It had rained. As the September day evened into night the surface of the cobblestones glistened with the remnant sunlight. I had been working in hotel rooms and bomb shelters and was glad for the downhill walk, but glad also that it was short: curfew brings a second nightfall, manmade by the proximate authorities who want to keep you alive, and by the distant ones who want you dead.

I rang the bell at the unmarked door, and creaking floorboards invited me into a home. My hostess's work is to explain war, and I had met her once before; and I have seen her since that evening, on an island in the Baltic Sea. There she was wearing a necklace with hammerlets of Thor, as people did in eastern Europe a thousand years ago: "it makes me feel stronger."

Ours is not a hospitality culture, and I feel awkwardly in debt to friends who have made me feel at home in other countries, who exemplify internalized generosity regardless of the external situation. During this war, when Ukrainian friends have come to visit, they invariably bring a gift for my children: something they took trouble with, carried with them on the long overnight train ride to Poland (no flights in Ukraine, remember), and then on whatever other journeys brought them into my house.

. . .

Once upon a time, many internet years ago, a woman named Megan Fox (not that Megan Fox) took a video of her trip to Chicago’s Field Museum, whereupon she whined about the fact that the museum acknowledged the reality of evolution, instead of coddling her belief in creationism. Tragically, the full video appears to have been lost to time, but there are still a few clips available, for those of you who never got to witness its majesty.


She writes for PJMedia these days, by the way. Tragically, I missed her article last year about how Trump was making dating great again for MAGA women — after some liberal women said they would give up sex or divorce their husbands after he won, in the model of the 4B movement in Korea — because now they wouldn’t have to compete with liberal women with “high body counts and low morals” for men. It’s a fun one!

Following in her footsteps now is one Bethany Mandel, whom you may remember from the time she wrote an entire book about “woke” and then found herself unable to define the term “woke.”

Or from the time she ran for Montgomery County, Maryland, school board despite homeschooling her kids, and lost.

This week, Mandel published an editorial on Fox asking “Why are major museums pushing climate change instead of celebrating the spirit of America?” and describing her horror when she went to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History only to discover that instead of celebrating America, they kept going on about science.

The easy answer to this is “Because it’s a science museum, you strange little woman,” but Mandel was not looking for easy answers.

One exhibit states, “Since the last ice age, Earth’s climate has warmed. But now that warming is getting faster because of us.”

The message is clear: “Hope you liked the dinosaur bones, kids — because we might be next.”

Well … yes?

I understand that people like Mandel (and Fox before her) like to have their weird beliefs coddled and would love to go to a science museum that doesn’t even mention climate change. Or that tells them “Sure! We’re having crazy weather these days, like those floods in Texas that just killed a whole bunch of people, but that’s only because Democrats are manipulating the weather with chemtrails because they want you to feel bad about your SUV!” or, you know “Sure! We’re having crazy weather these days, like those floods in Texas that just killed a whole bunch of people, but that’s because God is mad about gay people and feminists!” depending on what flavor of right-wing lunacy one subscribes to.

. . .

You’re going to be shocked here, but it turns out a laminated card from Hobby Lobby with Donald Trump’s face on it, which one of Trump’s room mother volunteers made to amuse him — probably Karoline — is not actually a valid $5 million citizenship agreement with the United States for high rollers.

The Washington Post reports this week that despite how Donald Trump loves to pull it out and and show it to people, his idea for a $5 million golden visa is probably never gonna fuckin’ happen. Sad news for Trump, but it turns out that — we hope you’re sitting down for this one — no real rich people were actually that interested in it anyway.

In other words, the world’s real rich people are ignoring Donald Trump, the trashiest semi-rich guy who ever lived, because they do not actually want the gauche thing he’s selling.

Must feel like the 1980s in New York for him.

Trump announced these tacky golden cards back in February, and because the toddler-in-chief is nothing if not literal, he did it by waving an actual card around with his face on it, as if he imagined those who wish to bribe him for citizenship in his gold-plated new America would present that card in order to be admitted to Ellis Island or something. Trump swore then that it would be available “in about less than two weeks,” because “in about less than two weeks” is his standard answer when making promises that will never ever fucking come true.

