Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3
Musings on life, the theatre, technology, culture and the occasional emu sighting
It’s not a fantasy. It’s Trump and the MAGAts plan.
The Lincoln Project put out this ad called Aftermath.
As the ad says, “This isn’t a fantasy. It’s Trump’s Plan. And he’s counting on you to believe it couldn’t happen.”
Believe it. Share it.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
What a sticky mess we’re in.
Well this is a fine mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. The media/political party industrial complex has put us right where they want us to be. Spinning, Whirling, Scared. Confused. Befuddled. Pissed Off.
As I watch my grandson propel himself around his surroundings this weekend with the reckless abandon of innocence, I can’t help but wonder at the wonder of it all. Watching him realize the consequences of waving an ice cream cone around in the heat of a summer night was a heartbreaking humorus lesson in beginning to see the light. The whirling and spinning only stop when gravity takes over and it all ends up a mess on the sidewalk.
Meanwhile back in the world of knowledge and supposed wisdom, it seems those of us in the rareifed air of adulthood who know better have become unconcerned if not unmoored from the law of physics.
After Joe Biden’s interview on ABC last night it seems we’re completely at the mercy of upcoming news cycles, whether we tune in or tune out. It’s starting to feel like it’s going to be an endless summer, fall and beyond. It’s an unending episode of Lost, where confusion reigns at the expense of narrative and plot. At some point it has to end, but there doesn’t need to be an end, just an endless supply of Special Features.
Sadly, whenver this spins to an end that end that will only help the party of convicted felons and child rapists help us end it all. But that can be spun up and away too.
I’m heartsick that the Democrats have fallen into depths beyond disarray, with new depths still to be plummed apparently. I’m pissed off that what used to be the GOP is happily using this ramapaging forest fire as cover to run and hide from Project 2025, while they continue to scan for more to burn.
The world feels like it’s caught in a lyric somewhere between Tommy Roe’s Dizzy and Stealers Wheel’s Stuck in the Middle With You, with some sort of AI generated click track back beat played by a boy band wearing Supreme Court robes, pretending they understand Hip Hop.
Goodness knows when this will all fall down. But then goodness has nothing much to do with any of it.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
Fighting for the future.
I get asked often why I fight so fiercely about the detestable and dangerous turn our country has taken. Yes, it’s about the larger ramifications of our country now subject to the character and whims of an elected king. Ironically in the week we celebrate our American independence from a king. It’s certainly about that.
Selfishly though, it’s really about the future of my two gandkids. Spending time with them this 4th of July and I fear for their future. I fear for the moments when their small world innocence is lost and I have to tell them how things used to be.
There were joys to hold on to:
Watching my grandson dance with abandon in the middle of a crowd listening to the Detroit Symphony while waiting for fireworks to begin.
Giving my granddaughter her first taste of ice cream and watching her face light up the same way I watched my Dad give her mother, my daughter, her first taste and then try to devour everyone else’s ice cream the same why my granddaughter did.
Watching my wife teach my grandson how to make a wish by tossing a coin in a fountain.
I’m fighting for all of that in hopes one day they will only have to read about what we’re living through as a sad piece of history and not the moment when irreversible change happened.
That’s my wish and my fight.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
Send this to your friends, your enemies, and anyone else who needs some sense knocked into their heads.
If you’re struggling like I am with the fundamental changes happening in this country as we hit the 4th of July, play this ad from John Cena about what it means to be an American.
Don’t just play it, send it around. Every day. Each and every day. Especially to those who’ve lost the plot.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
Pay attention! The time is now. Not November.
Pay attention!
Below are three links to articles I saw upon waking this morning. If these don’t wake you up inject some damn caffeine into your veins.
First up. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, not yet clothed in a brown shirt, tells us “that we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
Pay attention!!
Next up. Phillip Bump gives us The Perfectly Valid Presidential-Immunity Murder Hypothetical. This should be a gift link, but if it’s not or doesn’t work, it might be time for you to learn that there are a million ways to get around paywalls on the Internet. At the moment.
