In this fraught election season, I’ve learned to listen to my spouse.

When I hear him mutter “oh for FUCK’s sake,” I know he’s glanced at his phone to read another push notification. Today it was what can legitimately be called a bombshell, i.e., Haley Stevens, the loser in Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, endorsing the Republican Mike Rogers, after spending a couple of days tiffing with the man who beat her, Abdul El-Sayed.

The kids have an expression: Main-character syndrome, to describe a person who can never see a situation without seeking to make it all about them. Haley Stevens has a terminal case. In this case, I think she’s being guided by her fiancé, a lawyer and strongly pro-Israel activist, who no doubt helped guide millions in AIPAC money to her campaigns. But this is only speculation.

Speculation based on hints. Like this, from Politico over the weekend:

“Jason is vaporizing Haley’s future so that he can be a main character in this moment and it is sad to watch her participate in that,” Caitlin Legacki said of Stevens’ fiancé Jason Turkish in a social media thread, saying that during the primary he was “an extraordinarily toxic presence, was verbally abusive to staff and had some of the worst political instincts I’ve ever witnessed.”

So he has main-character syndrome, too.

Also, this, a Facebook post by Ray Wert, the husband of Mallory McMorrow, who was the third candidate in the primary and who dropped out before the election:

I’ve known Haley Stevens for a long time. Until now, she has always had staff to protect her, prop her up, and keep her safe from her own irrational behavior. What we’re seeing now? This is just raw, unfiltered Haley.

The Haley who flip-flops and goes from thought to thought without rhyme or reason. The Haley that calls you at 3 AM to yell at you, and then calls you back at 5 AM oblivious to the fact that she even spoke with you at 3 AM. The Haley who bends to the last and loudest voice that tells her something.

More often than not that last voice is now her fiancé. And as you can see by what one of her former staff people posted earlier here on X, that appears to potentially be a really troubling relationship.

Ultimately, I don’t think it will matter. About 1.4 million votes have already been cast statewide, and given the circus this has caused, I doubt there will be a stampede to clerk’s offices to spoil and recast ballots. I think, ultimately, she will be seen for what she is — a turncoat. But I don’t know. No one knows. We won’t know for a few more days.

And man, am I tired. So tired. Between Halloween and current events, I could use a long vacation.

On Sunday, I went to an open house for a new funeral parlor opening in Detroit, run by Lynch & Sons. No fearsome diagnosis at this end, I should add. One of the Lynches is a friend, and I went to be supportive. This beauty was parked out front:

A 1939 Packard, duplicate of the hearse driven by the patriarch of the family, the original Lynch, who sent his family into funeral service. One of his sons told me he and his brother are the only ones who know how to drive it.

“Three on the tree?” I asked. Yes, he replied, and I said, “I can drive it.”

I can. I can drive a three on the tree, a four on the floor, and any other pattern you want to throw in. The paddle shifters in my Subaru are a mystery to me, but I’ve never used them. On Saturday I was passed by a Waymo driverless taxi. Can’t drive that. Wouldn’t want to, either. I bet the steering on that hearse is a workout, though.

Oh my, am I tired. This may be the last update until after the election, although you never know. Let’s all cross our fingers and hope for deliverance. Onward!

I’m going to tell a story from deep in my memories, which means I’ll probably get some details wrong. I already wrote one version, checked with a source and learned he recalled the whole thing differently, so we’re in grandma’s-reminiscences territory, but here goes:

One year in Fort Wayne, a woman stepped up to run for city council, Deirdre “Dede” Hall, a member of the popular Hall restaurant family. She had money, and an issue, removing the hated (by her) Old Mill Road roundabout, which she thought had been shoved down the Old Mill Road community’s throat, with my old buddy Mark the Shark directing the shoving. Old Mill Road is lined with elegant homes and is considered one of the Good Streets in town. Both Mark and Dede lived on it, not coincidentally. He favored the roundabout as a traffic-calming structure, and she didn’t, because once you’ve arrived on Old Mill Road, you don’t want anything to change.

So she planted her yard signs, which were red and green.

And then, late in the filing period, another challenger emerged. David Hall, a local crackpot, the kind of guy inevitably described as a gadfly, which is journalese for crackpot. What’s more, he ran as a Republican, same as Dede. And what’s even more, his yard signs, which were mostly homemade and few in number, used not only her red and green colors, but a similar color-block graphic design. He’d clearly been put up for the job, and he was, I think by another local crackpot.

This sent Dede into orbit. She kicked up a huge fuss, implying that using someone else’s “campaign colors” was just this short of identity theft, and what’s more, their common last name and identical initials would confuse voters and cost her votes. I don’t remember the extent of the coverage, but it got at least some. The election came, and David Hall got a few votes, but not enough that, had Dede gotten them instead, would have swung the race in her favor.

The roundabout remains.

This was, at the local level, a classic example of what the Watergate defendant Donald Segretti called ratfucking, and a more polite person would call dirty tricks or maybe even gamesmanship.

