I don’t normally talk about the many, many natural disasters, but . . .

This is a border crossing between Nepal and China.

Here is the story . . .

So what was behind all this?

Nature is wicked. I saw this morning as I checked CNN, there are still 3000 people missing.

We hate everybody.

I love Shipwreck. Don’t always agree with her, but I love her.

Yes, I have reached that stage of barely articulate disgust a few times.

Meanwhile, an interesting segment from Harry Enten.

But it isn’t just non-college educated white voters who are sick of the status quo.

Driving the news: Michigan’s Democratic primary for Senate offered a snapshot of the growing generational divide among Black voters in particular.

• U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, 86, a civil rights icon from South Carolina, campaigned for establishment-backed Rep. Haley Stevens. But Abdul El-Sayed, 41, overcame Stevens — and the more than $60 million in outside spending backing her — to win by less than 1 percentage point.

• A Washington Post analysis found Stevens had an eight-point edge in counties with the highest Black populations — a smaller margin than many expected. El-Sayed, meanwhile, dominated counties with the highest numbers of young adults.

Oh, this is all bad. You don’t want what happens when people figure out they can’t vote their way out of it and the elite are too stupid to leave even the crumbs and regular people feel backed into a corner.

But in the meantime, I have popcorn to share . . .

How’s that war going?

Good news I suppose, we’ve stopped trying to bomb Iran into submission.

Bad news . . .

Behind the scenes: The sources said Rubio outlined the Trump administration’s current Iran policy in phone calls with several of his counterparts:

• Avoiding military action against Iran for the time being.

• Increasing economic pressure on Iran through the U.S. naval blockade and the new Treasury Department sanctions push.

• Transporting as much oil as possible through the strait and into global energy markets.

• A second U.S. official said this is expected to be the policy at least until after the midterm elections, when a new military campaign could again be on the table.

So what are these crippling sanctions?

Ah, our old friend Barak “I’m definitely not a propagandist for Israel” Ravid, both articles.

Do you know how long Iran has been under sanctions?

A long freaking time. Almost as long as I’ve been alive. They’ve grown quite resourceful from what I gather.

What he said: “Let there be no ambiguity as to the position of the United States,” Bessent said at a news conference. “An economic engagement of any kind with this murderous regime will expose those responsible to the full reach of American power.”

• Bessent did not give a deadline for compliance, but said, “I’m not going to set a timeline, but we do not have infinite patience here.”

• “No one is above this,” Bessent said in response to a question about whether the initiative would encompass China. “This is economic asphyxiation of this regime ... and no one should test our resolve.”

What’s that sound I hear?

That’s China laughing.

I think it’s time to put the “big brained Boovs” out to pasture.

So what are really the odds Trump will be impeached?

Are we really surprised that the Elephant and Ass Show rolls on?

The theater . . .

Democrats and the president have been savaging each other on the campaign trail with increasing fury as the midterm elections approach, and as Republicans are fighting to retain their thin House and Senate majorities.

Mr. Trump has called Mr. Jeffries a “thug,” and at a May campaign event referred to him as a “low IQ” person who had inspired him to deride Democrats as the “Dumocrats.” Mr. Jeffries routinely suggests that Mr. Trump is not only extreme but corrupt, vowing that Democrats would “hold the crooks accountable” if they won control.

But will they hold the “crooks accountable”?

Because here is the reality?

The private get-together was described by one of the people as a catch-up for Mr. Kushner and Mr. Jeffries. The two men have stayed in touch since they worked together on a criminal justice bill midway through Mr. Trump’s first term.

During the recent meeting, the pair discussed housing, immigration and the high cost of living as potential areas of common ground. Mr. Kushner suggested that Mr. Jeffries should meet with the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, two people with knowledge of the meeting said.

This is the one time I’d be fully behind impeaching a president. This is the single most openly corrupt presidency of my lifetime, and impeaching Trump and dragging his family and friends before judges for abusing their positions would send a strong signal that there is a limit.

Will they do it?

This year, Mr. Jeffries has remained noncommittal about any plans to pursue a third impeachment of the president, and has not discussed publicly what oversight could look like if his party were to win the majority.

“We’ve not ruled anything in and not ruled anything out in terms of accountability,” he told The New York Times in an interview last month, noting that his focus would be on forcing out major Trump officials.

“We’ve got to make sure we continue to get rid of toxic Trump cabinet secretaries,” he said. “Pete Hegseth, in my view, should be next on the list.”

So the answer is . . .

They’ll get rid of a few expendable idiots (Pistol Pete being one), but they’ll let the grift go on.

Why? Well, we’ll let Temu Obama explain as he tries to deflect.

Everything Hakeem Jeffries says in there applies equally to his colleagues. The Trump grift might be a bit bigger and a bit bolder, but it’s the same thing.

I doubt anyone wants to start down the road of actually going after corruption. Because if there were a House trial exposing all the little shell games and shakedowns and various little schemes of Trump and Co., then we might start asking about Obama’s Netflix deal and his $800 million eyesore of a presidential library or the Clintons’ foundation or all the really good stockpickers in Congress.

And if we say that was a bridge too far, maybe we pull back and say, “You know what? I saw another bridge a few miles back. I think that might also be a bridge too far.” And so on until we actually start making a dent and the examples we make of people grow.

And then no one would have a reason to run for Congress.

But that’s my opinion. What’s yours?

Are the financial games running out of road?

I have to go to a wedding this afternoon, so I’m phoning it in a bit. But Ana Kasparian has a really good explanation of the games Scott Bessent is playing to keep the financial ship afloat as it develops increasingly more holes in the hull.

This is what happens when you have a bunch of wealthy people in charge who have never had to budget and when they got in trouble (Trump, I’m looking at you), they simply declared bankruptcy, screwed the little guy, and started over.

Now if we had the little guy in charge . . .

Meta’s interesting settlement

Everyone was cheering this week. It was called Meta’s “Big Tobacco moment.”

So you can get most of the information from the title of the article, but there are catches.

The full value of Meta’s payout depends on whether other social media companies also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes. Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. It will pay an additional $5 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.

In a call with reporters on Wednesday, Meta’s legal team said the company negotiated the terms of its settlement to require the other companies to join, setting industry standards that would not single out Meta.

So basically, Meta doesn’t want to lose money, so they don’t have to do it if the other companies don’t do it.

So what are these “standards”?

The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. teen users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications during school hours of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the “like” button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls.

What caught me by surprise was a quote from Saagar Enjeti in the Breaking Points newsletter.

I always get nervous when people with such diverging ideologies agree.

So here is my problem with all this: it always starts with “for the children.”

The elite in this country would love nothing better than to curtail everyone’s social media use. Why? How has the world changed since people could “crowdsource” news and don’t have to depend on the various outlets?

We were promised an open flow of information on the Internet and instead we’re getting “kiddie controls,” which are a small step from having to show ID to set up an account followed by an invisible social credit score and forcing people back into mainstream media. No one is suggesting you can’t spend all day watching, say, Fox News or MS(not)Now. They’re suggesting you can’t spend all day searching out what the hell is really going on by following and talking to people on open platforms.

Yeah, I know I’m a cynic, but cynicism has helped me be right more often than not.

Vampires in Poland

I happened on this article . . .

A 400-year-old grave held the body of a young woman, the rusted blade of a sickle over her throat and a padlock fastened to her foot — the macabre signs of a community terrified the deceased would rise again.

Archaeologists unearthed Zosia, as the skeleton was nicknamed, from an unmarked burial site in 2022 near the village of Pień in northern Poland. The grave’s grisly contents made international headlines, and the 2024 documentary “Field of Vampires” followed researchers as they re-created what her face may have looked like.

Instead of trying to past in the whole article, here are a couple YouTube videos.

What did the girl look like?

The CNN story includes more updated information.

The young woman was likely Protestant, given the grave goods. Although she was buried a top a hill in a cemetery for the unwanted, her family had wealth.

The research team is more certain that Zosia, who was between 17 and 19 when she died, came from a wealthy family. Traces of a silk fabric found near her skull that may have been used as a trim on a hat or bonnet contained metal threads made of pure gold and silver. By comparison, according to the study, the burial robes of King Sigismund III Vasa and Queen Constance of Habsburg, interred around the same time in Kraków in southern Poland, contain not a single pure gold thread.

And she was likely local.

The researchers believe Zosia likely spent her childhood in the region because the chemical signatures in her dental tissue indicated that she consumed food and water from local sources, and they were similar to those of other bodies buried in the cemetery. The isotopic signatures were also similar to those of other individuals buried in the cemetery but not especially unique. Growing up in other regions in central Europe would result in similar patterns, the study authors noted.

And she had a health condition.

Earlier examinations of Zosia’s skeleton had suggested that she perhaps had a haemangioma — a vascular tumor — in her sternum, Poliński said. The condition may have caused pain and produced a deformation or swelling on her chest. However, according to the latest study, there was no evidence of trauma or pathological conditions on her remains that could have led to her death.

So how did she die? And why did they conclude she was a vampire in the first place?

Who knows? But it’s interesting.

Escapism

I watched . . .

I will give it to the people of the European cold countries. They can write some really dark mysteries. And this one, the ending . . . I still don’t know what to make of it.

And . . .

I love a spicy heroine and if you want to know what would have happened if Romeo and Juliet had lived (it’s a comedy, so I’m not spoiling anything), you finally get to find out.

I’m reading a long book. I’m not enjoying it that much, but I’m OCD, so I’m reading it.

Well, we made it another week, and August draws to a close.

I made an executive decision yesterday as I became twitchy from all the running I’ve been doing to take the week off before Labor Day. I can’t be stuffing “news” into all my open moments and stay sane. So I’ll see you back here the Tuesday after Labor Day. I want to do some Claude compiling about the meat industry because my experiences in ag country and the MAGA cult’s cheering about how Trump is “breaking” the meatpacking monopoly while he imports 300,000 metric tons of “product” (literal word he used) for ground beef is not adding up. So I’m going to give some sort of analysis my best shot.

Beyond that, anything I missed this week?

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That was my favorite meme from last week. I feel the sentiment to my core.

I just found this one this morning . . .

You’ll get it in a minute.

But let’s start with something a little less dark.

I did not see the twist coming.

And away we go . . .

Chalk one up for the Little Guy. Meet Lucas Byrd . . .

He’s a five-foot-five-inch, 133-pound college lightweight college wresting champion.

Meet Ellie Holzman . . .

She’s a six-foot-two-inch college volleyball player. (We never give women’s weights.)

The two met while they were both attending the University of Illinois, starting out as friends and then moving into something more.

They caught the public’s attention in March 2025 when this happened . . .

Sorry for the overly excited “bros.” That was the video I could find.

Anyway, flash forward a year and a half.

The first time I saw the photo, I thought it had to be AI. But they’re a real couple.

Hey, I love it. May they have a long and happy life together.

Another story with a happy ending, two men went out fishing and their boat sank . . .

Were these men are extremely unlucky or extremely lucky?

I’ll let you decide.

Actually, I might take five days adrift at sea in a cooler over this . . .

Maybe she should just come ask Erebus for help . . .

As the other half said, twenty-nine toes is a lot of claws.

That it is. My couch shudders.

Are we still doing this?

For all the zeal Congress has shown in investigating America’s response to the covid-19 pandemic, it has been strangely uninterested in exploring a basic question: why did so many Americans die relative to the numbers who succumbed to the virus in other rich countries? Understanding the answer would seem relevant to guarding against the next, inevitable pandemic.

The reason our numbers are higher is because we were counting people who died from other things as dying from COVID because the hospitals wanted the money.

Glad I could help.

Okay, I understand nostalgia, but really?

One of the apps exploring this idea is Carrier Pidge, an app that allows users to send messages at the speed of pigeon. Users track their bird on a map as it whips toward its destination.

Like real birds, the digital pigeons have a chance of getting lost or dying — 0.2 percent. Buying a new one within the app will run you 99 cents.

As it turns out, this slower, riskier and costlier version of messaging has wide appeal.

And still more reliable and just a little more costly than a first-class stamp.

Another app released in April, Roost, which lets users send texts via such animals as including pigeons, snails and penguins, reported that it has reached 650,000 downloads this month.

How can a society with so many problems be this bored? I ask you.

Meanwhile, it used to be enough to write a good cookbook . . .

The company [Betty Crocker] on Tuesday introduced a line of three cake-slice-shaped handbags that sold out in 13 hours, in a stunt clearly intended to appeal to a younger crowd. The campaign was desperately Gen Z-coded, starting with its name, “Betty Ate,” and including the language of the news release declaring that Betty Crocker “is serving more than cake this season.”

To be precise, Betty Crocker never did serve cakes. Betty Crocker at best served cake mixes and in the beginning a book telling you how to make your own cake.

Now they’re selling bags shaped like cake.

There’s a case study in the degradation of a society right there.

But then again, we don’t need cake bags to tell us that.

In an email Monday, NIPSCO, the Merrillville, Indiana-based utility provider that supplies natural gas and electricity to over 1.3 million residential and commercial customers across the northern third of the state, said it’s “focused on safely restoring power to all customers in every affected community.”

I hate to say this, but in 2026, if we can’t get the power on two weeks after a summer storm, we need to set the AI data centers, fake carrier pigeons, and cake bags aside until we can figure out how to keep the lights on.

Lady Darline won her runoff on Tuesday, even though this is what she knows about foreign policy. (Hint: it’s a number less than one.)

Well, thank God the military has nothing to do with foreign policy.

And thank God Congress isn’t responsible for deciding whether or not we should go war.

(Sadly that second statement is now funny precisely because it’s true.)

But Darline is a little fuzzy on this whole “politician as public figure” thing.

You know how we have “Karens”? I think in the future we may have “Lady Darlines”: women who think they should just be crowned instead of elected simply because.

Oh, wait, we already had that.

It was called the Hillary.

Trump got all pissy at Canada and decided he’d change the name of Lake Ontario . . .

I suppose I should be grateful it’s not Lake Donald.

By the way, “Ontario” is a Native word that just means “great lake” or “beautiful waters.” It has nothing to do with Canada. The province in Canada was actually named after the lake, not the other way around.

But let’s not let sanity get in the way of stupidity and pettiness.

And speaking of pettiness, Donald Trump is literally threatening to tear down the Kennedy Center if somebody doesn’t let him put his name on it somewhere.

Driving the news: “An order blocking the Board from appropriately recognizing President Trump,” the DOJ argued in Monday’s filing, “will cause donors to flee, financial contributions to dry up, and structural rehabilitation to stop.”

• Without Trump’s efforts, the filing reads, “the Center will deteriorate further into an unsafe, decrepit structure that will be required to be taken down.”

• The document also suggests that if the venue deteriorated that way, the Kennedy Center could be replaced with “a large outdoor amphitheater overlooking the Potomac River.”

• Such a venue has “been proposed, by some, for many years,” it continued.

Or, just stick with me here, Trump could just put his ego away and find the money to renovate the center to honor JFK.

But then again, look at who we’re talking about.

Show me the lie.

Speaking of intolerance, remember when the right had a sense of humor about having a geriatric president with brains of pudding and the temperament of a child and didn’t let “reverence” for the office get in the way of a good joke?

Yeah, good times.

My goodness, what did he say that would destroy his career?

Of course, they cut off the part where Jelly Roll (in case you didn’t know who the hell this is) makes fun of himself . . .

But the MAGAns/MAGAites/MAGAniacs/whatever were not having it . . .

Funny thing, but Jelly Roll did not use Ozempic to lose the weight. He did it the old fashioned way, by literally working his ass and love handles off.

But Jelly Roll got the last laugh . . .

There’s a reason why we’ll never really get our ducks in a row . . .

And that is it.

No one “sold out.”

Trump is a clown. It’s not our fault the material writes itself.

The material would have written itself had Queen Kami won, but she didn’t.

So Trump jokes it is.

But the big story of the week wasn’t a big story at all, but a little blurb that was so ridiculous I just can’t help myself.

I either make fun of the hysteria or I go hide under the bed.

And there’s dog hair under the bed, and spiders. (Actually, I don’t know about the spiders, but there is dog hair.)

Natalie Winters, a White House “correspondent” and co-host on Bannon’s War Room, made a horrific discovery this week. Just shocking.

And at least one MAGA outlet took it and ran . . .

Wait until you hear how to earn them? Do you have to make a bomb? Behead a doll? Weave and sow your own burqa?

Because when the Girl Scouts start offering badges for learning Islamic doctrine, visiting mosques and participating in hijab-related programming, the organization is no longer merely accommodating Muslim members. It is helping institutionalize Islam inside the Girl Scout experience itself.

Oh, you mean like this?

I’m sorry. I interrupted the hysteria.

Nowadays, however, the Girl Scouts are apparently trying to get young recruits hooked on… Islam. . . .

That is a pretty dramatic shift from wildlife badges and cookie sales. Winters pointed to a February 2025 Girl Scout event at the SALAM Islamic Center in Sacramento, where girls were invited to tour the mosque, try on hijabs and learn about “the significance of modesty.”

And then, after that purely optional exercise, go home to their good Christian families understanding that Islam is just a religion like theirs.

Oh, the horror.

But continue with the hysteria.

This all must be very recent, right?

I mean, the whole of the Zio-Nut right it seemed took to Twitter to boycott Thin Mints and Samoas and declare America on the precipice of sharia law (that’s the second time this summer I’ve had to go price a burqa—the first was when El-Sayed won in Michigan).

R.I.P. Girl Scouts. It was fun while it lasted, but overnight the Muslims just rolled in and conquered the beloved institution of American goodness and light like they did Spain in 711 AD.

Oh, wait, that’s not quite right.

So it took them seven years. But Spain is still Muslim today.

See.

Wait, um, what is that I’m being told? What’s that you have buried way down there seven paragraphs in, Post Millennial?

The programming is not new and goes back to the early 2000s. A Girl Scout troop connected to PGMA in Washington, DC, advertised Ramadan overnight events dating back more than a decade. Activities included Islamic prayer, Quran and Hadith study, religious discussions and service during iftar. Girls were instructed to bring prayer garments or hijabs and Islamic educational materials.

Sooooo . . . early 2000s is not only not new, but it’s not even recent. We’re saying the Muslims have been “institutionalizing” themselves in the Girl Scouts for twenty years and no one noticed.

Hold on one second while I check something.

Hey, Google, when did the Boy Scouts start offering Muslim “kill the infidel” badges?

1980? You’re telling me that for the last forty-six years, the Muslims have been trying to “hook” Boy Scouts on terrorism and no one noticed and they just quietly then in the early 2000s moved on to Girl Scouts?

We haven’t panicked so far. I’ve seen the local girl scouts. None of them are dressed head to toe in a black. None of them even seem to know the words “Allahu Akbar” or even “Insallah.” There are no Halal-si-dos. What gives?

That raises a bigger cultural question. The Girl Scouts have always had some relationship with religion. Christian troops, Jewish troops, and other faith-based groups have used scouting as an extension of their communities for generations.

Yes, and they all do it the same way.

From the Girl Scouts . . .

With a list of the organizations they partner with . . .

So we have the Baha’i, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists . . . a gazillion Christian denominations (when the Roman Catholics and the Polish Catholics can’t even share, we’re in trouble) and . . . Islam.

I’m not really seeing the problem here, RedState.

But these are religions that preach tolerance and acceptance of gender equality, although there are certainly prescribed roles for husbands and wives, as well as motherhood.

So now RedState is worried about gender equality. I spent an entire week watching right-raging TwiX scream about abandoning the 19th Amendment because those crazy liberal women were too sympathetic to Lindsay Clancy’s plight. Where is RedState’s article about that?

Let’s not get it twisted: You can have sympathy for mothers. You can have sympathy for mothers who have post-partum psychosis. You can have sympathy for mothers who have been failed by a medical system.

But let’s not have too much sympathy for mothers who strangle their own children with exercise resistance bands. Because when you turn a heartless monster into a poster-woman for your movement, you might have a slight problem.

Same damn author, I kid you not. The problem, Kyle, is that we’re not sure Lindsay was a heartless monster, and some of us think perhaps the medical system failed her badly enough that she shouldn’t be held completely accountable for killing her children.

Anyway, back to Kyle’s screed on little cookie sellers going into mosques rather than his screed on women not all jumping on the “burn Lindsay” bandwagon.

This liberal culture cannot be sustained with the mass importation of foreigners with illiberal worldviews. Americans are increasingly being told that traditional national institutions must adapt themselves around the religious and cultural practices of growing immigrant communities. That is exactly what set off the recent DFW Airport fight over proposed Muslim ablution facilities.

