Yearning for hell to freeze over


Surely we must be in hell: March 19, 2025. Official White House photo via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

The news of late has been so surreal that it feels like living in a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, set in a fascist America from which there is No Exit. How the hell do we get out of this place?

A lifelong criminal, con man, and creep of the highest order struts on the world stage like a king, dispensing commands to hellify the world. Half the population, eager and true-believing citizens of hell, are so depraved that they see this king as God’s agent on earth, even as he hastens to light their little lives, too, on fire. The other half of us see what is happening, stunned, bewildered, and near paralyzed by the spectacle of it.

In this hell, freedom is the right to dominate and exploit. Truth is whatever serves the king. Virtue means doing whatever the king wants done. Empathy is toxic. Justice is retribution and persecution. Fairness is at the top of the list of things that must be reversed because fairness can no longer be allowed. Any act of fairness is a crack in hell’s foundation.

In philosophy and literature, there is a well developed idea that this world is hell (even before Donald Trump came along). Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “For the world is Hell, and men are on the one hand the tormented souls and on the other the devils in it.”

Time after time people like me have bought into hopes that this criminal, con man, and creep would be neutralized and brought to justice. Time after time he has slithered out of it, not least because there are so many who are afraid of him or who long for a piece of the perks and power in a hellified world — hell’s courtiers, sold souls, connoisseurs of the practice of domination, exploitation, and cruelty.

A new hope?

The Epstein scandal gets more interesting every day. Dare we hope that it will be the Epstein scandal that finally causes hell to freeze over? This morning, the New Republic has this piece by Alex Shepherd: Is This the Turning Point of Trump’s Presidency? It’s early yet, but the Epstein story has all the makings of a defining scandal that could grind Republican rule to a halt.

It’s asking a lot of MAGA fools to comprehend that reality is pretty much a complete reversal of all the lies they have believed. A thousand smoking guns pointed right at their tiny brains may not be enough. We can only hope.

Meanwhile, even if Trump manages to slither out of this, the subversive beauty of the truth trying to come out, while the king and his court struggle to keep the scam going, is a sight to see.

The media and some of the punditry, bless their timid little hearts, are ganging up now to come up with scoops that fry Trump’s ass in the grease of his own guilt. Here’s an example of a good one this morning, from Midas Touch. The link is below.


A screen shot from the video at Midas Touch.

Aux armes, citoyens!

Happy Bastille Day!

I scoured YouTube for a truly good performance of Hector Berlioz’ setting of La Marseillaise. The version above is poorly recorded and somewhat slimmed down, but it was the best I could find. Done properly, the piece requires a huge and excellent orchestra and a vast chorus with a separate men’s chorus, women’s chorus, and children’s chorus. In the above, we must settle for a single chorus, though it’s large and well trained.

I can easily imagine constructing an unserious but entertaining theory that the reason we Americans have such a factured political culture is that we don’t have a proper national anthem. If the day ever comes when we can actually fix the American Constitution to repair our democracy and take it back from the oligarchy, Christianists, and authoritarians, we also need a new national anthem to go with the new Constitution.

Slough again

A friend emailed me yesterday with more about Slough and how the English town of Slough punches above its weight, culturally. I have never watched “The Office,” and thus I don’t know what kind of treatment Slough got. I should add, though, to my mention of “Slow Horses” (Apple TV+) and the Slough House series of novels by Mick Herron that in “Slow Horses” and Slough House the reference to Slough is insulting. Slough House is a place where MI5 sends its failed agents, and this Slough House is said to be so far from MI5 headquarters that “it might as well be Slough.”

My friend’s email also included a link to this video, which is a kind of hymn to Slough — quite touching — by the main character of “The Office.”

Extra credit: From the New York Times, 2008: What’s So Bad About Slough?

Writers worth remembering


The Prisoner of Zenda was published in 1894. But it was very popular and went through many editions. This appears to be a book club edition, published, I think, in the 1920s. There were movie versions as late as 1979.

In every generation of writers, there are only a few writers who write classics that remain in demand and are kept in print. Everything else falls into obscurity. These books, some of which may even have gone through multiple editions, continue to exist only in the surviving copies, which no doubt become fewer and fewer decade by decade.

I am hardly the first to complain that I find the fiction that gets published these days to be pretty much unreadable. On June 25, the New York Times ran a piece touching on this, Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear? David Brooks’ column on July 10 was When Novels Mattered.

