The Department of Justice made public this week a letter written by Ryan Routh, the would-be Trump assassin. In it, he writes that he expects to fail, but that he hopes others will “finish the job” and offers $150,000 to whoever does. This incensed people across the political spectrum, but particularly on the right, and for once I agree. Although I imagine any sane person would understand that a man in federal custody, and likely to remain so for many years, is going to call backsies on the $150K promise, the sorts of people who might attempt it, aren’t. Sane, that is. It just seems there should be multiple ways to indicate probable cause to a judge without revealing that detail.

But I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll leave it to them. However, I am a writer, and I just want to pick a small peeve in these stories, i.e., the labeling of any statement by a person who’s committed an act of violence as a “manifesto.”

Granted, this is mostly done by dumbass news sources, like the New York Post or Rod Dreher, but it bugs me just the same. I suppose it started with the Unabomber, and whatever else you can say about Ted Kaczynski, he took his violence seriously. His manifesto was called “Industrial Society and Its Future,” and it ran 35,000 words. Publishing it got him arrested, but he had something to say, and said it. Supposedly he has a fan club now.

By contrast, the woman who shot up a school in Nashville, Audrey Hale, left behind a journal of sorts, marked with some coherent passages but also a great deal of angry scrawling. The Tennessee Star is the only publication that published selections from it. This photo, with the publication’s watermarks all over it, gives you an idea:

To their credit, they put “manifesto” in quotes in their reporting. I’ve said before that I don’t mind it (too much) when language changes, but every time I hear some racist ranting or anguished scrawling called the same thing that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels labored over, I cringe.

Ai-yi-yi, another bout of insomnia last night. I turned off the alarm and tried to stay in bed as late as possible, but I probably got four hours, total. Since I missed morning swim, I took a bike ride in the cool, cloudy conditions, something that usually makes me feel good, but I multitasked by listening to the “The Daily” podcast, and it just depressed me. It was about the shortage of housing, particularly affordable housing, and toward the end, the reporter pointed out, correctly, that we have faced extreme housing shortages in this country before, the period after World War II being the most obvious example. It was solved in part by enormous federal incentives to build middle-class housing, the obvious answer today, as well. But will this ever be accomplished? I doubt it.

Even assuming the best-case scenario, i.e., a Harris victory and a Democratic Senate, any effort to enact a large federal program to, you know, HELP PEOPLE would be attacked nonstop by the usual suspects, who will wail and throw sand in the gears and churn out memes and do whatever possible to stop the whole thing.

I also considered how we might leave our current house, maybe downsize to a condo in a different municipality and leave this three-bedroom Colonial to someone with children in the schools. We’d get a decent price for it, but then we’d have to buy in this overheated market, and our taxes would skyrocket. Why? Because Michigan adopted Proposal A 30 years ago, which pegged property taxes to the rate of inflation or 5 percent, whichever is less. When you buy a house, its taxes “pop up” to whatever value the market placed on it by your purchase, but then they’re pegged. During the great recession, when our house lost nearly half its market value, the taxes adjusted downward, a small relief at a very scary time. Now they’re pegged again, and as a consequence, we’re paying far less than newer residents who bought after the recovery, for the same services. If we bought a new place, we’d almost certainly be paying more. So we stay put, empty nesters in a community that desperately needs school-age children, because our taxes-and-insurance nut in our paid-off house is about $500/month.

When Proposal A was passed, real estate wasn’t the volatile market it is today. The population was different. Everything was different. It’s probably time to revisit Proposal A (which had other moving parts about school funding). But the Michigan legislature now has term limits, the worst idea ever, and is now populated by people who whirl in and out of their seats, never stay long enough to develop true legislative skills and pass truly meaningful policy. And like Washington, the camps are divided and dug in. Things only get done when one party has complete control in Lansing. People wonder why the Democrats put the pedal to the floor when they got bicameral/executive control in 2022, for the first time in 40 years. That’s why.

OK, enough of that.