Because no one besides Muslims in the US ever asks for special accommodations. 🙄

Now the same debate is showing up in one of the most familiar childhood organizations in America.

Twenty years or so after the program first started. And there was no debate until now. You jackasses didn’t even know.

No one is saying Muslim girls should be barred from the Girl Scouts.

Oh, no, no one would ever say that. They might think it, but saying it would be rude and not very good optics.

But preaching a religion whose adherents are notoriously intolerant of "infidels" is where our institutions should draw the line.

Because absolutely no other religion has zealots that are intolerant of people who are not their faith.

“Oh,” you say, “but, Lillia, that’s in Israel.” Okay, try this one.

Funny, but how the world grows more complicated . . .

In essence, the Muslims started their Boy Scout and Girl Scout programs for the same reason the other religions did. They didn’t want to convert but to conserve.

Back to the Post Millennial article . . .

Harvard University's Pluralism Project noted that in 2006, Muslim parents were seeking ways to combat American culture in the US, and looked to the Boy Scouts. "Whatever their background, all Muslims face a common challenge: encouraging their children to practice Islam in a society often dominated by Christianity and the mass media... To respond to this challenge, mosques and Islamic centers across the country have started Boy Scout and Girl Scout troops that provide recreational programs for children while also incorporating elements of the Muslim faith," they wrote.

Just like the Polish Catholics and the Roman Catholics and the Hindus and the Buddhists and the Jews and the Nazarenes and the Episcopalians, etc. and so on ad nauseum, parents wanted to pass on their traditions.

At the same time, it became a good way for other children to learn about faiths that were not their own (the Polish Catholics could finally begin to understand the Roman Catholics a little better—I am never going to get over that).

In the right hands, it becomes a tool of tolerance and enlightenment.

And in the wrong hands?

It becomes fodder for Friday.

This was a bad week for losing people. You never saw his face, but his voice was familiar. On Thursday, they announced Peter Cullen had passed.

On Wednesday, we lost Tim Curry.

I had forgotten all the movies he was in. But my favorite has to be Clue . . .

And on Tuesday, we lost Dolly Parton . . .

This one hurts. Dolly Parton was such a large part of my youth. There was her music, of course, but my mother’s family lived near Pigeon Forge and Sevierville, Tennessee. We went to the Dixie Stampede, which has since dropped the “Dixie” part, and Dollywood. Dolly Parton was such a big part of that community and the stories of her generosity and kindness were legion. She is what you really want in a “celebrity.”

There were so many clips of her interviews circulating, but I found two I wanted to share . . .

I know in her later years she “offended” some on the right by having more “generous” views on the alphabet crowd than most found acceptable, but she found a way to influence people without banging them over the head. That’s rare.

And she was a realist . . .

There are so many songs we could go out on this weekend, but this is my favorite and best fits my mood as this generation of greats passes into memory . . .

So play a little Dolly in remembrance or rewatch Clue (or even Transformers, but maybe only the first one because they kind of went downhill after that).

And have the best weekend.

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Lindsay Clancy would never deny she killed the children. In fact, she would admit to it immediately. But the twist came when she pled not guilty by reason of insanity. Now, over three years later (because “justice” is anything but swift in the US), the trial of Lindsay Clancy has become yet another culture war battle with a reasonable middle ground trying to balance between two competing hysterical extremes.

I will admit I have not followed the case and I only grew interested when I started watching the usual suspects lose their minds and wondered, “Now what is this tomfoolery about?”

I have an opinion about the case, but it’s not strongly held. What I have a stronger opinion about is the endless exhaustion I feel over the very loud factions of our society that cannot approach any situation with anything approximating nuance and reason and instead run around with their hands waving in a panic, while missing a much larger issue (in this case two issues) entirely.

But we need to get some background to even have that discussion.

The insanity plea is a very old, very well recognized concept.

Insanity pleas date all the way back to Greek and Roman law. In essence, since ancient times, people have realized that there is a difference in culpability between those who are sane and those who are disconnected from reality, or, in a word, crazy. The current standard used dates back to Britain in 1843, when a Scottish woodcutter suffering from paranoia killed the secretary to a Sir Robert Peel, thinking the secretary was Peel. The jury acquitted him, and the Queen freaked out because she assumed that if she too was killed, someone could get away with it by claiming “insanity.” (Yes, royalty has always been self-centered. Who knew?) In response, the House of Lords came up with the M’Naghten Rules, named for the assassin.

That every man is to be presumed to be sane, and ... that to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.

In the last nearly two hundred years, the rules have been “tweaked,” but the gist is essentially the same. The defendant has to suffer a break with reality to the point where they become incapable of judging right from wrong.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that they can’t “premeditate.” A crazy person can plan out a murder. The question is if they were enough in control of their faculties to know that the murder itself was wrong.

Now how often do people try to use the insanity plea? Overall, not often. The following statistics come from 1991, but no recent studies have been done, so we’ll go with this.

From the abstract, which gave an aggregate figure from eight states that varied quite widely . . .

Overall, the insanity defense was raised in one percent of all felony cases. Further, only 26 percent of those raising the insanity defense were actually acquitted NGRI [not guilty by reason of insanity].

But there are caveats to this . . .

• “An unexpected finding, across jurisdictions, was that some defendants were

  found NGRI without ever entering an NGRI plea. In fact, approximately 15

  percent of all insanity acquittees never actually plead NGRI. Of these, most had

  plead not guilty.”

• “Finally, these data indicate that the decision to acquit someone was seldom

  made by a jury; only seven percent of 2,500 acquittals were disposed of by a

  jury. Rather the decision to acquit was made by other key players in the criminal justice process including the prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge. It’s

  clear that negotiation plays a central role in the insanity plea, just as it does in

  other areas of the criminal justice process.”

In other words, being found NGRI by a jury is a long shot. The odds are against Clancy.

And even if found not guilty by reason of insanity, by Massachusetts law, she’ll face a mandatory forty day observation and likely long-term commitment with periodic review.

Either way, Clancy’s life as she knew it is over, and that’s without the whole “having killed her kids, lost her husband, and being paralyzed from the waist down” thing.

Postpartum psychosis is also a very old, very well recognized syndrome.

The recognition of postpartum psychosis dates as far back as the recognition of insanity as a mitigating factor when dispensing “justice.” In 400 BC, Hippocrates (of the Hippocratic Oath fame) was the first to document the affliction.

His patient was delusional, confused, and insomniac within six days of a twin birth[3]. A medieval gynecologist attributed the disorder to “too much moisture in the womb, causing the brain to fill with water.” [4]

We can laugh, but I doubt the women suffering laugh.

The same article continues with a concise history.

By the late eighteenth century, German and French obstetricians and neurologists were beginning to write more frequently about the disease. In 1858, French psychiatrist Louis Victor Marcé published his “Treatise on the Madness of Women who are Pregnant, Recently Delivered, or Nursing.” [5] Marcé’s carefully observed treatise, while suggesting treatments that today seem woefully barbaric (applying leeches to the vulva, for example), nevertheless is a model of observation – and Marcé saw in his postpartum mothers the same symptoms that doctors struggle to control today. His observations led him to conjecture about the role of the immune response and the endocrine system, two systems that today are widely acknowledged to contribute to postpartum mental illness.

In talking about postpartum psychosis itself, the article goes on to say . . .

The name “postpartum psychosis” is not, perhaps, the best moniker for an illness that is at least as much an affective, or mood, disorder as it is a psychotic disorder. Many clinicians mistakenly believe that the term can be applied to any psychotic symptoms in the postpartum period, or that its clinical features will be identical to those of schizophrenia or other primary psychotic disorders. In fact, the symptoms of postpartum psychosis are distinctive and unique.

And those symptoms are . . .

Now for some statistics I got from Claude . . .

• 1 to 2 births per 1,000 result in diagnosed postpartum psychosis (I used “diagnosed” for a reason, as the number may be greater). For comparison, per 1,000 live births, 5.52 infants die, and per 1,000 live births 0.18 women die. I know we don’t work with fractions of people, but we need something for scale. Postpartum psychosis is far more common than maternal mortality but a little more than a third as common as infant mortality.

• Symptoms usually emerge within weeks of delivery; however, the symptoms are on a continuum, and early signs can be dismissed as the typical effects of having a baby—insomnia, “baby blues,” anxiety, etc.—and only later grow severe enough to be recognized as something more serious.

• While it is difficult to get a solid idea of the percentage of women with postpartum psychosis who are at risk of killing their children, among women who suffer a depressive element with the psychosis (as Clancy did), research has shown the percentage to be as high as 4.5. And while it’s hard to get a bead on what percentage of women with postpartum psychosis also suffer a depressive element, one large cohort study put it at 41 percent.

• Finally, up to 88 percent of cases of postpartum psychosis could, in retrospect, be diagnosed as either bipolar or schizophrenia. That fact is specifically important for this case.

Given all of that, while postpartum psychosis is recognized, beginning in 1968, in the DSM-II, it still does not have a standalone diagnosis in the DSM-V. Why is this important? Many countries have laws on the books that recognize the mitigating factor of postpartum psychosis, even if they don’t word it that way. For example, the UK Infanticide Act of 1938 allows women to be charged with manslaughter rather than murder if “at the time of the act or omission the balance of her mind was disturbed by reason of her not having fully recovered from the effect of giving birth to the child or by reason of the effect of lactation consequent upon the birth of the child.” In the US, no special deference is made, despite the commonality of the disorder.

Another interesting tidbit that will become relevant: the treatment for bipolar disorder is commonly an antidepressant and a mood stabilizer. Significant research suggests that simply treating bipolar disorder with an antidepressant can induce a manic switch. But one specific case study looked at the effect of treating postpartum depression masking bipolar disorder with simply antidepressants. The outcomes were, to put it mildly, not good.

A reappraisal of information collected retrospectively and prospectively leads us to conclude that: (1) postpartum depression was the first manifestation of bipolar disorder, (2) treatment of postpartum depression with an antidepressant likely lead to induction of a mixed episode with psychotic features, (3) continued use of antidepressant perpetuated the mixed episode and prolonged the hospitalization, (4) early identification of prodromal symptoms (insomnia, racing thoughts and irritability) and prophylactic use of quetiapine prevented postpartum recurrences of depression or psychosis, and finally (5) avoidance of antidepressants and use of mood stabilizers was effective in preventing further recurrences.

This information will be important, as correctly diagnosing and getting the right medication can make the difference between a woman who functions and a woman who goes off the deep end.

Was Lindsey Clancy “out of her mind” when she killed her children?

I’m going to admit, I don’t know. All we have is the information from the trial. However, at least from what can be gathered from that, Clancy did indeed have what looked like a textbook case of postpartum psychosis and was desperately seeking help. Here are the broad outlines.

Her youngest was born in May of 2022. No one really talked about how she was during the pregnancy nor during the five months between when she she gave birth for the third time and the fall when she started seeking medical help and her mother and sister describe noticing something being horridly amiss. The lag between the birth of her last and people noticing symptoms or her seeking help is not really evidence against postpartum psychosis. As I described above, in the early stages, it often manifests in ways that can be written off as simply “having had a baby.” But it grows worse over time. So the lag neither proves nor disproves that she suffered from postpartum psychosis.

Lindsay Clancy would first contact medical professionals in September of 2022. Between then and the killing of her children, she would go through three providers, including a psychiatrist, and receive thirteen different psychiatric medications, including the antidepressant Zoloft, the antipsychotic Seroquel, benzodiazepines Klonopin and Valium, and the mood stabilizer Lamictal. At one point, she would receive a diagnosis of bipolar, which her husband would immediately push back on. That doesn’t necessarily make him a villain, but if you’re paying attention to the above, a missed diagnosis of bipolar underlying postpartum psychosis and the resultant misprescription of drugs can have dire consequences.

To be fair, the prosecution pointed out in court that many of the pills were not taken, suggesting that she was seeking the help but not taking it. Furthermore, in public (if not in court), an attempt has been made to blame SSRIs. The problem was not the SSRIs. The problem was the misapplication and misdiagnosis. Had anxiety and depression simply been her issue, they likely would have alleviated it.

However, she would end up in the ER on December 31, 2022, after telling her husband she was having suicidal thoughts, thoughts of hurting the children, and feeling “numb.” In early January, she would spend five days in an in-patient facility, being discharged when she told the doctors she was no longer having “intrusive” thoughts. The day before she killed her children, she had her final telehealth visit with her psychiatrist. Through this all, she kept a journal describing her struggles. In short, she seemed to know something was seriously wrong and she was trying to address it.

Her husband was well aware of what she was going through. He lived with her, obviously. But she was open about her struggles. In December of 2022, she sat down with Patrick and her mother and told them that not only was she suicidal but she had “intrusive” thoughts about harming the children. In this conversation, Patrick asked her directly if she felt she needed to be kept away from the children. She said no. He described the situation as “confusing” because she disclosed these “intrusive” thoughts but then went on to act like any mother. Patrick further disclosed that no medical professional told him she shouldn’t be left alone with the children. (Of course, interjection here, that seems like common sense after an ER visit, a sit-down conversation, and an in-patient stay, which is why Patrick doesn’t come across as particularly sympathetic to me. That doesn’t mean Lindsay isn’t to blame. It means he shares some in my eyes, regardless of whether she was “crazy” or not.)

An interesting tidbit, Patrick testified for the prosecution, and Lindsay is now his ex-wife. He remarried this year, although as late as October of 2024, he still indicated in an interview he was trying to maintain a relationship with Lindsay. It is not necessarily damning that he testified for the prosecution as he found the bodies and called the police. On the other hand, his mother testified for the defense, defending her ex-daughter-in-law as a very good and loving mother, up until her break, and also describing watching her then-daughter-in-law spiral.

How have people reacted?

Oh, now this is the interesting part, even more interesting than what seems a cut and dried case of a woman going crazy and killing her children (whatever the jury decides). This is the “tomfoolery” I described earlier.

We have the outlandish (but perhaps somewhat defensible) . . .

“Blaming” her husband is kind of an understatement. There are suggestions that he killed the children and convinced his mentally unwell wife she did it. I don’t think it’s true, but the theory is interesting nonetheless because of the thought process that underlies it. CNN gives a list of reasons, among them lack of faith in institutions of justice (no duh). But I think it’s simpler: (1) it’s hard to wrap your head around a mother killing her children, and (2) we only have his word that the children were alive when he left the house, and he doesn’t come across as very sympathetic. That may just be optics and “the moment,” but I can easily picture a man who couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to the fact that his wife is spiraling into madness because he himself would then have to look after their children. My bias is affirmed by how relatively quickly he remarried and “moved on.” But again, I’m at a distance. I could be completely wrong.

The more interesting reactions come from the usual suspects in the culture wars.

On the “left,” we have the “Lindsay, same” crowd.

Meanwhile, outside the courthouse . . .

Am I overly comfortable with this? Nope. I think you can have compassion for Lindsay Clancy. In fact, I think given enough experiences in life with mental health issues in yourself or others, you will have compassion for Lindsay Clancy. I think if justice is served, based on what I’ve gathered, ruling her NGRI and leaving her in psychiatric care for an indefinite amount of time will be punishment enough. The woman killed her kids, she lost her husband, she’s paralyzed from the sternum down, and she’s only in her mid-thirties. She has a long, hard life ahead of her, and she will never not be known for what she did, no matter the reason. But to paint Lindsay as some sort of martyr for women’s causes? It’s not realistic.

Women are the freest they’ve ever been with the most options, meaning it’s not as if we’re forced to get married and have kids. Something bad happened to Lindsay, but bad things happen to people all the time. Framing this as “society mistreats women” just comes across as really selective and suggests a dystopia we don’t really live in.

On the other hand, among the other “vocal” fringe that tends to be more “right,” we’ve got ourselves a full-blown moral panic going on that, if I actually thought it was more widespread than TwiX, would almost justify the “society hates women” framing.

Any sympathy or compassion for Lindsay Clancy, any attempt to remind them of how well established the insanity defense and well recognized postpartum psychosis are is framed as this sick cultural shift toward “women wanting to kill their kids.”

We can disagree about whether Lindsay Clancy was in her right mind or not. We can disagree about the line between compassion and validation. We can have a conversation about the wisdom of charging her with first degree murder rather than manslaughter, which ups the stakes for the jury. We can talk about how much culpability we think “crazy” people have in their acts. We can even entertain the suggestion that Clancy was crazy, but not that crazy, as her actions can both be viewed as recognizing she needed help but also understanding herself that she was a danger to her children, and yet she remained.

But what we cannot do in good faith is say that this fringe movement that is crazy about everything is going to lead to a bunch of women being inspired by Lindsay Clancy and killing their children, particularly if she is judged not guilty by reason of insanity. That also suggests a dystopia that does not exist.

That’s the kind of culture war hysterical BS that makes the rest of us “normies” so very, very tired.

To which I replied . . .

Yes, I’ve been un-shadow-banned. Now I get to exercise my self restraint on the cesspool that is TwiX.

That’s a challenge.

Can we talk about the elephants in the room, please?

However, there is a point to be made here. Lindsay Clancy gave everyone plenty of notice that she was spiraling out of control and that she was a danger to her children, whether you believe she was psychotic at the end or just plain evil.

How many times and how many ways do we see this pattern repeated? Someone shows all the signs of X, signs get ignored, and bad things happen.

Let’s take the first one: our medical system is a joke, whether you’re talking physiology or psychology. You have a woman who ends up in the ER and who admits herself to in-patient treatment saying she’s having “intrusive” thoughts about killing her children, and someone suggests she might be bipolar, and you’re just “throwing” medications at her and have her doing tele-health visits?!? Lindsay Clancy should have physically been seeing someone. For upwards of five months, this woman screamed every symptom of postpartum psychosis, and the medical system just kept futzing around.

And it’s not like postpartum psychosis is so rare no one would think, “Hey, it’s a long shot, but maybe we should look at this diagnosis.” In 2024, there were 3,628,934 births. That means of those births, at a minimum, 3,628 of them resulted in a woman suffering postpartum psychosis (1 in 1,000). If the one study can be generalized and 41 percent of those have a depressive element, that is 1,487 women. Of those, 4.5 percent is sixty-six. I will admit, I don’t hear sixty-six stories every year of women killing their children, so the numbers are likely inflated by sampling or research bias. But there’s no denying that postpartum psychosis exists, and that it is common enough and dangerous enough that if you have a woman saying, “Hey, I’m thinking about hurting my kids,” someone should sit up and take notice. Those women who have it, especially with a depressive element, represent an obvious danger to their children, through no fault of their own, as hard as that fact is to grasp. So why no medical “professional” suggested that maybe Lindsay shouldn’t be alone with her kids rather escapes me, especially as she openly expressed her worries about “intrusive” thoughts.

So the medical system failed to diagnose her and approach the situation with the statistical seriousness it requires.

But is that unusual? Oh, hell no. Our medical system is widely known for getting diagnoses wrong or not taking things seriously. Usually however the person who suffers is the one who could have caught a physical ailment earlier, not the kids of a woman in the throes of postpartum psychosis. But the mechanism is the same. Overworked clinicians in a profit driven system throw pills at something and patients are ill served and fall through the cracks.

But let’s for a moment assume that Lindsay Clancy was not “crazy.” Another system completely failed in this case. Do you know the stupid reasons CPS is called in? And a woman saying she has thoughts of killing her children doesn’t raise any red flags for anyone? No one stopping by to do an in-home study? No one suggesting maybe the kids would be better off with the grandparents for a time, until Lindsay was stable? Nothing? Just crickets?

Our bureaucracy is just as torpid and bloated as our medical system, and often with the same results: the people who need help or need intervention don’t get it, and bad things happen.

See what I mean about larger issues at play? Lindsay Clancy’s children were failed by at least two very expensive and bloated systems, even if you’re not willing to suggest that Lindsay herself was. And because we make this about “martyrdom and women’s rights” or “abolish the 19th” 🙄 or . . .

rather than trying to fix the broken systems, we’ll have more Lindsay Clancys in the future.

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How’s that war going?

If you ask Trump or Fox News . . .

If you ask literally anyone else including Mark Levin . . .

On the plus side, he admits the war is going badly and we’re not winning.

On the down side, because things are going badly, we should nuke Iran.

I never really understood the desire to hang people for their “words.” But I’m starting to get it. I am “triggered” by this. I think if we’re going to nuke someone to make ourselves safer, I’d rather drop a bomb on Mark Levin’s house. We’ll even make sure his family is gone, so only he goes out in a blaze of non-glory.

We talked about the USS Lincoln yesterday, so we can check that off our list. It’s headed home finally, though maybe leaving behind the smaller boats, because I guess you’re okay if you’ve spent nine months on a smaller boat, or maybe we won’t notice if people start committing suicide on the smaller boats. SMH.

