Politcal links for the day

 Don’t Be Fooled: America Hates These Toxic Right-Wing Gasbags | The New Republic

Are we losing our freedom of speech? • Indiana Capital Chronicle

 

ECB official warns climate crisis poses growing threat to ‘core financial stability’ | Economics | The Guardian 

 

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Catering

Just going to drop this idea of mine with the hope someone finally comments.

 I like my group sessions for meeting and hearing guys younger than me. Especially the leader who appears to be educated (he likes to be discreet about his background), who gets his news from TikTok, does not like history, thinks Will Ferrell's career has imploded due to his political views, and dresses like a Yuppie. As for my peers, they are all working class and do not seem to have any experience with newspapers; they are all in survival mode due to their status and educational background does not offer much in the way of work. 

The leader gives me an opening into the online bros.

My peers provide an insight into the people who are MAGA's bedrock, their street level crew.

What I am seeing in the wider world when I am at the grocery, elsewhere, and what I am getting through my political news also factors in what follows.

 And it comes down to catering.

Catering in the sense that people think they should be given whatever fulfills their lives.

Psychological counseling emphasizes the psychological well-being of the person. Ethics are denigrated. I am not sure if it even includes character. Why not? Standards of character depend on social, not psychological, standards. Society, the community, does not appear in what I have seen or heard.

 Character Is Countercultural - by Mark Hertling 

The private sector “uniforms” are different, the language is different, and the tasks are different. But the essential requirements of character and leadership remain unchanged. Competence is expected in every profession, in every industry. Great organizations define what competence looks like and usually train and teach it well. What separates good organizations from exceptional ones is their understanding that competence alone is insufficient. Character—one of the key attributes of any leader—determines whether knowledge is used with wisdom, whether authority is exercised with humility, and whether success is measured not only by achievement but also by service.

Looking back across that journey—from family and school to coaches and scoutmasters, from West Point to the Army and eventually the private sector—I realize that none of those institutions believed character development was someone else’s responsibility. Each accepted a share of the task. Each expected young people to become a little more than they had been the year before. Most importantly, each reinforced lessons that had begun elsewhere.

Most Americans, regardless of political affiliation, still admire leaders whose actions consistently match their words, whose integrity survives public pressure, and whose decisions reflect something larger than personal ambition. We may disagree passionately about policy or ideology, but few would argue that honesty, humility, courage, and responsibility are obsolete virtues. 

 This is not a left/right thing; albeit the left talks about community, the right depends on its online communities. It seems generational. It seems to deny responsibility to a community.

Either we have a severe educational deficit in this country from the street to the highest echelons of power, or we have a poorly educated population manioulated by politicians who should know better. 

Now Bicycles Are Woke? (Sheila Kennedy) a nation of idiots or a nation besieged by idiots?

I have never quite appreciated (liked) The Sun Also Rises; only after reading The Sun Also Rises at 100 (First Things), I wonder if I should not think more highly of Hemingway.

Hemingway conceived his signature prose style as a way to reckon with suffering. A man who knows his worth does not bare the painful underside of his soul; he keeps his agonies to himself. He is on familiar terms with death and has learned to contain his fear. And while he enjoys the good things in life more than most others do, he is laconic in even his most extravagant appreciations: He knows pleasures are not made to last. As Hemingway wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1926 of his failing marriage, “Our life is all gone to hell, which seems to be the one thing you can count on a good life to do.”  

What I feel as underlying this demand for being catered to is that those being catered to expect a good life without an end to their pleasures. No more “no pain, no gain”. Just give us what we like, bury what we do not like.

Have we all gone mad?

Call It What It Is (Sheila Kennedy)

It isn’t just dementia due to aging, although that condition is clearly worsening the problem.

There’s ample reason to worry about Trump’s longstanding mental defects: frequent statements that are, at best, detached from reality — the repeated false claims about crowd sizes, election results, and other easily verifiable facts; his
erratic and/or contradictory statements made within short periods (sometimes within the same speech); the constant
grandiose rhetoric (his self-comparisons to historical figures); and his assertions of victimization by nefarious “others”…The evidence is overwhelming. 

Mental health professionals have argued for years that he demonstrates narcissistic personality traits. (Several even wrote a book in 2017 titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.”) 

Where to now?

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WTF Politics

 Since no one comments, I assume the hits are also runs. Meaning you are looking without reading. Therefore, I have decided to spend less time exploring our politics.

The push to reduce the Supreme Court’s power (SCOTUSblog ) has some good ideas, some stupid ones, and not a sense of a comprehensive reform of comprehensive problems.

How much tuition does an Indiana voucher cover at Indianapolis private schools? (Chalkbeat ) - not enough to keep it from looking like a scam.

In 2016-17, the state reported that almost half of all voucher students had their full tuition and fee amounts covered by the voucher. By 2024-25, that figure had dropped to 28%.

Iran Has Figured Out How to Overwhelm U.S. Air Defenses 

 The U.S. and its allies burned through more than 11,000 munitions, including large amounts of defensive missiles, in the first 16 days of the war alone, according to a March analysis by the Royal United Services Institute. The report predicted then that U.S. forces were about a month away from running out of THAAD interceptors. An April report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies noted that “diminished munitions stockpiles have created a near-term risk.” A follow-up report the next month warned that it would “take three or more years from today to return to prewar inventory levels” of Patriot and THAAD missiles.

Brig. Gen. Hossein Mohebbi, an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps spokesperson, said that “Patriot systems have been weakened to such an extent that Iranian missiles and drones are reaching their targets without being intercepted.” He said that during a flurry of attacks from July 8 to July 22, Iran struck numerous air defense and radar installations, including six “Patriot air-defense radars.”

CENTCOM did not reply to a request for comment on the claims by the U.S. official or Mohebbi.

I thought we had destroyed their military months ago. That's what Trump has been telling us, right? 

 I went to Walmart today and spoke with the bus driver. He is certain Fauci's diaries convict Facuci of all sorts of evil-doing.

Fauci Diaries Expose Depths of Katie and Stephen Miller’s Hypocrisy (The New Republic )

Indiana state agencies turning to AI for behind-the-scenes work (Indiana Capital Chronicle )

Agencies using or planning to use AI submit a readiness assessment, which officials then review for the tool’s “objectives, efficacy, and risks.” Once approved, the agency can proceed but must provide followups either annually or after substantial changes to the AI tool or its use.

Many of those approved proposals sought to aid workflows. Several agencies planned to use AI voiceovers for videos and presentations or for parsing and analyzing data. 

But others outlined more extensive use. The attorney general’s office received approval for a Thomson Reuters-owned tool that “provides attorneys with AI-powered legal research tools to generate answers to complex legal questions, draft initial documents, summarize case law, and identify relevant statutes.”

