The second in a series of ‘billionaires I have known’

One thing I have zero fucking patience for this is the idea that Trump has won and we are just going to sit back and watch it happen. NO!!!!! If we don’t fight on every front, then we deserve to lose. And the idea of people being “tired.” Huh? What have you done? Doomscroll? I mean, c’mon, we have a whole set of history of change to build on here that shows how people can turn the worst moments into something that might not be victories but at least are less bad situations. The battle for American democracy is far from over, unless you just don’t give a shit about it.

This leads me to what I thought a useful article at Vanity Fair about holding the Senate accountable:

While the Patel pick only adds to the sense of gloom that Trump’s authoritarian fantasies may come to fruition, it’s important to remember that autocrats want you to believe they are more powerful than they already are. Trump has been president-elect for less than a month and we’ve seen instances in which his ambitions have been checked. His first attorney general pick, Matt Gaetz, had to withdraw because of sexual misconduct allegations (which he denies). The MAGA favorite for Senate majority leader, Rick Scott, lost a secret ballot to John Thune, a lawmaker more in the mold of Mitch McConnell (who, likely not seeking reelection, could be a thorn in Trump’s side). Scott, it should be noted, didn’t even make it to the second round; he got 13 votes, less than not only Thune (23) but John Cornyn (15).

Trump has historically bullied Republicans into doing what he wants, but in a 53-47 senate, he can only afford to lose three senators in trying to get his cabinet picks confirmed (given that JD Vance would be the tie-breaker in a 50-50 vote.) Some who could be swayed against Trump include Maine’s Susan Collins, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis. I’d also keep my eye on the independent-minded(ish) doctor Bill Cassidy and Mitt Romney’s successor John Curtis. While it’s fair to be skeptical whether some of the aforementioned senators will buck Trump and the Republican Party line—see Collins and Murkowski’s role in the fall of Roe—it’s no time to cynically write off the Senate as a check on executive power.

Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s second rule of fighting autocracy is to “defend institutions,” which, he writes, “help us to preserve decency.” Snyder adds, “They need our help as well. Do not speak of ‘our institutions’ unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. So choose an institution you care about and take its side.” These Republican senators have the constitutional power of “advice and consent,” a responsibility we should hold them to—especially if Trump tries to opt for recess appointments to get unconfirmable nominees into positions of great power.

If we are cynical, if we assume the worst from everyone, then we have surrendered in advance. I think it’s important to remember that even Trump responds to pushback. Trump is very reactive, seen, at times, as taking ideas from the last person he’s talked to. The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman last month told her colleague, Ezra Klein, “He doesn’t especially like the work of governing, didn’t when he was in the White House. But he likes power, and he likes being praised, and politics combines both of those things.” There are ways to get Trump to do things; incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles seems to have figured it out. Trump isn’t a mystery, if anything he is very straightforward and transactional.

If pro-democracy voters expect senators to do nothing, they are effectively giving those lawmakers permission to do just that. We should expect our elected officials to protect norms and institutions; that also goes for members of the House, where Republicans hold a slim majority. If people care about democracy and the direction of the country, they should call on senators to do their jobs and subject Trump’s picks, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and Patel, to legitimate scrutiny.

Do I think democracy makes it through another Trump administration? Only if democracy supporters stand up for norms and institutions, and resist falling down the path of cynicism and hopelessness. It only takes one person to do the right thing.

I suppose in this case it takes four people. I should say as well I am curious as to what Mitch McConnell is going to do here. He loathes Trump personally and while he is the most cynical human living today, he might be out for some revenge, or at least to knock down a couple of the most ridiculous picks and keep the Senate as an independent body. Of course I wouldn’t bet money on that, but what I am saying is that the battle is not over. Yes, the Senate sucks. Yes, the Senate is going to be worse now than before. Yes, tons of horrible judges will be confirmed. But even given that, we still have room to at least try to claim a part of it as ours and pressure senators to do the right thing. Some of them might at least occasionally do it too! In any case, giving up is for losers.

The post Fight to Hold Institutions Accountable appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

For the love of god, quit calling your newsletter “my Substack”. “You can talk about your work as *your work*. It’s your newsletter, or your email, or your blog. Or just your writing. But it sure as hell isn’t ‘your Substack.’”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

When I started Travis McGee & Me in 2008, I never figured it would be getting regular readers 16 years later. But folks keep coming here for McGee and JDM info. And my little book of the same title keeps selling a dozen or two copies every month.

But as I face the medical fight of my life, I realize it would be unfair of me to simply vanish without saying thanks to all you readers. If I make it through, I’ll be back to tell the tale. In the meantime, if you’re the praying type, please say a prayer for ol’ D. R.