Of course, we still have the problem of our stockpiles running low, and if this story is anything to go by, that will remain a problem for the foreseeable future. (By the way, remember those old jokes about how communist factories never really produced anything because the system didn’t reward production, just presence. Yeah, mentioning that for no reason.)

Okay, I’ve changed my mind. First we hang the people who do shit like this.

Those involved described a project that was rushed and ill considered from the start. Congress paved the way, removing government contracting guardrails — meant to ensure taxpayer money isn’t wasted — so that Ukraine-related defense projects could be funded quickly. The Army took advantage, handing General Dynamics lucrative no-bid awards without knowing whether the machines it planned to use could perform the desired work. The Army’s due diligence was inadequate, four former Army and General Dynamics officials told ProPublica.

But the details, OMG, the details . . . it was like an old slapstick routine . . .

It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week.

Only weeks earlier, defense officials and executives had touted the factory’s innovative new machinery, imported from Turkey, at a gala opening ceremony. But employees were already used to spectacular mishaps, fiery and otherwise. “After the second, third, fourth time, it just became almost normal,” one former worker said. “It got to the point where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.”

Instead of producing shells in an efficient and streamlined fashion, the pricey machines kept failing in bizarre ways. The robot arms would swing out of control, smashing into carefully calibrated equipment, and sometimes they would unexpectedly drop hunks of steel 5 feet down to the floor. The factory’s signature device, meant to precisely stretch the steel for the artillery shells, instead often cracked it beyond repair. Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.” To workers, even the factory buildings themselves came to feel doomed, with acrid smoke hanging in 100-degree heat over foundations seemingly sinking into the earth.

The factory never produced a single useable shell. Not one.

And rather than hold the company accountable, the government gave them more contracts.

When asked how exactly they planned to recoup the money, this is how the government responded . . .

In a detailed statement to ProPublica, the Army said it will recover funding for the project by getting unspecified discounts from General Dynamics on production orders.

Yeah, and Mexico is going to pay for the wall.

“Discounts” on no-bid contracts. Now that’s hilarious.

But this is no isolated incident.

Compared to the multibillion-dollar budgets of other DOD projects, the financial cost of the Texas debacle is small. But the lack of consequences for the companies involved, in the view of defense-spending critics, is symptomatic of a larger problem: a deep-rooted culture at the Pentagon and in Congress in which expensive failures lead only to more spending. Such critics fear that extreme cases like this one could become more common if the Trump administration succeeds in boosting the defense budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. The administration is also seeking tens of billions of dollars for its war against Iran and pressuring defense companies to quickly ramp up weapons production.

“Too often the contractors have no accountability for their mistakes,” defense budget researcher William Hartung said. The Texas failure, he said, “is a foreshadow of what’s to come if the Trump administration gets the budget it asked for.”

Meanwhile, you’re buying off-brand everything to try to stay afloat.

Ain’t American capitalism great?

Oh, as an add on, an interesting statistic I found through Opinion Today . . .

That’s predictable. Here’s what caught my eye.

Usually independents are between Republicans and Democrats, but here they’re even more skeptical than the Democrats.

I find that interesting. I suppose my immediate explanation is that independents are truly becoming independent and don’t believe either party will put a stop to the war, and that cynicism is showing up here. But do you have a thesis?

The expendability of people when it comes to politics: Charlie Kirk and Brandon Straka (of J6 and WalkAway fame)

I know, this is my pet fixation, but if you start to understand this, you begin to see the whole of the machine. My sister shared a clip from Ian Carroll with me, so I want to give her credit. However, someone had sped it up, so I clipped the original.

As an outside observer, do I think Charlie Kirk was that powerful? That’s where I disagree with Ian Carroll. I don’t know that he ever would have been president, just because the populist conservative movement has been betrayed itself and has betrayed others so spectacularly. Being associated with it unless he completely disavowed it is toxic.

Kirk was “special” because he was visible, and he was made visible by his own efforts, yes, but also because he had the money behind him. But people built him up for a certain purpose and when he decided to buck that purpose, he and his memory were expendable. (Even if we decide Tyler Robinson did it, the fact that the current iteration of TPUSA is almost unrecognizable and those at TPUSA are pushing ideals that Charlie Kirk would have rejected in his name should make your skin crawl. He has been as rejected and exploited in death as he was in life. And I say that as a pretty neutral observer.)

But this is also a picture of the way the Elephant and Ass Show treats the people who buy into it and foolishly validate it. I caught a second video on X this morning (Friday morning) that illustrated this from another angle.

Straka went on to address Bongino . . .

Look, I’m ambivalent about how much sympathy I have for the J6ers. They were done dirty, really dirty. But in all these I notice one thing: none of them ever seem to blame the person who did them the most dirty, and that would be Donald Trump. He had a chance to pardon them in 2021 and damn the consequences, taking responsibility for his role in their persecution. But he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t even begin to really address it until it became a campaign issue.

And this is what people need to learn. Stop fighting for politicians, and don’t be afraid to call them out. They couldn’t care less about what happens to you, so you owe them nothing.

“Habibi City” sends the Zionist “bubbies” into an utter tailspin . . .

I had this in the Friday roundup, but Friday got too long. So here you go.

Just for the record, “habibi” just means friend in Arabic. That’s it. I find it’s actually kind of a fun word, like “bubby,” a Yiddish word for friend.

The link is to an archive version, so you can read the article for free, all of it. And honestly, I’ll tell you to go read it. I’m not sure what all the angst is about. It is actually pretty predictable fare, all the way around.

But this is ultimately the positive picture of New York that the article paints summed up in a couple paragraphs . . .

At Barzakh, one of the first sources of tension was over whether to allow a group of Palestinians from the pre-1948 borders to perform with Israeli peers. “Of course, they’re not Zionists, but these were tensions we had to reckon with,” Abba recalls. L​ast year, Barzakh hosted a Hebrew-Arabic language exchange​. After the event was posted on Instagram, a heated debate unfolded in the comments section. “Consider how many Arabic speakers are forced to learn Hebrew as a means of survival​,” one user noted. “This is hope,” said another. Some called on Abba to cancel, but he didn’t budge. “There is within the Arab young generation, the kids who were born here in U.S., an idea that you cannot sit with an Israeli in the same room,” he told The Forward at the time. “I’m the owner of this place, and I say this is not the case.​ ​But you do lose business.” . . .

“People make fun of the idea of coexistence these days as an ideal, but it happens here,” he tells me. He’s especially proud of what goes on at Barzakh during Ramadan. “You have Iranians drinking wine at one end of the bar and hijabis at the other having tea,” he says. “And you can’t find that in Tehran, in Casablanca, in Jeddah or Nablus.”

To me, this is what I expect of a multicultural city, and it gives me hope. Here on US soil, we can all maintain our traditions but still get along.

Of course, while I’ve never been accused of being optimistic, even I am too optimistic for some.

Some people clearly do not want to get along.

Enter the Israeli outlet Haaretz, which has a bone to pick with the New York Magazine about an article they did about a city in America.

“Against this celebration of the Levant, New York Magazine points an accusing finger at Israeli cuisine, and especially at the restaurants that serve it. The article’s central claim is that the success of Israeli cuisine before October 7 came, at least in part, at the expense of the Arab and Palestinian cuisines from which many of the dishes identified with it originated. The magazine notes that hummus, falafel, kubbeh and various salads were not born in the State of Israel, and that much of what was served in New York until then as “Israeli food” is in fact Palestinian, Arab, North African or Mizrahi.

And where is the lie in that? Are we back to “woke” again where we have to pretend that a country that has lasted for less than nine decades somehow has a “historical” cuisine, and that hummus was developed by Polish Jews post 1940s when they “discovered” garbanzo beans and tahini in the Levant?

But if you want a “glimpse” into the mind of Israelis, understand that “Mizrahis” are Jews. They’re Arab Jews. They’re Jews who have dwelt in the Levant since time immemorial. They aren’t transplanted Poles and Ukrainians. They’re actual people of the physical land.

And they’re not somehow considered “Israel.”

Telling, huh?

But here in the US, there was a meltdown as well. (Why wouldn’t there be?)

If you go looking for the “smear” of Jews, you’ll find the very predictable . . .

A tone-deaf New York Magazine “hit piece” that purportedly celebrated Arab and Muslim culture in the Big Apple – but actually fixated on a so-called Israeli “genocide” of Palestinians and referred to the Jewish state as a mere “land mass currently called Israel” – has sparked fierce backlash, prompting outraged subscribers to cancel while insiders reveal the publication’s dubious practices.

See predicatable.

And then there’s this one . . .

Let’s see if we can answer that . . .

On the other hand . . .

Oh, but you say, we’re talking about Muslims (Mamdani himself not being Arab or Farsi, but still Muslim).

So, yes, there’s a place for Jews, and they’ve made it, in greater numbers it would seem than those they say are trying to drive them out.

Now do I have a problem with the the New York Magazine article? Yes. It does what I hate, which is hyperbolic victimhood by association.

It’s a tension heightened by the reality that our visibility and clout increases alongside suffering, trauma, and despair in our home countries.

What can we do about it? At the very least, a kind of vigilance is required. In her 2012 essay collection, Black Cool, the writer and activist Rebecca Walker describes ancestral West African qualities that are often excluded from modern understandings of Black coolness: traits such as “cultivated reserve,” “coded resistance,” “intentionally disruptive eccentricity.” For SWANA’s diasporic communities, cool is also in some ways coded and inseparable from its origins. In Arabic, it’s known as sumud, a grassroots concept that emerged in Palestine after the Six-Day War partly as a means of survival. Sumud is steadfastness. It is perseverance and a quiet refusal to disappear. No matter what we’re up against — occupation, displacement, annihilation — we can’t afford to lose our cool.

You’re living in freaking New York. You are no more likely to suffer “occupation, displacement, [or] annihilation” than I am. Or Rebecca Walker of “Black Cool” fame, whoever the hell she is.

But in the end, I can’t get too worked up about that attitude because the Free Press came in and finally outdid themselves.

The article is behind a paywall, but the outlet was kind enough to let the author record a little video and post it on TwiX.

If you don’t want to watch the video, which is hysterical both as in the man is having a psychotic break with reality and as in hilarious, we can get straight to the point with the final paragraph before the paywall . . .

Even if you ignore for a moment the fact that the real blād, for Arafat, is not overseas but a three-hour Acela ride away, a larger question remains: If all you care about is your native culture, if you wish to fill every moment of your day with swell SWANA sensations, why not, ya know, go back to SWANA?

And Mr. Leibovitz can say this, according to the video, because he came to the US for the sole purpose of making America a better place and not to build it in his own image.

Is that true?

Well, here is his “career” according to Wikipedia.

So Leibovitz was in the PR division of the IDF, he comes to the US and takes a space an American student might have had at Columbia University to get an MS in journalism and Ph.D. in communications (that’s in another part of the Wikipedia page). And then he uses those degrees to go to work for «counts on fingers» the Israeli consulate as a senior press officer, culture editor of the Jewish Week (a pro-Israel, Zionist outlet), and editor at large of the Jewish publication the Tablet (another pro-Israel, Zionist outlet).

In other words, he is doing exactly what the people he’s complaining about are doing. He’s living an Israeli life here in the US, fixated not on Israeli culture (whatever the hell that might be) but on the well-being of the Israel project. He wants to build an America that is Israel-friendly. No, I take that back. He’s desperate to build an America that is Israel friendly, so desperate that he’ll take an innocuous article about the rise of Arab-Farsi-Middle Eastern culture in New York and turn it into “The Muslims are coming! Everyone grab your metaphorical guns (or maybe even literal guns)!” It’s one thing to go to a Lebanese bookstore in America to learn about Lebanese bookmaking or to go to a fundraiser for women in Gaza. It’s another to work for a Zionist publication in America pushing Israeli excuses about such things as why Israel had to shoot a car with a dying little girl in it nearly 350 times and then try to kill the people who came to try to rescue her.

So why does Liel not go home? Oh, that’s right. Because the propaganda he spews doesn’t work quite so well coming from outside the house.

Now this self-deportation I can get behind . . .

If you don’t want to maneuver your way around CNN’s paywall, the archive.is link is here.

There is one telling section in here.

What about security?

With details of the family’s imminent relocation emerging, one rather important element was not immediately addressed: their security.

Their taxpayer-funded police protection while visiting the country has been a longstanding bone of contention. In fact, it was why Harry made an 11th-hour decision against bringing his wife and children to his London engagements last month, as initially planned.

Harry, who remains fifth in line to the British throne, has been embroiled in a years-long battle with the UK government after his security was downgraded by its Royal and VIP Executive Committee (RAVEC) when he and Meghan stepped down from his royal duties.

But so far, the British state has refused to budge.

Last year, Harry told the BBC that he couldn’t “see a world in which I would bring my wife and children back to the UK at this point.” His remarks came as he lost a challenge against the Home Office in the UK Court of Appeal over his security arrangements. At the end of June, he was still waiting on a review by RAVEC’s Risk Management Board.

It was not immediately clear if they had found a resolution with the Home Office or who would pay for any necessary security on their return. A UK government spokesperson has previously described its protective security system as “rigorous and proportionate.”

As far as I know, they have no security in the US, other than what they pay for with their allowance and whatever they can grift from Netflix for shows no one watches.

My guess is that when they moved here, they thought they would become American royalty. Instead, they just blended into the toxic sea of the overprivileged and self-hyped American celebrity class.

And that’s no fun.

But what’s your take?

Escapism

I actually watched things this week.

To be honest, that was last week, but when I was writing up the SMC, I forgot and it’s worth talking about. The movie was visually stunning. Emma Stone does her usual great job. She really is quite versatile. The basic premise was interesting, and the “feminist” message, especially given the time period in which it was set, was not too heavy-handed. But as I watched, I wondered: are humans really that much about sex? Or is this marketing? Or Holly-weird?

The other half and I also watched . . .

Bob Odenkirk is kind of typecasting himself, but that’s okay. The movies are fun and predictable.

Also . . .

I really like David Tennent. My other half’s opinion? The eight episodes could have been two. But I notice he watched it. British mystery series are as much about character development as the mystery. If you like that, this is your cup of tea. If not, then I suspect you’ll share the other half’s opinion.

And finally . . .

I was expecting a twisty mystery. It’s more about police incompetence, which makes sense since it’s based on a a true story. Is it good or bad? If you’re going in looking for a twisty mystery, save your three hours. If you want a window into UK police incompetence and the effect it had on this family, you might get something out of it.

And I read . . .

I love these little books. They’re short and fun and the main character is wonderfully drawn while the side characters are good as well. I guess Apple TV has turned this into a series with Alexander Skarsgard as Murderbot. I actually think he’s the perfect fit.

Well, summer is almost over. Goodreads released their list of “fall reads.” In North Dakota, they’re harvesting wheat. I have zucchini coming out of my ears and the winter squash is taking over the garden while the lettuce bolted. Finally, football practice at the local high schools is fully underway. How was your summer?

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And for a little political fun, we go to the Chinese, in honor of hitting the 40 trillion mark . . .1

I love how close they got Alec Baldwin’s voice.

And away we go . . .

Meet the “world’s ugliest dog” . . .

Given that the contest only includes the US, I don’t think the title is accurate, but she’s still so ugly she’s cute.

I’m not a big fan of squid to begin with . . .

Twenty tons.

I didn’t even know there was that much squid in all of the US at one time.

I’ve heard of recycling, but this is ridiculous.

Last year, Lodge was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing and selling body parts “as if they were baubles.” Authorities said Lodge was at the center of a ghoulish scheme in which he shipped brains, skin, hands and faces from cadavers to buyers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

His wife, Denise Lodge, was sentenced to just over a year in prison for assisting him. Six other people who bought remains from Cedric Lodge also pleaded guilty and have been sentenced, according to Harvard.

In one example, Cedric Lodge provided skin to a buyer so it could be tanned into leather and bound into a book, a “deeply horrifying reality,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Alisan Martin said in a court filing.

Well, Grandpa did love to read 🥴 . . .

Sometimes you wonder how the world got so messed up. And sometimes you get the answer. With leaders like this . . .

Burnham is the new UK prime miniser.

Not all that bright.

Nancy Mace lost her primary recently so she’s got to find a new gig . . .

Mace (R-SC) broke out her inked-up gun show while promoting “Get Maced,” a program where she will apparently address news of the day.

The 48-year-old South Carolina Republican revealed in February that she got several tattoos, which provided her “the pain that I need to feel.”

Yes, I know Nancy Mace’s history.

No, I’m not going to refrain from laughing about what seems clearly to me to be a midlife crisis.

Meanwhile in Florida . . .

If you’re asking why does that name sound familiar, it’s because this is Alexander Vindman.

Yes, he was the babyfaced skidmark with delusions of grandeur who caused the exhausting first impeachment.

Thank you, Florida, for once doing the smart thing and keeping that drama queen at home.

Speaking of changing careers, SpokesBarbie is out . . .

All these blonde women the Trump administration keeps hiring remind me of Margo Needler . . .

Don’t worry, they’ll find another plastic person to replace this plastic person.

Honestly, I hadn’t thought of it before, but the one thing you could say about Kayleigh “Binders” McEnany and Biden’s two, Jen “Peppermint Patti” Psaki and Karine “Spokesmoppet” Jean-Pierre, was that they were memorable.

The women this administration puts forward can be switched around like dolls and no one would notice.

Maybe even some of the men too.

Who will replace her?

Okay, that face? Are we being punked?

One of the leading contenders to replace departing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is a California native who once worked for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Pundits say a natural fit for the role would be Steven Cheung, who is already serving as the White House communications director. Cheung helped oversee some of Leavitt’s responsibilities while she was away on maternity leave.

Ah, pundits say. He doesn’t stand a chance.

Trump was so vain he made soldiers who went to his birthday cage match pass physical specs. There’s no way Oddjob here is becoming the face of the Trump administration. (I know, I just dated myself mightily. Every year, Bond week on TBS, it was a ritual with my father.)

Of course, the leading choice, at least of the MAGA cult, seems to be . . .

Why?

By the way, this same Kalshi . . .

So there’s that.

But the Democrats are afraid of this Scott Jennings?

He suggested he had a conversation with Mitch McConnell, a turtle-shaped potato that we still haven’t seen outside the vegetable patch in months.

No one’s afraid of people who have conversations with produce.

Meanwhile, it seems that SpokesBarbie might not have left under the best of terms.

Speaking of Natalie Harp, a name I had never heard before now . . .

OMG, did that set off a firestorm.

I heard what he said. I think that’s on you if you heard “affair.” I heard more “human binkie for an eighty year old insecure child.”

As I said, “human binkie for an eighty year old insecure child.”

Jesse Watters was about the only one not losing his mind . . .

Do I think that Watters has finally found solid footing and a sense of integrity? 😳😂 No. He’s at Fox News. But I think he might understand that maybe “MAGA” wants to brush this one off and not draw attention to it.

Because once you notice, the relationship is weird AF. Someone ain’t right in the head here.

It’s not quite true that Trump saved her life.

From the New Republic . . .

Harp claimed she received “an FDA-approved immunotherapy drug for an unapproved use,” but Trump’s Right to Try law only applies to drugs that have not been approved by the FDA. Healthcare providers were already allowed to prescribe FDA-approved drugs for off-label uses long before Trump ever entered office.

So basically, nothing Trump did helped Natalie. And even if he did, this relationship is a little strange.

Let’s go back to the Times article.

Wherever President Trump goes, his most dedicated aide is never far behind. Even on a golf course in Scotland, the president found himself pursued by his platinum blonde assistant, who sprinted over the fairways to keep up with his buggy.

Nicknamed the “human printer” because she often carries paper copies of Trump’s Truth Social posts, Natalie Harp believed she was doing her job in Scotland, keeping the president informed of supportive articles and messages.

However, it appears Trump just wanted to play golf.

Mortified that she had upset the president, Harp later wrote him an apology.

“I … am sorry if I was an embarrassment walking the course in Scotland,” she said, according to a copy obtained by The New York Times.

“I want things to always be right between us. I also know I’ve been distracted all week (forgetting to eat throughout the days, and even forgetting to sleep, and only catching a couple hours at a time).”

She signed the letter: “With all my heart, Natalie.”

I’m not sure what she’s worried about. She’s Trump’s stenographer. He’d have to type his own posts.

Yeah, I saw Tulsi Gabbard in that video. I wish I’d seen that sooner, like two years ago. I would have understood why she turned out to be such a grand disappointment. The signs were there.

