I had such a fabulous day off yesterday! I got some early birthday presents, went shopping and thrifting, spent a few hours at the pool, and made a delicious dinner. Hope everyone is having a great weekend thus far.
Ukraine Updates
Focus of war shifting south towards Mariupol, Ukrainian minister says
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/16/focus-of-war-shifting-south-towards-mariupol-ukrainian-minister-says
#RIP
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, dies at 92
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2023/06/16/daniel-ellsberg-pentagon-papers-dead/
My book club is reading this now…It’s so good.
Barbara Kingsolver: ‘Rural people are so angry they want to blow up the system’
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jun/16/barbara-kingsolver-rural-people-are-so-angry-they-want-to-blow-up-the-system
Hang this in the Louvre
I love her too.
Have a super weekend!
I think that Tim Curry tweet is one of the funniest tweets I’ve ever seen. “people should know he isn’t doing well either.” Should we, @jakenolen? And then Tim Curry (I assume) gets wind of this tweet, and replies.
Maybe I should join twitter. I could have a whole persona where I’m tweeting from beyond the grave. “Just ran into @winstonchurchill. Drunk again LOL. Told me a joke about @wallissimpson”
The reason why that TikTok is so funny is because she sells it. When you do something like that you have to go all the way and then some. No half-assed bullshit there.
Also, “God save the queen, man!”
It was a speech about gun control in Hartford, CT. Under what circumstances would…this is going to be a fun election season.
One of the sort of secrets to the Pentagon Papers was that the chief librarian of the RAND Corp let Daniel photocopy the papers without alerting the authorities.
The chief librarian was a medically retired former naval aviator named Dick Best who flew dive bombers off the USS Enterprise at Pearl Harbor and at Midway. He’s also the only man who almost single handed sank two Japanese Aircraft Carriers (Akagi and Hiryu.)
Ben Bradlee talks here about how Kissinger pushed Nixon hard to go after Ellsberg, despite Nixon originally being unconcerned about the Pentagon Papers.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/daniel-ellsbergs-life-beyond-the-pentagon-papers
Nixon eventually responded to Kissinger by authorizing the Plumbers to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist looking for dirt.
The piece that usually gets left out is that once news got out of the Plumbers breaking into the Watergate, Kissinger went to the NY Times DC chief and swore up and down that they had no connection to the White House — and the Times spiked their coverage of Watergate, even though the Washington Post was publishing story after story of evidence.
https://www.politico.com/story/2007/12/clubbing-with-the-elite-007192
Having grown up in a very rural area in my yout’ I can understand some of the feelings they feel as a marginalized group. No one wants to be mocked, ignored or treated like shit.
Which is quite ironic to me considering they are more than happy to do the same to others. Bitching endlessly about how all their tax money goes to the cities when it is the other way around-cities subsidize the rural areas. Voting constantly against their own best interests. Electing politicians who actively troll others so they can feel powerful however briefly. Bitching and moaning when policies they support blow up in their face (Trump China trade war or Brexit for example.)
I don’t have any good ideas to breach the wall between rural/city.
Now I’m gonna have Snap Yo Fingers in my head all day, so thanks for that.
Oh, I almost forgot, it’s Saturday. Surely there must be an open house…Let’s take a look at a place in Hampstead (London) once owned by Sir Ridley Scott:
https://nypost.com/2023/06/16/ridley-scotts-historic-former-uk-estate-lists-for-35-9m/
The breakfast nook is something to do die for!
hahahahaha….just found out whos headlining this years motogp festival in town
its dj paul elstak….dunno if he ever made it stateside…but hes a huge name over here….mostly for the 90s happy hardcore scene
gonna be a lot of me aged people including me thinking they are 16 again and probably regretting it the next day
guess ill go score some molly for the full experience 😀
i’m going to hate myself next sunday…uhh….afternoon probably
Not familiar with DJ Paul, but I have been on a similarly dated techno spree (Tiesto, Oakenfold, Crystal Method), so I’ll have to check him out.
tiesto is another big dutch name from the same era
might as well check out party animals whilst you are it…they are good fun
oh dear…..ive put myself in dutch party mode
its not even dinner time yet….this is not going to end well
A couple of days ago Mark Thiessen at the Washington Post joined Ross Doubthat at Deadsplinter in saying Biden should pardon Trump.