I wandered down this memory lane after reading the New York Times story about the ratfucking effort to recruit another Dan Sullivan to run against Mary Peltola, for the U.S. Senate seat from Alaska. The incumbent is also named Dan Sullivan, of course, and the plan was — is — to dilute the vote for the Republican and allow Peltola, a Democrat, to squeak into the Senate.

Big fucking deal. Or rather, big ratfucking deal. I have zero doubt that the Republicans would do the same, have done worse, in fact, in any number of elections. If you can’t run with the big dogs, don’t get off the porch. Even the Times says it’s legal:

Ballot-stacking tactics are common in politics and generally considered legal — and have been employed by both parties in Alaska. But this operation, which has not been reported before, reveals the lengths to which Democrats went to seek advantage in a Senate race that could determine control of the chamber.

“Alaskan voters need to know,” said Elisa Rios, Ms. Peltola’s former campaign manager and longtime aide, who was fired amid a staff shake-up in August, and agreed to a series of interviews with The Times since then. “There was a lot of speculation, and voters should get the full picture when making their decisions.”

Dimed out by her own staffer. I ask you, who’s the real rat here?

Of course, the Trump team has taken that sin and quintupled it:

The Justice Department, meanwhile, filed a lawsuit in federal court at President Trump’s behest last week seeking to block certification of the election results if votes for the other Mr. Sullivan cost Senator Sullivan the win.

The obvious question: How could you tell which voters cast a ballot for the wrong Sullivan? But that’s the kind of legal team playing in the once-proud Justice Department.

OK, then. One more Monday before Election Day. I hope I live through my 14-hour shift. Fingers crossed, as this one is for all the marbles. Happy Halloween, and have a great spooky weekend.

This is why we need data centers, apparently:

Late last year, Marissa Mayer was struggling with what felt like an impossible task.

Her daughter Marielle was turning 10, and Marielle’s teacher wanted three bullet points summarizing what made her special. Mayer — the former chief executive of Yahoo and a pioneer at Google, where she was the first female engineer — likes cracking a hard problem. But she felt overwhelmed by the range and complexity of potential answers.

So Mayer asked her personal A.I. assistant, Dazzle. Within a few seconds, Dazzle delivered an answer.

“It came back and was like, your daughter is empathetic, creative and an animal lover,” Mayer said. She thought it was perfect.

Imagine that. Imagine being a big Silicon Valley macher looking to promote your new “AI assistant,” and coming up with that story to tell the New York Times. With no shame whatsoever. It is so difficult for you to think not of three well-developed paragraphs about your daughter, but bullet points, and find it so overwhelming that you delegate it to your pet clanker, who comes up with three descriptors so bland and anodyne that they could have come out of a committee in one of Google’s boardrooms.

Poor little Marielle. I’m sure she wants for nothing other than a mother, one who doesn’t see her as ol’ what’s-her-name, occasionally glimpsed passing through the rooms of her lavish San Francisco home.

I saw one reaction to this last night, that of a normal person, who said that if he had done that, he’d have taken the secret to his grave.

The rest of the story is equally horrifying, touting Dazzle as “an AI wife,” i.e. “an emotional labor bot that can plan a birthday party and knows when it’s Crazy Socks Day or Crazy Hat Day at the kids’ school, because it has photos of the fliers that came home crumpled in a backpack.”

I have a better idea. Let’s not have Crazy Socks Day. Or Crazy Hat Day. Or let the kids, or the husband, keep track of these vital observances.

And these freaks are the ones leading us into the future, demanding our natural resources, breaking our power grid, promising a cure for cancer. Maybe, one of these days. In the meantime, they’ll tell the world’s worst mother about her daughter.

P.S. What 10-year-old isn’t an animal lover, by the way? Given that this AI assistant has access to all your photos, etc., it may be basing this conclusion on a few pix of Marielle with a puppy.

Feh. Enough. We’re less than a week away from you-know-what, and one day past elections in Israel. Both events will/have reveal(ed)…something. I’ll leave that to the experts. But if you’re daring to think past Tuesday, I found this dispassionate take on what, exactly, the anticipated blue wave can actually accomplish once they dry off and get sworn in, pretty informative. You campaign in poetry, govern in prose, the old saying goes. Here’s the prose: We lose Alito, but likely pick up a similarly unhinged 40-year-old conservative. Impeachment yes, maybe multiple impeachments yes, removal no. And so on. Definitely worth a read.

As many of you know, all comments here are moderated, but once you pass the gate, you’re in for good. A typo in your screen name or email will send you back to moderation. Today was a new one: An AI-written spam comment in the moderation bin, which referenced elements in the previous post, struck just the right tone, and…plugged an AI product. The clankers are coming for all of us.

Happy Wednesday.

Our neighborhood has two Halloweens. I don’t entirely approve. When it started, there was lots of talk about keeping the local kids “safe” by having a separate Halloween, which led me to start calling it racist Halloween because there was absolutely nothing unsafe about the local Halloween before someone decided we needed two. There were a noticeable number of Halloween tourists, i.e., the kids who are brought in from nearby neighborhoods. I do not care if you don’t live nearby. Some of these kids live on blocks with one or two occupied houses, and so what if they want to come to a place where there’s a porch light on at every one? If that makes people feel unsafe, I’m sorry for you.