Pay attention!!!
And finally (for this post at least) Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes take on the SCOTUS decision in A Decision of Surpassing Recklessness in Dangerous Times.
Pay attention!!!!
And if you think the political cartoon by Bruce MacKinnon above might be too much, I’ll just say again
Pay attention!!!!
The time to act, the time to work is now. While we must vote, if you wait until it’s time to vote, you’re already losing more than we’ve already lost.
Pay attention!!!!!
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
Going to be surreal celebrating USA independence from a king after the Supreme Court ruling.
I’m struggling through this political mess we’re in and shared some of my thoughts in Rome Magazine on Medium. I hope you take a minute of your time to read it.
The irony of the Supreme Court giving the president immunity most monarchs would die for may be rich, but it’s also extremely sad, given the timing. Yes, I’m still in a state of profound disillusionment and yes, I’m working to figure out how to change that, but I’ve got to be honest. There are moments when I’m not sure if it’s worth the candle, much less lighting up some fireworks this 4th of July.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
That sinking feeling.
Last night I spent good time with good company, all of like minds politically and socially. In that good company is a very good friend of substantial means. At one point he asked me if I was going to watch the debate tonight, or as he characterized it, “the TV event that might decide the future of the world”. I responded that I would indeed be watching and felt his characterization, though extreme, was sadly too damn accurate.
He later said that his financial advisor had called a Zoom meeting of all of his clients for Friday morning to discuss paths forward after the debate and anticipating a SCOTUS decision on Trump’s specious immunity claims. He said his financial guy sounded a bit panicked.
No shit.
Personally I’ve moved beyond panic. I’m now in a state of profound disillusionment. A descriptor I borrowed from Tom Wellborn a fellow traveler on social media. I wrote about that last week on Medium in a post called, well you guessed it, Profound Disillusionment.
I hope you take a few minutes and read it, depressing as it may sound. We live in a country where I fear that if the decaying orange convicted felon, now the candidate for what used to one of two major political parties in this country, but is now just an cover for grifting and cruelty, died a horrible public death, the chaos he’s unleashed can’t be reversed. At least not in my lifetime.
In the light of day last night’s good time feels far too much like commiseration.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above.
It’s time to share a little Sunday Morning Reading. Words on Apple, words on politics, words on loss, and some words on photography. Read some words.
This week Apple will hold its annual World Wide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) focusing eyeballs on Cupertino and what everyone expects to be Apple’s big push into the Artificial Intelligence game, now looking like Tim Cook’s version will be called Apple Intelligence. This has been no secret for quite some time. That said, Mark Gurman of Bloomberg seems to have gotten quite a few of the details, whether leaked or planted who really knows, on what’s about to unfold. Check out Here’s Everything Apple Plans to Show at It’s AI-Focused WWDC Event.
As a companion to that check out John Gruber’s take on Gurman’s Epic Pre-WWDC Leak Report. Gruber seems to think it’s indeed a leak and the folks inside Apple aren’t too happy. IYKYK
As I stated the focus will be on AI. I’m thinking it will be just as hard to cleanly view where this is all headed as it has been with announcements from other companies, given that no one has nailed down an AI or LLM that seems to live up to the promises or provide reliably accurate answers. Check out Google’s and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse to Say Who Won the 2020 US Election by David Gilbert.
Perhaps the best pre-WWDC piece for providing some pre-perspective comes from Om Malik in Apple + AI: What to Expect at WWDC 2024.
Natasha MH has penned a lovely piece about the lives we cherish and the ones taken from us with Weeping For Relationships Made Out of Dreams and Denials. There have been lots of dreams and denials dashed in this last decade. Some very personal and some quite global.
In many ways, Natasha’s piece linked above is a a companion to this David French piece The Day My Old Church Canceled Me Was a Very Sad Day. We’ve gotten far to used to loss and far too accepting of how we’re experiencing so much of it because of the turmoil visited on us by one orange-tinged demagogue. Brenda Wineapple says this is Trump’s Most Dangerous Gift., and that it will never rise to the level of public tragedy. If that’s the case, nothing ever will.
