBERS movie podcast episode about Hitchcock. He’s in Episode 17, a 90 minute episode which covered all sorts of fun topics, ranging from silent Hitchcock, Hitchcock’s fascination with icy blonde females and the influence of Hitchock’s wife (who helped to write several scripts). (Here’s his Popmatters columns and my interview with him).
Shocked and devastated to learn that innovative documentarian Morgan Spurlock died at 53. He’s best known for his SUPER SIZE ME documentary, but actually he made two outstanding TV documentary/reality shows for CNN that cannot be missed (and unfortunately isn’t streaming anywhere). 30 DAYS describes several “social experiments” where he puts himself or another person into uncomfortable situations for 30 days. (Read the wiki page about the show to see just how ground-breaking these shows were). After that he did INSIDE MAN, a great deep dive into social and political issues. These were always interesting, funny, humane and uplifting shows. US has just lost a legend.
A few days before the Texas primary, I am nervous about just how many Texans will vote for that other guy. I was looking up data about the 2020 Texas primary — Biden got 33.%, Sanders got 29.8% and Warren got 11.4%.
A written Constitution and the courts that are supposed to enforce it are weak guarantors of a liberal democratic society. The Supreme Court of the United States does not always align itself with authoritarian policies and movements, but it does so often enough that it cannot be counted on as an ally in a conflict between constitutional democracy and something more sinister.
And the Court is particularly ineffective in standing up against figures like Trump, who enjoy broad (if not necessarily majoritarian) political support.
Millhiser is a shrewd commentator on constitutional questions. His books are worth reading too.
Racism is not about your feelings as a white person. It’s about the simple, brute fact that many rights you take for granted are not enjoyed by Black people in particular, and people of color generally, to varying degrees. For example, most white people can take for granted that if a police officer sees them they will live through the encounter; no Black citizen can make that assumption in the same automatic, don’t-have-to-think-about-it way. None of that has a whit to do with whether an individual cop is “personally racist”—it has to do with centuries worth of assumptions and cultural expectations and a culture of policing that took a century to build. When Timothy McVeigh killed 195 people in Oklahoma City, nobody suggested rounding up all the white people from his part of Michigan or putting every right-wing militia group under 24-hour surveillance. Yet some right-wingers (I’m looking at you, Michelle Malkin) were more than willing to revive the idea of internment after 9/11. This is not something that any conservative I have spoken to even sees as an issue.
This is why talking about people of color being racist is of very limited utility—a Black person (or Asian person. or any other PoC) can hate white people all they want, but they have little ability to make life difficult for white people generally. It is not a situation like physics were you can have equal and opposite charged particles. But this is something that no conservative ever recognizes. Right-wing people simply don’t acknowledge at all that systems can be racist, and even if the entire country was instantly repopulated with non-racist people those systems would still be there.
Many voters aren’t reacting to Trump’s many outrages because they have never heard about them. “What?” you say. It’s been all over the news for months and years. Yes, but a large fraction of the country does not follow the news. Not on TV, not in newspapers, and not on the Internet. They are busy living their lives and politics is simply not important to them. Political junkies (which probably includes most/all of our readers) can’t believe this. But do you follow all the latest developments in sports, music, fashion, and business? Dedicated sports fans probably can’t believe there exist people who don’t have a clue who Caitlin Clark is and dedicated stock market junkies can’t believe there are people who don’t know whether the Dow-Jones index is closer to 20,000, 40,000, 60,000, or 80,000. But these folks exist.
One study shows that only about one-third of the population follows any news. Another study shows that until close to an election many people spend less than 10 minutes per week looking at political news. That’s probably about the amount of time they spend brushing their teeth.
These data don’t show that people are stupid. They just show that most people don’t prioritize keeping up with politics. They have jobs, kids, and bills to pay. What politicians do and say isn’t important until right before an election. Sometimes there is a big story, like a government shutdown that interferes with their lives, in which case they notice, but what Trump said in some rally in far-off Ohio does not register at all. Do you want to know what the biggest news event of 2023 was for most Americans? It wasn’t the wars in Ukraine or the Middle East. It was the Chinese spy balloon.
While I was doing research about the Three Graces (and other mythical themes) in paintings, I came across this unusual contemporary rendition by Terry Guyer. At first, I laughed, but it really is beautiful and well-rendered. (You can buy a semi-expensive poster-size print of it for $150 or so. ) Actually that last link goes to the print on Fine Art America which sells prints of many famous paintings — copyrighted and public domain both — I assume that the artist gets a cut somewhere down the line.
