Writers are infamously messy, and I suppose I am too. My Google Drive, desktop and other repositories hold various half-baked drafts of this and that. From time to time I try to clear them out, but I hang on to some of them. One in my blog drafts folder has a headline — The indifferent sea. — and is an unkind look at something one of my husband’s former colleagues, who was college friends with none other than Stockton Rush, wrote about his dead classmate. Alan asked me to maybe consider not publishing it, if for no other reason than it would make future collegial gatherings maybe a bit awkward. I agreed.

Rush is, of course, the man responsible for his own death, and four others’, when his jerry-built submarine imploded en route to the wreckage of the Titanic in the North Atlantic. The U.S. Coast Guard has published its own report on the disaster, and it is…not kind:

At the time of the Titan’s final dive, Mr. Rush possessed a credential issued by the U.S. Coast Guard that permitted him to operate vessels of a certain volume on inland waters.

That credential was based on falsified information, the report said: In 2020, OceanGate exaggerated the volume of the Titan in a letter to the National Maritime Center so that it would appear as though Mr. Rush had the requisite time at sea needed to earn the credential.

…In an interview with the board, the OceanGate director of operations described a dive in which an earlier OceanGate submersible, the Cyclops 1, became stuck beneath the bow of the Andrea Doria shipwreck near Nantucket, Mass., with Mr. Rush at the controls. In response, Mr. Rush had a “meltdown,” the director of operations said, adding that when he asked Mr. Rush to relinquish the controls Mr. Rush threw the controller at him.

All of which made me dig up the original column, and hoo-boy, talk about aging like milk:

From test pilot Chuck Yeager to Mount Everest explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, risk-takers are a special breed. OceanGate CEO Tock was one of them. Unlike the astronauts and explorers who lived to reach the summit of mountains and outer space, however, Tock was fascinated by going to the bottom of the ocean.

…Ask anyone in my Princeton University Class of 1984 which one of us would be brave enough to dare such a mission, and Tock would be at the top of the list.

…When we were 19 years old, he became the world’s youngest commercial airline pilot, commanding Saudi Airlines planes during our college summers.

The part about Saudi Airlines was my first whoa moment. You’re telling me a commercial airline allows college students to fly its planes? Not quite. A little Googling reveals he worked as a first officer, i.e. co-pilot, on DC-8s operated by Overseas National Airways, which was under subcontract to Saudi Airlines to do charters, so kinda true, but not really.

But for the deepest and most unselfconscious look at ol’ Tock, you really have to go to the Princeton alumni publication:

Seemingly round-the-clock news coverage of the missing submersible has led to some unfavorable characterizations of Rush as a risk-taker whose adventures trended toward recklessness. Deep-sea explorers, oceanographers, and other industry leaders were reported to have expressed concerns about OceanGate’s safety precautions in recent years. For example, the Titan was built of both titanium and carbon fiber, which is used in the aerospace industry but considered experimental for deep-sea pressure.

“I mean if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything,” Rush told CBS Sunday Morning last year. “At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question. I think I can do this just as safely by breaking the rules.”

Rush’s friends said that quote has been used to misrepresent his “joie de vivre” outlook on life, and that the message of his quote was likely more along the lines of encouraging people to live their lives and not be afraid.

“History shows us that exploration and innovation are inherently risky and dangerous,” a group of alumni wrote in a statement to PAW, signing it “Proud and Grieving Friends of Tock.” “We’re disappointed, if not entirely surprised, at the outpouring of armchair quarterbacking about the science behind his work.”

Was Tock a rich kid? Of course he was:

He kept a private plane at the Princeton airport, and friends recounted adventures they took with Rush at the wheel.

…(A) friend who flew with Rush on his private plane during college remembered the feelings of trust and safety she felt on board. “He cared for people deeply and he wouldn’t want to put me in a position where I was unsafe.”

Bad things never happen to rich kids, as we all know. Ah, well. Now we know, but we always knew. Meanwhile, speaking of rich kids, Croaky has effectively pulled the plug on publicly funded mRNA vaccine research. If bird flu goes big, let me say it now, while I’m healthy: It was nice knowin’ ya:

Mr. Kennedy has been sharply critical of the technology. In a video posted on social media on Tuesday, he claimed incorrectly that mRNA vaccines do not protect against respiratory illnesses like Covid and the flu, that they drive viruses to evolve and that a single mutation in a virus renders the vaccine ineffective.