The New Old Middle East (Foreign Affairs)

The United States and Israel cannot bomb their way to a better region. A truly changed Middle East, one that could be the basis for a more stable regional order, would be defined by stronger central governments in Arab states such as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen. Today, those places are plagued by civil war or domestic unrest, and the region will remain volatile as long as those governments are not able to police their borders and prevent nonstate actors in their territories from pursuing their own foreign and military policies. Weak states, after all, cannot make durable peace.

A transformed Middle East would also see an end to the efforts of regional and outside powers, most notably but not exclusively Iran, to encourage or fund militias. It would include a diplomatic process, broadly supported internationally and accepted regionally, focused on working toward a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would ensure Israel’s security and the Palestinians’ right to self-determination. And it might involve genuine regime change in Iran, carried out by the Iranians themselves and resulting in a government that respects its neighbors’ sovereignty and drops the ideological crusade against Israel.

But Trump and people I have met here far from the nearest gears of power think big explosions and a big display of force should be enough to bend the Iranians to our will. I cannot help but think of this old song I first heard from Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes:

 

Commerce Dept. quietly announces 7 new equity stakes in private companies  (The Hill)

The announcement comes nearly a year after President Trump announced the federal government would take a 10 percent stake in Intel, one of the nation’s largest chip manufacturers, for roughly $11 billion in federal subsidies the company received.

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The practice has drawn criticism from Trump’s Republican base. Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who drafted the foundation of the CHIPS and Science Act, said at the time the law never intended to let the federal government take a major stake in Intel or any other major company.

 The real WTF moment of the day.

 

 

 

 

Indiana Politics & Government

 The more time I spend in the Nineteenth Century, the more I am convinced that Indiana needs to change how it is governed.

It is past time that we had the recall. That belongs to the Progressive Era and still has not arrived in 2026.

It is time that we had access to the referendum so that we could bypass the oligarchy that is the General Assembly.

'Middleman': Former Indiana ag director backs removal of LG's leadership duties (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Beckwith makes me like this idea. The thing is, it also makes practical sense. Indiana's governor/lieutenant governor relationship has not been closely looked at, at least by me. Indiana's governor has no great political power; his veto can be overturned by a simple majority. And it appears that it used to go to whoever came in second in the gubernatorial election. That changed in the Sixties; only the Lieutenant Governor still has great responsibilities. 

“We believe it is critical that the Indiana director of agriculture be elevated to a cabinet-level position with a direct line to the governor — a full secretary of agriculture, if you will — to ensure that agriculture, as a foundation of our state’s economy, has an advocate at the highest reaches of state government,” said Alan Dunn, president of the Indiana Corn Growers Association.

Dunn said the Indiana Corn Marketing Council supported the research of an emerging startup into a corn-based acrylic acid, which is used in adhesives, coatings, paints and more. Despite that Hoosier involvement, Illinois won the pilot production plant.

“While (the council) can invest in research and promotion of new uses of corn, what it can’t do is provide economic development incentives for locating production facilities,” Dunn said. “… This is an example where collaboration at the cabinet level of leadership may have been able to keep this opportunity in Indiana.”

***

Rep. J.D. Prescott, R-Union City, said the change would present a “demotion” for the industry.

“Right now, our secretary of agriculture is … our No. 2 elected official in the state of Indiana,” he said. “I would actually view that as demotion, moving into a secretary position.” 

Perhaps a more technocratic than a political approach would be helpful. Especially since Beckwith's bigoties do motivate him so.

 No Surprise: Most of us get our news from scrolling on our phones (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Indiana’s newest statewide nonprofit newsroom, Free Press Indiana News (FPI News), debuted in June and first launched entirely on social media, because they know younger audiences get their news primarily from their social feeds. At the start of reporting each story, the newsroom staff discusses how best to tell stories on social channels and their website.

“Our Instagram, Facebook, X, Threads, Bluesky and Substack accounts launched June 15, while our website launched July 15,” said Lindsey Erdody, FPI News editor-in-chief. “We’ve already seen great traction with our Facebook and Instagram accounts in particular.”

In a little more than a month, FPI News has gained close to 4,000 followers each on Facebook and Instagram. FPI News is owned by Free Press Indiana, the same parent company of Mirror Indy.

“Reaching younger audiences has been a conundrum for as long as I can remember,” said Oseye Boyd, editor-n-chief of Mirror Indy. “I don’t know that anyone has it figured out, but we are intentional about working to serve this demographic.”

From a comment made during one of the Friday sessions, the leader gets his news from TikTok. That makes me  suspicious of his knowledge. Not many in the group have online access. What do they do for news?

I do like it when Todd Rokita gets reminded that he has to obey the law: Indiana attorney general loses appeal in Haitian trafficking investigation (Indiana Capital Chronicle); Indiana's attorney general is not the head of Indiana's prosecutors. Our forefathers spread power around. 

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita can’t compel an Evansville manufacturer and migrant support group to cooperate with a human trafficking investigation in the absence of a specific allegation, the Indiana Court of Appeals ruled Monday.

The three-judge panel’s opinion affirms an earlier ruling from the Vanderburgh Superior Court denying Rokita’s petition to enforce civil investigative demands against Berry Global Group and the Haitian Center of Evansville in a 2024 trafficking investigation.

Judge Nancy H. Vaidik, who authored the opinion, found the attorney general’s demands were “unauthorized, invalid and unenforceable” due to a lack of particularized evidence.

“The record makes clear that the Attorney General is at most trawling for evidence of wrongdoing — looking for information that might eventually trigger an investigation, based on his alleged concern that someone, somewhere might be involved in labor trafficking,” she wrote.

Rokita has a problem differentiating between reality and what politically motivated blather comes out of his mouth:

Instead, the attorney general’s office claimed it had reasonable cause because Berry Global “is a large, sophisticated employer that actively recruits refugees and migrants and works with various migrant resettlement nonprofits” and support groups like the Haitian Center, according to the opinion.

Asked in trial court, state attorneys could not identify a suspect or act of human trafficking either, according to the opinion.

The court held that allowing Rokita to enforce CIDs in the absence of a specific suspect or allegation would violate First and Fourth Amendment protections and burden business.

Indiana law “authorizes the issuance of a CID only if an ‘investigation’ is being conducted,” Vaidik wrote in her opinion Monday.

“For an investigation to exist, there must be a factual predicate — an articulable reason to suspect that particular wrongdoing may be afoot. A mere hunch will not suffice. Here, the Attorney General has not shown that he has information of any sort, he is searching for something to investigate. Therefore, the CIDs issued to Berry Global and the Haitian Center were unauthorized, invalid and unenforceable.” 

