I read this story this morning in the Washington Post. Here’s the lede:

Major League Baseball has approached the Trump administration about hosting a game at a national park, officials from the White House and MLB confirmed Saturday.

The administration has scouted locations in Grand Teton National Park to build a baseball park to host an MLB game, according to two other people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

I’m considering writing a letter. Not an email, but a letter that goes into an envelope with a stamp, hand-addressed to Major League Baseball, Office of the Commissioner, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. It will read:

Dear Commissioner Manfred,

Sincerely, etc.

I’ve always thought the open letter is the lowest form of column-writing, followed closely by The Speech He Should Have Given, but this isn’t a column and it’s not an open letter, just the current contents of my troubled head, so whatever.

I don’t want to be too much of a doomer about our current situation, but when I read stuff like this — and I hate everything about this story, including the obligatory quote from some national park advocacy group pointing out the obvious — I think we’ve gone around a corner that we won’t be coming back from. This is what happens when you stage a fucking MMA fight on the White House lawn. Every sport is going to want a piece of the action. One man, one man and his 70 million followers, every one of whom can eat a bag of dicks and then jump out a high window, brought this on. They broke this country. Who knew our big strong country was this fragile? Not I.

And don’t tell me this would be a temporary baseball stadium, to be disassembled afterward and the ground “restored,” or whatever. It crosses a line that says nothing in this country is as important as stupid spectacle, staged for rubes by despoiling something that was once thought sacred, or if not sacred, too important for this sort of thing. And to think, these are by and large the same people who had a stroke over Robert Mapplethorpe sticking a bullwhip up his ass.

I mean, in 18 months one man managed to ruin the premiere public-health agency in the world.
Measles is killing Amish children, but no matter — if they don’t survive, they weren’t strong enough to begin with, according to Bobby.

It turns out it’s easy work, destroying something that took decades, even centuries, to build. Just add Trump.

It’s been a quiet weekend. Cleaned bathrooms, swam, rode my bike down to the Ford House for their annual harvest fest, a big snooze unless you were in the market for trinkets, jewelry made from reclaimed tin, tea towels with the Detroit Lions logo or other crap. I spotted a local orchard’s cider-and-donuts stand and asked for one glass and one donut. “We’re only selling donuts in half-dozens, and cider by the gallon,” I was told. I guess the calories burned and sunshine enjoyed counted for something. Watched “Slow Horses.” Went to bed.

I hope yours was more exciting.

The trip to Fort Wayne was great. We saw old friends, met new ones, marveled at the evolving city, and saw a soccer — er, football — game, in the new stadium:

Yes, it’s nearly empty. But the season is almost over, and the stadium’s only been open since May. Parts of it are still under construction. But the tickets are reasonable, the design is thoughtful (there are picnic areas, children’s play places, and more) and I’m sure it’ll be an asset, going forward. Seating capacity of 9,000, and they expect to have concerts there eventually, so that capacity will grow with field seating.

We met with the mayor, who talked up the new park and this and that. Everyone is bullish on the Fort.

Now to the swag bag:

The Indiana tote bag I’ll use at the farmer’s market, the chocolate bar will be eaten, the zippered pouch will come in handy for something, the lip balm will live in the bottom of a bag. Which leaves the FW flag pin and the soccer scarf. Any FWFC fans out there who can use it? Or the pin? Brand-new, happy to share, free shipping.

Now I’m trying to catch up with stuff. A long car ride in the passenger seat leaves you with lots of links to share. So let’s hop to it.

A remarkable essay by Erick Erickson, a garden-variety wingnut, on the far-right lunatics who frighten even him:

Charles Haywood made his fortune selling shampoo. He sold his Indianapolis hair care company in 2020, and he has spent the years since writing out, at length and under his own name, what he would like to do with your country. Rod Dreher, who is no man of the left, read Haywood’s online ramblings and described Haywood as pouring out vile from “deep in his Midwestern Führerbunker”.

In a document he calls the Foundationalist Manifesto, Haywood explained that his preferred government “will not be democratic.” The state “will have unlimited means,” because “properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.” Women “will not be permitted to choose career over family.” Men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.” The state will seize the assets of “any citizen who views himself as a global citizen.”

Hoo-boy. Yes, a strong streak of leopards-eating-faces, etc., but worth a read.