So for the first year or so, we declined to participate. Come on Halloween, kids, and we’ll give you everything you want, but not before. However, my heart softened over the years, seeing so many of our neighbors’ kids out, so now I have a giant bowl of chocolate by the front door and am waiting for the first sign of them.

Some of these kids will double dip, returning on Halloween, and I don’t care about that, either. On Halloween we are asked only to listen to some spooky music, dress up if we’re so inclined and enjoy fun-size Snickers bars. Why complicate it with resentment?

Fifteen minutes to go.

I had to return a book to the library today, and I did it on the bike, because the weather is perfect. My route took me through the municipal building parking lot, where early voting is going on. A pair of bored volunteers for a school-board candidate were passing out flyers, and I stopped to chat. They said the turnout looks, anecdotally, to be pretty heavy so far. That may or may not mean anything, of course, but I’m choosing to see it as a good sign. The president is up in Port Huron, addressing a crowd in his usual rambling, demented fashion. Checking the socials, it appears he just told the crowd that Nicki Minaj, who is in attendance, has “one hell of a beautiful ass.” Ladies and gentlemen, the leader of the free world.

I wonder if Nicki looked around and asked herself what she’s doing in the middle of this crowd of old white people, because that’s what I’m seeing — maybe 25 pairs of working ovaries in the whole place. The president is shaping up to be box-office poison for the candidates he’s supporting, so much so that the conservative editorial-page editor of the Detroit News advised Mike Rogers, running against Abdul El-Sayed for the U.S. Senate seat here, to “call in sick.”

I hope Mike Rogers wakes up this morning with the 24-hour flu. Or maybe mild food poisoning from eating a bad piece of shrimp at a campaign event Saturday night.

I don’t wish the Republican U.S. Senate candidate ill. In fact, The Detroit News endorsed Rogers, and I believe it is vital to the well-being of Michigan and the nation that he prevail over Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. That’s why I would like to keep him off the stage today when President Donald Trump arrives for a pre-election rally in Port Huron.

Tough shit, Republicans. You bought the ticket, now take the ride.

:::pause for 90 minutes of candy distribution:::

Halloween was a success. Most surprising costume: Walter White, in yellow hazmat suit, baldy cap, drawn-on goatee and respirator. “Walter White,” I commented. “I gotta say, I’m surprised.”

“We’re good parents, I promise!” the mother called from the sidewalk. “He hasn’t seen it.”

OK then, time to tackle the work week. Short time until the election.

I see you guys found out about the Vivek Ramaswamy ad already; I finally caught up with the comments in the previous post. Of it, I have little to say other than are you fucking kidding me? But I think Roy said it best:

I’ve always known the guy was a piece of shit but he’s broken through to sub-shit.

Every time you think these guys can’t go any lower, someone in the group yells, CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

I can only hope this is Ramaswamy’s final exploding cigar, especially at a time when the Epstein story is still top of mind, in a state where Epstein operated, in a party where millions still think sex trafficking is a huge, tip-of-iceberg story. (It is, but I believe it’s misunderstood by most people who worry about it. The Acton case — molested by a stepfather or other close relative — is where much of it starts. That Acton was able to escape that environment and make it through med school, etc., is nothing short of a miracle.)

I read that Ramaswamy’s team thought the ad “tested well with persuadables,” which is the sort of phrase you hear at this time of year. Imagine being called into a conference room to watch that thing. (I’d link, but this late in the news cycle, it only exists in fragments in posts and reposts, and I don’t have the time for the long search required to find a pristine copy.) After the first few hours, when the ad’s provenance was still murky, Ramaswamy himself took credit (if that’s the word) for it, and blah-blah’d about how it Raises Important Issues, etc.

These people, these Republicans, have been living in the monkey house so long they’ve lost their sense of smell, along with their shame. Let’s hope — hope! — the rest of the country can finally smell the stench coming off them.

A couple days ago I batted out a few hundred words about Trump, and I wasn’t going to post them here because I’ve already said a lot of it here. So I dumped it on Facebook, and it got a response, so I’ll re-dump it here. It won’t surprise anyone, but as someone who thinks of things by writing about them, I kind of surprised myself. So here goes, and happy Wednesday:

Talk to a therapist, or a priest, or rabbi, or any other counselor, religious or secular, that you might encounter, and they will likely tell you to be very careful with the word “hate.”

It’s serious business. Hatred is like taking rat poison and waiting for the rat to die. It should only be reserved for the most serious occasions, or, paradoxically, trivial ones. Which is to say, it’s OK to say you hate Brussels sprouts, or the new Kid Rock album, but you should never use it on people. Hate is the wellspring of evil. Hate leads to ethnic cleansing, scorching violence and other terrible things. We are all children of God, after all.