Voter subpoenas denied in recount of narrow Indiana Senate Republican primary (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Republican member Paul Mullin supported her motion to question 11 voters who disclosed in social media posts or to news reporters that they had cast Republican primary ballots in Senate District 23 to support Deery despite being Democrats or self-identified “progressives.”

Morales saw his reelection bid fail last month at the state Republican convention after losing the support of top state party leaders. That included U.S. Jim Banks, whose political organizations spent millions of dollars to support Copenhaver and other primary challengers to Republican senators who opposed redistricting.

Morales said in voting against the subpoena request that it wasn’t proper to question voters after they had cast ballots.

“This is the right thing to do, to make sure that we reject the motion to subpoena any voters because I don’t believe that’s the right thing to do,” Morales said. “I believe everybody has the right to go and vote, but they need to do it the right way. And the right way, again, is I encourage the General Assembly next session to close our primaries so we can avoid all of this.”

Every so often the wrong person, for the wrong reasons, does the right thing. Depose voters and ask them who they vote for? Not the business of any politician. Morales is a bum, what we get from the political inbreeding in Indiana's Republican Party.

 Indiana inspector general discontinues publication of investigative reports (Indiana Capital Chronicle) 

Former Gov. Mitch Daniels created the Office of Inspector Genera in 2005 to investigate allegations of waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement and wrongdoing in state government.

Investigative reports, which generally do not include the names of uncharged persons, are publicly available online dating back to the office’s founding — except for the years 2006 and 2026.

The OIG released nine investigative reports last year summarizing investigations into contingency fee contracts, falsified case management entries, improper gifts, falsified time sheets and other allegations.

This year: None.

The OIG issued two news releases when criminal charges were filed against a former case manager from the Department of Child Services and an employee from the Indiana Veterans’ Home.

Court records and State Ethics Commission reports remain public record, offering at least partial access to information the OIG used to release.

But if criminal or ethics charges aren’t warranted the public won’t know of key allegations or findings. For instance, in 2023, a report showed that the Indiana Family and Social Services Administration lost dozens of laptops, worth thousands in the chaos of setting up and winding down a statewide vaccination hotline during the height of the pandemic.

This sounds too much like Trump firing inspector generals at the federal level. It is the people's government, not Governor Braun's and not any political party's.

Speaking of Trump, this sounds like it has more to do with Trump's agenda than what Indiana needs: Braun directs state to revisit coal power plant closures (Indiana Capital Chronicle).

Gov. Mike Braun directed his energy and natural resources secretary to revisit settlements that closed or sought to close coal power plants in Indiana.

Settlements identified in a Friday executive order include those that would close a plant before 50 years of service — described as the average age of retirement for electric generation units in Indiana — or where there was no allegation or finding of wrongdoing. 

The secretary should also revisit agreements between plant operators and the federal Environmental Protection Agency, justice department or environmental groups where the State of Indiana was not a party, the order said. 

“These consent decrees and settlement agreements should be re-evaluated in light of the current and future need for energy to power existing demand as well as future economic development in Indiana,” the order stated.

The order noted a projected 7 gigawatts-plus of Indiana coal electricity generation retiring or transitioning to another source across the next 12 years, as well as an assessment from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation determining Indiana may not have the electricity resources to keep pace with upcoming demand.

Braun aligned the need to revisit these closures alongside recent federal backing for coal plants in the state. 

Ball State has the Digital Civil Rights Museum for Indiana. You should check it out.

And what is it Li am learning about nineteenth-century Indiana? That we feared the blacks, that we kept them down, that systemic racism is a real thing.

My evidence? Read the following:

Cory v. Carter, 48 Ind. 327 (Ind. 1874)

State v. Gibson, 36 Ind. 389 (Ind. 1871)

School Desegregation (Encyclopedia of Indianapolis)

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Looking Out At The World From Muncie

 It doesn't look so good sometimes. It feels like my thinking is divorced from the main currents out there. Frankly, I like my thinking better. When I was getting sucked down into nihilism by my depression, I could not understand why thinking diverged from what everyone told me about reality. I thought I was crazy. Not so sure about not being crazy, but it is my life, and I am happier living with what I think is right. I just stay amused about it all.

Proof that Indianapolis is multi-cultural and how much that recognition is in danger: Indy’s Global Village Museum facing funding troubles.

The Real Reason Elon Musk Keeps Insisting DOGE Cuts Killed “Zero” Kids (The New Republic) leaves me wondering why certain ideas do not die. Are our egos so frail? Is our empathy illusory?

All this pushback from Kristof and Beddoes—who nonetheless indicated some “sympathy” with Musk’s claims about USAID—constitutes important work. But on some level, these fact-checks miss the point. We don’t think Musk intends claims like these to be debated on an empirical level. Rather, Musk is communicating in  subterranean tropes that his far-right global audience will instantly find intelligible: He’s advancing the generalized sentiment that due to DOGE cuts, nobody died for whom we need to feel any passing responsibility. Nobody died who’s worthy of our concern. 

“They cannot cite a single name of someone who died,” Musk recently posted. “Not a single name!” That’s false, as Kristof demonstrated, and of course it’s absurd to demand single names when we’re talking about enormous numbers of deaths. It’s beyond contestation that USAID’s destruction unleashed fresh humanitarian horrors. But the key event here is Musk continuing to assert otherwise in the face of an escalation of human suffering that’s amply documented: You can’t name these people. They never existed. 

As the two of us have detailed, Musk’s rhetoric has grown ominously more oriented around the idea of global race war. Last month, after an immigrant stabbed a white man in Northern Ireland, Musk used his X platform to viciously stoke anti-immigrant anger and helped incite days of far-right riots and pogroms there, often using stark invocations of global racial armageddon to do so.

 The Media (Sheila Kennedy)

Then Krugman gets to what he calls the shaping of the information space, the promotion of ideas and ideology that serve the interests of the very wealthy with “zombie” ideas that experience should have debunked. (Tax cuts for the rich have never stimulated economic growth. Climate science is not a hoax.) The takeover of the legacy media is one way of promoting those “zombie ideas” 

The Ellison family has already acquired CBS and installed Bari Weiss to corrupt it. Ellison’s proposed takeover of Warner will effectively destroy CNN as we now know it. (Krugman says “It will almost turn into Fox News. Now, that won’t be a profitable venture. There’s already a Fox News, and so creating another one is not going to actually produce a lot of profits, if any, but that’s not the objective. This is buying influence.”) Look what happened to Twitter when Musk took it over.

Krugman says this takeover of the general information environment by a handful of billionaires will continue, and the only “fix” is to bring the concentration of wealth at the top down

 A New Take on Homer’s Epic: “The Odyssey,” the Movie (Thornfield Hall) why Musk failed to stop The Odyssey: he has no art in his bones.