The Indiana connection made me wonder whether Haywood was throwing a few shekels at the Indiana Policy Review, a one-man sinecure for a former colleague of mine, but no. I did find a typically stupid column by that colleague, praising the Amish, and contrasting them, in a single paragraph, with Muslims:

An Amish recently explained his community’s success to the Guardian newspaper: “I can see the big changes they have come to society, which my children will never see. There is more independence on the individual level, but people have become more selfish – everything is for themselves. We value the idea of working for the betterment of everyone. Our goal is to show people that it works if we are honest in our dealings, respect people and go the extra mile.”

In the simplest terms, the Amish ask the question: Just because a Ford GT can go 215 m.p.h., do you need to jump in and put the pedal to the floor? More exactly, they back up a bit and ask the question of whether you really need a Ford GT — or any car, for that matter. The thought occurs that this general approach might be useful in considering our own community’s questions about birth control, artificial intelligence, data centers and such. And education? Give me a minute to think of something I learned important in school after eighth grade . . .

…You don’t have to be an expert on either the Amish or the Muslims to make a comparison based on their actions and words. The Muslims are living a mistake of the 7th-century where they conflate religion and conquest, the outcome being predictable and disastrous. The Amish, God bless their hearts, have chosen not to make that mistake.

Huh? I wonder what it feels like to be a man in his 80s, living off the largesse of two wealthy families, with the sole task of producing garbage like this.

RFK Jr., off the leash again:

The speaker before Mr. Kennedy was Mark Gorton, the president of the MAHA Institute, who called the success of the polio vaccine a “fraud,” priming the audience for the remarks of their former leader, who railed against vaccines for two decades. The speaker after him was Andrew Wakefield, a discredited British doctor whose retracted paper linked the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine with autism. Decades of research have proved that finding to be wrong.

…He promised the crowd that he would “be in this fight” to the end, and said the work he was doing was methodical. He added that his team was launching studies after which, he said, “we will take appropriate action.”

He also generated applause when he announced that he would be looking at the health effects of electromagnetic radiation and so-called chemtrails, the trails left by airplanes that the Environmental Protection Agency has said are actually condensation, not chemicals.

Chemtrails. Andrew Wakefield. Trashing the polio vaccine. Every week, it’s worse.

But that’s it for me today. Happy weekend! I blogged three times this week! Now off to bike the bridge again.

This has been the summer of the e-bike. Or rather, the summer of assholes and idiots on e-bikes. I get the feeling it’s the same elsewhere, too.

My community is generally described as “affluent,” and the first thing you learn when you move here is, if you’re looking for someone to blame for teenage bad behavior, it’s usually the parents. When I was compiling police reports, I lost track of how many alcohol-soaked teen parties were saved from a law enforcement breakup by a lawyer dad stepping onto the front porch and denying entry. There was a horrific fatal car crash a couple years ago, where the teen driver was known to routinely travel at insane speeds — thanks, tracking apps — and was still allowed by his mother to drive. (The crash was on a residential street with a 25 mph speed limit. The kid was going 105 when he lost control. The passenger died, not him.) And this summer, it’s 13-year-olds on Class 2 or 3 e-bikes, bombing down sidewalks without a care in the world.

I hate to play in-my-day, but in my day, I got around on a 10-speed bicycle and felt like I had pure freedom under me. I can’t think of the last time I saw a kid on a regular old bike; they all have at least pedal assist or more frequently, throttles. These bikes are capable of 20 or 30 mph, and they are menaces. It would be one thing if they were ridden in the street, where they belong, but no. Their riders prefer the sidewalk, and they don’t practice even the simplest courtesies, like making noise when overcoming a pedestrian. That no one has been injured is a miracle. I have yet to see a kid wearing a helmet on one. EDIT: I should have said here that there hasn’t been a serious injury here. In Birmingham, two 13-year-olds on an e-moto, on the sidewalk, hit a turning truck, and both are in the ICU, a couple weeks later.

Last month, it was an actual chase on e-motos, which are a step above even the Class 3 e-bikes. They’ll go 50 mph, and three Grosse Pointe brats were, once again, blasting down a sidewalk on them when they caught the attention of the police, who chased and arrested them.

