Antisemitism

 Well, the day we all feared has come. The Democratic Party officially has its equivalent to a Marjorie Taylor Greene—as in, an antisemitic conspiracy theorist with a host of loony beliefs. I am referring to Maureen Galindo, who was unfortunately suddenly all over the news yesterday as a contender in the Democratic primaries for a congressional seat in Texas. 

She truly sounds like MTG from the worst point of the latter's QAnon period—except that Galindo is if anything even more overtly antisemitic than MTG ever was. She has reportedly railed against what she calls "the Jews who own Hollywood." She has implied that Jewish people constitute the "Church of Satan" and the "synagogue of Satan." And so on. 

Compromises

 The recent hantavirus outbreak on a cruise ship has been dominating the news all week—and doubtless it is prompting many Americans to question whether it was really such a wise choice for us to dismantle our world-class public health system and appoint in its place a bunch of ideological hacks who appear not to even believe in the germ theory of disease. 

In particular—an opinion piece in the New York Times notes yesterday—Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana may be regretting his choice to vote in favor of Kennedy's nomination—seeing that public health was, for a time, the one issue most dear to him.

Sleep and Death

 My dad is in the terminal stages of brain cancer, and as the disease has progressively attacked his mind, he has inevitably gotten more confused and disoriented over time. 

Having cruelly robbed him piece by piece of his eyesight, his mobility, his work, and his short-term memory, the cancer is taking dad closer each day to what Hugh MacDiarmid called the "dread level of nothing but life itself." 

The Pranks of Brute Force

 Trump is pretty definitively losing his Iran war by this point. We're now over a month into the supposed ceasefire between the two parties, and the Strait of Hormuz is still effectively closed to commercial shipping. Iran retains the ability to frighten ships and insurance companies off with just a few random strikes; which means they retain enormous leverage in the ongoing negotiations with the United States. 

And Trump, I'm sorry to say, has no moral standing to complain about this. I don't say it's good for any government—let alone a brutally repressive theocratic one—to deliberately shut down a major economic artery of the globe. But Trump was the one who first announced the principle of the right of the stronger. And according to that rule—if you suddenly find yourself the weaker party, you have no moral claim against one's opponent. 

Shark and Dogfish

 The Trump administration carried out yet another set of extrajudicial killings on the high seas this weekend—bringing the total number of civilians it has murdered in these boat strikes to at least 192. 

Every one of these attacks has been an atrocity and a war crime. But this weekend's added a cruel twist: it left "one survivor at large in the eastern Pacific," as the New York Times put it. 

Millions

 Trump's sweeping termination of U.S. foreign aid programs last year has largely fallen off of most of our news feeds—leaving a lot of conservative influencers to declare that it was all no big deal; a nothingburger. 

But Nick Kristof today in the New York Times does the math and brings the receipts. He marshals convincing evidence that the number of people—mostly children under five—who have died so far as a result of Trump's aid withdrawals is at least in the hundreds of thousands. 

I'm not using AI; AI is using me

 I read a very annoying article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday and now I'm wishing I hadn't. 

It was about the cottage industry of people online who claim to be able to spot when other writers are using AI. 

They have identified a number of tells, they say, which amount to a "house style" for AI.