Unsightly Mental Blemishes

The venerable Freddie deBoer, self-aware leftist, has some remarks on the following lefty generations (partial paywall, gives you a taste):

The idea that “the personal is political” has proven to be one of the worst intellectual developments in the history of the left. I would argue that, more than any other ideological influence, this idea has underpinned the social justice turn in American liberalism, which has transformed the language and norms of contemporary left-of-center people and briefly the politics of the Democratic party. That famous little nostrum has ruled over a period of time in which any sense of politics as an exercise beyond and outside of the self has collapsed, leaving us with generations of progressive people who think that doing politics is all about feeling and not doing, who mistake posting black squares on Instagram and liking Frank Ocean for doing politics. “The personal is political” is why people think that crying until the other person stops talking is an appropriate way to debate, why the representation of Black woman in the next season of Love is Blind is treated as a bigger deal than lead in the drinking water in Black communities, why autism and ADHD have become lifestyle trends with vague activist connotations, why an entire generation of culture writers churn out pieces about how Inspector Gadget is propaganda for white supremacy, why left-of-center American politics is so horribly immaterial, why feelings have utterly eaten actual material oppression as the concern of the left. I’m not a fan.

I had not thought about, nor observed, this. In a sense, the personal is political is anti-compromise; it admits no error as there is no appeal to shared thoughts, and so becomes anti-intellectual; as a failure to explore options, the left, like the right, becomes obdurate and arrogant in its pitiful world.

This may require some meditation.

“Parkinson’s is a preventable disease. It’s not a natural consequence of aging. Eighty-seven percent of Americans have no known genetic cause,” [Dr. Ray] Dorsey said. [WaPo]

We usually call it sex and get on with it.

The Sign of Four (1983) is from the Sherlock Holmes canon and concerns an immense fortune, stolen from India, and what members of a certain group will do to get it. Competently told, this is a middle of the roader.

There are at least three other films of this Holmes story out there.

Gastrocolic reflex:

If you’ve noticed that you often have to poop right after you eat, you might wonder if food just goes straight through you. It’s not that: It’s your gastrocolic reflex. It’s an automatic trigger in your digestive system that tells your bowels to move old food out to make room for the new. It’s perfectly normal, but it can differ between people. [Cleveland Clinic]

I shan’t share. Noted in “What you put in your coffee can have an outsize impact on your health,” Trisha Pasricha, MD (WaPo):

Senator Mullin (R-OK) is today’s contestant!

Mullin: President Trump is our champion. We’re the players. He’s the coach.

Clearly not conversant with our style of government.

From WaPo (paywall?):

Scanning a loyalty card might be costing you money.

Companies say they’re rewarding your devotion with points, discounts and perks. But behind the scenes, many are using these programs to monitor your behavior and build a profile — then charge you what they think you’ll pay.

I discovered evidence of this in my Starbucks app. Using California’s privacy law, I asked the company to send me the data its rewards program had collected about me.

Then I shared that data with two former Federal Trade Commission officials who spent careers defending consumers. They spotted a startling pattern in the numbers: During months when I bought more coffee, the app offered me fewer promotions. Sure, I was still collecting “stars” I could use for freebies. But the more loyal I was, the fewer discounts I got.

For the record, Starbucks denies it.

Look, call them by their most accurate name: identification cards. They let retailers identify and leverage individual buying habits, maximizing profits on your back.

I’m fortunate, I don’t think I’ve ever had such a card, but for unrelated reasons, not because I’m paranoid. Keeping life simple pays off.

The shark tip-toed into the room. The door creaked, and Kolossus turned, startled. He didn’t remember that door!

Mega Shark vs. Kolossus (2015), the fourth in a series unfamiliar to me, is a wretched piece of work, but at least it has the basics of a plot – attempt to kill the eponymous shark, fail, losses, another attempt, more payment, that sort of thing. All logical in context.

But details matter, and here the details are silly. We could compare to an old favorite, Pacific Rim (2013), which also features sea monsters and robots – and is way beyond this. But the latter had believable characters, and this does not. It’s populated by tired cliches.

Don’t waste your time.

Due to surgery on my hand, blogging will be curtailed for a couple of weeks.

This goat is being sheared for completeness, as this special election did not result in a “flip.” Back in 2024, a bit over a year ago, incumbent David Yates (D-KY) defeated Calvin Leach (R-KY) for the District 37 State Senate seat in Kentucky, 60.4% to 39.6% – call it a 20 point victory.