Almost exactly a year ago, Doubthat wrote “To Heal America and Avoid Hypocrisy, Biden Must Pardon Trump Now.”
Now Thiessen has written “In his 2020 victory speech, Joe Biden declared that “to everything there is a season — a time to build, a time to reap, a time to sow. And a time to heal. This is the time to heal in America.” If he wants to deliver on his promise to heal the country, he could do so with one action: Pardon Donald Trump.”
…it’s a lousy competition…but the most egregious caping award is a hot ticket at the moment
…you should check out some of the defences of boris/condemnations of the committee that precipitated his departure from the commons…they make even thiessen sound like a sound judge of character & precedent
Yeah, the Boris Report has been outstanding theater — if you like farce.
Is Johnson showing signs of coming back? Because that would be a prerequisite I’m sure.
One of the insane bits of gaslighting with the Trump pardon pieces that occasionally pop up is the complete denial of any pattern of past evidence to Trump’s law breaking and GOP complicity.
There is near total chronological collapse. Grind down all facets history to one little nub of “wrongdoing” and then pivot to saying “why judge this l’il ol’ thing?”
…he’s been making those “call me cincinnatus” cracks since he ceased being prime minister…& all manner of self-interested triangulation is causing ostensibly coherent people to fall over themselves to equate him being at the top of the ticket with what they’re fond of calling “an historic mandate” off the back of his last scorecard at a general election
…so in a sense very much so…almost as much as the people who want to see the back of him have been driving the many, many nails he left laying all over the place on his way up into the coffin they want to box him up in…which makes it moot until it isn’t, basically
…but the daily mail thinks all its christmases have come at once now they get to call him their new columnist
…if it wasn’t such a depressing spectacle it’d be funny as fuck…no joke…there are people out there attempting to vilify anything & everything from the basis of government to the minutiae of parliamentary procedure to logic, semantics & plain language just to make him out to have done less wrong than someone who hasn’t been tossed out of the house so they can argue that it’s all terribly unfair & out of context & proportion & only an idiot wouldn’t go into the next election with him in charge instead of rishi rich
…smaller pond, maybe…& lesser offences than shut-up-donnie-you’re-out-of-your-element
…but he might top him out for apologists hawking utter bollocks in an effort to drown out the clear facts of how overwhelming the case against him remains
Cinncinatus, the guy who legendarily saved the nation then retired over their protests to live quietly on his farm.
The standard PR playbook progression is first offer an idiotic idea as a joke. Then at a later point find a dupe who is hungry for a contrarian take to say “yes, I know this idea is idiotic, but if you squint and look from this perspective, it’s not wrong.”
The final stage is to have people yelling, without irony, that the idiotic idea is completely right.
And the pundit types who elevated the idiotic idea all through its metamorphosis, will wring their hands in the end say, well if people believe it, we have to treat it seriously.
There are tools for disrupting the PR playbook, of course. Has Johnson has done enough to see them used?
…the only thing he wants anyone taking from the cincinnatus reference is “saved the empire…toddled off to mind his own business as a salt of the earth tiller of fields…returned by popular demand to deliver salvation once more”…& then only to shove the classical education down everyone’s throat while tacitly acknowledging that he’s worn out the “aren’t I a bit like churchill?” schtick
…but…that’s why I went with that hat-trick the other day of a call-back to that when he popped his prime ministerial clogs…fox news calling joe a “wannabe dictator” [which they’ve since jettisoned a producer for as a transparently insincere mea culpa] & elon calling for a modern day sulla as the answer to “our” problems
…as for the playbook…need I remind you boris might as well have written significant bits of that…he is by nature that exact creature…much more so than he’s been a politician…& certainly for much more time CV-wise
…though the daily fail is a bit of a step down…albeit one that leans hardest towards the corner he painted himself into when he decided that of the two columns he’d written up for the telegraph about brexit…unless it was the spectator…if that part matters…the pro-leave one served the interests of his personal advancement better than the one with a passing familiarity with logic & reality
…the blurred lines between the press & politics in the UK are of a similar order of opacity to the ones in the states…but also quite different
…imagine if…say…mnuchin became the editor of AM new york the way osborne did the evening standard
…it might sound like a parallel but there are some significant ways in which it wouldn’t be?
