Just to show that everybody who contributed to the lawyersgunsandmoneyblog.com fundraiser was justified in supporting a prime mover in American politics, “defund Elon” is already getting traction!
Their sparring swiftly degenerated into threats on social media, as Mr. Trump questioned whether the government should cut its billions of dollars in contracts with Mr. Musk’s companies, and Mr. Musk claimed that there were references to Mr. Trump in government documents about the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein while also seemingly approving of calls for Mr. Trump to be impeached.
[…]
Elon Musk’s friends and associates on Thursday are in a state of disbelief. Several said they, like the rest of Washington, are glued to their computers as they watched their friend joust with President Trump, unsure what exactly his plan is.
Few of Musk’s associates expected this to last forever, but they are sad that it had come to this.
[…]
Elon Musk posted on X, “The Trump tariffs will cause a recession in the second half of this year.” Musk’s disapproval of the sweeping tariffs are not new — he has long been a critic of the policy, including while he was in the White House.
[…]
Among a barrage of social media posts attacking President Trump and threatening to decommission a spacecraft contracted to the federal government, Elon Musk agreed with another post saying that Trump should be impeached and JD Vance should replace him.
Amazing how many different people have failed to learn this lesson.
Alligators are everywhere in Florida. In fact, I actually proposed to my wife next to an alligator pond when we lived there. That wasn't the plan; it's just that alligators are so prolific that we happened to be next to a pond of them at the time.
For the most controlled alligator experience (not a fan of free-range alligators), go to Gatorland, the alligator-themed amusement park.
Among the resident gators is Jawlene, a young lady who has no upper jaw. Gatorland posts on Facebook that she was rescued from the wild in 2023. Although she was severely malnourished at the time of rescue, she's recovered her proper weight and is a popular attraction.
I had plans for my first free evening this week, but then got distracted and lost an hour and a half somewhere. It's weird how often that happens. Catching up with the washing up will just have to wait for tomorrow (...or some later date).
A parcel arrived today! I ordered some of the Diana Wynne Jones books I didn't already have; I have most of them already, but decided it was time to fill in the gaps, so I expect I'll be re-reading these this month. I need to catch up with my booklog; I've only read about a dozen books in the last two months, so it shouldn't take all that long, but I keep getting distracted.
I watched the funeral of one of my primary school classmates on Tuesday; it feels very strange for someone I remember as an eleven-year-old to be dead. Having said that, it wasn't any kind of surprise; he had a horrible genetic condition and had spent the last decade in a care home, and at that he outlived his two younger brothers by nearly a quarter of a century. Some people just get a really raw deal. We were never close, but it's impossible not to feel the unfairness of it - especially for his parents, who brought up four children knowing that three of them were unlikely to make it much past puberty. You know these things happen to people, but it's harder to accept when you see them in your own community.
And now I need to go and assemble tomorrow's sandwiches and go to bed at a reasonable hour. The swimming crew are going for coffee tomorrow, so I definitely can't be late!
This sequel to one of my favorite books of last year, a young adult post-apocalypse novel with a lovely slow-burn gay romance, fell victim to a trope I basically never like: the sequel to a romance that starts out by breaking up the main couple or pitting them against each other. It may be realistic but I hate it. If the main thing I liked about the first book was the main couple's dynamic - and if I'm reading the sequel, that's definitely the case - then I'm never going to like a sequel where their dynamic is missing or turns negative. I'm not saying they can't have conflict, but they shouldn't have so much conflict that there's nothing left of the relationship I loved in the first place.
This book starts out with Jamison and Andrew semi-broken up and not speaking to each other or walking on eggshells around each other, because Andrew wants to stay in the nice post-apocalyptic community they found and Jamison wants to return to their cabin and live alone there with Andrew. Every character around them remarks on this and how they need to just talk to each other. Eventually they talk to each other, but it resolves nothing and they go on being weird about each other and mourning the loss of their old relationship. ME TOO.
