Four hours after leaving work, I got home.
I was a bit bugged at work today. Too much on my mind, a bit tired from staying up too late to watch the start of The Justified miniseries on FX. No writing done in the past two days, except in my head. A new chunk of "Chasing Ashes" fell into my head.
We got done a little early, I was heading to the bus before 1:30. Needing to go to the sheriff's, it being hotter than Hades, I decided to take the #12 bus around to where I could walk down from Memorial to the courthouse and the catch the #7 from there at 2:30. All that I accomplished.
On the way to the courthouse, I saw another hawk on a pole. I cannot make up my mind if it was an immature redtail hawk
or a Cooper's hawk:
I lean toward the latter.
I went off the rails a little when I got back downtown. On the way downtown, I decided to skip the Midwestern Writers conference over at Ball State. I had thought of looking up Larry Sweazy, and then I thought better of it. I decided to get a pulled pork sandwich. Which meant not taking the first Ball State bus. Then instead of getting the books I searched for this morning, I got four others and only one from the morning's list. Christopher Marlowe, here I come (even though I have not yet finished with Roberto Bolano.)
I got in at 5:30 and did little for over an hour. I worked on getting a pulled muscle in my right calf to relax. It is better now, not as much a limp as earlier.
KH and I discussed my grant proposal. I have some ideas now. He also reported that of the two Canadians who read "Love Stink", one gave up after 10 pages and the other thought it was a tough start but interesting. MW has a copy, my niece is still reading, and I will await further word from them. I am not dismayed, just quizzical.
Last night, I spent a long time talking to MW. These calls are good on one level, and they also keep me getting anything typed. Better to be human, I guess.
Maybe I will stay up and watch the finale of Mayans. That is a show that I think improved. It was also popular in prison.
What follows is stuff from yesterday and today, minus The Beatles.
Hunter Biden’s ‘laptop’ looks more and more like a politically motivated criminal scheme
Marcy Wheeler has a new post that breaks down some of the many, many known oddities of the supposed "laptop." When you consider that the whole premise of the story to begin with is that a "Hunter Biden" allegedly wandered into a random Delaware computer repair shop, handed over a damaged laptop, completely forgot about it afterward, and then somehow the computer dude and/or allies decided that Donald Trump ratf--ker Rudy freaking Giuliani was the person he needed to deliver the laptop's data to, dozens of other oddities piled on top of that begin to turn what started out as farce into a full three-ring circus of weird.
Marcy's post is, as usual, worth reading in full, but here’s the shortest version of it: Quite a lot of evidence suggests that in 2018 or 2019, Hunter Biden was the target of a successful phish or other hack that gave an outside party access to his iCloud account, his email accounts, and other data.
Of special note is a window of time during which Hunter was receiving addiction treatment (from the disgraced ex-Fox News talking head Dr. Keith Ablow, no less, just to put a nearly cartoonish spin on all this yet again) and appears to have had "limited" online communications. Despite those limited communications, somebody was using this period of time to make a hell of a lot of technical changes to Hunter's iCloud and email accounts...
Is a good novel smarter than its author? Kundera thought so… - a collection of comments and links on Kundera.
I read one Irvine Welsh novel in prison -The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins (a bit of censoring for my monitoring software) - and have seen the film version of Trainspotting. I saw a copy of a Welsh novel at the Ball State Barnes and Nobel. Irvine Welsh and Miranda Sawyer in conversation at Spiritland - be warned, he's Scots.
Big Caesars and Little Caesars by Ferdinand Mount review – rogue’s gallery
For if the five acts he identifies as Johnsonian assaults on democracy – including attacks on the civil service, curbs on the right to protest and bringing in compulsory voter ID for elections, which Mount sees as outright voter suppression – haven’t exactly turned Britain into a police state yet, laws like this remain on the statute book long after their author is gone. Even if the last Caesar refrained from exploiting them fully to his advantage, the next one might not, and history suggests that there is always a next one.The Dutiful Wife
Mount is right; the point isn’t whether Johnson, or Trump for that matter, can successfully come back themselves. It’s that what they represent will always be back, sooner or later, and democracies must be ready for it.
Cristina Garcia on Chronicling Cuba’s Complex History Through Fiction
Q&A with Reed Farrel Coleman, author of Sleepless City
Americans are still better off, with more in the bank than before the pandemic
However, households are rapidly spending down that extra cash they’d socked away during the pandemic. Median account balances are at their lowest levels in roughly three years and have dropped as much as 41 percent from their peak in April 2021, when Americans were flush with government stimulus money and tax returns, according to a JPMorgan Chase Institute analysis of the bank accounts of 9 million Chase customers.The rise of the anti-capitalist Right in Germany
Taken together, the data helps explain the big mystery behind how the U.S. economy has managed to avoid a recession that many economists had forecast: Consumers, supported by a strong labor market, have been able to keep spending despite inflation and a sharp rise in borrowing costs.
But it also highlights why Americans remain tentative about their economic prospects, particularly as they face higher prices on food, housing and travel. Many have been working through their savings and say their bank account balances are on a downhill trajectory, with little prospect of building them back up to where they were a year or two ago.
The harshest critics of industrial policy and clean energy investments—including the House “Freedom Caucus” and other GOP members who voted against the bi-partisan infrastructure bill but are now taking credit for its investments—seem to lack faith in American workers and businesses. They don’t believe we can organize ourselves, pass policy initiatives, and spend public money in a way that will grow the pie for everyone—not just the biggest businesses in the world. The naysayers argue that America can’t resuscitate its own steel and auto manufacturing sectors in more dynamic and sustainable ways, and don’t believe we can bring supply chains back home even as company after company is sending out announcements about once-offshored jobs returning to the heartland.
Apparently, according to the logic of these critics, the laws of globalization shall not be challenged. But if we listen closely to what the naysayers are really arguing, it’s essentially this: America’s best days are behind us, and we should just relent. We should just fold up shop and let China run the world’s economy as multi-national corporations get richer and more powerful while working families end up in a more precarious situation.
What the essay does not say, maybe cannot explain, is why the MAGA Republicans think this way? How can they fulfill the promise of making us great again if they do not believe in our greatness? I will think it must have something to do with the addiction with playing the victim, which seems to me the one consistent tent of American conservatism these pas t40 years. Then, it may be, they lack faith in us because they seek the strongman who will revenge their self-inflected victimhood, and we the people must pass away for the strongman to gain power.
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