Let’s pretend you-know-who doesn’t exist today. Let’s set the Wayback Machine for the early days of this blog, back when I had a writer-crush on Jon Carroll.

The San Francisco Chronicle columnist wrote five days a week, and his average was…well, it was astounding. I always read him, and I was rarely bored or disappointed. If you write five days a week, you will file a lot of columns about nothing in particular, and yet, even these were pretty great. He wrote about his cats a lot. He wrote about the persimmon tree in his yard. He wrote about getting caught skinny-dipping on a backwoods trail. He wrote about his daughter, a performer with Cirque du Soleil. And even among these always entertaining pieces, he wrote a fair number of straight-up bangers. I remember, in the early days of this blog, linking to many-many of them. They were such a pleasure to read. He was on my mind recently because a friend is dealing with the decline of a parent, and the piece he wrote about his own mother’s death was such a masterpiece, I wanted to reread it, maybe pass it along. (You can’t do that anymore without signing up for yet another email, which I simply can’t do, these days, especially for something I’m sending to someone else. Here’s yet another call for some sort of mid-grade newspaper collective gift-link arrangement, similar to the NYT’s or WP’s.)

Time marches in only one direction. Carroll left the paper in 2015 and had a blog for a while. Blogs are a pain in the ass, and after a while it tapered off, as 99 percent of blogs tend to do. (nancynall.com — still blogging after all these goddamn years!)

Anyway, it made me google ol’ Jon, and I found this interview with him, published just this week. He’s 81 now, and not writing, but still alive and kicking. Part of the reason he’s not writing is:

What is difficult about being your age?

I’m going blind. Around 2019 I was diagnosed with macular degeneration, which means that I am slowly and painlessly losing my sight. I had already stopped writing professionally when I got the diagnosis, and I’d also stopped publishing the blog, Jon Carroll Prose, that I had launched in December 2015. Now I can’t drive, and I can barely read. I get shots in my eyes every 10 weeks that slow the degeneration, but they won’t reverse the process.

On the positive side, Apple has wonderful accessibility options. I have a tablet that has very big type and I can sort of read it. I use voice-to-text technology for texting (it doesn’t work for email, alas), and I occasionally depend on the kindness of friends such as Nancy Friedman, who has helped me with this interview.

I can see my garden. I can see colors. I’ve always loved observing birds, and now, well, one of the things about birding that people don’t talk about is the sound. If you stand in the middle of the Sacramento Wildlife Refuge and cup your ears you hear a constantly changing cacophony.

What else is difficult? I was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes about 30 years ago, and about 10 years ago I developed diabetic neuropathy, which means that my feet hurt all the time.

But he’s still Jon:

I refuse to vegetate, to lose interest in things, to let my curiosity atrophy. It’s a danger that we all face. It’s not an unreal temptation. How do you fight it? You talk. You think. You speculate. My granddaughter, who is 23, comes over here to hang out, not because we asked her to help but because she enjoys it. We play cribbage and talk about horses.

Here’s a thing a lot of old people are privately thinking: I’m really glad I’m not going to be around to see what 2050 will look like. I fear for my grandchildren. Our politics is controlled by billionaire boys who are enthusiastically letting the planet go to shit. I’m afraid the results of this little experiment in fascism will be sad. My granddaughter’s generation is the first that will do less well than their parents.

Bless him. And bless NN.C reader Nancy Friedman.

Newspapers — good ones — always had room for a writer or two like Jon. That was one of things I loved about them, the way you could just stumble across a column like his. Alan used to work with a guy named Ralph, a copy editor. At his retirement, a colleague talked about how Ralph also once wrote a weekly column called Mr. Cheap. It was all about entertainment to be had for free or not-much. One day Mr. Cheap went out to eat in Melvindale, a working-class suburb here, and witnessed a woman changing her baby’s diaper on the restaurant table. He ended up writing a hilarious dunking on ol’ Melvindale, just an over-the-top roast of the place. And Melvindale? Went insane over it. On the public-access cable channel, a crawl ran over all the programming for days, giving viewers the number to call to cancel their subscriptions. Was anyone in The Detroit News management worried about this? They were not. It was all funny. There were hundreds of thousands of subscribers then. There were many pages in the paper. They had to be filled somehow.

OK, then. The weekend is looming. The forecast: 90 degrees on Saturday, 96 on Sunday. And 98 on Monday. Kill me now.