A little while later, Yates resigned to take a different job. The special election to fill his seat took place a week ago, featuring Mr Leach again, and Gary Clemons (D). Mr Clemons defeated Mr Leach, and improved on the victory margin – 72.6% to 25.1%, or about 47 points, give or take.

This is in the same district won by Harris, a year ago, by only five points.

So when only 5170 total votes are cast, what does it mean? 41,584 total votes were cast a year ago, so just by eyeball the voter count dropped by nearly 90%. In my eyes, that’s significant and may mean that Mr Leach lacks voter appeal.

I wouldn’t pivot my judgment of the future on this special election.

Inherent contempt:

The third type of contempt power—Congress’s dormant inherent contempt power—is rarely used in modern times. Inherent contempt was the mode employed by Congress to directly enforce contempt rulings under its own constitutional authority until criminal and civil contempt statutes were passed, and it remained in use into the twentieth century. Under inherent contempt proceedings, the House or Senate has its Sergeant-At-Arms, or deputy, take a person into custody for proceedings to be held in Congress. [National Constitution Center]

In other words, Congress using their own martial powers to enforce their duly-determined laws. Noted in “Members eye ‘inherent contempt’ against Bondi after incomplete Epstein disclosures,” Steve Benen, MS NOW:

In theory, Khanna and Massie could try pushing a resolution to hold the attorney general in contempt of Congress, but in practice, such an effort would almost certainly end in failure: Not only would the measure need approval from the Senate, but it would also go to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. The idea that Bondi would allow her own team to prosecute her is unrealistic.

Inherent contempt proceedings in the House, however, can be approved by majority rule in the chamber; they would not need the Senate’s or the president’s approval; and, perhaps most importantly, they wouldn’t require the administration for enforcement.

We may be seeing this term of art thrown around often in the near future. I wonder if AG Bondi even knew it existed. I know I didn’t.

Yes, yes there was. Death Valley now has a lake.

Spaceweather.com.

Nice pic.

… Of Amateurism.

The announcement of Trump’s Golden Fleet is a failure on so many levels.

• Trump’s going to contribute to the design? It can take a decade or even more to design a new combat vessel (the article has estimates of 4-6 years, which I think is absurdly optimistic), and perhaps more for something that’s 1500 feet long and has the consequent complexity network issues. Trump may be dead of old age long before just the design is completed.
• At an estimated (same link) $10B per, losing such a ship to enemy action, accidents, typhoons, and other events means that $10B is gone, along with the time to analyze what went wrong, correct the design, and build the replacement, go through change of design verification, crew recruitment and training, and deployment. Much better to have many cheaper ships. If you want more, research what happened to German WWII battleship Tirpitz after her sister ship, Bismarck, was sunk by the Brits.
• While the weaponry cited extends the reach of a battleship, it remains highly limited compared to the most potent vessels in today’s navies, namely aircraft carriers and strategic submarines.
• Will such ships need traditional armor for slugging it out with other ships? Maybe for surviving air attack, torpedo attacks, even drone attacks (see below), but every ounce of armor will add to fuel requirements. And if a nuclear power plant is used, then you need to develop highly sophisticated recovery techniques for what that ship sinks. Lucky for you, our nuclear powered aircraft carrier techniques may transfer.
• The rest of the world has been watching Putin’s War and recognizing drones appear to be the next innovation. Us? We’re re-examining the Battle of Jutland, one of the last clashes of big ships — back in World War I. That said, yes, we can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time – but not when the bubble gum dates from 1910.

In short, this ‘golden fleet’ is symptomatic of a fixation on gold that has become a mental illness.

Or a deliberate distraction.

Perhaps technically a TV series or serialized movie, The City and The City (2018) is unusual in its adherence to a lack of omniscient viewpoint throughout the first half (two episodes, four total), only slacking its rigidity in the second half to reveal certain important details.

This is the story of cop Tyador Borlu of the city Besźel, who has been assigned the murder of Mahalia Geary. In his backstory is the unsolved disappearance of his wife, Dr Katrynia Perla, a scholar, who has hidden connections to Mahalia. His pursuit of the truth, as assisted by Constable Corwi, takes him to Detective Dhatt of the city of Ul Qoma.

Or perhaps it doesn’t.

