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.

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.

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

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

Facts matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK, time to get to work.

It really doesn’t feel like Memorial Day until someone reproves you for expressing happiness that you have a day off. There are MAGA scolds everywhere, especially since they jumped down Kamala’s neck for daring to tweet “enjoy the long weekend.” MAGA scolds spend the day in prayer and reflection, perhaps leaving church long enough to nibble on a hot dog and wave a little flag.

We’re having barbecued ribs here at the Nall-Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere home base. We are happy it’s a nice day. We are concerned these may be some of the last nice days the U.S. gets, as we have a lunatic president and a crew of enablers bound and determined to destroy it. Here’s his Memorial Day message:

Once again, I will say it: I can’t wait until this motherfucker is dead. I will celebrate. I will dance. I will open my windows and ululate.

This being MemDay weekend, it’s also Movement weekend, the big techno dancefest that seems to grow every year. For a while I collected drug stories around the festival, as stimulants and hallucinogens are pretty deeply embedded in the culture. (Not all techno fans, etc. etc. But when Kraftwerk plays an impromptu set at 4 a.m., a real thing that happened at an after hours a while back, that audience wasn’t staying alert on black coffee.) My fave was the tale, perhaps true perhaps not, of the dealer who set up shop outside one of the more popular nightspots in an RV, and served his wares out a side door, like a food truck. Detroit, and illegality, is a rich garden of economic innovation. However, my friends who do the festival regularly are now deep into their 30s, weed is fully legal, and I’m reliably informed that as the weekend wanes, you’re more likely to find restorative yoga brunches than a Xanax party.

We went to a Thursday-night jazz-cozying-up-to-techno set last week, and it was very nice. The trumpeter had an echo pedal on his mic, not something you see every day.

As I am an Elder, my main — my only — mind-alterer is a nice cocktail. Alan just served me one, in fact. Isn’t that a pretty mojito?

I appreciate the choice of the green straw. He’s always had an eye.

If I were a harder worker, I’d come up with a few paragraphs about the sacrifices of war. But today, I’m not. Enjoy the long weekend.

Mercy me, it’s Thursday already? That it is, and I completely missed on the midweek blog. Sorry about that.

However, others have been gathering string on my behalf. On someone’s behalf, anyway. While I strive to find the top of my desk under a shifting stack of work, please enjoy:

Eric Zorn, a Chicagoan, justly praises Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s stirring call to action, delivered in New Hampshire on Sunday. You probably saw piece of it here and there, and if you didn’t, rest assured: It was a good’un:

Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption, but I am now. These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have. We must castigate them on the soapbox and then punish them at the ballot box.

They must feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history with our democracy intact — because we have no alternative but to do just that — that we will relegate their portraits to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors. … I’m telling you what I’m willing to do, and that’s fight for our democracy, for our liberty, for the opportunity for all of our people to live lives that are meaningful and free.

Being in Chicago, he was able to report the Tribune’s, and the Illinois GOP’s, ridiculous reaction:

The Illinois Republican Party rushed to the fainting couch in a news release Monday headlined, “Pritzker Calls For Violence Toward Republicans.”

JB Pritzker’s attempt to woo New Hampshire Democrats as he barrels towards the 2028 Democrat primary was full of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric. Pritzker’s obsession, to insult and to chastise President Trump, showed forcefully as he stoked the crowd in calling for political violence against Republicans.

The Tribune reported:

Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, reposted a clip of Pritzker’s speech on social media and asked, “Are you trying to inspire a 3rd assassination attempt on my dad?” And deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller in Washington also criticized the remarks, saying they “could be construed as inciting violence.”

“The destruction of property sits directly adjacent to the — to attacks on humans, physical attacks,” said Miller, who also cited the past assassination attempts on Trump.

Easy there, Grand Old Paranoids. Fighting with “every microphone and megaphone that we have” is call for protests and rhetoric, not a call to take up bear spray, baseball bats and flagpoles, as those who answered the call from Dear Leader did on Jan. 6, 2021.