Just as the chilly spring we’re already calling Maycember fades out, the summer heat arrives. The current forecast is for upper 80s/low90s through the weekend and into next week. Joy! Sweat! Smelly bras!

Now that the obligatory Midwestern small talk about the weather is out of the way, let’s get to the news, eh? Looks like we’re going to war with Iran, too. It won’t be a bad war, like Iraq. No, it’ll be a Grenada-type war, where we roar in with a bunch of air power, drop bombs pew-pew-pew, then roar out and land with erections already at half-mast. Also, some ICE agents arrested a mayoral candidate in New York City, for trying to escort a migrant the agents were trying to arrest. And then :::touches earpiece::: we learn that Kristi Noem was taken, by ambulance, to a DC hospital. Just moments ago, as I write this?

“Some lip filler got dislodged and traveled to her brain,” I said.

“Stephen Miller threw a telephone book at her,” Alan said.

And this is where we are in the United States of America, c. 2025. I give up.

It just occurred to me there are no telephone books anymore. So what did Stephen throw at Kristi? A remaindered hardcover of “The Art of the Deal,” perhaps. Or a Remington bronze. You never know.

So I was reading about how the shooter in Minneapolis — excuse me, alleged shooter — found details about his intended victims via data brokers. These are the businesses that, when you idly Google a person you made out with at a high school party, offers their Facebook or LinkedIn page, but adds they can give you phone numbers, home addresses, criminal records, etc., for a fee. Much of this information is public, to be sure, but has in the past required a little more skill to find than just opening an online account. There have been efforts to rein these companies in, but alas — they haven’t gone anywhere. And once again, I marvel at how our miraculous technology has come to enslave us, because we prioritize the needs of business over people.

My sister went to Europe in the ’90s, when cell phones were becoming ubiquitous everywhere. She watched, on trains, as Europeans blah-blah’d through tunnels without a care. Another friend talked about being on a ferry somewhere in Greece, so far from land you couldn’t see it in any direction, and talking to her mother in the States as though they were standing next to one another. At the same time, Verizon was basing their entire ad campaign on shitty coverage — remember “Can you hear me now?” Why? Because in these MARXIST, COMMUNIST HELLHOLES, government set the cell standards and sometimes picked the companies that could provide the service. Here, we let the Invisible Hand do that, and consequently, I spent half an hour on the phone with AT&T trying to get a data charge reversed, because Kate had downloaded an album at her friend’s house, and her friend lived on the edge of a weird cell here that, miles from Canada, always switched to Rogers, the Canadian company.

Now, of course, no one dares answer a call from any unfamiliar number.

I’ve gone off on a tangent, haven’t I? Here’s a picture of the lake this morning, for the first week of outdoor swimming. One of my favorite dawns — when you have to look for the line between the water and the sky:

What will tomorrow bring? Something crazy, for sure.

I’m gathering from the comments in the previous thread, social media and regular old media that Saturday’s #NoKings events were smashing successes. I’m the worst at estimating crowd sizes, but there were several thousand at the Detroit rally, and hundreds if not thousands more in the various suburban events. The signs were excellent, and every single one correctly spelled. Here’s my favorite of the Detroit crowd:

Mine was ridiculous, but I stood in one place for the most part, and people stopped, read it all, looked up at me and said, “I’m so glad someone is pointing this out,” so there:

Most heartening: The range of people in attendance. There were old people sitting on their walkers, young children running around waving little flags. (I saw a video on Bluesky of a bunch of old people leaving their assisted-living home for a march, on electric scooters and walkers. It was…moving.) All the colors humanity comes in, as well as all the colors tattoo ink comes in. Some trans folk. Dogs wearing signs. People passing out water and snacks. And no violence, except for a brief scuffle when some bikers wearing Detroit Highwaymen colors tried to start some shit. It ended quickly, and good for them, because they looked, for the most part, overweight and slow, and the young men who opposed them, lean and strong. It was over in a few seconds, the crowd chanted “Nazis go home,” and they did.

The best estimates I’ve heard for total numbers nationwide is in the millions, and I believe it. The No Kings organization asks for RSVPs (which I never offer, because who needs more email) and the number is based on that. It’s good to know I — we — are not the only angry ones out here.