Between the central conceit of the story, on which I shan’t elaborate, and the flashback-heavy nature of the narrative, this is a tale requiring close attention, and a partner with whom to cross-reference the tale; we had to stop from time to time just to straighten out who was in what part of the story.

It was quite invigorating.

But there are enough holes, such as missing character motivations, to lessen the satisfaction of the story. It’s not overwhelming, and stories that leave open questions can be the best if the questions are those of morality: If that were me, would I have done that? But when they’re along the lines of Why did that character do that, it’s nonsense? then there may be fractures in the story structure.

But the positives of this story far outweigh the negatives. Simply as a brain exercise it’s worth the time; as a possible peek into the future, it’s thought-provoking.

Recommended.

This much-referenced thread finally gets an update, some bad news for Democrats, as their DNC chairman, Minnesotan Ken Martin, has decided to go back on his word:

When Ken Martin was elected chair of the Democratic National Committee in February, he promised a report investigating what went wrong for his party in 2024. “The reality is what we need to do right now is really start to get a handle around what happened last election cycle,” he told reporters. “We know that we lost ground with Latino voters, we know we lost ground with women and younger voters and of course working-class voters. We don’t know the how and why yet.”

Ten months later, Martin has made a remarkable reversal. He will not release the long-awaited autopsy, he announced on Thursday, even though it’s done. Despite months of work — including hundreds of interviews with party operatives in all 50 states — and a pledge to use the report to drive the party forward, Martin appears to have decided that publishing it would be a “distraction.” [Zeeshan Aleem, MS NOW]

Part of the problem here is that there’s less than a year before the 2026 Elections are held, and it’s all-important, if you’re the DNC Chairman looking to move up, to win those elections and not upset everyone with criticisms of certain factions.

Without the report being available, it’s hard to know which factions. Maybe the folks who botched the management of the transgender issue?

Some unknown-to-me corruption-promoting faction?

Well, this is bad news for Democrats and independents alike, and good news for the Republicans. Maybe Martin’s a plant? I doubt it, but the Republicans do boast a lot of billionaires who are loose with their money.

Which means the Democrats will win in 2026 by a vanishingly small margin over a bunch of fourth-raters, and wonder, once again, where things went wrong.

The Presidential Address continues to generate comment. Here’s Erick Erickson and his palpable sense of dread:

The fact that the President and his team thought eighteen minutes of yelling a week before Christmas was going to be a helpful reset suggests they have even bigger problems. No one is going to remember this speech in a week, and probably not by the weekend.

That he felt now was a good time to do it seems odd. Certainly, the President’s supporters loved the speech. But will that give them reason to show up next November? They are not showing up with the President on the ballot. How does this speech change that? And independent voters are turning against the President. How does this speech change that?

It’s felt like someone yelling that the Vikings are still going to win the Super Bowl this season and you should believe him, but here in reality the Vikes have been, as they say, mathematically eliminated from the playoffs.

Yes, that bad. But what it conveys is a basic poor understanding of the world and how it works. It’s like listening to a monarchist talk about how monarchies are great stuff, when a single decision of a monarch can leave a country a smoking ruin. Think post World War I Germany.  And then their belief that some God or ‘nother has picked them for the spot and therefore it was not a bad decision.

My point, besides the observation that most folks who’ve failed to mature will dodge responsibility for bad decisions? That independents who are paying attention will see that behavior and not only recognize it as disqualifying for that individual would-be power-grabber, but damaging to their associated Party as well.

As critical as Erickson is being of his own folks, he needs to double it. No, he really does. Just as do the Democrats of themselves.

Here’s Andrew Sullivan (paywall):

On Wednesday night, we saw someone drowning, not waving. Underwater by 18 percent on the economy and 28 percent on inflation, he barked at us for 18 rushed minutes behind a podium, telling Americans that any economic anxiety is entirely because of Joe Biden, and that a new Golden Age is at hand. He then did a breathless Greatest Hits weave. …

I read that after my composition, but it’s mostly the same: Trump is falling apart as he doesn’t have the skills to navigate reality. Tough on him.

And behind door #3 is … your mama!

Crimson Peak (2015) is a Gothic horror tale, and I’ll just come right out and say that I don’t understand the point of Gothic horror tales, but I’ll chat about it anyways.

Sir Thomas Sharpe has come to America in order to sell his invention, a mass mud extraction mechanism, with sister Lucille in tow. He comes across Carter Cushing, a very wealthy businessman and widower, and his nubile daughter Edith. Edith is an aspiring author – why this matters is never really clarified – who, as a child, was warned by her mother’s ghost, or perhaps some random trouble-maker ghost, about “Crimson Peak”.