When you’ve pissed off both Don Jr. and Stephen Miller, you know you’ve hit a nerve. Keep it up, governor.

Eric’s Substack is pretty good, btw. He publishes twice a week, with the Chicago-heavy content going in the Tuesday edition, the paid one. Thursday’s is friendlier to non-Chicagoans.

Bonus Zorn: Exploring the origins of the word “tilt” as a synonym for malfunction, and its roots in pinball, he quotes from “Wired,” Bob Woodward’s book:

In his 1984 book “Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi,” author Bob Woodward described the coked-up actor at one point as “like a pinball machine on tilt, out of control.”

The quote made me wince, because it’s such a perfect illustration of what a leaden writer Woodward is. I remember reading “Wired” and thinking, how can a book about a comedian be so unfunny? FWIW, a pinball machine on tilt is not “out of control,” it’s dead. Activating the tilt sensors makes the machine freeze and lets the ball roll out of play. But the book was full of passages like that. Probably the worst was Woodward on the chizborger-chizborger sketch, an SNL classic, which he lays out in such excruciating detail that it isn’t even mildly amusing.

In other news, I recently became aware of a publication called Michigan Enjoyer. Hmm, what’s this, I thought, and clicked on their About page, where I read:

Michigan Enjoyer is Michigan media for those who relish the beauty of life here and are tired of apologizing for it.

Wha-? Huh? As one who enjoys the beauty of life here and has never once apologized for it, or even thought I should, I read on:

An antidote to the boring, biased, and out-of-touch local media, we’re here to breathe vitality back into a state that used to overflow with it. You “problematic” Michiganders too busy building to be depressed and offended—you’re our driving force.

Oh. OK. If you scratch someone upset about the boring, biased and out-of-touch local media, nine times out of 10 you’ll find a right-winger, and whaddaya know, I’m right. Here’s a recent headline:

DTW Is the Democrat Dream

Subhed: It’s an ultra-safe surveillance state full of high-end luxuries, so why do we all hate being there?

What follows is a glimpse into the mind of an editorial team who thinks some people go around apologizing for enjoying the beauty of life in Michigan. While I despise the early-2000s habit of dissecting blogs line-by-line, once known as “fisking,” I must say this column was just one jaw-dropper after another:

Detroit Metropolitan Airport is a leftist utopia. Everything is pre-packaged, arbitrary rules are strictly enforced, and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s voice even blares over the loudspeakers.

That’s the lead. First of all, it’s a what? And how does pre-packaged everything make it so? At a time when having the wrong tattoo and a Chicago Bulls cap can get you sent to a concentration camp, is this the time to whine about arbitrary rules from a conservative corner? As for Benson’s voice, he’s objecting to a recording played every so often in recent weeks, reminding travelers that the Real ID deadline is absolutely coming for real this time, and they should be mindful. We heard it when we went to New Orleans. I don’t recall it being all that frequent, or in any way blaring.

I should stop here to confess my prejudice: I like our airport. I don’t like that it’s on the other side of the county, but I can live with that. The entrances and exits make sense, there are plenty of restrooms, moving sidewalks, a tram, lots of food choices and it’s never less than reasonably clean. But most important, it’s a hub. You can fly nonstop from Detroit to Tokyo, for crying out loud. Spend 20 years of your life in someplace like Fort Wayne, and then come back to me with your complaints. In that city, the choice was always to either pay significantly more to book a vacation flight out of there, or save the extra dough by driving to Indianapolis or Chicago, which isn’t so bad when you’re departing, full of we’re-on-vacation high spirits. When you return, tired and road-weary, you now face a 110- or 150-mile drive to your house, and that part sucks.

But it’s the nature of this guy’s complaints that blow my mind:

(Airports) are always regulated by county- or city-port authorities and almost always located within or adjacent deep blue urban hubs. They even have special police forces and federal TSA security apparatchiks enforcing terminal access.

…When faced with overt government regulation, travelers are forced through a slightly humiliating screening process, as frequent flyers pay for quicker security sweeps.