Then half the community's children die in a hurricane, and it's STILL all about them awkwardly not talking to each other and being depressed. I checked Goodreads, saw that they don't make up till the end, and gave up.
The first book is still great! It didn't need a sequel, though I would have enjoyed their further adventures if it had continued the relationship I loved in the first book. I did not sign up for random dead kids and interminable random sulking.
Long-simmering tensions between President Trump and Elon Musk burst into the open on Thursday, as the two men traded barbs and insults, signaling the rupturing of a relationship that had been one of the most consequential in modern American politics.
Trump, publicly addressing Musk’s latest attacks on his signature tax bill for the first time, said he was disappointed in his former White House adviser and suggested he was suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.” Musk, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help get Trump re-elected, shot back in real time on social media that Trump was ungrateful and wouldn’t be sitting in the Oval Office without his support.
The feud could have serious consequences for both Trump and Musk. Musk on Thursday mused on social media about starting a new political party and encouraged Republicans to side with him in his spat with Trump, as Tesla shares declined. And Trump threatened to eliminate government subsidies and contracts for Musk’s businesses.
For months, Trump and Musk had enjoyed a marriage of convenience, and the White House granted the billionaire a long leash to express his opinions publicly as he worked to cut spending through his Department of Government Efficiency. They publicly praised each other, even as frustrations festered behind the scenes.
When Musk aired his initial criticisms of the tax and spending package, Trump held his tongue, hoping to maintain a strong relationship with the billionaire. But Musk’s decision in recent days to ratchet up his attacks on the bill made their uneasy alliance unsustainable, according to people close to both men.
As a lib, let me be clear that I would be very owned if Trump were to defund Elon.
In related an very entertaining news:
[PC]
Now I’m going to pack my things and go:
Time to drop the really big bomb:@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.
BTW I know I’m Charlie Brown eyeing that football, but this could be a real problem for Trump. The right wing fever swamps are all in on the Epstein Files as a kind of Protocols of the Elders of Zion for pervs, and of course it’s perfectly possible that Epstein had a bunch of dirt on Trump.
In light of the President’s statement about cancellation of my government contracts, @SpaceX will begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately pic.twitter.com/NG9sijjkgW
Bad news: the endoscopy failed. (I was scheduled for an upper GI endoscopy via the nasal sinuses to take a look around my stomach and see what's bleeding. Bad news: turns out I have unusually narrow sinuses, and by the time they'd figured this out my nose was watering so badly that I couldn't breathe when they tried to go in via my throat. So we're rescheduling for a different loction with an anesthetist who can put me under if necessary. NB: I would have been fine with only local anaesthesia if the bloody endscope had fit through my sinuses. Gaah.)
The attack novel I was working on has now hit the 70% mark in first draft—not bad for two months. I am going to keep pushing onwards until it stops, or until the page proofs I'm expecting hit me in the face. They're due at the end of June, so I might finish Starter Pack first ... or not. Starter Pack is an unexpected but welcome spin-off of Ghost Engine (third draft currently on hold at 80% done), which I shall get back to in due course. It seems to have metastasized into a multi-book project.
Neither of the aforementioned novels is finished, nor do they have a US publisher. (Ghost Engine has a UK publisher, who has been Very Patient for the past few years—thanks, Jenni!)
Feel free to talk among yourselves, especially about the implications of Operation Spiders Web, which (from here) looks like the defining moment for a very 21st century revolution in military affairs; one marking the transition from fossil fuel powered force projection to electromotive/computational force projection.
The Rock Springs Massacre is one of the most horrible events in American history, a murderous pogrom that miners–mostly members of the Knights of Labor–committed against Chinese competition in the town of Rock Springs, Wyoming.The New Yorker has a very welcome discussion of an event hardly any Americans know about, as well as the archaeology going on there to try and recover what we can about Chinese life in what was always a hardscrabble town and which remains so today.
