I was in Whole Foods over the weekend, picking up a few things. The founder of WF was a big libertarian, right? One of those guys who believed we could “heal ourselves” by choosing the correct organic foods, and anyone who didn’t — whether because of cost or attachment to Doritos — well, it sucks to be you. And that’s how I came to associate the chain with the MAHA movement, which believes much the same thing.

Then I stumbled into the supplements aisle, and hoo-boy, do these people swallow a lot of this crap. Food is all you need to heal you, along with ten thousand sketchily vetted, surprisingly expensive capsules that almost all come with zero evidence of their efficacy other than a vaguely worded article on some website, as well as the all-important recommendation by either an Instagram influencer or your personal trainer, or both.

The older I get, the less of this stuff I’m even tempted to take. For me it’s vitamin D because I live in a sunless pit six months of the year, vitamin B taken at the same time to remind me I remembered the D (because B turns your pee neon-yellow for a few hours), and that’s it. The truest words I’ve heard in some time came on Chapo Traphouse, when one of the guys said, “Sooner or later, every con man will try to sell you supplements.”

Of course, also, many of these supplements are sold via Amazon, a company I am trying my best to boycott, or at least deal with as little as possible. (I just ordered two books direct from the publisher, in case you doubt my commitment.) I am just one small, angry, bitchy person, but as I cannot launch a torpedo at the Bezos yacht on its next trip to carry the new Mrs. Bezos to her next adventure, perhaps collecting another environmental award, I can at least withdraw my business.

And yes, I know Amazon owns Whole Foods now. I only shop there once in a great while.

I imagine we all saw at least one or two pictures from the tackiest wedding of the century (so far). The guest-arrival photos were a nightmare of mermaid hair and squashed boobs. The bride, on her third marriage and the mother of three children, wore virginal white. The witnesses seem to have been chosen from a list of the randomly famous. Are they actually friends with this far-flung group? The Kardashians? The Kushners? Tom Brady? Oprah? Do you get the feeling Mr. or Mrs. Bezos have any friends they’ve known longer than a decade? A childhood or college friend they’ve kept on the Christmas-card list? I don’t get that feeling. If so, they might have married in a similarly lavish ceremony at this or that Bezos house, and not have to take over a European city for a week to get the right backdrop for the photos.

Tacky-tacky-tacky.

It’s hot again here, and I want to read the new Laura Lippman book. So here, have some amusing bloggage…

The Department of the Interior’s efforts to revise unfavorable stories about American history at National Park Service sites appears to be backfiring — instead of reporting incidents of “negative” history as directed by new signs, visitors have used the signs’ QR codes to submit hundreds of comments in support of the park service.

In a 65-page leaked document provided to SFGATE by the National Parks Conservation Association, the hundreds of comments that have poured in through June 16 show overwhelming support for better funding for national parks and increased protection of public lands.

“This felonious Administration is the very definition of un-American. The parks belong to us, the people. … Respectfully, GO **** YOURSELVES” reads one comment that has been reported through multiple parks and is directed to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.

“Rangers, have a lovely day. You are appreciated,” the commenter added at the end.

“This park is perfect. Please tell Trump to go **** himself,” reads a similar comment posted through Keweenaw National Historical Park in Michigan.

…and have a pic of me and Dustin meeting Laura Lippman herself last week, at a book-signing in Toledo:

Does she look nervous or tired? We were at the very end of the line. Great dress, LL.

If you live to my east, be advised the heat wave is faltering. This one, anyway. The temperature’s in the low 80s, the sun is behind clouds, it’s raining a bit and I can give the A/C a break. By Friday we’ll be kissing 90 degrees again, but any break is nice. Yesterday a brief, fast-moving storm moved through and took out our power. I had to wrestle the generator out of the garage, get it started, string cords, all the stuff we end up doing at least once or twice a summer so we don’t lose the contents of our refrigerator. I was almost literally pouring sweat and couldn’t even lie under a fan to cool off. The humidity was brutal. How the hell do you people in the south stand it? I would purely die.

The good news: The juice came back on after four hours. Did the whole generator thing in reverse. Settled in for some TV and it winked out again, for three minutes. It’s like DTE was playing a little joke. Bastards.

We all awoke to learn the news from New York City. I don’t want to read too much into it, because optimism is useless at a time like this. And this is only a primary; more will be revealed. But I will allow myself at least some glee that sex pest Andrew Cuomo will have more time to spend with his family. Is that good enough?

I don’t know what to say about much of anything at the moment, other than: Fresh thread for discussion. Have at it.

There are two kinds of sellers at Eastern Market, most Saturdays: Growers and wholesalers. The first group grows their own produce, the second buys in bulk at the produce terminal, packages it separately and sells at a pretty good, better-than-grocery-store price. There’s no deception here, unless a customer is dumb enough to believe Michigan has a citrus crop.

Sometimes I stop at a particular wholesaler early, because he sells limes three for a dollar and we’re into lime cocktail season. This week I had to wait while the seller, clearly exasperated, searched his phone for CashApp, so a buyer could pay him $12. And call me boomer as much as you like, but this is ridiculous.