…The McNamara and Evans terminals look less like airports and more like suburban malls. The PGA Tour Shop, Johnston & Murphy, Estee Lauder, Brookstone, and iStore Express. These are global brands for a super-striver consumer. But it’s a command economy with a neoliberal flavor. Travelers are captured and repeatedly price gouged due to a lack of competition.

Welcome to every single airport in the country, except for the smaller ones like Fort Wayne, which probably doesn’t have a Johnston & Murphy, Estée Lauder, etc. The big thing everyone mentions about FWA is this: A crew of greeters offers warm cookies to arrivals. This is nice! I’d love a cookie. It would sustain me on my 150-mile final drive to my destination.

But so many questions have I! The terminals “look less like airports and more like suburban malls?” What should airports look like, because in between those mall stores and restaurants are gates with windowed walls where you can see planes. Would you prefer a three-sided shed, a wind sock and a crew that starts the planes by pulling on the propeller, the pilot in a leather helmet giving a thumbs-up from the cockpit? I prefer the modern version, even if it comes with a neoliberal flavor. And price-gouging? People don’t shop at the airport for bargains — it’s on the other side of security. You shop there because you forgot to pack something, or you’re bored, or you have money to burn. Expect to pay a premium for this.

Then he bitches again about Real ID, claiming “what it really appears to be is a state (and federal) cash grab to force adults over the age of 18 to get brand new state ID cards that are somehow harder to falsify.” Why do we have this law? Because the 9/11 Commission recommended it. It was passed by Congress and signed into law by, anyone? George W. Bush. Full implementation has been delayed now for 20 years. If it were a cash grab, it’s a pretty shitty one. But I’d point out to this writer that it’s no more onerous than the requirements they want to enshrine in the SAVE Act, the one that will require new voters to prove their citizenship to register. 9/11 actually happened. But non-citizens voting is vanishingly rare.

Oh, well. Some people will never be happy. I’ll offer this miserable traveler one pro tip: TSA Pre is the single best $80 I ever spent, even factoring in the hassle of having to be fingerprinted. It’s good for five years, and every time I fly, which isn’t often, I’m glad I did it. But then, I’m a Democrat. And I like having a cocktail before I board, even if it is overpriced.

The last thing I’ll say about Michigan Enjoyer: It’s the latest stop on the downward spiral of Charlie LeDuff’s career. And he’s doing the same thing to them that he did to Deadline Detroit: Cut/paste his column into his own social media, thereby depriving his publisher of the click. What a guy.

OK, it’ll be Friday in 24 hours and I still have work to do. Enjoy the weekend, and let’s hope there’s fewer chores next week.

I guess most of you saw at least something about the demonstrations on Saturday. Hands Off 2025 ranged from sea to shining sea, and organizers said at least 500,000 RSVP’d for the events. I didn’t even know that was an option; I just showed up. (Or maybe I did, saw the RSVP link that required me to give them my email, and thought: Nah, I get enough junk mail already.) Anyway, based on the turnout in Detroit on a chilly, overcast, rain-threatening day, I’d say the crowds exceeded expectations.

There were several thousand marching here. At least 8,000, I’d guess. The course was from the Detroit Institute of Arts to Little Caesars Arena down the southbound sidewalk of Woodward, then back on the other side of the street, 1.7 miles each way. The returning side was back at the DIA while some were still leaving the grounds. Lots of people, lots of horn-honking from passing motorists.

I made a sign, because George Soros promised me an extra $10 if I did:

Thanks to Dorothy for the idea. It was clever, but not cleverest by far. A selection of my own photos:

And some bangers I found on social media, mostly Bluesky:

Here’s Fort Wayne, with Mark the Shark’s granddaughter and her great-uncle Phil:

P.S. Her dad’s a pediatrician, and that little girl looks EXACTLY like her grandmother.