In contrast, Tubby’s birthday party in D.C. sounds like it was ridiculous. I didn’t watch, but I saw a few clips. It looked pretty…what’s the word? Wan. Give the Russians and North Koreans this: They know how to do this. We don’t, and it showed. May we never follow their example. The best recap of it is here, and I’m sorry threadreaderapp is so ad-clogged, but as Xitter circles the drain, I guess its spinoffs must, too. (It scrolls better on desktop/laptop than on a phone.) But it’s good, the writer is an event planner and knows his stuff:

The whole parade was this: green vehicle after green vehicle. Not many bands. Not much variety. Single file. Lots of space between each thing. Would have been better if it was shorter, with the gear more densely packed. Which maybe isn’t safe? But live a little, who cares, let’s go three wide with the tanks like it’s Talladega.

Now that might have been crazy, but it would have been better TV. Watching those single tanks roll by, I was imagining the smell, the greasy diesel exhaust wafting over the crowd. Yuck.

Afterward, we attended a little birthday party for a friend who’s doing the urban-farm thing in a depopulated Detroit neighborhood. Alan remarked that we could have been sitting in a state forest campground, and he was correct.

In other words, it was a cheerful, fun Saturday. God knows we all needed it, after last week. Let’s hope the one we’re bearing down on is better.

As expected, things have continued to get worse in the last three days. Marines called in to Los Angeles. Croaky dismissing the entire CDC vaccine advisory committee. Sly Stone, dead.

I now believe WHICH BATHROOM DO CASTRATED REPUBLICANS USE? is the wrong message for the sign I’m making for the Saturday protest. Too flip for a dangerous time (and I’m a big believer in flip). I’m wondering whether STAND! FOR THE THINGS YOU KNOW ARE RIGHT (thanks, Sly) would be better, or the headline on a Michelle Goldberg column earlier this week: THIS IS WHAT AUTOCRACY LOOKS LIKE.

For now, my poster board is blank. Suggestions welcome.

It’s exhausting, being whipsawed between scorching anger, shame and sadness over what’s become of this country. How are we all doing, fellow travelers?

I’m feeling a big blank, myself. So let’s skip to some bloggage, eh?

A scorching, dead-on column from Hamilton Nolan, on Substack. I don’t think it’s paywalled, because I was able to read it, and I’m not a paying customer of Nolan, yet. This was so good, however, I might have to become one:

Yesterday, I went to a union rally in Manhattan in support of David Huerta, the SEIU California president who was arrested while protesting against ICE in Los Angeles. There were hundreds of SEIU members there—32BJ building workers, 1199 hospital workers, everyone. They all came out and showed their faces. Who is more brave, do you think? The immigrant woman who works cleaning up office buildings who is willing to come out to a protest and hold a sign supporting a man who was arrested for opposing injustice? Or the six-foot-tall weightlifting ICE agent with a gun and a badge and the force of law behind him who is so scared of anyone knowing who he is that he has America’s worst Congressmen filing bills to make it a crime to reveal his identity?

I laugh at the cowardly ICE agents. There’s a reason people are yelling at you, man. It’s because you’re being a fucking asshole. Do you know what would constitute bravery? Saying, “No, I am not going to carry out this grotesque and racist government assault on its citizens, because I know it is unjust.” That would be brave. Saying “no.” Putting on your bulletproof vest and breaking up families and shrugging and saying “just following orders” and hiding your face is the most weak-ass thing I can imagine. “I’d rather destroy the lives of entire families than have the fellas make fun of me. I’d rather tear mothers away from their children than get a regular job.” Go fuck yourself man. Because nobody cool is ever going to fuck you. That, I guarantee. Keep on dreaming.

Gift link to The Atlantic, a Tom Nichols piece on the military brass who are struck dumb at the outrage coming from the commander-in-chief. Commenting on you-know-who’s speech at Fort Bragg, he writes:

Trump, himself a convicted felon, doesn’t care about rules and laws, but active-duty military members are not allowed to attend political rallies in uniform. They are not allowed to express partisan views while on duty, or to show disrespect for American elected officials. Trump may not know these rules and regulations, but the officers who lead these men and women know them well. It is part of their oath, their credo, and their identity as officers to remain apart from such displays. Young soldiers will make mistakes. But if senior officers remain silent, what lesson will those young men and women take from what happened today?

The president cares nothing for the military, for its history, or for the men and women who serve the United States. They are, like everything else around him, only raw material: They either feed his narcissism, or they are useless. Those who love him, he claims as “his” military. But those who have laid down their life for their country are, as he so repugnantly put it, just suckers and losers, anonymous saps lying under cold headstones in places such as Arlington National Cemetery that clearly make Trump uncomfortable. Today, he showed that he has no compunction about turning every American soldier into a hooting partisan.