Anyway, back to Natalie.

I’m not sure how Trump feels about Natalie, but Natalie is determined to follow him wherever he goes.

She jumped in the back of an SUV to go to court with Trump.

CNN tracked down Natalie’s brother . . .

I think brother here might want to stage a little intervention.

Look, this is MSM we’re dealing with and “unnamed sources,” and it sounds like the siblings aren’t all that close from comments I caught at the digital watercooler called X.

But honestly given all the insanity of the Trump administration, would you really put it outside the realm of possibility that Trump has turned this woman into some kind of little pet?

In this case, the MAGA cult would be better off just not responding.

But then again, when do they ever do the smart thing?

Apparently someone has not told Harmeet about the Streisand Effect.

The thing is, it was the MAGA crowd that first brought up “affair.” I’m not sure if it’s because they have sex on the brain or because they realize that might be the least disturbing explanation.

Here let me show you.

Tell me who that person all the way on the right is?

No, it’s not Ivanka. (I thought that too.)

It’s Natalie.

In fact, it’s almost like Natalie is a replacement daughter, the one who, unlike Ivanka, will run around at Trump’s side.

Nope, not at all.

So I’m going to preface this part by telling you why I absolutely had no respect for John McCain. I only had one reason and it was enough for me. John McCain spent five and a half years as a POW in Vietnam, and still . . . that bears repeating . . . and still he was a neocon. He was totally willing to send other young men and women to suffer on the battlefield.

The only person I have less respect for than someone who never enlists and pushes war is someone who enlists, finds out how utterly horrid war is, and still wants to send other people into the meat grinder. You have to be pretty messed up in the head to do that.

Enter Johnny Joey Jones of Fox News . . .

Never mind that he started with the false premise that they are in fact doing what they signed up to do, which is defending the US.

So what’s going on. We’ll let the Iranians explain.

I find it depressing that we have to go watch Iranian Lego videos to find good summations of the conditions on US ships.

Now is the situation all that bad?

One woman whose husband, a 13-year Navy veteran, attempted to leap overboard, says he’s now on a medical hold and frightened for the future.

“He’s scared,” Annabelle Loma told the Navy Times.

Her husband’s deployment had been extended numerous times, she told the outlet.

“He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year career is ruined, just like that. That’s not fair, that’s not right. That’s not what he should be worrying about right now.”

Another spouse, Maria Rodriguez, said her husband managed to catch a fellow sailor before they could jump, pulling them back onto the deck and prompting three others to run to help.

“He said he hadn’t felt adrenaline like that in his life, and he was just so thankful he was able to get to [the sailor] in time, to stop them from going overboard,” Rodriguez told the Navy Times.

Other relatives voiced similar concerns, including high schooler Shelby Sanders, whose mom has been serving on the Lincoln.

“When she can email me, she’s definitely down,” the youngster said. “I think they’ve had five weeks of non-stop combat operations or something like that, so that makes it really tough to communicate consistently or even know if we’ll be able to. It sucks.”

“I don’t know how to enjoy starting my senior year when my mom isn’t here, you know?” Sanders added.

That’s just a smattering.

When asked about all that, what does the Pentagon say?

“The health and well-being of every Sailor aboard Abraham Lincoln is a priority. Based on information available to the command, we have not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation or suicide attempts aboard the ship,” the spokesperson added.

Can’t find what you’re not looking for.

“We take every service member’s well-being seriously and have religious, medical and mental health professionals available to assess and address concerns as they arise. Lincoln is providing a comprehensive support network, including onboard deployment-resilience counselors, chaplains, Fleet and Family Support Center services, Military OneSource, and medical professionals.”

I’m betting the “support network” is “comprehensive,” but they’re on the same damn ship, so I doubt they’re in any better state.

And why are they in this situation?

You see, just as no one (inside the administration) outside of everyone (with a map and a lick of common sense) suspected that Iran would do the obvious thing of closing down the Strait of Hormuz, no one (inside the administration) outside of everyone (with a map and a lick of common sense) would have thought that Iran would destroy the bases that resupply the ships. It’s not like the first obvious move to fend off any invading army is to remove its ability to easily resupply.

In all seriousness, we all knew this. We didn’t even need toy ships and a big table and a bunch of men with stars and ribbons on their chests.

But it’s not just on the ships that the soldiers are growing tired.

As people pointed out, Trita Parsi is being nice. It’s not “guy” written on the plane.

Now I would love to say that the side that says it loves our soldiers so so much, that cries the biggest, fattest tears on Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day, that makes sure to run around thanking all these people “for their service” decided, “Wow, well, maybe we should listen.”

I’d love to say that.

But I’d be lying.

Instead they decided to . . .

Attack the messenger.

Attack the soldiers . . .

(Because you can’t wipe off dust, apparently.)

Claim it was all AI . . .

Try to get Trita Parsi deported and some soldier thrown in jail . . .

And finally make complete asses of themselves attempting to “debunk” the story . . .

Nobody ever said the plane was on a carrier.

We have planes all over on bases.

And planes never get dusty in the desert.

We love our soldiers.

We support our soldiers.

We will do anything for our soldiers.

Except bring them home or listen to them.

Oh, wait, I’m getting breaking news . . .

But wait . . .

So you’re leaving the smaller boats?

Why does it always feel like one step forward and two steps back with these people.

Speaking of the Navy, I’ve been listening to the Blue Angels practice for most of the day. There’s an airshow this weekend up at the airport. I went to a lot of airshows as a kid. My father was a pilot. I like them, but not well enough to pay $55 a person and spend all day in the heat and noise. So we’re headed to the mountains.

I don’t pay as much attention to country music as I used to, so this song and video are nearly a decade old, but when I caught it this week, I thought it was so well done and I had to share, just for the nostalgia factor.

Have a great weekend!

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Something I realized as I worked on my husband’s aunt’s obituary was that we have it rather wrong what the real American Dream is . . . or was. You see, my in-laws started out dirt poor, built a business, lost it, went to work for other people, and still ended up in a relatively decent place financially while putting two sons through college. As I wrote, I realized that was possible once. I mean, I’ve realized that before, but the obituary and a Ben Shapiro clip gave me one of those little epiphanies we sometimes have. I realized there are in fact two versions of the American Dream, one that is sold to people to keep them in line and is actually quite alive and well even though it’s twisted, and another, the more authentic one, which really is on life support with a certain class of people (actually those who have achieved the first version of the American Dream or those with serious generational wealth) constantly pulling the plug as others desperately try to shove it back in.

This whole story starts with Ben Shapiro saying Ben Shapiro things, raging about an interview that Tucker Carlson did with Hunter Biden.

I didn’t watch it, but I went looking for a couple shorts. I have to say, I do enjoy Hunter Biden, wouldn’t vote for him for dog catcher, but from the bits and pieces I catch, he makes me smile.

So Hunter Biden sits down with Tucker Carlson and Wee Ben loses his mind . . .

Because I guess living near the Tates makes you guilty by association. However, brushing off Epstein as some conspiracy theory because it’s politically inconvenient makes you . . . what again?

So what is Ben going off about here? Well, this is a sample of the conversation . . .

Hunter Biden’s numbers are off. There are actually only about 950 billionaires in the country, but the top 1 percent controls 40 percent of all wealth, whereas the top .1 percent controls roughly 14 percent. Of the twenty centibillionaires in the world (people who “are worth” more than $100 billion), fifteen of them are American. Claude and I had a conversation, as you can tell.

But the point remains, there is a serious concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of a relatively few.

Let’s be clear. Those people are not the problem really. The system that allowed them to concentrate that wealth is the problem.

So two generationally wealthy men tell you the system is being rigged against you and the other generationally wealthy man tells you the fact that you’re struggling to choose between rent and health insurance (or have lost that struggle) is your fault because you didn’t work hard enough and make enough burritos at home.

Look, all these people are selling something. I am way past the point in my life when I’m working under any sort of delusion that anyone has pure motives. Everyone has an angle. But I think the motive is pretty clear in the case of Ben here.

So, as I said, I spent yesterday going to New York talking business with some of the most successful and brilliant business people in America. You know what my main takeaway was? America kicks ass. America is great.

Also Ben Shapiro . . .

Most of those bad ideas revolve around a very very basic failed idea that people are addicted to. That there ought to be a special cadre of elite people who direct the economy toward their specific end.

You mean like a small group of the most successful and brilliant business people in America who thinks America “kicks ass”? I’d think America kicked ass too if I got to run things and suck the blood out of the nation and the people.

What is Ben really angry about here?

Answer: it’s his people in control, and by “his people,” I don’t mean “Jews” or “Zionist Jews.” I mean a group of people who run the country based on their own interests, whatever those interests may be. They are the “elite cadre.” They don’t want to lose that status to another “elite cadre” that don’t share their interests.

That’s really the game.

Of course, Tucker Carlson reacted . . .

Yes, there is antagonism building toward a certain group of Jews, and you can see it when such as Tucker Carlson uses the term “goyslop.” I’d say it makes me wary, but this is one of those situations where if you, like Ben Shapiro and other Israelis with American passports, are working in such bad faith, I think our country has bigger problems than saving you from your mouth and your dishonesty.

But bringing us back around, as I wrote my husband’s aunt’s obituary, I realized that we’re using one term for two ideas.

In other words, I fully agree with Ben Shapiro on one thing: we need to have a discussion about what the American dream is and what it is not.

Ben Shapiro would suggest to you that a modern life full of trinkets and fast food with the very slim chance that you might one day become a millionaire is the “American Dream.”

That “American Dream” is alive and well. Of course, America is not special in that way.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: China has billionaires, 539 of them to be exact. Now it is true that the ratios are dramatically different (1 in 334,000 people is a billionaire in the US but in China, the number is more like 1 in 2.6 million). It’s harder to become a billionaire in China, but it’s far from impossible.

I’m also assuming that in China people can afford “fast food” and lots of cheap junk. Temu exists after all.

And that seems to be Ben Shapiro’s definition of the “American Dream.” It is not impossible to accumulate mountains of money while the general population can afford the ingredients for cheap burritos and decorate their homes with Dollar Tree kitsch.

But it is true, people can become wealthy. It is even not impossible if you start out very poor. To get into the 1 percent in the US, your household only has to have roughly $14 million. JD and Usha Vance come close, despite his humble beginnings, at $12 million. While it’s difficult to find, Ben Shapiro’s parents are reportedly in the $20 million range, well over the line. Ben Shapiro himself is solidly in the 1 percent. I suppose it’s much easier to get into the 1 percent if you started out there. However, as JD demonstrates, you can make it.

Now how did JD Vance make it? Well, if you read Hillbilly Elegy, he went into the military, used that to go to school at Ohio State, and used all that to go to school at Yale on scholarships. Of course, that’s his version. If you go outside his autobiography, you realize he got some real boosts along the way, particularly once graduated from Yale, though the likes of Peter Thiel. So Yale gave him an education, but it also gave him connections. If he’d graduated from a Ohio State, he might have had a lucrative local practice, but he wouldn’t be VP.

Now do I look down on any of this?

Well, as I say, principles don’t buy palaces, nor do they fill empty stomachs. I’ll admit that JD Vance worked his ass off. But the important thing to notice about the “American Dream” a la Ben Shapiro and JD Vance is that hard work is not just putting in the hours in school or in physically building a business. It’s being clever about paths and connections, spending as much time shaking the right hands as honing your skills, trading the right favors and, yes, to put it really bluntly, kissing the right asses.

There are other ways. Take this video from James Li (you already saw it last Saturday) . . .

Yes, the “American Dream” of making a shit-ton of money is still viable. You can do it. I won’t even say you’re compromising your values. I blame Pepsi for ruining the chips, not the family for selling the company, though I admire the other family more for hanging on and not letting their product and name be despoiled by corporate greed.

But there was another American Dream, the one Tucker Carlson is talking about, the one that ran through the obituary I wrote, and that American Dream is not doing so hot.

To understand the bait and switch here, we have to go back to the beginning.

Most people did not immigrate to the US to “get rich.” I think that’s a rather modern phenomenon. They came to the US to build solid lives, which is something entirely different than “getting rich.”

Let’s take my family as an example, as I am mostly of relatively recent immigrant descent (late 1800s). My mother’s great grandparents on her mother’s side were “serfs” in Germany. They were stuck working on a farm for someone else. They came to America not to find wealth but to be able to build lives for themselves, and they did. On my father’s side, I don’t know his parents’ history that well, but given that my grandfather was an infant when they came over and my grandmother was first generation and both came from Germany, I suspect it was the same. America was for a long time a land of opportunity where hard work all but guaranteed you a comfortable life. Of course there were always exceptions, but most people could, simply by living an average life and doing an average amount of work, own a decent car and a home without paying on it for thirty years. They had the ability to leave the wife at home to take care of the kids. In a cousin’s case, a whole family of six lived comfortably on the income of a foreman at a factory, and the couple still built a nest egg, leaving behind something for their kids. People could build “generational wealth” even being a work-a-day Joe.

But even those who ran up against adversity could live good lives. My maternal grandfather had a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 55. He pulled a pension from working at a steel mill in Cleveland, Ohio. It wasn’t enough, so my grandmother went back to work at a hospital doing intake. The family would move out onto a farm, where they raised sheep and chickens. My grandmother would put my mother through college at a private school on wool and eggs. As the story goes, one day a government somebody turned up and asked my grandmother how much she made. My grandmother told this person and then immediately grew indignant at the response. This person told my grandmother she was poor, their “household income” being well under the government designated poverty line. My grandmother took that as an affront. She was feeding her family, putting her daughter through college, and owned the farm they lived on outright. How on earth could she be poor when they had such a stable life? My grandmother, even though all that, would when she died in the early 1990s leave my sister and I each about $75,000 and my mother her house in a little town in Tennessee. She was poor according to the government, but yet she could accumulate enough to leave something behind. Try that today.

My other set of grandparents went west to North Dakota during the days of the Homesteading Act. They got their chunk of land and worked it. My dad said they never had much. They struggled sometimes, but as others gave up, they grew the farm. No one worked off the farm, unlike today. The only way my father and uncle supplemented the income was by my father spraying crops from a biplane and hunting coyotes from the air and the brothers doing a bit of machine work and repair for the neighbors. Despite that and despite being dryland farmers (no irrigation and this was long before the days of the oil boom), they were faced with two medical situations that would today have wiped them out. First, my grandmother got stomach cancer. She went all the way to Mayo to see if she could get help (her family was from near there). She died in the hospital in Williston because she didn’t want to die at home. The family had no insurance, but the bills were paid in full. My uncle would later fall asleep and roll a truck. He virtually amputated his leg in the accident. It was holding on by skin. He was rushed not to Williston, but to Minot, so a two hour ambulance ride, and spent six weeks in the hospital and swing bed recovering after they reattached the leg. He and my father paid that bill as well. Can you imagine a dryland farmer in North Dakota with no real income outside the grain they sold and a few odd jobs pulling that off today? And those were not the only economic catastrophes they faced, but they persevered.

The real American Dream was not this one narrow path to a mountain of gold. The real American Dream was almost endless paths to a solid middle class lifestyle, and even barring that, being poor not being a real impediment to a secure life, helping your child through college, and building a nest egg.

If someone tries to pretend that we’re fine as a nation and society because the first version of the “American Dream” is alive and well but the second one has one foot on a banana peel and the other in the grave, they are trying to distract you.

Now there are a lot of wealthy people that do this. Ben Shapiro is hardly alone. Most wealthy people who do it do so because they are benefiting mightily from what American capitalism has become, which is a general exploitation by the few of the many. And that is partly Ben Shapiro’s reason, but he has another one. Another video you’ve seen before, but it’s worth including again.

If you really want to see where I’m going with this, we’ll throw in another Israeli with an American passport.

Mark Levin tries to shame people, but here’s what he doesn’t understand. Americans are already sacrificing a lot. We have lost our middle class to corporate greed. We tax people to create a social welfare net so people can survive and as a way to make up for the loss of that middle class and the many layers of greed in virtually every system in the country that make it impossible even with a solid middle class income to get ahead. And he wants us to sacrifice more, not for our country, which would be bad enough given how disproportionately a small group of people benefit from how it’s being run versus the rest of us, but for another country, in the ultimate display of elite exploitation of the masses. We notice this tactic because there’s no masking it, not in this case. And in a way, that’s good. Because we notice it here, we will learn to notice it elsewhere as well.

But it all comes down to this. I’m not in favor of full-blown socialism. I think that when you take a capitalist mentality and introduce socialism, you get, well, Obamacare, a system that treats taxpayers and customers like a sea of money with no accountability. That can’t be sustained. The same thing would happen if taxpayers paid for college educations or even gave people a universal basic income.

But I have no problem with people who introduce these ideas because they are identifying a very real problem, the fact that the original American Dream is in the death rattle stage and people aren’t making it. We’re going to have to do something, and socialism looks like “something.”

Now there are other options: to think outside the box and do what it takes via taxation of the ultra wealthy, lowering taxes on everyone else, cutting out government spending that doesn’t directly benefit Americans, regulating the largest of businesses if not breaking them up, protecting American workers from foreign competition (be it imported workers or imported products), and whatever else people can come up with to create an environment that will bring the original American Dream back to life.

But I fear that is also an uphill battle, because we already have an “elite cadre” structuring our economy for their own ends and a whole lot of people foolish enough to think that they’ll win the Ben Shapiro lottery and that’s all that matters.

I think it is required by law that if you do a piece on the American Dream you have to include this bit . . .

Well, I’m not asleep. How about you?

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How’s that war going?

I was watching Breaking Points the other day, and Saager Enjeti predicted that just like the Iraq War, this war will go on for years, at a low level, and eventually it will just be white noise. I tend to agree with him.

There will come a day when I don’t do these updates because what’s the point? It will have become a part of our lives. On that day, I might actually cry. Until then . . .

Ah, so we’re finally admitting there is a problem. I guess that’s progress.

Or not . . .

We have Iran by the throat and in two years there will be an underground pipeline.

Can we survive two years?

Let’s forget for a second that this isn’t really about Iran having nuclear weapons. It’s about Israel. Put that aside.

If this was just about your daily commute, it would be one thing, and bad at that. But produce doesn’t truck itself across the country on unicorn farts and neocon dreams. Everything in your life is affected by the price of crude oil.

And those people cheering in the background are one of the reasons we can’t have nice things.

But do we really have Iran by the throat?

This is the Wall Street Journal . . . the warmongeringest of warmongering papers.

Trump only thought this because Trump is a fool.

For weeks, President Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory in the Iran war should Tehran fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz, even floating the idea privately to senior aides that he’s willing to walk away without a nuclear deal, U.S. officials said.

So eighteen (at least) dead soldiers, billions spent, a world economy in shambles only to get what we had before this whole thing started.

But there’s a problem.

But that scaled-back objective became more difficult when Iran insisted Saturday on its highest price yet for permitting the free flow of traffic in the waterway, seeking billions of dollars in U.S. payments, the removal of American troops from the region and an end of the U.S. naval blockade, among other things.

This rapid chain of events suggests Trump’s options for walking away from the conflict have again narrowed. Trump has repeatedly threatened—and then backed away from—a massive escalation of its bombing campaign. But the recent chaos in negotiations signaled Tehran is prepared for a long and grinding conflict.

“Iran’s recent hardline demands for reopening the strait make it increasingly difficult for the president to manufacture a face-saving off-ramp from the conflict,” said Mona Yacoubian, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

You know how in horror movies, you should always make sure the monster is dead? Because it will come back if you don’t.

Well, the Iranians are not making that mistake.

Sucks for the US citizens, including the military.

One sailor was rescued after jumping overboard this month, the Navy confirmed after a report by CNN. The sailor was quickly picked up by an air search and helicopter, treated by the ship’s medical department and transferred off ship for follow-on care.

Families of those on board, interviewed by two military publications, said there had been several other incidents of suicide attempts.

Hegseth said reports of poor conditions and mental-health issues “completely misrepresented” reality. He told Newsmax: “We make sure every ship, every crew, every captain has everything we can provide them at every single moment. Some deployments are longer than others, and ⁠I have more respect and gratitude for those sailors than anybody.

“What they do in those high seas in those austere conditions with less port calls, it’s incredible.” He added that he wanted those on board “home as soon as everybody else does”.

Pete Hegseth is full of shit. We all know that.

And how about our “commander in chief,” who plays gulf with anti-drone technology nearby.

This is the Wall Street Journal, by the way, the warmongering paper. So the fact that they have to print this is a bit devestating.