Sir Sharpe fails to sell his invention to Mr. Cushing, and when he proposes to Edith, Cushing cuts him off at the knees, bribing the Sharpes to leave America immediately. But then Cushing is found dead in a communal shower, and Sharpe’s marital suit for Edith’s hand takes a turn for the better, and soon enough she accepts. Sharpe, having, he believes, secured funding, returns to his home.

Which is on a mountain where the mud runs red.

Well, Edith, despite being married, can hardly get laid unless she dangles her imminent inheritance in front of Thomas. She finds herself in a competition for Sir Thomas’ affections with Lucille … sister of Sir Thomas. The storytellers then, in what seems an interminable series of weird discoveries, hauntings, closeups on knives, and my Arts Editor commenting on their costumes, try to build suspense. I laughed a lot, and in retrospect I don’t think I liked Edith, or anyone else, enough to care.

Finally, in the midst of a snowstorm, the wine is clarified, along with the very sketchy backstory of Sir Thomas and Lucille, and Edith’s savior, who is so obscure we couldn’t recall if he was a surgeon or a lawyer[1], comes running in … and takes a knife to the belly. Competency at saving distressed maidens is generally appreciated in Gothic tales, but whatever. I do preach thinking outside of the box.

Well, in the context of frequent hauntings in this tale, it’s not entirely disingenuous to proclaim the characters live on, despite the general gouting of their blood, so regardless of your attachment to the good guys or the bad guys, The End is not really The End.

Perhaps the lesson of this tale is the consequences of being stubborn. Or maybe not. Since I didn’t really care for anyone at the end, I find the analysis to be a dubious enterprise. But if you like horror, with a heavy ladling atmosphere, you may like this modern take on the old Gothic horror tale.

Regarding the Presidential Address, Steve Benen has his list of top ten lies., which is useful in its reinforcement of the President’s relative consistency in lying; many liars are tripped up by their inconsistency, brought on by yielding to the impulse to lie when the truth is, at best, inconvenient to one’s ambitions^[1].

His #1 bears repetition:

#1: “I negotiated directly with the drug companies and foreign nations, which were taking advantage of our country for many decades, to slash prices on drugs and pharmaceuticals by as much as 400%, 500% and even 600%.” This whopper claimed the top spot for me, because on top of the absurdity of the lie, one has to layer the fact this guy still doesn’t understand how numbers work.

That President Trump continues to make claims that would result in patients being paid to take drugs suggests he either considers his supporters to be dunderheads, or that his intellect has decayed to the point where he should be replaced.

It’s not a good look. Observers remarked that he appeared to be in a panic, which is certainly justified for the champion mendacity machine who’s finally failing in the face of reality. When will Vance dare to make his grab for glory? Does Trump have to drop in his tracks?

¹ Robert Heinlein remarked, probably in his fiction, that there were two categories of lying. I forget the one, but the other was to tell the truth, but in such a way as to make it seem like a lie.

If you’ve been holding your breath waiting for cultured, i.e., “petri-dish” meat, well, it’s time to turn purple:

For nearly a decade, it was regarded as one of the most promising companies in its field. Investors poured in, public attention followed, and hopes grew that it could help revolutionize how meat is produced. But last week it emerged, largely under the radar, that Believer Meats, formerly known as Future Meat, had abruptly halted operations. …

Industry sources say a series of management decisions left the company with no alternative but to lay off its roughly 100 employees in the United States and Israel and suspend operations entirely. The collapse has prompted a broader question within foodtech circles: if one of the sector’s most advanced companies cannot survive, what does that mean for the future of cultured meat? [Calcalist]

I always had trouble understanding how they were going to scale up the initial development work. Maybe they did, too.

Megalography:

1. The depiction of great or grand things, such as heroes and gods. [Art And Popular Culture]

I must say the definitions presented in the DuckDuckGo summaries for megalography had a greater variance than average. Noted in “DINING WITH DIONYSUS,” Benjamin Leonard, Archaeology (January/February 2026):

Inside a large house in a part of Pompeii called Regio IX, a team from the Archaeological Park of Pompeii unearthed a splendidly decorated dining room that eighteenth-century excavators had stumbled upon but largely ignored. Opening onto a garden, the vaulted room is lined with partially preserved columns painted a rich red that frame frescoed wall panels. Archaeologists were surprised to discover that the frescoes represent a rare example of a megalography—a group of paintings depicting nearly life-size figures, in this case part of the retinue of Dionysus, the god of wine. Researchers have dubbed the residence the House of the Thiasus, after the term for a Dionysian procession, and have dated the frescoes to between 40 and 30 B.C. on the basis of their style.

