This amusingly overbuilt Long Point Pencil Sharpener is by California-based stationery company Blackwing.

Rather than sharpening your pencil point into a mere cone, it cuts a curved taper into it; this shape, the company claims, "resists breakage."

The sharpener is made of machined aluminum, and the blade is German steel.

Comes in three colors, and runs $22.

I rewatched Wes Anderson’s 2009 film Fantastic Mr. Fox again and I have to say that it might be my very favorite of his films. Now, I get it if you don’t like Anderson. It’s an aesthetic alright and if it isn’t yours, you probably find him unbearable. As for the films being all the same, well, that’s not uncommon of many directors, so I don’t have a lot of patience for that argument. It’s just that you don’t like the films being all the same in this kind of way. Again, that’s OK. I admit that his whimsy and put-ons have varying degrees of effectiveness over a now pretty long career. But I do like it when Anderson turns to animation and his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s story is pretty great. For one, George Clooney is absolutely perfect as the fox. The combination of ridiculousness, arrogance, and male ego works very well and Clooney can really deliver that. Meryl Streep as Mrs. Fox is almost as good, though she’s asked to do less. Of course Jason Schwartzmann, Bill Murray, and Owen Wilson show up doing basically their normal thing in a different role. I am amused at Brian Cox as the reporter. Willem Dafoe as the rat is great too. And I happen to love the animation, though I confess to being no expert on the subject and having not nearly as much knowledge as anyone who cares about the topic in any more than a passing way. I’m surprised this didn’t make a ton of money, though it did generate a small profit at the time that has grown over the years. Anyway, it’s highly enjoyable. After all, we are all just wild animals.

The post LGM Film Club, Part 497: Fantastic Mr. Fox appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

From the Beetle to the Rabbit to the Golf, Volkswagen has long made affordable, practical cars that those with smaller budgets can afford. Now they're aiming that prowess at the EV market with the unveiling of their ID EVERY1.

The concept car is intended to make the transition into production for €20,000 (USD $21,667) in 2027. Hailed as "affordable entry-level all-electric mobility" by Thomas Schäfer, CEO of Volkswagen Passenger Cars, the 94hp vehicle will reportedly have a range of 155 miles.

Aesthetically, the vehicle was designed to have a friendly, approachable look. "Our ambition was to create something bold yet accessible," says Andreas Mindt, Volkswagen's Head of Design. "The ID EVERY1 has a self-assured appearance but remains likeable – thanks to details such as the dynamic front lights and the 'smiling' rear. These design elements make it more than just a car: they give it character and an identity that people can relate to."

The big question for Americans is whether that €20,000 sticker will apply in 2027, given the way our current administration's tariff war is going. The point may be moot; sadly, VW has announced no plans to bring this affordable EV to the U.S. market. With any luck things will change in two years' time.

I was talking to a friend about how to add a directory to your PATH today. It’s something that feels “obvious” to me since I’ve been using the terminal for a long time, but when I searched for instructions for how to do it, I actually couldn’t find something that explained all of the steps – a lot of them just said “add this to ~/.bashrc”, but what if you’re not using bash? What if your bash config is actually in a different file? And how are you supposed to figure out which directory to add anyway?

So I wanted to try to write down some more complete directions and mention some of the gotchas I’ve run into over the years.

Here’s a table of contents:

• step 1: what shell are you using?
• step 2: find your shell’s config file
  • a note on bash’s config file
• step 3: figure out which directory to add
  • step 3.1: double check it’s the right directory
• step 4: edit your shell config
• step 5: restart your shell
• problems:
  • problem 1: it ran the wrong program
  • problem 2: the program isn’t being run from your shell
  • problem 3: duplicate PATH entries making it harder to debug
  • problem 4: losing your history after updating your PATH
• notes:
  • a note on source
  • a note on fish_add_path

step 1: what shell are you using?

If you’re not sure what shell you’re using, here’s a way to find out. Run this:

ps -p $$ -o pid,comm=

• if you’re using bash, it’ll print out 97295 bash
• if you’re using zsh, it’ll print out 97295 zsh
• if you’re using fish, it’ll print out an error like “In fish, please use $fish_pid” ($$ isn’t valid syntax in fish, but in any case the error message tells you that you’re using fish, which you probably already knew)

Also bash is the default on Linux and zsh is the default on Mac OS (as of 2024). I’ll only cover bash, zsh, and fish in these directions.

step 2: find your shell’s config file

• in zsh, it’s probably ~/.zshrc
• in bash, it might be ~/.bashrc, but it’s complicated, see the note in the next section
• in fish, it’s probably ~/.config/fish/config.fish (you can run echo $__fish_config_dir if you want to be 100% sure)

a note on bash’s config file

Bash has three possible config files: ~/.bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, and ~/.profile.

If you’re not sure which one your system is set up to use, I’d recommend testing this way:

1. add echo hi there to your ~/.bashrc
2. Restart your terminal
3. If you see “hi there”, that means ~/.bashrc is being used! Hooray!
4. Otherwise remove it and try the same thing with ~/.bash_profile
5. You can also try ~/.profile if the first two options don’t work.

(there are a lot of elaborate flow charts out there that explain how bash decides which config file to use but IMO it’s not worth it to internalize them and just testing is the fastest way to be sure)

step 3: figure out which directory to add

Let’s say that you’re trying to install and run a program called http-server and it doesn’t work, like this:

$ npm install -g http-server
$ http-server
bash: http-server: command not found

How do you find what directory http-server is in? Honestly in general this is not that easy – often the answer is something like “it depends on how npm is configured”. A few ideas:

• Often when setting up a new installer (like cargo, npm, homebrew, etc), when you first set it up it’ll print out some directions about how to update your PATH. So if you’re paying attention you can get the directions then.
• Sometimes installers will automatically update your shell’s config file to update your PATH for you
• Sometimes just Googling “where does npm install things?” will turn up the answer
• Some tools have a subcommand that tells you where they’re configured to install things, like:
  • Node/npm: npm config get prefix (then append /bin/)
  • Go: go env GOPATH (then append /bin/)
  • asdf: asdf info | grep ASDF_DIR (then append /bin/ and /shims/)

step 3.1: double check it’s the right directory

Once you’ve found a directory you think might be the right one, make sure it’s actually correct! For example, I found out that on my machine, http-server is in ~/.npm-global/bin. I can make sure that it’s the right directory by trying to run the program http-server in that directory like this:

$ ~/.npm-global/bin/http-server
Starting up http-server, serving ./public

It worked! Now that you know what directory you need to add to your PATH, let’s move to the next step!

step 4: edit your shell config

Now we have the 2 critical pieces of information we need:

1. Which directory you’re trying to add to your PATH (like ~/.npm-global/bin/)
2. Where your shell’s config is (like ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, or ~/.config/fish/config.fish)

Now what you need to add depends on your shell:

bash instructions:

Open your shell’s config file, and add a line like this:

export PATH=$PATH:~/.npm-global/bin/

(obviously replace ~/.npm-global/bin with the actual directory you’re trying to add)

zsh instructions:

You can do the same thing as in bash, but zsh also has some slightly fancier syntax you can use if you prefer:

path=(
  $path
  ~/.npm-global/bin
)

fish instructions:

In fish, the syntax is different:

set PATH $PATH ~/.npm-global/bin

(in fish you can also use fish_add_path, some notes on that further down)

step 5: restart your shell

Now, an extremely important step: updating your shell’s config won’t take effect if you don’t restart it!

Two ways to do this:

1. open a new terminal (or terminal tab), and maybe close the old one so you don’t get confused
2. Run bash to start a new shell (or zsh if you’re using zsh, or fish if you’re using fish)

I’ve found that both of these usually work fine.

And you should be done! Try running the program you were trying to run and hopefully it works now.

If not, here are a couple of problems that you might run into:

problem 1: it ran the wrong program

If the wrong version of a program is running, you might need to add the directory to the beginning of your PATH instead of the end.

For example, on my system I have two versions of python3 installed, which I can see by running which -a:

$ which -a python3
/usr/bin/python3
/opt/homebrew/bin/python3

The one your shell will use is the first one listed.

If you want to use the Homebrew version, you need to add that directory (/opt/homebrew/bin) to the beginning of your PATH instead, by putting this in your shell’s config file (it’s /opt/homebrew/bin/:$PATH instead of the usual $PATH:/opt/homebrew/bin/)

export PATH=/opt/homebrew/bin/:$PATH

or in fish:

set PATH ~/.cargo/bin $PATH

problem 2: the program isn’t being run from your shell

All of these directions only work if you’re running the program from your shell. If you’re running the program from an IDE, from a GUI, in a cron job, or some other way, you’ll need to add the directory to your PATH in a different way, and the exact details might depend on the situation.

in a cron job

Some options:

• use the full path to the program you’re running, like /home/bork/bin/my-program
• put the full PATH you want as the first line of your crontab (something like PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:….). You can get the full PATH you’re using in your shell by running echo "PATH=$PATH".

I’m honestly not sure how to handle it in an IDE/GUI because I haven’t run into that in a long time, will add directions here if someone points me in the right direction.

problem 3: duplicate PATH entries making it harder to debug

If you edit your path and start a new shell by running bash (or zsh, or fish), you’ll often end up with duplicate PATH entries, because the shell keeps adding new things to your PATH every time you start your shell.

Personally I don’t think I’ve run into a situation where this kind of duplication breaks anything, but the duplicates can make it harder to debug what’s going on with your PATH if you’re trying to understand its contents.

Some ways you could deal with this:

1. If you’re debugging your PATH, open a new terminal to do it in so you get a “fresh” state. This should avoid the duplication.
2. Deduplicate your PATH at the end of your shell’s config (for example in zsh apparently you can do this with typeset -U path)
3. Check that the directory isn’t already in your PATH when adding it (for example in fish I believe you can do this with fish_add_path --path /some/directory)

How to deduplicate your PATH is shell-specific and there isn’t always a built in way to do it so you’ll need to look up how to accomplish it in your shell.

problem 4: losing your history after updating your PATH

Here’s a situation that’s easy to get into in bash or zsh:

1. Run a command (it fails)
2. Update your PATH
3. Run bash to reload your config
4. Press the up arrow a couple of times to rerun the failed command (or open a new terminal)
5. The failed command isn’t in your history! Why not?

This happens because in bash, by default, history is not saved until you exit the shell.

Some options for fixing this:

• Instead of running bash to reload your config, run source ~/.bashrc (or source ~/.zshrc in zsh). This will reload the config inside your current session.
• Configure your shell to continuously save your history instead of only saving the history when the shell exits. (How to do this depends on whether you’re using bash or zsh, the history options in zsh are a bit complicated and I’m not exactly sure what the best way is)

a note on source

When you install cargo (Rust’s installer) for the first time, it gives you these instructions for how to set up your PATH, which don’t mention a specific directory at all.

This is usually done by running one of the following (note the leading DOT):

. "$HOME/.cargo/env"        	# For sh/bash/zsh/ash/dash/pdksh
source "$HOME/.cargo/env.fish"  # For fish

The idea is that you add that line to your shell’s config, and their script automatically sets up your PATH (and potentially other things) for you.

This is pretty common (for example Homebrew suggests you eval brew shellenv), and there are two ways to approach this:

1. Just do what the tool suggests (like adding . "$HOME/.cargo/env" to your shell’s config)
2. Figure out which directories the script they’re telling you to run would add to your PATH, and then add those manually. Here’s how I’d do that:
   • Run . "$HOME/.cargo/env" in my shell (or the fish version if using fish)
   • Run echo "$PATH" | tr ':' '\n' | grep cargo to figure out which directories it added
   • See that it says /Users/bork/.cargo/bin and shorten that to ~/.cargo/bin
   • Add the directory ~/.cargo/bin to PATH (with the directions in this post)

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing what the tool suggests (it might be the “best way”!), but personally I usually use the second approach because I prefer knowing exactly what configuration I’m changing.

a note on fish_add_path

fish has a handy function called fish_add_path that you can run to add a directory to your PATH like this:

fish_add_path /some/directory

This is cool (it’s such a simple command!) but I’ve stopped using it for a couple of reasons:

1. Sometimes fish_add_path will update the PATH for every session in the future (with a “universal variable”) and sometimes it will update the PATH just for the current session and it’s hard for me to tell which one it will do. In theory the docs explain this but I could not understand them.
2. If you ever need to remove the directory from your PATH a few weeks or months later because maybe you made a mistake, it’s kind of hard to do (there are instructions in this comments of this github issue though).

that’s all

Hopefully this will help some people. Let me know (on Mastodon or Bluesky) if you there are other major gotchas that have tripped you up when adding a directory to your PATH, or if you have questions about this post!

Gene Hackman has passed.

Gene Hackman, who never fit the mold of a Hollywood movie star, but who became one all the same, playing seemingly ordinary characters with deceptive subtlety, intensity and often charm in some of the most noted films of the 1970s and ’80s, has died, the authorities in New Mexico said on Thursday. He was 95.

Mr. Hackman and his wife were found dead on Wednesday afternoon at a home in Santa Fe., N.M., where they had been living, according to a statement from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff’s deputies found the bodies of Mr. Hackman; his wife, Betsy Arakawa, 64; and a dog, according to the statement, which said that foul play was not suspected.

Ok. So, there are circumstances.

Hackman is, I think, my favorite actor of the 70s generation, which obviously is an extremely tough crowd to get ahead in. I listen to Smartless religiously, especially the eps that interview actors, and it’s fascinating to listen to how people in the business now have a combination of fear and reverence for that generation. Hackman carried an easy combination of wisdom and menace, which he could leverage from role to role. My favorites list is tough, but in no order:

1. The Conversation
2. Royal Tenenbaums
3. French Connection
4. Unforgiven
5. Get Shorty
6. The Quick and the Dead
7. The Firm
8. No Way Out
9. Superman I & II
10. Night Moves

I appreciate that’s an awfully idiosyncratic list but he had an idiosyncratic career.

Some clips:

Photo credit: By Christopher Michael Little, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10689828

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American Architect & Building News, August 3, 1883 (copyright expired)

Complex Queen Anne-style upper panes included stained glass inserts.  American Architect & Building News, December 22, 1888 (copyright expired)

A typical floorplan, with two apartments per floor--left and right.  The American Architect and Building News, January 17, 1891 (copyright expired)

Carl Pfeiffer's Queen Anne design carried into the interior, as well.  American Architect & Building News, August 4, 1883 (copyright expired)

William Marsh Rice, from the collection of Rice University

American Architect & Building News published this depiction of a Berkshire parlor in August 4, 1833 (copyright expired)

image via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

Never, does the cook "take a day off"...Never, does Basil, the butler, decide to locate in Chicago to be near his aunt...Never is it necessary to dismiss Marie for impertinence...Never, in fact, do any of those things that heckle and non-plus householders occur...An Arcadian town-house--The Berkshire.

