I had a few notes tucked into a draft post, but once again, the week has been overtaken by events – both breaking just this afternoon.

I’m thinking specifically of Roy Moore and Louis C.K., of course. The Moore story is the grossest, of course, for a number of reasons. Some are obvious, but to me, it was noting the age of consent in Alabama (16, of course). Because it’s not enough to point out that a 32-year-old man was trying to date a girl literally half his age and barely able to drive. You have to note that it could be, technically, legal.

Man, Alabama is a weird place:

Wendy Miller says that Moore approached her at the mall, where she would spend time with her mom, who worked at a photo booth there. Miller says this was in 1979, when she was 16.

She says that Moore’s face was familiar because she had first met him two years before, when she was dressed as an elf and working as a Santa’s helper at the mall. She says that Moore told her she looked pretty, and that two years later, he began asking her out on dates in the presence of her mother at the photo booth. She says she had a boyfriend at the time, and declined.

Her mother, Martha Brackett, says she refused to grant Moore permission to date her 16-year-old daughter.

“I’d say, ‘You’re too old for her . . . let’s not rob the cradle,’ ” Brackett recalls telling Moore.

Miller, who is now 54 and still lives in Alabama, says she was “flattered by the attention.”

“Now that I’ve gotten older,” she says, “the idea that a grown man would want to take out a teenager, that’s disgusting to me.”

It’s times like this I can almost thank God for Twitter, which gives such an immediate voice to the ones screaming in my head. Right now, I’m reading that some Breitbart guy is on the radio defending Moore because three of the four girls were “legal” and Moore himself was single at the time. Good to know!

Oh, and here’s the Alabama state auditor:

Moore began dating his wife Kayla around this time, according to Ziegler. “He dated her. He married her, and they’ve been married about 35 years. They’re blessed with a wonderful marriage and his wife Kayla is 14 years younger than Moore.”

Asked whether or not the report would upend Moore’s campaign, Ziegler predicted that Alabama voters would be angrier at the Washington Post for “desperately trying to get something negative” than Moore for his dalliances with teenage girls decades ago.

“He’s clean as a hound’s tooth,” Ziegler claimed, before relying on Scripture to defend Moore.

“Take the Bible. Zachariah and Elizabeth for instance. Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist,” Ziegler said choosing his words carefully before invoking Christ. “Also take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.”

Yes, that’s true, but as I recall from my catechism class, Joseph kept his hands to himself and they both died virgins. So there’s that.

And then there’s Louis C.K., whose thing was whipping it out. Whipping it out and polishing the bishop in front of women, while they…sat in frozen horror? Tried to leave the room? I imagine the reaction is part of the fun for these creeps.

Glad to see some nuance noted here:

For comedians, the professional environment is informal: profanity and raunch that would be far out of line in most workplaces are common, and personal foibles — the weirder the better — are routinely mined for material. But Louis C.K.’s behavior was abusive, the women said.

“I think the line gets crossed when you take all your clothes off and start masturbating,” Ms. Wolov said.

Yes, I’d say so.

Men! Are we going to have to go over the rules again? Apparently so. They’re almost identical to the ones for whether you should ever send a lady a dick pic, and they boil down to this: No. With a trusted partner who has expressly given consent to watching you do that? Sure. With everyone else? No.

OK, then. I have an evening thing tonight and then a housecleaning date with myself tomorrow. Best hop to it. Have a great weekend, all, and may no one appear before you in tighty whiteys unless you’ve asked them to.

I’m not in the best frame of mind these days and really shouldn’t do this to myself, but if you want to get depressed about this fucked-up country we live in, go to GoFundMe.com and search the term “shooting.”

I’ll wait.

What you learn there, and actually learn more quickly when we’re in a rare lull between mass shootings, as opposed to still mopping the blood from the floor from the last one, is that there are two kinds of victims of these things. There are the ones we carry out in body bags, and the ones left behind, and it’s these unfortunates we collect money for. That they survive is only the first step in a recovery that may not fully happen. They’re maimed, some seriously, left paraplegic or quadriplegic or in chronic pain forever. They have post-traumatic stress equal to that of any veteran of a war zone, because that’s what they are, with the added insult that they never enlisted in any army, never were trained for war, and simply had the misfortune of thinking they were going to a movie or to church or to the office Christmas party when they met up with our unique brand of national madness.