I saw two shows this week, both before the election, so I could actually enjoy them. The first was Allen Lowe and the Constant Sorrow Orchestra, at Firehouse 12 in New Haven. I had never seen Lowe before, a saxophonist who has played with approximately everyone in the last fifty years and has his fans but never quite hit the big time, or at least as big time as jazz gets these days. He has a super neat project, called Louis Armstrong’s America, which is a gigantic set of songs (69!!!!!) that each represent a particular theme in his life or something that was going on while he was active in music. It’s not a cover project. Lowe talked about this and said he had all respect for anyone who wanted to cover Armstrong as a tribute but he thought it would be more interesting and fulfilling to think about his larger impact on music and the world around him, as well as its impact on him. He got together a lot of musicians for these various recordings. There was a much smaller band for this show: Lowe on tenor sax, Frank Lacy on french horn/trumpet/trombone, Elijah Shiffer on alto sax, Lewis Porter on piano, Will Goble on bass, and sadly I did not catch the name of the drummer. These were cool compositions because they really did start with a musical theme of the moment where the story is set and then they go off in different directions that remain pretty accessible while extremely interesting. Frank Lacy was especially fun to see; you don’t get a lot of French horn in jazz these days. Or maybe any days. Anyway, I need to hear more of this, but it was a good set.

Then I went full Gen X and saw the Juliana Hatfield Three at the Sinclair in Cambridge. First time and I mean, finally! It was fun, if not profound. I don’t really go for nostalgia acts and Hatfield really isn’t one generally, but she was playing the entirety of the Become What You Are album, which is a good album, but it was such a 90s throwback to play the whole thing in order. She didn’t care and that’s fine. She said she was still really proud of the album and for that matter of the 90s. That’s cool and I mean, it was a peak Gen X moment for sure. I think there were a few people under 40 there, but let’s be clear that audience was extremely 45-55. Honestly, that’s rare for me; I’m either one of the youngest people at a lot of the jazz or folk shows or one of the oldest people at the more rock shows. But when I see DBT or Old 97s or now Hatfield, it does feel very generational. I did think the show would be more political, especially given it was right before election and especially because she played her song “Rhinoceros” about Melania submitting to sex with Donald Trump (“Guess who’s getting FUCKED by the Rhinoceros!” what a chorus), but she just played it, made a very passing reference to the election happening and hoping it went the right way (sigh), and moved on. I guess that’s a very Gen X move too.

By the way, the opening band was great. We sometimes forget given the intense focus on Seattle bands of the 90s there was there was a ton of great rock and roll coming out of Boston, Hatfield included. So she had Hilken Mancini and her band open and that kicked a lot of ass. Mancini was the singer of Fuzzy but never quite made it bigger than that. She then started a punk aerobics deal for Gen X people who weren’t going to work out to Jane Fonda like mom. And she plays and releases some music and I need to hear more of it. Boston punk legend Thalia Zedek came on stage for a song too, which she tends to do at these kind of shows. I’ve seen her do that a couple of times at Wussy shows. I enjoyed that as much as seeing Hatfield.

Other news:

Henry Rollins tells you punks to quit whining about Trump’s win and fight, like Joe Strummer taught you.

I’m a fan of the songwriter Christopher Paul Stelling and although he’s played in Rhode Island many times, it’s never works out for me to see him. Well, he had a surprise concert last night in the town of Warren and I am on his email list. Of course it was the one night this month I have plans….But in any case, he noted that Rhode Island has been key to his career, but it’s getting harder because so many venues are closing. That’s certainly true. Both the Columbus Theatre and the Askew have closed. The Columbus is a grand old theater with two stages where I’ve seen many shows. Some comedy club guys have purchased it and plan to do some needed renovations and reopen it; let’s hope for the best on that one. Askew was a small club, maybe not perfectly designed, but could get acts like the Old 97s lead Rhett Miller doing his solo tour. In fact, I was supposed to see Jim Lauderdale there tomorrow, but it shut its doors this week. Ugh. I mention all of this because of my larger concerns for the smaller end of the music industry, clubs bigger than a local coffeehouse but smaller than the 5000 seat venue. Go see live music and support these places! The music dies if you stay home doomscrolling!

I’ve never even heard of the hippie band It’s a Beautiful Day, but their songwriter and keyboardist Linda LaFlamme died.

As if living in Syracuse wasn’t unpleasant enough--any radio station switching to all Christmas music 20 days before Thanksgiving should have its license taken away.