The biggest media fail I’ve seen so far comes from the Detroit News, which so dropped the ball they ended up posting a story about the march in Wyandotte, a downriver suburb. Three hundred people showed up, Debbie Dingell spoke, and they gave four paragraphs of pushback to the chairman of the state GOP, who sneered at what he called a “fake grassroots organization.” Are you kidding me? It was so grassroots it smelled like a new-mowed lawn. At least he didn’t talk about outside agitators or paid protestors, but I don’t know what the reporter left in her notebook. (And George Soros better pay me that extra ten bucks!)

I took the bus there and back, because we’re down to one car this week and Alan was supervising some plumbing fiddling over at Kate’s before she moves in. Stopped on my walk back from the bus stop for a slice of Buddy’s Pizza, and a nice Girl Scout was selling cookies outside. Now that’s what I call a good day.

Posting early for timeliness’ sake. Hope your Hands Off was fun and heartening, too.

I’m thinking of going to a Hands Off demonstration this coming weekend — there are several in the metro area. But I need some ideas for a sign. Bottom line: I want it to be mean, because fuck those guys. So far I’ve got:

HEY ELON
YOUR SON
is NOT a
HUMAN SHIELD

Too obscure?

Or

ELON MUSK:
GENEROUS WITH HIS SEMEN
STINGY WITH YOUR MONEY

Too wordy.

Or

VANCE & TRUMP:
FATMAN & ROBIN

This only works if you know the Burt Ward Robin.

Something along those lines. If you have any brainstorms, drop ’em in the comments.

An amusing story in the WashPost today (gift link) about the disappearance of the Oval Office ivy.:

The ivy sat atop the fireplace mantel for most of the past 50 years, providing a backdrop for meetings with countless leaders and foreign dignitaries at the White House. It has filtered the air breathed by Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Whitney Houston.

Cuttings were given to exiting staff members, to propagate their own plants. “Countless” people have Oval Office ivy descendants in their own offices and homes now. A sharp-eyed trustee of his own ivy plant noticed something different on the mantel now:

In its place, conspicuously, are seven gleaming decorative objects, seemingly made of gold. A Maryland writer named Jamie Kirkpatrick noticed them earlier this month, around the time of the contentious Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, when the mantel was visible in nearly every photograph of Trump and Vice President JD Vance arguing with Zelensky.

What were those? Kirkpatrick wondered. Golf trophies?

No. And they’re not trash, but they are golden objects for a president who loves golden objects:

They’re artifacts from the White House’s own collection. The central gilded bronze basket, called a compotier, was made in France around 1815 and gifted to the Nixon administration in 1973. To its left and right are a pair of urns from the Monroe Plateau, a set of gilded tableware acquired by President James Monroe in 1817, shortly after the British burned the White House. The outer two sets are from a collection acquired during the Eisenhower administration that are usually displayed in the Vermeil Room, which is named after its contents. (Vermeil is gilded silver.)

Click through for some shots of the ivy before and after the gold-plated president sent it back to the greenhouse. God, what a jerk.

Another gift link, to a story in the NYT, about a woman who rode her “medical freedom” to an early grave:

In 2007, more than 1,440,000 Americans were diagnosed with cancer. Dawn Kali was one of them. Then in her mid-30s and raising three kids, Ms. Kali’s natural warmth and openness made her a popular waitress at the raw-food restaurant where she worked in San Francisco. When her doctor told her she had Stage 1 breast cancer, the fact that survival rates for her cancer type were in excess of 90 percent (and rising) did little to soften the emotional blow. Ms. Kali knew what cancer entailed: a barrage of medical treatments that seemed to sap people of their quality of life. And then they’d die anyway. “That’s not going to be me,” she swore.

Nope! Instead, Kali fell in with a quack:

She discovered “The pH Miracle,” a 2002 book written by a charming self-proclaimed naturopath named Robert Oldham Young. Mr. Young asserted that deacidifying the body through diet, exercise and his pH Miracle-branded pills and creams could cure virtually any sickness. Cancer, Mr. Young taught, was merely a symptom of an acidic internal environment. His credibility was bolstered by his appearances on national talk shows that featured him as a diet guru.