We always say life can change in an instant. But no one signed up for that one.

Anyway, dig down in those search results, past the big-goal campaigns, and find out how many of these people are simply…well, fucked seems to fit. Many have no or little or not-worth-shit health insurance to begin with, and are left with thousands in bills for treatment of all kinds, loss of income, whatever you need to make you whole when all you can do is lie on the couch and tremble.

So this story from Slate caught my eye today. It takes note of the infuriating Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, passed in 2005, which shields the firearms industry from any legal liability related to their products — thanks, Washington! The piece suggests a new tax on sellers and manufacturers of guns, to be pooled for the care and treatment of people whose lives are forever changed by them, the people at the center of all those GoFundMes:

Every state already has a crime victim compensation program, although not all victims are eligible and states impose strict caps on payouts. The average cap is $25,000, and most states impose lower limits on specific benefits like counseling. That $25,000 ceiling is much lower than the average jury would award to a victim of negligence, so these programs cannot plug the gap created by the PLCAA. Nor can civil suits against the shooters themselves, who are almost always too poor to pay jury awards. (By contrast, the American firearm industry made about $13.5 billion in revenue in 2015.)

Instead, states should consider the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act as a model. Congress passed the NCVIA in 1986 in response to a raft of lawsuits against vaccine companies. It created a compensation fund for individuals injured by vaccines and was funded by a tax on vaccine sales. A special court now hears claims and awards compensation to victims. In addition, the NCVIA allows victims to maintain their rights to sue manufacturers under traditional tort law.

Sounds good to me. Of course it’ll never happen. America!

And in other massacre-related news, there’s this, which I’m filing under Why I Hate the Internet:

About an hour’s drive from the carnage in Sutherland Springs, five women gathered after sundown outside an emergency room where victims of the morning shooting were still being brought in.

The women knew some of the victims, they said. Several sounded upset because authorities wouldn’t let them see any bodies. One wondered aloud if a victim who had been declared dead by officials that day actually still lived. “We have to get to the bottom of this,” one woman said.

“False flag,” said another, and then another, and another.

The story’s about the proliferation of this “false flag” nonsense so popular in Wingnuttia, the same lunacy that leads some people to harass the Sandy Hook parents who lost their children, and now, to stand outside a hospital and get upset because they’re not allowed into view bodies.

I’m really feeling sour at the moment, if you haven’t figured it out yet. Or as today’s Twitter meme goes:

But what is this week about? Looking back at the same week a year ago. Some good stuff to read on those lines:

Neil Steinberg:

Sometimes terrible occurrences can have good results. Something awful happens, but then you become aware of it, and change and things get better. And if there is one thing that is true about Donald Trump, as I’ve said before, he’s a symptom and not a cause. He is the same lying, bullying fraud he has always been, subtle as a brick, obvious as can be.

Nearly half of America voted for him anyway.

That is the terrible part. America elected him. He spread his goods—xenophobia, malice, deceit, delusion, ignorance—and 63 million of us signed on up.

The question now: is Trump our rock bottom? Or are there hells below this one?

From the Boston Globe, a stubborn and hardening rift in York, Pa.:

Tonya Thompson-Morgan has found herself blocking some of her old high school classmates and other Facebook friends. She struggles with the competing emotions of telling her 12-year-old daughter why it’s wrong to say she “hates” Trump, but also why it’s wrong for Trump to call the NFL players she respects “sons of bitches.” When she walked around the York Fair this summer and saw people handing out signs that read “Trump is still my president,” she felt turned away from the only community she’s ever known.

“When can we heal? When is there a healing process?” she says, taking a long pause to compose herself and wipe away tears.

“Unless I turn off the lights, go in my bedroom, shut the door, and turn off the TV, there is no way to escape,” Thompson-Morgan says. “I feel like we eat, sleep, and breathe Trump. Trump for breakfast, Trump for lunch, Trump for dinner, and Trump as a midnight snack.”