“As the pandemic showed us, mRNA vaccines don’t perform well against viruses that infect the upper respiratory tract,” he says in the video.

“By issuing this wildly incorrect statement, the secretary is demonstrating his commitment to his long-held goal of sowing doubts about all vaccines,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.

What else is new?

So that’s Wednesday’s stop on the Farewell to American Greatness tour. How’s your week going?

Been running hard the last few days, and it caught up with me Sunday. Didn’t get much done, other than a fair amount of reading. Finished Louis Bayard’s “The Pale Blue Eye” and started “Hotel Ukraine,” the final Renko novel by the recently departed Martin Cruz Smith. Soon I’ll go downstairs and make…something for dinner. Can’t decide between chicken-sesame noodles or a New York strip. What would you guys choose? My decision center appears to have gone on strike.

But I’m using the instruction I used to give Kate when she was potty-training: Listen to your body. And mine, right now, is saying Chill.

It also told me to stop reading the news after I made my appalled way through this almost unbelievable NYT piece (gift link), the top of which I’ll paste because FOR FUCK SAKE:

Hours after West Point pulled its offer to have her teach cadets, Jen Easterly posted a short essay in which she laid out what happened to her and what it meant for the country.

“This isn’t about me,” she wrote last week. “This is about something larger.”

Over three decades, Ms. Easterly, 57, had compiled an impeccable résumé as a West Point graduate, a Rhodes Scholar and an Afghanistan war veteran. She had served as a key aide on President George W. Bush’s National Security Council and led a critical cybersecurity agency under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Now she was blackballed — in her own words, “a casualty of casually manufactured outrage that drowned out the quiet labor of truth and the steady pulse of integrity.”

The source of the casual outrage arrayed against her was Laura Loomer, a right-wing agitator and self-described “Islamophobe,” who has become a powerful and largely unaccountable enforcer in President Trump’s Washington.

This. This is why I can barely look the few known MAGAts in my life in the eye anymore, for fear I might start frothing at the mouth about BALLROOMS and HEGSETH and ROSE GARDEN WTF and JEANINE PIRRO and now booting a woman who has literally given her impressive life to the service of the United States, on the word of a lunatic who was, as one Bluesky user pointed out, banned for life from Uber and Lyft for harassing the Muslim drivers. If I am triggered, well then I am triggered. I’m tipping into despair. Mission accomplished.

At least we’re given some comic relief, in that the president so overweight and out of shape that he drives his fucking golf carts onto the greens of his many courses is the one who is resurrecting the President’s Physical Fitness Test. A million brains lit up the grid with the same thought: You first.

Look at the photo at that last link (it’s a free one). There’s President Tubby, doing the same mommy-lookit-my-pitcher-I-drew thing of holding up the signed executive order (because that’s the only way he knows how to get anything done), while his younger staff of toadies and ass-kissers chuckle in the background. No doubt every one is also thinking: You First. Also note that the one is “WWE Chief Creative Officer Paul ‘Triple H’ Levesque,” no doubt fresh from paying condolences to Hulk Hogan’s family, after the Hulkster, allegedly a picture of strength and power, croaked at the relatively young age of 71. Heart attack, surely not at ALL related to the various drugs he gobbled like candy throughout his adult life.

Such fine role models. Loomer, who isn’t 35 yet, has had enough plastic surgery to resemble the Joker, and young men are gobbling dozens of dodgy supplements to achieve the Chad-like look they think will get women of a higher class than Loomer to fuck them. If that isn’t the Trump administration in a nutshell, I don’t know what is.

Oh, and let’s not forget Bobby Jr., another one almost certainly juicing. Well, may his shrunken testicles be a testament to his dedication.

Finally, really New York Times?! Here’s another paragraph in the Loomer/Easterly story:

And it raises big questions about the ways power and influence are currently wielded in Washington; what it means to be a patriot; and whether loyalty to Mr. Trump or any sitting president should be a prerequisite for government service.

RAISES QUESTIONS? JFC, no wonder I just want to read light crime fiction these days.