When looking for fiction to read, I rarely find book lists helpful. This neglected fiction is not on anybody’s radar screen, and besides my taste in fiction matches poorly with that of people who compile book lists. But I have found that an AI can be very good at finding neglected fiction to read, if you explain in detail what you like. I have been using ChatGPT’s 4.1 model for this. My to-be-read stack, which was empty for a while, has been replenished.


⬆︎ The Thirty-Nine Steps was published in 1915. Alfred Hitchcock based a movie on the book in 1935. The copy above was a Reader’s Digest book published in 2009. Though it’s a Reader’s Digest book, it contains the complete text.


⬆︎ Sword at Sunset was a bestseller after it was published in 1963. It’s one of the fortunate old books that has been reissued in Kindle format and a new paperback edition.


⬆︎ It seems that the biggest bookstore in Scotland for used books is in Inverness, not Edinburgh. That’s Leakey’s Bookshop. I will be in Inverness for a couple of days in late September, so Leakey’s definitely will be one of my stops. Before I go, I’ll ask ChatGPT to help me make a list of books and authors to look for.


⬆︎ I have been greatly enjoying Slow Horses, which can be streamed on Apple TV+. There have been four seasons so far, with a fifth and sixth season in the works. The TV series is based on a series of novels, Slough House, by Mick Herron. It seems there is no end to the humiliation heaped on Slough, a town about 20 miles west of London. I wrote about Slough in a post in April 2024, The magical threads from nowhere to somewhere. Be sure to read the comments!


⬆︎ I ran into a friend a couple of days ago who told me that he has completely cut himself off from the news, to protect his mental health. I don’t advocate going that far. But I do think that we need to keep our heads above it and realize that what we’re living through is a disgusting pig circus directed by idiots. The New York Times lifted the lid just a little in a recent guest essay, The Ruthless Ambition of Stephen Miller. In this piece, someone is quoted as saying that Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, doesn’t know or care much about policy and that “She’s producing a reality TV show every day.” In the photo, that’s Trump, of course, with Jeffrey Epstein. Though we know that Trump flew on Epstein’s plane seven times, we’re expected to believe Trump’s denials that anything naughty or illegal happened.

Trump proudly visits new concentration camp


Official White House photo via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

I wonder: Is it because contemporary Republicans don’t know anything about the history of Nazi concentration camps that they are so eager for photo ops in front of cages, and that thus they just don’t understand how foolish it is to strut their depravity for the historical record? Or is it something like the opposite, that they are truly proud to be what they are?

They own it now. They own everything that ever happens in these places. The fools who voted for them own it, too.

Often it’s impossible to get public domain photos for current events. For Trump’s visit to “Alligator Alcatraz,” though, dozens of official White House photos were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. The Trump regime, clearly, wants the photos to be seen by as many people as possible.

I find that I just cannot comprehend how people like this think. And I’m afraid we’re going to learn much more about what this kind of people are capable of.


Official White House photo via Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

Cucumbers … and sesame


Asian cucumber salad with salmon pâté

The local summer tomatoes aren’t here yet. The cucumbers, though, are tiding me over. For the past three weeks, I’ve gotten three pints of cucumbers each week from my local farmers, Brittany and Richard. They grow four types of cucumbers. I love them all.

If I were asked to make a short list of the loftiest flavors on the planet, I’d include toasted sesame. Sesame is an ancient crop with a history that goes back at least 3,000 years. (Barley, by comparison, was cultivated 9,000 years ago!) I always have raw sesame seeds in the fridge, and every time I think to use them I wonder why I don’t use them more often. They’re easy to toast, in a skillet. As for storebought toasted sesame oil, I use that almost every day.

I haven’t seen it in ages, but health food stores used to sell sesame salt. That’s a Japanese condiment (gomasio) made from toasted sesame seeds (ground) and salt. It’s easy to make your own. Toast the sesame seeds in a skillet, and grind them in a blender.

We usually disparage the post-agriculture diet as inferior to the hunter-gatherer diet. No doubt that’s true. But, these days, when international trade and international shipping are so easy, we can have post-agriculture foods from all over the world at low prices — foods from other climates, and thus a much greater variety of foods. Then again, a purely local diet can be healthy, too — as long as one has, or has access to, some really good fields, pastures, and gardens.

Ugly media failure on “the Big Beautiful Bill”


Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate parliamentarian. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The media have done an absolutely rotten job of saying what’s in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” The stories will say something about the deficit, then revert to the usual he-said she-said political junk. It’s infuriating.

As is so often the case these days, we have to depend on refugees from the mainstream media to provide us with very basic information that the mainstream media ignores so that it can focus on the inane political yipyap that it loves so much.