Five or six hundred people lived in the Chinese encampment. They fled in all directions. One witness later described the hills to the east of town as “literally blue with the hunted Chinamen.” Leo Qarqwang was getting treatment for his wounds when he saw armed men approaching. He ran toward the hills. He later compared Chinese residents to a flock of frightened sheep. He spent several days wandering through the sagebrush, with nothing to eat. Eventually, he found the railroad tracks and caught a train to the nearby town of Evanston. Many of the fleeing Chinese residents tumbled down the steep banks of Bitter Creek, splashing into the muddy water. At least one man was cut down as he struggled to clamber up the bank on the other side. His body was later found half submerged in the creek. Another man, Leo Mauwik, was shot in the arm as he fled. He didn’t stop running until about four o’clock in the morning, when he reached the neighboring town of Green River, about fifteen miles to the west.
Violence coursed through Rock Springs. A white woman—likely “Mrs. Osborn,” the owner of a local laundry—fired a revolver at some Chinese men as they fled, felling two of them. Another woman, by one account, had a baby in her arms but still managed to knock down a Chinese man running by. When her child wailed, she spanked him before turning to pummel the Chinese man.
The rioters began setting fire to buildings, and dense black smoke billowed over the area. Frightened residents dashed outside with blankets covering their heads. Rioters tossed bodies into the burning buildings. The smell of charred flesh was acrid. A gusting wind soon led to fears that the conflagration would spread through the town, and rioters suspended their torching of the Chinese huts, but more than forty still burned to the ground. Miners usually stored their gunpowder inside their homes. When the flames reached a cache, the sky would flash with a powerful explosion.
Ah Lee, a Chinese laundryman, had barricaded himself inside his home. Attackers broke through the roof and shot him in the back of the head. A female rioter looted bundles of laundry he had laid out for delivery. Ah Kuhn, a Chinese interpreter known for wearing a fur coat around town, took shelter in a cellar. When he emerged, several white men opened fire, and he ran in a panic, dropping about sixteen hundred dollars in gold—more than fifty thousand dollars today. He made his way to a house east of town, where a white resident gave him bread and water and allowed him to rest before he continued on his way. Several Chinese residents approached the Reverend Timothy Thirloway, who lived near Chinatown. His two daughters taught English to Chinese miners in the evenings. The fleeing residents asked if they could hide in the family’s home, but were told it would be safer if they left town. One miner, known as China Joe, hid in a large oven for three days, then sneaked out in the middle of the night and fled.
A group of rioters marched on the home of Evans, the foreman who had arrived at the No. 6 mine after the melee, and advised him to leave town. He departed that night. Next, the group visited the home of Soo Qui, one of the Chinese head men, but he was in Evanston. His terrified wife met them instead. “Soo, he go,” she said. “I go to him.” Two days later, she arrived in Evanston by train, disembarking in a colorful gown. A newspaper reporter characterized her as the “last of her race” to abandon Rock Springs and “probably the last to set foot in the place for many a long year.”
At around 7 P.M., Dave Thomas and others visited Chinatown to assess the situation. They spotted an elderly Chinese man they knew, lying in agony in the dirt. They debated whether to end his suffering by shooting him, but left him to die. The local sheriff deployed deputies around town, but struggled to muster enough men to hunt down the rioters. Throughout the night, gunfire continued, and rioters recrossed the creek to torch the remaining buildings in the Chinese quarter. The fires burned all night, bathing the town in a red glow.
I believe this is some of that DEI we keep hearing about.
Human beings are sometimes described as the apex species of earth, which you would assume from the way we've taken over. But it wasn't easy getting here, and the way we make more humans is real crapshoot, evolutionarily speaking. This is true of all mammals, in comparison to insects or birds, but humans have a harder time and a much higher failure rate than other mammals. For every fertilized egg that makes it to actual birth, two are failures and are discarded along the way, most even before a woman knows she is pregnant. About half of these miscarriages are because the fertilized egg has the wrong number of chromosomes. Another way that human reproduction is so fraught is because of the huge demands a human fetus put on the mother, leading to conditions like gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia, which can be fatal.