Here’s one lighter item, something new for the Nall/Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere Back 40. Did you know petunias can come up volunteer? I did not, but several little patches have popped up in the cutest places, like at the foot of our river birch:

It’s kind of like a Bambi forest. I like it.

Anyway, the new week is about to begin. Let’s hope lighting strikes someone who richly deserves it. Oh, and P.S. I’m making the steak. Turned out I didn’t have any peanut butter in the house.

I woke up super-groggy today, not uncommon when the alarm goes off at 5 a.m. I didn’t have enough time before my workout class to hit Starbucks for a cappuccino with an extra shot, but I did have time to hit the McDonald’s drive-through. Small black coffee, please. It was 5:45 a.m.

Pulled around to the window, where I was asked for 96 cents. “Really?” I said. “That seems low. I’m sure it’s more than that.”

“Well, with the senior discount, that’s what it is,” the window lady said, prompting me to ask how she knew I was a senior, goddamnit. (I didn’t say the goddamnit.) “Do you have cameras back there at the menu board?”

“This early, small black coffee? I just figured,” she said, handing me back a nickel. So really, 95 cents.

This is my life now, I guess. Little encounters with McDonald’s employees.

The class was good, but insanely hot and muggy. The weather is supposed to break tomorrow. And this is the rest of my life, I guess: McDonald’s and the weather.

This blog, too. A story hooked me the other day with its headline.

The Website at the End of the Internet: Reddit is one of the last thriving islands of the old web. Can it survive AI?

The question remains to be answered. Also:

The World Wide Web from which Reddit grew, and for which Huffman expresses so much reverence, has been going through something akin to ecological collapse after being poisoned, then abandoned, by advertisers that have little use for independent websites anymore. At the same time, the rise of generative AI suggests a lot of people are just as happy — if not happier — getting life advice, news, and conversation from a robot that has read a bunch of sub-Reddits as they are chatting with internet strangers themselves.

It gets way more into the weeds of Reddit and the internet than I’m interested in, but the bottom line is the same thing you’ve no doubt read elsewhere, because it’s an old story: Humans are a disappearing feature of the internet, steadily being replaced by bots and AI garbage yammering at one another. If you spend any time at all online, you’ve surely noticed it. If you’ve been online as long as some of us have, well, you really know. It’s easy to remember the early years of everyone being connected; oh, you like this obscure artist or singer/songwriter or movie or hobby TOO? Let’s be friends! Send me an email! I’ll write you back!

No more.

On the other hand, I have become oddly fixated with some Reddit groups — or subreddits, I guess. The amount of time people have to waste online talking about the stupidest shit imaginable is almost awe-inspiring.

Anyway, here you are: Human-powered blather since 2001. Fool that I am.

I would generally have a little more bloggage for you, but the news these days has been so depressing, I feel a little overmatched by it. You know, of course, that Ghislaine Maxwell is cruising toward a commutation or pardon, right? Emil Bove, lying thug, cruising toward a late-term Trump appointment to SCOTUS. Israel is run by thugs, and also liars. Even the coming of pleasant weather will be prefaced by a storm. Earthquake in Russia, tsunamis in the Pacific — it’s just not a good-news kinda week.

But there’s this: David Von Drehle is quitting the WashPost. Here’s his last column. It’s short, elegant and good.

That’s what I got.

Apparently “Sinners,” released around late spring, was one of the big summer movies, only prestigious, y’know. So I decided not to read anything about it, and try to have one of those rare experiences, wherein we can take in a work of art without knowing anything, or much, about it.

I knew it starred Michael B. Jordan, and there were vampires. That’s it.

So I averted my eyes from the headlines that speculated it might be an Oscar contender, although that made me want to watch it more. An Oscar-worthy vampire movie? Count me in. It finally came to HBO a couple weeks ago; Friday was the night to watch.

And, sadly, I was disappointed. It wasn’t that great. Points for locating the vampire plot in a new location (a ’30s juke joint in rural Mississippi). Points for some great music within. But the rest? Meh.