(Man, did I identify with that one.)

A final one, non-election related, on Harvey Weinstein’s repulsive behavior as he tried to stop the various investigations into his earlier repulsive behavior.

OK, then. Night is settling in and after a trip to the dog park, the day seems less grim. Time to wind it up with a little leftover soup. A good Wednesday to all, and let’s discuss the election results from around the country as they become available.

And as the weekend winds up here in November 2017 in the year of our Lord, 26 people are dead in yet another mass shooting, this one in a church; a U.S. senator is nursing five cracked ribs after an assault by a neighbor; and the second season of “Stranger Things” is a disappointment.

However, it serves as a pretty good distraction from the news of the day, so there’s that.

How was your weekend? Cool, then warm and rainy here. Miss Kitty came home for a couple days. We ate tacos. I went to Windsor. That was about it. It was a good weekend to be outer-directed, to turn one’s attention to, say, Hawaii:

Protesters in Hawaii mocked Donald Trump with signs that said “welcome to Kenya” as the President touched down on the first leg of his Asia-Pacific tour.

It’s good someone can keep a sense of humor at times like this. Probably helps to be in a place with such nice weather all the time. Has there been a president in anyone’s memory so often mocked like this? Nixon, maybe, but nothing like Trump. The few people I know who admit voting for him are quiet these days; the only rigorous defense I see anymore comes from the batshit cheering sections, and even there the air seems to be leaking from the balloon.

Or we can turn to London, last stop on earth before Adnan Khashoggi departed for Hell:

Adnan Khashoggi, the flamboyant Saudi arms trader who rose to spectacular wealth in the 1970s and 1980s while treating the world to displays of decadence breathtaking even by the standards of that era, died on Tuesday in London. He was 81.

…Mr. Khashoggi had several brushes with the law but was never convicted of a crime. He was involved in many of his era’s highest-profile scandals, including Iran-contra and the Marcos family’s effort to spirit money out of the Philippines.

I can never hear his name, even in my head, without hearing it in Robin Leach’s voice, as Ad-nan Hah-shogi was constantly popping into “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” and my old buddy Tarek did a killer Robin Leach impersonation.

Or we can look to home, where Eastern Standard time returned right on schedule, and now it’s dark as hell early, which makes a mass shooting and everything else going on this weekend probably something we just deserve.

So while we wait for news to come in on the latest mass killer, let’s try to have a good start to the week.

Today I will be sticking close to home. Those of you who are over 50 and have decent health insurance can probably figure out why I will be sticking close to home, so I don’t need to go into details, do I? The timing of this will be tricky, as I have a car in the shop and a very nice loaner. I need to turn it in before the rocket fuel kicks in, because those are some sweet leather seats. It’s funny, how we talk of these things in code. I was buying the rocket fuel earlier this week, and pushed it over the counter to the cashier along with a giant bottle of fruit-punch Gatorade.

“If this is what I think it’s for?” the clerk said. “You can’t use the red Gatorade.”

That wasn’t on my instructions, but it made perfect sense. I went back for a bottle of lemon-lime. At times like this, we need to take care of one another.

Today I am grateful for a) health insurance; and, to a far lesser extent, b) the idle hours to get all these tests done before it runs out. The new patient reports on this particular procedure, the one they hand you at checkout, include photos. I shudder to think.

So, for the huddle today, two stories of the Albion’s Seed variety. (I’m sure Coozledad will provide an amusing, obscene footnote.) First, via Reuters:

WAYNESBURG, Pa. (Reuters) – When Mike Sylvester entered a career training center earlier this year in southwestern Pennsylvania, he found more than one hundred federally funded courses covering everything from computer programming to nursing.

He settled instead on something familiar: a coal mining course.

”I think there is a coal comeback,” said the 33-year-old son of a miner.

Despite broad consensus about coal’s bleak future, a years-long effort to diversify the economy of this hard-hit region away from mining is stumbling, with Obama-era jobs retraining classes undersubscribed and future programs at risk under President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 budget.