I say all this to make it clear that I have given it some thought, but I cannot deny the conclusion it’s led to.

I hate Donald Trump.

Seriously. I hate everything about him. I hate his blithe stupidity, his greed and corruption, his racism, his taste in music, and certainly his taste in architecture. I hate what he’s done to the White House, our house, not his. I hate his contempt for the rule of law, and everything I once believed was good about this country – our open-heartedness, our energy, the way we welcome newcomers with a sonnet that specifically asks for the tired, the poor, the tempest-tost, and how many of them become millionaires, or at least comfortable Americans, in a generation or two. I hate that he gave a Kennedy Center Honor, once reserved to crown great American artists at the pinnacle of their careers, to Gloria Gaynor, who had two disco hits, and Sylvester Stallone, who acts primarily by curling his lips.

And these are minor issues, relatively speaking. The alienation of our allies, the diminishment of the country’s standing in the world, the Iran war, ICE, and no doubt more horrors yet to be revealed? I can’t even.

“Game of Thrones” fans may remember how young, exiled Arya Stark would lull herself to sleep by running down a list of her enemies, people she wanted to kill. I sometimes do the same, although being non-violent, I only want them to die, painfully and soon. I consider them the men responsible for inflicting Donald Trump on our once-great nation: Rupert Murdoch, Mark Burnett, Jeff Zucker, Roger Ailes (already dead, granted), Roger Stone, et al.

And speaking of death, it’s what I absolutely wish on Trump. I hasten to add that I don’t want him assassinated, mainly because that would get his ugly face on Mount Rushmore. But I do want him to die, before I do, and I want the three Ps – painful, public and protracted. I would settle for one of those, and I want the death inflicted by God. I don’t really believe in God anymore, at least not a God that blesses America, because look what He sent us with Trump, but I want God, or cosmic justice, to kill him. If Trump suddenly clutched his chest and collapsed at one of his rallies, I would leap to my feet and clap like a child at a birthday party. If he contracted flesh-eating bacteria, I’d be over the moon. I might even go back to church.

I would certainly start celebrating. I might wander the neighborhood with a bottle of champagne, pouring glasses for passers-by. In this, I am not alone. There’s an internet meme among people who feel the same way, a phrase: When it happens. Everyone knows what it means. I saw one spiritual sister of mine who actually had a bottle of bubbly engraved with that very phrase. A lawyer I know, a real-estate agent, probably many people I know, have laid a few bottles aside in cool basements, fearing shortages when it happens.

Because you know, I know, everybody knows that when it does happen? There will be celebration in the land. If he dies in office, of course JD Vance will declare a national day of mourning, but friends, no matter when it happens, it’s gonna be a party, for three days, five, or however long it takes to plant his carcass in the ground. We’re all gonna call in sick. Bars will do a land-office business, and servers will take home fat rolls of tip cash. We’re gonna replay clips of Ivanka shedding a few rehearsed and photo-tested tears – and Melania shedding none at all – and laugh.

I know this confession may lead some to brand me a sick person, poisoned by hatred, but I don’t care. One of the things I most despise about this despicable man is what he’s done to me. I read earnest essays about our divided nation, whether we can ever clasp hands across the bloody chasm, and my heart can’t even summon a tiny flame of empathy. In Detroit, two men, both opinion journalists, have a road show called The Civility Project, designed to help us, as the phrase goes, agree to disagree, but with respect for one another.

Sorry gents, but that ship has sailed. I want a truth and reconciliation commission, maybe with a guillotine standing by for speedy executions of the worst offenders. Later, Bobby Kennedy! Arrivederci, Pete Hegseth! A double whiskey before you slip your neck into the notch? Sure. Unlike you, we’re decent people.

We’ll bury you next to Big Daddy, maybe on one of his golf courses, where he planted his first ex-wife.The graves will need to be public, of course, so the people who suffered under Trump will have their opportunity to pay respects. My advice to anyone who might visit: Wear rubber boots.

Edit: For some reason, this posted with comments closed. Open now.

Like seemingly everybody else in the world who cares about movies, we saw “You Can See Everything” this weekend. Hoo-boy.

I want to start by telling you everything you may have read about it already is true. Let me lay out a few:

It is the most imaginatively crafted and executed documentary I’ve seen in…maybe ever. Co-director (and onscreen talent) Nathan Fielder has really grappled with the ideas of truth, facts, and their relation to humans, and come up with something that raises more questions than it answers. It makes Michael Moore’s body of work look like a fourth-grade filmstrip on how cottage cheese is made.

You should definitely go into it knowing as little about it as possible, so I won’t reveal any major spoilers here. However, I will discuss it generally. If you’d like to leave, see the movie and come back later, that’s fine. You do you.