So it’s all fine and good to have this protest action, but I have a question.

Why is it that protest actions these days almost always advertise themselves as nonviolent?

Let’s be clear, I am most certainly not advocating for violence, which would almost certainly be stupid and counterproductive. I am however curious as to the process by which we fetishize nonviolence to the point that we have to define any political action as nonviolent upfront. Even leaving behind the fact that Martin Luther King was a gun owner and that guns were central to self-defense in the civil rights movement, it’s still kind of weird despite the bad history behind it. I am trying to wrap my brain around this.

It’s almost as if protestors today want to advertise that they will do nothing to threaten the system. It’s not as if, unless you live in Portland or Seattle, there are organized groups of anarchists who want to break shit that you have to worry much about in these protests. It just seems to me, again, to be announcement that we aren’t threatening in any way, shape, or form, that we will hold our little action and go home (probably using public transportation) and we can be ignored.

So I’m curious–why do we do this today?

The post The Nonviolence Fetish appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Tragically, Los Angeles resident Brandon Sanders found his home had burned to the ground in the Eaton fire.

There was one good piece of news: His Tacoma had been parked far enough away from the burning structure that only the front of the vehicle was scorched. To his surprise, when he tried to start it "it fired right up," he writes. "Everything works, even the headlights and blinkers!"

Social media being social media, there are now posts going around claiming that Tacomas are fireproof. It should be obvious to the sane, but Sanders' experience with the truck was very good luck. In this other photo, here we see a house that was unscathed by the fire:

Note the unlucky SUV on the neighboring property that burned. Beneath it, you can see that aluminum has melted beneath the vehicle and flowed down the driveway. Aluminum melts at 1,221° Fahrenheit (660° Celsius). The Tacoma was not exposed to that temperature, or it would look like this SUV.

The unburned house, by the way, was designed by architect Greg Chasen. "Some of the design choices we made here helped," he writes. "But we were also very lucky."

If you're interested in what design decisions can harden a house against fire, in this comprehensive video—which has gone viral—homebuilder Matt Risinger analyzes two unburnt L.A. homes. One is the Chasen-designed house, and the other belongs to Tom Hanks:

I suspect that Abigail will also comment, but the Vulture profile of Neil Gaiman is as gross as you’ve been led to believe:

In The Sandman, the DC comic-book series that ran from 1989 to 1996 and made Gaiman famous, he tells a story about a writer named Richard Madoc. After Madoc’s first book proves a success, he sits down to write his second and finds that he can’t come up with a single decent idea. This difficulty recedes after he accepts an unusual gift from an older author: a naked woman, of a kind, who has been kept locked in a room in his house for 60 years. She is Calliope, the youngest of the Nine Muses. Madoc rapes her, again and again, and his career blossoms in the most extraordinary way. A stylish young beauty tells him how much she loved his characterization of a strong female character, prompting him to remark, “Actually, I do tend to regard myself as a feminist writer.” His downfall comes only when the titular hero, the Sandman, also known as the Prince of Stories, frees Calliope from bondage. A being of boundless charisma and creativity, the Sandman rules the Dreaming, the realm we visit in our sleep, where “stories are spun.” Older and more powerful than the most powerful gods, he can reward us with exquisite delights or punish us with unending nightmares, depending on what he feels we deserve. To punish the rapist, the Sandman floods Madoc’s mind with such a wild torrent of ideas that he’s powerless to write them down, let alone profit from them.

As allegations of Gaiman’s sexual misconduct emerged this past summer, some observers noticed Gaiman and Madoc have certain things in common. Like Madoc, Gaiman has called himself a feminist. Like Madoc, Gaiman has racked up major awards (for Gaiman, awards in science fiction and fantasy as well as dozens of prizes for contemporary novels, short stories, poetry, television, and film, helping make him, according to several sources, a millionaire many times over). And like Madoc, Gaiman has come to be seen as a figure who transcended, and transformed, the genres in which he wrote: first comics, then fantasy and children’s literature. But for most of his career, readers identified him not with the rapist, who shows up in a single issue, but with the Sandman, the inexhaustible fountain of story.

I’m a late-comer to Gaiman (I only read American Gods last year and never really had the opportunity to become a fanatic), so this isn’t psychologically catastrophic for me in the way it is for some of his more dedicated fans. I also know a few people who are personally acquainted with Gaiman and pretty much all of them have indicated that they only find the revelations surprising in degree rather than in kind.

Where are we with respect to the artist and the work at the dawn of this post-woke age? In the future I don’t plan to avoid any Gaiman-related project because of Gaiman, but at the same time I don’t think I’ll want to read or watch anything specifically because it’s Gaiman. I make no judgment of how anyone else approaches; if digesting the work of a creep is too creepy for you, I’m in no position to tell you that you’re wrong and that you need to read American Gods or watch Sandman.

Photo credit: By Kyle Cassidy – By email, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37378819

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I moved to Albuquerque 25 years ago this summer. Crazy. One of the first places I discovered there was Alpahville Video, your classic arty based movie rental store. It was good. They had all kinds of things. Of course, the rise of Netflix killed it a few years later and what has been better for cinema in the last quarter-century than that company…..Anyway, at the time they had VHS and DVD and I had both players. So I would do what the goddamn algorithms–a technology to create the worst and most boring version of yourself possible–can never do, which is allow you to browse and explore and pick things up and consider and then make a choice.

Well, one day, I was looking at their Asian section and I wanted something that wasn’t Japanese or from one of the relatively few arty Chinese directors whose films were available in the US. I picked up a VHS tape of a film called Turumba, directed by a Filipino guy named Kidhat Tahimik and released in 1981.

What I ended up watching was the best film about globalization I had ever seen or still have ever seen.

The story goes like this–there’s a family in a small town in the Philippines, probably not all that far from Manila, but far enough without a highway, which happens to be under construction. The time is 1970 or so. The family is really artistic. The father teaches music and is the lead cantor at the town’s religious festivals, called Turumba. The grandmother created a really advanced way to make the papier-mache toys popular in the town. Grandma is still around teaching the craft with an emphasis on craft. One day a German woman comes to town and sees the toys. As it turns out, she’s a scout for German manufacturers. She buys everything they have. Those things sell, she orders more, and pretty soon, she’s making big orders. Out goes the craftsmanship and in goes mass produced toys to commemorate the Munich Olympics in 72. Out goes spending time playing music and in goes long days in the nascent factory, not only for the kids (it’s told through the 10 year old or so son of the cantor/head of the household who becomes the factory owner) but for the kids of town. Out goes hanging out at night and in comes electric fans and TVs and cars. Out goes the joy of life and in comes the sadness of capitalism, a sadness that few actually want to reject because of the material upsides.

What makes the film so brilliant is the ambivalence. It isn’t romanticizing the people or place. They already exist in a globalized world. The kid loves his Batman t-shirt. It’s just starting at a given time–a time when globalization already is impacting a community in one way–and demonstrating what happens when that globalization goes into overdrive. It’s also not propaganda. It’s certainly a critique of neocolonialism, yes, but done the right way. The film really is about ambivalence. It’s funny. There are little asides that amuse. It’s filmed like a documentary but is not ham-fisted at all. It’s super cheaply made–the subtitles take up half the screen and Criterion Channel pretty clearly just did the best they could with a VHS copy since I am pretty sure this was never put on DVD. I would absolutely recommend watching this. I was amazed to see it show up and I was so happy. I watched it a couple of times, then the video store closed, and I hadn’t seen in 20 years. It was just as good as I remembered.

This leads to me two additional points. One is that for as wonderful as Criterion Channel is, it’s quite striking how even film buffs just want to watch 80s and 90s big budget films they remembered liking back in college. The monthly programming now is deeply skewed in that direction, with very little on foreign films. This month includes a Nicole Kidman retrospective, a collection of films called “Surveillance Cinema,” which is a way to organize The Truman Show and Minority Report and Gattaca into a respectable Criterion thing; and three Cameron Crowe directed films. There’s also a couple of collections around older Hollywood films, but it’s pretty clear that there really is no market for foreign films, even among cinephiles, in this country. I get that Criterion is responding to the market. The problem is that it is very hard to search for films otherwise unless you are looking for something specific. If you try, you can search by country and if you put in Philippines, a bunch of things come up, but you have to think of that yourself. If I hadn’t seen this film in the Recently Added category, I would probably have never found it.

The other thing rewatching Turumba made me consider is how villages become centers of a specific type of craft. I’ve been in Oaxaca for nearly two months. You might be familiar with the alebrijes that come from here, the fantastically artistic wooden animals. They are cool, I grant you. I have a few. The story of these here seems to be similar–something a few people did, then a British filmmaker brought some of these people abroad, they got popular, and now the economy of two entire towns is making these things. I very slightly know an anthropologist who has written a book on this and I guess I should read it. How do specific towns rearrange their economies to produce what were once crafts for a mass global market?

Anyway, watch this film.

The post LGM Film Club, Part 443: Turumba appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

A couple of years ago, I saw the superb Mali Obomsawin play with her jazz band. She is Abenaki. She started talking about land acknowledgements and called them “corny” before going on to say that the real land acknowledgment is knowing that her ancestor was imprisoned in Boston for practicing his religion. That got pretty well at the absurdity of land acknowledgements. What do they actually do? The answer is usually nothing. At first, one might argue they were useful in the sense of reminding folks that the land does have a Native history. But pretty quickly they became a way for whites to engage in performative liberalism without any kind of commitment and then they became a way for corporations and wealthy institutions to give lip service to something progressive while doing absolutely nothing for Native Americans here today, including people of the tribes being mentioned! This has bothered me for years now.

The excellent historian of Native America Kathleen DuVal had an op-ed yesterday in the Times about getting rid of this ridiculousness and focusing on actually working toward justice for the Tribes today.

If you work at a university, large corporation or left-leaning nonprofit or have attended certain performances, you have probably heard a land acknowledgment, a ritual that asks you to remember that Native Americans were here long before the peoples of Europe, Africa and Asia. The New York City Commission on Human Rights, for example, on its website “acknowledges the land politically designated as New York City to be the homeland of the Lenape (Lenapehoking) who were violently displaced as a result of European settler colonialism over the course of 400 years.”

The point is to make us more aware of the dispossession and violence that occurred in the establishment and expansion of the United States. But they’ve begun to sound more like rote obligations, and Indigenous scholars tell me there can be tricky politics involved with naming who lived on what land and who their descendants are. Land acknowledgments might have outlived their usefulness.

Instead of performing an acknowledgment of Native peoples, institutions should establish credible relationships with existing Native nations. In the United States, there are 574 federally recognized tribes, plus many state-recognized tribes and communities that own and manage land, operate social services and administer federal programs, much as counties and states do. They run tribal businesses and make small-business loans to their citizens. They provide jobs and revenue that help drive regional and rural economies. What they need from universities, corporations, nonprofits and local and state governments is partnerships that acknowledge and build on their continuing sovereignty.

…

The Native Governance Center notes that land acknowledgments often “become an excuse for folks to feel good and move on with their lives.” The journalists Graeme Wood and Noah Smith have criticized them as “moral exhibitionism” and ethnonationalism. In an interview Keith Richotte Jr., the director of the University of Arizona’s Indigenous peoples law and policy program and a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, told me that if land acknowledgments “are treated as the only or last step of one’s commitment to Indigenous peoples and nations, then they can become more harmful than beneficial.”

Land acknowledgments tend to reinforce the myth of Native disappearance and irrelevance. In calling attention to dispossession, they often miss the point that Native Americans survived and are having a renaissance in culture and sovereignty. The vanishing-Indian myth has deep roots in American history. As part of taking Indigenous land, 19th-century Americans found it useful to believe that Indians were fading away. They described precolonial North America as a wilderness — “occupied by a few savage hunters,” as President Andrew Jackson put it, who “were annihilated or have melted away to make room for the whites.” Jean O’Brien, a historian and citizen of the White Earth Ojibwe Nation, called it a “narrative of Indian extinction that has stubbornly remained in the consciousness and unconsciousness of Americans.”

Tribes are still here and have had to go to court to defend their remaining sovereignty and property, spending their revenue to buy back land that once was theirs. In 1996 the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians bought back one of their sacred sites, the Kituwah mound, which once sat at the center of the Cherokee Mother Town, and the Osage Nation has saved the only ancient pyramid mound remaining in St. Louis by buying its summit. In its 2020 McGirt v. Oklahoma decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the treaty-defined boundaries of the Muscogee, Cherokee, Quapaw, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Seminole nations remain in full force because Congress never disestablished their reservations. Yet the State of Oklahoma has continued to fight tribal jurisdiction over criminal cases. If tribes didn’t have to spend revenue buying back land and defending their interests in court, they could use more of it on the health, education and criminal justice programs that benefit their citizens and their neighbors.

My colleague Amanda Cobb-Greetham, the founding director of the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Okla., and a citizen of the Chickasaw nation, told me that instead of lengthy discussions about whether and how to write land acknowledgments, institutions should engage in active and meaningful relationships with the Native nations that are now or were on the lands those institutions occupy. Florida State University and the Seminole Tribe of Florida have established such a relationship, which started with the tribe’s involvement in designing the mascot’s regalia but now extends to other partnerships, including creating a Native American and Indigenous Studies Center.

I know some of these people and respect them very much and I can’t agree more. Have your land acknowledgement if you want, but if you aren’t actively doing something within your power to remedy injustice today, then it’s totally worthless. If you are a university, are you offering free tuition and fees to the Tribes in your area? If you are a professor, are you assigning work by Native scholars or centering Native voices? If you are running a corporation, are you engaging in affirmative action plans for the Tribes? There lots of things we can be doing. But mostly, land acknowledgements exist to make whites feel good about themselves.

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The new class of weight loss drugs also have miracle drug impacts it seems and given that both good health and the lack thereof have enormous economic structures build around them, their impact is likely to be quite dramatic.

Some junk-food companies and alcohol sellers are freaking out about the prospect of reduced appetites or booze cravings. As they should: The average household with at least one family member on a GLP-1 is spending about 6 percent less on groceries each month within six months of adoption. That translates to about a $416 reduction in food and drink purchases per household a year. Spending reductions are even greater for high-income households, according to a new study by researchers at Cornell University and Numerator.

Some categories have been hit harder than others. For example, these households are spending about 11 percent less on chips and other savory snacks and 9 percent less on sweet bakery items. Select healthier foods, such as fresh fruits and yogurts, have gotten a very tiny bump.