The guy I buy eggs from says this happens all the time and increases every year, because young people are abandoning cash. What’s more, older people like me seem to think it’s perfectly fine to pay for $7 worth of eggs with a $100 bill. Which is also ridiculous, unless you’re at a meat counter buying prime rib. I was reading a Facebook group for residents of my city, and there was an indignant business owner complaining that the city hadn’t enabled a parking app for its meters, and “no one carries change anymore, especially young people.” That may well be true; the manager of the waterpark I worked at two years ago noted it was taking longer every year to close out the registers in the snack bar, because younger people were simply bedeviled by quarters and dimes, and strained to count them.

I use an app to park in Detroit, because the kiosks that take cash are often inoperable, enforcement is robust, tickets are expensive and I’m nearly always staying at least an hour, which makes the transaction fee negligible. Plus, the cost to park is, for a major city, miniscule — a dollar an hour.

But in Grosse Pointe? To pop in and out of the dry cleaner? I keep an Altoids tin in my dashboard cubbyhole, filled with change. I put in a dime, get 12 minutes and leave with six still available for the next lucky parker. If I use the app, they’ll tack on a 40-cent transaction fee. The hell with that.

Add this to the list of Shit I Thought I’d Never See: That cash would become a problem.

So! The heat wave has arrived where I am. Two hours until noon, and it’s already 86. Yesterday it started cool enough that I could wear long pants, and by 1 p.m. it was oppressive. The next three days will be worse. But this is the climate we have chosen, so.

There is good bloggage, too:

Thanks to Nancy Friedman for posting, in the last thread, this Jon Carroll column, “13 Things You Should Know About My Mother,” published on M-Day 2005. (If you get a register-to-read pop-up, just reload a time or two.) Things I learned:

1 She was adopted into a wealthy family in Grosse Pointe, Mich. Her father was a politician.

2 She left Grosse Pointe to go to Vassar. When she graduated, she was supposed to return home and marry one of 200 eligible rich boys. Instead, she went to Hartford, Conn., and got a secretarial job in an insurance company.

…4 She met my father, who was poor, Irish and Roman Catholic. She married him. She was disinherited.

She never saw her father again. Well, that is a very Old Grosse Pointe thing to do to a daughter, if I do say so. Also:

8 When I was 8, she was waiting for a bus when an ash from a cigarette dropped on her pretty summer frock, and the frock erupted in flames. A passing motorist took her to the hospital. The scars on her legs took 25 years to heal.

This is the second woman I’ve heard of, suffering such a mishap. (The writer Eve Babitz was the other.) Jon’s mother’s would have happened in the 1950s, but Babitz’ was in 1997, when I like to think consumer-protection laws had largely shielded American skirt-wearers from clothing that could burst into flames. (I imagine the Trump administration is working hard to roll back these regulations, don’t you?) Maybe Babitz, famous hippie eccentric, was wearing a thrifted or imported-from-a-country-where-they-don’t-believe-in-that skirt. Whatever, a good summation on a mother’s life.

From national treasure Eli Saslow, a deep read on the spring 2025 measles outbreak in Texas. Saslow is able to get into anyone’s confidence, and portrays these…what’s the word? antivax idiots, yes. These antivax idiots come across sympathetically, but my heart was left as cold as stone. Here’s the local chiropractor, who does a lot of non-chiropractic health care in West Texas:

Most of what he remembered about measles came from an old “Brady Bunch” episode, where the children celebrated staying home from school and played board games. “If you have to get sick, sure can’t beat the measles,” one of the children said. …“I feel like I’ve been lied to,” Kiley told his wife as his fever rose to 104 degrees.

“Lied to” by a sitcom, check. More:

For more than a decade, Kiley and Carrollyn had debated whether to vaccinate their children. Each time, they decided against it. … In recent years, as many as 15 percent of families in West Texas school districts had applied for “conscientious exemptions” from the M.M.R. vaccine. What Carrollyn feared more than measles was the remote possibility that her children might experience an adverse reaction to the shots. Two of her younger siblings had been vaccinated and had then suffered from high fevers that led to febrile seizures — scary convulsions that lasted several minutes but didn’t cause permanent damage.

“My children won’t see this disease in their lifetimes,” she always concluded. “The vaccine would probably be fine, but why take an unnecessary risk?”

The takeaway from the story is, lots and lots and lots of people not only got measles, but not the Brady Bunch board-games variety. This was a severe outbreak, with high fevers, intestinal distress and more. All four of the chiropractor’s children had to be hospitalized. Bobby Kennedy should be horsewhipped.

Finally, if you have an HBO account, I highly recommend “Surviving Ohio State,” a documentary (a film, not a series, thank God) on the sexually abusive sports doctor there, Richard Strauss. It’s a familiar story, similar to the same narrative with Dr. Robert Anderson at U-M — rumors for years, student athletes complaining of fondling during exams, an actual penetrated-while-drugged rape, etc. — but no one did anything, not one thing, about it. No, wait, there was one coach who tried to get OSU to take action. A woman, of course, coach to both the men’s and women’s fencing teams. One of the villains of the piece is none other than U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. It’s good.

The Iraq Iran bombing I don’t have the capacity to discuss right now. But you all feel free.

OK, then. On to confront the heat and figure out a plan for the day. I’ll probably work, because why the hell not.

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.