“I’m not sure who or what to blame for the poorly staged “I’m melting” moment.”

https://newyorktheater.me/2024/04/17/the-wiz-broadway-review/#:~:text=I%E2%80%99m%20not%20sure%20who%20or%20what%20to%20blame%20for%20the%20poorly%20staged%20%E2%80%9CI%E2%80%99m%20melting%E2%80%9D%20moment.

Ok, well NOW I’m looking forward to it.

(At DPAC, Durham NC.)

There’s a universal truth buried in here:

«Since the late tenth century, European churchmen had been fretting over what they could do to rein in the violence perpetrated by knights engaged in local feuds. The popes had direct experience of this through the Normans of southern Italy. But trouble was—or seemed to be—endemic. Two early attempts to impose Church discipline over unruly knights were known as the “peace movements”: the Peace of God (Pax Dei) and Truce of God (Treuga Dei). These were mass advocacy programs through which clergy tried to impress on fighting men the need to refrain from plundering churches, and killing, raping, maiming, or robbing civilians. Bishops tried to enforce the Peace by putting towns and regions under the Church’s explicit protection, and threatening God’s curse against trespassers who did their inhabitants harm. The Truce, meanwhile, named days and times of the year when fighting was forbidden.3 Both the Peace and the Truce of God proved widely popular among the common people, but they were not enormously effective. So among the many things that vexed Urban at the outset of his papacy was how to support moral censure with positive action.

Then, in 1095, an intriguing solution presented itself. In the first week of March, ambassadors from Alexios I Komnenos’s court in Constantinople appeared in the west.4 They tracked down Urban in the city of Piacenza, where he was holding an ecclesiastical council known as a synod. And they made him a proposal. According to the German chronicler Bernold of St. Blaisen, they “humbly implored the lord pope and all Christ’s faithful people to give [the Byzantines] some help against the pagans in defense of the holy Church, which the pagans had almost destroyed in that region, having seized that territory up to the walls of the City of Constantinople.”»

– Powers and Thrones (Dan Jones)

https://bookshop.org/ebooks/quotes/62d88b8f-2c22-4ad5-b27a-14f655d1cb7a

Every Western (movie) starts with the townspeople trying to enforce their rules against guns in town.

So here’s the truth: violent, armed men are not popular. They’re not the heroes.

Also: all that “Deus vult” horseshit is (excuse me, was) just an excuse for said armed, violent men. The First Crusade was just a way to ship those guys off, away from “here”, wherever “here” was.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/caracas-on-the-potomac

«From here on, I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to private surveys. And when they tell a different story from the official numbers, there will no longer be a reason to take the official data more seriously.»

I’m sure Susan Collins and other sober Republicans have concerns.

https://www.newsweek.com/zohran-mamdani-has-17-point-jewish-voter-mayoral-race-lead-2106305

People need to just chill about Mamdani. The Democrats of NYC chose him, and that’s that.

Would Dems of any other city choose a similar candidate? Who knows? But whoever they were to choose (hypothetically) would be the right choice for their location.

https://newrepublic.com/article/198613/trump-epstein-fiasco-democrats-new-weapon

“What good does it do to keep fighting losing battles?”

Well…

«“The courts can screw around with this, but it would clearly be saying, ‘We don’t care about the law,’” Ornstein told me. “Every time we can shed light on the unwillingness of John Roberts and the Supreme Court to do anything about Trump’s lawlessness, the better off we are, even if it’s far from ideal.”»

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/durham-county/article311494896.html

«Sterling Bay bought Heritage Square at 606 Fayetteville St. for $62 million three years ago and wants to redevelop it into a life sciences campus with a 325-unit, high-rise apartment building. Originally, the proposal featured an underground parking garage, but the discovery of bedrock beneath the property last year prompted Sterling Bay to seek a zoning change.»

How do you “discover” bedrock under a piece of property after you buy it? (I.e., how do you not know what you’re buying?)

(I guess, after that kind of money has changed hands, that property’s getting developed, no matter what.)

«The company also promises that the project will bring 1,500 jobs with average salaries of $80,000, and investment to both the city and the Hayti neighborhood, which was devastated by the construction of the Durham Freeway, or N.C. 147, in the late 1960s.»

History.

«According to researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill, the temperature in Hayti is up to 7 degrees hotter than anywhere else in the city, a result of development and the construction of the Durham Freeway.

…

“One of my friends’ family sold their home for somewhere between $75,000 to $100,000; they thought they were getting a really good deal,” she said. “That same house was torn down and rebuilt and is now worth $600,000.”»

White flight, pave the city, gentrification, is that the right sequence?

«“Nobody is opposed to redevelopment, but on the backs of a community that has already been disinvested in and is vulnerable, it’s just not the right thing to do,” Scott Neville said.»

The aforementioned $62 mil says something’s gonna happen.

https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/democratic-party-favorability-ratings-low

G. Elliott Morris not freaking out about that WSJ poll.

https://www.wsj.com/economy/trump-tax-cuts-winners-losers-4dbf8fc7?st=ZQNvfn&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink (gift)

«First, some explanations. These charts look only at the law’s tax provisions, not at its reductions to spending on programs such as Medicaid and nutrition assistance, which will tend to affect their lower-income beneficiaries. Tariffs, which weren’t in the law, aren’t part of the calculations. We mostly compare next year’s tax system with what would have happened if Congress had done nothing. This approach most clearly illustrates what lawmakers did, even though they were never likely to let all the tax cuts lapse.»

So. After your “conservative” uncle has raged about his tax burden, all that Sturm und Drang got him a 2-3% change in his after-tax income. He can go roll in his tiny pile of dollars.

Conversely, for a 2-3% bump in taxes (change in post-tax income), we could get 15 million people back on Medicaid, and 5 million more back on SNAP.

(https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2025/jun/how-medicaid-snap-cutbacks-one-big-beautiful-bill-trigger-job-losses-states#:~:text=The%20Congressional%20Budget%20Office%20(CBO,see%20their%20nutrition%20allotments%20reduced.)

Trying to figure out how to write dialogue. Thought I’d go back and read something by a writer I think is good. And I keep getting lost in the narration. Had to read this, like, 3 or 4 times.

«Amélie joined us one afternoon, having completed most of her work securing locations. The woman who out-thinned and out-tanned the rest was there, as she had been every day, lying on her towel when we arrived, still there when we left, her skin the dark oily sheen of roasted hazelnuts.

“Like a nun marries God,” Vito said, “she has married Apollo.”

“Is that the name of her plastic surgeon?” Amélie asked.

I laughed, my own implants barely contained in the triangles of my white bikini. Mine were expensively done. But it could be on account of something more subtle—an assumption Amélie made about me, and about herself, that we were both too clever and naturally pretty to stoop to paying for shortcuts—that she would not suspect my breasts aren’t real.

“She reminds me of someone,” Amélie said. “A woman I once knew who was addicted to tanning, and always on some starvation diet. She was very tortured. She died from drinking too much water.”

“What do you suppose got into her?” Vito asked.

“I think she mistook water for selfhood. Like those people who get into yoga and think you can just breathe and it will solve all your problems. Life is more than water and air.”

“There’s beer,” I said, as I opened a fresh one a waiter had just delivered.

“If your tortured friend had chosen beer,” Vito said, holding his up to mine, “she might still be alive.”»

Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner https://bookshop.org/p/books/creation-lake-rachel-kushner/21003229?ean=9781982116545&next=t

https://fortune.com/2025/07/24/sam-altman-theo-von-podcast-ai-fears-humanity/

I do. I know what happens “next”. People figure out AI is bullshit.