I was reading this Atlantic piece about legal sports gambling this morning, too. It concentrates on the personal price paid by legal gambling — the precarious households made even more so, mostly — but I wonder: We can’t be more than a hair’s breadth away from a Black Sox-style scandal in college or professional sports, can we? And when it happens, what will we do? Stick a stake in the heart of a multi-billion-dollar industry and drive gambling back into the shadows? Don’t be silly.

OK, then. In cheerier news, I have had a pork shoulder simmering in the crock pot since morning, and it’s almost time to shred it into tasty pulled-pork bits. Enjoy early autumn, wherever you are.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an ambitious man:

Here's how we can Make America Healthy Again. Please join me. #MAHA 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/NmGLw1rxcC

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) September 22, 2024

Over the weekend, he proposed making America healthy again by “getting the fluoride out of the water,” which tells you where this is coming from. He’s previously announced that he only drinks raw milk. And he’s against vaccines. So, bringing back widespread tooth decay, preventable childhood diseases and the constellation of illnesses that can be traced to unpasteurized milk. Make Dentures Commonplace Again!

And still, the race remains tight. Ai-yi-yi.

And then there’s Mark Robinson story. I haven’t waded through the comments on the last post, but again: Ai-yi-yi. The phrase “I’m a black Nazi” got thrown around a lot, mainly because it was the least offensive thing he posted. Not that I ever would quote David French, but for the sake of concision, a snippet:

Even before the primary, Robinson’s horrific character was on display. Among other things, he had called school shooting survivors who advocated gun control “media prosti-tots,” accused Michelle Obama of being a man, and trafficked in so many antisemitic tropes that his election as lieutenant governor in 2020 was an alarm bell for Jewish leaders in the state.

In other words, Republican voters knew he was a bad man when they chose him. Now they know he is a very bad man.

Actually, this isn’t a terrible column, if a bit obvious:

Both parties have always been vulnerable to nominating or electing the occasional crank, but Donald Trump’s ascendance meant that a crank led the party, and the best way to join with him is to imitate him. That’s how you get a Mark Robinson, or a Marjorie Taylor Greene, or a Lauren Boebert, or a Matt Gaetz. The list goes on. That’s how leaders change institutions. They make them into images of themselves.

In this case, Trump has done so explicitly. Almost all the worst figures in the Republican Party have ridden Trump endorsements to the top of their local pyramids. Robinson received Trump’s endorsement and swamped his primary opposition. Trump even called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

The lesson is simple: If you want more Mark Robinsons, vote for Donald Trump.

Ugh, this stupid, stupid country. Maybe we can still save ourselves.

At least it was a good weekend. Went to a film noir screening Friday, “Victims of Sin” and “Night Editor,” both unknown to me. Saturday, enjoyed — or endured — the last hot-and-miserable summer day, which happened to be the last day of summer. Today, work and a change in the weather. And so fall arrives. And the new week begins.

So J.D. Souther is dead. Or maybe he styled it JD, no periods, like you-know-who the hillbilly racist. Still, a moment of silence from me.

:::a moment passes:::

:::blasts this song:::

You probably don’t know him, but I think of him as providing many entries on the playlist from a particular time in my life. He was a songwriter, and wrote a lot for the Eagles, among many others. To me, though, it all comes down to “The Souther-Hillman-Furay Band,” one album that came out in 1973 and I discovered a couple years later. It still evokes that time in Athens, when my world was school, beer in student bars, health-food restaurants, the rural roads around the county, and all that. Later on, Souther would appear on “thirtysomething” as John Dunaway, a crunchy-granola social-justice type who tempts Hope with infidelity, but she resists. When is “thirtysomething” coming to streaming, anyway? I need to reacquaint myself with these people.

Anyway, a toast to JD. Lately, all the sexy men I remember from my youth are revealed as very old men. And I know what that means.

Speaking of the decrepitude of age, let’s hurry up with this new technology, so I don’t have to get a knee replacement:

(W)hy replace a knee if just the cartilage can be repaired instead? That line of thinking has led to new techniques flipping the script on how to mend troublesome knees.

“We’re not going to stop arthritis,” says Cassandra Lee, chief of the division of sports medicine at UC Davis Medical Center, as well as the orthopedic surgeon who operated on McHatton. “But can we push that knee replacement way down the road? That is, I think, the ultimate goal.”