You should know the basic facts, however: Elizabeth Holmes was co-founder and CEO of a startup she named Theranos, which she said would revolutionize medical testing by reducing the amount of blood required to do these tests to just a few drops. You may recall photos of her in her heyday, wearing a black turtleneck, her blonde hair streaming over one shoulder, her lips carmine-red. (She was said to be entranced by Steve Jobs’ similar uniform.) She is usually shown holding a very small capsule between her thumb and forefinger, containing the aforementioned few drops of blood. Like so:

The startup’s aim was to install a box about the size of a computer printer in drug stores around the country, where you could pop in, suffer a small pinprick and, before you left, get the results of any one of hundreds of tests — HIV, cholesterol, PSA, the gamut. And it wouldn’t cost much at all.

The only problem was, the machine didn’t work. It never worked. So Holmes and her partner in both work and life, Sunny Balwani, constructed an elaborate fraud, faking results long enough to wheedle hundreds of millions from credulous angel investors, all the while hoping they could someday, somehow make it work.

When it collapsed, both Holmes and Balwani were convicted of fraud and sentenced to prison terms. Appeals failed, and Nathan Fielder joined Holmes and her new romantic partner, Billy Evans, for the last month of her freedom before reporting to Bryan Federal Prison Camp, current home of Ghislaine Maxwell, in Texas.

“You Can See Everything” is the premise of the “radical transparency” offered by Holmes and Evans, who in the interim between trial and prison managed to produce two children, also seen onscreen.

And we see a lot. Holmes signature look, featured heavily in the teaser for the film dropped at the Telluride festival in late summer, is on abundant display. Her big blue eyes, her abundant hair, her seeming ability to look directly at you and never blink — that’s the Holmes look. And while we can debate forever why she was seemingly able to hypnotize so many people who should have known better, I think the most important fact is this: Most of them were men. And Holmes is not hesitant with demonstrating Pretty Privilege.

John Carreyrou, the Wall Street Journal reporter whose work exposed the fraud, now works for the NYT. He wrote about the film this week, too:

Ms. Holmes has wanted to tell her side of the story for a long time. In the summer of 2016 she had discussions with Errol Morris, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker she had hired to make sleek Theranos commercials at the height of her pre-scandal fame. Mr. Morris entertained the notion of doing a film about Ms. Holmes seriously enough that he called me to ask me to participate.

“I see it as a ‘he said, she said,’” he told me.

“That’s not how I see it,” I responded. “There are basic facts and those facts show that Elizabeth Holmes committed fraud.”

I think it’s safe to say that Holmes is a strikingly attractive woman when she wants to be. She got David Boies, correctly described by Carreyrou as “one of the country’s most feared litigators,” to work for her. She lured Henry Kissinger, Gen. James Mattis and former Secretary of State George Schulz to sit on her board. Here’s the board list (from Wikipedia) from May 2016:

Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO
Riley Bechtel, former Bechtel Group CEO
David Boies, a founder and the chairman of Boies Schiller Flexner
William Foege, former director of the CDC
Richard Kovacevich, former CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo
Jim Mattis, later U.S. Secretary of Defense
Fabrizio Bonanni, former executive vice president of Amgen

I see one woman — Holmes — in that list. I suspect the other half-dozen all have eyes and penises.

The most charitable thing one could say about Holmes is, she too has eyes, and has seen how so many Silicon Valley startups are like hers, smoke and mirrors that don’t work, until one day they do. There’s a scene in the film where Holmes and Evans assemble the component parts of a Theranos machine, then struggle to explain how, exactly, it will work. (Because it doesn’t work now, but it could! Once “the chemistry” is figured out!) They babble a lot of words that rely heavily on “the cloud” and a few other tech buzz words, but anyone who understands English should recognize they’re saying nothing. At some point, Evans suggests that Holmes, who he calls “an inventor,” just has a brain that works differently from everyone else’s. And that’s what makes her so special and great.

Her brain does work differently. But it makes her a sociopath, not a genius inventor.

Here’s a typical description of Holmes, from a no-name website before the fraud was exposed:

Her home is a two-bedroom condo in Palo Alto, and she lives an austere life, sleeping four hours a night. Although she can quote Jane Austen by heart, she no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn’t date, doesn’t own a television, and hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. She eats most of her meals at the office. She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, spinach, lettuce, and celery.

“I was probably, definitely, not normal,” she said. “I was reading ‘Moby-Dick’ from start to finish when I was about nine. I read a ton of books. I still have a notebook with a complete design for a time machine that I designed when I must have been, like, seven. The wonderful thing about the way I was raised is that no one ever told me that I couldn’t do those things.”

I do not believe she read “Moby-Dick” at 9 years old. And may I see the hands of any parent who would tell a 7-year-old that their “complete design for a time machine” wouldn’t work? This woman, I swear.

Trust me, this movie is wild and weird, and you will be thinking about it for days afterward.

Finally, thanks to Heather for flagging this video, in which a former metro editor for the Chicago Tribune yells (figuratively) at an NYT “assistant managing editor at The New York Times’ for Trust and Standards,” and while Mr. Chicago can’t seem to convince Mr. NYT that they’re doing anything wrong, it is a satisfying watch, BECAUSE HE SPEAKS FOR SO MANY OF US.

OK, I gotta get some work done. Let’s have ourselves a week.