Those readers who have been watching the market cap DJT, Trump Media & Technology Group Corp, slowly sliding were no doubt surprised to see it jump quite a bit today.

Did Trump Media announce excellent, unexpected results today? No.

From OilPrice.com:

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the operator of Truth Social, announced Thursday it has reached a definitive agreement to merge with TAE Technologies in an all-stock deal valued at roughly $6 billion. The move effectively turns a social media company into a deep-tech player, targeting the massive power requirements of the artificial intelligence boom.

The deal, which is set to close in mid-2026, would create one of the first publicly traded fusion energy firms. TMTG is putting up $200 million in cash at signing and another $100 million when the merger paperwork is officially filed.

For TMTG, the deal offers a bridge to the physical infrastructure world. For TAE, it provides a massive cash injection and a direct path to the Nasdaq.

Uh huh. So DJT senior management thinks it can leverage Truth Social and nuclear fusion for money making synergies?

The tie-up comes as the tech world faces an increasingly desperate hunt for electricity. AI data centers are devouring power at rates the current U.S. grid was never designed to handle. This has sparked a “nuclear renaissance” among big tech firms; Microsoft recently signed a deal to help revive the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, while Amazon has been buying up data center sites located right next to existing reactors.

That’s a big bet, especially given that much of the big boost in energy consumption involves the shakiest of the commercial “AI” technologies, generative AI. Long-term readers know I’m dubious on this technology.

The jump in valuation appears to be all about speculation. What does TAE bring to the difficult problem of fusion engineering? What’s their big insight? Can AI remain the big pie in the sky, or will the promise so urgently asserted by the AI zealots turn out to be empty?

Will the deal even close? There are no guarantees in a deal like this. If the deal falls through, there’s no reason for the valuation of DJT to remain this high.

High risk. High reward?

In case you were wondering if we’re going to war anytime soon, maybe we are:

Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before — Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

DONALD J. TRUMP
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Or maybe not. Just how much does a post to a poorly-attended social media platform count towards official business? Foreign leaders must regard amateur crap like as true headache-inducers. Who put American military forces under the control of a half-baked twerp like this? they must wonder.

Oh, doo doo doo doo doo … add musical notes where needed.

I didn’t see the Presidential Address last night due to having other obligations – exercise, which is important at this point in life.

However, seeing as I’m located in Minnesota, the local news station on the CBS network carried a clip of the Address that directly mentioned Minnesota. They’ve also provided a summary:

I’ve mentioned before that Speaker Johnson is a weak Speaker or a Speaker with an outre agenda, and we’re seeing it again:

The media is all a-twitter about the latest scandal – Chief of Staff Susie Wiles dishing on her boss, the President.

Vanity Fair published a swath of interviews Whipple conducted with Wiles in a two-part series Tuesday that raised eyebrows in Washington due to the chief of staff’s unusually candid quotes. Wiles tends to stray from the spotlight, seemingly preferring to carry out her job behind the scenes at the White House.

In the fourth paragraph of the two-part interview, Wiles was quoted as saying Trump has an “alcoholic’s personality,” that Vice President Vance “has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” and that Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought is a “right wing absolute zealot.” [The Hill]

And after it was published?

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles forcefully pushed back on Vanity Fair’s framing of her interview with author Chris Whipple, calling Tuesday’s sweeping article a “disingenuously framed hit piece” on her, President Trump, the Cabinet, and White House staff.

“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team,” Wiles wrote in her first authored post on the social platform X since October 2024.

Followed by sycophancy so honeyed that it makes me gag. But looking over more of her quotes, it just seems like someone lit themselves up and ran around in circles in order to distract from a far more horrendous report – say, the Epstein Files – just getting ready to drop.

Indeed, something like alcoholism, since it’s treated as a disease rather than a personal failing these days, and Trump is a famous teetotaler in any case, actually makes him look better.

And Wiles running around screaming that the media mislead her just seems ingenuous in the extreme.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a story to watch, but keep an eye out for other incidents, reports, and activities that may be of far larger significance in the end.