Peak Coal passed a while ago. Natural gas killed it, not the Obama administration. This is the broad consensus the story references. Yet many in coal country continue to clap for Tinkerbell, setting up this conundrum:

What many experts call false hopes for a coal resurgence have mired economic development efforts here in a catch-22: Coal miners are resisting retraining without ready jobs from new industries, but new companies are unlikely to move here without a trained workforce. The stalled diversification push leaves some of the nation’s poorest areas with no clear path to prosperity.

Ta-da! Yes. You have to be willing to change to actually change, although admittedly, I share their cynicism about the “new industries” that might move to coal country once a “trained workforce” assembles itself at whatever critical mass they require. So I sympathize, to a point. But any coal miner who can’t see the forces that took away his or her livelihood — automation and fracking, mainly — simply isn’t paying close enough attention.

Which brings us to this laughter-through-tears piece beb pointed out late in yesterday’s thread. Remember “rolling coal,” i.e., modifying exhaust systems on big-ass trucks to blow thick clouds of black smoke into the atmosphere? Sometimes with amusing rear-window stickers warning of “Prius repellant?” Some states are passing laws to ban the practice. And yeah, well:

Entire dissertations could be written about rolling coal. Even more than Trump’s ascension, it seems to perfectly capture a moment in time, an inarticulate yawp of protest from angry white men. They feel disdained and overlooked and they will blow thick black smoke in your face until you pay attention.

There’s no faux nostalgia involved. Unlike with, say, hunting, there’s no tale of rugged rural self-sufficiency to draw on. This is not some sturdy heartland tradition with which meddlesome elites want to interfere.

Rolling coal is new; it just caught on a few years ago. It does not improve the performance of a truck. It has no practical application or pragmatic purpose of any kind. It is purely aggressive, a raw expression of defiance: I can pollute your air, for no reason, and no one can stop me.

Lots of writers love Hunter Thompson, and I’m one of them, at least before he became a human cartoon and general wrecking ball. “Hell’s Angels” is a fine piece of new journalism, and there’s a long passage in there about the Angels, and the rest of California biker culture, having their roots in American Appalachian/Okie/poor-white culture. I read it when I was 16 or so, and it opened my eyes to class issues as a companion to racial ones. Their flag is the Gadsden. Their motto: “It’s a free country,” sometimes spoken through a belch while crushing a beer can against one’s forehead.

Anyway, the Vox piece is pretty good, and I recommend it.

I keep coming back to something I said often when the auto industry was collapsing, southeast Michigan was contracting and workers everywhere were on the park bench, so to speak: What are we going to do with these people? Retraining was part of the answer. But when retraining itself is resisted, then what do you do?

OK, shower time, then my final solid food for a while, and a few hours after that? Rocket fuel!

Final thing I wanted to share: This photo.

Last Saturday night was a monthly dance-party pop-up my younger friends enjoy, so I tagged along this month, mainly because of the venue, an obscure bar that sits almost literally in the shadow of the Marathon refinery in southwest Detroit. From the outside, it looks like a somewhat more upscale version of the thousands of workingmen’s bars all over Detroit’s less-glamorous districts, shot-and-a-beer places where you can prepare for, or wind down from, your shift. But step inside, and it’s the most neon-y neon lounge you ever saw.

“Oh my god, it’s ‘Miami Vice,'” I said as I showed my ID to the doorman.

“I was gonna say ‘Scarface,’ but yeah,” he replied.

Every surface that didn’t have a neon fixture had a mirror, making photography a little tricky. This welcome-to-hell glow was hard to expose for:

But it was so much fun. I saw one of my old Wayne State students. “I always knew you were a badass,” he said. Kids these days — gotta love ’em.

Well, what a couple of days, eh? At the end of it, I only know one thing for sure: “Putin’s niece” is a real dime, and George Papadopoulos was desperately hoping for that London meeting, so they could, y’know, have a drink, get to know each other better. I’m sure they’d exchanged pictures. Hers emphasized her Slavic cheekbones, his a certain Hellenic moodiness.

And I don’t have much to offer beyond that. There are hundreds of thousands of words of analysis, and I’ve only gotten through a few thousand. Plus, this story has now been overtaken by a terror attack in New York.