No, music was not better when you were younger. Kill the nostalgia inside you! It’s a purely reactionary emotion, as we saw this week in fact…..

Here’s one of those great random Bandcamp playlists–German New Wave.

I literally could not care less about the Grammys, but here’s the full list of nominations for those who might.

30 year anniversary of Iris Dement’s great My Life.

Remembering Quincy Jones.

Rolling Stone ranks the top 50 salsa albums of all time.

Charli XCX sampling Bonnie Raitt is making the latter a lot of money.

This week’s playlist:

1. Bob Dylan, Desire
2. Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Past is Still Alive
3. Waxahatchee, Cerulean Salt (taking over the lead in listens for any album since I got this computer in March 2024, with 9)
4. Torres, What an Enormous Room
5. Laura Veirs, My Echo
6. Waylon Jennings, Waylon Live, disc 1
7. Borderlands: From Conjunto to Chicken Scratch
8. Bobby Bare, Cowboys and Daddys
9. Bill Callahan, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle
10. Dolly Parton, Just Because I’m a Woman
11. Miles Davis, In a Silent Way
12. The Louvin Brothers, When I Stop Dreaming: Best of the Louvin Brothers
13. The Rolling Stones, Beggars Banquet
14. Ennio Morricone, The Legendary Italian Westerns
15. Brennan Leigh, Ain’t Through Honky Tonkin Yet
16. Bonnie Prince Billy, Master and Everyone
17. War on Drugs, Slave Ambient
18. The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs, disc 3
19. Rambin’ Jack Elliott, Kerouac’s Last Dream
20. Jake Blount, The New Faith
21. Bonnie Prince Billy, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You
22. Bruce Springsteen, Nebraska
23. Bill Frisell, The Willies
24. Eric Taylor, Resurrect
25. Blood Lemon, self-titled
26. Waylon Jennings, Waylon Live, disc 2
27. Margo Cliker, Pohorylle
28. Old Crow Medicine Show, Tennessee Pusher
29. Steve Earle, El Corazon
30. Ian Tyson, Cowboyography
31. Lorelle Meets the Obsolete, Balance
32. Sonny Fortune, Long Before Our Mothers Cried
33. Mates of State, Mountaintops
34. Joe Ely, Live Shots
35. Yo La Tengo, This Stupid World
36. PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
37. Neil Young, On the Beach
38. Sonic Youth, Dirty
39. John Moreland, In the Throes

Album Reviews:

Thurston Moore, Flow Critical Lucidity

This is not the greatest Moore release ever. Of course Sonic Youth were all big Deadheads, but they took the best part of that experimentation and put it into their own noise-based music. This on the other hand sounds like a lesser version of The War on Drugs, jammy but also kind of pointless and heading off into the smoky ether haze. “We Get High” is a perfectly good name for a song, but it also might suggest the state of Moore while recording it.

C+

Reyna Tropical, Malegria

This is the project of the hip as fuck producer and guitarist Fabiola Reyna. It was supposed to be a duet album, but shortly before it was being made, her bandmate died in an e-scooter accident (really, stay off those things!). She suffered a ton of grief, as one would when your best friend dies. So the album honors him by switching off from the real songs to snippets of recorded conversations they had. Were I to listen to this a lot, I’d probably skip those, but they do work artistically. Meanwhile, the reason we are listening are the other songs, which pull broadly from the Latino musical diaspora, with a lot of Mexican and a lot of Colombian influences especially. It is fairly highly produced, but in the good way that makes it all more interesting. Reyna is a perfectly good guitarist too. I saw her at Newport Folk, having heard of this project but not actually having heard it. I enjoyed it live and I enjoyed the album too.

A-

Wadada Leo Smith/Amina Claudine Myers, Central Park’s Mosaics of Reservoirs, Lakes, Paths, and Gardens

Smith and Myers are two of the all time legends of modern jazz. Smith has gotten very into taking the American landscape and history and wrapping his music around it in recent years, in a way that sometimes makes more sense in his unique mind than maybe for the rest of us. So here he and Myers, one of the great if quite challenging pianists of our time, think about the beauty of Central Park, which for New Yorkers at least is as good as it gets. There’s certainly nothing wrong with this project, but it is hard, slow listening, which sometimes has held these projects back a little bit. Brilliant music, if you are in the mood. But you might not be in that mood very often.