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Recuperating, Not Spry

 Healing but not doing much more.

I made it to group on Friday. My legs got wobbly. I took the bus there and back, as little walking as possible. I stayed put for the rest of the day. Did some reading, watched shows on Netflix. Right now I cannot recall what it was! Thusday Murder Club. 

Got a rejection. 

Thank you for sharing "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984" with A Public Space. We regret that we are unable to use this piece for the magazine, but appreciate the opportunity to consider it.


All our best,

A Public Space 

I keep having these intense moments of insomnia. Those I have used to work on my research project. 

CC called again on Friday. I spoke with KH, too. Joel C called with compliments for “Ahab in the Moonlight”. That is now published. I need to get a link here to it. 

Saturday, I went to Payless and the convenience store twice. A little more walking, a little more of my research project.

I started watching Orphan Black on Netflix. I like it. Oh, I started Bugonia and just could not take its deepness or weirdness. Looks good, though.

I decided against church. Not enough energy, pain is more a low-level discomfort. 

 One thing decided: a different working schedule. I need to get some books read.

Things read over the past few days that I want to share:

The Eyes of Athena and the Disenchanted World of The Odyssey (Reactor) 

The Fermi Paradox, Percolation, and Inbreeding  (Reactor) 

Zardoz: …What the F*ck Did I Just Watch?  (Reactor) 

You Must Remember This’s Karina Longworth on ‘The Bisexuals’ 

Exclusive: In a Ukrainian bomb shelter, Laura Loomer has some regrets (AP News)

How America’s newspapers lost their voice 

Pennsylvania roads are being coated in radioactive wastewater − here’s why 

From author to anime hero: the unlikely revival of a Japanese literary star | Fiction in translation (The Guardian)

No Longer Human comprises a series of notebooks by a formerly “handsome young man”, who declares his incompatibility with the human race. For him, the world is “a place of bottomless horror”; he concludes that “living itself is the source of sin”. The narrator of the title story of Schoolgirl takes a similar view: “the problem is that I’m corrupt. I’m a bad girl.”

The relentless pessimism in Dazai’s work risks seeming overwhelming or indulgent but, as Barton puts it, Dazai “leans into [the self-loathing] with a kind of exuberance”. Indeed, his appeal in part lies in this “unashamed emotional quality, but also tempered with enormous intelligence”.

Cool Machine by Colson Whitehead review – final part of the Harlem Trilogy is freewheeling fun | Fiction | (The Guardian) 

Whitehead initially envisioned the Harlem Trilogy as a jaunty entertainment, a break from the serious Pulitzer-winning business of The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. Cool Machine specifically covers the New York of his youth, a scene he experienced first-hand, which only adds to the air of vivid, freewheeling fun. Whitehead maps the streets, labels the landmarks and dips in at intervals with handy background information. He takes a dark and dangerous corner of history and makes it feel illuminated, magnified, even borderline family-friendly.

A Sudden Flicker of Light by David Thomson review – a brilliantly eccentric history of the movies | Film books (The Guardian)

 Revisionist? Well, it certainly takes us to wintry and sombre ponderings on the movies’ (perennial) tendency to coarsen and to cheapen, to enforce cultural mob-rule. He cites King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd, starring James Murray, a former extra plucked from the ranks and groomed for glory but whose awful destiny was to descend into alcoholism and homelessness – back into the crowd. He emphasises movies’ amazing populist-democratic power and reach, their power embodied by the fact that, unlike in the theatre or concert hall, a film’s action could not be stopped or affected by the crowd in front of it. Like a theologian dragged by doubts to the foot of the cross, Thomson wonders if the movies will always lack literature’s way of allowing us to enlarge our imaginations, as opposed to forcing a submission to the screen.

The Rest Is History (Lapham’s Quarterly )

Who Cares? (Sheila Kennedy)

The American Prospect, among others, has reported on the crisis in what we call “Care work.”

As the report notes, immigrants from countries like Haiti, Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Uganda, Jamaica, the Philippines, and dozens of others make up the majority of people who serve the aging, frail, sick, disabled and dying. These immigrants “bathe their clients, change adult diapers, supervise medications, and provide companionship in relationships that are intimate as well as professional.” And they are the targets of Donald Trump’s hatred.

How civilisations fall, according to Gibbon (Engelsberg ideas)

5th Circuit ‘answers the call’ from Clarence Thomas on gun law

4 little-known Google Calendar tricks I use to plan my workweek - and save time (ZDNET)

The Problem With Middle-Class Socialism (The New Republic)

Secret Service Agent Put on Leave for Alleged Leaks About JD Vance (The New Republic)

Trump Prepares to Attack Eighth Country of His Second Term (The New Republic)

Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon (The New Republic)

What Do You Have to Hide? - by Jared Henderson

WNAP-FM | Listen Online - myTuner Radio

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Compleat Angler, by Izaak Walton

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Post Surgery Politics

  Recuperating from surgery on Tuesday, so still a little rocky. My brain is not in the mood for extended exgesis. Take the following for what they are worth. 

Capitalism’s ‘Metabolic Rift’  Los Angeles Review of Books 

 

(3) Undoing Trump’s Golden Age of Corruption

sch 7/23

Notes For A Friday: Ethics, Mary Beard, Odysseus, Rejections. Morons In Government

I did group, almost falling asleep at the end. I came home and did a nap. Something like 4 hours. When I woke, I was a little disoriented about time and date. The sky outside was as dull and gray as it had been this morning.

 What I thought would be a small diversion became this post. It has been at least 4 hours since I started. Now, I have run through my emails and have nothing more to say about the outside world. Or life. Or whatever you find here.

I regret to notify you that it has been decided that "Agnes" will not be published in Flying Island Journal at this time. On behalf of the journal's editorial team, I wish you the best of luck with your writing endeavors.

Sincerely,

Hiromi Yoshida

--

Hiromi Yoshida, MA, MLS, SpLIS

Poetry Editor

Flying Island Journal

hyoshidajj06@gmail.com

And:

Thank you for allowing us to consider "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town, 1976 -1984" for Midwest Review. We are sorry to report it was not selected for publication. 

We are honored you thought of us as a home for your work. 

Sincerely,

The Editors, Midwest Review

‘The Odyssey’ Review - by Sonny Bunch ( The Bulwark )

The Odyssey is more fractious, more fissured. It is, first, two hours of abuse and defeats and arguments and disappointments and the occasional bit of grubby cleverness, followed by an hour of glorious vengeance. (So glorious, in fact, that people in my audience were clapping at the mere plucking of a bow and the beautiful twang of its reverberations.) Odysseus, like Oppenheimer, is a man who changed the world, albeit one who had some regrets after the fact: Change is momentous, change is dangerous. When you shatter norms and fail to respect what has come before, you risk calamitous darkness. 