…Wiley and colleague Ken Gall, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke, are instead trying to re-create cartilage in the lab. Over the last several years they’ve developed a hydrogel composed of polyvinyl alcohol, a polymer often used in contact lenses, and cellulose fibers. Tests in a compression machine, Wiley says, demonstrated that the product could support 1,100 pounds of force, simulating five years of use. The hydrogel, which is pressed into the end of the femur bone, is being used in a Phase 1 human trial in Latin America. Wiley and Gall hope to get the green light to begin human trials in the United States sometime next year.

You should not be one little, teensy-weensy, speck of surprised to hear that the guy who killed himself and others in the OceanGate submersible disaster was a prickly egomaniac:

In 2016, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush steered paying customers in the Cyclops I, a Titan predecessor, to the wreckage of the Andrea Doria, a ship that sank in 1956 off Massachusetts, former OceanGate operations director David Lochridge said during a hearing about the Titan’s implosion.

Yep, ol’ Tock Rush nearly got the thing stuck on the bottom, checking out the wreck of the Andrea Doria, and only turned the controls over to another with petulance. Which he had a lot of:

Lochridge elaborated on Tuesday, testifying about a culture in which his safety concerns were shrugged off to feed Rush’s ego — by accomplishing feats no other reputable deep-sea exploration company had tried because they were dangerous.

You don’t say.

In other news at this hour, happy interest rate cut. And happy birthday to Dexter, before the day slips away.

We’re having a stretch of glorious weather, at least if you’re not a farmer. Those people are never happy with any weather, and ours, lately, has been dry. I don’t think it’s rained since before Labor Day, and the next chance of it — and only a chance — is a week from Tuesday. The skies have been clear and sunny, temperatures topping out around 80 in late afternoon.

Essentially, I’m living in Los Angeles without the traffic. At least for a while.

The weather helps moderate the natural impulse to bang one’s head on the wall. I suppose many of us saw Pete Buttigieg’s comments on the chat shows Sunday, making the very sharp observation that all this talk about dogs and cats and so forth is just dust thrown up to get us to stop talking about Project 2025, et al. I think he’s right. So I’m going to enjoy the weather, ignore the dust in the air, and keep sending a few bucks, here and there, to Democrats.

As for the “assassination attempt” yesterday, well. More will be revealed. But until then, we obviously need to build a wall around golf courses, allow access only through solid-steel gates, and arm caddies.

I keep thinking about November 7, 2020. I’ve written in detail about it before, but the day remains in my brain as the goal for 2024. Vote, win the election, then go play miniature golf on a warm day.

Let’s see if it holds out.

It was a good weekend, in the sense that I got a bunch of stuff crossed off my to-do list for this week, which means I can fritter a little time away here and there as it unwinds. I’ve resolved to try my hand at darning a couple of tiny moth holes in a good cashmere sweater I don’t want to retire just yet. No, never darned before, but that’s why God gave us YouTube. We’ll see how that goes.

Bloggage? Oh, let’s see:

Roy is very smart on the subtext of GOP messaging of late:

What you have to understand is that, while both misogyny and racism are important parts of MAGA, the policy itself is never as important as the hatred and disgust they can engender with them.

That’s why, on abortion, Trump can fudge and lie to his heart’s content. As I’ve explained, he’s worked it so that his fans understand he’s lying and wink at it — they know they’ve already gotten the result they wanted from the Trump Supreme Court, and that their desired further disempowerment and servitude of women relies more on getting the normies to help elect him than on politically dangerous shows of support for the fait accompli.

But his misogynist yap about E. Jean Carroll, Kamala Harris, et alia — and creepy fantasies about women aborting babies after birth — those are non-negotiable. MAGA must have those. Because they demonstrate something more important than policy, or even short-term electoral gain.

An entertaining read on the funeral home used by the rich and famous, in the NYT (gift link). I sent it to a friend here, also a funeral director. Of course he knew it well. A direct cremation there costs around $15K. I guess that’s to be expected. They embalmed Jackie Onassis in her own apartment, which just proves you can get anything delivered in New York.