Trump’s supporters and his party will excuse his behavior at Fort Bragg the way they always have, the same way that indulgent parents shrug helplessly at their delinquent children. But senior officers of the United States military have an obligation to speak up and be leaders. Where is the Army chief of staff, General Randy George? Will he speak truth to the commander in chief and put a stop to the assault on the integrity of his troops? Where is the commander of the airborne troops, Lieutenant General Gregory Anderson, or even Colonel Chad Mixon, the base commander?

Check out the pic with it, too, shot from behind Fatass’ ample backside, showing the hooting soldiers who could end up killing their fellow citizens one day. No, I don’t think I’m being dramatic.

OK, then. Off to work and another day in this troubled land.

The fun stuff first? OK. So I was at the market Saturday morning, when my attention was caught by this:

It’s a dancing Cleveland postcard! As I drew near, the tout working with the postcard had it spin around, where there was a QR code, which I scanned, which took me to a web page, which suggested I follow Destination Cleveland on Instagram. And just like that, I am entered for a chance to win a magical weekend in Cleveland. (Second prize? TWO weekends in Cleveland, har har.) The package includes baseball tickets, dinner at a brewery, admission to the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame, etc. Honestly? I hope I win. I always liked Cleveland, which is in many ways Detroit Junior, a post-industrial city that’s an ethnic mix of blue-collar muscle and great music. But what I want to point out is that the city formerly known as the Mistake on the Lake is rebranding itself as “The Land,” which is hilarious. My sports-watching friends say this campaign is visible in all the Guardians and Cavaliers broadcasts. I was unaware until Saturday. Now I am not.

Odds of winning? Slim. The dancing postcards were also downtown yesterday.

OK, now for the less-fun stuff. Obviously, the National Guard stuff in California is a terrible and terrifying escalation, and if there are any MAGA chuds reading this, isn’t it interesting how quickly the stated aim of deporting criminals has moved to home-improvement stores where day laborers congregate, hoping for work? Do you ever wonder, if these crews are such a threat to national security, why the arrests never seem to include the owners of the landscaping and construction companies who do this hiring?

Anyway, I fear it’s going to get very ugly. Who’s going to a protest on Saturday? I’ll be at the one in Detroit, which is, coincidentally, at Clark Park, in the heart of Mexicantown. We may be under martial law by then, of course.

A little bloggage:

Here’s a curtain-raiser in the WSJ about the new dawn at the Kennedy Center, as it prepares to launch under Dear Leader. There’s now a new position there, director of faith-based programming, and they’re off to a gangbusters start:

[New director Richard] Grenell requested a June 1 public screening of “The King of Kings,” an animated feature film about the story of Jesus, as told by the character of Charles Dickens. Grenell ordered that the free event take place in the center’s biggest venue, a 2,500-seat concert hall, at a projected cost of $29,000 for staffing, gratis popcorn and other expenses.

The event featured a prayer wall where visitors could post their written prayers for the nation, and was sponsored by the Museum of the Bible and Moxie Pest Control, whose founder made an unsuccessful run at a Republican U.S. Senate seat in Utah last year.

When advance sign-ups for tickets indicated a full house, Kennedy Center leaders added a second screening, increasing the total cost of the event.

Employees, who said there is typical attrition for free events, said the actual turnout left the hall 55% full for the first screening and 58% full for the second.

Brought to you by Moxie Pest Control! Comedy gold.

Meanwhile, I can recommend a podcast that Eric Zorn’s Substack alerted me to, although it’s a year old. (Like Cleveland’s rebranding, I totally missed it.) “Chameleon: The Michigan Plot” covers the conspiracy to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. And while everyone here knows my biases in this case, and while I recognize and understand the ways a storyteller can subtly tilt a tale in sympathy of one side or another, I must come away from this with a grudging admission: This was likely entrapment, or at least a very obvious push in that direction by the multiple FBI informants who were trying a little too hard to get a bunch of extremely stoned halfwits off their butts and into a plan. Quarter-wits, I should say — rarely has the tragedy of left-behind, uneducated, unmotivated Michigan manhood been so vividly portrayed as in the hours of covert recordings (most of which were never played in court) unspooled here. I found myself almost physically recoiling from listening to these guys talk about pretty much anything. They had atrocious grammar and little vocabulary beyond f-bombs. No wonder one of them lived in the basement of a vacuum repair shop.