Jennifer Rubin, who resigned from the Washington Post and is now a part of “the Contrarian” on Substack, provides a partial list this morning of items in the bill that the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, said are in violation of the Byrd Rule.

You’d almost think that the media don’t want us to understand just how corrupt and repulsive Republicans really are. And, yeah, let’s talk about campus protests and trans teenagers instead — you know, those real threats to America.

Jennifer Rubin’s list:

• A provision selling off millions of acres of federal lands

• A provision to pass food aid costs on to states

• Proposed limitations on food aid benefits to certain citizens or lawful permanent residents

• Proposed restrictions on the ability of federal courts to issue nationwide injunctions and temporary restraining orders

• A proposal for a funding cap for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and for slashing pay of employees at the Federal Reserve

• A proposal to slash $293 million from the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research

• A plan to dissolve the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board

• An effort to repeal an EPA rule limiting air pollution emissions of passenger vehicles

• An item allowing project developers to bypass judicial environmental reviews if they pay a fee

• A measure deeming offshore oil and gas projects automatically compliant with the National Environmental Policy Act

• A modified version of the REINS Act, which would increase congressional power to overturn major regulations

• A scheme to punish so-called sanctuary cities by withholding federal grants

• An increase on Federal Employees Retirement System contribution rate for new civil servants who refuse to become at-will employees

• A measure seeking to extend the suspension of permanent price support authority for farmers

• A requirement forcing sale of all the electric vehicles used by the Post Office

• A change to annual geothermal lease sales and to geothermal royalties

• A proposal for a mining road in Alaska

• Authorization for the executive branch to reorganize federal agencies

• New fee for federal worker unions’ use of agency resources

• Transfer of space shuttle to a nonprofit in Houston from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum

Streaming hours well spent

“Zero Day,” on Netflix, is the political opus that “Mountainhead” was not. Robert De Niro is magnificent as a former president who is called out of retirement to investigate a nationwide cyberattack.

“Mountainhead,” by the way, started out with an interesting premise but quickly devolved into a rather silly black comedy.

In “Long Way Home,” on Apple TV+, Ewan McGregor and his old friend Charley Boorman, starting in Scotland, ride classic old motorcycles across seventeen countries of northern and eastern Europe. It’s good, lightweight fun. It’s also a fine travelogue that gets us into some places where tourists don’t often go — northern Norway, Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia.

Drone photography has done wonders for travel documentaries.

After all, what is comfort food for?


Fried barley biscuit with fixin’s

Especially on a diet, there is only so much that a mortal can do to fend off the heathen craving for bread and wine. Yesterday, a friend in California who had no idea that I’m on a diet sent me this text:

“I got a loaf of organic sourdough batard, some organic avocado oil mayonnaise, some Irish Kerry Gold butter, and some prosecco from Spain. I also got a bottle of organic Merlot.”

That, and the news, sent me over the edge. I tried to work out how to get maximum comfort from, say, 900 calories or less.

Fried barley biscuits were the solution: flour made from hulled barley, a little olive oil, and nonfat milk. Frying the biscuits in a little peanut oil made the biscuits a little less dry than if I had baked them.

Ignorance and folly

One of the most horrifying images I’ve seen in months was the White House photo of Trump, Vance, Rubio and Hegseth lying their ignorant asses off for the cameras. It would be hard to find four greater fools and sicker souls anywhere on the planet, and yet there they were, in the White House.

MAGA types probably still believe Trump’s lies and triumphalism. But I give the media high credit for starting to get the truth out so fast that by Sunday morning, on the talk shows, Trump’s goons had to start walking things back.

One of my biggest concerns is terrorism. Iran doesn’t have the capability of a military response far from their own borders. They’ll have to retaliate on the cheap, and that means terrorism. The Washington Post took up that subject this morning: A weakened Iran could turn to assassination and terrorism to strike back.

I hope gasoline prices jump to $11 a gallon. Gasoline prices are one of the few things that the American ignorati can understand.


Fools, rushing in

Take that, Ezra Klein


Ezra Klein in attention-seeking mode. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

All liberal pundits have an inherent conflict of interest, a constant temptation that tends to lead them astray. Those of us who read the output of the punditry must always be alert to that conflict. It’s that competing for attention may sometimes override their integrity and wisdom. They have to be at least a little provocative.