Jordan plays two characters, it turns out: Identical twins. There’s no story reason for making them twins, they could just as easily have been non-twin brothers with a second actor, but oh well. There’s a couple-three references to cunnilingus that suggests the brothers were masters of the art, but again, it didn’t really pertain to the story. I had high hopes the vampire clan, who started out all white, might thematically suggest what white people did to black music of the Mississippi Delta, but he didn’t really explore it. There’s a tacked-on KKK mini-plot that seemed to exist so the audience could get the thrill of watching a while klavern mowed down with a machine gun.

I’m not much for horror, but vampires are at least interesting monsters. These vampires…were not.

In a summer of brutal weather, starvation in Gaza and a full-on assault on American democracy, this doesn’t count as a tragedy. Just a disappointment. But it’s always good to see cunnilingus get a free public service announcement, I guess.

And the brutal weather continued. It’s about 90 as I write this, and will stay that way for two more days.

Also: A man randomly attacked 11 people with a knife in a Traverse City Walmart, which then exposed idiots who cannot use a map and understand that the northern Michigan resort city is not Dearborn, and a suspect by the name of Bradford James Gille is unlikely to be Muslim. In fact, he sounds like one of the many, many mentally ill souls in this country, having self-published a book about his revelation that he is, in fact, Jesus Christ. He hails from Afton, a dot on the map and still a bit of a drive to TC, about 90 miles to be exact.

Good thing the president just signed an E.O. requiring homeless people to be involuntarily committed to the scores of nearly empty mental hospitals that exist throughout this great land, just waiting to be filled. Mr. Gille will be right at home there.

Well, this is sad news: Martin Cruz Smith died last week. One of my favorite authors, most notably for his series set in the Soviet Union (and later Russia, and later still, Ukraine), featuring his soulful, chain-smoking antihero, Investigator Arkady Renko.

His (gift link) obit tells the story of his breakthrough with “Gorky Park,” first in the series, set in Cold War Moscow and published in 1981, to great acclaim. An elegant and stylish writer, he managed to catch a wave that tracked the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. and recent history of what came after; the second in the series, “Polar Star,” took place on a Soviet factory ship in the Bering Sea during the Perestroika/joint venture era. Then came “Red Square” (post-collapse), “Wolves Eat Dogs” (Chernobyl), “Havana Bay” (Cuba), “Stalin’s Ghost” (the swing back to the right), “Three Stations” (oligarchs), and four more. I read them all, but something changed around “Stalin’s Ghost,” which is when Smith announced his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, and the change he’d had to make in his process: As I recall, he would sit in a chair, compose sentences in his head and recite them to his wife, Emily, who would write them down. And I don’t know what that says about writing, and rewriting, but the books were different, first subtly, then noticeably, then (to my mind) disastrously so.

Gone was the stylish prose; the later books feel like he was using a ghost, and who knows, maybe he was. He made a lot of money off the early books, but money runs out, and maybe he needed some. Or maybe he just had to do them — writing is like that. But it was sad to see Renko reduced to such a thin ghost of what he’d once been. The last book in the series, “Hotel Ukraine,” was published just last week. I guess I’ll read it, because I’m an Arkady completist, but it’s gonna hurt, I know.

No one ever said death was pleasant. But we remember the good people. All crime/detective fiction follows a formula of sorts, and the great ones find new ways to calculate the formula. Smith did that, no small feat.

In other news at this hour, Hulk Hogan croaked, too. No great loss.

Also, Chuck Mangione. There’s a very strange party going on the bardo right now.

And now we head into the weekend, when it promises to be cooler. I’ll try to stop complaining about the weather. None of us live in Gaza, after all.

Have a good one, all.

I don’t want to be Russian, shrugging off corruption with a what-can-you-do. I don’t want to be Hungarian, doing the same. And yet, being dumbfounded and outraged 24/7 is exhausting. I’m giving in to what my former religion teaches is a sin: Despair.

So when I read that the Kennedy Center Board of Ass-Kissers wants to rename the opera theater therein for Melania Trump, all I can do is scoff and say, “Not a bad come-up for an old whore.” And if anyone should blanch at that, I would remind you to grow up.

Meanwhile, Congress may be adjourned until after Labor Day, but I hope the Dems keep the water torture going. Like Sen. Wyden in Oregon:

“The Trump administration may be closing the books on Epstein’s sex trafficking, but I am not ready to give up. Far from it,” the Oregon senator said in a statement earlier this week.