(GIFTED article) A business writer estimates how much TX Governor Abbott actually accomplished with the extra $10 billion he sent on protecting the border with Mexico. Turns out this action only reduced annual migrant crossings by 23,000 (so Texans are paying on average $435,000 for each migrant encountered). “The shame is that these billions and billions of dollars are not an investment in policy, but an investment in politics,”
Using AI to generate tableux about famous cartoon characters. Simpsons in the 1950s. Here’s Family Guy and Southpark. In a year or two these kinds of tableaux will be a dime a dozen. There’s an uncanny valley which is cleverly addressed by making it seem like 1950s nostalgia and using 2 or 3 second clips. Anything longer would seem ridiculous.
EXCITEMENT: I just made my first call on Whatsapp! I am so awesome! (BTW, my Whatsapp profile name is NOTKAFKA )
COMEDY WITH CONAN AT MOHER. I visited this castle at the Cliffs of Moher in 2008. Yes, it was just as windy….
WHO’S IN CHARGE?/WHO’S TO BLAME: If the 2024 election brings unfortunate results, my generation has only themselves to blame (finally!)
OSCAR PREDICTIONS: Every year, without seeing any of the movies, I make a prediction for which will win the Oscar award for BEST PICTURE before nominations are even announced. Today I can announce that the winner for 2024 Best Picture will be KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.
19th century: Gone to Texas . Used as a euphemism for going to another place in order to escape one’s debts.
This razor wire, which stretches for dozens of miles, is designed to ensnare migrants and prevent Border Patrol from reaching them. The wire is located on the U.S. side of the border—which means that by the time migrants reach it, they are on American soil. Federal law grants Border Patrol the right to access all land within 25 miles of the border; it also requires border agents to inspect, process, arrest, and detain migrants on U.S. soil. The Texas Guard, however, has barred agents from performing these tasks. It has fenced off a large section of Eagle Pass, an area where migrants frequently cross the Rio Grande into the United States, and has banished Border Patrol from entering. Border Patrol tried to monitor the area by boat, but the Texas Guard put a chain around the gate to the boat ramp so that border agents couldn’t use it. Guardsmen also piled dirt on both sides of the gates that provide access to the Rio Grande in order to block federal access to the river.
The Texas Guard’s actions are in direct conflict with federal law. Moreover, Abbott has directed guardsmen to push unauthorized migrants back across the border, which further contradicts federal law: Congress has deemed these migrants “applicants for admission” once they reach U.S. soil and has granted them certain rights, such as the ability to seek asylum. Texas has effectively nullified multiple federal statutes by trying to turn away migrants and forbidding Border Patrol from intercepting them.
NIKKI HALEY EMBRACES UKRAINE: One thing unremarked upon about the Republican primary is that Nikki Haley very much embraces internationalism and especially supports Ukraine and our NATO commitments. If Trump were to knock out Nikki Haley early and easily from the Republican primary, that would send a signal to the Republican Party that isolationism is ok — and that abandoning Ukraine is necessary in order to stop the aliens from invading our border.
DOCUMENTARY RECOMMENDATION (FREE ONLINE!) Beyond Utopia” tells a harrowing story about two attempts to transport North Korean refugees to South Korea by smuggling them into China and taking them to Vietnam and Laos and finally to Thailand. On one level it describes the past and present political situation in North Korea effectively and dramatically. (Did you know that many young children in North Korea have witnessed public executions?) On another level it focuses on one family’s effort to reunite, with actual footage of the family during the perilous journey. It’s both a heroic and inspiring film.
NETFLIX RECOMMENDATION: “RUSTIN” is a superb (and, yes, inspirational) biopic of a “complicated” civil rights leader who organized Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington. Surely Colman Domingo deserves to win an Oscar for best actor, but everything about the film was wonderful — excellent cast, great script, great music, unafraid to deal with “hard” issues. Also, it offered a different perspective on King and other civil rights leaders.
SUPPORT BORDER SECURITY & IMMIGRATION BILL (+Ukraine, etc). If ever there was a good time to write your US senator, that time is now. (A vote will come in the next day or so). A bipartisan Senate bill written by OK senator Lankford and CN senator Chris Murphy would solve a lot of problems and make Americans safer.
. Campaigns and entities that support candidates like the DCCC have levers to pull to turn out voters and make the best of the political environment. They create field programs to canvas door to door, as well as do events and contact voters by text or email. They engage in polling and message testing to better understand voters. They run ads that increase candidate appeal and deflect attacks.