Still, is this the beginning of the end? Or the end of the beginning? Odds on a) firing Mueller; and b) pardons for convicted aides? Anyone?

I woke up today with a sore throat, which sent me into a reflexive panic for a moment – how will I do all the things I have to do while operating at .75 power? – before I remembered that I can call in sick, so to speak, and I did. Still applied for three jobs, two of which I could do in my sleep. I won’t get any of them, because this is a run of bad luck I’m just going to have to get through. And it sucks.

But a few the celebrity world: Stop calling Kevin Spacey a pedophile. He is — or apparently is, if recent revelations are to be believed — and ephebophile. The difference is the one between pre- and post-pubescent, but still underage, children. Pedos go for kids, ephebes for young teens. Both are terribly damaging in their unique way. Sexuality is a continuum, and ephebophiles no doubt see themselves as wise father/older brother figures, initiating the young into the world of adulthood. But it’s revolting just the same. Spacey’s going to have a long climb back.

It’s raining creeps. Still.

And Halloween is a wrap. I’m getting weary of the days-long candy thing. I give out candy on Halloween, to anyone who rings the doorbell, until it’s gone. I decline to participate in special trick-or-treat carve-outs — the special just-for-the-neighborhood hours, the business-district things, all of it. Halloween is one day, and it’s a good day, but that’s all it is. Or used to be. Adults ruin everything.

Back to nursing the ol’ throat.

Guys, I know I’ve been scarce around here, and for the life of me, I can’t quite say why. Alan was off last week, and we did lots of staycation-y things, and it just didn’t work out.

Also, I started reading a Nabokov novel – “Ada.” Seemed a wiser use of my time.

So I don’t have a lot of bloggage today, but who needs it on Indictment Day? That’s all anyone will want to talk about, so talk. I’ll be back with a fuller plate later on.

Wednesday is upon us, and I’m still mulling over last night’s entertainment — with Alan off this week (pulling the boat, putting storms in the doors, that sort of thing), we’re doing weeknight thing we never get to do otherwise. Staycation fun, peeps! Monday night was open-mic comedy night at Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, at which we were the only white folks and I heard more N-bombs than in a month of streaming hip-hop. And last night we saw “The Florida Project,” a spectacular micro-budget film about poverty in the Sunshine State. I can recommend it highly, for standout performances and an almost perfect mastery of tone in a story that’s essentially plot-free but still has a lot to say.

What plot there is revolves around Moonee, a six-year-old who lives with her mother Hallee in a dive-y motel near Disney World. Hallee has the emotional maturity of maybe a seven-year-old, so they get along like aces. Moonee is charming and fearless, and her mother is the same way, only in the adult you can see the sociopathy that lies beneath. (I don’t recommend this to Jeff, unless he can fit it in during work hours.) As a journalist, all I could think about were the stories I and my colleagues have been writing for years, calculating how far behind Moonee must be in school by now (even as a first-grader, yes), her behavioral deficits, even the toll her diet – which seems to consist solely of waffles, jelly sandwiches on day-old bread from the food bank, soda and pizza – is taking on her baby teeth. The film takes place over part of a summer, when Moonee and a couple of friends run wild through the motel, and others like it nearby, having charming kid adventures, while her mom tries to avoid work but still make the weekly rent on the $38/night room they share.

Things happen, expected things. But the story still feels like a series of snapshots laid in a row. Both thrilling to watch and deeply unsettling. Find it at an arthouse near you.

I see somehow the comment thread on the last post skated off on a tangent about wind turbines. Michigan is starting to add them here and there, primarily in the Thumb, but the ones we see most often are on the Canadian side of Lake St. Clair, and by “see” I mean that driving home on a dark night when it’s reasonably clear, you can see their red lights blinking way over the water.

A more vivid experience was a few years ago, when we drove to Stratford for a little theatuh, and took the Port Huron route, which is less freeway and more country road than you get by crossing in Detroit. It was a foggy day, and these behemoths were obscured until we were almost upon them, and they’d loom up out of the mist, turning slowly. Very dramatic, like something in a fairy tale. It was almost enough to distract from the unexpected (for an American, and especially a Michigander) pleasure of driving on a well-maintained, non-potholed road.