Other communities report similar incidents. And once again, I blame the parents. In my time on the planet, I’ve noticed a phenomenon among the better-off — as soon as they complain about what something their kid does costs, you can check your watch, and within 30 seconds they will tell you exactly what it costs. To wit: “My kid’s hockey is costing me so much, I can’t even tell you.” Three, two, one: “Twelve grand a year, can you believe it?” Or 20 grand, or 25. They have to tell you. They’re compelled to let you in on just how much income they’re willing to commit to their kid’s recreation.

And e-bikes, and e-motos, are not cheap. You’d have to be a very dedicated teenage lawn mower to save up the money for one. They are very dangerous, though, especially on sidewalks. One went past me so close a couple weeks ago I felt my arm hair stir. And downtown, leaving the jazz festival on my own 50-year-old regular bike, riding in the street, two young men on e-motos not only rode on a very narrow sidewalk, scattering pedestrians, they looked at me like I’m the chump, hey check out grandma pedaling her antique.

Damn kids these days. They’ll learn.

In other news at this hour, are you noticing a spate of car washes being built near you? We have; they’re popping up like mushrooms, sometimes within a block or two of an existing car wash. Guess who’s responsible? You won’t believe it:

This legislation permanently reinstated 100 percent bonus depreciation for qualified property placed in service after January 19th of [2025]. This change represents a game-changer for investors looking to reduce their tax burden while earning passive income through commercial real estate.

…Bonus depreciation allows investors to accelerate their tax deductions by expensing the entire cost of eligible assets in the first year. In the context of car wash investing, this can provide an enormous benefit.

Consider the following example:

** You invest two hundred fifty thousand dollars in a car wash syndication
** You receive a $400,000 depreciation allocation in the first year
** That amount may offset your taxable income from the investment and potentially from other passive income sources
** Your effective after-tax yield increases as your tax liability decreases
** In practical terms, investors can reduce or eliminate taxes on their distributions from the investment. For many, this creates a win-win situation: the combination of cash flow and significant tax deferral or reduction.

And why car washes? They require a big capital outlay up front, but begin cash flow quickly upon completion, so “this means the depreciation can potentially be matched to real distributions.” How nice. I can’t wait until we reach total market saturation, and these ugly monstrosities are abandoned to sit vacant and become crack houses. Data centers, but flashier.

OK, enough. We’re off to the Fort later this week, for a quick drop-in visit. Hoping for good weather, hoping for friendly faces. Hoping for fewer e-bikes.

Hey, everyone. Just catching up on the comments from the last post, which are infuriating. Or rather, infuriating and sobering, and I’m speaking about Little Bird’s Medicaid issues and Sherri’s husband’s cancer care. Strength and courage to both of you. It so happens I just saw a social-media post by a friend and former colleague who works for Easter Seals in Indiana. It details the loss of services and benefits for a young woman with Down syndrome, one who lives in a group home and can’t take care of herself outside it. Down syndrome. I ask you.

All so that the Bezoses and Musks of the world can get a tax cut. Also, so we can wage a stupid, world-destabilizing war and build a ballroom. Well-done, America.

Sherri, best to you and your husband on this — and here I will deploy a term I despise — cancer journey. Everything is a journey these days. Your weight-loss journey. Your menopause journey. Unless it’s a season, which is also popping on those indices that track language. I hear it a lot from terminally online people making excuses for why they’ve decided to turn a blind eye to Tubby’s atrocities: It’s just that I have other things on my mind in this season. Ah, I see.

But all the good luck to Sherri and her husband. Immunotherapy is truly amazing. It’s why Jimmy Carter lived well past his announcement that he was receiving hospice care. My sister has a friend who’s lived so long (and well) on the immunotherapy drug Keytruda that she’s known as a Keytruda long-hauler.

OK, then.

Yesterday we went shooting.

I shot just OK, which I blame on the weather. I prefer to hit the sporting-clay range on warm winter days — around 40 degrees — when the walk between stations doesn’t feel punishing, and the sun, should it arrive, ditto. In my defense, I slept badly both Thursday and Friday nights and the humidity hit me hard. I was sweating so much my glasses wouldn’t stay up on my nose, which made my aim rather haphazard. Alan, on the other hand, worked out the rust on the first few stops and was hitting most targets cleanly by the end. Every time we do this I fantasize about getting a Browning over/under like Alan’s and practicing enough to get good, or at least better, at it. Then I consider the associated expense, and the cleaning, and the number of times I’d actually get out to a range, and think, nah. But it’s fun once in a while.

Also, I’ve watched enough cop shows and Tarantino movies that I kinda fantasize about one of those pump-action Mossbergs, decidedly not a sporting-clays gun.