When asked if the naval deployment had lasted too long, Trump said it hadn’t gone on “nearly long enough.” His comment appeared to be a nod to the continuing naval blockade, which Trump is hoping will eventually put pressure on Iran economically and convince it to surrender its nuclear program. Aides have convinced Trump—at least for now—to give the tactic more time to work before resuming military strikes.

The conditions on the aircraft carrier have received growing attention from members of Congress, amid reports about lack of food, personal supplies and plumbing backups and broader concerns about the sailors’ mental health. A person went overboard the Lincoln in early August but was rescued, according to a U.S. official.

The aircraft carrier hasn’t made a port call in 200 days, setting a record for consecutive days at sea, according to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.). A port call allows the crew to resupply, rest and regroup during standard deployments.

It’s sort of like a prison at sea.

One that could end up on the wrong end of a missile or drone and sink to the bottom of the ocean.

But I guess, that’s just the price of keeping our Greatest Ally safe.

Normally, I’d just share the video, but people have been sharing this person’s videos without attribution, and he’s clever, so he deserves credit.

Meta paying “rage baiters”

Okay, this one is interesting because there’s a detail that makes it all very “suspicious.”

So I’m not interested in this article because I care about who does and does not get paid for what. This is ABC, so it true MSM fashion, one has to really watch what they define as “white nationalist” and “Neo-Nazi” . . .

The Noticer, a far-right Australian news website that regularly promotes white supremacist and neo-Nazi ideologies, has been making money through the same Facebook revenue program since November 2025.

There is a short period from January 11 to February 15 when it stopped earning money for unknown reasons.

The Noticer is currently suspended from its X account with a notice that the account is “temporarily unavailable because it violates the X Hateful Profile Policy”.

Their account is live again on X. It was demonetized from Meta, according to them. Although I didn’t scroll that far back, I see nothing that wouldn’t be found outside Fox News.

And then there’s the just bewildering . . .

Monica Smit, the founder of the anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown group Reignite Democracy Australia, joined Facebook’s content monetisation program in September 2025.

She appears to have been earning advertising revenue through Facebook from as far back as 2017.

Her page features vaccine misinformation and promotes the sale of “radiation protection” bracelets through her personal website.

Six years in, we’re all still in denial about the overreaction to COVID.

But here is what is funny about this, and, no, it’s not the hyperventilating from ABC that these “wrongthinkers” are making money.

I’ve not looked into X’s monetization program because I don’t post that much and I’m shadow-banned, so it really would be pointless now (yes, I find that ridiculous and it sticks in my craw a bit), but I think that anyone who pays for a certain level of “membership” has a chance to make money off their accounts. No one is really gatekeeping here.

But this program from Meta?

According to Facebook, the monetisation scheme that Hugo Lennon, Monica Smit, March for Australia and The Noticer appear to be profiting from is “an invitation-only programme that lets you earn money from the performance of your eligible public reels, photos, stories and text posts.”

What To Fix executive director Victoire Rio said it meant that, in effect, Facebook was in a business relationship with these people and organisations.

“If we consider that Meta is in a direct commercial relationship with its publishers, insofar that they’re paying them royalties and that they have a monetisation agreement with them, then you could argue that they are liable for the content that gets produced by their business partner in some ways.”

These people were invited, meaning sought out.

Forget for a moment that ABC’s point here is that they want to punish Meta for the content it lets on its platform in a work-around attempt to drive non-state-approved narratives from the public square.

I have a question for you: was Meta just “careless,” or was it trying to raise engagement by monetizing the heterodox to get them to create more content and thereby create more interaction with Facebook?

Because here is what I do know to be true from the COVID years: Facebook has no problem censoring users. So that whole “It’s not Meta’s role to police offensive” thing is 🐂💩.

Have we not learned anything?

Speaking of “policing” social media . . .

They frame this as “all about the children.”

A bipartisan majority of Americans support more government rules for how ​social media companies conduct business, including a requirement of age-verification tools to keep younger children off social media, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.

The poll, ‌which was conducted over the six days ending August 3, comes as companies like Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube face mounting legal pressure over their treatment of young users. A trial is expected to begin on Wednesday over allegations by state prosecutors that Meta designed its products to addict young users.

This is one of those things that sounds like a good idea until you think it through to the historically predictable end.

If you’re demanding age verification, you’re basically insisting that you tie an ID to every social media account. Now I am out here, you have my name, and if you were even half clever, you could track down where I live in about thirty seconds.

But I also understand the desire and need for people to operate anonymously.

James Bosserdet, a 60-year-old mechanical engineer from Tennessee who voted for Republican President Donald Trump ​in the 2024 election, said he mostly wants the U.S. government to have a smaller role in Americans’ lives, but that cracking down on social media companies is an exception.

“Somebody’s got to ‌do it,” he ⁠said, referring to setting restrictions on social media for kids. “Is it the government’s job? I don’t want it to be. I think maybe it should be.”

No, it’s not the government’s job because the government will take advantage of it. I know right now they can track everything I do and say, even if I go “incognito,” but it takes a little work on their part. No one should be forced to tie every post to their social security number, which is basically what this would result in.

Monitoring social media when it comes to children is the parents’ job.

Especially since the government is nosy enough already.

This is the problem with American capitalism . . .

A story of two companies, as only James Li can tell it (he’s worth following IMH[umble]O) . . .

I understand about wanting to make money, but I also know that one of the big problems of our current system is consolidation.

There has got to be a middle ground.

AI can be a great equalizer . . .

Why it matters: While there are limitations to what AI can build today, that’s changing by the week, and gamers are optimistic this is only the beginning.

• “If something is kind of possible today, in a year, it’s going to be nailed,” Matt Shumer, an AI investor and video game builder, told Axios.

Currently, there are of course limitations.

Reality check: AI-built games come with limitations. Current models can really only create remakes of games that already exist, because they rely on past data (like YouTube clips of old games) to construct levels and maps.

• It can take a lot of (expensive) prompting and many, many turns with AI models to craft something that looks new or original.

But as people learn how to better use AI, especially combining the image building of, say, ChatGPT with the programming capabilities of Claude . . . I can see how independent creators could once again undercut the corporations.

Ironically, I think an AI voices this video and AI might have made it, but it still shows what AI can do with just even the simplest of prompts, so enjoy if you’re curious . . .

Just because I don’t think we needed a study to figure this out, and I love cats . . .

So there’s a little difference in how the study itself frames the conclusion and how the Scientific American frames the conclusion.

Basically researchers compared the “helpfulness” of finding a “lost” object among toddlers, dogs, and cats. They would have the caregiver of the said subject in a room and put a sponge under, for example, a blanket, and then the caregiver would pretend to look for it. The test? Would the animal or child automatically help?

“But children and dogs were more likely to show helping-related behaviors—approaching, indicating or retrieving the object for the person. By the final trial, more than half the dogs and nearly half the toddlers indicated the object’s location, and some also brought it to the caregiver. Cats never approached it and only rarely indicated its location.”

So was this because cats were stupid? (Okay, stop laughing. We all know [most] cats are very smart.)

To test this, the researchers added a final trial, replacing the sponge with food or a favorite toy. Cats then approached and indicated the object as often as dogs and children did.

Selfish little bastards, huh?

So above was the way the magazine summed up the conclusion, but here is the title of the actual paper . . .

The findings indicate that domestication and close social contact with humans do not, by themselves, induce a tendency towards spontaneous, human-like prosociality. The similar results in dogs and children can be explained by the social/cooperative nature inherited from their ancestors and the specific selection effects that occurred during dog domestication. These factors may have contributed to dogs' exceptional cooperativeness with humans, promoting the development of spontaneous interspecific prosocial tendencies.

In all seriousness, I see this. Canines are naturally a pack species whereas I can only think of lions as an existing feline that shows any inclination to form social groups.

Whereas cooperation is an evolutionary advantage for “pack” animals, like humans and dogs, it is not for solitary animals, like most felines.

But the story is still humorous.

Escapism

I didn’t watch a movie or a full series this week. I’ve been watching the first season of Broadchurch on Netflix. My husband is so funny. He rarely interacts with much of what I watch (and I do the same for what he watches), but he must think about it because he came to bed last night, “Why would you not know your son’s friends? I mean, she’s a cop.” I look up, “Huh?” “That show we’re watching. She’s a cop and she doesn’t know what’s going on with her eleven year old son.”

I just chuckle.

Anyway, I did finish a book . . .

It was really good. I’ve read so many iffy books lately, this one was refreshing. Some of it I figured out, but there were still enough little twists to make it exciting, and it had a satisfying ending. So overall, if you like mysteries, it’s a quick little read.

Just one thing, because I’m getting old and a fact checker should have caught this, but during a storm that supposedly takes place in 1980 or 1984, one of the characters remarks that all the storms that are deadly are named after women because women are the most dangerous or something like that.

The problem? Say it with me: up to the 1970s all tropical storms and hurricanes were named after women, with men’s names only being fully put into rotation in 1979.

However, I even remember as a child that the only names I heard were women’s. So . . . 🤷‍♀️

I am, this morning, one slipper short because the Golden Taker has taken one and only God knows where it is at. My house is not that big, and yet I can’t find it. So I’m barefoot, something that’s not bad, but not normal. I’ve decided Golden Takers are good exercise, because you will aways be searching for one shoe.

So today started shorter because I watched Andrew Wilson and Candace Owens “debate.” It wasn’t a real debate. It was a little weird. But I was fixated anyway. I didn’t mean to sit and watch all three and a half hours, but it was little like watching a train wreck, for both of them. Candace Owens had a golden opportunity, but she fell into Andrew Wilson’s trap of fixating on a single thing, and Patrick Bet David did nothing to help that along. However, she remained a heck of a lot cooler than I would have. Meanwhile, if Andrew Wilson is a “master debater,” we’re in serious decline as a society.

I know not everyone is interested in this, but if you are, James Li does a cool little wrap up.

I don’t think she destroyed his career, though he’s pretty lousy. I mean, if being a “master debater” means all you do is ask someone to explain how they made a leap in judgment and then claim that leap is impossible and then ask again how they made that leap in judgment and do that over and over, I too could be a world class debater.

Also this . . .

That right there is the man TPUSA sent out to pay $300,000 to debate a woman. By the way, if you have $300K to blow on a “conversation,” taxes are not high enough. I say that mostly jokingly.

This clip is my favorite. I will admit that Candace’s question comes across as kind of a cheap shot, but Andrew Wilson was pretending he was on some noble quest and this is three and a half hours into what I think she thought was going to be a real albeit contentious discussion of the evidence and his trying to turn it into a moral discussion of “shame Candace” for tearing the right apart while trying to get something TPUSA can use as a legal cudgel. Whatever else one might say about Candace Owens, seven months pregnant, the fact that Andrew Wilson did not end up with that microphone coming out of some orifice means elevates her in my eyes. She’s calm (calmer than I would be, which is why I’m not doing what she does).

Anyway, that’s my pet obsession at the moment, mostly because the behavior of people reminds me so very much, primarily, of the madness surrounding COVID. Just slightly poking the narrative makes it fall apart, but yet so many people refuse to deviate from the “official” story. Of course, this is on a much smaller scale and there are plenty of other situations (the economy, Israel, the war in Iran, etc.) that can be described in the same way.

Anyway, I’m going to assume no one wants to talk about Tyler Robinson and Charlie Kirk (unless you do), but if there’s anything above that you’d like to address or anything I’ve missed, I’ll see you around in the comments.

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Mike Rogers is running against Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan for the Senate, so for our second bit of lead-in fun . . .

Finally, some truth in advertising. 🫤

And away we go . . .

Well, that was an expensive prank . . .

Authorities in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard in the Arctic fined a person over $5,200 for waking up a polar bear with a boat horn.

The Svalbard governor’s office said in a release Thursday that the incident came earlier this month as the boat floated in a strait separating two of the islands and people aboard saw a polar bear sleeping on land.

One of the people on board set off the horn, jarring the sleeping polar bear into moving. Other people on the boat then notified the governor’s office, which determined the horn was honked on purpose. Officials did not say what type of boat was involved in the disturbance.

We here in the US don’t investigate murders with this much diligence.

Unnecessary disturbances of polar bears are illegal under the Svalbard Environmental Act.

Let sleeping bears lie.

They mean it.

If I’m only half this spunky at 79 (never mind 97) . . .

The “greatest generation” is still earns their name.

Just for the picture . . .

Thank you, BBC Science Focus, for ruining grapefruit for me.

I like Oreos. I like KFC. But this?

If the two companies collaborating haven’t scared you off yet, the actual flavor just might. KFC and Oreo have partnered to release a fried-chicken-flavored cookie. Yes, you read that right. Taking the classic chocolate cookie Oreo fans know and love and combining it with a cream blended with 11 savory seasoning, this new cookie is sure to confuse you.

The Oreo creme, which replaces the cookie’s usual sweet, white filling, consists of herbs, spices and salt that resemble the classic KFC batter. So while it’s not actually chicken-flavored, it’s still unique enough to leave everyone questioning the combo. The cookie also features the KFC logo on one side, instead of the usual Oreo logo.

If you want to try them, however, for the moment, you’re going to have to go to China.

Speaking of the land of Pooh Bear and Bat Lady . . .

More than six years after COVID swept the world, there’s still no definitive answer about its true origins — and likely never will be.

Why it matters: For all of the political vitriol and intelligence disputes over the topic, missing evidence means the debate over whether it jumped from animals to humans or came from a lab may never be satisfyingly settled.

We all know it came from a lab. The only questions left are (1) was the release deliberate? and (2) was the US involved?

Real journalism would—

Oh, wait.

I’m seeing the problem.

Speaking of (un)real Journalism™️ . . .

Do you see that? Flock Cameras don’t want anything to do with law-abiding citizens.

They’re getting savaged in the comments on both X and YouTube.

You see “law” is a very loose term.

He wasn’t selling it. He was just bringing it back for personal use.

But you’re saying, Lillia, he was breaking the law.

Yeah, well, so were people going out “unnecessarily” during COVID.

See the problem yet?

Ah, but which “state” are we talking here?

Now isn’t that interesting.

Speaking of “state propaganda” and America’s Greatest Ally™️ . . .

So if you’re not familiar, the tree above is known as the banyan.

Problem one . . .

Their roots do not go deep. The tree’s attachment to the ground is mostly surface-level, just like, as a random example, imported, non-native to the Middle East Israeli Jews.

Problem the second, those things you see are not actually roots in the traditional sense. Rather than the tree growing a single trunk from the bottom up as most trees do or being a collective organism like aspens are and shooting up little saplings from a single root system, these “roots” actually come down from the top of the tree and shoot into the ground allowing the tree to continually grow and choke off the vegetation around it, just like, as a random example here, imported, non-native to the Middle East Israeli Jews.

Problem dray (as the speakers of Yiddish would say) the banyan is not “indigenous” to the Levant, much like, as a random example here, imported, non-native to the Middle East Israeli Jews. In the banyan’s case, the tree is a native of India, or more broadly the Indian subcontinent. In the “imported” Jews case, Poland, Ukraine, other random Slavic countries, a lot of them anyway.

Problem shemloshaa (as speakers of the forcefully resurrected Hebrew would say) . . .

Just like, as a random example here . . .

Well, you get the idea.

Actually, I think it’s a perfect comparison.

Hey, don’t call me an anti-semite.

I wasn’t the one who decided to compare myself to a shallow-rooted, non-native, invasive species of tree.

I consider myself an elm: not much to look at, never anybody’s choice, but persistent to a fault. 😉

Kristi Noem got a statue this week . . .

Kristi and her dog would have been more appropriate I think.

Though a bit graphic.

Second thought, horse is fine.

Animals know. This guy . . .

. . . went on the Jeremy Boreing show and this happened . . .

I get nauseous listening to these people too. Poor pooch.

In other circus news, Todd Blanche, Trump’s personal attorney, is now our attorney general . . .

AG Ken here pinkie swore Republican holdouts that he would not bring back the piggy trough, er, restitution fund, er, whatever they were calling it to hand out nearly two billion to Trump’s buddies.

Ah, that’s right it was billed an anti-weaponization fund.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a formal order late Sunday terminating President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate his political allies, a move that follows weeks of negotiations with two Republican senators who were blocking his nomination to become attorney general.

I think piggy trough has a better ring to it. Certainly more truth.

So let’s see. What did we just do here?

Todd Blanche went down to “interview” Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey’s BFF and underage sex kitten procurer, who informed Blanche that Trump had never, ever, ever partaken of such delicacies (pinkie swear again). And in return for those assurances, he made sure Maxwell was moved to more cush accommodations to serve out her time in circumstances more comfortable than a lot of “free citizens.”

And he’s now attorney general.

Yup, that should restore faith in the DOJ.

Now this is how you treat politicians . . .

I think here in America, we should extend this to the media as well.

Speaking of the media, there is nothing wrong with economy. It’s messaging.

Yup, all messaging . . .

Even more “messaging” . . .

Totally bad messaging.

But what can you expect when our aging president is falling asleep on the job . . . literally.

Oh, this isn’t uncommon. Over three minutes of Trump “resting his eyes,” as my father used to say . . .

Actually, I found myself nodding off during that clip. How come all those voices sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher?

Anyway, in a funny little rumor . . .

And it does if you watch the video above.

At least he seems mostly with it when he’s awake, unlike the previous resident of the DC Elder Care Home at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Though that seems a low bar.

But the one thing Trump is not is courageous.

So the story gets funnier. They smuggle Trump out on the catering van, fly him to the UK in a military plane, and then smuggle him back on Air Force One via, again, the catering van.

According to Headline USA . . .

Trump’s secretive maneuvering came after Israel briefed the U.S. with purported intelligence about an Iranian plot to assassinate him. The Times said the decision to switch planes in Turkey stemmed from different intelligence than what the Israelis were providing. The Times added that some U.S. officials believe that the Israeli intelligence was intended to convince Trump to escalate his war against Iran.

Officials have yet to provide any evidence of a credible Iranian assassination attempt against Trump.

Actually, in my mind, the real threat would be the Israelis blowing up the plane and blaming it on the Iranians.

Oh, you laugh.

Wait, you’re not laughing? Huh. I won’t take credit. Israel has done that all by itself.

But there is a real problem here, I mean other than the fact that few of us trust our Greatest Ally™️ not to blow up Air Force One.

The existence of a potential threat against the president doesn’t in itself mean his war against Iran is a failure. But the spectacle of him leaving incognito after a NATO summit is likely to be interpreted overseas as a new affront to American power. It also raises this question: If Trump cannot guarantee his own safety on the territory of a major ally, how can his administration’s case that it has all but obliterated Iran’s military capability and regional terror threat be fully believed?

If Trump can’t guarantee his own safety? What about the rest of the people on the plane if Iran was intent on shooting it down and thought the president was on there?

So he just left them to die. No warning. Nothing. Just left them to die. And then pretended that he was on the plane all along?

Yup.

The symbolism inherent in this moment as it relates to the Trump presidency as a whole is almost too perfect.

Just FYI, Iran doesn’t want to kill Trump. They want to humiliate him.

And in that, they’re succeeding. Dying would give him the easy way out.

So this . . .

. . . is complete overkill.

Unless he’s worried about another country starting with an “I” killing him.

Now that is a legitimate concern.

And they know every move he makes.

Speaking of dying . . .

That base, previously known as Joint Base Charleston, was created in 2010 after the merger of a Navy base and an Air Force base that were both established in 1941. It will now be known as Joint Base Lindsey Graham.

The senator had wanted to be a military pilot. But because of a hearing problem in one ear, he trained as a lawyer and served as a judge advocate general in the Air Force, the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve before retiring as a colonel in June 2015, according to his sister, Senator Darline Graham, who was appointed to serve the remainder of Mr. Graham’s term.

According to his sister? This isn’t something NYT could fact check?

Anyway this is where it gets funny.

“Senator Lindsey Graham dedicated his life to serving this state and serving the armed forces of the United States,” Mr. Hegseth said. “He served this nation, both in uniform and in both houses of Congress, as everyone here knows.”

This Lindsey Graham?

Hey, there’s death and destruction in the Carolinas, but Iz-rhul!

Just call him the late Lindsey Graham, R-Israel.

Hard and fast rule: When they tell you what they think of you, believe them.

It’s an insult to name any base in the US after Lindsey Graham.

Hegseth should talk to Bibi. Maybe they can name something in Israel after him.

Funny little followup: Graham’s little sister, who dropped her married name for campaign purposes, won the special primary in South Carolina to run for her brother’s seat.

Because somehow being Lady Lindsey’s little sister and having the backing of Trump and AIPAC is all that’s needed in this supposed democracy of ours.