OK, then. It’s Sunday, and I have a feeling the week ahead will be…not good. Maybe the TACO principle will apply; it would save a lot of bloodshed. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

I was reading about the slapfight between twin drama queens Musk and Trump, and for some reason it dislodged a memory from childhood. I was never much of a dinosaur fanatic, but every kid is at least somewhat interested in them, and I vaguely recall a story about a triceratops and a T. rex, whose skeletons were found at the same excavation, entangled in such a way to suggest they died together, after an epic battle. The theory was, the triceratops gored the T. rex, but his horn got stuck so deep he couldn’t dislodge it, and the taller beast fell on the shorter one, pinning and dooming it. A very spicy end, and one that would be entirely fitting for Trump and Musk.

To abruptly switch the scenario to 1939, it would be like when the Wicked Witch of the West melts down in her castle, and her previously fearsome goons immediately proclaim “Hail to Dorothy! The wicked witch is dead!” That would be the rest of us, only who would we hail? The Tesla Takedown demonstrators, who dragged Elon back to his company boardrooms? The thousands of fast-food workers who helped fill Trump’s blood vessels with cholesterol? We’d have to make a list, a long one. We could work on it as we pour the champagne.

Not much to report today. I’m tired of you-know-who dominating every news update and many waking thoughts, so I’m shutting him out. The weekend awaits. Let’s enjoy it.

Hey, MAGA chuds! The reason your friends think you’re a racist piece of shit, even though you really voted for the border the babies the tax cuts blah blah blah? Is because you have fully gotten in bed with these despicable racist pieces of shit, and at this point who can tell the difference:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the Navy to take the rare step of renaming a ship, one that bears the name of a gay rights icon, documents and sources show.

Military.com reviewed a memorandum from the Office of the Secretary of the Navy — the official who holds the power to name Navy ships — that showed the sea service had come up with rollout plans for the renaming of the oiler ship USNS Harvey Milk.

But that’s not racist, you cry. Harvey Milk was gay, but he was white. Very true. So let’s take a look at the other vessels on the Navy’s recommended-for-renaming list:

The Harvey Milk is a John Lewis-class oiler, a group of ships that are to be named after prominent civil rights leaders and activists.

CBS reported Tuesday that the Navy is also considering renaming other John Lewis-class oilers including the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and USNS Harriet Tubman. Both Marshall and Ginsburg were Supreme Court justices, and Tubman was a Black abolitionist who helped slaves escape the South via the Underground Railroad.

Just lie back and enjoy your new identity.

And while we’re on the topic of current outrages, here’s what’s going on in academia. In Indiana, the governor fired the three elected trustees for Indiana University, and replaced them with the usual suspects:

Sage Steele is a former ESPN host and commentator who parted ways with the network in 2023 after she was reprimanded for a string of remarks about Barack Obama’s racial identity, mandating the COVID-19 vaccine and more. She sued ESPN for allegedly violating her First Amendment rights to free speech.

She has since started her own podcast and YouTube show “The Sage Steele Show.” She’s also been associated with the Trump campaign, at one point rumored to be vying for Trump’s press secretary role. She denied the rumors.

James Bopp Jr. is a conservative lawyer formerly part of Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita’s team. He was influential in late 20th century anti-abortion campaigns by the Republican party and has campaigned to remove barriers to corporate and union funding of political campaigns.

Brian Eagle is an attorney, wealth consultant, and partner at his firm Eagle and Fein. He is a current member of the Central Indiana Community Foundation’s Cornerstone Advisory Council, a philanthropic organization with the stated values of anti-racism, authentic relationships, inclusivity, leadership, effectiveness and sustainability.

So, an ESPN dipshit, a staffer for the worst AG in recent Hoosier history and some other dude.

And in Michigan, U-M president Santa Ono resigned the presidency after only three years, announcing he was the sole finalist for the presidency of the University of Florida. Days later, he asked that his name be stricken from a letter signed by other higher-ed leaders, objecting to “unprecedented government overreach” and “political interference” in higher education. He was obviously positioning himself for a red-state higher-ed job. But then? Oh noes! The hard right in Florida decided this dude was a little too squishy on DEI, and Tuesday the state board blocked his hiring. He’s now a man without a country. And a job.

Let this be a lesson to all of you: You cannot win with MAGA. Don’t even try.

It’s fucking Wednesday.

Any Redditors on here? I am, because in the enshittified web, it’s often the only place I can get a fairly simple question about cooking or styling or whatever answered. Because I don’t want to spend my whole life there, I’m not in many groups, but one I am in is Boomers Being Fools. For the comic relief.