Today we’re headed to a pool party, so I should probably pack a bag. Let’s hope it doesn’t rain.

And let’s hope for a good week ahead, with lots more GOP missteps as the midterms approach.

Today’s to-do list:

Update blog
Pay two car insurance premiums
Think about the 9/11 anniversary on Friday.

So, to job no. 1, then: A couple weeks ago I wrote a check — a paper check, like the senior citizen I am — to Abdul el-Sayed’s campaign, and dropped it in the mail. The U.S. mail, also favored by we Olds. I did this specifically to avoid the fundraising platform Act Blue, through which I donated to Jocelyn Benson earlier in the year, and now spams me relentlessly, on every single channel of communication. Sorry, Dem Candidate Running in Arkansas, I wish you luck, but I don’t have the resources to help everybody. Every plea is a puppy looking up at you from the kill pen. Please please please our fundraising reporting deadline passed and we’re so far behind, etc.

Meanwhile, I’m getting the same pleas from El-Sayed, mostly on social media, and my check is still uncashed.

How often do you write checks? I just looked at my register, and it’s…eight so far in 2026. It would be near zero if my city would stop assessing a $10 service charge for online payments.

Just paid the car insurance, because I had to get up to pee and lost my train of thought here. Might as well get that out of the way.

So here we are at 9/11. As so often happens these days, I find myself arriving back at a state of disgust with my fellow American, at least the ones who voted for Trump. Like everyone else who is paying attention, I heard about Tubby’s remarks earlier this week on the subject. First, how envious he was of “the man in the red bandanna,” because that man, Welles Crowther, was briefly more famous than him, and Tubby doesn’t like that. Next, the statement that he went to lower Manhattan to help with the cleanup, and perhaps most outrageous, that he was rescued by two firefighters as one of the towers started to collapse.

Here, the Guardian has a roundup of a couple more 9/11 lies he’s told.

It’s just mind-boggling, how every stutter and hesitation and misremembering by Joe Biden was amplified and beaten like a bass drum, and the New York Times — the goddamn New York Times — called Trump’s lies part of an “evolving — and often disputed — account of his actions on Sept. 11 and in its aftermath.” Evolving! And often disputed! I mean, I know the NYT isn’t going to screech LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE, but to call this “disputed” is underselling it, I’d say.

I’m so disgusted. Two notes from the weekend:

1) Alan was watching the Take 6 performance, an a cappella group, wildly popular, at the jazz festival Sunday night. Between numbers, one of the vocalists remarked on the venue’s proximity to Canada, right across the river. “I love Canada,” he said, and the crowd roared its approval, at a near-ear-splitting level. Which you’d expect. Besides the proximity, some of the audience no doubt works in the auto sector, and the Detroit companies sell more than 600,000 vehicles in Canada, now tariffed at 50 percent.

2) I was sitting at breakfast Monday, alone at the bar in the hotel restaurant, chatting with a couple roughly my age, locals. We were talking about the temptation of moving to northern Michigan post-retirement, but then the husband said, “The only problem is, if you need a decent hospital, you have to come back downstate.” And I replied that the current administration had only worsened that issue, what with the rural hospital closings amid lower Medicaid reimbursements. The husband said, “Well, they voted for that.” No sympathy. And then he identified himself as a “real Republican.”

I know this doesn’t mean he’ll necessarily be voting for Abdul, but maybe he’ll stay home on Election Day, or leave that race untouched. One can hope.

OK, one bit of bloggage: While I know that when an allegation of child abuse is made, authorities must act quickly and not quibble over the trustworthiness of the accuser, hoo-boy the more that we learn about the accuser in the Pete Buttigieg accusation earlier this summer, the worse it gets:

While acknowledging that the evidence shows that her false hotline tip resulted in an “intrusive investigation of an innocent individual and his family,” the prosecutor determined the woman was not “capable of forming the requisite intent to support a criminal conviction.”

The caller has a long history of alcohol abuse and mental illness, E. Nelson Chipman Jr., a prosecutor in Indiana’s Marshall County, where investigators determined the call had originated, wrote to state police in a July 29 email outlining his decision [to not charge her with a crime]. Her history includes “hallucinations and delusional thinking which includes frequently responding to voices only she hears,” he added.