Trump made campaign promises to release FBI files related to Epstein. But he then seemingly reversed course after taking office, saying they wouldn’t be releasing further Epstein documents. Many of the president’s supporters have been pushing him to release documents, including a list of Epstein’s clients.

Wyden said several banks waited until Epstein’s arrest to flag suspicious transactions that could be related to criminal activity. Now, the senator is pushing to make Epstein-related financial documents public. Wyden disclosed many of his revelations in a New York Times article that details what his staffers found digging through confidential bank records.

Hell yeah, Barry Levine:

Mr. Trump has acknowledged being friendly with Mr. Epstein for about 15 years, ending with a falling out over a real estate matter in 2004. Mr. Trump has not been accused by law enforcement of any wrongdoing related to Mr. Epstein, but his relationship with Mr. Epstein has come under scrutiny.

…On Wednesday, The Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Ms. Bondi told Mr. Trump this spring that his name appeared in the Epstein files. The context in which his name was raised remains unclear.

Hell yeah, Politico:

Trump and his closest allies thought they’d spend the summer taking a well-earned victory lap, having coaxed Congress into passing the megabill, bullied foreign governments into a slew of new trade arrangements, convinced NATO allies to spend billions more on collective defense and pressed world leaders to bow to various other demands from Doha to The Hague.

“POTUS is clearly furious,” said a person close to the White House, who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to discuss the mood inside the West Wing. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them sort of paralyzed.”

Good. Maybe he’ll have a medical event that will require him to use a cane or walker thereafter.

And yeah, if all this requires sacrificing Bill Clinton, that’s fine with me. It’s time, and no one cares anymore. He’s an old man.

By the way, it’s worth clicking on the Politico link to see the fucking mess Tubby has made of the Oval Office, which now looks like a higher-end New Orleans whorehouse. Fitting, I know! When he and the old whore are finally gone, there isn’t going to be enough sage and sandblasting to drive all that gilt crap out.

Sorry I’m late today. We had a perfect start of the week, and currently it’s 86 degrees, forecast to be 10 degrees hotter tomorrow, with humidity in the armpit-mold range until the middle of next week. It isn’t weather to spark creativity. But we press on.

Friday was indeed the perfect summer day the forecast promised, and so in late afternoon I told Alan we needed to truck the bikes to Belle Isle, do a half-loop, then head down the Riverwalk to Valade Park, where Bob’s Barge would be open. Bob’s Barge is a bar, on a floating platform right on the water, so you drink your beer looking out at the river and gently rising and falling with each passing vessel.

And so that’s what we did. It resembled what Jeff Borden once described as the ideal exercise, i.e. like sex: “You work a little, you get a reward, you go to sleep.”

But the real focus of the weekend was on Sunday, when this happened:

The girls played the Concert of Colors, an annual summer weekend of music that takes place downtown, mostly on the grounds of the DIA. The “colors” part refers to diversity, so as an all-female band, that counted. They had a serious delay getting onstage (tech issues) but sounded great once there, and had some new-music tricks up their sleeve, including some lovely harmonies.

There was this bomb-ass art car that looks like a roach parked out front. I believe the people who built it call it the Carcroach.

I was briefly left in charge of the merch. The view from the merch tent:

I shared the table with the merch guy for War. Obviously War, having had a several-decade head start, was doing more business than I was, but it was fun talking to him. He was like LA Mary’s son, only Hispanic and 20 years older (at least).

Now we’re home again, I’m tired, so here’s some bloggage:

Here’s some comic relief for you, where you don’t have to see his face or hear his voice.

At the Alligator Alcatraz press conference a reporter asked Trump what he planned to do to fulfill his next campaign promise. His full response was six minutes long. This is a verbatim reading of part of his answer. You won't have to listen to his voice or see his face.

[image or embed]

— Decoding Fox News (@decodingfoxnews.bsky.social) July 6, 2025 at 6:35 AM

But remember, it’s Biden who was demented.

FWIW, and we’ve covered this here before, all of our appliances are EnergyStar (RIP) rated as efficient, and I’ve noticed zero difference in their efficacy. They may even work better, at least as it relates to toilet-flushing, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

A long, but skimmable gift-link transcript of a NYT conversation with Julie Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who broke the Epstein story way back when. From time to time in recent years I’ll ask one of my Columbus friends, “So how are people talking about Les Wexner now that he’s been so roped to Epstein?” And the answer, inevitably, is a blank look.