There are some potential retail winners. For example, rapid weight loss has encouraged some patients to replace their wardrobes. Theclothingrental company Rent the Runway recently reported that more customers are switching to smaller sizes than at any time in the past 15 years.

Airlines could save significant money on fuel if passengers slim down en masse, a financial firm projected. Life insurers could cash in, too, given the many mortality risks linked with chronic obesity. “Generally, running a life insurance company right before immortality is discovered — cancer vaccines, antiaging therapeutics — is a good business to be in!” said Zac Townsend, CEO of the life insurance company Meanwhile.

Nearly every GLP-1 user I’ve interviewed in the past year has also mentioned spending money on new hobbies, such as pottery classes or pickleball leagues. Some deliberately picked activitiesto replace social engagements that revolve around food or alcohol; others said they simply gained the energy and self-confidence to try new things.

“I am way more active than I have been,” said Mitchell, whom I interviewed for a recent PBS NewsHour story about Ozempic economics. “I took my daughters horseback riding on the beach last Christmas. We’ve been snow tubing, things that I would have never thought to do.”

OK, some of this seems anecdotal. However:

The Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, nearly single-handedly kept its home country’s economy out of recession last year while most of Europe struggled. And because Americans are the primary customers of these meds, U.S. dollars flowed heavily into Denmark, causingthe Danish krone to strengthen relative to other currencies.

To keep the krone’s value steady relative to the euro, the Danish central bank had to cut interest rates. Put another way: Overweight Americans unintentionally helped Danes get cheaper mortgages.

Wow.

In any case, good health is good! And it has good effects!

Obesity is a chronic disease associated with dozens of other ailments, including joint problems and cancers. So helping Americans lose weight has the potential to make the public much healthier — and reduce spending on other (costly) care.

Seven women in Mitchell’s family, for instance, had breast cancer and both of her parents developed forms of dementia. Mitchell herself developed diabetes, too. All of these problems have linkages with obesity. “I don’t want to be sick,” said Mitchell,explaining why she turned to Wegovy after previously trying diets, exercise, therapy and surgery. “After taking care of my parents, I said, ‘I don’t want my children to have to take care of me.’” Her obesity is now in remission and she no longer has diabetes.

Of course, such potential health benefits — and cost savings — will materialize more broadly only if patients keep up with their medications and adopt healthier habits to help maintain lower weights. Which is a big if.

Research suggests most patients who wereprescribed these meds stop taking them within a year. Some stop because they’ve successfully reached their goal weight. But many others report stopping because of costs, unpleasant side effects, drug shortages or squeamishness about needles.

Who knows what will happen with all of this. But it sure is one of the more fascinating things to come along in the last couple of years. I bet RFK will have thoughts……

The post Weight Loss Drugs and the Economy appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Jimmy Carter has died. Carter was a pretty bad president and then one of the two greatest ex-presidents, along with John Quincy Adams. He’s become something of a beloved figure among liberals in the last twenty years or so, both because of his brave stance denouncing Israeli apartheid against Palestinians and because he lives his faith through Habitat and his other actions, with no sense of the hypocrisy so common among evangelicals. But still, Carter really sucked as president.

Born in 1924 in the small southwestern Georgia farming town of Plains, Carter grew up in the region’s small farming elite. His parents owned a lot of land and his father was a successful businessman. This gave the young man a lot of chances that even many Georgia whites did not have. Of course, his father was a staunch segregationist and they were the wealthiest family in a largely African-American area. But Jimmy went to the local public schools and succeeded there. Then he fulfilled his childhood dream of attending the Naval Academy in Annapolis. It took awhile for a boy from southwest Georgia to make this happen. First, he spent a year at Georgia Southwestern College in Americus and then a year at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Finally, in 1943, he got accepted to the Naval Academy. He did well, graduating 60th in a class of 820 in 1946. With World War II just having finished, the expanding U.S. military presence around the world required a lot of officers and Carter would spend the next seven years at bases all over the place, both in the U.S. and being deployed in the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. He started his family at this time too, having married Rosalynn in 1946.

Carter became interested in submarines and eventually qualified for command of ships. In 1952, he started working in the Navy’s growing nuclear submarine program. He was based out of Schenectady but spent time at the Naval Reactors Branch of the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington as well. When a partial meltdown took place at Canada’s Chalk River Laboratories in 1952, U.S. experts went to help, including Carter. He was exposed to radiation while disassembling the reactor. He was in protective gear and didn’t suffer any negative health consequences, but this permanently affected his position on nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

In 1953, Carter started training to serve on a nuclear submarine. But he was tiring of military life and when his father died, Carter and Rosalynn chose to return home to Plains. At first, he and his family, now consisting of three small boys, lived in public housing in Plains, making him the only president to have lived in public housing. But he soon took over the family farm and his father’s peanut operations. Being a scientific man, he made this a going concern.

One thing that always drives me nuts about how conservatives talk about Carter is their dismissal of him as a “dumb peanut farmer.” Sure, and a Naval officer who worked on nuclear submarines.

One of the critical questions about Carter is how he more or less overcame the racism so central to his growing up. That he followed someone as utterly awful as Lester Maddox as governor makes his rise and career even more interesting. Carter’s early political career is one of racial moderation but not a lot of racial courage either. He mostly kept quiet about his belief that segregation should be abolished. That doesn’t mean his positions weren’t known. When the White Citizens’ Council approached him to join them, he refused and then they boycotted his peanut warehouse. There was room for moderation among whites on segregation and that’s where Carter firmly remained. Not every white was a WCC or KKK member, even if very very few took any real risks on promoting desegregation.

In 1961, Carter became the chairman of the Sumter County School Board and here he did vocally approve of integration. When he ran for state senate the following year, the Democratic Party machine wanted him to lose, so they fixed the election with the aid of the county sheriff. Carter challenged the result, the fraud was uncovered, and Carter won the next election.

But Americus was a place of racial violence. That was hitting a peak in the early 1960s and Carter basically did not speak out about it out of fear of alienating the segregationists he needed for his political career. This was the politics of the racial moderate. For an ambitious politician from southwestern Georgia, this was not unexpected. He certainly could have been a whole lot worse.

Carter was a very hard worker and very ambitious. These traits served him well. He rose rapidly within the Georgia Democratic Party, taking speed-reading courses so he could digest more material. He got a position on the state Democratic Executive Committee and became chairman of the West Georgia Central Planning and Development Commission, overseeing the distribution of state and federal grants. This made him regionally powerful and also put him in conflict with established interests who disliked the anti-corruption politics of the newcomer.

All of this was intended to set him up to run for governor in 1966. Carter was something of a late entry, but his political enemy, the Republican Bo Callaway, whom he had clashed with on the planning commission, ran on a pro-segregation platform. Democrats feared losing the state for the first time since Reconstruction and Carter decided to take him on. He ran as a moderate and came in third in a three-way primary, behind the loathsome violent racist Lester Maddox and the old New Deal liberal Ellis Arnall. Maddox won the run-off and then the general.

Carter was devastated—coming in third was not his plan and seeing Maddox take power was definitely not his plan. But he ran again in 1970, this time a more experienced party leader and a savvier politician. He managed, somehow, to court both the black vote and the segregationist vote. He met with Andrew Young and Martin Luther King, Sr. while also inviting George Wallace to come make a speech in Georgia. Overall, this was a more conservative campaign than four years earlier. He attacked his liberal primary opponent for being a northern-style progressive and, toward the end of his campaign, actually disseminated racist ads showing his opponent with black basketball players. Such was the reality of Georgia politics in 1970.

The moment he took office, Carter completely turned his back on the segregationists. They were angry. In his inaugural address, he said the time for racial discrimination was over. That was fine, but he wasn’t a particularly effective governor for reasons that repeated themselves in his presidency. He didn’t like working with the legislature, in no small part because he hated the glad-handling that required, which he associated with corruption. He also felt government was too big and while there may have been good reasons behind his goal of streamlining government, reducing departments, and placing greater power in the governor’s office, this would also serve some less than progressive ends in the White House.

On race, Carter appointed a lot of African-Americans to offices, the first governor of Georgia to do so since Reconstruction. On the other hand, he opposed busing as a strategy to integrate schools, co-sponsoring an anti-busing resolution with George Wallace at the National Governors Association annual meeting in 1971, and he supported the death penalty, which of course was disproportionally applied to black people.

Carter would also embrace really bad positions for political reasons. For example, when William Calley, architect of the My Lai Massacre that killed over 500 innocent Vietnamese, was convicted of his crimes, he led a statewide initiative that created something called American Fighting Man’s Day and had Georgians drive with their light on during the day for a week as a symbol of their support for the war criminal.

Carter seems like an unusual presidential candidate, or more accurately, an unusual person to actually win the nomination. He was always very ambitious. He tried to align with conservative forces at the national level so he could balance the McGovern ticket and become the VP candidate in 1972. That obviously did not work. He did the work to raise his profile, but it was still low. In 1973, Carter appeared on What’s My Line, where the panelists had to guess his occupation. It took a long time before Gene Shalit (who still lives!) figured it out. Carter was just a medium-sized state first term governor with no national profile. That was not going to stop him.

Carter announced his presidential candidacy in December 1974. No one cared. By January 1976, he had just 4 percent support among Democrats in polling. But, with overall disgust at Washington after Watergate, Carter managed to rise fast in early 1976. He won in both Iowa and New Hampshire. He was the moral outsider moderate, not Nixon, not Wallace, and not McGovern. It worked. The darkhorse won the candidacy, naming the liberal Walter Mondale as his vice-president. He had a big lead early in the general, but Ford nearly came back to win; in fact, Ford won more states. But Carter became president, the most unlikely person to win a presidential election since Warren Harding.

Unfortunately, Carter really sucked at being president.

The problem with Carter’s presidency is that he was bad at the job. Really, he was bad at it in many ways. The ultimate micromanager, he could get distracted with trivia. His distrust of established politicians meant that he found himself surrounded by economic advisors who told him repeatedly to triangulate between the parties, alienating everyone. He had opportunities to change the nation’s trajectory by passing groundbreaking legislation with large congressional majorities, especially in his first two years, but he just wouldn’t do it. His moralistic take on the world had some value in a post-Nixon era, but also blinded him to the complexity of many problems and the kind of deals one had to make in order to succeed.

Simply put, Carter is as close to a libertarian as we have ever had as president. That’s a tough one for us to swallow perhaps. We may want to see him as a great liberal. But he wasn’t a liberal at all, especially not on economic issues. He truly believed that nation needed to move on from the New Deal state. He distrusted government programs to help the poor. Although Congress was filled with liberals, he surrounded himself with the new neoliberals who told him repeatedly that inflation mattered much more than either building an effective political coalition or taking brave stances to use his power to create a more equal world. He loved deregulation and repealed many of the protections for consumers that had come into the law over the few decades before this. He fought for lower taxes over economic stimulus, consistently undermining his own Democratic Congress. Moreover, he was a true believer in all of this stuff. It wasn’t political expediency, which you might understand. No, he had a vision for the economy was antithetical to contemporary liberalism. Just because he was a good man personally and a Democrat and a great ex-president does not make any of this untrue.

Now, to be fair, these were tough times. The corporate lobby was now well-organized and seeking to roll back the labor and environmental and consumer regulations Americans had passed in the previous few decades and especially the last ten years. The real impact of that was in the future, but looking back, it was clear where this was headed. The economy was really tough. The nation had not dealt well with the oil crisis and the Vietnam War.

Inflation was a very real problem. Already an issue when he took office, the OPEC oil boycott meant that inflation jumped from 5.8% in 1976 to 13.2% in 1980. That would have caused massive problems for any president. Capital mobility and deindustrialization were beginning to sweep the nation and no one had any answers for communities such as Youngstown. That city’s famed Black Monday, where the first of the big steel plants shut down, took place in the first months of the Carter administration. What to do about Youngstown and other places would be a big theme of this administration. But Carter’s own reticence to take aggressive action on the economy and deindustrialization continues to reverberate today. Basically, Carter didn’t care much about cities like this and effectively offered them nothing to ease their burden.

But even outside of the big issues of the time, Carter wasn’t very good at being president. He always had a more than a bit of the anti-politics politics that drives ideas today like jungle primaries and his lack of attention to partisanship meant that he blew many easy chances to create positive legislation. His micromanaging was legendary and took him away from the things he needed to be focusing on. He started his administration by taking on some western water projects that he thought was pork, which was probably fine in theory, but this is what he chose to spend his first political capital on and all it did was infuriate leading members of Congress from both parties who benefitted from them. As they say in the West, whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting. If Carter had bothered talking to western politicians about this, he would have known better but that was not his style. Instead, he just made enemies of people who led powerful congressional committees and who started looking at the westerner Ronald Reagan shortly after.

None of this is to say Carter didn’t do some good things. His second day in office, Carter pardoned all Vietnam draft evaders, a clearly morally correct policy and one over which he took a political hit. Carter was also the greatest environmental president we have ever had. It’s worth noting what a missed opportunity the nation had to get serious about its environmental problems and move forward into a clean energy future that could have significantly mitigated the impact of climate change.

Nothing says more about these missed opportunities than Carter having solar panels placed on the roof of the White House and Reagan then having them removed. Carter taking on the energy crisis like it was a war was a great policy, but it’s also not one Americans wanted to hear. Americans want their president to kick some ass. Telling them to turn down their heat and put on a sweater is more or less the opposite of that. Creating the Department of Education was probably a good thing, even though the position is one of the weakest in the Cabinet, which at a time when Linda McMahon is about to lead it is probably a good thing, even if local control over education is in the end creates a lot of problems.

Much of what Carter faced was an era where he was pretty clear-minded about America’s limitations, governing a nation angry at having those limitations exposed. Americans wanted to drive huge gas-guzzling vehicles, not having gas rationing plans, which Carter presented to Congress in 1979. His famous “malaise” speech from later that same year, based on our energy issues, but talking about the overall position of the United States at that time, was widely attacked. One might argue that Carter simply lacked the political skills to be an effective president. Terrible at messaging these issues and too honest for a cynical media, he struggled to connect with Americans. Perhaps a different politician could have taken on these issues more effectively, but we will ever know. In any case, he had so alienated Congress by that point that in May 1979, the House voted against giving Carter the authority to create a gas rationing plan; Carter responded by calling the vote “embarrassing” which did not help him mend those needed relations.

On other environmental issues, Carter was really great. His choice to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Eula Bingham, was outstanding and this was the only administration in which OSHA was really moving toward the activist force it could be. His 1978 declaration of a federal emergency at Love Canal and the Superfund program that followed was brilliant.