…The woman, who was not named in the email, is from Alabama but was visiting family in Indiana at the time of her call about Buttigieg. During her “relatively short stay” with relatives, she was involved in at least three separate police encounters, according to the prosecutor. The incidents included an arrest for domestic battery, during which her blood alcohol level was reportedly 0.32, four times the legal driving limit in most states.

Lordy. With that, I’m going to eat lunch and read a book on this rainy but otherwise very pleasant afternoon. Enjoy yours.

This weekend I learned that the German chocolate cake is not German in origin, but was in fact named for an American baker, Samuel German, who came up with the recipe as a way to use the semisweet dark chocolate he had…formulated would be the correct word, not “invented,” I guess. You can’t really invent chocolate.

I learned this while baking one, for an impromptu party thrown for an ex-editor. I also learned that “impromptu” and German chocolate cake don’t really go together. It’s a recipe that, if you’re devoted to scratch baking as I am, is pretty damn complicated. But it was the birthday boy’s favorite, and so I did my duty. Then I left my phone behind, so I’m enjoying a phone-free Sunday morning, and that’s a very good thing.

But it can’t last forever. I’m heading back over to his apartment in a bit to pick it up.

Work this week will be pretty wild, as we tick down the days to the Detroit Jazz Festival, the world’s largest free jazz festival, a phrase I probably wouldn’t have added before I started working on the social-media team, but that’s social media — marketing, not necessarily journalism. However, the job puts me face-to-face with great musicians and I get to hear some wonderful music in the bargain, so it only feels like work some of the time. It’s a good gig for the semi-retired.

Which is, as usual, my way of advance-apologizing for spotty blogging until we wrap on Labor Day.

That little factoid about German chocolate cake is the sort that sometimes gets me called something like “the walking encyclopedia” when I step out of journalism circles, where everyone is a walking encyclopedia. It goes with the job. “Did you know Dolly Parton had a disco album?” I remarked in a non-journalist text string last week after she died, and it happened again. I can’t help it, as I sit in a firehose of information all day. But today I found myself looking at the fresh New York Times and Free Press on my kitchen table and said, “I’m out.” You have to unplug from time to time, or your brain explodes. (Plus I already read much of it in the last few days, where the Sunday content is trickled out over the web. When our excellent newspaper carrier retires at the end of the year, I may cut back on one or more of our newspaper subs. Or I may not. Advertising in the print editions still supports many of them. I won’t be a party to killing a legit news source, even if they employ Mitch Albom.)

That said, I found a few stories to share today before I clock out:

We all remember the OMG SATANIC CHILD ABUSE IN DAYCARE CENTERS panic of the ’90s, right? Here’s an absolutely infuriating story about a woman who was swept up in it, served YEARS in prison for a crime she never committed, was finally released, and later received a formal exoneration, which would enable her to get compensation from the state of Ohio. However:

The exoneration cleared the way for Ms. Smith to seek compensation. She fantasized about being able to help her children — to pay off her eldest’s house and car and hire a lawyer to extricate her struggling youngest from legal trouble and child support debt. Maybe there would be enough, she hoped, to fulfill her lifelong dream of visiting the Vatican.

Ohio law is intended to make compensation for exonerees straightforward and quick, especially when the local prosecutor poses no objections. Under the law, Ms. Smith would receive at least $1 million. Mr. Tomlinson told the court he believed she had been wrongfully imprisoned and deserved recompense.

But then she ran into opposition from the state attorney general, Dave Yost, who stepped in and had Mr. Tomlinson’s statements stricken from the record.

[The original prosecutor] Mr. Rosenbaum, for his part, advanced a new argument: The exoneration should not have occurred, he said, because it had cleared the way for Ms. Smith to sue him and several others involved in her prosecution.

They were joined in their opposition by Tony Cillo, a Republican who had recently defeated [the prosecutor who supported the exoneration] Mr. Tomlinson, a Democrat, in his bid for re-election. Mr. Cillo called the exoneration “one of the most flagrant frauds upon the entire state of Ohio” and a conspiracy to “acquit and pay” Ms. Smith.

Mr. Yost’s office declined to comment on pending litigation, and Mr. Cillo did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Rosenbaum said, through his lawyer, that he had “prosecuted all his cases with the highest ethical standards, and the prosecution of Nancy Smith was no different.”

Yost, and all the rest of these terrible, terrible people, are slimy pieces of crap. A long read, but worth it.