Canada. They get the job done.

I have yet to see a driverless car on the roads around here, although truth be told, you wouldn’t know one to see it – they still have people sitting in the driver’s seat. There’s a robot bus running around north campus at U-M in Ann Arbor, not sure of the human-override factor on that one, although my guess is, they have one. The technology isn’t advanced enough yet, but it’s getting there, and fast. David Leonhardt wrote a column about testing a driverless Volvo that got to the heart of the adoption problem, I think:

I expect that we will agonize about using them, out of both legitimate caution and irrational fear. Any driverless crashes will be sensationalized, as has already happened, while we ignore tens of thousands of deaths from human crashes. But I still expect that driving will be revolutionized sooner than many people now understand. …Those researchers at Penn and Chicago also studied the circumstances in which people get comfortable with computer control, and found a theme: When the choice isn’t all or nothing — when people have “even a slight amount” of control — they are more open to automation.

That’s where driving is headed. The shift will be gradual, not sudden, as Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, told me. Cars will handle many tasks, while a human driver will have override power. The combination won’t be perfect, but it can be much better than the status quo.

I suspect he’s right. What he’s describing sounds like the cake-mix problem I read about somewhere. Duncan Hines is fully capable of producing a just-add-water cake mix, but they don’t, because customers prefer to add an egg and half a cup of oil. It makes them feel like they’re baking, not just phoning it in.

It’s funny. I know people who are terrified to fly for fear of crashing, but think nothing of driving every day, when statistically one is leagues safer than the other. But the feeling of control is powerful, no doubt.

I was charmed by the WashPost’s account of David Letterman’s Twain award ceremony. Perhaps you too.

What ugly times these are. My peaceful Saturday breakfast, that I mentioned here a few days ago? I sat there at the counter, scrolling Twitter, nearly vibrating with revulsion. This phone-calls-to-soldiers’-families business has about broken me. Talk about taking a presidential duty that isn’t…easy, exactly, but certainly not difficult to pull off, and then screwing it up this badly, is simply dreadful.

All it requires — all it requires — is a competent staff and a man in the Oval who is capable of saying a few standard statements, either on the phone or in a letter. Deepest condolences, a nation grieves, be comforted in your time of sorrow knowing his death had greater meaning, etc. etc. A normal person with standard-issue empathy could do this in an hour. Again, it’s not easy, but it’s expected.

And even this gang that can’t find their asses with both hands and a map couldn’t pull it off. It’s almost literally sickening.

Well, the families are getting their letters. They’re in the mail. Overnight mail, in fact.

And that was just the beginning of the weekend’s mudslide of news, followed by Bill O’Reilly paying a colleague $32 MILLION DOLLARS because he didn’t do anything wrong like sexually harass her, of course. Then I read this almost witlessly bad column by Ken Stern, a former NPR executive, about the how the “liberal media” needs to pay more attention to red America, because apparently the nine million stories doing just that since the election need to be bumped to nine million and one. Did I say witlessly bad? You tell me:

Spurred by a fear that red and blue America were drifting irrevocably apart, I decided to venture out from my overwhelmingly Democratic neighborhood and engage Republicans where they live, work and pray. For an entire year, I embedded myself with the other side, standing in pit row at a NASCAR race, hanging out at Tea Party meetings and sitting in on Steve Bannon’s radio show. I found an America far different from the one depicted in the press and imagined by presidents (“cling to guns or religion”) and presidential candidates (“basket of deplorables”) alike. …It was all inspiring, but it left me with a very different impression of a community that was previously known to me only through Jerry Falwell and the movie “Footloose.”

(Nance, you’re thinking. Could it be this gentleman has a book to sell? Why yes, yes he does! It drops tomorrow!)