Moving on to elections, it’s not going to come as any great shock, but AOC is running in 2028. She says she’s not, or at least hedging her bets, but she is.

First there came the great egg freezing . . .

I make a prediction now: AOC will never have kids. She’s too self-centered.

Actually, I don’t think Republicans are “outraged” that AOC isn’t having children any time soon. I think seeing AOC remaining childless as a definite positive is one thing that I might have in common with them.

So what sparked this little tirade?

Guess we found the “loser.”

Or he just didn’t do well in the focus groups.

As desperate as the Republicans are, so are the Democrats. They have nobody, with the possible exception of Ro Khanna (whom I’m ambivalent on, but comes the closest to being untainted by all the insanity and pandering).

Just FYI, AOC is less of a socialist than I am. One of her first acts of non-bravery was to give in on “force the vote” over Medicare for All. However you or I might feel about that, for an American “socialist” that’s the Holy Grail.

And she wimped out.

And she’s continued to “wimp out.”

There’s not a Democrat that isn’t going to support public housing. I mean, how else can you funnel those government funds to all your hedge fund buddies? So there is no point is supporting Jeffries over anyone else on that issue.

And she’s a partisan hack.

Because you know what’s not “good for Israelis”? Not being able to defend themselves from return fire when they’re killing children.

So it was fine to protect the genociders. Just don’t arm the genociders. Got it.

But lately AOC has decided to “reinvent” herself.

This is actually about the best ChatGPT has done. I’m impressed. I just fed this section in and asked it for a futuristic mockup ad.

Anyway . . .

My husband calls these people “blisters.” They show up after the work is done. Now that it’s “safe” for her to be anti-fund-the-genociders’-Iron-Dome, she crawls out from her safe space.

And expects you to forget.

But that’s not the only thing she’s expected you to forget.

Look, other than defunding the police, the rest of those are all positions I may not agree with 100 percent, but they are pretty standard fare (hardly radical) and I can even defend them, so AOC would have no problem, if someone loaned her a brain. ICE has become a monstrosity (though CBP is part of the problem), I economically survive because of fracking, but even I’ll tell you, I’m not sure how good it is for the environment, and as for the Electoral College? I see the point of arguing that the popular vote should rule. I can make a counter argument, but it’s a legitimate discussion.

My problem is that AOC is a chameleon.

There she is trying on her “southern.”

She is first and foremost a political creature. She will be anything the focus groups tell her to be.

And at one point, they told her to be this . . .

But here is the problem. Worrying about being “morally right” over being factually right is called being “woke.”

And it got to be a big, big problem.

We had a scientist fired from the New York Times because he used the n-word, not as a slur, but in an explanation of the slur.

We had an everyday Joe fired over cracking his knuckles.

And then the bakery by Oberlin College . . .

At least they got money out of it.

Most stories don’t end that well.

A young woman had to resign her job because of posts she made as a teenager . . .

We had the David Shor episode . . .

On May 28, David Shor, a political data analyst, sent a controversial tweet. Soon after George Floyd’s death, alongside peaceful mass protests there was a substantial amount of looting and vandalism in Minneapolis and a few other cities. Shor, citing research by Princeton political scientist Omar Wasow, suggested that these incidents could prompt a political backlash that would help President Donald Trump’s bid for reelection. At the same time, he noted that, historically, nonviolent protests had been effective at driving political change “mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage.”

He would lose his job by pointing out the obvious. Political violence creates a backlash, no matter how worthy you think the cause is.

And then there was Bret Weinstein, one of the original victims of the woke mob.

Weinstein disagreed with Evergreen’s “Day of Absence,” where they wanted all “white people” to leave the campus so that all the minority students could stay on campus while the white people spent the day off campus learning about “allyship.” It was an already very stupid tradition where minority students would go off campus to “discuss” race and equity issues.

Bret Weinstein and his wife were harassed so badly they finally ended up resigning and settling with Evergreen for half a million for failing to provide them with a safe work environment.

The irony?

From Forbes . . .

Woke is a cult. You can be saved one minute and a heretic the next simply because you remained consistent in your beliefs.

And then we have Lee Fang, who very nearly lost his job and his career because during George Floyd, he dared to include a video of a black man asking why people only care about black people who die at the hands of cops, and why they don’t care about the oh-so-many black people who die at the hands of other black people.

From an article by Glenn Greenwald . . .

Note that it was not Lee who was saying any of this. These words came from one of about a dozen people he interviewed who were participating in the protest. Lee offered no editorial comment on them at all. He simply uploaded the interview alongside all the others he conducted.

Because the view expressed by this young man was so off-key to the compelled consensus that had emerged in the wake of Floyd’s death, his mere posting of this interview sparked widespread and indescribably intense rage. And into that rage stepped a young Intercept reporter who — much to the surprise of many of her colleagues — apparently identified as black.

The person who “identified as black” stirred up a woke lynch mob.

Glenn Greenwald goes on to debate with himself whether he was right in encouraging Fang to “apologize” rather than publicly defending him.

I don’t think it would have mattered. There are no good answers when what is “morally right” (as judged by the mob) becomes more important than what is factually right.

And that was “woke 1.”

AOC was all in.

So what is she saying now? (I don’t know why YouTube is stretching the thumbnail, but I love it.)

Wasn’t woke 1 crazy? Yes, it was: in the way, the Red Scare was “crazy,” or the Salem Witch Hunts were “crazy.” By “crazy” we mean destructive and frightening and requiring of a truth and reconciliation commission.

And she blames it on COVID! Never mind that woke preceded COVID by quite a bit.

The one mark of a good leader is that they resist the madness of crowds.

Not ride it to the bloody finish line.

But then again, what do I know?

I’m still running on the old system software, full integrity (or best efforts at) and no woke.

I’m very proud of my niece. My sister put a video of the Bear running barrels to part of a song . . .

A few days later, the horse and my niece had a wreck. Long story short, they’re both okay. The horse is just fine, though I’m not sure what happens next for her because she was doing well before she resorted back to crazy. My niece was doing so well with her and is about the only human being that loves her (everyone else is leery of her, which is to some degree not the horse’s fault but a product of her being very smart and incredibly mishandled when she was young), but I don’t know if she’ll get back on her. Bucking is one thing; going over backward is quite another. My niece on the other hand hurt her leg when it got caught between the very large horse and the very hard ground. She didn’t break anything, but she’s having trouble walking on it.

So please keep her in her thoughts. She’s a good little “horse woman” and the horse is special in her own way, so I hope they both get through this.

But back to the whole song, which reminds me of the opening to a sitcom but reminds me of the value of independent content creators.

Have a beautiful weekend.

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How’s that war going?

Oh, you laugh.

Turns out that the only people talking were Iran and Oman. We weren’t invited to the party. But Trump was taking credit anyway.

Oh, also, we had to bail out the Japenese yen.

Why?

Uh, no, that’s not the reason.

I notice he doesn’t tell you why Japan is experiencing such inflation.

We only need one.

In short, the US economy is a house of cards and even a mild sneeze will knock it over.

Japan was about the sneeze . . . because we blew pepper in its face.

So we had to grab a taxpayer funded sneeze guard to save us from the taxpayer funded sneeze that was about to knock over the economy largely driven by taxpayer funds.

It’s all taxpayers all the time.

Let’s move on, shall we?

Seems we’re tired of AI already . . .

I found this interesting. Of course, Utah was the state where the Kevin O’Leary had his big fight over the data center. I think it left a bad taste in Utahans’ mouths.

The big picture: You’ve probably seen hundreds of them on social media for concerts, sales, grand openings and other events — promoted in visually busy rectangles packed with sentence fragments and a hodgepodge of colors.

• Audiences say they can spot the slop immediately, usually thanks to the flyers’ careless or repetitive designs — and that it’s a turnoff.

What they’re saying: “Once I began noticing them, I saw them everywhere,” 404 Media cofounder Jason Koebler wrote last month. “The scourge of low effort, stylistically indistinguishable AI-generated signs and flyers have flooded both social media and, increasingly, posters, billboards, and signs in real life.”

As I have discovered, you have to learn to use AI. I make my images with it. They do have a distinctive style, as if the AI is caught in a loop. I have had to tell ChatGPT a few times to “unclutter” the image, to take things out or simplify it.

So that is the first thing. If you use AI and you’re lazy about it, it’s going to show. That’s not just true for images, by the way. That’s also true for information.

But the second thing is that humans, or at least some of us (yes, I include myself not because I am particularly brilliant but because somewhere along the line I picked up a depressingly rare set of skills) are still more creative and intuitive than AI. So there’s still a place for us yet.

The 9/11 event we need . . .

I just stumbled on this on X.

Posted by . . .

If you’re not going to be in New York (which of us is?), Richard Gage posted that it will be livestreamed.

They also held a conference in 2025, and you can find the videos on Redacted on YouTube.

I won’t say I’ll be watching it, but if you’re interested, there you go.

El-Sayed is not in fact a socialist. Yeah, I was surprised too.

I’ve learned more about this man than I ever wanted to.

He said what?

He’s the son of Egyptian immigrants. He’s Muslim.

I’m not sure I get the big deal.

I had to put up with this . . .

It is far less jarring to see a Muslim Arab American say Inshallah than it is to see a supposed Catholic get on TV and claim her deceased protestant (of some stripe) husband ran around shabbat shaloming.

One is natural. One is pandering.

But I have been repeatedly also told—beyond that now I have to go shopping for a burqa—that he’s a commie.

Well, turns out . . .

The article is not paywalled.

You know how I go on ad nauseum about how if you are running around freaking out about the commies taking over, you should make capitalism work?

Well, here you go.

The current framing of the political insider class is to characterize the wins as emanating from the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. And there’s a reason for that; Bernie Sanders is a DSA member, and he’s been endorsing a number of the challengers, including El-Sayed. But El-Sayed is not actually a socialist. He is, by his own words, an anti-monopolist.

And what does that mean?

I’m a capitalist who reads about capitalism. And when you read about capitalism, it is very clear, even to the originators who coined the idea, that the biggest risk to capitalism was not going to be government regulation, as much as the corporatists want you to think it is. It was always going to be monopoly. And we know that hyper-capitalism tends toward monopoly. We also understand that that happens in part because, when a corporation gets big enough, it has enough power to start “rent seeking,” which is a fancy way of saying influencing government action to protect its own interests. And that’s the place we are right now in capitalism. I think small business is amazing. I think it’s a really efficient way to move capital into the areas where it can be really efficient to create a lot of jobs. I’m just not a socialist. And so I want capitalism to work the way it was supposed to work, not the way that the corporations tell us it’s supposed to work.

The quote is from an interview El-Sayed did with the New Yorker.

Whatever else you may or may not like about this man’s platform, I think he’s on the right track here.

And people will start listening.

Inshallah.😉

One of these times, the change will take.

I have to tell you, the 2028 presidential election is looking dismal.

The newest poll from Emerson College, released on Thursday, July 23, shows Buttigieg leading among Democratic voters with 19%, with California Gov. Gavin Newsom at 17% and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tied at 13%.

On the Republican side, it’s a very tight two-horse race, as Vance leads with 39%, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio coming in with 38% of GOP primary voters. In a distant third is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis with only 5%, while 9% of voters are undecided.

There is not a single one of these people I’d waste the ink to fill in the bubble for. Yes, that includes Vance. I say that with a certain amount of sadness and resignation. We’ll get to him down below.

As for 2026, the Republicans have the midterm curse of having had control of the House, Senate, and White House, which is historically baggage enough. But they’ve squandered whatever goodwill they had bigly with the war. Does that mean that they’ll necessarily lose?

Nope.

Because the only competition is the Democrats and things are going a little weird.

The WSJ is practically squealing with delight.

Some of the problem is the lingering frustration among major donors over how their money was spent in the 2024 presidential election, when nominee Kamala Harris quickly raised more than $1 billion but still lost after a rushed process to nominate her. Others point to the painful divisions in the Democratic Party’s donor base over the war in Gaza, antisemitism in the U.S. and an insurgent group of Democratic socialists.

I think what we’re really seeing is a public tired of the show, and donors afraid they’re not going to get what they’re paying for.

But one thing did happen this week that had the cult formerly known as MAGA in an utter panic . . .

The reaction was predictable . . .

See it’s not Trump that’s the traitor, even though I can’t think of a single campaign promise he’s kept in full. It’s the people calling him out on not keeping his campaign promises that are the traitors.

See, the cult formerly known as MAGA.

Don’t worry. I recognize it happens on the “left” as well.

Anyway, I didn’t listen to Tucker Carlson’s segment on it, but I caught Joe Kent on TYT.

And honestly he’s right. Throw out the culture war issues. Just focus on what’s really, really important, what we can agree are the obstacles to a true democracy. We can fight the culture wars later.

As for why JD Vance can’t head up the movement, Joe Kent is more generous than I am, but in short, he’s spoiled goods. Perhaps beyond 2028, he can distance himself enough from Trump and the neocon takeover of the cult formerly known as MAGA, but at the moment, he’s seen as complicit.

But there is a problem with the picture.

And Kim Iverson is also right. You have to bring in the left. It won’t work otherwise.

But that shouldn’t be a problem if you stick to the issues that we all know are sabotaging any chance people have of actually being able to effect change at the ballot box.

If you take the time to watch this or even if you don’t, your thoughts?

Fauci: The circus rolls on

I haven’t really talked much about Fauci because of this . . .

Did he change the topic? Oh, that depends on how you look at it. You could interpret his answer as why he doesn’t care about what Trump did or didn’t do.

But in the end, Trump also has to answer for a lot, during COVID and now.

Don’t get me wrong. I like Rand Paul.

However, as I watch the whole Fauci thing, I can’t help but think we’re back to the radioactive squirrels. Yes, they’re dangerous, but they’re still just a distraction.

Does Fauci deserve to spend the rest of his days in a tiny little cell?

Of course he does.

Does that mean I’m going to forget what the Republicans have done otherwise and go rushing to the ballot box and open my wallet to get them reelected?

Are you kidding?

But Fauci was hauled in front of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, and he pleaded the fifth over 100 times.

It got this ridiculous . . .

So the Senate committee voted to hold Fauci in contempt, along party lines. What comes of that, I don’t know.

But I don’t have much hope for us.

Here is CNN’s article . . .

The Covid-19 pandemic was a historic stress test that revealed American politics as too broken to deal with a national crisis.

Yeah, we ran out of toilet paper when we should have run out of Kleenex, and people were acting like idiots.

Six years later, a new political storm over Dr. Anthony Fauci, once the nation’s most prominent health official, suggests those fractures are now even more toxic. And a long-delayed reckoning over the worst public health emergency in 100 years is more distant than ever.

It’s not just American politics that is too broken. It’s America’s institutions, including the media, that are too broken.

If after six years a news agency can’t recognize the utter clusterfuck that was the hysterical reaction to COVID, that is a huge problem.

If a news agency is still trying to protect this narcissistic, corrupt little man because “orange man bad,” then that is a huge problem.

Fauci’s plight is also something of a Washington tragedy. In nearly four decades at the NIAID, he was the rare official feted by Republicans and Democrats alike. Foreign governments regarded him as the gold standard of global health, and his involvement in President George W. Bush’s PEPFAR global anti-HIV/AIDS programs helped save millions of lives.

And that right there should have set off the warning bells. He was far better ass-kisser than he was a scientist. You don’t survive that many administrations otherwise. That was my great lesson to take away.

Does CNN take that way?

No, they go with the old saw . . .

No one argues that Fauci did everything right. Some of his advice has looked, in retrospect, to be contradictory or not supported by science.

But the political heat around the famous doctor may also be an obstacle to something more important: full accountability across the public square over the pandemic, which might improve the federal response to the next emergency. . . .

The pandemic was such a horrific experience that most people just wanted to move on. But that desire has tempered a reckoning among public and medical officials for in-depth examinations of the period, Lee argued. “Looking back, what did we get right? What did we get wrong? I don’t see that kind of internal reckoning.”

Well, no one wants a reckoning because everyone would have to look in a mirror.

But here is where the article ends . . .

No public official should be above answering for decisions made in positions of public trust. Fauci’s critics see him as imperious and resistant to scrutiny — even while excusing the failings of Trump, who was often a torrent of misinformation and crank cures during the emergency.

But if an official as respected as Fauci is not immune from vicious, personal vilification by national leaders, other, less high-profile public servants might chose another profession and leave America ill-served in the next crisis.

“These attacks upon Dr. Fauci — it’s not just about him,” Democratic Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey said at the hearing last week. “It’s sending signals to others … our scientists, our doctors, our healthcare professionals, our researchers. (It’s) trying to show to them that if you don’t get in line with the politics, that you will also potentially be subject to attacks.”

God forbid we have accountability.

And that is why we’re broken. There is no accountability. Not for Fauci. Not for the media. Not for the Republicans who want to use this as a distraction while memory-holing that it was Trump who put Fauci in the position of power to begin with and made an opening for unproven vaccine technology that likely has done a lot of harm. Not for the Democrats who, well . . .

Nobody is held accountable.

That is why we’re not ready for the next “crisis.” Because we’re already in a crisis . . . of faith and integrity.

I always wondered about these shows

Restrained on her front steps next to her 17-year-old son, Dillon learned she was under arrest on a 3-year-old warrant she says she didn’t know existed and stemmed from a dismissed misdemeanor charge. “If this is on any social media, you all are going to be in trouble,” Dillon told the officers.

She pleaded with the officers to handcuff her arms in front to avoid causing her pain because she was recovering from shoulder replacement surgery, the video showed. While they changed the handcuffs after about 5 minutes, Dillon was kept in that agonizing position for more than four hours in the back of a patrol vehicle, she said.

A year after her arrest, Dillon filed a lawsuit in June against Knox County, the sheriff and four deputies, alleging the frightening ordeal only happened because they were filming for the show and used a stale warrant to make “dramatic content.”

This woman is not alone.

Just last year, a Maryland man sued police and the producers of “On Patrol: Live,” alleging he was wrongfully arrested and portrayed in a false light in an aired episode. In 2024, a Texas county agreed to pay $2.5 million to a resident who claimed the sheriff’s office staged his son’s arrest in 2020, broadcast on a similar show called “Live PD.”

And this happens for a very simple reason.

“When there’s an entertainment value attached… You push aside all of these other considerations that come into play about people’s humanities and rights,” said Brandon Golob, professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine.

Meanwhile . . .

Law enforcement officials who support collaborating with such shows say there’s value in sharing a real-life, unfiltered glimpse into their profession with the public and highlighting how they serve communities.

“Seeing it all as it really happens allows the public to reach their own conclusions and form their own ideas and opinions,” said Lawrence Police Department Capt. Tracey Cantrell, whose agency also participated in “On Patrol: Live.”

And the conclusions we reached in these cases? That cops are assholes who will do anything for attention.

Okay, not all cops.

But others in law enforcement have turned down requests to be featured on these programs, arguing their profession is not entertainment.

When he was the Washington, DC, police chief for nearly a decade, Charles Ramsey declined to partner with a police reality television show. The work is serious, can be dangerous and it’s not fair for people officers encounter who are going through a crisis to be filmed, Ramsey said.

“This is real stuff,” said Ramsey, also a CNN law enforcement analyst. “Hauling around a camera crew is not something that I think is in the best interest of the department, the citizens, the city, anybody.”

And my faith is restored, slightly.

You?

Escapism

I rarely talk about music because I have pretty pedestrian tastes and I’m fifty, so nostalgia kicks in.

But the other day I was listening to The Highway, a “new country music” channel on Sirius.

Oh. My. God. That music is horrid.

I grew up on country music. That’s all there was in my parents’ house (other than the Irish Rovers) and on the radio (western North Dakota, mostly AM, with stock reports and Paul Harvey religiously at 12:15). I can sing along with most everything from the era of Johnny Horton to Alabama on up to Garth Brooks. But I hardly listen to new country, and so I thought, why not try?

Seven songs. I made it seven songs. I made it seven because around song three or four, they played Shaboozey. I don’t know which one, but something with some character, and I could push on a few more.

The rest? These people need to be very afraid of AI, because the music—both the lyrics and the instrumental—sound like it was produced by AI already.

So just one of the songs was this one . . .

I remembered it because it had Missoula in the lyrics and as a student of literature I was analyzing the chorus and thinking, this doesn’t make a lick of sense. But all of them had this tendency to rely on cliches and worn corny metaphors backed up by nondescript barely better than Muzak track in a way that had me . . .

I thought to myself, “I can name two songs off the top of my head that did this infinitely better.”

And then there’s . . .

Beyond those two, my favorite song in this particular “genre” of country music . . .

Now, tell me what those three have that the first one lacks?