Speaking of terrible people, Lucian Truscott’s Substack on Pete Hegseth is worth your time.

Finally, Dolly’s death got me thinking about Whitney Houston, for some reason. “I Will Always Love You,” a sweet song about leaving behind a lover (or maybe Porter Wagoner — accounts vary), is one thing in her voice, and quite another in Whitney’s, whose every recording carries the subtext of look what a belter I am. Not only that, she ushered in an age of belters that we’re still living through. Some years back, on a long drive, I cued up a Spotify playlist of various versions of “Lush Life,” a sad song about drinking yourself to death over a broken heart. The more recent the recording, the more likely it is to be belted by a singer who seems not to have actually read the lyrics. What do you think about this? Discuss.

I’ll be here this week, unless I’m not. Carry on.

The pedestrian/cycling lane on the new bridge has been open about two weeks. The Derringers took their first shot at it today. The weather report was favorable, the schedule was clear, and so we did it.

It’s a beautiful bridge, still clean and sparkling under the blue sky. The suspension cables give you some great details in the pictures. And there are many made-for-Instagram angles.

But ultimately, it’s the sky and the water and the other people on the bridge.

That’s Alan.

It’s a long climb up, and I regretted not checking my gears first, because I’m stuck on the big ring on the front. I mean, I made it, but I was glad for the downhill. On the other side, we blew through customs in a trice. “You have any weapons?” the Canadian border agent asked. “We’re bicyclists, not bikers,” I said. And that was that. Then it was two more miles into downtown Windsor for some Chinese food, and the whole thing in reverse coming back home. My sense was the Canadian climb was steeper, the American climb longer but shallower. So pick your poison. It’s a workout either way.

But overall, I think this bit of infrastructure is brilliant. There was solid bike travel both ways, and plenty of pedestrians, too. I’m not saying it’ll have a major impact on cross-border tourism, but any way you can get people crossing the border is a good thing. Now for an entrepreneur to park a food truck on either side, and you’ve got the start of an economy. In another couple of years, who knows what can happen. All because you made it easy for people who don’t travel in cars.

Just one bit of bloggage today, called to my attention by my Ohio people. An ad for Vivek Ramaswamy, running for governor there. It’s almost like the whole state hasn’t been in the grip of the GOP for years now. I hate this timeline.

But let’s have a good weekend anyway. Summer is fleeting. Let’s enjoy it, even if it rains.

Sometimes people ask if I miss being a working journalist. The answer: No. No, no, a thousand times no. I still have major respect, even awe, for people who continue to do it in this environment, but I have zero desire to join them. Every so often I’m inspired to write something for others to read, similar to what I do here but less messy. I have outlets for that. I don’t feel the urge to do it more than every so often.

Forgive me. I’m having a lost day. Slept very very badly last night, missed my workout, feel like shit. Spent much of the day working without much spark or pleasure, feeling gloomy about everything. Stuff like this, from my city’s email newsletter:

Built with AI, probably ChatGPT. It’s simply amazing how quickly this style has taken over the internet. I see it almost every day, and so much of it is ludicrously wrong — the tennis ball about to hit the woman’s head, the weird jewelry hanging from her neck, the fact that isn’t Lake Front Park, the flag with the weird stars (because without them, we might not know where we are, right?) — to name just a few. “Game, Set, Play.” The leaves on the court. The overall busyness of it. Graphic designers are going out of business because you can send ChatGPT a press release, and it will vomit up something like this.

I figure, if you’re going to oppose data centers, and I do, you have to not do the things that require data centers, like turn perfectly understandable words into AI slop flyers.

But creativity isn’t entirely dead. You may remember that back in May or June, I wrote about the revived, very stupid idea to turn Belle Isle, currently a state park, into a commonwealth or protectorate or something, where very wealthy people could live tax-free, in return for being job creators, or something. It was an idea first rolled out in 2013, when the developer who dreamed it up self-published a novella set some years in the future, after Belle Isle had become the Dubai of the Detroit River. It was a very strange book, with an undercurrent of homoeroticism that was immediately evident to any reader smart enough to know the meaning of the word. Also, a monorail. And F1 racing.