Ms. Kali adopted Young’s “alkalarian” program: an all-liquid, low-acid diet of vegetable smoothies supplemented by Mr. Young’s proprietary pHour Salts, purified water drops and green powders. Soon she was drinking a gallon of juice each day. Now, she controlled her treatment. The prescribed combination of a strict diet, meditation and exercise left her feeling empowered.

It also left her cancer free to spread. You can guess how her story ends. I will say that Kali did finally wise up, but too late. The story is about much more than Dawn Kali, and I’ll bet you can guess whose name pops up.

OK, then. A nice weekend. Kate closed on her house! She moves soon.

We celebrated with champagne, and took some of it at the kitschy basement bar, likely to be a rehearsal space:

I did my friend Jimmy’s fun-fiction class again. The class is in Hamtramck. Followed this deep thinker through a few stop signs:

Sigh. As my friend Deb texted me last week, just once I want to wake up, look at my phone and not say, “Jesus Fucking Christ.” Let’s all have a good week, eh?

Seems I’ve been neglecting this venue in recent days. Sorry about that. Life and work has piled up, but the pile is manageable now, and so: Back to it.

Like most of you, I’ve been watching the unfolding of the Signal scandal — and it is a scandal, and not one I’ll affix “-gate” to — with a growing sense of horror. The initial horror of the deed, followed by the exasperated horror of the spin: Seriously this is not the big deal you think it is, nothing classified was shared, anyway Signal is secure, anyway that guy should have revealed himself anyway HILLARY DID IT FIRST, etc. As a friend said, wait until Hegseth leaves his phone in a bar somewhere. Because you know that’ll happen. But at this point I don’t have anything special to say about it that hasn’t already been said, so let’s just continue that conversation.

I do have a number of photos to share.

Got my car washed yesterday, because it was shamefully dirty. I don’t know about your car wash, but mine is like an explosion of small-market capitalism, the long hallway from the drop-off to the pickup bays lined with windows — so you can watch the wash, of course — and under that, stacks of stuff for sale because you never know what you might be missing. Peanut-butter pretzels are big this week; a while back it was barrels of cheese puffs. Office supplies of the sort sold near the checkout lines at Staples — tissue, Post-its, legal pads. Lots of car-related stuff like air fresheners or steering-wheel covers (a product I’ve never used, nor felt the need for). Shop towels, microfiber and cotton, in bulk. Lately they’ve been selling generic versions of those Scrub Daddy sponges. There’s a mechanical horse for children to ride while they wait. Self-published books by local authors, and the traditional bulletin board of business cards. But lately I’ve been taken by the family-business displays, like this:

The car wash is called Mr. C’s. That is the original Mr. C, although I’m sure he perished long before it opened. That is one impressive mustache. Sicilian, of course, because northern Italians weren’t the main immigrants from the boot, but rather, the impoverished southern ones. A framed obit near this photo tells more of the story. Sorry the picture is so crappy, but I can read it:

The subject being remembered is the second Mr. C, son of the mustache man. After the original Mr. C came here and earned enough money, he came back to Sicily, married, and left his pregnant wife behind while he crossed the water again and started his grocery business, “pushing a vegetable cart on Detroit’s east side.” At some point he sent for his family; his little boy was 6. The cart became a store, then another store, and by the time that little boy retired in 1969, he went to work in his children’s businesses, which by then included another market, and then a line of delis. The car washes came in 1991, across the street from one of the delis. His son, Vito Jr., is now called Bill. (Or was — this obit is from 2000. Dunno if he’s still with us. The top-tier wash is called “Bill’s Best,” and that’s the one I got.) The Mack Bewick Market is now deep in the hood; it was owned by a friend of a friend’s father for a time, and was notable for not having any bulletproof plexi between the customer and the clerk, “however, the clerks were never more than an arm’s length from a gun,” friend reports. I found a social-media post by someone who said “you could get ANYthing there,” and she wasn’t talking about drugs, but rather, the things that make hood life possible, like low-cost infant formula, counterfeit license stickers for your plates, etc.

An inspiring family story. I wonder how they feel about current U.S. immigration policy.