We think it’s all happening to us in the here and now. But while today’s issues are horribly threatening and provoke chatter of Civil War, we’ve had our share of the same from our past. Jon Grinspan takes on a bit of a tour of some long forgotten American history that actually led to our actual Civil War with Long Before the Woke, There Were The Wide Awake.
And as a final Sunday morning palette cleanser check out The 25 Photos that Defined the Modern Age in a piece put together by M.H. Miller, Brendan Embser, Emmanuel Duma, and Lucy McKeon. The pictures are worth thousands of words but the words accompanying the pictures are worth quite a bit as well.
If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
Politically Incorrect AI? Where’s the problem?
Artificial Intelligence is taking its beatings as it weaves its way into just about anything we think might give us a leg up. Recent misfires from Google and Microsoft after big announcements shed light on just how, to this point, reliably unreliable your AI of choice can be. On one hand it’s entertaining. On the other it’s concerning. If there was a third hand I think it would shake towards irony.
MSNBC ran a recent report highlighting inaccuracy scores when AI chatbots were asked political questions and came up with an average of 27% incorrect responses.
It seems to me that a 27% inaccuracy rate is probably within the ballpark of what we hear on any normal day from traditional news sources, social media, and folks sitting at the counter at the local diner. While there are certainly problems, it feels much like AI is doing what it’s designed to do: spit back the nonsense we feed it and it feeds on.
Frankly, I don’t think humans can design any piece of software that will outstrip our human capacity for ignorance that gobbles up the increasingly large amounts of garbage already available. As long as folks can make money from feeding us the fake alongside the real the churn will continue.
Addendum: After posting this I noticed this article in my feeds:
Google and Microsoft’s AI Chatbots Refuse To Say Who Won The 2020 US Election. I guess not answering is one way to avoid an inaccurate answer.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. You can also find me on most social media using my name.
The Alito Court may be about to repeat the mistakes of 2022.
History may be about to repeat itself. Hopefully it rhymes. Donald Trump is a convicted felon and he and his fluffers are doubling down on their attempts to manufacture a fantasy world that bears no resemblance to the one most people live in. Yet we’re still waiting a decision from the Supreme Court on whether or not U.S. presidents have immunity and thus are kings who can round up and possibly kill political rivals, deport anyone they desire, and generally turn the U.S into a autocracy staffed by criminals.
While that immunity case has no bearing on the New York case that added 34 convictions to the decaying orange turd’s résumé, it is all tied together because there’s this thing called an election in a few months wherein we’ll decide if America still exists as a democracy.
The Supreme Court hasn’t issued an opinion yet, which in and of itself is an opinion. In delaying action they’ve effectively sided with Trump, allowing any real chance of a trial to be pushed off until after the election. But unfortunately they have to make a decision before they can head off to their yachts for the summer.
What’s intriguing to me is I think the Alito Court is about to make the same political mistake they made in 2022 with their decision removing women’s rights to an abortion in Dobbs vs. Jackson. It was a victory for abortion foes, but energized the electorate enough to wash away any Red Wave in the 2022 elections and others that have followed since. My suspicion is if the Alito Court grants anything resembling immunity to Trump, we’ll see the same sort of rage-fueled energy at the polls in November. There’s enough of that energy already bubbling, but this might (should) blow the lid off the pot.
It’s June, SCOTUS is heading to the end of this term, and an announcement could come any day as the court traditionally rolls out decisions from the current term. The hen-pecked Alito is under fire for flying insurrectionist adjacent flags while blaming his wife, further degrading any sense of integrity the Supreme Court had remaining. I’m thinking (and hints suggest) the decision will be in Trump’s favor thus completely erasing what few bits of integrity still remain on the white board. If they do, it will hopefully ignite the electorate again to finally cancel this unreality show we’ve all been living through.
You can find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome.
Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3 