. . .

History rarely announces itself. It creeps in quietly, cloaked in the language of “law and order,” “national security,” and “patriotism.” But every now and then, it screams.

Last week, it screamed.

Donald Trump, now seated once again behind the Resolute Desk, and his Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, have openly threatened CNN with criminal prosecution for reporting on the existence and use of an app — ICEBlock — that alerts undocumented immigrants about nearby Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations.

This app, which is publicly available, and the reporting around it — likewise rooted in public records — is suddenly being framed as a “national security threat.”

Let’s be crystal clear about what’s happening: the President of the United States and his administration are threatening to jail journalists for doing their jobs.

This isn’t just an authoritarian flirtation. It’s a shot across the bow of American democracy. And it should chill every citizen who still believes in the sacred protections of the First Amendment and the role of a free press in our constitutional republic.

. . .

Luckily, Real Americans don’t have to deal with any of those issues so there’s no reason they would need to have a discussion about it at the kitchen table.

That image is from a New York Times interactive story about all the biomedical research cuts and what they’re going to affect. It’s not pretty.

I don’t know how we survive if these people are willing to sacrifice their lives and livelihoods for their Dear Leader (NYT link):

Wheat grows so prodigiously here on the Kansas high plains that in 1953 the surplus birthed one of the Cold War’s big ideas: Food for Peace, a federal government program that delivered the excess bounty to a hungry postwar world.

Conceived by a Kansas farmer and created by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Food for Peace has sent burlap sacks of grain stamped “From the American People” to more than four billion people in 150 countries around the world. Now it is effectively dead.

The program was administered by the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Elon Musk fed “into the wood chipper” on a weekend in February. Kansas’s Republican lawmakers tried to save it but failed to persuade President Trump, who last month proposed cutting the entire 2026 budget for Food for Peace as well as another food aid program dear to Kansans, the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition program.

[…]

It was the latest blow to farmers, particularly in Kansas, where about 80 percent of those on the high plains voted for Mr. Trump and agriculture makes up almost half of the state’s economy. The president’s whipsawing tariffs and cuts to agriculture grants and global food aid have left the state with swollen silos, shrinking markets and volatile prices for crops.

Last year Kansas sold half its annual wheat crop abroad, but those buyers have mostly dried up. At least one big grain broker is now trying to sell Kansas grain that once fed people overseas for use in dog food.

Paul Penner, a Kansas wheat farmer and former president of the National Association of Wheat Growers, is frustrated that there have not been more objections to the administration from wheat growers and the state’s largely Republican congressional delegation.

“We need people who are willing to speak up,” he said. “I think privately they say things, but publicly, no. And I’m not sure what their pain threshold is.”

I’m sure Trump will write them a check at some point. He loves to take credit for helping “his” farmers” when he destroys their livelihoods. And it could get them through the moment. But he’s already destroyed their long term markets by letting Elon take a chainsaw to USAID and alienating their global customers.

I don’t know how much pain they are prepared to take for their Dear Leader. I can’t understand why they’re willing to take any at this point. It’s not as if it’s World War Two and we all have to sacrifice. They’re taking these hits in order to punish non-white people and own the libs. Is it really worth it?

We like hurricane forecasting. Perhaps it is our upbringing in an area that got unpleasantly surprised by multiple hurricanes over the decades before weather satellites existed. Perhaps it is all the horrible news about possible missed warnings before the awful flooding in Texas this weekend. Perhaps it is that we are right this instant looking out our window at clouds from the edges of what was Tropical Storm Chantal as they prepare to drop an inch or two of rain on our heads and allow us to take “water the geraniums” off our weekly to-do list.

Or perhaps it is just our common fucking sense telling us that if humans can forecast these things with reliable methods and data, there is no good reason not to.

On this issue, however, the fascist chucklefucks in charge of America’s federal government apparently disagree. They have been angling to carry out Project 2025’s stated goal of eliminating the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and cutting the National Weather Service (NWS) to the bone because both organizations are part of the “climate change alarm industry.” Well, we certainly wouldn’t want any alarmism while people are drowning in more frequent and devastating floods, would we?