And now, to work.

I have a friend — a wonderful person in so many ways — who gets upset by the news, so she ignores it. News always gets in over the transom one way or another, so she’s aware of who’s running for major offices in the state and country, etc., but she has some amazing gaps in her knowledge. Not long ago she expressed bafflement that there’s another bridge across the Detroit River under construction. Never mind that the debate over building it lasted years, the construction is visible from nearby freeways, from the riverwalk, and the bridge itself is nearing completion. This was in June:

How do you miss something like that, even if you don’t drive downriver all that often? I’m envious.

And yet, we all have our blind spots. Ask me who played in the last Super Bowl. I couldn’t tell y– Wait, yes I can. Taylor Swift’s boyfriend’s team vs. San Francisco, and Taylor’s BF’s team won. But the year before? It was…same teams. Everybody in Detroit was carping that NO ONE WANTS A REMATCH OF THOSE TEAMS, right? (See above: Some news comes in over the transom.) But the year before that? Forget about it.

All of which is to say, I feel like I’ve been marinating in far-right content for a while now. I’m not on Rumble and Telegram, but I do have a Truth Social account (BOR-ing), or did. So much of it is in the mainstream now, though. The Overton window has moved so far in that direction it’s around the corner of the house. So I read this story in the WashPost today, about how Trump is suggesting his assassination attempt maybe isn’t what it seems — i.e. stereotypical Troubled Young Loner seeks spotlight through violence — and nodded in recognition. Absolutely nothing surprising here:

On the first night after Donald Trump was injured in an assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., some supporters and allies, including campaign staff, immediately began blaming President Joe Biden and Democrats before any information was available about the shooter or his possible motive. Trump himself didn’t go there. In his first public statements after the July 13 shooting, Trump thanked law enforcement, offered condolences to the rallygoers killed and wounded, and called for unity.

But his tone changed in recent weeks, as the Republican presidential nominee began promoting conspiracy theories such as those that label the assassination attempt an “inside job” by government agencies or make up Democratic ties to lawyers representing the shooter’s parents. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), frequently portray the attempt as part of efforts by political opponents to prevent the former president from returning to power.

Melania’s recent contract negotiation must have called for something similar, because the ho’ wife* is carrying his water, too:

https://t.co/ZCTwZSqZND pic.twitter.com/KKA6anTEYC

— MELANIA TRUMP (@MELANIATRUMP) September 10, 2024

* obligatory disclaimer: Sex work is work. Also, hel-LO filters.

Any assassination is going to stir up conspiracies, and I’ll admit this one is weird in many ways, but one of the weirdest is how no medical team answered questions about the extent of Trump’s injuries. There was some blood, the panty-liner bandage at the convention, and now his ear shows zero sign of having been grazed by a bullet. And Trump continues to say he was “took a bullet the head” for freedom, or whatever.

I’d never say it didn’t happen, as some on the left do. But if we’re talking about people who we haven’t heard anything about in the days since? I’d include the guy who really did take a bullet to the head, for the crime of being a Front-Row Joe, or whatever you call the people who sit up front at Trump rallies. You know, ol’ what’s-his-name. :::Googling::: Corey Comperatore. Hilarious guy who posted videos about his desire to run over cyclists.

The week, it is ending. And next week will be better, unless it’s worse.

P.S. The new bridge will have a pedestrian/cycling lane, and won’t that be fun.

How does anybody keep up with the news these days? Just yesterday I was thinking I’m an empty cup, and then I opened my laptop and WHAM MAGA idiots say Haitians are eating cats and WHAM tropical storm Francine is bearing down on the WHAM debate stage set for WHAM that “Sound of Freedom” guy, who is being sued by a bunch of women for — quelle surprise — being a sexually aggressive creep.

Closed my laptop. Let the room grow quiet again. Took Wendy to the vet (enflamed gums). Picked up a novel (“Demon Copperhead”). Sometimes you have to unplug. Just for a little while.