Ken Stern was a money guy at NPR, so I assume he didn’t get into the newsrooms much, or else he might not have written a sentence as stupid as the one about Jerry Falwell and “Footloose.” Jesus on a damn cracker, is there any news organization that does more reporting in RealAmerica ™ than NPR? From Indian reservations in the Dakotas to cattle ranches in Texas (hey, Wade Goodwin!), literally sea to shining sea, NPR has sent its intrepid reporters. Maybe the C-suite guys think it’s all about 30-year-old Kevin Bacon movies, but not the people with boots on the ground.

But the problem is, I am plumb out of patience with anyone who can defend this shitshow anymore. I’m no longer interested in starting a dialogue, because I think it…well, it wouldn’t go well. As one of you said, you have to go with your morals, and I’ve made my choice.

Ah, well. We got over to Ann Arbor Saturday night. One of Kate’s classes had a show as part of Edgefest, an avant-garde jazz festival. Here’s the score for their piece:

Kate played her electric bass, but also a bucket, metal pie plate and a pair of rocks. That’s avant-garde jazz for you. It was cool, though.

And with Monday nearly here, the grind begins anew. Keep your nose clean.

One of the smarter pieces of journalism I recall in recent years — maybe “This American Life,” but can’t be sure — was about economic development. Working thesis: There’s no such thing. True economic development requires investment, real investment, in infrastructure, in education, in entrepreneurial ideas, which crash as often as they don’t. No one likes investment anymore, at least not public investment, because that = taxes, and OMG can’t have those.

So what we call economic development is really just a bunch of states and cities trying to lure businesses away from one place to another, like prostitutes cutting the price until the customer settles on one. The Sun Belt’s economic development came at the expense of the Rust Belt, to use only the most obvious example.

Which brings us to Amazon’s search for a second headquarters. Perhaps your city is capering before the retailer of the future, because it seems half the cities in the country are. Detroit certainly is. The bids were due yesterday, I believe. Ours was accompanied by a video. An excellent video, with maybe some confusing shots here and there. Go ahead, spend three minutes on it. It’s very inspiring.

Detroit should really do some economic development in making cool bid videos. The one when Detroit was angling for the X Games is even better. Didn’t get the X Games; Austin won that one. They had a good video, too. But Detroit filmmakers could certainly improve on Washington D.C.’s, or Danbury’s, or Dallas’, or even Philadelphia’s. (Watching these in succession, I’m wondering how long before the swooping drone shot becomes as cliché as walking-in-slo-mo-away-from-the-explosion.)

I doubt we’ll get the Amazon headquarters, because they’re not going to be looking for a nice video. Like the customer looking over the goods on an Amazon dynamic-pricing page, they’re going to want the best price. So all that yammering about restaurants and diversity and prose poetry is going to come down to: How much public money are you willing to cough up?

Meanwhile, back in Realityville, I need to get back to the job hunt. But I wanted to point this out for people who didn’t follow the links on one of Cooze’s comments yesterday. The story is about contenders to be president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. Final paragraph:

J.D. Vance, the best-selling author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” a memoir about his upbringing in Appalachia, was also floated early on in the process as a possible high-profile, younger recruit. He has met in recent months with Stephen Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist who has since returned to his post running Breitbart News, and Bannon has privately expressed a desire to install an ally at the conservative institution.

So much for the moderate populist, the thinker, the son of the soil ready to lead. The hell with that guy, and I’m sorry I bought his stupid book for my brother last Christmas. Is Middletown, Ohio even Appalachia? I don’t think so.

Miscellanea: Making media literacy great again, from Columbia Journalism Review:

More than 10,000 students have taken Stony Brook’s news literacy course, which is constantly updated to help students identify the latest ways bogus news and information are created. For instance, there are dozens of websites that let anyone easily produce counterfeit social media posts, then retweet them, post them on Facebook, or embed them in a news story. But fake tweets seem positively quaint compared to an even newer threat: Using artificial intelligence to make videos of people saying things they didn’t say. Researchers recently made a video of Barack Obama speaking very earnestly about his priorities for the waning days of his administration.

“The single most important thing I can do now,” Obama said, according to the doctored audio track, “is to play golf.”