On public lands, Carter was outstanding. His most important action was signing the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, providing protection to 157 million acres of land, 43 million of which were in national parks, the creation of two national monuments, and over 12 million additional acres designated as wilderness, a process that followed Carter using the Antiquities Act to protect 56 million acres as national monuments in 1978, which led him to be burned in effigy in Fairbanks.

On some foreign policy issues, Carter deserves a good bit of credit. The negotiations that led to the SALT II treaty with the Soviets, fixing nuclear missile counts and limiting new development was a very positive step toward peace in the Cold War. The Ford administration had started this process, but Carter is who nailed it down with Brezhnev. The agreement was signed in 1979 and it seemed that Soviet-American relations were improving. But with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan shortly after, relations suffered badly and the Senate refused to ratify SALT II.

On the other hand, Carter, bringing his moralism into foreign policy, decided to boycott the 1980 Olympics. This was a shame. The only people who suffered in this boycott was the athletes who had trained for the Olympics their whole life. The Soviet response to boycott in 1984 meant that you had back-to-back games tainted with political posturing. Carter redoubled efforts to influence Pakistan after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which might make sense from a geopolitical perspective but the Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq regime was pretty awful. No good choices there. But a lot of that funding went to Islamist resistance groups, which did not exactly end well for the U.S. or for the citizens of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Still, Carter always defended this decision.

Fundamentally, Carter bringing human rights and moralism into foreign policy was simply hard to do, especially in the aftermath of Kissinger. It was a welcome change, but it was also applied with massive inconsistency. That’s what we see in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Carter wanted to use U.S. influence for a free Rhodesia and to end apartheid in South Africa, but he faced too many big obstacles, including growing fascism among white South Africans, the election of Margaret Thatcher (and Britain was more influential in South Africa anyway), and the fact that conservatives in Congress such as Jesse Helms liked apartheid. Carter was mostly good, but then he would say nothing against the horrors of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines because they were too important an ally. These inconsistencies were noted at the time.

Carter faced the Latin American dictatorships and responded with at least some level of disapproval, telling the Argentine junta to quit throwing people out of airplanes. He didn’t respond well to the rise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, but at least he didn’t instantly move toward murderous militarism in the same way as Reagan would. He also worked out the treaty with Panama to return the Panama Canal to that nation in 1999. That undermined an increasingly problematic site of protest by anti-colonial forces that reminded the world of American imperialism. It also led to a massive right-wing backlash, becoming the culture war issue of the 1980 election and leading to the defeat of several long-time politicians who supported it, such as Frank Church in Idaho. This is one of those issues that is almost impossible to wrap your head around today—why did returning the Panama Canal to Panama cause such a widespread reaction. But that’s OK, in 50 years, people will wonder the same thing about Critical Race Theory and the modern Republican Party. Amazingly, we are now talking about taking over the Panama Canal today because our next president is not only a zillion years old, but is partly a response to Carterism anyway.

Of course, Carter’s signature achievement was his work toward peace in the Middle East. The Camp David Accords did not in fact bring peace to the region, but Israel and Egypt have more or less gotten along ever since and that reduced overall tensions tremendously. Unfortunately, the assassination of Anwar El-Sadat and the rise of Hosni Mubarak placed sharp limitations on Egyptian governance and the recent history of Israel is of a nation turning far to the right. But getting those two nations to sit down and work out an agreement was an actual foreign policy achievement far greater than nearly any president has had in foreign policy.

It’s hard to say much positive at all about Carter’s response to the Iran hostage crisis. To be fair, there weren’t a lot of great cards to play. But the rescue operation was an unmitigated disaster and Carter deserved the blame he received for it. Early on, I don’t think you can criticize Carter too harshly. He announced sanctions and proclaimed he would not order a military action that would “cause bloodshed.” But as his 1980 reelection campaign struggled against the rise of Ronald Reagan, Carter ordered an invasion of Iran to rescue the hostages. Operation Eagle Claw was one of the worst disasters in American foreign policy history. First, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance explicitly told Carter that this was a terrible idea, but Zbigniew Brzezinski was a more influential advisor—and he wanted a military solution. The actual operation of the mission was a complete disaster, with botched preparations, the waste of fuel, and then desert sand blasted into the refueling tanker, leading to two planes going down in the Iranian desert. Vance resigned in disgust. This both showed American incompetence and gave the Iranian regime endless propaganda with their own people and globally. Coming on the heels of Vietnam and the oil crisis, this was a huge blow to American prestige and self-confidence.

Of course, the media also savaged Carter in horrendously unfair ways. He was seen by the Beltway elite as a redneck outsider who didn’t share their values or interests. His infamous Playboy interview when he said, “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times” led to a lot of chortling among the media. His evangelicalism was funny to them. Nothing sums up how awful Carter fared with the Beltway hacks that make up our mainstream media then and now than the infamous rabbit incident. Carter was a man with a farm in rural Georgia. He was used to dealing with animals and knew how to handle a rabbit. But these Beltway hacks found it hilarious. What a buffoon, that Carter! He had a difficult brother that was a media joke. Good thing the media handles problematic family members of Democratic presidents reasonably today! He also had his young daughter Amy in the White House with him and she received way too much media attention for a girl that age. I don’t have much positive to say about how the media has evolved over time, but largely leaving the underage children of presidents alone is a good thing, even if you are unfortunate enough to have Donald Trump as your father. Presidential children of age who are trying to implement fascism, well, that’s another thing entirely.

But it was really on the economy that Carter’s presidency floundered. A believer that inflation was caused by monopolies, he believed strongly in deregulation. Carter’s emphasis on deregulation wasn’t entirely out of order; after all, he did help create the modern microbrewery movement through it. And while the Airline Deregulation Act did usher in an era of cheap airfare, it also laid the groundwork for the almost comically terrible experience of flying today. But overall, his emphasis on deregulation as opposed to better regulation played no small role in the neoliberal era that has snowballed into the all-out war on the regulatory state today. He had no vision for fighting inflation except for softer versions of the pro-corporate policies that Reagan would later pursue, while not offering any sort of message that Regan would be so effective at. But his austerity programs and desire to cut social programs led to a lot of disturbance among Democratic leaders. As Tip O’Neill said in 1979, “Can you reelect the president on austerity?” The answer was no.

Perhaps nowhere did Carter show his massive limitations of imagination and governance than on the Humphrey-Hawkins Act. That bill, which would have created true full employment, initially with the right to sue the government if you could not find a job, was an attempt to rebuild the liberal coalition by appealing to the best of the New Deal job programs and to the black community, which suffered so badly from underemployment. The bill’s sponsors thought Carter was on board with them during the 76 campaign, but they were wrong.

Carter surrounded himself with neoliberal economic advisors who prioritized inflation over every other goal and governed significantly to the right of his quite liberal Congress, infuriating the left. Carter sent Charles Schultze, his chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, to torpedo Humphrey-Hawkins. Schultze effectively shut down any provision that would actually create full employment or commit the government to putting money into job creation. The final bill, a mere shell of the original, committed the government more to fighting inflation than to helping the poor.

What happened with Humphrey-Hawkins repeated itself over and over during the Carter administration, infuriating unions and the left. As Jefferson Cowie tells in his great book Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class, near the end of Carter’s administration, a journalist asked International Association of Machinists president Wimpy Winpisinger how Carter could revive his reputation in the labor movement. Wimpy answered, “Die.”

Of course, Winpsinger didn’t want Carter to die, but that’s how far Carter’s reputation had fallen on the labor left by 1980. Carter’s response to the decline of the steel industry was almost nonexistent. He was more focused on propping up foreign steel suppliers to fight inflation than worried about the jobs lost in the U.S. The Japanese and European steel companies dumped their extra supplies on the U.S. market, undermining the ability of American firms to compete in their home markets. This undermined his own base voters in critical northern states and, taken aback by the closures, he simply struggled to even articulate a coherent response and nothing that happened undermined his belief that growing imports would only help the U.S., both in domestic and foreign policy. Carter shrugging his shoulders at Youngstown and other sites of deindustrialization infuriated working class voters.

In short, Carter had the congressional majorities to rebuild the New Deal coalition. Instead, he pandered to conservatives on economics, defied his own congressional caucus, and proceeded to fail entirely in stopping the Republican Party in 1980. I don’t know if reestablishing New Deal politics would have stopped the rise of Reagan and the right, but it couldn’t have ended worse than Carter’s actual policies did. Again and again, Carter sent bills to Congress that no one liked. His alienated his own party, Republicans didn’t support the bills either, and he simply would not build political coalitions to help himself out. You can’t help those who won’t help themselves and Jimmy Carter would not help himself.

By 1980, Carter was heavily damaged goods. The growing right certainly wasn’t going to vote for him over Reagan. Yet, he had strongly alienated his fellow Democrats, both in Congress and the base, which was still pretty strongly union-based at this time. His racial moderation wasn’t going to appeal to southern whites and he lost the chance to really lock in high participation from African-American communities by his economic policies that did not take the fight against poverty seriously. It’s fair to say that Ted Kennedy’s primary run against Carter was stupid and just hurt the president, but then Carter had pretty much asked for a liberal challenger. In fact, I don’t really have a problem with Kennedy deciding to challenge Carter, but Kennedy himself ran an awful campaign, so he damaged Carter without actually beating him, the worst of both worlds. Who knows if Kennedy would have defeated Reagan, but this was still the pre-serious part of his career, so I am skeptical.

In the general, Carter actually started out ahead of Reagan in polling, but by the fall, it was clear that Reagan was going to win. He did, going away. Carter only won his home state of Georgia, Minnesota, West Virginia, Maryland, Rhode Island, and DC. The electoral college total was an awful 489-49. Reagan won 50.1% of the popular vote to 41% for Carter and 6.6% to John Anderson. What a disaster.

After Carter lost, he had every right to be bitter and withdraw into private life. In 1981, there wasn’t too much of a precedent for what ex-presidents did, by which I mean that they did all sorts of things. Some were old and died soon after. LBJ went back to Texas, relaxed a bit, and started teaching at the University of Texas occasionally. Eisenhower golfed. Hoover stewed in endless bitterness at FDR. Nixon sought to rehab his reputation.

Carter chose none of these paths. Rather, he went into a life of public service unprecedented among an ex-president since John Quincy Adams. This started with the founding of the Carter Center in 1982, which I think is the first serious foundation founded by an ex-president. Carter made the most of it, fighting for worldwide democracy and human health.

Carter is most famous for his work with Habitat for Humanity, which seems like such an institution now that one forgets how central Carter was to its growth. He and Rosalynn started working with Habitat on a 1984 project in Americus, near Plains. Soon after, he led his own Habitat group to New York and a long collaboration had begun. Now, while we can that this sort of voluntarism has a downside because the government should be taking care of housing for the poor, of course the government is very much not doing that. Carter, believing in living his faith, helped spur a new path of voluntarism and this was a tremendously positive thing.

Carter’s work on tropical diseases is even more important. It’s hard to state just how horrific diseases such as Guinea worm and river blindness are. In 1986, the Carter Center decided to take on Guinea worm. That year, 3.5 million people suffered from the disease, spread through 21 countries. Today, it is almost completely eliminated. This is how you do a post-presidency. Carter long said he wanted to outlive Guinea worm. He may not quite have done so, and it could come back without continued vigilance, but what an amazing accomplishment. Moreover, through the whole thing, although Carter has no small ego himself, he handled himself with such grace and class and modesty. Bill Clinton, who always had a complicated relationship with Carter, could have learned more than a few things from the man about personal behavior, both during and after his presidency.

Carter also continued to take brave and bold stances on the issues he most cared about. He had no reason to take controversial positions. But he felt it was the right thing to do. That was especially true with his advocacy to peace in the Middle East. His continued efforts for peace in the Middle East were always incredibly noble, if out of fashion with an Israel no longer interested in a two-state solution or peace with the Palestinians. He spent a decent amount of time in North Korea, talking to that nation about giving up their nuclear program and in 1994, persuaded Kim Il-Sung to agree to a freeze, although of course that didn’t last. His election monitoring in politically troubled countries, particularly in Africa, was crucial work as well. In 2002, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Unlike Barack Obama’s Nobel Prize for not being George W. Bush, Carter truly earned his Nobel.

Up to the end, Carter spoke out. He criticized Trump for ending the Iran nuclear deal, a true foreign policy disaster, showed up around the nation for various events, often revolving around the Carter Center, and bemoaned the state of the government. He was a moral voice. He wasn’t a good president, not by a long shot, and recent efforts to revive his reputation aren’t very convincing. He was outstanding in some areas, but the number of unforced errors severely undermined him. But he was absolutely a good man. We will all miss him. But definitely not for his presidency, which was bad.

The post Jimmy Carter appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

Well this is something special, a holiday treat for the end of 2024: a group of archivists (including Chris Person) has uploaded an HBO magic special by Ricky Jay that has been largely unavailable since it aired in 1996.

This is an RF rip of Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, to date the greatest card magic special ever produced, directed by David Mamet of all people. This special was produced by HBO and to date has never had a home release, although poor home recordings of this special exist online.

Person described his process for archiving videos at Aftermath:

Before getting into preservation generally, it’s worth considering how we got here. Why is so much media lost or badly preserved? A recurring reason is that the people in charge are sometimes, but not always, asleep at the wheel. Media is forgotten or stored improperly, and humidity and heat have destroyed more of our history than we will ever know. Sometimes companies handle the material sloppily (I’ve blogged about the use of AI before, but there are countless examples in audio too).

Having shared all that, I feel like the quality of this YouTube video of the special is not perceptibly worse than the one uploaded to archive.org? What am I missing?

And as always when I post about Ricky Jay, I recommend Mark Singer’s irresistible 1993 profile of Jay, which begins with this story:

The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:

Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.

“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.

He turned over the three of clubs.

Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”

After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”

Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”

Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right — what was the card?”

“Two of spades.”

Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.

The deuce of spades.

A small riot ensued.

Tags: Chris Person · David Mamet · HBO · magic · Mark Singer · Ricky Jay · TV · video

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Let’s talk about education for a minute,” said Matthew Civello, CEO of Scanscraps, at a recent roundtable talk at the Conference of Climate and Compost at Baruch College in New York City. “I’ll just take a show of hands. How many people here today are familiar with alternate-side-of-the-street parking?” Civello’s question was met with laughter and a near-unanimous show of hands in the audience. “It’s probably the most successful program the city has ever rolled out,” he continued. “And how many of us own a car?” More than half of the hands went down. “Even if you don’t own a car, you know about alternate-side-of-the-street parking. … [So, for composting,] education is great, but there has to be a motivational stimulus to make people want to participate. You need to incentivize people with rewards, and also with enforcement, and it has to be on an individual level. It’s a behavioral exercise. First and foremost, it has to become part of our city’s DNA.”