What makes humans so uniquely bad at reproduction among mammals? There are plenty of theories, but the evidence points to the fact that we developed large brains that demand more resources, and to the fact that such a brain, and other features that define us as human, developed when the world's population was so low that mutations weren't selected out early. Read how the human gene system went strangely wonky at the Conversation.
When Sigourney Weaver kicked ass in the movie Alien in 1979, it set off a tsunami of sequels and loosely related films. That was because the alien xenomorph scared the daylights out of us. It was only a matter of time before this universe was brought to television. The series Alien: Earth debuts on FX on August 12th.
This series takes place before the events of the original 1979 movie (but after Prometheus and Alien: Covenant), so you know that what happens will be held tightly wrapped from the public on earth. The premise is that a spaceship from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation crash-lands on earth. As you might guess, there is facehugger on board. But there are also four other alien species brought back from who-knows-where! We may never find out, but we know that these aliens are not benign, and present a lethal threat to earth. -via Geeks Are Sexy
Continuing revising (pre peer review) an academic journal paper. And today** has felt like 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, another step forward. So overall progress! Though much yet to do. But happy with progress. Even if it at times feels like an old style dance, with the forward/back moves!
** Well after 3pm when I'd finally woken up properly!
1/21/1988 President Reagan meeting with William F Buckley in oval office
Everyone wants to put everything wrong with today’s America on Trump and what passes for friends with that guy. Fair enough, but this all has major antecedents. We are living in the America Pat Buchanan envisioned, the America Phyllis Schlafly envisioned, the America Ed Meese envisioned. And the America William F. Buckley envisioned.
In 1955, with the peak of McCarthyism having passed, Buckley assembled an eclectic group of ex-Communists, libertarians, traditionalists, and Catholics to found National Review, a publication for “radical conservatives.” What kind of magazine would it be? And given its indelible association with Buckley, who held a voting majority of stock ownership, what kind of public figure would he become? In its mission statement, Buckley distanced the magazine from the “irresponsible” right, though he declined to name any names. In a letter quoted in John Judis’s 1988 biography of Buckley, he responded to an early complaint that the magazine was too highbrow to be effective by explaining that he wanted to “abjure the popular and cliché-ridden appeal to the ‘grassroots’” and to target “opinion makers.”
But Tanenhaus shows that Buckley and the magazine were also pulled by countervailing impulses. In an early profile of Buckley, the literary gadfly Dwight MacDonald was surprised to hear him defend a crass book by “two peephole Hearst reporters who trafficked in innuendo, smear, and sexual sensationalism” (the book alleged, for instance, that 90 percent of crime in the city of Cleveland was committed by “darkies” and called the University of California, Berkeley “a bed of sexual perversion, left wing teaching and narcotic addiction”). “I don’t like the way the book is written any more than you do,” Buckley admitted. “But it’s on our side.… And anyway you’ve got to write that way to reach a big public.”
For an early issue, the magazine called on McCarthy himself to pan a book by former Secretary of State Dean Acheson, though Bozell actually wrote the review, inserting enough schoolyard invective (“As ‘Brains’ Acheson sees it …”) to impersonate Tailgunner Joe. Tanenhaus notes that National Review’s editors may have striven “for learned hyperliteracy, but as leaders of a nascent movement they were prepared to welcome almost anyone who wanted to join and sought them out, wherever they were to be found—including in groups with names like American Heritage Protective Committee, the American Way, Citizens Grassroots Crusade of South Carolina.”