Ohio, WTF?

Maybe Jeff Gill can shed more light on the most recent horrific child abuse case to be revealed in rural, or semi-rural Ohio. This one is in Licking County, where he lives. Once again, the mugshots do not disappoint:

And the details are ghastly. Nine kids and two adults, perhaps three adults, living in “horrific conditions” in a single-wide trailer:

The juveniles, between ages 1 and 13, were removed from the home and two adults were arrested. A twelfth person — a 64-year-old — was reportedly also in the home, according to the sheriff’s office.

According to the sheriff’s office, the living conditions were “horrific” and the initial complaint originated from the Licking County school district, which alerted child services.

At least four of the kids lived in a shed adjacent to the home, the sheriff’s office said.

Jonathan Parr, who is reportedly the father to seven of the nine children, was charged with child endangerment and subjected two nonbiological children to physical abuse, court records state. He also has prior felony convictions out of Wisconsin and multiple weapons charges, records state.

We are living in “Idiocracy,” but it’s a horror movie. So many of the smart young people I know are putting off children, or ruling it out entirely, either because they feel they can’t afford it, or because they’re so pessimistic about the state of the world that they don’t want to subject their own flesh and blood to a burning planet already barreling headlong into World War III. I know there are arguments to be made against this, but when you’re the one facing two decades of child-rearing, it’s hard to sell optimism.

And meanwhile, Mr. Parr here has seven kids, now scarred for life.

Sorry to start you off with a bummer. JD Vance is in Michigan as I write this, and truth be told, it’s kinda comical:

JD Vance: "I want to give a few shoutouts. First of all, your next governor, the great Congressman John James. He's not with us this afternoon."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) October 15, 2026 at 4:54 PM

Box office poison, JD!

Boy, watching that circus clown augur in after the fall of MAGA is going to be so delicious. A phonier phony never did phony. I had “JD/Usha split” on my 2026 Bingo card, but I didn’t know at the time she had a bun in the oven. I’m carrying it over to 2027, because I believe sooner or later she’s going to realize her husband has spent the last two years cozying up to people who call her a jeet behind her back, and she’ll either grow a spine or simply whistle for a lifeboat off the sinking ship.

And weren’t we just talking about the NYT and their both-sidesing? Getta loada this:

Here was the “suggestion,” by the way:

During a visit to Tyler, Texas, on Wednesday, JD Vance opened a rally in support of the Republican nominee, Ken Paxton, by addressing a man in the crowd who expressed his admiration. “I love you too sir,” Mr. Vance said. “In a totally platonic way, to be clear. I’m the vice president, not James Talarico.”

He paused for effect, smiling as he waited for applause.

A common view of Mr. Vance is that he is a chameleon, capable of quickly toggling from sharp-edged attacks to common-sense statesmanship at a moment’s notice, depending on what he needs. His claim about the sexuality of Mr. Talarico, who Democrats believe represents their best hope of winning a Senate seat in Texas in decades, shows the kind of personal broadsides that Mr. Vance embraces in a tough campaign environment.

Ha ha, such a funny guy. I used to cringe a little when people kept making the Vance-fucks-couches crack, but now I hope it hangs over his stupid head until he dies.

The latest useful-journalism story going around is about the GOP congressman who yelled at a reporter — a student reporter, no less — asking him tough questions, telling her she “didn’t have permission” to record him. This in a gaggle of reporters, all of who were recording. “This is a two-party state,” he said, meaning that both parties must consent to being recorded, “and I don’t consent.” A high-school student could explain that such issues pertain only to private conversations, in person or over the phone. A person in public has no expectation of privacy, and a press gaggle is certainly a public event. Lots of TV stations are dragging a lawyer or two in to explain this to the idiots in single-wide trailers who might have believed the congressman had a right to say, “You, turn your recorder off. Everyone else, carry on. Next question.”

OK, then. Into the weekend we slide. Less than three weeks until the elections.

I opened my Sunday ink-on-paper New York Times to see my senator, Elissa Slotkin, wearing a grave expression in a Page One photo. The story was about increasing threats of violence to public officials. (Gift link, as always.)

Also “as always,” the copy bent over backwards to both-sides it. Subhed: Thousands of violent messages targeting U.S. Politicians Across Party Lines. The copy: They aimed at Republicans and Democrats alike, and at a range of officeholders from county clerks to United States senators. And the photo of Slotkin, a Democrat, was paired with one of Rodric Bray, a Hoosier state senator and a Republican.

But dive deeper and one politician in particular appears to be the wellspring from which the lion’s share of this violence flows. You’ll never guess who.

Consider the case of Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example:

What started out as a flood of threats primarily from the left evolved into menace from the right, too, after Ms. Greene’s break with President Trump last fall.

Ms. Greene’s dispute with the president centered largely on Jeffrey Epstein, the sexual predator who eventually killed himself in jail. Like many on the far right, Ms. Greene had agitated for the release of government files pertaining to Mr. Epstein. Then she began agitating directly against the president she had once fawned over, when his government refused to do so.