But first: Do you think that some form of the intelligence world — and Epstein’s connections to it — played any role in why he got off so lightly the first time?

Brown: I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that’s, in part, one of the unanswered questions about Epstein, because I just don’t know. I know there’s a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, I try to stick to the facts, and so it’s just something we don’t know for sure.

Douthat: Yeah. I’m drawing on your view about your skepticism around the blackmail narrative. There’s two intelligent stories you could tell: One, Epstein is literally an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the U.S. government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That’s the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell, as we mentioned earlier, had connections to Israeli intelligence.

So this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as a conduit of information. But it’s not that he’s being run as a kind of entrapment ring. If we don’t think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.

Hmm. Interesting. But I think it’s time for bed. Zzzzzz.

Well, the cool front arrived as advertised, thank goddess. It was windy during morning swim, and I lost an earplug. I made a few halfhearted underwater canvasses of the crime scene, then figured it was gone for good. Finished my swim, showered, dressed and thought I’d walk the perimeter of the pool one more time before ordering another pair. The wind had pushed it right to the gutter, only one lane down.

Obviously, today is my lucky day.

Go ahead, laugh, but if we still had a swimming-supplies retail storefront nearby, I wouldn’t have even bothered looking for it. But in a time when we have to buy so much online, it seemed worth the extra effort, just to avoid shipping and handling. While some online shopping is undoubtedly efficient, I’m starting to crave the experience of entering a store and being pleasantly surprised by what I find there. I have a friend who does Instacart for her groceries exclusively, something I cannot imagine. You let someone else pick out your apples? Girl, are you crazy? Trusting someone else to buy my groceries is like trusting them to do my laundry. No way.

And with that mishmash of nothing in particular, let’s get to the news, which has continued the week’s trajectory of being ever more horrifying: Emil Bove (a man whose soul is worn on his face, if there ever was one) on greased skids to be a federal judge. A Justice Department recommending a one-day sentence for a cop convicted of firing wildly into Breonna Taylor’s Louisville apartment. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, marked for death. It’s just one fucking thing after another.

Late in the afternoon, I read that President Pudding-for-Brains is diagnosed with something called chronic venous insufficiency, and I was disappointed it wasn’t congestive heart failure. I’m not in a healthy frame of mind these days.

So I leave you with one excellent obituary, for Connie Francis, who left the mortal plane this week at 87. I’ve known two Connie superfans in my life. One was my old buddy Paul, who loved to go around singing “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” and other Connie hits. The other is a friend here, who can extemporize for an hour about her business sense, particularly her recordings of her hits in other languages, which of course sold well in those countries. She learned the lyrics phonetically, and discovered that yeah, the world was waiting to hear “Vacation” in Japanese. You have to admire a girl like that.

Also, this phrase is waiting for you low in the obit:

Like Mr. Darin, with whom she was romantically involved until her father chased him off with a gun when she was in her late teens,

Well, they were Newark Italians.

God, I need some good news, and no, I don’t mean something about a plucky puppy or warmhearted mail carrier. I mean I want to see something that gives me hope for the future of my country. Let’s hope the weekend brings something around.

I used to read The New York Times exclusively on their website, but for some reason I downloaded the app, figuring it would work better on my phone, and then I allowed push notifications, and that’s how I learned on Monday afternoon…

In a major victory for the Trump administration, the Supreme Court on Monday allowed it to fire thousands of Education Department employees, functionally eliminating the agency.

What’s more…

The court’s decision, while technically temporary, lets workers who had been reinstated during the legal battle be fired again.

Well, ain’t that a kick in the head. Imagine that, another “major victory” for the most corrupt administration in my lifetime and probably American history, delivered by a corrupt Supreme Court. This is just exhausting to see, week after week. And here we thought summer would be relaxing. Instead, it’s just hot. And infuriating. A friend shared a witticism going around in his youngest daughter’s crowd: When this is over, woke is coming back to hard there are going to be tribunals for people with outdoor cats.

If it’s ever over, that is.

On that theme, I don’t know how I missed this on Sunday. Headline:

The Canadians Are Furious
Trump accomplished what was once considered impossible: Our northern neighbors have united against us.