Nukes, Data Centers, A VAT in our future: Race and Gender-Based Contract Practice Ends | Indiana Week in Review | July 17, 2026.

 

Donald Trump claims election insecurity; Markwayne Mullin warns states to cooperate - and so we all join the madness?

Trump's remarks on election security: What to know is that there is no meat on this bone.

John Ware: troubling light on The Troubles (The Article)

Neither Confirm Nor Deny is a book written by a journalist who, with his colleague Geoff Seed, took personal risks and now presents a rigorously researched and balanced account of what happened in Northern Ireland.  It is not a book that makes you want to go into the garden and hoist a Union Jack — nor, come to that, an Irish Tricolour.   Ware explains – in almost too much detail — how undercover security work during serious conflict can, unimpeded by the law, take an ethical nose-dive.  It is to be hoped that this book will make such events, and the moral judgements behind them, much less likely in the future. 

‘At times I felt I’d bitten off more than I could chew’: Christopher Nolan on sweeping the Oscars, making The Odyssey – and getting a puppy (The Guardian).

Bitten by Willie Nile - again!

 The Odyssey review – Nolan goes god-tier with breathtaking epic of men, monsters and moral metamorphosis (The Guardian)

The result is a gigantic, shimmering mirage, a mysterious three-hour vision of crazy episodes that does not yield up wisdom or contentment, but only a grim resolution to continue with the fight, to make sense of ruined lives, to re-enter the scorched battlefield of loss. 

 I've seen only one John Waters movie, Hairspray, but maybe I should have seen more. He was just not on my or my friends' radar. Still, I knew who he was. ‘The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage (The Guardian) is a good reminder.

Nor should the comedy in either film disguise their underlying seriousness. Hairspray may treat the Civil Rights era with a deft touch but its indignation is palpable. Both movies celebrate resistance in the face of racism, fascism and tyranny. What do these movies have to say about the US in 2026? “I think they say that anger can be good, but the way you change things is through humour.” Is there anything he wouldn’t joke about? “I’m certainly not going to go into Israel and that whole situation. It’d be a lose-lose for me to even try. But I’ve always walked the edge of what you can’t make fun of. In all my movies, I make fun of things I like, not things I hate. That’s why I’ve been getting away with this for 60 years.” 

The Day She Returns review – another Hong Sang-soo round of slow, reflective boozing really hits the spot  (The Guardian) has some interesting writing advice:

...The film withholds overt meaning like a short story … and is quietly engrossing.

Our Hero, Balthazar review – a darkly comic satire of incel culture and gun violence | Movies (The Guardian) hits on a subject I have no understanding of and has me pondering this paragraph:

Deathdealer_16 turns out to be Solomon (Asa Butterfield), a Texan living in a trailer with his grandma, none too pleased to see Balthazar. But the two strike up a friendship, with Balthazar besotted by the shooting range, and Solomon eager to prove to the New Yorker there’s more to him than incel futility. Hitting a homoerotic pitch (“You wait to see the rest of what I’m packing,” says Solomon after revealing his glove box pistol), the film is at its strongest outlining this queasy interdependence. It’s a buddy-movie travesty of the mutual incomprehension and fascination between liberal and red-state America, suggesting that resignation to and glorification of gun violence aren’t so far apart. 

It seems to me we are now a nation of the infantilized. I thought that was the goal of prison. Have the powers that be learned their lessons from the pirson-industrial complex and applied them to the nation at large? 

Why Is Digital Freedom Making Us Exhausted and Sad? (The New Atlantis)

For more than two decades, Han has shaped a form of writing equal to his concerns: brief, concentrated books that think in movements rather than arguments. Their brevity feels deliberate, as if composed for the attention economy yet guided by another sense of time. Winding through subjects as varied as Zen, smartphones, and gardening, they often return to the same question: What has become of freedom in the digital age? 

***

Burnout, depression, anxiety: these are the maladies of our time. No one denies their spread, but their wider significance is a matter of debate. For Han, they are not signs that the new order is breaking down. They are signs of its success. We are free — and the result is not liberation but exhaustion. 

***

What Han would later diagnose as burnout is not just a condition of exhaustion; it is a condition of perception. Moods are how we feel the world, even before we think about it. They are less like emotions than the background conditions of our experience, like slow-moving weather patterns that give times and places their character. They cannot be examined like objects from the outside — we are always already within them — but they can be named and described. In Heidegger, Han found a way to notice them. And it made him weather-wise, alert to the world at a time when the weather was changing.

The Berlin Wall came down during Han’s years as a student, marking the end of the Cold War. For most in the West, the mood was jubilant. Liberal democracy and the free market had triumphed, and the specter of totalitarianism seemed to recede into history. The future, many assumed, belonged to societies that were more market-driven — and therefore more free. Han, however, had seen enough to question that story of progress. Growing up under the extreme pressures of Korean capitalism, he knew that domination could take many forms. South Korea had not followed the Big Brother model of the North, yet its people labored with an intensity that suggested another kind of domination — one rooted not in surveillance or prohibition but in competition, achievement, and the inner compulsion to perform.

If the twentieth century had feared domination by the state, the twenty-first would reveal another possibility: domination by freedom.

***

By now, we understand the basic mechanics of the profit model. While complex in one sense, its logic is painfully simple: keep users using; sell their attention to advertisers. In the early 2010s, news about predictive algorithms came as a shock. It seemed uncanny that an advertising algorithm could detect a woman’s pregnancy before anyone else knew about it. But the headlines have long since moved on. What once seemed unsettling has faded into the din of daily life, normalized under the regime Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism.”

When Zuboff began writing about it in 2015, the public imagination often returned to a familiar nightmare: Orwell’s Big Brother, the all-seeing avatar of the surveillance state. Zuboff argued that the comparison was misleading. Today’s most powerful surveillance systems are not instruments of the state, nor do they rule by repression. They are transnational, driven by a market logic that shapes behavior without appearing to command it — what she called “Big Other,” a diffuse computational order that monitors and modifies human action at scale.

***

Han’s new book, The Tonality of Thought, approaches freedom in a different mood. Consisting of three public lectures, the book returns to themes that have run through his work for more than two decades. Han is not searching for a stronger self, but for a way beyond the self — another way of inhabiting the world, combining German Romantic ideals with Eastern thought. “If I may compare my thinking with a fruit,” he writes, “then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.”

***

In this clearing, Han’s thinking lets Western concepts take root differently. Among them is eros — a term that, in Greek thought, signifies much more than desire in the everyday sense. It is the soul’s movement beyond itself, toward a beauty that transcends possession. Eros reorients the reflex of self-enclosure, the habit of drawing the world inward and rendering it usable. The soul, instead of grasping, is laid hold of.