We’re all familiar with the extreme versions of this on the right. Think Rudy Giuliani, or Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Lauren Boebert. They have no integrity at all. Their entire schtick is about theatrics for the sake of getting attention. Ezra Klein, certainly, has too much integrity to go that far — though I think it’s true that part of what led formerly serious pundits such as Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald off the right-wing edge of the earth is that they went where the attention is.

Klein’s bid for more attention was his book Abundance, published earlier this year. He apparently calculated, quite correctly, that there was a lot of attention to be had, as a liberal, for arguing that regulation was behind shortages of things such as housing.

Klein got his butt kicked in an interview this morning in the New York Times. It’s Ross Douthat interviewing Lina Kahn, who was head of the Federal Trade Commission under President Biden.

Douthat says: “There’s been a really stark division between people who want to organize liberal thinking around antimonopoly, anti-corporate power thinking, and people, like my colleague Ezra Klein, who have been arguing basically that the Democratic Party doesn’t have a strategy for dealing with the intense thicket of regulatory obstacles to building things and homes and factories in America.”

Khan (who I think is much smarter than Douthat, by the way), says: “Look, we need to talk in a market-by-market way, but if you are offering a diagnosis that is also suspiciously quiet about the role of corporate power, I think that should raise some questions as well.”

Some examples

Kahn is being subtle, and she is being fair. She is saying that Klein is ignoring the many ways that corporate power, in addition to regulation, leads to a shortage of affordable housing. I asked ChatGPT 4o to list some of the ways corporate interests inflate the cost of housing and the cost of renting:

• Large corporate entities — private equity firms, real estate investment trusts (REITs), hedge funds — have increasingly purchased single-family homes and rental properties, particularly after the 2008 financial crisis.

• Large developers and investment firms often buy and hold land (especially in growing urban fringes) without building, waiting for values to rise.

• Corporate developers increasingly construct entire neighborhoods of single-family homes intended solely for rent, not sale.

• A handful of large firms dominate sectors like building materials, cement, and lumber distribution, contributing to inflated construction costs.

• Corporate landlords and real estate lobbies (e.g. National Multifamily Housing Council) invest heavily in lobbying to block rent control, eviction moratoria, and tenant union protections.

• Some large landlords use rental pricing software (e.g. RealPage’s YieldStar) to algorithmically set rent levels and discourage undercutting.

Klein is on probation now

Klein, in my view, has traded a chunk of his credibility in trying to buy more attention. To me, this calls into question his integrity as well as his credibility. This can be a slippery slope, the slope that corrupted Greenwald and Taibbi so badly that only the right-wing mediasphere can stomach them.

This is happening at a time when corporate-owned media are increasingly pressuring their liberal pundits to compromise themselves to increase their appeal to right-wing readers. This is why Paul Krugman left the New York Times. It’s why Lillian Rubin left the Washington Post.

Let’s hope that Klein comes to his senses and doesn’t slip down that slope.

I have bonded with my ATV


The meadow across the road. Click here for high-resolution version.

I was embarrassed for even wanting an ATV. I was embarrassed when I bought one. It seemed like a trashy thing to have. But I’ve had it for two months now, and I haven’t regretted it for a minute.

It gets me outdoors much more. I don’t zoom around and make a lot of noise. I even installed a “silencer” on the muffler to make the ATV run quieter. I go slow to see what I can see. I have never even used fifth gear. I go places I would never go during snake season for fear of stepping on a snake. I’m getting to know individual trees. I’m learning where the blooming things are. It’s even a social thing, because sometimes a neighbor and I ride together.

The valley in which I live, with its two ridges, is a lot like a tiny state park. There are between two and three miles of roads and trails, two small bridges suitable only for tractors and ATV’s, and two fords across small streams. There are two springs with deep pools where frogs and tadpoles live. There’s an observation tower on one of the ridges that neighbors built. I’ve helped install antennas on top of the tower for emergency use. There is solar power in the tower. A VHF radio that I provided is installed there permanently. I have a rugged HF transceiver that I can take to the tower in case the electrical grid ever goes down (far from impossible during my lifetime).

The ATV is a 2001 Honda Rancher 350 with four-wheel drive and electric shift. I was extremely lucky to find a classic 25-year-old ATV in like-new condition. It’s a beast, though it feels friendly. It often reminds me of riding a horse — sitting on a saddle, feet on foot rests that feel like stirrups, knees clamped against the machine’s chest, watching out for overhanging limbs that might slap me in the face, sometimes rising in the stirrups for a better look up ahead.


⬆︎ Rose of Sharon in my backyard. Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ Butterfly weed in the meadow. Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ The backyard at the abbey at 7:20 a.m. Click here for high-resolution version.