When Bridge began its Michigan Divided project, one of the participants, a woman about my age, said she “didn’t give a rat’s ass” about the Access Hollywood tape, because she “got hit on all the time in my job in the corporate world.” Meet just one personification of why hazing continues, why sexual harassment continues, why corporal punishment of children continues: I lived through it, and so can you. Here’s another: I was assaulted, but you were just harassed. Stop cheapening my experience. Ahem:

Remember the schoolyard chant, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me?” Words simply aren’t the same as actions. They’re not treated the same — nor should they be — under the law. And their ultimate effects are vastly different.

There’s a spectrum of victimization. At one end is an unwanted advance or comment, and at the other is rape and death. The problem with #MeToo is that it’s almost encouraging people to celebrate that victimization, regardless of where on the spectrum it falls.

I don’t think any woman who #MeToo’d this week is celebrating anything, but you can’t tell that to some people.

The weekend is nearly here. Enjoy yours.

It wasn’t a great day. Nothing heinous, just the usual job-related crisis of confidence, complicated by one story after another coming out of Washington. I actually found myself feeling vaguely nauseous, but that might have been the spicy peanut stew I ate the night before. Still. As Josh Marshall has said, he’s poison.

So maybe it’s him after all.

A friend just messaged me: You could read for hours about Sessions, dead troops, Manafort, etc. and still not be caught up on today. I’d add: And if you’re trying to find a job at the same time, you could drive yourself crazy.

But now we have a pizza and a bottle of wine, and there are few things that can’t be made better with that.

Another improvement: Around 5 I closed the laptop and took Wendy to the dog park in Detroit. Unlike the one in Grosse Pointe, the admission to which is regulated more strictly than Studio 54, the one in Detroit is open to all. Not only that, people come with six-packs and marijuana and have known each other for years. Good-old-daysing is rampant in Detroit, and these folks reminisce about the time before the park was even fenced in. “You needed a better-behaved dog then,” one guy said. Well, whatever — it was fun to be out on a fine day and not talking about the president. Wendy ran and played, and there was an obese pit bull named Darla. Plus two German shepherds, a boxer and a couple of indeterminate mutts. A happy crew. Dog parks are great; why did it take so long to think of them?

So, then. I subscribe to the Poetry Foundation’s daily email, which is often the most welcome one of the day. Here is the text of “Enough Music” by Dorianne Laux, but I think of it as The Ballad of the Long-Term Couple:

Sometimes, when we’re on a long drive,
and we’ve talked enough and listened
to enough music and stopped twice,
once to eat, once to see the view,
we fall into this rhythm of silence.
It swings back and forth between us
like a rope over a lake.
Maybe it’s what we don’t say
that saves us.

Bloggage? Sure:

Yet another Facebook page created by the Russians, this one called Heart of Texas. Secessionist, of course, and very popular, with 250,000 followers at its peak. Content? Do you even need to ask?

Posts began to follow a perceptibly hard-right course, stressing Texas’s status as a “Christian state,” or touting the Second Amendment as a “symbol of freedom … so we would forever be free from any tyranny.” Some of the page’s contributors talked about the need to “keep Texas Texan,” whatever that meant. There was also a generous dollop of conspiracy theory. There were posts about the allegedly unnatural death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the supposed federal invasion orders behind the Jade Helm military exercise. Fake Founding Father quotes mingled with anti-Muslim screeds and paeans to Sam Houston. And the number of followers steadily crept into the hundreds of thousands.

Though the site’s authors understood their audience well, there was something off about their writing. The page’s “About” section proclaimed that “Texas’s the land protected by Lord [sic].” Grammatical and spelling glitches were everywhere: “In Love With Texas Shape,” “State Fair of Texas – Has You Already Visited?,” “Always Be Ready for a Texas Size,” “No Hypoclintos in the God Blessed Texas.” (Or take this caption for a photo of country music star George Strait: “Life is not breaths you take, but the moments that take your breth [sic] away.”) Yet the typos never seemed to raise any suspicions in readers’ minds.

The #MeToo posts just keep on coming. Here’s one from Mo Ryan, the Chicago Tribune Variety TV writer.

Back to the grind. Tomorrow, I think I’ll clean two closets.