Against a Zen backdrop, this can seem difficult to place: the Western longing for beauty seems to unsettle the stillness of Buddhist detachment. Han’s books, inhabiting that tension, do not systematically resolve it. Instead, they bear its fruit in a mood that attunes us to the world. What matters for Han is that both movements, in their different ways, loosen the grip of a possessive inwardness. The question is no longer how to possess the self, but how to move beyond it.

***

Han begins from a different premise. Freedom in the digital age is found not in resisting the Other, but where the Other resists us. It is a question of ends: does freedom secure the ego or free us from its grip? One posture is habitually on guard, the other habitually open. For Zuboff, who draws again from Sartre, the danger is plain: “Hell is other people.” For Han, the more radical danger is an “inferno of the same” in which the Other disappears.

A life organized entirely around the self — its projects, its performance, its wants — leaves no room for the kind of relations in which freedom can actually take shape. The word freedom, Han likes to note, shares a root with friend. One is not free alone. Freedom arises from vulnerability. It begins not in mastery but in exposure, where one is no longer fully one’s own.

Which, since John Locke is integral to my research project, makes me think of Locke's idea that true freedom reaches its height in civil society - with other people, ordered liberty.

 AI Is Changing What We Can Do. Who We Become Is Still Our Choice. | The Humanist Review of AI

Let’s step back and ask one of the central questions of ethics: “What kind of people should we want to be?” Ethics, in the classical sense, is about how to live well. And that involves more than producing the right outward acts. It involves becoming the sort of person who can recognize what is right, choose it for the right reasons and respond to the world with the appropriate thoughts and feelings.

How, then, could an automated oracle help? It cannot tell you what to feel, because feeling is not something you can summon by obedience. But neither can it settle the matter by telling you what to do. Reasons matter, and to be a morally responsible agent you must reason for yourself. That thought is central to the ethical tradition that reaches back through the European Enlightenment and to Immanuel Kant. Central to Kant’s thought was the ideal of people fully in charge of their own lives, reasoning toward the right decisions through a kind of self-government he called autonomy. People who simply do what they are told, even when what they are told to do is right, are not living autonomous lives. Nor is this a uniquely European idea. Confucius taught the virtue of yi, which involves recognizing what is right and acting in harmony with moral principle. Buddhism offers similar lessons. What matters is not just what you do but the intention with which you do it.

Accordingly, philosophers have rightly been suspicious of “moral deference”, in which someone decides what to do based on what another person or institution declares to be right. Moral guides, your priest, your rabbi, your imam, your guru, even a humble philosopher, can help you think things through. They can draw your attention to features of a situation you may have overlooked. But if they are doing their job, they will not simply listen to your quandary and pronounce a course of action without giving reasons. They will want you to do what is right because you understand why it is right, because only acts that arise from your own deliberation are fully yours. If they espouse values you do not recognize, your compliance does not turn their judgment into your own.

I should add that I am not assuming values are matters of mere belief rather than knowledge, or endorsing relativism, the notion that different normative traditions are entitled to their different answers. You can reject moral deference and affirm autonomy while still believing that there is such a thing as moral truth, and even moral expertise. Perhaps many moral questions, perhaps even all of them, have a universally correct answer. It remains the case that, even if LLMs give excellent answers to moral questions, you still should not defer to their conclusions. You should try to understand the reasons they offer, because it remains important that people act on the basis of their own, admittedly imperfect, understanding. That, in my view, is itself one of the universal moral truths.

***

Once we recognize that people, media outlets or spiritual guides may try to shape us in these ways, we can take that into account. We can ask what interests they have in influencing us. We can consult a range of sources with different interests. I know the pastor has an interest in getting me to make a larger offering. I know that Fox News tilts right and The Guardian inclines left. So, I can weigh what they say accordingly.

But the most effective forms of manipulation are invisible. And one problem with applying this strategy to AI is that we often lack any clear picture of the interests, if any, that guide it. That is one place where public education would help. One strength of LLMs, however, is that, unlike the pastor, they are often willing to tell you what they “know” about the forces that shaped them. And researchers have explored the political bent of the major models. There is a lot of evidence that existing LLMs tend to lean somewhat left of political center. It would be unfounded conspiracy-mongering to suggest that some secret center-left cabal is controlling things behind the scenes. Once you consider the shape of politics in the North Atlantic world, where the main LLMs are based, more ordinary explanations present themselves.

***

Political outlooks also differ in ways that reflect evaluative disposition rather than straightforward factual belief. Moral psychologists Graham and Haidt, for example, argue that concern about fairness tends to diminish, and concern about group loyalty to increase, as one moves rightward.^[8] If so, users should know that fine-tuning may favor equality over national loyalty, reflecting the outlook of the cosmopolitan, highly educated people who help shape these systems. Autonomy is strengthened when people can judge advice in light of the perspective that informs it.

***

But notice that an AI guide that did agree to simply choose options would not be much use if you could neither identify the relevant features of your situation nor see what your options were. An LLM cannot tell you anything useful unless you can inform it about your situation. And grasping what matters in your situation is a capacity you can acquire only through practice. There is always something else you might consider. You have to learn what is relevant and how to respond to it.

I would add it is not enough to learn, but to remember and to have faith in what you know in the face of a world that does not care. I knew much. Depression became nihilism as my faith in ethics, in people, in what I was doing with my life dissipated.

Oops, I stopped reading too soon.

Aristotle thought that we develop this capacity through habituation, by practice. For him, the virtues were not rules or isolated good acts but settled dispositions of character, ways of seeing, feeling and responding that are formed over time until they become, in a good sense, second nature. Confucius, in a different key, stressed the role of ritual and custom in shaping good habits of response. Our sensibilities, our capacities for detecting what matters in the human world, do not come ready-made. That thought, largely sidelined for a time in modern moral philosophy, was revived in the twentieth century by thinkers such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, who urged that ethics return its attention to character, judgment and human flourishing.

One role of fiction, in fables and parables—in novels and short stories, in film, video and even painting—is to let us imagine complex moral situations and so develop habits of judgment and feeling. Conversational exchanges with an LLM, in which scenarios are built out collaboratively, could certainly engage the imagination in ways that help shape character and sensibility. Still, it is likely to remain true that we develop these capacities mostly by using them in the situations we face, alone and with others. Time online draws us away from those encounters.

I once told a friend of mine that the hardest ethical questions were between two equally bad choices. It seems now that may not have been taken as much comfort. I think that was the last time I saw Paula.