Civello is illustrating the paradox of NYC’s new boroughwide “mandatory” curbside collection of organic waste: How can you compel more than 8 million residents to separate food scraps and other compost from their garbage? How can you regulate the wide-scale collection of different kinds of waste? And how can you even make a smidgen of difference in the composition of some 14 million tons of garbage that NYC annually feeds to landfills?

Structure and Consistency

“Changing behavior requires structure and consistency,” said Baruch conference organizer Samantha MacBride, a sociologist and professor at the college’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, in her keynote address. “Once you get behavior going, if you don’t have the physical structure for it to mean something, and the consistency of information being provided, the behavior’s going to peter out.”

A former director of research and operations at the New York Department of Sanitation (NYDS), MacBride cited statistics from earlier pilot programs (2013 to 2023) for curbside organics collection in parts of Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx that showed a continuous decline in participation. “The prior efforts were rolled out district-by-district,” she said. “The current program is now rolling out to entire boroughs, and the trends are all showing declining capture rates—and the capture rates were never high to begin with. The capture rates of the new districts are even lower.”

In recent years, NYC has managed to “divert” about 20% of its recyclables from landfills. But with collection rates of just under 5% for organic waste—in a pilot, no less—New York is a long way from, say, the 80% total diversion rate boasted by San Francisco. MacBride called the New York program “inefficient,” with a lot of trucks bringing in very little material. “You’re paying a lot of money for labor, fuel, with nothing to show for it,” she said. “Municipal programs like that cannot survive.”

MacBride said that the Queens pilot’s low capture rates stem from a lack of education about the curbside organics program; frustration with the city’s on-again-off-again approach; problems with missed collections; and, especially, the structural challenges of separating trash in large buildings. “You can have people wanting to participate all you want in their own kitchens,” she said. “If they don’t have it properly set up in their building, it won’t matter.”

Access and Incentive

Back in the early aughts, when my family started composting in our apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, we dutifully set up a bin in the kitchen and periodically took the contents to our neighborhood garden, which had a public compost bin. At some point that became too much for the garden to manage, and they quietly removed it. We started taking our compost to nearby farmers markets, until they stopped collecting during the pandemic.

In 2023, the New York City Council passed the five-part Zero Waste Act, designed to expand curbside organics collection, set “zero waste” targets by the year 2030, provide yearly progress reports, set up at least three food-scrap drop-off sites in each district, and provide a recycling center in each district. (This follows suit from successful programs in other cities, such as San Francisco and Seattle, whose organic-waste-disposal ban garnered headlines and diversion rates of around 60%.)

To its credit, the Adams administration answered the NYC legislation with its citywide curbside composting program, led by NYDS Commissioner Jessica Tisch (who recently moved on to become police commissioner). The city has touted the benefits of separating compost and food scraps—from the diversion of organic waste from landfills, where it generates greenhouse gasses, to the reduction of rats on the streets—while offering organics bins to buildings in all five boroughs and installing more than 400 app-driven “smart bins” throughout the five boroughs (more on those below).

And yet, it’s not clear what’s going to happen with the curbside program. “All buildings are now supposed to have access to the brown bins,” says Clare Miflin, architect and executive director of the Center for Zero Waste Design. “And as we all know, from the pilot programs in Queens and Brooklyn, even though it’s mandatory, many buildings don’t maintain these bins for their residents.” 

NYC’s “mandatory” program is based on the participation of buildings. And its enforcement will fall—not unlike the enforcement of recycling collection—on those buildings, in the form of fines for noncompliance, due to take effect next year. According to an NYDS educational video, the “warning period” for all five boroughs will extend until the spring of 2025. “That’s when you really need to look at participation,” Miflin noted wryly, “because lots of people don’t do anything until they start enforcing it, right?”

Cultural Mosaic

From a waste-disposal standpoint, Gotham was unusual from the get-go. “Most other U.S. cities, like Chicago and Philadelphia, have alleyways where garbage can go to await pickup; the men who designed Manhattan’s grid in 1811 didn’t give us such spaces,” Miflin writes in the essay “Vital City.” “Continuous street facades—with few loading docks or parking garages—create a lively, walkable city, but they make it hard to hide the trash.” Another unique challenge is NYC’s polyglot population. “New York is tough because it’s such a variety of density,” Miflin says. “What works here is different—actually, it’s better to take from Europe, where cities don’t have garages or alleyways.”

Then there’s New York’s decades-long infatuation with big black garbage bags, where most trash currently resides on streets until pickup. Many reports trace this practice to a 1968 sanitation-workers strike, which plunged the city into a garbage crisis, yet led to widespread use of plastic bags in place of Oscar the Grouch–style metal cans. But the trash bags, a ubiquitous part of the cityscape, generate their own problems: they create litter, smell, and block sidewalks; they’re susceptible to vermin, require a lot of cleanup, and, according to Miflin, are socially inequitable: “It’s why richer parts of the city are clean and parts of the city that don’t have the staff to clean up are dirty, because we have a system that requires a lot of labor to do it properly.”

Miflin’s firm has been advocating for “containerization” of NYC’s garbage for years; in 2017, it published Zero Waste Design Guidelines, with strategies ranging from shared, permanent public containers for lower-density neighborhoods to big four-wheel bins that can be stored in large multifamily buildings and rolled out for collection. “The larger buildings have waste rooms,” Miflin said. “Many of them have trash chutes. They can just store the stuff inside and wheel it out to a temporary place on the street. Whereas the smaller buildings don’t have trash chutes and don’t have as much staff. It makes sense that their residents take stuff straight to the street and put it in permanent containers.”

In 2023, the DSNY published its “Future of Trash” report, pointing to containerization models from other cities including Paris, Barcelona, and Amsterdam. “In that report, the DSNY suggested they would have all four waste types in the street,” Miflin said, referring to organics, glass and plastic, mixed paper, and trash. “Then they realized it would eliminate too much parking, so they said, ‘OK, we’ll just do it for trash.’ In places where they’re trying shared containerization—such as Morningside Heights—I’ve talked to residents who say, ‘Oh, I can just take the trash straight outside, but I have to go to the cellar to get rid of my recycling and organics?’ It disincentivizes people to separate garbage if it’s easy to throw away trash and more difficult to throw away recycling and food scraps. It perpetuates this trash-centric system.”

Where Does it Go?

The “smart bins” for compost started appearing on Upper West Side streets in 2023, to the bafflement of many of my family and friends, until it became clear that downloading the NYCCompost app provided access to unlock the bins any time day or night. Voila! The bin on our nearest corner became our go-to place to deposit food-scraps—unless the app said it’s “full,” which happens fairly frequently, leading to a search for another bin or a wait until another day to get rid of compost.

We also were pleased when our co-op building (with 40-plus units) acquired a brown bin for organics from the city in October. However, that bin was used for just a few short weeks before it disappeared from our garbage area. One night, when asked where it went, one of our building workers replied that it was “taking up too much room,” then added, paradoxically, that it “didn’t hold much stuff.” So we reverted to the nearby “smart bin” for dropping off compost.

“The smart bins are a great idea,” said MacBride. “They’re part of the solution because they’re convenient, and they absolutely do bring in cleaner organics than curbside collections. Unfortunately, right now, the smart bins are being mixed with school organics on collection truck routes, and school organics are highly contaminated. The material that’s coming into the smart bins is being wasted in terms of being good clean organics that could be composted locally.”

Both MacBride and Miflin pointed out that collecting organic waste on a citywide scale inherently involves contamination—which means it’s less “pure” and reusable. About 80% of the organic material collected by the NYDS goes to sewage-treatment plants, where it’s anaerobically treated. “Those are the big silver digestion eggs you see at Newtown Creek, where it’s made into this kind of slurry,” Miflin said. “That’s way better than having it all go to the landfill, hundreds of miles away. But it’s not true composting.”

Miflin said there’s no substitute for the kind of compost that NYC community groups have been collecting for decades. “With these grassroots groups, they check it when people drop it off. People don’t put in plastic bags, so it’s very good quality compost. They then apply it for street trees, or they bring it to school gardens or community gardens. That compost is used in the city to make soils healthier.”

Grassroots Groups Struggle 

In NYC’s never-ending budget battles, collection of compost and organic waste has often been treated like a bastard stepchild. In 2020, neighborhood composting groups, as well as curbside composting pilot programs, were defunded by the de Blasio administration during the pandemic. “It wasn’t purely because of Covid,” MacBride said. “It was already going on the chopping block.” 

After a public outcry from New Yorkers, a segment of the neighborhood composting funds were restored for the 2021 fiscal year, only to face new budget cuts from the Adams administration early this year. Another public outcry ensued, leading to another partial refunding announcement by the City Council. Meanwhile, Grow NYC, which has spearheaded many of the composting efforts at neighborhood farmers markets and community gardens, gets a much smaller part of the fiscal pie. “Most likely, all those dropoffs you saw in farmers markets are not going to come back,” Miflin said. Indeed, Grow NYC has permanently closed a long list of compost dropoff sites, directing residents to the curbside composting page of nyc.gov for alternatives.

“This administration made it clear, with their initial cuts, that they didn’t value the contribution of community composters—which is, in my opinion, morally wrong,” MacBride said. “You have people who have voluntarily taken it upon themselves to do something that is nothing but positive for the city—they’ve proved that they can do it for close to 30 years. And they’re still fighting being displaced from plots of land where they operate and for relatively small amounts of funding. Still viewed as extraneous to the issue of sustainability in waste.” She advocates a broad-based, cooperative approach that includes staffed community drop-off sites allowing micro-haulers—small bike- or e-vehicle-based neighborhood-level collections—to work alongside DSNY, picking up organics as a service to buildings.

Building Education

While individual behavior is key, the success rate for the curbside compost program will hinge on the participation of buildings, where education and outreach should be intensified. “The labor—the work that’s going to make or break this program—is with the porters,” MacBride said. “These are some of the lowest-paid, lowest status folks who will be asked to do a lot of extra work without necessarily extra pay or resources. The porters and their supers and the building managers should have much more direct attention from DSNY.” 

Such efforts are ultimately intertwined with enforcement of the program. “When we start enforcing, we’ll need to go in and check on arrangements,” MacBride said. All of this will require major groundwork at the building level: How’s the recycling, garbage and organics room set up? What kind of bags line the receptacles? Does the porter have to carry an organics bin upstairs? Where’s the set-out area? Are there signs on every floor in the building telling people where to take their organics? Has educational material been handed out? Has each tenant received a kitchen container for use in their home? “These steps are hugely labor-intensive,” she said. “They involve an agency working with people who do the labor in the building. This is not being carried out—on anywhere near enough of a scale that I believe New York City needs.”

Featured montage by the author.

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.

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.

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It is October 21. Kamala Harris has raised record amounts of money. It hasn’t mattered much–it was a tossup election from the moment we finally got Biden to step aside for her and give Democrats a chance and it remains a tossup election today. Leaving beside the depressing nature of that fact, it’s just true. She has all the cash she can use and she is spending it. Yet people are still giving. This is stupid. There is no way to spend that money between now and the election. Even outside the question of the efficacy of all that money–and like the race to defeat Susan Collins, we have clearly reached the point of maximizing returns–it is simply too late to move that money through this election cycle for anything that means anything at all. I doubt at this point it even makes sense to give to downballot candidates, though perhaps on the margins I could be convinced. The consultants and their targeted advertising to get you to give more money–and let’s be clear, that’s what your money is going toward here–are going to tell you that you have to give just this much more or TRUMP WILL WIN, but don’t do that, at this point it just isn’t true.

The real issue of course is that because we liberals lack any kind of institutions to build toward political engagement. we have individualized everything. Yes my friends, we are all neoliberals now. What was once collective is now entirely individualized. We are anxious, so we open our wallets to the grifting consultant class. The focus now should be on GOTV efforts in your local communities. That’s how you build community and political solidarity. You and your friends figuring out which older or disabled residents of your communities need to get to the polls, now that’s useful political action. Telling your 18 year old disinterested family members how to vote and who to vote for, that’s valuable. Talking to people, that’s useful. And it has to be on what matters to them, not on your anxieties about Trump, about which they very well may not care. Remember that organizing starts where people are at, not where you are at.

I have said it before and will continue to say it–spending your hard-earned money on national elections is just flushing it down the toilet, especially with already well-funded campaigns and late in the cycle. But since we have torn down every institution that brought liberals together, from the union hall to the social club to the liberal Protestant church, we have nothing but our anxiety.

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A word about our new Nobel Prize for Literature. The only of her books I have read is The Vegetarian, though the others look great too. This is kind of author that people were hoping the Nobel reforms of a few years ago would lead to winning the prize. This weird little novel is about a woman who stops eating meat and then withers away after nightmares about blood and guts of that industry, but is actually rejecting the patriarchy that dominates her life. Evidently all her novels have these types of political themes. From E. Tammy Kim in The New Yorker’s daily newsletter, which I get by email so I don’t have a link:

In works such as “The Vegetarian,” “Human Acts,” “The White Book,” and “Greek Lessons,” she applies a light, often experimental touch to heavy themes: women’s experiences under patriarchal rule; the buried histories of twentieth- and twenty-first-century South Korea.

Han came to the attention of most readers outside South Korea with “The Vegetarian” (translated into English by Deborah Smith), which tells the story of Yeong-hye, a woman in Seoul who responds to a series of gory nightmares (“great blood-red gashes of meat”) by giving up her carnivorous ways and rejecting her husband and extended family. I’m partial to a larger-scale novel, “Human Acts” (also translated by Smith), about a people’s uprising and U.S.-backed massacre, in 1980, in the southern city of Gwangju, where Han spent her early childhood. In an author’s note, she reflects on a grim source of inspiration: a boy, killed in the massacre, whom her father, the writer Han Seung-won, had taught in middle school. “How had the seasons kept on turning for me, when time had stopped forever for him that May?”

Han’s latest novel is “I Do Not Bid Farewell” (forthcoming in English)—a beautiful, mysterious story built around another historic tragedy, a pogrom on Jeju Island after the Korean War, told from the perspective of three women characters. A few months after it came out, in 2021, I met her for a vegetarian meal in Seoul. (We have known each other for a while.) South Korea was trending authoritarian, increasingly steered by male grievance, which got me thinking about 2016, when Han and Smith won the International Booker Prize for “The Vegetarian.” That same year, a feminist movement took hold in South Korea, #MeToo avant la lettre, and made the literary world its first bit of housecleaning. Ko Un, a poet who’d long been considered South Korea’s most likely winner of a Nobel Prize, was revealed to have been an abuser; no one reads him anymore. Korea’s #MeToo uprising has since shrivelled, but Han and many other women writers—Kyung-sook Shin, Kim Hyesoon, Hwang Jung-eun—are still in their rightful place, defining contemporary Korean literature.