B+

Joe Santa Maria, Echo Deep

Santa Maria is new to me. He’s a woodwinds guy, based out of LA. Plays just about everything on this album–all the saxes, flute, clarinet, some keys. Very interesting work and so varied within the album. Some of these pieces are like chamber music, others have such a big bottom to them it sounds like techno at first a little bit. As you’d expect, very woodwind heavy, which includes Andrew Conrad on other winds. You also have Dan Rosenbloom, Brandon Sherman, and Andrew Rowan all on trumpet, Ryan Dragon and Julianne Gralle on trombone, Lauren Baba on various strings, Tim Carr on drums, David Tranchina on bass, and Max Kutner on guitar. As you might expect, with all this, Santa Maria delivers a big sounding album, which I happen to like. In the liner notes, he talks about all the influences here, ranging from the folk music he listened to on public radio stations when he lived in the Midwest to his travels in Indonesia. That helps explains the enormous range of this recording. It also reminds me that I really do need to do a bit more work exploring the west coast jazz scene.

A-

Hauschka, Philanthropy

I’ve always Hauschka’s piano work just fine. Volker Bertelmann is an interesting guy and when you want to hear some kind of hipster piano work, he can fill that gap. It’s not something I necessarily want to hear very often, but I’ve never regretted picking up the couple albums of his that I own. Could see even buying this one. It’s an expansive album that ranges from the challenges of prepared piano to small scale orchestra work, with the electronic music influence that has always shaped his music. Solid, at the very least.

B+

Ethan Iverson, Technically Acceptable

Certainly more than technically acceptable, but also a pretty boring piano trio. The cover of “Killing Me Softly With His Song” is case in point why this belongs more at a piano bar than an album I would want to hear again. Leave your tips in the jar, they are good musicians. Oddly, they follow that cover with a rather difficult cover of “Round Midnight” with a pretty challenging vocal, but the piano still remains bar trio work. If there was any question about the technical ability, the three part sonata at the end would kill them, but then that forces to ask why the rest of the album is so boring.

C+

Jolie Laide, self-titled

This is Nina Nastasia’s new band, with Jeff MacLeod. And it’s pretty good. I’ve been happy for her middle aged revival and this extends that. The songs are very much about traveling and the freedom the West offers. from the beach of California to the deserts of Nevada. The album begins with the lyrics “Back to the West” and that’s where she’s going, recovering her life after a very difficult marriage that led to her partner’s suicide. This is an album of a woman recovering her life, her sense of self, her past, and her plans to move forward. Good project. Great songs.

A-

Bonnie Prince Billy/Nathan Salsburg, Hear the Children Sing & The Evidence

I can’t as say I was initially that thrilled about the idea of Bonnie Prince Billy singing 20 minute covers of Lungfish songs, turning them from their post-punk originals to modern folk. But BPB does whatever he wants to and while sometimes it can be a complete disaster, usually it’s worthy and this is another example of the latter. The lyrics don’t even feel that repetitive nor the whole project that drawn out. You just kind of fade into this album and then after a much longer time than you realize, the song is over. Sure, why not do this.

B+

Shovels & Rope, By Blood

Generally a pretty big Shovels & Rope fan with their spousal team of earnest singers. But their album from 2019 was more solid than great. Nothing truly stood out here that I thought really drove it home. Evidently, fans saw this album as a big step forward and I believe it, but I thought 2016’s Little Seeds better. Still, there’s nothing wrong with any of this–they bring their punky rootsy music into a pretty appealing package that probably will make both sides of any couple pretty OK with it.

B

As always–and especially today–this is a thread for all things music and art and NONE things politics, except where they might intersect with the music as a couple of these notes do.

The post Music Notes appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

If you’re like me and like to have NewsBlur sitting open all day, then you’ll love the new NewsBlur macOS app. It’s a first-class app that supports all of NewsBlur’s features, from intelligence training to sharing/blurblogs.

Introducing the NewsBlur macOS app, available for free on the Mac App Store.

The macOS app also supports all of the themes, so it can turn itself into dark mode automatically.

It’s configurable and supports ay=utomatic hiding and showing of the feed list so you can focus on the stories you want to read. Use your mouse to swipe left and right on both stories and to swap which pane is visible.

In the Grid view, you can swipe right with your mouse to temporarily show the feed list, giving you a compact view of your news stories without having to give up screen real estate.

Training is supported natively, so you can hide those stories you don’t want to see while highlighting those thast you do.

It’s important to be able to train, because you can set notifications to be sent from either your Unread list or your Focus list, ensuring you only see the notifications from sites you want to see. And clicking on those native macOS notifications takes you directly to the story in the new macOS app.

If you have any ideas you’d like to see on macOS, feel free to post an idea on the NewsBlur Forum.

Coming up soon are the discover feeds feature, where you can see related feeds based purely on semantic similarity (and not based on mined usage data), as well as real-time updates to the macOS app similar to the dashboard on the web.