I am not a Saul Bellow fan. He put me off my writing for decades. I felt it was a milieu that had no reality - factual or emotional - for me. Yet, I keep coming back to him. Wondering was I wrong about him. Did I close my mind? I wish I had read Philip Roth first rather. Bellow was older - closer to Mailer, whose fictions leave me cold. But I admire Nelson Algren - also of Chicago and close to Bellow's age. And Vonnegut, Heller, Gore Vidal were of the same generation. There is someone else from the Fifties dancing in the shadows of my mind who leaves me as disinterested in his topics as does Bellow. I cannot get a name to form. Cheever's people have all the sexual tics and social anxieties. Yet, I understand their problems better. Augie March I found a novel worth reading, but Humboldt's Gift preceded it by decades. 

And today I received a link to ‘Ravelstein’ Revisited - by Jonathan Marks (The Bulwark). This fit into the previous entries in this post. It might have also sparked a bit of reflection on my Bellow bias. A recession of sorts. It is a consideration of a Bellow novel for which I have only read disdain, to be polite.

 I DON’T THINK THAT CHICK’S EXPOSURE, sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional, of his own defects justify his shameless exposure of a friend. To be sure, Ravelstein and Chick both merit praise from Bellow’s perspective. Bellow, throughout his career, took a special interest in ineffectual intellectuals, most notably Moses Herzog in Bellow’s novel Herzog, whose book-learning and talent for observation does little to make him wise. Herzog is, however, raised above his fellow moderns, who are less foolish than he is in some ways, by his high ambition, rare in a world ruled by economics, natural science, and the quest for the comforts those pursuits provide. Herzog wants to “live out marvelous qualities vaguely comprehended.” That desire, pursued even to the brink of madness, matters more than the failure of Herzog to gain more than the mystical conclusion that “only the incomprehensible gives any light.”

Chick and Ravelstein, who attempt but fail to understand a world Chick deems “mysterious,” are honorable in the same way Herzog is, a way that is compatible with great foolishness. Perhaps Ravelstein, who understood the quest for human completeness to be nearly always futile, wouldn’t mind being understood as a noble failure. But I doubt that even Chick’s Ravelstein would consider the abandonment of his lifelong convictions and preferences in the face of death to be the kind of failure that is noble.

Yeah, pretty sure I will only read Ravelstein if I am stuck with nothing else to do.

Effing brilliant:  Star Shrapnel by Ata Zargarof 

Book Review: Talking Classics by Mary Beard  

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The Good News (not) From Indiana

 Off to a slow start this morning, recuperating from my road trip to Indianapolis yesterday. Indy drivers exhaust me nowadays. 

Yesterday I got a bunch of my cases scanned and sent back, got tired and stopped, came back here and found out I missed two pages in a case I needed to have. The trip wore me out good but I got to thinking that I have to go back now. 

Up earlier today than expected. Thinking about heading back to Indy. 

Only it is gloomy and thunderstorms are predicted. No, I think I will stay here and do domestic stuff. 

Definitely Monday for a return while I have a car at my disposal. 

And I did not get to see The Interview, either. Caffeine. I need caffeine. And a shower. 

I guess Trump did another of his hot air speeches. Cizzilia compared it to Rivera & Capone's vault.

 Trump alleges vast conspiracy to commit and cover up election fraud; any fraud committed was under his watch, nothing said about actual manipulation; too bad hot air is now taken as reality.

Trump addresses nation on election security but offers no new proof: Five takeaways 

The Real Threat to Our Elections Is Donald Trump 

Too bad the President paid more attention to the economy than his wounded vanity: Remarks on inflation, employment and monetary policy (Dallasfed.org).  

Now for the good news (not) from Indiana. ICE is here, ruining lives. School kids  suffer while the state runs a surplus and we spend billions of dollars on bombs for Iran. And the State Of Indiana demonstrates its prudish lack of humor.

Indiana, ICE and the Destruction of Immigrant Families (Mother Jones)

Joanna and her two young sons are US-born citizens. She comes from a multi-generational Latino American family. Manuel was born in Honduras. Indiana has been his home for over fifteen years. He owns a successful roofing business that employs several people. He’s a mentor and leader to them and others in the community. Joanna earned a degree in psychology from the University of Washington. They started a family. They work hard, pay taxes, own their home, have two cars. Their children attend the local elementary school. They volunteer and are active members of their church and their community. Manuel was in the final stages of obtaining permanent residency when ICE “took” him. Their family is one of tens of thousands of mixed-status households in Indiana.

“The new administration thinks, We’re going to just deport everybody and get everybody out of here,” Joanna says. “But there’s not an understanding of how our communities have been here for so many generations, that we are the American community already.”

ICE holding 28 people at Clark County Jail after unannounced operation Wednesday | Indiana (newsandtribune.com)

CLARK COUNTY – At least 28 people were detained Wednesday and Thursday in Clark County and are now being held in Clark County Jail on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to jail records obtained by the News and Tribune.

Reports of an ICE presence outside of the Home Depot in Clarksville fostered some concern Wednesday morning after local activism group Do Something Southern Indiana posted pictures of a black unmarked Ford F-150 with blue and red lights there on Facebook.

Clarksville Police Chief Nathan Walls confirmed with the News and Tribune on Thursday that ICE, or a different agency acting on behalf of ICE, had been in town. He said nobody told the Clarksville Police Department about any immigration-related operations occurring Wednesday.

Cuts to SNAP, Medicaid could impact free school meals at high-poverty schools (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

If a school loses Community Eligibility Provision status, families will need to apply individually to prove they meet income restrictions for free or reduced-price meals.

The income limit for a family of four is $42,900 a year for free meals and $61,050 for reduced-price meals.

Families who earn too much will no longer qualify and will need to pay out of pocket.

The Center for American Progress estimates this would cost the typical Hoosier family with two kids an extra $1,080 a year.

“Inflation’s already pretty high,” said Lyndsay Coe, a single mother in Indianapolis who relies on $302 a month in SNAP benefits and free school meals to feed her daughter.

“We have a bare refrigerator” by the end of the month, said Alexandra McMasters, a single mother of two children living in Clinton.

Laid off from her job in healthcare, McMasters now works part-time for the U.S. Postal Service.

Yeah, I am in that kind of mood this morning - how else to feel with this news? Even though this last bit ought to provoke a good laugh.

Food truck removed from Statehouse Market over slogan; could have free speech implications (Indiana Capital Chronicle)

Kirollos Barsoum, communications director of the State Personnel Department, said “Participation of food trucks and other vendors at the Statehouse Market is by invitation and is at the discretion of the State Personnel Department. We routinely evaluate vendors based on a variety of operational and programmatic considerations, and we reserve the right to modify the vendor rotation or discontinue participation at any time.”

The Capital Chronicle also asked for copies of any complaints received and he said “no responsive written records exist.”