It’s a shame that the so-called mainstream media have fired or bought out all their columnists (or hired terrible ones), because damn, there are people writing more or less for free who have a lot of smart things to say. This piece on the “sanewashing” of Trump is really good.

If it feels like half the electorate has gone mad, that’s in part because the press continues to fail to present Trump as he truly is. The average voter probably doesn’t spend much time watching clips of Trump’s rants or reading his unhinged screeds on social media. But they might consume reporting that consistently “sanewashes” his derangement.

The sketch comedy series Key and Peele had a bit where the calm, no-drama Barack Obama (Jordan Peele) would have his true thoughts conveyed through a boisterous, profane Anger Translator (Keegan-Michael Key). The press has functioned as Trump’s Sanity Translator, to far less amusing effect: They filter through his nonsensical, offensive gibberish and offer readers a sanitized version that’s more PR spin than actual journalism.

MAGA cultists might consider Trump the second coming, but many swing voters hold a more reasonable, if still inaccurate view: Yes, Trump’s a jerk, but he knows how to fix the economy. The reality is that Trump’s both a bigoted creep and a total buffoon who can barely string a coherent sentence together on policy.

The centerpiece is the word salad served at the New York Economic Club last week, after someone asked him what plans he had, if any, to make child care more affordable. The answer:

Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, uh, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio and my daughter, Ivanka, was so, uh, impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.

But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t — you know, it’s something, you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.

But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to but they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s gonna take care. We’re gonna have — I, I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time. Coupled with, uh, the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country — because I have to say with child care, I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth.

But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, uh, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in.

We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people. But we’re gonna take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about: Make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question.

How do people — sane people, members of the fucking NYEC, sit and listen to this and not erupt in jeering afterward. Or just say, “I don’t understand. Please explain again.” The question-asker went on CNN later to complain. She should have complained to his orange face. But as the piece linked above points out, MSM reporters didn’t do much, or any, better. They reported this answer, maybe with an adjective like “jumbled,” as though it played by the rules. And as much as I admire those few soldiers left trying to fight this war, we need new rules of engagement. Because the old ones don’t make sense anymore.

I reckon we’ll have a lively pre-, during- and post-debate commentary here, so let it begin.

And just like that, the four-day downtown festival I worked is over. I slept in my own bed last night, not the RenCen Marriott, although there’s something to be said for awakening to a view of the Detroit River in dawn’s early light, the sign from Caesars Windsor reflected in the water, looking like spilled…blood, I guess. Appropriate for a gambling house, wagers being responsible for gallons, tankers of blood-spill through the ages.

In the Canadian fashion, that casino is non-smoking. Progress.

And for now, I plan to rest for two days, then turn my attention to another project. I hope that by Christmas, my workload will finally ease.

I’d forgotten what it’s like to be so busy you can’t pay attention to the news. Thursday night is about when I checked out, although being in a hotel room with cable, I was able to watch much of CNN’s interview when they replayed it through the weekend. It was amazingly dumb. The questions were all about prompting reactions to stupid shit various GOP blockheads have said. Why should Kamala Harris have to dignify Trump’s racist comments? Why should Tim Walz have to answer expressed ignorance about his own child? Fuck every last one of them.

As they say on the internet: WhY wOn’T ShE TaLK aBouT PoLiCy?

Fortunately, my room also had Netflix. So I could put on early “Sex and the City” and just let ’em roll as I dozed off.

Today, I have to clean-clean-clean the house before Alan’s sister arrives for a visit. So short shrift again, but I’m hoping things will settle down, soon.

The view from my window for four days:

Back in about 48 hours.

I’ve been seeing it here and there — maybe even in these comments — that there are fewer Trump yard signs in evidence, and this is maybe a hopeful sign. I, too, have noticed this. There’s the guy across the street and a few others here and there, but definitely not as many as ’16 and even ’20. However, I don’t think this is good news. I think it’s a sign of trench warfare. I think we’re just exhausted. Why bother with a yard sign? Is it going to change any minds? I don’t think so.

That said, I impulsively stopped at the Grosse Pointe Dems storefront and picked up two Harris/Walz signs, one of which is in my yard. Gave the other to a friend. We’re hopeful.