South Carolina was a state Buckley knew all too well. Some of the most revelatory parts of Tanenhaus’s biography depict the family’s second homestead in Camden, a small city in the middle of the state. At the behest of Buckley’s mother, a “proud daughter of the Confederacy” who never quite felt comfortable in Yankee Connecticut, his father had purchased a sprawling antebellum property that was once owned by the first senator to resign after Lincoln’s 1860 election. There, the family befriended figures like the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond, who garnered more than 80 percent of the vote in their county in 1948, and the archconservative textile magnate Roger Milliken, later the most munificent National Review donor outside the Buckley family. They employed a staff drawn from the area’s population of Black sharecroppers and domestics, whom they treated relatively well, at least compared to their neighbors. The “family seemed, and in many respects were, models of compassion and fair dealing,” Tanenhaus writes. Yet Buckley’s parents were also the sole financial backers behind a new local newspaper associated with the white supremacist Citizens Councils.
National Review’s shameful defenses of white rule in the South, Tanenhaus shows, drew on Buckley’s own complicated experience of it. On the one hand, he seemed incapable of grasping white supremacy in its vicious totality, given the more genteel and paternalistic form of racism he experienced within his family: “Any suggestion, made to a [white] Southerner, that segregation is in fact a manifestation of ‘race hatred’ elicits from him an expression of sheer wonderment,” he wrote. Yet the magazine also exhibited a “craze” for John C. Calhoun’s defense of states’ rights, and Buckley himself made arguments in public that were “far more incendiary and racist,” according to one historian of the right, than anything said by Robert Welch, the conspiratorial John Birch Society founder whose banishment from the conservative movement Buckley considered a career-defining achievement.
It’s a real wonder that Young Americans for Fascism Freedom still exists today and is all in on Trump.
I did a quick search over past posts and I see that bibliotherapy has been a thing that I have been posting the odd link about for A Long Time, though I see the School of Life's page thereon is now 404. In the way that things are constantly being suddenly NEW, I see I also had a link much more recently on the topic about which was cynical.
When reading is positioned as therapy, we argue, evaluative intentions intersect awkwardly with the cultural logics of literature, as practitioners and commissioners grapple with what it means to extract ‘wellbeing effects’ from a diffuse and everyday practice. As a result, what might look initially like another simple case of medicalisation turns out to have more uncertain effects. Indeed, as we will show, incorporating the ‘reading cure’ troubles biomedicine, foregrounding both the deficiencies of current public health responses to the perceived crisis of mental health, and the poverty of causal models of therapeutic effect in public health. There are, then, potentially de-medicalising as well as medicalising effects.
We get the sense that the project was constantly escaping from any endeavours to confine it within meshes of 'evidence-based medicine': 'Trying to fit the square peg of reading into the round hole of evidence is where things sometimes get awkward.'
Larfed liek drayne:
In five experiments on how reading fiction impacts on measures of wellbeing, Carney and Robertson found no measurable effects from simply being exposed to fiction: the mechanism, they note, is not akin to a pharmaceutical that can prescribed.
Environmental activist Greta Thunberg, of Sweden, addresses the Climate Action Summit in the United Nations General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters, Monday, Sept. 23, 2019. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)
It’s not Trump, it’s climate change. Even under Biden, we weren’t even coming close to doing enough and of course under Trump, we are doing less nothing. It’s bad. It’s very very very bad.
Seven years ago, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that the world wouldn’t warm 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels until 2040.
Then two years ago, the group predicted the world would pass that threshold between 2030 and 2035.
Now, new data from the World Meteorological Organization released Wednesdayindicates that Earth will cross this point in just two years.
The accelerated timeline is due to higher-than-expected temperatures over the past few years, diminishing air pollution that cooled the Earth and greenhouse gas emissions that continue to rise globally despite the growth of renewable energy.
And it means that irreversible tipping points in the climate system — like the melting of Arctic ice sheets or the wide-scale collapse of coral reefs — are closer at hand than scientists previously believed.
Humans–smart enough to transform the planet, too stupid to know how to control those changes.
99% of all species on this planet would benefit if humans went extinct.
Location: The Foundry 101 Rogers st. Cambridge, MA
We will have a bunch of short-run prose collections, including Perspichor Freelance Explorer (an asexual monster romance), Disabled Cyborgs, and more! Cone say hi!
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