It’s been chilly this week, but it won’t last, and yesterday Alan raked up all the plant detritus, mulched it with the mower, ran out the gas in the snow blower and set the stage for the first green shoots, expected soon:

We’ll check back in a few weeks, see how it shapes up.

Finally, I followed a link on an old blog a few days back and lo, it still works, and isn’t this story more interesting now:

Boeing should have rejected then-President Donald Trump’s proposed terms to build two new Air Force One aircraft, the company’s CEO said Wednesday.

Dave Calhoun spoke Wednesday on the company’s quarterly earnings call, just hours after Boeing disclosed that it has lost $660 million transforming two 747 airliners into flying White Houses.

This was in 2022, and Boeing was already $660 million in the hole, and responsible for all cost overruns, under a contract signed during the first Trump administration. Meanwhile, I read this story last month:

President Trump, furious about delays in delivering two new Air Force One jets, has empowered Elon Musk to explore drastic options to prod Boeing to move faster, including relaxing security clearance standards for some who work on the presidential planes.

What could possibly go wrong! Keep an eye on this. It could get good — or funny!! — really fast. I want someone to only finger-tighten the bolts holding down the POTUS-only toilet. If regular civilians have to fly on planes with the doors blowing off, it’s the least they can do for us.

Thursday already! Have a great one.

We went to Costco on Saturday, a very bad idea, although Costco was handling the crowd pretty well — all checkout lanes open, and as always, the ruckus was in the fresh-foods section, where people were lined up for Lunch at Costco, i.e. all the samples they were giving out.

To be sure, one of those people was me, although only in the less-busy stations. I ate a bite of plant-based pasta, some sort of savory pastry, chicken Alfredo and cherry cheesecake. Mea culpa.

That said, it was kinda festive, because everyone, and I mean everyone except the Derringers, was outfitted in festive Detroit Lions merch, and spirits were high. Go Lions! We’re Super Bowl-bound!

Alas, that didn’t work out. This is why I, generally speaking, don’t follow sports. Isn’t life full of enough disappointment? Isn’t the idea of facing the next four years misery enough? Do we have to layer our crushing moods like a party dip? I say leave that to others. In return, I promise I won’t bandwagon when your team is having a great year.

This was the Costco in Macomb County, i.e. Trump country, so it’s possible all the smiles and go-teams were also about Monday’s events, and I’m not talking about the King holiday. Perhaps it just wore Lions merch instead of MAGA hats. Entirely possible, but at this point I don’t care. I put down the NYT in despair today, unable to read anything more troubling than a short piece on Jamie Leigh Curtis. But it won’t last. I’m only practicing self-care, and only for a while.

This very interesting data tool shows that I’m among friends in my precinct — Harris by 28 — and the metro area in general is still blue enough for comfort. For now. Anyway, I ain’t giving up.

That said, if you’re feeling fragile at the moment, you probably don’t want to read this, but here’s a taste. It’s about Trump’s phone call with the Danish prime minister last week:

In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion. Trump made it clear to Frederiksen that he is serious about Greenland: He sees it, apparently, as a real-estate deal. But Greenland is not a beachfront property. The world’s largest island is an autonomous territory of Denmark, inhabited by people who are Danish citizens, vote in Danish elections, and have representatives in the Danish Parliament. Denmark also has politics, and a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.

At the same time, Denmark is also a country whose global companies—among them Lego, the shipping giant Maersk, and Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic—do billions of dollars worth of trade with the United States, and have major American investments too. They thought these were positive aspects of the Danish-American relationship. Denmark and the United States are also founding members of NATO, and Danish leaders would be forgiven for believing that this matters in Washington too. Instead, these links turn out to be a vulnerability. On Thursday afternoon Frederiksen emerged and, flanked by her foreign minister and her defense minister, made a statement. “It has been suggested from the American side,” she said, “that unfortunately a situation may arise where we work less together than we do today in the economic area.”

If you voted for this, then, well, you voted for this.