But I’m mainly here to tell you that the social-media work I’m doing is eating my leg off, and it all comes to a climax this coming weekend, which is my way of saying this may be the last you hear from me until after Labor Day. The next few days will be action-packed. But I’ll have my laptop, and I’ll try.

Today I mainly want to draw your attention to Neil Steinberg’s excellent blog on Robert Kennedy Jr., on the occasion of the utter rejection of all he claims to hold dear, and his willing embrace of Trump flunkydom.

None of it is news at this point, but this was a sharp observation, I thought:

RFK Jr.’s story is not at its end, unfortunately, but now continues, to a fresh hell, the humiliation of being a Trump acolyte. Take a glance at a piece I wrote in 2016, “Chris Christie in rags” about the “stunned, miserable stare” on Christie’s face when he found himself standing in Trump’s rogue’s gallery of supporters, just another supernumerary to the Great Cheetoh God, hoping to huff a contact high of ego and power. The former governor of New Jersey later tried to reinvent himself as a person with a functional conscience, and speak out against Trump. Too little, too late. Or as I sometimes will write a reader: a person who thinks that Donald Trump is a good idea for this country can’t really expect anyone to care what he thinks about anything else. It’s the same reason you don’t ask homeless people for stock tips. I wonder as RFK slides deeper into the Trumpian netherworld whether it will ever occur to him that he had done this to himself.

It’s sorta breathtaking, in a way: An environmental lawyer has now allied with a man for whom the environment is a golf course. A vaccine opponent who’s now in the pocket of the man who, in his one decent act as president (although a no-brainer), fast-tracked the Covid jab. And I keep thinking about RFK’s voice, his spasmodic dysphonia, which he is said to believe was the result of a flu shot, and refuses to treat. I hadn’t heard him speak in a while, and on Friday, I was struck by how difficult he is to understand. The condition is treatable, with Botox shots to the larynx, but he refuses to get them. And now he’s hoping for a high-level position in the second Trump administration — Trump, a man who picks his inner circle on the basis of how they look, and was said to be repulsed by Nikki Haley’s slight skin discoloration. You just know he’s imitating his new supporter the minute Sad Bobby leaves earshot.

But you know what? It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. So the hell with him.

Now it’s back to the video-editing mangle with me, and I wish you a pleasant unofficial last week of summer. We’ll see if my yard sign gets stolen.

God bless you, girl:

LIVE from the DNC – @JackPosobiec: "How many abortions have you had?"

DNC Attendee: "I'm being paid by George Soros to have an abortion on stage." pic.twitter.com/AyQvgivtSI

— Human Events Daily (@humaneventslive) August 19, 2024

That’s the way to deal with these weird freaks.

I didn’t watch any of the RNC, so it’s hard to compare however they did their roll call of the states with the raucous, DJ-spinning roll call I’m watching now at the DNC. They just hit Idaho, and the DJ cued up “Private Idaho,” which is probably the only danceable song ever written about that place. What will it be for Michigan? Either Motown or Eminem, but I’m figuring it’s gotta be Motown. Whatever it is, this is pretty cool, although I loved the virtual roll call in 2020 and the calamari ninja from Rhode Island.

They should play this song for Rhode Island. Wouldn’t mix with the high-energy groove, but it’s definitely one of those only-song-written-about-it kind of places.

And now Michigan! And it’s Eminem after all.

Kamala is in Milwaukee tonight, running a similarly high-energy rally. Meanwhile, the orange menace was in Howell, Michigan this afternoon, where he took over a police station for a “press conference” of 150 journalists and 70 or so supporters. It was…not high-energy:

it's the second straight day where a sedated-sounding Trump has been ranting incoherently at an event (this time in Howell, Michigan) while people are forced to stand behind him for way too long. Note the complete lack of reaction to everything he says & the fact that he appears… pic.twitter.com/9iY7biRO7Z

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 20, 2024

We might pull this thing out after all. But keep the pedal to the floor all the way.