Zachary Cormier, an associate professor of law at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law, said there could be First Amendment implications. Offensiveness alone can’t be precluded by the government.

For it to regulate that kind of speech, he said, it’d need to rise to the level of obscenity. That standard, while varying from community to community, tends to be high.

“And usually these types of business slogans that are meant to be provocative,” Cormier said, “you know maybe even have some type of sexual connotation or double entendre, don’t normally rise to that level.”

***

Sims, the food truck owner, also felt he didn’t get a chance to appeal or come up with a solution since the email stated the decision was “final.” Nobody had complained to him while at the market, he said, and he’ll lose between $4,000 and $5,000 in revenue from the two Thursdays he’ll miss in August and September. 

Need to get ready for the rest of my day. 

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Indiana politics making me roll my eyes with disgust: Really, Indiana? (Sheila Kennedy). 

Indiana to end race, gender preferences in state contracts (Indiana Capital Chronicle) letting people get access at jobs they were kept from by prejudice and then calling them that chance is now considered to be racism. We have become a nation of thumb-sucking victims. But the real story is beyond that  - it is about power. Indiana's Attorney General submits an opinion to the Governor on how to bypass a statute rather than have the supine Republican General Assembly repeal the law.

I think I will need to look at that opinion for my research project.

 Independent tops spring secretary of state fundraising, Democrat amasses general election war chest (Indiana Capital Chronicle) will Greg Ballard or Beau Bayh deliver us from our one party government?

Senator Jim Banks introduces bill on birthright citizenship 

Banks’s office said in a statement that the bill would find that “illegal immigration and birth tourism constitute an ongoing invasion and amends federal law to confirm that children born to illegal aliens and birth tourists are not entitled to automatic citizenship.”

“The Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship decision was an unprecedented assault on American sovereignty, and we must do whatever it takes to save our country,” Banks said in the statement. “I’m leading the Citizenship Act to reverse the effects of this consequential ruling and ensure the millions of illegal aliens that invaded our country can’t continue to exploit our immigration system.”

We have no more Dick Lugars.

A new news outlet for Hoosiers: FPI News - Independent statewide journalism in Indiana. We need more of this!

 

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Rejected, Bourdain, The Most Encouraging Thing I Have Read In Ages.

 Up and working on my other writing chores. Like this post.

A rejection that came in late from  Open: Journal of Arts & Letters for “After Making Landfall”:

Thank you for your submission. We appreciate the time and trouble you took to give us the opportunity to read your work; however, we must respectfully decline to accept it for publication, as it does not satisfy our editorial needs. We will be glad to learn that this work has received prominent placement elsewhere.

Cordially,

James

Submissions Editor

I came late to Bourdain through my friend Randy K. He came to fascinate me - thoughtful without humbug. I read I wanted to be Anthony Bourdain—until I met him with sympathy, thinking how much his sort of wonder and openness and acerbic wit have disappeared from our lives.

The controversy over The Odyssey is on my mind. So is a comment made by the fellow running the group sessions. He disdains Will Ferrell for being political; he said that was why Ferrell's career has gone down hill. Nothing about Ferrell's talent, nothing about Ferrell's age; only that Ferrell's career died because of his politics.

Actors age out, comic actors age out quicker. That is my opinion. Ferrell's style was outrageous to the point of obnoxiousness. He is now of an age where that kind of routine looks sad, even desperate. That made his shelf life even shorter. Barbie showed he has more life as a supporting actor. And if you think comic actors do not age out, then give a thought to the careers of Eddie Murphy, Dan Ackroyd, Paulie Shore, and Bill Murray. Even the Marx Brothers wore down, and who was watching Bob Hope movies in the Sixties? But this thing of letting private opinions negate a performace, where doe sit come from?

I did not expect much from Has America Crossed the Asshole Threshold? for all of its provocative headline. Instead, Carlyn Beccia brightened my day, sparked my tepid optimism.

Humans have been walking up to this line for three thousand years. Most societies that crossed it died. But a few — a strange, stubborn few — stood at the edge, looked down, and did something that shouldn’t be possible: they turned around. America itself did it once, a little over a century ago, when the country was more corrupt, more violent, and more for-sale than it is now. So what changed?

A coalition of nobodies dragged it back. How they did it is the most important story nobody tells. Because we are standing at the line again — and this time we can measure it.

***

Now, the finding inside the finding — the one that matters most and gets reported least: MAGA Republicans are not more willing than anyone else to personally commit violence.

Read that again. They don’t want to throw the brick. They want someone else to throw the brick for them.

The researchers are careful about what this means, and so should we be: this is a chorus, not an army. But if you’ve been paying attention for the last three thousand years, that should not comfort you, because the chorus is the mechanism. Societies don’t collapse because millions pick up weapons. They collapse because millions approve and normalize cruelty.

***

And the American host, by the 1890s, was compromised at every level. Tammany didn’t hold a single voter at gunpoint — the ward voted for turkeys, knowingly, for decades. Lynchings drew crowds of ordinary citizens; the photographs sold as postcards at pharmacies, which is a sentence I need you to sit with. Race science filled lecture halls with respectable, churchgoing audiences. Standard Oil’s machine ran on thousands of willing clerks, legislators, and middlemen who knew exactly what they were carrying and carried it anyway.

The political scientist Robert Putnam—who spent decades measuring American social cohesion —found that the Gilded Age was the most atomized, low-trust, every-man-for-himself moment in the American record.

And yet, America survived.

***

The actual first movers were, and I cannot stress this enough, nobodies.

Between roughly 1870 and 1920, Americans went on the greatest civic-joining spree in the country’s history — Putnam’s data show more enduring civic organizations founded in those decades than in any comparable period before or since. Unions, granges, fraternal lodges, women’s clubs, settlement houses, mutual aid societies, congregations, the PTA. Millions of people who had every reason to conclude that honesty was for suckers instead went out and found the other cooperators.

They weren’t being noble. They were being practical: alone, each of them was lunch. Together, they were a market where decency broke even.

***

The threshold is real. The arithmetic is real. And the arithmetic has exactly one input you control. Every era’s turnaround began the same way: some unmeasurable number of people, each acting alone, declined to sell — and then made the single most subversive move available to a member of a collapsing civilization.

They found the people who could not be bought.

 Which is something Donald J. Trump and his ilk will not understand: there is a line where money does not matter. Where there is a different calculus of profit. The Iranians stump him because they do not care about making his kind of profit. The No Kings movement shows that people can act without the help of polical parties. It just takes a little faith.

 I have about an hour - two hours gone now since I started working this morning - before I need to get ready for the writer's group. If it is not meeting, then I will beat it back here. Meanwhile, submitting stories!

 

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