For me, it is, in a word, soul.

Speaking of which . . .

And that old time country.

Oh, just to clarify, music is one of the best escapes, as long as you’re not pulling your hair out listening to the lyrics.

Meanwhile, I am kind of in a reading slump, so I picked up what to me is a really old book at the library . . .

Originally published in 1954, when my mother was just a year older than my niece is now.

I’ve read “The Lottery” (which student in high school or a basic college lit class hasn’t?). I’ve also read The Haunting of Hill House. I like older writers because they can turn a phrase like modern writers can’t.

The whole room partook somehow of the smooth hills and sunsets; the chair in which Elizabeth sat was soft and deep and upholstered in a kind of cloudy orange, her feet lay on a carpet in which a scarlet key design ran in and out and around a geometric floral affair in green and brown, and the wallpaper, pervading and emphasizing the room, and somehow the Arrows, presented the inadvertent viewer with alternate squares of blue and green, relieved almost haphazardly by touches of black. There was nothing of harmony, nothing of humor, in the Arrows’ way of life; there was everything of compromise and yet, comfortably, a kind of deep security in the unmistakable realization that all of this belonged without dispute to the Arrows, was unmovable and after a while almost tolerable, and was, beyond everything else, solid. Not even Aunt Morgen could deny the Arrows the reality of their living room, and when one met them at a lecture on reincarnation, or walking placidly together toward the park on a Sunday afternoon, or dining at the home of one of those odd people who always seemed to invite them, Mr. and Mrs. Arrow brought with them, and spread infectiously, an air of unfading wallpaper and practical carpeting, of ironclad and frequently unendurable mediocrity. (p. 21-22)

I have met people like this. It’s just such an amazing description.

I didn’t like it as much as I like The Haunting of Hill House, but it was still a nice palate cleanser.

And I watched . . .

Think of it as a cross between Kill Bill and Ready or Not.

It was entertaining, bloody but quirky, with a satisfying turn of events and ending.

Sorry, I feel like I’m phoning it in a lot these days. Tuesdays have fallen away. I struggle to find the time and the energy for the garden, the yard, the paperwork, and life and doing research for Tuesday pieces. When fall comes and things calm down, hopefully I can get back to it.

Beyond that, it’s smokey and hot here, but so far—fingers crossed—nothing is burning. We’re getting the results of Spokane’s mishap.

So how was your week? Anything to mention about the above or anything else? I know I don’t hit it all.

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I so relate.

And away we go . . .

I missed my calling . . .

The UCI reportedly issued a specific warning about clothing that “could modify riders’ morphology.” Wielerflits, which first reported the story in Dutch, pointed to several instances in which female cyclists appeared to have noticeably larger busts during time trials than during road races. . . .

“Chest fairing” involves placing material inside a cyclist’s jersey to alter the shape of the chest. The modification redirects airflow around the rider’s body, reducing pressure on the thighs and lowering aerodynamic drag, according to Wielerflits and CyclingNews. The reduced resistance can help cyclists ride faster.

Looks down at what I fondly call my double-D “food shelf” . . .

From the crime blotter . . .

Okay, it was a little funny. 🤷‍♀️ I’d have to know the hospital. Maybe it was a well-earned prank.

In other, uh, crime news . . .

He wasn’t trying to kill himself. Witnesses say he had a “makeshift” parachute.

So he was just stupid and crazy, but not suicidal.

That makes all the difference.😏

This isn’t a FFS story . . .

But this is . . .

According to Arizona court records, Farinacci pleaded guilty in 2012 to amended charges of manslaughter, stemming from an Oct. 11, 2010, incident involving his parents.

Farinacci fatally shot his father after an argument over washing dishes, before running off and attempting to commit suicide, according to court documents.

Under a plea agreement in 2012, he began to serve a 12-year prison sentence on the manslaughter conviction followed by supervised probation on the aggravated assault conviction.

So he shot his father over «checks notes» household chores.

In a sane society that would be a sign that maybe he shouldn’t be let out amongst people unsupervised.

Farinacci was released from prison in December of 2020 and discharged from probation in February, 2024, according to court records.

Prison math.

The discharge order states he failed to comply with conditions related to fines and fees, did not complete a mental health evaluation or domestic violence treatment, and received multiple reprimands from his supervising probation officer.

The court noted he had no outstanding warrants at the time of the discharge.

So why was he discharged again? What was Arizona thinking?

And now he burned down a chunk of the area around Spokane because—I don’t know—someone asked him to take out the trash.

In “entertainment” news, Daily Wire is out with a new movie . . .

I know how you feel. This was my reaction.

Excuse me while I go write a script about a bunch of fanatical Jews who put together a sex trafficking ring to move around young women and girls so that they can catch US politicians in compromising positions and then eventually blackmail a sitting US president into going to war against Iran. Thankfully, our plucky hero, an up and coming head of a large conservative youth organization, exposes the malignant fanatical influence, stands against it despite threats to his career and life, and brings a halt to the whole thing before the US runs through all its weapons and the world economy melts down.

What do you mean the ending is too unrealistic?

Nah, you’re right. The hero would probably be shot on a college campus by said fanatics and have the whole thing blamed on a fake trans-furry jihadi while the Zionists take over the organization and we end up in the war anyway.

Definitely more realistic.

I don’t have what one would call a lot of faith in humanity, but there are some stories that make even me go . . .

So you remember this kid, right? (And I do mean kid, like teenager still.)

Well, turns out, his parents are a piece of work . . .

The Cornell University student who declared he’s “not interested in working for a Jew” got tossed from his parents’ $1.75 million home in Virginia — and is now sniveling online for cash.

By the way, this is the news section of the New York Post, not the opinion section, the news section.

Tells you all you need to know about the New York Post.

So his parents kicked him out for a comment made to what turns out to be an Israeli with an American passport about not wanting to work for “a Jew.” The comment was made in private, but the Israeli with an American passport decided he’d go public with it because he’s the victim, as this nineteen year old oppressed him by not taking an internship.

The reason Austin Franco gave? His experiences with Jews had not been good.

Call me crazy, but I don’t think this will help his opinion. In fact, society may have created a lifelong anti-semite, and a bunch of us reading about this aren’t feeling too warm and fuzzy about certain Jews either.

Austin Franco, who went viral for declining a job interview at NYC startup VryfID for antisemitic reasons, took to X on Wednesday, declaring, “My parents are kicking me out.”

And then he dared to go looking for help.

The rising junior created a GiveSendGo campaign, which has already amassed more than $8,000 from twisted supporters — on top of the roughly $25,000 raised in a separate fundraiser.

Because of course he deserves to be living on the streets for the rest of his life.

Dad Alexander is a Cornell alum and patent lawyer, and Diana is a senior product manager for a banking regulators’ trade association.

They told The Post that they found their son’s behavior reprehensible — and believe he’s fallen victim to dark online influences.

Dark online influences, you say. Like this?

That’s a lawyer in Israel, by the way.

Oh, or maybe this . . .

Or maybe this . . .

The man quotes himself. And Jews don’t believe in hell.

If this is all I knew of “Jews,” I wouldn’t want to work for one either. Or really have anything to do with one.

But the real villains of this story? The parents.

Kicking your kid out of the house because he engaged in “wrongthink”?

They’d have been model citizens . . . in Stalinist Russia.

F—k me, but people are f—ked up.

Then again, there are moments that give me hope for humanity . . .

AIPAC, by itself, spent $30 million to push Haley “I dream of Israel” Stevens over the line. In total, however, $60 million was spent on behalf of Stevens.

And she still lost.

But you know what was even funnier?1

In Michigan’s 8th Congressional District, Hassan—a Navy veteran, former federal law enforcement officer, and proud recipient of Donald Trump’s “Complete and Total Endorsement”—lost the Republican primary to Thomas J. Smith, a man who had already suspended his campaign, stopped spending money, stopped showing up, and endorsed somebody else before Election Day. Smith was not merely running a bad campaign. Smith was no longer running a campaign at all. And he still beat Hassan’s ass.

And how badly did Smith beat Hassan?

He lost by roughly 10,000 votes—50.4% to 33.2%—a 17-point molly-wopping administered by a candidate who had effectively unplugged his campaign, turned off the lights, forwarded the mail, and left town.

Trump was having a week.

On the plus side, he got his “Truth API” up and running. Some clever person on X made an infomercial for it . . .

But it was all downhill from there.

People noticed his new hair . .

That’s, uh, one way to look at it. The other is that a vain old man is trying on a new hairpiece and it’s not going well.

The memes and AI altered videos are endless this morning.

Or how about this . . .

So that’s what happened to Lady Lindsey.

But the thing that really ruined Trump’s week . . .

Remember that Olympic kayaker who was charged with “vandalizing” the Reflecting Pool because he pulled out a piece of the floating lining and they were desperate for someone—anyone really—to “vandalize” the pool, I mean other than the caravan of SUVs taking Trump out on to it.

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro is facing public calls to apologize, be removed from office or be disbarred after she moved to dissolve a criminal case against a former Olympian accused of vandalizing the newly renovated Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Friday afternoon, Pirro reversed course on her vandalism case against David Hearn, admitting in a court filing that damage to a recently installed pool liner was “the result of flawed installation by the contractor.”

Awkward.

Conservative political commentator Scott Jennings criticized the administration’s faulty evidence in the case, agreeing that Hearn is “owed an apology.”

“The administration looks like a monkey having intimate relations with a football,” Jennings told CNN’s “The Source” Friday evening.

By the way, that’s the same Scott Jennings who has been running interference for the football-humping monkey for a year and a half now while claiming to have substantive twenty minute conversations with the vegetable that is Mitch McConnell (unless he’s no longer a vegetable and he’s been composted behind our backs).

Meanwhile, back at the looney bin . . .

Oh, he didn’t stop there . . .

Oh, don’t worry about Jeanine. She’s seventy-five years old. Fox News will (probably) take her back when she’s inevitably fired, and if they don’t, she has enough money.

And she has her dogs.

Besides, that’s the risk you take when you serve a mad king.

Do you remember this old movie?

I love it. It’s got some really clever humor and a lot of actors that I only knew when they were older, like Carl Reiner and Alan Arkin, so it was really fun to seen them when they were young.

Also, it’s the first thing I thought of when I saw this . . .

What Marco Rubio said was bad. How the “righties” translated it was worse.

Cuban communists have infiltrated America.

Just find a mirror and say that to yourself.

I dare you not to laugh.

No, I take that back . . .

Let’s put this in perspective, shall we?2

That island is infiltrating America.

Need more perspective?

That island with 3 percent of the US population is infiltrating America.

How about more perspective?

That island with 3 percent of the population of the US where the GDP per capita is less than a tenth of that of the United States . . . is infiltrating America.

There aren’t enough of these people and they don’t have the money to infiltrate anything.

In fact, the only Cubans invading the US are, well . . .

Yes, Cubans have invaded our country, but it turns out that they don’t want to help Cuba as it is. They want revenge for being driven out. They want the US to settle old scores for them.

But you noticed the nuance here. People who are aligned with communist Cuba are pushing propaganda in our schools and institutions. Cuba doesn’t need to actually do it itself.

Wait, that’s familiar.

Where have I seen that before . . .

Give me a minute. It will come to me.

I know I’m struggling. It’s right on the tip of my tongue.

The money was distributed to Adelson’s super PAC, Preserve America.

Oh, wait. I have it.

It’s . . . Qatar.

Eh, we all know how ridiculous this is.

So why are we doing this, other than Marco Rubio’s parents were from Cuba and I guess no one holds a grudge like Cuban ex-pats?

Because Iran told us to go pick on someone our own size . . . so we chose Cuba.

So how badly are things going with Iran?

“We are looking for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” an officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch wrote in a message sent Wednesday to a broad group of military analysts, according to a source familiar with the message. A second source also said that a senior US military officer sent the message last week soliciting new ideas for how to deal with Iran.

The crowdsourcing-style query, which military officials said was unusual over email, is one sign of the limited — and potentially unpalatable —options available to Trump to force Iran into a deal on his terms. Hoping to find an alternative, the official at CENTCOM kicked off the brainstorming session via email to see if anyone had a better idea. The second source said CENTCOM is looking at everything, acknowledging it needs to reevaluate the strategy.

Everything? you say.

I must ponder this.

As the war rages on and prices go higher, we had the great burrito debate of 2026 . . .

Honestly, I’m not sure where these people are buying burritos, because I just had the Burrito Montana at our (the other half and my) favorite Mexican restaurant here in town, and with rice and beans inside, it was $14.00. I have just water, and with tip, it’s roughly $17. But it’s a damn good burrito. So, yeah, I suppose, on second thought, that’s a very reasonably priced restaurant, and with a drink, it would be $20.

Anyway, me personally I would have tried to push back on the $20, because Toxic Juans, I mean Taco John’s is something like $3 or $4 for your basic beef burrito, without the meal. It’s only “food” in the loosest sense of the word, but technically true.

Not the Israelis with American passports, because after all Matt Walsh dared to tie higher prices to wars, either directly or because Trump can’t focus on bringing groceries down when he’s too busy fellatiating Bibi.

We had Joel Berry of the formerly funny Babylon Bee weigh in . . .

And then you have Marc Thiessen, who looks like he never missed a meal himself and could possibly share . . .

Can someone please explain to Marc here that not every student lives on campus and not only college students eat burritos?

Even Eye-Patch McCain threw in his two cents . . .

And that was where the “blowback” started . . .

That’s sort of the problem. People who don’t actually struggle are telling people who do struggle that they’re struggling wrong.

There was one problem right off the bat.

Here is Walmart’s one pound of ground beef . . .

So what gives? people asked Mr. Kauffman.

So to get two pounds of hamburger at $4.44 a pound, I have to buy ten pounds at nearly $45?

If I had $45, I wouldn’t be worrying about how far $20 would get me.

Good question. I don’t think so, both about the wages and that being the dumbest thing you’ll find on X.

Shame on you if you haven’t saved up for two years to get the best price on beef.

Of course, you’d also need a really good sized freezer.

However, the real point of this discussion is the hypocrisy . . .

Yup, he did . . .

By the way, my grandparents all had gardens because they had land because they all lived in an agrarian economy and could get out of town and weren’t held hostage by the corporate greed and multiple layers of non-value-added cost that infests our food chain.

They’d shake their heads at our food bills, actually.

But I digress.

Yes, yes, he is.

Ben Shapiro frequently allows his inner his Marie Antoinette to run free.

And the right was calling him and his buddies out on it . . .

Or . . .

Except, to gently correct Mr. Shroyer, there is push back, or at least there is now with the midterms so close . . .

Or . . .

What happened to Gen X’s “messaging” you might ask?

We don’t message. We just sit here and watch you all fight and try to figure out if our mortgages are going to outlast our bodies or not.

I’m kidding. I really have no beef (pun intended) with either boomers or millennials.

I’m not kidding about the mortgage. As my husband says, he’ll work a half day the morning of his own funeral just to get caught up.

But the important thing to realize is we’re not really arguing about burritos.

On the one hand, we have the people trying to save the Republican Party from itself (that’s what this is, let’s be honest) . . .

And on the other hand we have . . .

Ben isn’t worried about you eating or the Republicans winning.

He’s worried about Israel.

I hate to tell you, Wee Ben on your wee high horse, but we don’t have to surrender to Iran.

They’ve already got us beat.

But back to that whole creative thinking about how to firmly “punish” Iran.

We can get Ben Shapiro to make a bunch of burritos . . .

And we can launch those at the Iranians!

Hey, you come up with a better idea.

Um, who just said, “Skip the burritos. Let’s just launch Ben Shapiro at them.”

Okay, you win. That’s a better idea. We’ll launch Ben and eat the burritos ourselves. We can make a day of it.

Sorry about the burrito fest. I just found it so funny.

Oh, by the way, Joel Berry during the 2024 campaign . . .

You know, a smart person would have gone through his old posts and deleted a few.

Which only goes to show, these are not smart people.

I love my dog videos. And I like videos with happy people. So . . . here you go.

Dogs make life better.

Have the best weekend.

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How’s that war going?

Trump still says we’re winning. We’re not. We blow up civilian infrastructure in Iran. Iran goes after anything our military can use, reaching so far as Egypt’s coast. Meanwhile, Bibi came to town and gave his lapdog instructions. Oh, and Zelensky was here too, begging for help as Russia gets tired of the tit for tat and starts firing on Kiev (Kyiv?). Oh, and somehow Ukraine thought it would be a good idea to fire on an Iranian cargo ships. Trump says he’s not sending the better weapons to Ukraine because we can’t share that kind of tech. The truth? We don’t have them to send.

I’m lazy this morning, so just a couple of the best clips, courtesy of Glenn Greenwald.

I wouldn’t say stumbled, so much as ran headlong into, but yeah.

And finally Thomas Massie . . .

Actually, I don’t care about that last one.

I suspect next week will be much the same.

My sister’s best friend from college has a husband who just finished officer’s school. They’re in the forties and he’s always been in sort of the logistics (supply chain) department, so I think he’s safe, but their son is going to bootcamp this month.

I don’t know him well, but I’ve watched him grow up through my sister’s pictures.

Let’s just say I worry. I’ve gotten tired of the “but they signed up for this.” That doesn’t justify getting them killed or maimed for Israel.

Week of natural disasters . . .

I don’t normally include these because if you’re paying attention at all, you’ve seen them, but yeesh.

And then on Tuesday, Japan experienced a 7.1 magnitude earthquake.

This video repeats, but it’s a good roundup of images.

Every now and then I think planet earth is just trying to get rid of us. Crazy thought, I know.

Shiloh Hendrix and “fightin’ words”

I don’t know if you remember this woman.

Hello!

My name is Shiloh and I have been put into a very dire situation. I recently had a kid steal from my 18month old sons diaper bag at a park. I called the kid out for what he was. Another man, who we recently found out has had a history with law enforcement, proceeded to record me and follow me to my car. He then posted these videos online which has caused my family, and myself, great turmoil. My SSN has been leaked. My address, and phone number have been given out freely. My family members are being attacked. My eldest child may not be going back to school. Even where I exercise has been exposed.

I am asking for your help to assist in protecting my family. I fear that we must relocate. I have two small children who do not deserve this. We have been threatened to the extreme by people online. Anything will help! We cannot, and will not live in fear!

Thank You

What did she do?

Things got worse for Ms. Hendrix though. She was eventually charged with three counts of disorderly conduct. In the end, one was dropped before she went to trial. One she was acquitted on (regarding the child). But one stuck (regarding the person who filmed her). Per MPR News,

Hendrix was sentenced immediately following the verdict being read. She was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine, was placed on probation and ordered to complete community service. She initially faced up to 90 days in jail, but will serve no jail time unless probation is broken.

And immediately the right went wild.

Yeah, because all conservative influencers like Matt Walsh call out all infringement on free speech all the time, just not when it’s politically convenient. 🙄

But I did wonder. As far as I knew, she didn’t actually touch anybody, so why the disorderly conduct charge? Because otherwise they are right about this being an infringement on the First Amendment, no matter that I think she’s not someone I’d want to be around.

Well, quirky thing about Minnesota law . . .

Minn. Stat. § 609.72 (Disorderly Conduct), Subdivision 1: "Whoever does any of the following in a public or private place... knowing, or having reasonable grounds to know that it will, or will tend to, alarm, anger or disturb others or provoke an assault or breach of the peace, is guilty of disorderly conduct, which is a misdemeanor: (1) engages in brawling or fighting; or (2)... [see Note below]; or (3) engages in offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous, or noisy conduct or in offensive, obscene, or abusive language tending reasonably to arouse alarm, anger, or resentment in others."

There was already one challenge to this law, which was passed in 1963 and amended again in 1967 and 1971, but never substantially changed. It previously had a provision for disturbing a meeting or assembly in section 2. But that was struck down, and the rest of it was narrowed to people can be arrested for disorderly conduct if they say “fighting words.”

What are “fighting words”?

Fighting words are statements so inflammatory that they are likely to provoke immediate physical retaliation. For example, shouting a slur or threatening harm in a heated public confrontation could fall under this category.

This means that sarcasm, jokes, or hyperbolic speech aren’t considered fighting words. Fighting words must provoke immediate violence.

Hendrix’s lawyer is appealing this, obviously, and she will likely win because of another court case in 1986, which ended in this ruling . . .

The S.L.J. case is a “warning against applying Minn. Stat. § 609.72, subd. 1(3) too broadly. The wording of the statute (which is subjective and borders on vagueness), requires conduct to “reasonably” arouse alarm, anger or resentment in others. Under S.L.J., the statute is limited to fighting words, and should be used only in good faith to prosecute criminal offenses. To avoid interfering with first amendment rights, this statute should not be used to combat rudeness or for social engineering.”