Friends? Fellow boomers? We are not well-liked by the youngsters.

I believe I’ve said before what my answer is when I hear younger people accuse my generation of getting all the jobs and buying all the cheap houses and then pulling up the ladder behind them, etc. I tell them that I’m very sorry that happened, that I missed the generation-wide meeting where that was discussed and voted upon, and then, if I’m feeling puckish, I’ll mention that the guy who informed my newspaper that we were phasing out pensions and going to 401Ks was way older than me.

But I signed up for the 401K! Glad I did.

Anyway, Boomers Being Fools is a ridiculous Reddit group, with the tone of petulant children. I was on an airplane and there was this whiny boomer lady or I had to spend time in the hospital and the boomer in the semiprivate room turned on Fox News or a boomer cut me off in a parking lot, etc. It’s actually kind of fun to read, and realize how sensitive today’s young people are. I try to please and thank-you my way through life. I don’t recline my seat on airplanes. I return the cart to the cart corral. I try not to be a Karen, and now I have to try not to be a boomer. It’s no use, I fear.

So, we watched “Mountainhead” on HBO over the weekend. You might have heard about it — a feature film written and directed by the “Succession” showrunner, and dealing with the same subject matter, i.e. the ultrarich and the blithe path of destruction they leave in their wakes, as well as their utter lack of self-awareness. (True fact, not in the movie: Jeff Bezos’ $500 million yacht travels with another, $100 million yacht as a tender. It contains all the toys for the guests on the big yacht — the Jet Skis, etc. — as well as the helipad. It recently traveled to Cannes, where Lauren Sanchez, Bezos’ girlfriend, was to receive some sort of award for her “environmental advocacy.”)

It wasn’t a four-star movie, but I’d give it a solid three, three and a half. A lot of the surrounding publicity is about how fast it was written, filmed and produced, as so much of this world defies and outruns satire, but the punches did land. The outline: Four of these tech titans are having a boys’ weekend at the mountaintop home of one, the poorest of the lot as a mere $500 millionaire. In the background, the world outside is burning because the richest of the quartet, plainly an Elon stand-in, has released an updated version of his social network that allows for undetectable deepfakes that have plunged much of the globe into chaos. He doesn’t give a shit, of course. The one with the slightest trace of a conscience has an AI product that could help users tell fact from fake, but he won’t sell it because the longer he holds out and the world burns, the richer he gets. The fourth member of the group is the elder, has a cancer whose reality he hasn’t accepted because he’s convinced transhumanism is around the corner and he can be uploaded into immortality.

In other words, pretty much the kind of poker weekend you have with your friends, right?

Atlantic story about “Mountainhead,” in gift-link form.

Now our week begins. Supposed to actually get above 70 tomorrow, if you can believe that forecast.

I’ve read a lot about Alice Waters, the doyenne of California cuisine. I’d never discount her accomplishments, which are considerable. If you cook with any sort of adventure in your soul, if you can tell a shiitake mushroom from a morel, if you consider seasonality and sustainability when choosing produce and meat and fish, you have Alice Waters to thank, for leading a food revolution, starting in the 1970s and still continuing.

However. I also concede she’s a bit of a nut on this subject. Her Marie Antoinette attitudes about how poor people should spend their food dollars are daft and condescending, and I’m sorry, but I’m not forgoing leafy greens through a long Michigan winter, as she has suggested we do. (“There are so many turnips and potatoes to enjoy!”) But I don’t want to get into that now. I’m thinking of the passage in a particular story, in which the writer playfully asked her how she’d feel if she knew her daughter, then a teenager, was sneaking McDonald’s. He described Waters as being genuinely saddened and distressed by the very idea of her child consuming a Big Mac. That’s how awful McDonald’s is, or was. (Psst, Alice: It’s worse now.)