Her disillusionment expanded after Mr. Trump took the country to war against Iran. She believed his tariff policies and curtailment of health subsidies were hurting her constituents in rural northwest Georgia, she said, and flouting his promise to put “America First.”

…Ms. Greene reached out to Mr. Trump, hoping for compassion from a president she had stood by for years. She forwarded copies of the threats to him, hoping that seeing the threats against her family would be enough to tone down the attacks.

She got a five-word reply from the president: “Your fault, you deserve it.”

Ah, why go through this again? You can all read it; it’s a good story. And I know why the NYT feels it can’t put a foot wrong in this environment. And yes, yes! CHARLIE KIRK WAS ASSASSINATED. That was a bad thing, a very bad thing, if only because it pushed Erika Kirk into our brainpans, and that has been excruciating. Still, though: Let’s not let quote-unquote fairness undermine facts.

Meanwhile, here’s another thing to make you wish for an early death: Muse, the AI agent Mark Zuckerberg thinks you need:

In September, small businesses around the country started receiving strange phone calls. “Hi, this is [Name],” they would begin before informing the recipient they were calling on someone else’s behalf. “I’ll be transcribing this call,” they would disclose, then launch straight into a request: “I’m looking for a quote to install three bidets”. Or: “I’d like to book a karaoke room.” Or: “I’d like to place a cake order for pickup today.” Some businesses simply proceeded, asking follow-up questions about the cake, getting answers, and logging the order. Others were more reluctant to continue. “Are you AI?” asked an employee at a Seattle karaoke place. “I need the real person.” Asked if he could help with the “customer-supplied” bidet job, a Colorado plumber replied with a question of his own, which was automatically transcribed, sort of: “Can you soak my dick?”

The mysterious calls came through Muse, an AI-assistant tool released by Meta last month, which the company says “handles it all” — including online shopping, purchasing flights, making reservations, managing inboxes, and, for some users, booking things over the phone. While internal documents leaked to 404 Media indicate that some of the calls in question may have been joint AI-human enterprises — with a call-center employee taking a handoff from an AI agent before sending the task back again — from the recipients’ side, it didn’t really matter. Suddenly, they weren’t talking directly to their customers anymore.

Did you ask for this? Because I did not. I don’t know anyone else who asked for this, either. I would like to invite Muse, and Mark Zuckerberg, to soak my dick.

Happy Wednesday.

Without getting too deep into the revolting details, let’s talk a little about the Cornell rape case.

I think we have been conditioned to think of gang rape in a certain way. Unless we’ve experienced it ourselves (shudder), we may think of it in a porn-y way (a woman held down by two or more men, who cries until she really gets into it, etc. etc.). Or we may think of it the way Jodie Foster and her colleagues acted it in “The Accused.” Again, a woman lifted onto a barroom pinball machine, assaulted by a series of men until she runs out, screaming.

We may have heard whispers of “gang bangs,” with the high-school slut or a prostitute, perhaps arranged for a party. She’s drunk — you’d have to be — and never says no.

Or we may be skeptical in general. The infamous Rolling Stone rape story about the University of Virginia turned out to be hooey. It’s unwise to believe everything before you know all, or at least some, of the facts.

There are men, and a few women, who are denying the claims made in the Cornell case by saying that she was willing until she wasn’t, and was she even unwilling, toward the end? She started out by saying yes to a threesome, then yes to a different arrangement, and it was only days later that she decided she’d been raped. So how can it be rape? How can you say no once you’ve said yes?

Simple: By saying no, but more critically, by men recognizing that a woman who is insensate or semi-conscious IS NOT CAPABLE OF GIVING CONSENT, EVEN IF SHE SAYS OK. We’re not talking tipsy or a little high. This woman reported being 10 drinks in before she even showed up at the frat house, then had more to drink plus ketamine.

Next week we’ll cover how to get her some help when no one else will. A big step, I know.

Let’s move on to an issue that really matters: Susan Dell’s face.

I’ve seen a million comments on it, and don’t really feel the need to add my own. She is entitled to do what she wants to her body, and I’ve reached the point I no longer trust photography. Here is her photo on her own foundation’s website:

And here’s a photo from Yahoo Finance:

I think I’ve told the story here before, when I was dating a news photographer and watched him printing and reprinting a photo of Jeane Kirkpatrick, burning and dodging to emphasize her wrinkles. He didn’t like her, and I’m sure the photographers who work the White House have no great love for the people they shoot there. But I’ve looked through a bunch of recent photos of her, and the second image seems closer to reality than the first. All I really have to say is: It’s too bad. She was so pretty once, and in what seems to be a misguided effort to hang on to pretty as long as possible, she…made some mistakes. It’s taken this long, but I am honestly grateful not to have been a knockout in my youth, or even much beyond average-looking, because the alternative seems to be the panic over its inevitable fading that leads to faces like this.

Also, Madonna looks terrible. Just gotta say that.