And “combatting rudeness or . . . social engineering” is clearly what this is, at least to me.

So why am I not up in arms about this? Well, because I think the rather abominable Ms. Hendrix will be fine.

And second . . .

That’s overly dramatic but it gets my point across.

Yes, it’s a dangerous precedent if it stands.

But letting this stand . . .

over this . . .

Was also a dangerous precedent.

As was this . . .

But here we are.

Muslims are taking over Spain!😱 Not quite.

This is one of those attempts to drive the livestock off the cliff that only works if the livestock doesn’t look at a map.

And therefore . . .

I wasn’t really paying attention because if Muslims are “invading” Europe, it’s a day that ends in “y.” The subject is complex and requires a discussion about all the moving parts, not just what people want to focus on because of the axes they have to grind.

And if it’s a politician fearmongering, it’s also, well, a day that ends in “y.”

But this one is too funny.

So back to “the Muslims are taking over Spain”!

To be accurate “the Muslims,” or more specifically “the Moroccans,” invaded a place called Ceuta. Though it was true that they did come in the tens of thousands, or something like fifty to sixty thousand of them.

But there’s a catch.

Nobody had to take boats. Nobody is flooding Spain proper. They just had to come in on trucks, though there is a “maritime” border and some died tried to swim it.

And rush over the “border” . . .

Now why is this happening? Well, I’m not really sure what is happening to be honest. Are the Moroccans “invading” Cueta and planning to displace the Spanish or did they just come into town for some PR stunt so someone could make a point?

But beyond that I can tell you what some suspect.

It was the New York Times that published the following little factoid . . .

So the Moroccan government told upwards of sixty thousand Moroccan civilians to bum rush the border. For what purpose? I mean, if you’re going to take that land, wouldn’t you want men with guns.

Weird, huh?

And then people started to “notice.”

Spain was one of the few European countries to call Israel out on its bullshit, by refusing to allow the US to utilize its bases to bomb Iran and put an arms embargo on Israel.

But Spain and Israel have long had a strained relationship it would seem.

That, my friends, is Bibi Netanyahu’s son.

Also Bibi’s son.

Israelis with American passports were making hay while the sun shines . . .

Yes, I remember now how Spain was bombing Catalonians, and Catalonians don’t have the same rights as the Spanish, and Spain put a big fence around Catalonia, while the Spanish moved in and stole the Catalonians homes and beat them.

Totally the same situation.

And then there’s Bibi himself . . .

Head of a country that’s not necessarily in a hostile relationship with Morocco . . .

With even Israeli media providing a connection . . .

Look, did Israel and the US foment a bum rush of the border around Ceuta? I don’t know, but let’s not lie and say it’s outside the realm of possibility.

The AfD (or Ah-ef-De), in English known as the Alternative for Germany, is described as a “far-right populist nationalist” party. It “notices” things too.

Of course, this all gets funnier because some people are absolutely dedicated to “not noticing” . . .

She has eyes, Mr. Redden, she has eyes, and she uses them.

Might want to try it.

I mean, it’s not like we don’t have precedent.

You know what’s interesting about the whole Muslims invading Spanish thing. You know what I haven’t seen the Spanish doing?

Google, what did Spain do to the invading Spanish hordes?

Look at that: no bombs, no shooting little kids in the head, no drones blowing people up. The people who died, died because they got caught in the crowd.

Spain just . . . sent them home.

Maybe Israel should be taking notes.

Poisoning AI

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this other than to suggest that if you use AI to do research (as I do), you should be careful.

If you don’t want to read the article, Mr. Cleveland-Stout made an appearance on Breaking Points.

The conversation is interesting.

If you want a more fun version that gives more background . . .

The only thing I’m going to add is something they did bring up in the Breaking Points segment: this isn’t just about Israel. Israel is obvious because we can see the difference between the AI answer and what we can find ourselves. But this problem is going to come up with any special interest with a lot of money.

Barring regulation, the only thing people can do is become “savvy.” Just like we grew savvy about learning which sources on the Internet to trust and then how search engines worked and then about what social media pushed, we’re going to have to become savvy about using AI for research.

To that end, I asked Claude (I know the irony is not lost on me) to come up with a checklist after I had a discussion with him about how big a problem this would be when using AI, including Claude.

I’ll share it here as a PDF. I was doing a lot of what is on the checklist because as I said, as a Gen Xer, this is not my first rodeo. I know to be skeptical, but if it helps you, have at it.

Ai Source Vetting Checklist

37.6KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The prize for Best Fantasy Novel since 1976 goes to . . . not Harry Potter

So it’s just a list in Collider, a publication dedicated to all things entertainment, but I found the choice interesting.

I’ve read the series the put at the top, and it didn’t surprise me, because it is really, really creative and thoughtful.

But I was a little shocked that for once someone chose quality over quantity (not to say I did or didn’t like J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series—it’s more nuanced than that).

It’s fairly obvious to see why the fantasy genre is a favorite among book lovers, with its fantastical worlds to explore, hidden threats, and plucky protagonists. The publication Collider recently showcased a few popular novels in the wondrous genre by releasing a list of the “9 greatest fantasy books of the last 50 years.”

In fact, no Harry Potter novel made the list, nor any of the gazillion YA fantasies. Of course, that’s not necessarily eyebrow raising since the list was “fantasies” more widely, and YA romantasy is a niche, a niche with a wide fanbase, but a niche.

But the winner, even over Game of Thrones, which also kind of surprised me . . .

Going to the Collider article itself . . .

“We’re all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not.” Northern Lights (aka The Golden Compass) is the first installment in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials saga, one of the most intellectually ambitious (and entertaining!) fantasy sagas ever. At the heart of it is Lyra Belacqua, a rebellious orphan living at Jordan College in an alternate universe where human souls exist externally as animal companions called daemons. After children begin disappearing, Lyra becomes entangled in a vast conspiracy involving a mysterious substance known as Dust.

Along the way, she encounters witches, aeronauts, religious fanatics, and armored bears, while also coming into possession of a highly prized object that can divine the truth about anything. Beneath all that adventure lies a deeply philosophical story exploring free will, innocence, authority, and the dangers of ideological control, setting a new bar for modern fantasy.

The Parade article quotes a 2007 interview with Philip Pullman discusses why he writes about what is essentially religion, given that the detail Collider left out of its description is that in the books human souls exist outside their bodies as animal familiars and the books center on what happens when the soul is severed. It’s actually kind of dark in a way, but poignant.

“Religion is a thing that human beings do. Every society that we know, about every human culture has had a religion of some sort, a body of thought that deals with the big questions,” said the British author, now 79. “‘Who created the universe? Was it created at all? What are we here for? What’s the purpose of life? What happens when we die?’ Things like that, these, I think, are the religious questions. And in that sense, I am a religious man because I think about these things and I have done all my life, these are very deep and important questions.”

If you’re looking for the list of nine you can click above or here.

I’ve read the Golden Compass series (the series this book is part of) and all but the last of the Game of Thrones books. (I gave up because it doesn’t seem like Martin will ever finish them and the books vary from the HBO show.) I’ve heard of a couple of the others.

How about you?

Escapism

I watched . . .

It’s a four-part series on BritBox (first episode on Amazon, but only the first episode, so don’t fall for it).

I’m going to have to go find the book. I read “Ten Little Indians” and I was surprised by the depth of the characters. This movie is similar.

And I read . . .

I’ve read a few of Alice Feeney’s books, and I think with this one I’m calling it. She likes the twists and turns, but the only one that really worked for me was Daisy Darker. The rest sacrificed believability to make a point or get a good twist in, and this was the worst of the lot. Had she not chosen to tell the story in first person, switching between characters, she might have pulled it off. But there is a peculiar limitation with being in characters’ heads: the internal dialogue has to make sense in retrospect, once the twist is revealed. Spoiler alert: If you help your ex-husband plan the murder of the nanny who allegedly threw your daughter over the bannister, you’re going to recognize him.

But even more annoying, the author is too lazy to keep details straight. She can’t keep Eden Fox’s age right. Within less than fifty pages, Eden Fox is hired at twenty-one to be a nanny. The daughter gets hurt. The first wife and the husband get divorced, and two years later Eden Fox marry’s the husband when she is . . . twenty. She aged backwards.

It seems like Feeney just couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to make the book work all the way around, because it was optioned by a “major Hollywood studio” a year before publication. I hate when you can tell authors are writing against a clock and for a paycheck and not paying attention. And you can tell that here.

We escaped to the mountains, where if you open the windows at night, the bedroom cools down and you can sleep, like a log.

It’s magical.

Anyway, let me know what you think of any of the above or if I “missed” anything.

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Or . . .

I’ve been feeling this one. It’s supposed to be nearly 110 tomorrow. Thank God I’m headed to the mountains.

And away we go . . .

The Weinermobile turns 90!

I do not know that I have ever actually seen the Weinermobile in real life.

In fact, I know I haven’t.

Huh.

Excuse while I go find my bucket list and add it somewhere.

When life gives you lemons . . .

You have to work with what you have, you know what I mean?

That sound you hear is my scratching another note on my bucket list.

What’s a Friday without a dumb criminal . . .

Police say the rider was travelling at 146 kilometres an hour in an 80 zone, and the motorcycle was missing its mirrors as required by law.

A video shows a police motorcyclist approach before the rider does a wheelie and speeds away, weaving through traffic.

The 20-year-old Richmond man eventually pulls over, and the Highway Patrol says he was co-operative, noting he wasn’t fleeing the scene since he didn’t see the officer or didn’t realize he was being watched.

His parents must be proud.

🤦‍♀️

I don’t know what the big deal is. It’s just Africa.

The map showed Nigeria, where the US currently has several hundred troops deployed, as landlocked in the Sahara desert. Mozambique, which is in south-eastern Africa, was relocated to the Horn of Africa, while Côte d’Ivoire in west Africa was placed on the other side of the continent. . . .

“Whoever created and approved this slide did not know where countries in Africa are and did not care to ​check their work,” wrote Matt Petit, who focuses on AI and geopolitics at the Atlantic Council, in the post.

There’s that American exceptionalism again.

A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included ⁠in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. The company did ​not respond to a request for comment.

I make a prediction. If war ever breaks out between the US and Russia, we’ll bomb Moscow . . . Idaho. Because some idiot will use AI, which won’t know the difference.

Bear that care and attention to detail in mind as you listen to this story.

So I decided to try to find out how bad the exhibit was.

Did you know you can actually go through the objects online?

They had a “pussy” hat and an LGBTQ protest sign from the 1960s. But they also had a MAGA hat and a Tea Party protest sign. But mostly it was Americana, like . . .

Or . . .

It looks like they have bits and pieces from every era and every viewpoint and even no viewpoint.

What is it that Trump wants really?

Ah, so Soviet-level gaslighting it is.

Another round of “they said what?”

“I can see Russia from my house.” —Sarah Palin.

Mentioning that for no reason.

It’s Schroedinger’s stockpile. As long as we don’t open the box it both exists and doesn’t.

But don’t worry, the White House has this all well in hand.

I don’t know what the hell that was either.

We had a domestic scandal this week . . .

Representative Max Miller, a second-term Republican representing northeast Ohio whose political rise was fueled by his close relationship to President Trump, has been accused by his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, of domestic abuse against her and their 2-year-old daughter.

Ms. Moreno, the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno, also an Ohio Republican, has said that Mr. Miller scalded her chest and stomach by throwing hot water from a skillet at her body; held a gun to her head; pushed her against a wall and hit her head; and fractured their daughter’s collarbone and bruised her shoulder.

According to court documents, their daughter at one point told Ms. Moreno, “Daddy kill you.”

Well, I’ll be happy to tell you that Republicans don’t put up with kind of shit from one of their own. Unlike the Democrats, they took immediate action, none of that hemming and hawing and deflecting . . .

Did you hear that? They’re allegations. We must wait for the process to play out. That’s how that always works.

Graham Platner would like a word.

Is this article from The Times (a UK newspaper) this out of touch or the best piece of satire ever? You decide.

Let’s start with the fact that if you describe yourself as a Democrat, you are not in fact politically homeless. You just don’t like who has moved in the room down the hall in your sorority.

I came across this article because of Glenn Greenwald.

I won’t say each paragraph is worse than the one that preceded it, but the uniparty mentality comes screaming through.

You see, these moderately wealthy, upwardly mobile women all got together to form this little club in New York.

Guttman, 36, and Patricof, 30, believe Democrats have overlooked a generation of young women eager to engage politically but who feel alienated by both the party establishment and the growing influence of democratic socialism in New York. The idea is that financing a new cohort of largely unknown candidates will also reshape the Democratic party down the line, producing a more moderate class of leaders.

“This is a group of people who are not far left and mostly feel politically homeless,” Guttman said. “They see the mayor’s office and they don’t really identify as that Democrat,” she added, referring to New York City’s democratic socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

So basically they’re trying to “save” the Democrat Party through monthly dinners at “buzzy” restaurants with featured political speakers and throwing a little money behind a candidate here and there.

The name of the club is Juno. The reason one of the founder gives?

Patricof studied classics at Dartmouth . . .

Sorry, the stereotype just got to me there for a moment.

Anyway, onward . . .

. . . and named the organisation after Juno, the Roman goddess who was the supreme patroness of women and also served as a guardian and protector for the safety of the empire. In many ways, she embodies the role they envision for themselves.

Funny enough, Juno is the renamed Greek goddess Hera, who is known less for helping women and more for being one of mythology’s most spiteful female figures (if not the most spiteful figure).

I bet they don’t include that in the brochure.

“We really are in a very populist moment,” Shor said, as diamond-set fingers shot up to ask questions. “If the 2028 election was today, we would probably lose.”

Because populist these women are not. In fact, you almost get the vibe at the writer of the article is laughing at them.

Here is how Empsom describes the DSA . . .

When it was founded in 1982, the Democratic Socialists of America was seen as a fringe anti-capitalist group that was totally unelectable. But in recent years, an affordability crisis and wealth inequality has helped rally voters to its cause. In 2018, the DSA had its first national breakthrough when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then just 29, was elected to Congress. Then in 2024, more than one million NYC voters chose Mamdani, 34, to run the biggest city in the nation. More DSA candidates are now winning Democratic primaries across America, proving the left-wing flank of the party is no longer just having a moment. It’s turning into a movement.

That is the most straightforward and least satirical sounding part of the article.

But many of Juno’s young members told me they don’t identify with it.

I wonder why.

“I think the Democratic Party, especially more in recent years, has been thought of as serious, not fun, and like almost overly woke,” Margot Adams, 28, told me. A Parsons graduate who lives in Greenwich Village, Adams and her mother co-founded Luxeire, a fashion brand aimed at working women where a button-down sells for around $250. She contributes about $3,000 a year to Juno.

Sorry, sorry. Just you know Greenwich village, $250 blouses for working women, and “Parsons,” as if I’m supposed to know what that is. I have no idea, but I assume it’s very expensive and very exclusive.

They have noticed how the Maga movement has become adept at turning politics into a social scene, hosting parties and events filled with unabashed young conservatives in glitzy dress. A viral example of this was captured, right after Trump’s second election, by a New York magazine cover entitled “The Cruel Kids Table.”

But when I asked how young people on the left could attract that kind of cultural visibility, Spivey was dismissive. “I think all of us here are very confident and we don’t have to promote ourselves as being at those types of parties,” she told me. “That’s the difference between old money and new money, you know what I mean?”

Ouch.

I’d encourage a read of the article if you want to see a group of really wealthy mostly white women (all white women?) entirely out of touch with the rest of the world and acting like that’s okay.

However, besides describing themselves as “politically homeless,” they are actually the absolute epitome of the Democrat Party . . .

From 6.30pm, Saint Laurent leather bags and laptops were set aside for glasses of white wine. The walls were dotted with Democratic memorabilia: fraying “Kennedy for President” flyers from 1960 and condoms stamped with “F*** Project 2025”. Guests eased into conversations as David Shor, the influential political pollster and head of data science at Blue Rose Research, prepared his PowerPoint that would anchor the evening’s conversations. He was wearing white linen and Birkenstocks. . . .

By 7.30pm, the women had taken their seats. Bowls of coconut red lentil dips were passed alongside sesame focaccia and fattoush salad.

All designer hat and no cattle, as the Midwest saying goes. The image is not jarring if you’ve been paying attention. We harken back to the greats, like Kennedy, putting him next to the stupid hysterical shit like condoms stamped with meaningless political slogans. It’s your typical Democrat branding: fear and nostalgia.

Actually not any different than your typical Republican branding to be fair.

Only conservative women have decided to add in a carrot of sorts.

I grow wistful for the days of bare ankles being scandalous . . .

She literally pulls her pants higher to show off her [insert vulgar euphemism here].

No, not disgusting, even times two. Or maybe that. But also . . .

Marketing. Marketing. Marketing.

They know their key demographic, or at least they think they do. (Men, you tell me. Does this work?)

But it did spawn a few fun knockoffs.

This is my favorite . . .

I got stuck on watching her put her feet up over her head. I haven’t been able to do that since . . .🤔

Huh, I have never been able to do that.

Speaking of those scary Mooslims, Mamdani had a week . . .

Oh, sorry, this is Mamdani being a scary commie, not a scary Mooslim.

But we’ll start here.

Today, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su and New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) announced that a core basket of everyday groceries will be 30 percent cheaper at the five new municipal grocery stores. The basket will include all fresh produce, meat and seafood, along with roughly 20 additional categories of pantry staples, dairy and refrigerated goods. The discount will apply to all regardless of income, with prices locked in and predictable rather than fluctuating week to week as is the case at private grocers. Combined, the savings are projected to cut New Yorkers’ average grocery bill by 15 percent, about $90 a month, or roughly $1,000 a year.

Eh, I don’t know how I feel about this. Ninety dollars doesn’t seem like a lot in a city where this is the average rent.

Actually, it’s kind of underwhelming, if I’m being honest.

I’m not sure I see the big deal.

But then I’m not these people.

The proposal has sparked skepticism from economists and commentators over how the city could deliver such steep discounts in an industry known for razor-thin profit margins. With grocery prices up about 33% nationwide since 2019, critics say the plan must explain how prices could undercut private retailers by 30% without significant public subsidies.

Yes, Fox News, we expect taxpayers to subsidize weapons to Ukraine, subsidize weapons to Israel, pay for a war to save Israel, pay for overpriced COVID “vaccines” that didn’t stop COVID and possibly killed a lot of people, pay for the research that brought us COVID in the first place, but subsidizing groceries, man, that’s just a bridge too far.

An immigrant-led business group is gearing up to sue New York City over Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s controversial plan to open five taxpayer-funded supermarkets — claiming the $70 million project will create unfair competition for nearby stores, The Post has learned.

So this is what it takes for the New York Post to root for immigrants. It’s a miracle!

MBC — formed earlier this year to create a unified front against Mamdani’s grocery policy — includes 50 chambers of commerce representing Asian, African, Caribbean, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and Jewish-owned businesses in New York.

Look at that. Mamdani is just bringin’ everybody together. It’s another miracle.

Miracles all around.

I get the gripe, though I’d really have to see some hard numbers on the effect this would have overall. I have trouble seeing how five grocery stores added to a city of nearly nine million cuts that hard into the market.

In fact, I only saw one thing that concerned me in this whole story (and not really that because it’s New York and I live in Montana and I couldn’t care less what New York does, because I’ve got enough problems here in Big Sky Country).

Going back to the first article . . .

The Mayor also issued a request for proposals (RFP) from qualified grocers or firms to serve as operators of one or more N.Y.C. Groceries stores. The selected operator will be responsible for day-to-day store operations, including merchandising, staffing and adherence to strong labor practices.

So how has that whole employing middle men to “manage” government programs gone for us in the past?

You say but that’s San Fran.

Fast-forward to Wednesday, when the City Council was startled to discover that McCray and Team Thrive are closing in on having spent an eye-popping $900 million since the program’s inception — and nobody seems to have a clue on what.

That is, nobody appears to have kept receipts; the subways and street corners are still overrun with crazy people, and nobody in charge knows what’s to happen next.

But let’s be clear: If your boondogglery sets the New York City Council back on its heels, you truly are soaring with the eagles.

I’m looking forward to stories of taxpayers subsidizing eighteen dollar radishes and eighty dollar boxes of cereal.

Now on to the Mooslim part, oh, sorry, the scary Mooslim part.

Mamdani, as mayor of New York, will be attending the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, just like every mayor before him.

And people are upset.