I know Waters is a committed lefty, but I can’t help but wonder what she’s thinking about the Washington crew these days. She and Croaky and Casey Means, his nominee for surgeon general, seem to have a lot in common. I thought of this on a dog walk after reading this excellent essay by Talia Lavin, about Means and her ideas about eating and health:

Casey Means, the Trump administration’s new nominee for Surgeon General of the United States, has a prescription for America. You can find it in her 2024 book, “Good Energy: The Surprising Connection Between Metabolism and Limitless Health.” In Means’ vision, “Good Energy” is a holistic approach to health, one predicated on the idea that “everything is connected.” The text strikes a tone that mirrors Means’ own career path, from training to be an ENT surgeon to life as a wellness influencer whose Instagram, @drcaseyskitchen, boasts nearly a million followers: there’s a sprinkling of grounded research that cites reputable medical journals, and a blizzard of plausible-sounding nonsense. (Means dropped out of her surgical residency and is not currently a licensed doctor.) Either way, what she offers is a kind of earthly paradise, one in which “you can enjoy balanced weight, a pain-free body, healthy skin, and a stable mood… the natural state of fertility that is your birthright.”

But like many other visions of paradise, to attain Means’ state of Good Energy, you have to obey the rules. And there are a lot of them.

According to her dubious statistics, only 6.8% of Americans are “optimizing energy production in their cells,” which is the prerequisite for the aforementioned earthly Eden of the body. For the other 93.2 percent, Means lays out a checklist of all that you must do to become one of the corporal elite. The section of her book on “Food” includes a daunting 23 items, starting with “I currently use a food journal or food tracker consistently to monitor what foods and beverages I’m consuming” and continues with eating three cups of leafy greens a day, plus avoiding foods with “refined seed oils,” all pastries, all sweetened drinks, all white flour, all artificial sweeteners, and—for a bonus—having the ability to not eat for longer than four hours without feeling “excess hunger or cravings.” There are further sections on “Toxins” (don’t store your food in plastic containers or eat high-mercury fish or use plastic water bottles or eat anything with artificial food dyes) and “Meal Timing and Habits.” Altogether, the material on food dwarfs the rest of the (very long) checklist, which includes sleep and the mind-body connection.

What it all amounts to is that Means’ “bold vision for health” in America involves an incredibly stressful, highly involved method of examining absolutely everything that goes into your body. It entails researching whatever you may consider eating, and avoiding oral contraceptives, antibiotics, and over-the-counter pain medications like ibuprofen, plus plastic water bottles and unfiltered water.

As I read on, I realized what Means’ affliction is, about a paragraph before Lavin revealed the same conclusion: Orthorexia nervosa. As the National Institutes of Health defines it (for now; I’m sure this web page is marked for death), orthorexia is an eating disorder “perhaps best summarized as an obsession with healthy eating with associated restrictive behaviors.”

I first read about it when I was clipping health news for Big Pharma, and it’s funny how so many MAGA people have some form of it, from Jordan Peterson and his crackbrain carnivore diet (beef, salt, water – and nothing else) to the various Paleo/caveman/low-carb regimes practiced in the manosphere to the organic vegan menus followed by women like Means.

Lavin, who grew up in a strictly kosher home, goes on to tie it to the dietary laws followed in her family:

I’m intimately familiar with systems of eating that involve a lot of label-gazing, head-scratching, and consideration of ingredients. The irony is that, even though I lived through two decades of religious dietary strictures of byzantine complexity, it never felt half as much like a story about sin as Casey Means’ book does. In Leviticus, God never promises a longer, healthier, pain-free life if you avoid breaking any of the dietary laws. He never promises anything, except avoiding becoming ritually unclean.

By contrast, the Instagram orthorexics explicitly declare that you’re broken unless you keep up with an ever-shifting codex of purity that, incidentally, involves quite a bit of discretionary spending. Sure, two sets of cutlery and kitchenware is a big outlay. But Means wants you to buy, at minimum, wearable activity trackers for your movement and sleep; a food journal; blue-light-blocking glasses; access to a sauna; charcoal and reverse-osmosis water filters; a glucometer; and a whole new set of pantry staples (she even specifies a seed-oil-free hummus brand.)

And of course, there’s cruelty involved. Fall away from the kosher path, and you’re a bad Jew. Eat Nacho Cheese Doritos? Then you richly deserve any illness that befalls you. All of this is backed up by ridiculous overstatement; note how Croaky talks about food dyes or processed foods or seed oils “poisoning” children. I will grant you, it’s probably not a great idea to drink a gallon of Red 40 every day, but most of us can survive our bad breakfast cereal or red licorice indulgences just fine. But if you consume these things after you’re told you shouldn’t? Then it’s so much easier to take away your Medicaid, you fat p.o.s. with no self-discipline.

In this, they are marching happily next to the more garden-variety cruelty practiced by the rest of the administration. And they feel fine about it, because they’re only trying to Make America Healthy Again. IS THAT SO WRONG?