As I general rule, I try to make about 1/3 or a little more than that of the novels I read from outside the US and European experience. That’s a lot to read and we all only have so much time, but sometimes it leads you to read great authors before they get this kind of international recognition, so this makes me happy. Plus The Vegetarian is just a great book.

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I’m not sure a racket can get any Trumpier than this:

Superintendent Ryan Walters isn’t just talking about buying Bibles for schools. 

Bids opened Monday for a contract to supply the state Department of Education with 55,000 Bibles. According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.

A salesperson at Mardel Christian & Education searched, and though they carry 2,900 Bibles, none fit the parameters. 

But one Bible fits perfectly: Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the U.S.A. Bible, endorsed by former President Donald Trump and commonly referred to as the Trump Bible. They cost $60 each online, with Trump receiving fees for his endorsement. 

Mardel doesn’t carry the God Bless the U.S.A. Bible or another Bible that could meet the specifications, the We The People Bible, which was also endorsed by Donald Trump Jr. It sells for $90. 

“The RFP on its face seems fair, but with additional scrutiny, we can see there are very few Bibles on the market that would meet these criteria, and all of them have been endorsed by former President Donald Trump,” Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice Executive Director Colleen McCarty said.

Any Republican hack can systematically violate the First Amendment. But how many can clear this much profit from the taxpayers? God Bless the USA indeed! Roy Moore was a piker.

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There’s been something of a move away from Florida for a certain kind of retiree who wants to live in a nice place (what that ever had to do with Florida, I have no idea) but were scared of climate change. One area where they have moved is Asheville, which is a nice place, to be fair. But part of it was the idea that it was a “climate haven.” This I do not understand. First, there are no climate havens. It doesn’t work that way. The actions of humans–a species intelligent enough to transform the world but too stupid to manage those transformations–will come from all of us in some way no matter where we live. But second, this is Appalachia, a wet land of creeks in narrow valleys with steep slopes. Do you want what happens when it rains a lot on narrow valleys with steep slopes? The creeks rise. I mean, there’s a whole genre of folk songs about floods in Appalachia! So this entire framing is just complete nonsense. Unfortunately, a lot of people found out about this recently.

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As Hurricane Helene ravaged the southeastern United States, Tampa General Hospital managed to ward off flooding using this AquaFence system. Unlike sandbags, these barrier wall systems are reusable, and can be stored flat.

The design is simple, but ingenious: The more water they're keeping out, the stronger the structure becomes. That's because each component is L-shaped, braced diagonally with steel struts, and designed to be used with the bottom of the L pointed towards the water. As floodwaters rise, they weigh down on the bottom of that L, anchoring each component in place. The upright of the L cannot collapse, because it is held fast by the high tensile strength of the steel braces.

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In this video released by the hospital, you can see how effective the 9-foot-tall barriers are:

I found out about this writing up one of next week’s grave posts, but I figured it deserved its own post. See, I had never even heard of the mid-19th century scheme to move the nation’s capitol from the cesspool that was Washington to St. Louis.

Merits aside, unspoken by these opponents is a 160-year-old idea: Disassemble the Capitol building, the White House and the rest of the district’s government buildings and ship the entire headquarters of the federal government to the middle of the country. More specifically, St. Louis, Missouri. An absurd premise, perhaps, but one that was given a close look in the years after the U.S. Civil War.

“They imagined they would move the real buildings themselves,” says Adam Arenson, a historian at Manhattan College in Riverdale, New York, and author of The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War. “The image is kind of fantastical but also intriguing.”

The idea of numbering the blocks of the Capitol building for reassembly hundreds of miles away was very much of its time.

“The whole thing is only thinkable in the aftermath of the Civil War, when you have had these kinds of massive logistical innovations and when they’ve moved so many people, but also so much stuff, around on the railroads,” says Walter Johnson, historian at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States.

The fact that many people at the time could imagine that this might really work also suggests just how much the nation was in flux following the war. Johnson notes that D.C. may have seemed less inevitable as the nation’s capital given that Richmond, Virginia, the center of the Confederacy, had just hosted “a capital that a lot of people believed was a real capital.”

Of course, racism and imperialism was at its core:

No one was more convinced of the importance of St. Louis than local businessman and booster Logan Uriah Reavis. Reavis was a remarkable man, with a remarkable appearance. He wore a long, messy red beard and walked bent over a cane due to a childhood illness. Born in Illinois in 1831, he failed in his early career as a schoolteacher “when the students ridiculed him ceaselessly,” according to Arenson’s book. In 1866, he arrived in St. Louis intent on starting a newspaper and elevating the image of his adopted hometown.

Reavis wasn’t the first to suggest the city as a new capital for the nation. In 1846, St. Louis newspapers claimed that the move would be necessary to govern a country that grew significantly in size after the end of the Mexican-American War. But Reavis may have been the most outspoken supporter of the cause. He presciently envisioned a United States stretching not just out to California but up to Alaska and down to the Gulf of Mexico. And he saw St. Louis as the obvious place for the government of this mega-United States: “the great vitalizing heart of the Republic.” In contrast, he wrote, Washington was a “distant place on the outskirts of the country, with little power or prestige.”

….

Beyond local advocacy, moving the capital rode a wave of interest among Republicans uninterested in their political allies’ embrace of the Radical Reconstruction vision of a multiracial democracy. These politicians, Arenson says, “said enough has been done for ex-slaves and wanted the country to get back to promoting the interests of white Americans.” These included Joseph Pulitzer, who, before starting his career as a newspaper publisher, served as a Missouri state representative, and German immigrant Carl Schurz, who became a U.S. senator in 1869.

Schurtz went on to become secretary of the Interior, promoting the elimination of Native American nations and the integration of Indigenous peoples into the U.S. mainstream. Johnson says that’s one indication of the way the effort to move the capital was tied to a broader imperial project. Many St. Louis boosters hoped to channel the nation’s energies into the settlement of, and extraction of resources from, the West.

“In a way it’s in the West that the North and South—the white North and the white South—are reconciled after the war,” he says. “At the expense of African Americans and Native Americans.”

In October of 1869, Reavis, Blow and other supporters of the capital removal cause hosted a national convention. Per History Net, delegates arrived from 17 states and territories. They declared their opposition to federal spending on improvements in Washington and declared that “the convenient, natural and inevitable place for the capital of the republic is in the heart of the valley, where, the center of population, wealth and power is inevitably gravitating…”

And now the chaser…

Of course, the failure of the cause didn’t stop the westward movement of U.S. power. In 1874, Civil War hero William T. Sherman moved the headquarters of the Army from Washington to St. Louis, making it a base for his campaign to seize Native Americans’ land and protect railroad and mining interests.

“He felt, I guess, freer to pursue a kind of military exterminationist policy from St. Louis than he did from Washington,” Johnson says.

Every time I see someone wearing a Sherman shirt to make fun of the South, I’m like well……………see there’s this whole genocide deal.

Anyway, among the things fascinating to me about all of this is how odd it seems that at this point in my career, there are still things in American history I have never heard of.

Plus imagine, provel could be the official Fake Cheese of American Pizza. Hideous I tell you!

The post When We Considered Moving the Nation’s Capitol to St. Louis appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

No one knows what caused some rally attendees who stood near trump during a rally in Tucson, Ariz. to report severe eye irritation, temporary vision loss, reddening of the face and runny noses. Could it be his skin dye and his hair dye and the Diet Coke infused flop sweat and crushed No-Doz combined to create fumes that were as toxic as his personality?

Maybe.

Several attendees who stood on stage with Donald Trump at a recent rally in Tucson, Ariz., reported significant eye injuries following the Sept. 12 event, saying they had burning pain and temporary blindness immediately afterward.

Some attendees who sat on the left of the stage sought medical care afterward, NBC affiliate KVOA-TV reported.

“I can’t see anything when I try to open my eyes. I see a bright light. It hurts, it hurts a lot to open my eyes. I have this cold cloth I put on and take off constantly. It’s horrible,” Mayra Rodriguez told the outlet.

If this story spreads we’ll be treated to a bunch of AI-generated images of an angel pushing stink waves away from the TFG.

Open thread.

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Minisoldr is a handle that Mark Robinson used from one end of the Internet to the other. He decided to share photos of his collection of SS troops with UltimateSoldier.net

SS TROOPS
By: Minisoldr

Some very nice looking Germans here Minisoldr. Some great poses on them too. Another excellent looking group of Germans, I can’t imagine any 1/6th WWII collector wouldn’t want to own! Special thanks for sending them in and sharing them with us. – GL

Now to be scrupulously fair, these are SS soldiers, and you certainly didn’t have to be a Nazi to be in the SS.

Excuse me Chet, I’m getting an update . . . it turns out you did have to be a Nazi to be in the SS, and a particularly fanatical and dedicated one. But just because somebody collects Nazi figurines that doesn’t mean he’s into Nazi policies and stuff. I mean maybe he just likes the uniforms.

Luckily, Robinson isn’t letting the Woke Media OR the Trump campaign drive him out of the race. His honor is loyalty, to coin a phrase.

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Back in July, I promised you some further thoughts about Blood and Cheese… and Maelor the Missing… after my commentary on the first two episodes of HotD season 2, “A Son for a Son” and “Rhaenyra the Cruel.”

Those were terrific episodes:  well written, well directed, powerfully acted.   A great way to kick off the new season.   Fans and critics alike seemed to agree.  There was only one aspect of the episodes that drew significant criticism: the handling of Blood and Cheese, and the death of Prince Jaehaerys.   From the commentary I saw on line,  opinion was split there.   The readers of FIRE & BLOOD found the sequence underwhelming, a disappointment, watered down from what they were expecting.   Viewers who had not read the book had no such problems.   Most of them found the sequence a real gut-punch, tragic, horrifying, nightmarish, etc.   Some reported being reduced to tears.

I found myself agreeing with both sides.

In my book, Aegon and Helaena have three children, not two.  The twins, Jaehaerys and Jaehaera, are six years old.  They have a younger brother, Maelor, who is two.   When Blood and Cheese break in on Helaena and the kids, they tell her they are debt collectors come to exact revenge for the death of Prince Lucerys: a son for a son.  As Helaena has  two sons, however,  they demand that she choose which one should die.   She resists and offers her own life instead, but the killers insist it has to be a son.  If she does not  name one, they will kill all three of the children.   To save the life of the twins, Helaena names Maelor.    But Blood kills the older boy, Jaehaerys, instead, while Cheese tells little Maelor that his mother wanted him dead.    (Whether the boy is old enough to understand that is not at all certain).

That’s not how it happens on the show.   There is no Maelor in HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, only the twins (both of whom look younger than six, but I am no sure judge of children’s ages, so I can’t be sure how old they are supposed to be).   Blood can’t seem to tell the twins apart, so Helaena is asked to reveal which one is the boy.  (You would think a glance up his PJs would reveal that, without involving the mother).  Instead of offering her own life to save the kids, Helaena offers them a necklace.   Blood and Cheese are not tempted.  Blood saws Prince Jaehaerys’s head off.   We are spared the sight of that; a sound effect suffices.   (In the book, he lops the head off with a sword).

It is a bloody, brutal scene, no doubt.  How not?  An innocent child is being butchered in front of his mother.

I still believe the scene in the book is stronger.  The readers have the right of that.   The two killers are crueler in the book.  I thought the actors who played the killers on the show were excellent… but the characters are crueler, harder, and more frightening in FIRE & BLOOD.   In the show, Blood is a gold cloak.   In the book, he is a former gold cloak, stripped of his office for beating a woman to death.    Book Blood is the sort of man who might think making a woman choose which of her sons should die is amusing, especially when they double down on the wanton cruelty by murdering the boy she tries to save.    Book Cheese is worse too; he does not kick a dog, true, but he does not have a dog, and he’s the one who tells Maelor that his mom wants him head.   I would also suggest that Helaena shows more courage, more strength in the book, by offering her own own life to save her son.   Offering a piece of jewelry is just not  the same.

As I saw it, the “Sophie’s Choice” aspect was the strongest part of the sequence, the darkest, the most visceral.   I hated to lose that.   And judging from the comments on line, most of the fans seemed to agree.

When Ryan Condal first told me what he meant to do, ages ago (back in 2022, might be) I argued against it, for all these reasons.    I did not argue long, or with much heat, however.   The change weakened the sequence, I felt, but only a bit.   And Ryan had what seemed to be practical reasons for it; they did not want to deal with casting another child, especially a two-year old toddler.  Kids that young will inevitably slow down production, and there would be budget implications.   Budget was already an issue on HOUSE OF THE DRAGON, it made sense to save money wherever we could.   Moreover, Ryan assured me that we were not losing Prince Maelor, simply postponing him.   Queen Helaena could still give birth to him in season three, presumably after getting with child late in season two.   That made sense to me, so I withdrew my objections and acquiesced to the change.

I still love the episode, and the Blood and Cheese sequence overall.   Losing the “Helaena’s Choice” beat did weaken the scene, but not to any great degree.  Only the book readers would even notice its absence; viewers who had never read FIRE & BLOOD would still find the scenes heart-rending.   Maelor did not actually DO anything in the scene, after all.   How could he?  He was only two years old.

There is another aspect to the removal of the young princeling, however.

Those of you who hate spoilers should STOP READING HERE.   Spoilers will follow, at least for the readers among you.  If you have never read FIRE & BLOOD, maybe it does not matter, because all I am going to “spoil” here are things that happen in the book that may NEVER happen on the series.   Starting with Maelor himself.

Sometime between the initial decision to remove Maelor, a big change was made.   The prince’s birth was no longer just going to be pushed back to season 3.  He was never going to be born at all.   The younger son of Aegon and Helaena would never appear.

Most of you know about the Butterfly Effect, I assume.

Yes, there was a movie with that title a few years back.   It’s a familiar concept in chaos theory as well.   But most science fiction fans were first exposed to the idea in Ray Bradbury’s classic time travel story, “A Sound of Thunder,” wherein a time traveler from the present panics and crushes a butterfly while hunting a T-Rex.  When he returns to his own time, he discovers that the world has changed in huge and frightening ways.  One dead butterfly has rewritten history.  The lesson being that change begets change, and even small and seemingly insignificant alterations to a timeline — or a story — can have a profound effect on all that follows.

Maelor is a two year old toddler in FIRE & BLOOD, but like our butterfly he has an impact on the story all out of proportion to his size.   The readers among you may recall that when it appears that Rhaenyra and her blacks are about to capture King’s Landing, Queen Alicent becomes concerned for the safety of Helaena’s remaining children, and takes steps to save them by smuggling them out of the city.   The task is given is two knights of the Kingsguard.   Ser Willis Fell is commanded to deliver Princess Jaehaera to the Baratheons at Storm’s End, while Maelor is given over to Ser Rickard Thorne to be escorted across the Mander to the protection of the Hightower army on its way to King’s Landing.