Anyway, a local journalist, Jeff Wattrick, wrote several scathing stories about it for Deadline Detroit, back when the site was new and fully staffed. He most memorably called the Commonwealth of Belle Isle something like “the HOA from hell, with police powers.” When the idea was rekindled late last year, pegged to a b.s. poll and Trump’s idea of “freedom cities” and a very compliant media willing to do anything for content, Wattrick was no longer in daily journalism, but still a writer. He started noodling around with a fictional sequel to the original story, and ended up with a 60,000-word novel. He’s started trickling it out on Substack, along with shorter interstitials about related this and that, like the b.s. poll and other stuff.

“Belle Isle 2: Belle Isler” is a slow starter, because he has to deal with the problem any sequel writer has: How much to assume your readers already know about the world you’re building. There are some very niche humorous moments: A discussion of setting up an emergency blood bank goes sideways, because the idea of donating something and not getting fair market value in return is anathema on Belle Isle. But once the action really starts, it’s showing a lot of promise. It’s a Hiaasen-esque first draft, but I’m enjoying it.

I hope I sleep better tonight.

And so we await the heat. I did a lot of complaining about the cold spring, but the last fortnight has been lovely, perfect June weather. Warm enough in the afternoon, but not too, which is to say perfectly comfortable without turning on the a/c. That won’t be the case starting tomorrow (high of 86) and continuing through the week, including a very unseasonal 99 on Wednesday. A legit heat dome. Things won’t start to moderate until a week from Tuesday.

Oh, joy.

We’ll make it through, of course. Providing the power doesn’t go down or some other emergency doesn’t strike. There are pools and fans and air-conditioning. Lucky us.

Me, I went through training Saturday to re-start my career as a precinct poll worker, a prospect that fills me with both anticipation and dread. The Michigan primary is in August, and no one expects any surprises. November is a different kettle of fish, of course. As I sat through two hours of stuff I mostly already knew, I tried to concentrate on the idealism of the people who signed up for this duty and not the nefariousness of the scoundrels already undermining the process by sowing doubt among the pigheaded idiots who still — still! — believe that the 2020 election was “rigged,” as the president says over and over. The people pulling their strings are going to keep up the propaganda until November and beyond, with repercussions yet unknown. In other words, it’s very likely going to be ugly.

I’ll just do my part. New wrinkles since the last time I did this job: As ballot-box inspector, the person who tends the tabulator, I have to stand 10 feet away when a voter is casting their ballot, i.e., feeding it into the machine, and only come closer if they’re having trouble and need my help. Also, we’re now doing curbside voting in Michigan, so that situation could come up. That’s about it.

It’s funny, working the polls. An efficiency expert could have a field day with how things run; you could easily get the job done with a third of the staff. But that would actually increase the chances of shenanigans. The beauty of this Soviet-style workforce is, no one has hands on a ballot for longer than a few seconds. When I worked the absentee counting boards, we had teams of six, and one person’s entire job was to smooth the ballots after they were taken from the envelope, so they’d feed into the tabulator without problems. Another person was charged with opening the envelope. It was ridiculous, but also genius.

And still, ignoramuses (ignorami?) claim it’s crooked. They wouldn’t last an hour at the job, having their preconceived notions smashed like china.

What else is going on this weekend? Oh, did you hear about this? A man, upset by the murder of Alex Pretti, wrote a letter to Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE. It read:

You are a monstrous human being and will go down in history as America’s Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher.

The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.

You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth.

Harsh moral condemnation? Absolutely. A threat? No. That didn’t stop federal agents from coming after the writer, a Rochester, NY man, at his home and then, later, at his hotel in NYC, where he was staying with his daughter. And all this came after they did the same to a woman who’d posted the name of the ICE agent who killed Renee Good, even though the name had been made public by the Minneapolis media. In the latter case, they pressured the woman to take the post down (she didn’t). In both, they informed the people involved that “they may be in violation of federal law.” (They aren’t.)

Guess what the woman who posted the ICE agent’s name was doing when they threatened her? Working the polls in last Tuesday’s primary in New York. In other words, being a good citizen.