I’m so mad at Croaky these days, I can’t even. And now they’ve cancelled the Moderna contract for a bird-flu vaccine.

There is joy in the land, however. Stephen Miller’s wife is leaving the White House to follow Elon Musk to wherever he’s going, and there’s a hot rumor the three of them were in a shall-we-say throuple type of relationship. Our breakfast conversation Thursday was not about eggs, coffee or what we each had planned for the day.

Me: “God, I can’t imagine being railed by both those guys. Literally a fate worse than death.”

Alan: “Nah, that’s not how it went. Elon railed her while Stephen watched, jerking off.”

It’s enough to make you want to splash Red 40 right in your eyes, isn’t it?

Have a great weekend, all.

Because misinformation is bad no matter who is spreading it, I note there’s a meme (as in a viral idea, not a picture with words on it) going around, that the reason Trump is going hard after Harvard is because his son Barron was somehow an unsuccessful applicant.

I’ve seen zero evidence this is true, and I doubt very much it is true. Everything I know about the family suggests Harvard is the last place Barron would apply. I’m sure his clingy mommy was thrilled he chose NYU, which is not a safety school for many people. Anyway, even if he had applied and been turned down, no one would know about it. I think the Harvard admissions office doesn’t comment on who gets in and who doesn’t, and I’d think even leaking that information would be a firing offense.

Facts matter.

Well, here we are, Wednesday. A short week, and already full of horrors. So let’s go bloggage-heavy today.

First, a decent Tom Friedman column about Israel, with a gift link:

I just spent a week in Israel and, while it may not look as if much has changed — the grinding Gaza war continues to grind — I felt something new there for the first time since Oct. 7, 2023. It is premature to call it a broad-based antiwar movement, which can happen only when all the Israeli hostages are returned. But I did see signals flashing that more Israelis, from the left to the center and to even parts of the right, are concluding that continuing this war is a disaster for Israel: morally, diplomatically or strategically.

You can say what you will about the Mustache of Justice, which I think was one of the names lefties bestowed upon Friedman during his world-is-flat era of interviewing Middle East cab drivers, but in general, I think he knows his shit about Israel, and if you’ve had your eyes averted in horror for a while, it’s a good catch-up.

Second, a truly fascinating story out of Hamtramck, the Detroit suburb. (I guess you’d call it that, although it’s completely surrounded by the city and is nowhere near an outer border.) Close observers of the news might remember that the mayor was nominated by Trump to be ambassador to Kuwait, as payment for being MAGA and likely tipping his city’s immigrant population in that direction. Hamtramck has gone from a Polish enclave to an immigrant melting pot-slash-hipster enclave to a culturally conservative, mostly Muslim melting pot, most of Yemeni and Bangladeshi descent. That aspect of the community is the subject of a long reporting project currently running in the Freep. Not to be a homer, but I found this story from The Detroit News far more interesting, and illustrative of the growing divide there, than a thousands-of-words chin-scratcher. It’s a report on last night’s city council meeting, in which the all-Muslim body voted to suspend the non-Muslim city manager, who himself had suspended the Muslim police chief, and hoo-boy these are some details:

During Tuesday’s regularly scheduled council meeting, (City Manager Max) Garbarino defended his decision to put the popular police chief — the city’s first of Yemeni descent — on suspension.

“When a police officer in any state, any county, any city across the whole nation is suspected of this, they are put on administrative leave. This is how this works,” he said.

Garbarino told The Detroit News he put the chief on paid suspension after receiving information from a Hamtramck police officer that Altaheri [the police chief] worked with an associate of President Donald Trump to bribe the president between $1 million to $5 million to pardon a federal prisoner who was convicted of financial crimes, among other allegations.

Oh really? The mayor and ambassador designate hasn’t taken the job yet, and presided over the meeting last night, huh. Also, my former editor watched the whole thing on YouTube and said the three-hour meeting was nuts, including several statements by residents in Arabic that were not translated.

Can I see the hands of those who believe Trump is incapable of bartering cash for pardons? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

An earlier Freep story on this mess, plus others, if you want a deeper dive.

As I said earlier, the week is already full of horrors. Croaky announced the government will no longer recommend Covid boosters for children, pregnant women or anyone other than we Elders. While I’m glad I can still get one, Kate, who works all winter in crowded clubs and bars, will have to either get a doctor’s note or pay out of pocket. This motherfucker. He’s another one I’ll ululate over when he checks out.

OK, time to get to work.