Willis Fell delivers Jaehaera safely to the Baratheons at Storm’s End, but Ser Rickard fares less well.   He and Maelor get as far as Bitterbridge, where he is revealed as a Kingsuard in a tavern called the Hogs Head.   Once discovered, Ser Rickard fights bravely to protect his young charge and bring him to safety, but he does not even make it across the bridge before some crossbows bring him down,  Prince Maelor is torn from his arms.. and then, sadly, ripped to pieces by the mob fighting over the boy and the huge reward that Rhaenyra has offered for his capture and return.

Will any of that appear on the show?   Maybe… but I don’t see how.   The butterflies would seem to prohibit it.  You could perhaps make Ser Rickard’s ward be Jaehaera instead of Maelor, but Jaehaera can’t be killed, she has a huge role to play as Aegon’s next heir.   Could maybe make  Maelor a newborn instead of a two year old, but that would scramble up the timeline, which is a bit of a mess already.   I have no idea what Ryan has planned — if indeed he has planned anything — but given Maelor’s absence from episode 2, the simplest way to proceed would be just to drop him entirely, lose the bit where Alicent tries to send the kids to safety, drop Rickard Thorne or send him with Willis Fell so Jaehaera has two guards.

From what I know, that seems to be what Ryan is doing here.   It’s simplest, yes, and may make sense in terms of budgets and shooting schedules.  But simpler is not better.   The Bitterbridge scene has tension, suspense, action, bloodshed, a bit of heroism and a lot of tragedy.  Rickard Thorne  is a tertiary character at best, most viewers (as opposed to readers) will never know he is gone, since they never knew him at all… but I rather liked giving him his brief moment of heroism, a taste of the courage and loyalty of the Kingsguard, regardless of whether they are black or green.

The butterflies are not done with us yet, however.  In the book, when word of Prince Maelor’s death and the grisly manner of his passing (pp. 505) reaches the Red Keep, that proves to be the thing that drives Queen Helaena to suicide.   She could barely stand to look at Maelor, knowing that she chose him to die in the “Sophie’s Choice” scene… and now he is dead in truth, her words having come true.   The grief and guilt are too much for her to bear.

In Ryan’s outline for season 3, Helaena still kills herself… for no particular reason.   There is no fresh horror, no triggering event to overwhelm the fragile young queen.

And the final butterfly follows soon thereafter.

Queen Helaena, a sweet and gentle soul, is much beloved by the smallfolk of King’s Landing.  Rhaenyra was not, so when rumors began to arise that Helaena did not kill herself, but rather was murdered at Rhaenyra’s command, the commons are quick to believe them.   “That night King’s Landing rose in bloody riot,” I wrote on p. 506 of FIRE & BLOOD.   It is the beginning of the end for Rhaenyra’s rule over the city, ultimately leading to the Storming of the Dragonpit and the rise of the Shepherd’s mob that drives Rhaenyra to flee the city and return to Dragonstone… and her death.

Maelor by himself means little.   He is a small child, does not have a line of dialogue, does nothing of consequence but die… but where and when and how, that does matter.   Losing Maelor weakened the end of the Blood and Cheese sequence, but it also cost us the Bitterbridge scene with all its horror and heroism, it undercut the motivation for Helaena’s suicide, and that in turn sent thousands into the streets and alleys, screaming for justice for their “murdered” queen.   None of that is essential, I suppose… but all of it does serve a purpose, it all helps to tie the story lines together, so one thing follows another in a logical and convincing manner.

What will we offer the fans instead, once we’ve killed these butterflies?   I have no idea.   I do not recall that Ryan and I ever discussed this, back when he first told me they were pushing back on Aegon’s second son.   Maelor himself is not essential… but if losing him means we also lose Bitterbridge, Helaena’s suicide, and the riots, well… that’s a considerable loss.

And there are larger and more toxic butterflies to come, if HOUSE OF THE DRAGON goes ahead with some of the changes being contemplated for seasons 3 and 4…

GRRM

Prisons

On 25 May 1895 Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labour for ‘gross indecency’. He was processed at Newgate Prison before being moved on to Pentonville Prison, where he began to experience the ‘hard labour’ he’d been sentenced to, namely many hours of walking a treadmill or separating the fibres in scraps of old navy ropes. A few months later he was moved to Wandsworth Prison where the regime was so harsh that in November he collapsed, banging his ear on the way down, which led to later infections and ailments. After spending two months in the infirmary, he was transferred to his final prison, Reading Gaol.

Freedom

Two years after his conviction, on 19 May 1897, Wilde was taken by train from Reading Gaol to Pentonville preparatory for his release. The next day he was actually set free and sailed the same evening for Dieppe, France. He never returned to England. He was to live on for three miserable, poverty-stricken years in Paris before dying of meningitis on 30 November 1900, aged 46.

A few months after his release, Wilde began writing ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ while staying with his former lover and loyal friend, Robert Ross near Dieppe on the Normandy coast. It was assembled from aspects of his experience of imprisonment but came to focus on one particular character and event, the hanging of one Charles Thomas Wooldridge, a former trooper in the Royal Horse Guards.

Charles Thomas Wooldridge

On 7 July 1896 i.e. a year into Wilde’s imprisonment, Wooldridge was hanged at Reading Gaol. He had been convicted of cutting the throat of his wife, Laura Ellen, earlier that year at Clewer, near Windsor. He was 30 years old. Wooldridge’s case and punishment provide the focus of Wilde’s poem. In Wilde’s hands Wooldridge is transformed from a prisoner into a symbol round which descriptions of prison life, the misery and harshness of incarceration, and the awe and horror at the prospect of judicial murder all crystallise.

The ballad form

Wilde added and added to the poem until eventually it consisted of 109 stanzas. Wilde’s pre-incarceration poems had been written in the style of late-Victorian Romanticism, with lush metaphors and sophisticated literary allusions to Greek mythology etc. By stark contrast, the Ballad is, as the name suggests, written in the simpler ballad form, long associated with folk, peasant and working class culture, and stripped of fancy literary references.

One of the reasons for choosing this form is that Wilde intended it, along with its message of prison reform and moral injustice, to reach as wide an audience as possible. He wrote to a friend suggesting that it be published in Reynolds’ Magazine, ‘because it circulates widely among the criminal classes – to which I now belong. For once I will be read by my peers – a new experience for me.’

The simplest ballads usually consist of four-line stanzas. Probably the most famous ballad in the English language is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published precisely 100 years before Wilde’s ballad, in 1798. The most famous stanza goes:

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

In the technical language of poetry a ‘iamb’ is a metrical foot made up of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (ti-tum). In the Ballad Wilde uses the traditional structure of iambic tetrameters (four metrical feet per line) alternating with iambic trimeters (three metrical feet per line) so the effect is:

ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum (4 beats)
ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum (3 beats)

So it’s the identical rhythm to the stanza I just quoted from the Rime. Where Wilde is a little unusual is that the 109 stanzas of his Ballad have six lines rather than four.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

The longer, 6-line form has at least two results. One is that each stanza has 50% longer to develop its thought or idea. This gives individual verses, and the poem as a whole, more weight (maybe).

The second consequence is that he could make the rhyme scheme more complicated. The rhyme scheme in the Coleridge is almost as simple as could be, ABAB i.e. where, shrink, where, drink.

Wilde’s rhyme scheme is that bit more complicated, at ABCBDB: first come three freestanding words – loves, heard, look; then a word rhyming with the end of line B (heard); then a freestanding word D (kiss), before another B word (sword). You can see how the D word doesn’t rhyme with anything else. The effect is to break up the seesaw monotony of ABAB with a wild card. It is regular enough to feel song-like but irregular enough not to be boring.

One last point: Wilde also mixes it up by quite regularly including internal rhymes within the same line, as in lines 1 and 5 here:

So with curious eyes and sick surmise
We watched him day by day,
And wondered if each one of us
Would end the self-same way,
For none can tell to what red Hell
His sightless soul may stray.

Sing-song isn’t quite the right word but this excess of rhymes, and especially the internal rhymes in one line, emphasise the ‘popular’ ballad vibe which in turn give the whole thing a kind of thumping obviousness; or maybe a kind of inevitability. Instead of the subtle floating of modernist verse it has a kind of thumping, marching quality, a doom-laden inevitability.

One last point: again, unlike the one-off lines and perceptions of more sophisticated poetry, the ballad revels in repetition. The multitude of rhymes are a sort of repetition on a small scale while certain words and phrases, descriptions (of the condemned man’s plight, of the grave) and indeed entire stanzas (namely the ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’ stanza), are repeated throughout the poem. This quality of wholesale repetition – repetition at the micro and the macro level – also contributes to the oppressive, doom-laden feeling.

Six sections

The ballad is arranged in six parts.

Part 1 (16 stanzas)

Part 1 paints the background: in the prison exercise yard the prisoners are walking in silent circles, looking up at the little patch of blue the prisoners call the sky, when the narrator notices a man with a cricket cap on his head who is looking up at the clouds with a particularly ‘wistful’ expression. One of Wilde’s neighbours whispers that the man is ‘going to swing’ i.e. be hanged. Why? For murdering his wife in her bed. This introduces the central premise of the poem, the rather sweeping generalisation that:

each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

And these generalisations move onto the idea that, although most men kill the thing they love, most are never caught or punished or condemned to hang, whereas this man, Wooldridge has been caught, convicted and sentence. Which allows the poem to move onto a vivid series of scenes describing what it’s like to be a man condemned to death, how:

• he is watched by wardens day and night to make sure he doesn’t kill himself and deprive the system of its justice
• on the fatal morning he wakes at dawn to see his cell filled by the chaplain, sheriff and governor
• he hurries to put on his convict uniform while a doctor checks his pulse
• he feels the hangman tie the leather nooses (three, apparently) round his throat
• he walks past his own coffin
• he listens to the Burial Office being read
• he looks up into the miserable skylight overhead in his last moments

Part 2 (13 stanzas)

Back in the exercise yard the narrator comments on how the man he now knows is condemned to death, oddly, strikingly, doesn’t give way to despair but drinks the air with simple pleasure. The narrator describes the black fate of the tree whose trunk is turned into a gallows. Then reflects how his own life has crossed with the condemned man’s like two ships passing in a storm, how they are both outcasts.

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other’s way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;
For we did not meet in the holy night,
But in the shameful day.

Part 3 (37 stanzas)

The narrator (again) describes life for the condemned man, the behaviour of the governor, doctor and chaplain who ‘leaves a little tract’. And life for the prisoners with vivid details of the ‘hard labour’ Wilde was condemned to:

We tore the tarry rope to shreds
With blunt and bleeding nails;
We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors,
And cleaned the shining rails:
And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank,
And clattered with the pails.

We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones,
We turned the dusty drill:
We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns,
And sweated on the mill…

But the description is background all the more to foreground the specific horror of Wooldridge’s fate. This description leads up to the prisoners returning from work past an open grave and knowing who it had been dug for.

And Wilde marvels that, while the condemned man slept like a baby, it was the others, his comrades, who were kept awake at night in terror at his fate. He claims the wardens were amazed to find, on their rounds, men praying (for the condemned man or for themselves) in the depths of the night. This seems doubtful a bit doubtful although we accept it as poetic licence and as part of the ballad form’s traditional spooky, supernatural vibe. It also happens to provide a handy example of how effective the poem is when it sticks close to actual description:

The warders with their shoes of felt
Crept by each padlocked door,
And peeped and saw, with eyes of awe,
Grey figures on the floor,
And wondered why men knelt to pray
Who never prayed before.

But just as quickly loses it, that closeness of observation I admire, when Wilde gives way to melodrama:

All through the night we knelt and prayed,
Mad mourners of a corse!
The troubled plumes of midnight were
The plumes upon a hearse:
And bitter wine upon a sponge
Was the savour of Remorse.

I don’t think the prisoners are actually ‘mad’, what does ‘the troubled plumes of midnight’ mean?, the hearse is conventional melodrama because, of course, there is no hearse for this dead man; the bitter wine on the sponge is of course a reference to Christ being offered the same during his crucifixion; and the capitalisation of Remorse takes us back to the heavy-handedness of medievalising allegory.

This histrionic tone continues into some stanzas which go way over the top. Wilde has the prison invaded by ‘crooked shapes of Terror’, by ‘phantoms’, a ‘ghostly rout’, who proceed to dance a grisly masque’ and even sing a phantom song whose lyrics are quoted. This has lifted off from the real to become a visionary fantasia which reminded me not only of the most hallucinatory parts of Coleridge’s poem but also the visionary processions you find in Shelley’s poetry. The ghostly rout’s song goes:

‘Oho!‘ they cried, ‘the world is wide,
But fettered limbs go lame!
And once, or twice, to throw the dice
Is a gentlemanly game,
But he does not win who plays with Sin
In the Secret House of Shame.‘

(Does this refer to Wilde himself? We know that between his trials his boyfriend Lord Alfred Douglas persuaded him to go abroad to, of all places, Monte Carlo, where he lost large sums gambling (a vice which never appealed to Wilde). Is he comparing the way Douglas rolled the dice but escaped conviction partly because he was a gentleman, whereas he, Wilde, was convicted because he indulged a bigger game, ‘playing with Sin’? Does ‘the Secret House of Shame’ refer to the entire lifestyle of gay orgies and rent boys which he indulged in and created in the years leading up to his arrest?)

The visionary dance scene ends as a more realistic dawn arrives. The prisoners are woken at 6am to clean their cells and by 7 are standing to. The narrator describes the horrible hopelessness the men felt at the absolute inflexibility of human justice which, for once, justifies the capital letter:

For Man’s grim Justice goes its way,
And will not swerve aside:
It slays the weak, it slays the strong,
It has a deadly stride…

And at 8am prompt a great wail goes up from the cells because every one of the prisoners knew that was the hour when Wooldridge was hanged. Again I’d contrast overdoing it (the madman on a drum):

We had no other thing to do,
Save to wait for the sign to come:
So, like things of stone in a valley lone,
Quiet we sat and dumb:
But each man’s heart beat thick and quick,
Like a madman on a drum!

With description which is more realistic and therefore more impactful:

With sudden shock the prison-clock
Smote on the shivering air,
And from all the gaol rose up a wail
Of impotent despair…

OK, I don’t like the archaic phraseology (‘smote’) or the schoolboy angst (‘despair’) but I can well imagine a kind of collective groan did go up all round the prison at the hour of Wooldridge’s execution, and that is a haunting image.