Finally, although this is a long essay, it’s worth reading, if you have any interest in ’60s radicals. It’s a review of Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s memoir, as the son of Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. But it goes far deeper, analyzing political violence in that era, and held my interest throughout:

In the past few years, the American Left has reformed once again, largely in protest of the Israeli slaughter in Gaza. Like the Vietnam War a generation ago, those protesters have been aided by a central, clarifying conflict—there has been, relative to the DSA of yesteryear, a bit less getting sidetracked into pointless internecine conflicts over the progressive stack—and unlike the Weather Underground, they have been free of any organized Action Faction, of any real effort to cross from building occupation and protest into violence. Of course, this has not spared them the same accusations of pointlessness, unreasonableness, and bigotry for failing to adequately appreciate the glorious incineration of children by US taxpayer-funded bombs. Merely protesting outside of sites dedicated to the auctioning of violently seized land is treated as a kind of violence itself, met with the same yowls and fainting that would meet actual efforts to resist the flattening of Gaza City, the illegal settlement of the West Bank, or at least the United States’ insistence on providing political and material cover for the ethnic cleansing of a captive population. They are still called childish for believing that the world does not have to be this way.

But if it is childish, if any of this—the outrage, the horror, the belief that something must be done—is childish, it is only because a child could see it. It is only adults who find comfort in the reassuring sobriety of pessimism. I keep reading that these protesters—like us, like the left wing of the Weather Underground—have been seduced by anti-American propaganda, by the nefarious infiltration of subversive “ideology” into feeds and articles and schools. If you believe that, you must imagine 9/11 with a twist: hours after the towers fell, as FDNY and NYPD officers swarmed the scene looking for survivors, a second wave of al-Qaeda hijackers brought another plane held in reserve, crashing it into the smoldering ground to kill the rescue workers they had lured there with the first attack. This is ordinary business in Gaza and Lebanon. What dastardly “ideology” is required to find this fact appalling? What far more common ideology is required to shrug, to accept that this is the way the world must be?

OK, that’s enough. News from Hot City later this week, I hope. IF I SURVIVE…..

I was up very very early Tuesday, for a lifeguarding shift. There were caddis flies hatching everywhere, and I didn’t think my camera would catch them, but it did:

They’re fine. Don’t bite. Hatch out of the lake, fly around and die. The fish go crazy for them.

Afterward I swam. The morning was cool, the water heated. It was…heavenly. At least four of the other swimmers had caught the Grosse Pointe stop on the Barbara McQuade book-a-palooza, and were impressed by how great it was, how smart she was. We wondered where we are as a country. Then we swam some more.

I can’t tell you how much I resent having this asshole in my brain for, what? A decade now. And I suspect that even if he bites the big one tomorrow, it’ll be another decade, or longer, flushing him out of the nation’s system.

But that’s no way to start a pleasant Tuesday, is it?

I keep watching the Saga of the Reflecting Pool. As of late afternoon Tuesday, it appeared workers were putting fencing? Around the pool? And cops were rousting anyone who even went near the actual water. Josh Marshall with a few thoughts:

We’ve discussed in the past Donald Trump’s penchant for creating spurious backstories to justify his various building projects. We were told last year that presidents and executive branch officials had been complaining for decades — or centuries! — about the need for a White House ballroom. “For more than 150 years, every President has dreamt about having a Ballroom at the White House to accommodate people for grand parties, State Visits, etc,” he claimed at one point. And it took him to finally create it.

Rinse and repeat: these absurd fairy tales are always part of the Trump sales job. With the Reflecting Pool it’s apparently been in crisis for the last century. Only Trump is going to be able to fix it for good.

Everyone wanted abortion returned to the states too, remember?

Man, these Ukrainians are some tough dudes:

For several months last year, a Ukrainian housewife, 35 and lonely in a marriage that had gone cold, traded WhatsApp messages with a Chechen commander, Achmad, stationed somewhere in Ukraine’s occupied south. They wrote about their days, their disappointments, what they hoped to do when the war ended. She asked about the front. He told her.

“Send me a picture,” she said. “I want to see your life.”

One afternoon, he obliged—a photograph taken inside the barracks, of himself and another soldier grinning for the camera. Behind them, pinned to the wall, was a map of the compound showing the unit’s position.

The housewife did not exist. “She” was a middle-aged officer named Serhiy working for Ukraine’s military-intelligence directorate, part of a concerted effort to draw secrets from the men sent to occupy his country.

“Serhiy was great at flirting,” his commander told me. “Guys in our team started asking him for dating advice.” Shortly after Achmad sent that photograph, the coordinates it revealed were struck by a Ukrainian drone.

Well, when the United States abandons you, sometimes you gotta choose a new path.

Another night of rough sleep last night, so I’m going to hit the hay while the sun still shines. Not hard to do around the solstice. A good summer lies ahead, I hope, for everybody.