Plastic surgery seems to be a mixture of many volatile elements — the surgeon’s skill, the material s/he has to work with (bone structure, mainly), luck (will the skin stretch evenly?) and the most unstable of all, i.e., the client. Will s/he be satisfied with the result? Can s/he even see it? What do we see when we look in the mirror? That’s the real mystery.

Finally, Hoosiers: Jeff Gill tipped me off to these groyper pieces of crap the other day. If you spend any time online, you may recognize “heritage” as right-wing code for white, and Heritage Indiana does not disappoint:

We’re friends who realized the world we grew up in is being destroyed.

We each came to this in different ways. Maybe you went back to your hometown and it was filled with strangers or you’ve noticed kids don’t play outside anymore.

We asked: “Who represents Hoosiers who want to preserve our way of life?” No one. If we don’t, our home will be erased. We are banding together to take back our state. This is what thousands of patriots are waiting for.

Their current beef is that Fort Wayne’s biggest hospital has an internal-medicine resident class of 15, and 14 are FOREIGN. Why won’t the media cover this story? they ask. Maybe because it’s not new, and who gives a shit. You want your kid to become a doctor, ride them every day of their lives the way south Asian, Asian and Middle Eastern parents do their own.

Enough with these racists. Time to upload and get the week going.

Got the vaccines at noon Monday. That night I was shaking with chills, turned up the furnace, ate some Tylenol, slept badly (but stopped shaking, via the usual sweat bath), got up at 5:30 to do my early lifeguard shift, came home and went back to bed. Slept fitfully throughout the day, and today, Wednesday, I’m fully restored. It seemed a stronger reaction than normal, but we opted for the Moderna mRNA flu shot, said to be 27 percent more effective than the usual one, and so disapproved of by the current HHS secretary that it almost… well, let the NYT tell it:

Initially the F.D.A. had refused to even review Moderna’s application for approval earlier this year, but quickly reversed course after a public outcry. The flu kills more than 300,000 people worldwide each year and was particularly harsh in the 2024-25 season, with an estimated 45,000 deaths in the United States, including at least 297 reported cases in children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The new vaccine is authorized for people ages 50 to 64. The F.D.A. issued an accelerated approval for adults 65 and older, which allows widespread use and can be converted to a full approval if the results of a follow-up study are deemed acceptable.

If Bobby’s agin’ it, I’m for it. But it did kick my butt. Of course, maybe it was the Covid jab doing the kicking; who’s to know? I keep a record for no particular reason, and this is my 10th Covid shot. :::scattered applause::: Still a Novid, to the best of my knowledge. I/we test whenever we have a cold, and so far, no positives.

And I’m really glad no one needed to be fished out of the pool yesterday morning, because I was operating at something of a deficit.

Moving on! I’m starting to feel more confident about Abdul El-Sayed’s chances in the Senate race, although I refuse to get smug about it. One reason is, he seems to have caught the attention of the right-wing media, but in a way that inevitably makes him look better, in some way. He runs circles around Fox News questioners, and the more he does it, the more they keep inviting him back to drop bombs like, “My name didn’t cost Michigan families $5,600 last year because of tariffs.”

Funnier, though, is this New York Post story, which inevitably was laundered through the Gateway Pundit, i.e., the stupidest man on the internet. The headline alone is great:

Abdul El-Sayed farts in public, ex aide says — and blasts Senate candidate as immature ‘manufactured man’

My brotha! It so happens that I, and virtually every other human being on the planet, farts in public, because farting is part of having a human body, and we can’t be in private spaces all the time. Of course, what this “ex-aide” says isn’t exactly just farting in public. He farts as comedy:

“He would openly do so without warning or embarrassment as his form of stand-up comedy,” Domingue wrote.

“To this day for him, the act of farting is easily one of the funniest things a person can do.”

Ha ha. Many well-decorated humorists would agree with Abdul, but honestly, who cares? His opponent is a Donald Trump rubber stamp, and that’s all that matters to me. Speaking of whom:

WASHINGTON — Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers appears to be breaking with President Donald Trump on another key issue less than a month before Election Day.

“Drinking a Labatt and watching the Red Wings, man, it just doesn’t get any more Michigan than that,” Rogers said in a new video ad released on Oct. 7. “Here in Michigan, we know that Canada is not our enemy. We need to end this tariff war now.”

The statement marks the second time in recent weeks that Rogers spoke out — albeit without criticizing Trump by name — against one of the president’s unpopular initiatives. This time, Rogers is calling for an end to Trump’s widespread trade war against Canada, America’s biggest trading partner.

The Republican Senate nominee also split with Trump on the Iran war in late September, saying it “needs to end and end quickly.”

The ad was shot in a bar:

The 30-second spot features Rogers wearing a flannel shirt and sitting at a bar stool at Bigg’s Bar & Grill on Gratiot Avenue in Chesterfield Township.

That’ll get the blue-collar crowd, ain’a?

OK, then. Time for me to push this out into the world and start exploring how we might make our gas-log fireplace less of a pain in the ass to use. Happy Wednesday, all.