Part 4 (23 stanzas)

No chapel service is held on the day they hang a man; the chaplain feels too sick. The prisoners were finally released from their cells at noon to take exercise in the yard. And so the men traipse round and round in the usual silent circles in their shabby prison outfits with the ‘crooked arrows’ on them. The wardens mind them in the usual way but the prisoners note the traces of lime on their boots and the newly filled-in grave by the prison walls. And Wilde is haunted by the image of the freshly dead man’s corpse wrapped in a shroud of quicklime designed to eat into his body like acid.

And all the while the burning lime
Eats flesh and bone away,
It eats the brittle bone by night,
And the soft flesh by day…

The authorities don’t sow anything on a hanged man’s plot of earth for fear the product will be tainted, but Wilde suggests the opposite: that God’s earth is kindlier than men know, that beautiful roses would blossom out of the curse man’s soil.

Wilde bitterly criticises the shabby underhand way Wooldridge was killed, a passage all the more effective for the relatively restrained diction, no capitalised allegories, no Despair etc, just the facts:

They hanged him as a beast is hanged:
They did not even toll
A requiem that might have brought
Rest to his startled soul,
But hurriedly they took him out,
And hid him in a hole.

They stripped him of his canvas clothes,
And gave him to the flies:
They mocked the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes:

The chaplain didn’t kneel to pray at the grave and yet Wilde insists it was precisely for sinners that Christ died, that God’s Son died for all men.

Part 5 (17 stanzas)

Only now does Wilde get round to telling us what it is like to be in prison. Having told us about this one condemned man, part 5 now widens the perspective out to consider prison and prisoners in the wider perspective of society and contains Wilde’s bitter criticism of the prison system: all it does is breed more vice and crime.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds,
Bloom well in prison-air;
It is only what is good in Man
That wastes and withers there…

Although he spoils this stanza, as so much else, with what I regard as heavy-handed use of capitalised allegorical abstract nouns:

Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate,
And the Warder is Despair.

‘Despair’ is a word I associate with immature poems by fifth formers in the school magazine. It’s such a lazy word, so easy to throw around in any situation, it lacks specificity and precision. It’s also so over-used simply because it is such a handy rhyme word – air, there, care, loads of rhyme words can set it up, it’s too easy, too available. In many ways Wilde’s diction, here and in all his poems, is an object lesson in how not to write a poem.

It was only around now that I realised there’s a recurring pattern in Wilde’s stanzas. Remember my comments on the 6-line stanza, how the extra 2 lines allow the thought to be extended? Well, I realised there’s a tendency for the first four lines to be good, sticking close to description of actual sights or events, but for Wilde to repeatedly spoil the effect by using those final two lines for over-the-top, allegorising histrionics. So:

At six o’clock we cleaned our cells,
At seven all was still,
But the sough and swing of a mighty wing
The prison seemed to fill,
For the Lord of Death with icy breath
Had entered in to kill.

Or:

The brackish water that we drink
Creeps with a loathsome slime,
And the bitter bread they weigh in scales
Is full of chalk and lime,
And Sleep will not lie down, but walks
Wild-eyed, and cries to Time.

To paraphrase George Orwell in Animal Farm, four lines good, six lines bad.

And yet, despite his style, the horror of prison life comes over well enough, the enforced silence and the loneliness. The first of these stanzas is a bit rank but the second one really conveys it:

With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell,
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.

And never a human voice comes near
To speak a gentle word:
And the eye that watches through the door
Is pitiless and hard:
And by all forgot, we rot and rot,
With soul and body marred.

But precise and upsetting, or over-the-top and Gothic, all these descriptions are designed to lead the poem up to its heart which is a vision of Christian redemption. For it is the very intensity of their suffering which, in Wilde’s view, leads men’s hearts to break but not into hopeless despair – instead, in the optimistic climax of the poem, this breaking allows Christ’s love to enter in and redeem them. I’ll quote the three relevant stanzas in full to give a sense of the flow of the argument:

And thus we rust Life’s iron chain
Degraded and alone:
And some men curse, and some men weep,
And some men make no moan:
But God’s eternal Laws are kind
And break the heart of stone.

And every human heart that breaks,
In prison-cell or yard,
Is as that broken box that gave
Its treasure to the Lord,
And filled the unclean leper’s house
With the scent of costliest nard.

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

This immediately reminds you of the passages in De Profundis where Wilde repeats that the only way to stay sane in prison was through acceptance – accepting his fate, accepting his destiny, accepting that it couldn’t have happened any other way, accepting every step that led to the miserable depths of wretchedness, and then accepting his condition in its entirety. Repining and objecting – if only I’d done this and if only I hadn’t done that – can only drive you mad with regret. The wretchedness of the conditions cause many a man’s heart to break but this is good. Only by breaking hardened hearts can the sweetness of God’s forgiveness be experienced.

Wilde is giving a straightforwardly, unironically Christian message of salvation. Jesus Christ moved among sinners, moneylenders and prostitutes, not among the upstanding rule-abiding members of the community, precisely because it is the sinners who need saving (and who, incidentally, in their own way, often embodied the true Christian virtues of charity and forgiveness, as demonstrated in his fairy stories). And so it’s in this spirit of Christian redemption that the poem rises to its pious climax:

Ah! happy they whose hearts can break
And peace of pardon win!
How else may man make straight his plan
And cleanse his soul from Sin?
How else but through a broken heart
May Lord Christ enter in?

And he of the swollen purple throat,
And the stark and staring eyes,
Waits for the holy hands that took
The Thief to Paradise;
And a broken and a contrite heart
The Lord will not despise.

It’s a moving climax within the rhythm of this very rhythmic poem but also because of what we know about Wilde’s biography: it is moving that the lifelong cynic, dandy and provocateur has been so broken down, so stripped of poses and smart one-liners, that his Christian conversion appears utterly genuine.

Part 6 (3 stanzas)

Having reached the climax of this Christian vision the poem tastefully, tactfully, ends with three short stanzas which recap and summarise the entire work with the laconic simplicity of the true ballad:

In Reading gaol by Reading town
There is a pit of shame,
And in it lies a wretched man
Eaten by teeth of flame,
In a burning winding-sheet he lies,
And his grave has got no name.

To be honest, Wilde could have ended there and done his job. I think he weakens the effect by going on and making the final stanza a repetition of the idea which dominated the opening, the notion that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’, repeating word for word the related verse in Part 1.

And all men kill the thing they love,
By all let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

It has a purely rhetorical, incantatory effectiveness but I don’t like it as an ending because I just don’t believe it.

Sales

The finished poem was published by Leonard Smithers on 13 February 1898 with the author’s name given as C.3.3. This number was how Wilde was referred to in prison, standing for cell block C, landing 3, cell 3. The aim was to avoid having Wilde’s name – by then notorious – appear on the poem’s front cover.

The poem was a surprising success, with Smithers reprinting it in February, a signed edition and a fourth mass edition in March, a fifth edition later the same month and a sixth edition in May. The seventh edition, in June 1899, finally revealed the author’s identity, putting the name Oscar Wilde in square brackets below the C.3.3.

The Ballad brought Wilde a small income for the rest of his life but it wasn’t enough to live on. The Ballad was the last thing he wrote.

Thoughts

You can see the effort that’s gone into the poem. You can appreciate the careful structuring of the material which delays a description of prison life till part 5 so that all the horror and negativity of prison life doesn’t sit hopeless and heavy but leads directly into the message of Christian redemption at what I take to be the climax of the poem. It is well and cleverly done. But still, in my view, it is marred by all kinds of faults.

Melodrama

The leading one is the sometimes ridiculous melodrama, the Victorian Gothic exaggeration. Coleridge’s poem is intended to be a high Gothic melodrama and works partly because it brings a sort of realistic description to an over-wrought subject. Wilde’s poem is not as good because it brings a consistent tone of overwrought melodrama to a subject which, arguably, would have been better treated with understatement. Thus in the opening stanzas one of the other prisoners tells him Wooldridge is going to swing and rather than accept the news as one more horrible thing about prison life, Wilde goes bananas:

Dear Christ! the very prison walls
Suddenly seemed to reel,
And the sky above my head became
Like a casque of scorching steel…

Similarly, describing Wooldridge’s manner he writes:

He did not wring his hands, as do
Those witless men who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black Despair…

This kind of melodrama is too simplistic; it’s a child’s version of psychology. The Cave of Despair reminds me of the widespread allegorisation in the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser’s huge allegorical epic,  the Faerie Queene.

I take the point that the ballad, as a form, is often melodramatic and involves elements of the supernatural (loads of gruesome murders and midnight ghosts). But Wilde’s penchant for capitalised abstract nouns (Justie, Despair) felt to me like a giving-in to late-Romantic clichés and that these clichés do what all clichés do, which is close off the possibility of genuine observation, of subtle psychology and insight, in favour of cheap special effects.

Late-Romantic diction

Secondly, Wilde’s style brings together all the faults of late-Romanticism, its archaic vocabulary and lush tone, without a hint of the new, stripped-down modernism which was going to appear in English poetry in just ten years’ time. It is the last gasp of a dying tradition. So (in my opinion) the first four lines of this stanza are good(ish):

I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky…

But are marred by the ‘poeticism’ of silver in the final couplet:

…And at every drifting cloud that went
With sails of silver by.

Wilde is more successful when he avoids big words like Despair and poeticisms about silver and ivory, and instead describes the observable facts, as he does in this grim stanza about what a hanging actually looks like:

It is sweet to dance to violins
When Love and Life are fair:
To dance to flutes, to dance to lutes
Is delicate and rare:
But it is not sweet with nimble feet
To dance upon the air!

OK the exclamation mark is childish but the image of the feet of the hanged man ‘dancing’ in a spastic frenzy for a few last seconds is vivid, realistic and horrible.

The central premise

I just couldn’t relate to the central theme or premise, the phrase Wilde repeats again and again and chooses to end the entire poem with – the notion that ‘each man kills the thing he loves’.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

I think the emotional impact he intended depends on the reader buying into this sentiment but I didn’t really understand it – I don’t think it makes sense. Most men very much do not kill the thing they love. Surely most men love the thing they love, don’t they? The following simply isn’t true:

Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.

Wilde 1) tries to give the phrase the ominous weight of impending Greek tragedy, to make it some central plank of human nature, 2) then places it as the central refrain of the whole poem, 3) assigning it the final concluding position in the entire work.

And yet, reading it in the summer daylight, it seemed non-sense, the opposite of the truth; it evaporated in my hands and so, insofar as the poem relies on it, the Ballad, as an overall argument or proposition, for me, fails.

Christian redemption

What did work for me (this time round) was the sequence about the human heart breaking in order to allow Christ’s love in to save. On this particular morning, on this particular reading, I found this very moving.

The power of details

But if I don’t buy into the ‘all men kill’ premise, many of the incidental details do stick and haunt the imagination: the little patch of blue overhead, the cricket cap Wooldridge wears, the wailing that goes up from all the inmates at the hour of the hanging, and the corpse’s swollen purple throat. Despite all its flaws of diction and logic, ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ remains a powerful work and indictment.

Femicide

It’s possible to read the entire poem, along with modern introductions to it, references in the letters, articles about it, and never once be reminded of the central fact that Wooldridge isn’t the innocent victim of a barbaric system, but that Wooldridge murdered his wife.

Do you remember the name of his wife (which I mentioned at the start)? No, most people don’t. She was Laura Ellen. Their fractious relationship led him to beat her up and Army rules led to them living apart. Suspecting her of having an affair he travelled to her lodgings in Clewer, they had an argument indoors which spilled out into the street where he cut her throat with a cut-throat razor and she bled to death.

You don’t have to be a feminist to find the way that Wilde lionises Wooldridge and makes him the central figure in his longest and most famous poem somewhat distasteful. It’s not hard to see the entire production as another example of the assault and abuse of a woman, and then her brutal murder, being elided and glossed over so that men can feel sorry for themselves.

The real victim here is Laura. Wooldridge, like Wilde, got his just deserts under the existing law of the time. Both of them would be imprisoned now, in 2024 (Wilde for procuring sex with under-age boys). Just like Wilde, Wooldridge was totally guilty of the offences he was charged with. But in Wilde’s concern for moral or poetic or spiritual exoneration, the real victim of the story is elided, occluded, forgotten, turned into the vague pretext for the refrain ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’.

You don’t have to be a feminist to find this a typical example of a male writer writing from a male perspective for male readers, distorting the truth, inverting the system of values (it was the woman who was the victim, not Wooldridge), making the wife-beating murderer into the central symbolic figure of the long poem, and over-writing, occluding, burying the real victim.

There’s a handy Wikipedia article about Wooldridge, which gives a lot more background to his case (and corrects Wilde’s erroneous belief that Wooldridge murdered Laura in their bed). But as if to prove the point, there’s no Wikipedia article for Laura. She only ‘exists’ in the discourse in her relation to the man who abused and murdered her. You don’t have to be a feminist to think this is typical.

• Charles Thomas Wooldridge Wikipedia article

Related links

• The Ballad of Reading Gaol online
• Oscar Wilde online

Related reviews

• Wandsworth Prison Museum
• Oscar Wilde reviews

Here’s an interesting thing and perhaps a good debate to have:

Students returning to school in a growing number of states and districts are facing tight restrictions and outright bans on cellphone use as evidence mounts of the damaging impact persistent connection to the internet has on teenagers.

In Los Angeles, the second-largest district in the country, the school board voted in June to ban cellphone use. In Clark County, Nev., the district will require students in middle and high schools to store phones in pouches during the day, starting this fall. Several states — including Indiana, Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida — have enacted legislation limiting cellphone access during the school year. And governors in at least three other states, including Virginia, have called on schools to restrict or ban the devices. Other states have provided funding to support restrictive policies.

Of the nation’s 20 largest school districts, at least seven forbid use of cellphones during the school day or plan to do so, while at least another seven impose significant restrictions, such as barring use during class time but permitting phones during lunch or when students are between classes, according to a Washington Post review.

Of course I think about this at the college level. I have to admit, I really gave up on banning cell phones a long time ago. Hell, I even use mine for the time, as is it’s not as if the clocks work in our classrooms….

But I wonder if I should reconsider this. Not this semester though, I’m on sabbatical which I am enjoying telling all my friends as they return to the classroom. But I wonder if it is worth trying to enforce this again in the college classroom. It’s hard to see any downside except for the enforcement. But the enforcement is a downside and is harder to do than in a K-12 classroom, where the teacher really is much more in charge. I am no softy either. I rarely get challenged much by students because I think I scare them a little bit. So I might be able to pull it off. But would it be worth it? Or do I really care?

I don’t have any real answers here, obviously. But maybe we are finally in a space where people find reason to put the damn phones anyway, whether they want to or not.

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