Plenty of close elections have been won by these tactics — and money can make a decisive difference. Democrats would probably still control the U.S. House if candidates like Jevin Hodge, Kirsten Engel and Adam Frisch were able to raise enough money for field programs. None did; all lost.
Still, political campaigns are clearly not the best vehicles for changing voting patterns in a lasting way — and especially who votes. These are short-term operations that spend many of their resources on paid media and leave little behind. They’re not set up to engage deeply with people over time, which is how to change both political beliefs and civic behavior.
“Dear Republican Senators of America, Ronald Reagan, who helped millions of us to win back our freedom and independence, must be turning in his grave today. Shame on you.” (TWEET BY POLAND’S PRIME MINISTER DONALD TUSK ON THE US SENATE”S REJECTION WEDNESDAY OF A BILL TO PROVIDE ECONOMIC AND MILITARY AID TO UKRAINE).
PATRICK STEWART BRINGS A SHAKESPEARAN TOUCH TO SESAME STREET. (YouTube). Very amusing.
I’m really torn about linking to YouTube, which seems to have found a way to overcome the ad-blockers.
Here’s Marquette Greene-Scott, the Dem candidate for my 22nd district (to oppose MAGA Troy Nehls). Houston Chronicle endorsed her today. She’s a Louisiana-born former math teacher turned attorney who also served as mayor of a small Texas town.
This 11 minute homage to an 80s sitcom is bizarre and silly and brilliant.
“Leadership requires killing people.” (PRO-TRUMP MEDIA PERSONALITY TUCKER CARLSON ON WHY HE DIDN’T ASK PUTIN A QUESTION ABOUT NAVALNY DURING HIS INTERVIEW WITH PUTIN LAST WEEK).
Here’s a lovely thought-piece by Navalny in 2022 (No subscription required) after the Ukraine invasion about how Russia can take the path towards democracy. QUOTE: “War is a relentless stream of crucial, urgent decisions influenced by constantly shifting factors. Therefore, while I commend European leaders for their ongoing success in supporting Ukraine, I urge them not to lose sight of the fundamental causes of war. The threat to peace and stability in Europe is aggressive imperial authoritarianism, endlessly inflicted by Russia upon itself. Postwar Russia, like post-Putin Russia, will be doomed to become belligerent and Putinist again. This is inevitable as long as the current form of the country’s development is maintained. Only a parliamentary republic can prevent this. It is the first step toward transforming Russia into a good neighbor that helps to solve problems rather than create them.”
VOTING PROBLEMS IN TEXAS. Distressed and amused at the bureaucratic difficulties this reporter had about registering to vote. (The main problem is that Texas does not allow online voter’s registration).
I have heard the excuse that Americans are “fatigued.” I have been in Ukraine three times since the war began. I have been in the capital and in the provinces. I have seen almost no Americans, fatigued or otherwise, in the country. And that is for the simple reason that we are not in Ukraine. How can we be fatigued by a war we are not fighting? When we are not even present? This makes no sense. It causes no fatigue to give money to the right cause, which is all that we are doing. It feels good to help other people help themselves in a good cause.
If we stop supporting Ukraine, then everything gets worse, all of a sudden, and no one will be talking about “fatigue” because we will all be talking about disaster: across all of these dimensions: food supply, war crimes, international instability, expanding war, collapsing democracies. Everything that the Ukrainians are doing for us can be reversed if we give up. Why would lawmakers even contemplate doing so?
If you happened to know lots of Ukrainians, as I do, you would know people who have been wounded or who have been killed. You would know people who get through their days with dark circles around their eyes, because everyone has dark circles around their eyes. You would know people who have lost someone, because everyone has lost someone. You would know people who are grieving and yet who are nevertheless doing what they can do. You would not know anyone in Ukraine who believes that fatigue is a reason to give up. Would you sell such people out?
I have heard the other excuse: that we need to audit the weapons we send to Ukraine. The expenses are minimal and the gains are great: a nickel on our defense dollar, achieving what we cannot ourselves do with all the rest. And here’s the thing: the weapons we send to Ukraine are the only ones in our stockpiles that are being audited. They are being audited not by accountants in suits and ties but by men and women in camouflage. They are being used and used well by people whose lives are at stake and whose country’s future is at stake. Ukrainians have used American air defense more effectively than anyone knew that it could be used.