Not much more today, except to direct you to this very excellent essay by A.R. Moxon, taking apart J.D. Vance’s agreement with a podcaster that went like this:

In recent days we were reminded that back in 2020 the bestselling author, pretend hillbilly, future prospective vice president candidate, and full-time awkwardness enthusiast Jorts Decider “JD” Vance went on Eric Weinstein’s podcast, and nodded along with an out-of-pocket statement that the host made.

The statement was that raising grandchildren was “the whole purpose of the post-menopausal female.”

It’s a great piece, but here’s where it rang all the bells for me:

It might be a bit hard for Vance to dodge the rap, though, since he’s spent so much of his time in recent years agreeing with creeps who say creepy shit about women, and being a creep who says creepy shit about women in order to impress creeps who say creepy shit about women, and generally just acting like the kind of creepy little suck-up who calls women “females”–which is to say one of a whole passel of moist pallid online dudes who freebased Jordan Peterson throughout the 2010s and antisocialized themselves into treating relationships with women as a sort of transactional warfare between sexes, in which men are bold adventurers looking for sex and family, which are natural human connections they seem to view as video game achievements to be bestowed upon them if they enter the proper cheat code, in which women are hidden clay jars containing sex and family, to be discovered and then once found added to the inventories of adventuring men as acquisitions. A number of these creepy perverts got rich on tech or crypto or whatever, and they think their wealth makes them geniuses instead of just wealthy, and the ones who didn’t get rich through tech or crypto or whatever seem to think the wealth of the others conveys genius upon themselves, so now they go around talking about themselves as Alpha Chad masters of the universe, and speak of other human beings like they’re fodder for their whims, and generally sound do their very best to sound like eugenicist mad scientists in Victorian novels.

Egg-zackly. These people aren’t just weird, they’re dangerously weird.

And they’re only to Pennsylvania! But it’s very entertaining. So I’ll leave you here.

The news has been moving at such a blistering pace of late. I know this story has already been passed around, but honestly, it was so interesting I have reread it a few times, and you should, too.

It’s about how Tim Walz, as a high-school teacher in Alliance, Nebraska, a little town in the western part of the state, decided to teach his geography class about genocide. This was in 1993, although the story linked above is from 2008, when Walz had recently been elected to Congress. And so:

Mr. Walz had already taught for a year in China, and he brought the world into his classroom in the form of African thumb pianos and Tibetan singing bowls. For the global geography class, he devised something far more ambitious than what the curriculum easily could have been — the identification and memorization of capitals, mountain ranges and major rivers. It was more ambitious, too, than a unit solely on the Holocaust of the sort many states have required.

“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. “Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters.

“The problem is,” he continued, “that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.”

How did he do this?

For nine weeks through the winter and early spring that school year, through the howling blizzards and the planting of the first alfalfa on the plains, the class pored over data about economics, natural resources and ethnic composition. They read about civil war, colonialism and totalitarian ideology. They worked with reference books and scholarly reports, long before conducting research took place instantly online.

I’m already loving his approach as a teacher. I wonder how many kids were in the school. How lucky they were to have a teacher like this. At the end of the unit, he asked them to give their best guess where the next genocide would happen, offering them about a dozen choices. And what did they come up with?

Their answer was: Rwanda. The evidence was the ethnic divide between Hutus and Tutsis, the favoritism toward Tutsis shown by the Belgian colonial regime, and the previous outbreaks of tribal violence. Mr. Walz awarded high marks.

Well. We all know what happened the very next year.

This guy isn’t perfect, because no one is. But I’d vote for a teacher who came up with a lesson like this over a guy who peddled a memoir selling out his community.

Well, how was your weekend? Mine was busy, at least until I tried to bring a heavy box in from the front porch, struggled to get the screen door open, and fell on my ass right off the whole thing. I’m fine, but I took a bang on the ribcage and my hip. The good news is, I didn’t break anything, but I do have a garish bruise the size of my hand there. And it still hurts to move. It’ll be better in a few days, but it sucks to glimpse your mortality, doesn’t it?

Another killer week ahead, with one after that, and then Labor Day weekend, and after that — relief.

This might be the last day for this for a while:

Fortunately it was a great day for it.