He wasn’t the first, but Reagan ran the playbook to perfection. He’d launch easily refutable bits like trees causing more pollution than cars or everyone on welfare driving Cadillacs, to guffaws from the pundit class.
Then the editors would run “well actually” bits about how under certain conditions trees can emit low level ozone, or one woman in the 60s who got rich from fraud.
And then the whole mess proceded to its inevitable result where the pundits proclaimed people believed Reagan, and that’s all that mattered, without a lick of self reflection how it happened.
Reagan knew exactly how it happened. He’d been a part of the Hollywood PR machine since the 40s and a political PR man for GE since the 1950s. He knew how to pull the levers, and starting with dumb “gaffes” was a way to kickstart the process.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2016/01/ronald-reagans-conservative-conversion-as-spokesman-for-general-electric-during-the-1950s.html
…I don’t know if there’s a full list anywhere easy to find…but this is just the telegraph ones
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/boris-johnson-archive/
…& this…may be less than strictly objective
https://gal-dem.com/comprehensive-history-everything-boris-johnson-has-said/
…but…in terms of transatlantic parallels…it’s like equating the ivy league with oxbridge
…it’s not wrong…& in both cases the vanishing point tends to be up their own fundament
…but the two are too divergent to be genuinely parallel…so the term is misleading at best…which is ironic I suppose since misleading seems to be the name of that game
…when it was reagan & thatcher the game was tighter & the rules were clearer…& the david camerons & tony blairs & boris johnsons all thought they could play it better…but they don’t have the grasp of the fundamentals that someone like thatcher (love her or hate her) had…let alone the level of control of the narrative
…so the screws stay loose…& at some point the wheels fall off
…doesn’t stop them saying the bandwagon is running just fine while trying to pull a fred flintstone to cover the lack of tyres, engine or drivetrain…& they still have all the same cast & crew to tell them they look as cool as the emperor in those new clothes of his that are all the rage with the cognoscenti
…but it’s a sorry fucking spectacle from where I’ve been sitting…on both sides of the pond?
Hang Trump, sure.
Pardon Trump, maybe in 200 years.
@ManchuCandidate do you have any dim sum or any favorite restaurant suggestions in Toronto? My mom suggested Dim Sum King and I can’t tell from the mixed reviews if it is a great dive spot or a mediocre old school one. She’s getting her recommendations from extended family who live there but who don’t necessarily eat out much.
Correction: she is getting recommendations from Google. Goddesses please protect me and my stomach 🙏. I don’t need the runs on my return flight with HZ3 in tow.
I would say great dive spot based on my infrequent visits in the area. Lots of restaurants look divey but food is usually good.
My parents wouldn’t take us kids to these kinds of places because mom didn’t want any of us to get sick (I was the most delicate stomach wise as a kid.)
I heard of Chi Dim Sum up in midtown. Looks nice, but can’t give a recommendation as I’ve never been there. Usually fancier/$$.
Thank you!
Every few years we have an attack of tenting caterpillars, this year they have taken over an island in the San Juan chain…
https://www.insider.com/millions-western-tent-caterpillars-invade-guemes-island-washington-2023-6
He was such a nice quiet Nazi boy…
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/seann-patrick-pietila-michigan-man-arrested-planning-mass-killing-synagogue/
This guy should be inducted into the hall of fame of assholes!
https://www.rawstory.com/donald-trump-curt-schilling/