I will be practicing self-care all day Monday, i.e. not watching the new administration goose-stepping into the White House. If anything happens, I’ll hear about it later and there will be multiple camera angles. My house needs cleaning. That’s what I’ll be doing. How about you?

I’m leaving Twitter on Monday. Monday, the day all of Elon Musk’s evil plans click fully into place at noon? That seems to be a good idea. I’ve already deleted it from all my mobile devices. I can still access it through a web browser, but there’ll be another level of inconvenience that will discourage me from doing so (as though the content, which is truly like a sewer nowadays, doesn’t already).

But the other day I stumbled upon a tweet by a Detroit media personality who is currently grubbing the bottom of the barrel of his career, trying to rebrand as a conservative. And this individual made a point of excoriating our newbie senator, Elissa Slotkin, for her questioning of Pete Hegseth this week, on the subject of whether, as Secretary of Defense, he’d obey an order from Donald Trump to send in federal troops to quell domestic unrest, or anything else he feels like tamping down with jackboots.

She’s so dumb she doesn’t even know about 1967!, etc. Hard to imagine that a military veteran and CIA analyst, as Slotkin was in an earlier chapter in her life, wouldn’t know that indeed, the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions, about 5,000 troops, were sent into Detroit during the civil unrest. I mean, I know that, and I’m not even a native.

But he leaves out the most important detail: That federal troops came to Detroit at the explicit and official request of the mayor and governor, after local police and National Guard troops were unable to quell the violence after (I believe) three nights of it. I talked to a friend who knows more about this than just about anyone, and he said it was quite a dramatic moment; President Johnson requested network television airtime at midnight to announce the action. Flanked by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Attorney General Ramsey Clark, LBJ laid out the request and his decision to grant it. It’s on YouTube, and you can watch it. Said the president:

I am sure that the American people will realize that I take this action with the greatest regret and only because of the clear, the unmistakable, and the undisputed evidence that Governor Romney of Michigan and the local officials in Detroit have been unable to bring the situation under control. Law enforcement is a local matter. It is the responsibility of local officials and the governors of the respective states. The federal government should not intervene except in the most extraordinary circumstances.

Only someone trying to mislead you would ignore that Trump has said he wants to send troops into American cities on his own whim, not at the request of local officials. He has spoken of “the enemy within.” From the AP last fall:

As Trump’s campaign heads into its final stretch against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, he is promising forceful action against immigrants who do not have permanent legal status. Speaking in Colorado on Friday, the Republican described the city of Aurora as a “war zone” controlled by Venezuelan gangs, even though authorities say that was a single block of the Denver suburb, and the area is safe again.

“I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered,” Trump said at the rally. “We will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them out of our country.”

This is, of course, what Slotkin was trying to get Hegseth to talk about. What will he, and Trump, do when Fox News gins up another “crisis?” My friend said he thinks we’ll find out sooner rather than later. I’m afraid I agree. And he won’t do it with the greatest regret, as LBJ did. Get ready, Springfield.

Meanwhile, every MAGA idiot is rolling at the incoming president’s feet like puppies. This is in Indiana:

One of Indiana’s most influential elected officials wants to take the practice of trying to lure residents from neighboring states a step further by annexing entire counties.

Republican House Speaker Todd Huston’s bill to create an Indiana-Illinois Boundary Adjustment Commission to “embrace neighboring counties that want to join low-tax, low-cost Indiana” is one of the supermajority’s priority bills for the legislative session, meaning it has a good chance of passing.

“Annexing.” Such a benign word. You want to live in “low-tax, low-cost” Indiana? Fine. It’s still a free country. MOVE THERE. Of course, if you lose a hand in an industrial accident, you’ll collect about $4.17, because the insurance industry owns the legislature. If you need help in an emergency, make your way down to your township trustee’s office, get on your knees and beg. Chances are you’ll be sent away with a lecture about self-reliance. Maybe you’ll get a little cash, but prepare to come back in another month and do it again. That’s how Hoosiers do.

OK, then. The end of the week is coming into view, and mine’s been not-great. Let’s hope for a good weekend.