In early May, Carney and Trump held a predictably surreal press conference in the Oval Office. Trump began genially, congratulating Carney on his election: “It was probably one of the greatest comebacks in the history of politics, maybe even greater than mine.” But when a reporter asked if he still envisioned Canada as the 51st state, Trump killed the goodwill.

“You know, I’m a real-estate developer at heart,” he said. The president waxed poetic about erasing “that artificially drawn line” on the map between the U.S. and Canada, saying that “when you look at that beautiful formation, when it’s together — I’m a very artistic person — but when I looked at that beauty, I said, ‘That’s the way it was meant to be.’” Carney interjected coolly, “Well, if I may, as you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale. We’re sitting in one right now.”

Isn’t that wonderful? The Trump administration is six months old. Or maybe we should think of it as 25 percent down the road to the midterms. Assuming we have them.

Not that I wish to hang the crepe. It’s just 88 degrees outside, and I am so fucking done with this. It might as well be nine below zero.

Meanwhile, in Ohio:

What sort of person looks at the guy on the right, this human mosquito, his whitened veneers gleaming in the light, and says, “That’s my guy.” The guy hasn’t had to figure out how the increase the budget of a small-city public-works department without increasing taxes, but he wants to run the state. I ask you.

Gift link to this excellent WashPost explainer on how the Texas floods happen. Even if you don’t read it, scroll through the graphics, which are outstanding, particularly the one showing the location of the Camp Mystic cabins vis-a-vis the riverbed. It’s…shocking. Maybe even criminal.

A good piece on another Stephen Miller manque, working at the state level. In Florida, of course.

Finally, Michelle Goldberg on MAGA and the Epstein story. Worth a read.

OK, then. A cooldown — a real one — is coming by week’s end, we’re told. We shall see. I leave you with a photo of Tuesday’s muggy, smoky sunrise. It’s pretty, though!

When I read that the owners of Camp Mystic tried to get certain structures removed from the Guadalupe River floodplain, it rang a bell that finally broke through: The news that, in 2017, a catastrophic flood in Houston was made worse because, wait for it, developers had built entire subdivisions inside a reservoir, but hadn’t told homeowners about it.

Because when they sold the houses, the level of the reservoir was low. Just as, when it’s not flash-flooding, the Guadalupe River is a pleasant stream you want to be close to, not up on a bluff looking down at it. Or as it was before Hurricane Harvey:

The vast basins are dry most of the time, dotted with wooded parks and sports fields, and are contained on their eastern boundaries by large, earthen dams. During rainstorms, floodwater accumulates behind those dams in areas known as “flood pools” and backs up to the west; how far it goes depends on how big the rainstorm is and where it hits.

That system worked well when the reservoirs were surrounded by prairie and rice fields. But in recent decades, development has encroached from all sides. Today, about 14,000 homes are located inside them. During Harvey, when more floodwater accumulated behind the dams than ever before, 5,138 of those homes flooded.

Some local government officials, like Harris County Commissioner Steve Radack, say they’ve warned residents for years during town halls and other public events about the risks of living in or around the reservoirs.

“It is very difficult to make people believe the unbelievable,” Radack said. “No one ever believed the reservoirs would fill.”

This is human nature. No one believed the reservoirs would fill, until they did. No one believed the river would carry away everything in its path, until it did. Living in a flooding city, as I did for 20 years, it’s easy to see this paradox. That river? That brown, stinky ditch? Coming this high? No way. And then it snows and snows, and then it rains and rains, and then the snow melts and combines with the rain, and the next thing you know you’re wearing rubber boots and throwing sandbags.

And that’s the best-case scenario. That’s a slow flood. We all saw the worst-case scenario July 4.

Fort Wayne has taken away a lot of the human factor by turning its floodplain into parkland. But honestly, I haven’t been keeping up. Have they had a major flood recently?

OK, then. A hot weekend. It’s been punishingly hot for a month now. During my Saturday boxing class, I was near a thermometer — it was attached to some fan. It was 83 when we started, and through the 45-minute class I watched it climb, degree by degree, until it topped out at 88. Thought I was going to die. Today was sailing — far more pleasant, but still hot.

How is it where you are?