All of this is to say that it makes sense — in the way that anything does these days — that the US Department of Defense recently announced that it would stop sharing satellite weather data with hurricane forecasters right in the middle of hurricane season.

. . .

Trump and congressional Republicans took a big risk by including some seriously unpopular measures in the just-signed budget bill. Many of them, notably cuts in food assistance and health care, and the effects of health care cuts on small rural hospitals, will hit red states especially hard.

The press has been filled with stories about the jeopardy this poses for Republican legislators who face re-election in 2026. These alarmist stories presume a relatively free and fair election. Can we assume that will occur?

Progressives have comforted themselves by pointing out that most of the swing House seats are in blue or purple states where Trumpers are not in control of the election machinery. But lately, the Trump Justice Department has begun an effort to intimidate state election officials nationwide.

The New York Times recently reported that senior DOJ officials, presumably in concert with the White House, have directed department lawyers “to examine the ways in which a hypothetical failure by state or local officials to follow security standards for electronic voting could be charged as a crime, appearing to assume a kind of criminally negligent mismanagement of election systems.”

. . .

A recent New York Times news story immediately drew fire from readers – and for very good reason.

Headlined “Mamdani Identified as Asian and African American on College Application,” the article centered on Zohran Mamdani, the candidate for New York City mayor who drew national attention recently with his stunning win in the Democratic primary election.

Its gist was that as a high school senior in New York City, Mamdani – who was born in Uganda and is of Indian descent – checked a couple of different boxes about race when applying for admission to Columbia University.

So what, you might ask. Why is this even a story, you might also ask.

. . .

The incident raises a larger issue: the Times’s apparent opposition to Mamdani’s candidacy.

On the opinion side of the paper, there’s little question about that. Even though the Times no longer makes endorsements for mayor, they published an editorial urging voters to avoid ranking Mamdani at all on their ballots because he was so unqualified. (New York City uses ranked-choice voting, which allows voters to list several candidates in order of preference.)

Remarkably, the Times stopped short of giving the same “don’t rank him” advice about disgraced governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned his office in 2021 and then ran for mayor against Mamdani in the primary.

The opinion side of the Times is entitled to its opinion, however misguided. But straight news articles, by contrast, aren’t supposed to go to bat for or against candidates. They’re supposed to be neutral and non-partisan, not cheering on one candidate or kneecapping another.

In practice, of course, that’s often not the case.

With this made-up scandal, combined with the pre-election editorial, the Times looks like it’s on a crusade against Mamdani.

And no lofty explanation about the mission can disguise it.

Audrey Southard-Rumsey pushed a flagpole into a police officer’s chest. Ralph Celentano shoved an officer over a ledge. Pauline Bauer accused Democrats of stealing an election and trafficking children and demanded: “Bring Nancy Pelosi out here now. We want to hang that fucking bitch.”

These are just three of the stories told on the Wall of Shame, a public installation by artist Phil Buehler that launched on 4 July in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York. The giant red, white and blue mural aims to document and highlight the stories and alleged crimes of more than 1,575 people involved in the January 6 2021 attack on the US Capitol who were pardoned by Donald Trump.

The project is the third in what might be called Buehler’s art against autocracy trilogy, a series of collaborations with the non-profit Radio Free Brooklyn. It began in 2020 with the Wall of Lies, a 50ft mural displaying more than 20,000 lies told by Trump during his first term in office. The second installation, the Wall of Liars and Deniers, was a mural displaying the 381 Republican politicians running in the 2022 midterm elections who denied Democrat Joe Biden’s legitimacy as president.

“Artists can have more power than Fox News to turn this around,” Buehler says in a Zoom interview from his Brooklyn studio, reflecting on the struggle for truth in the Trump era. “Boy, would Magaland hate it if culture, music and art [pushed back]. You’ve got to double down the other way and start flooding this zone with art as Trump tries to erase it.”

The Wall of Shame is a 50ft-long, 10ft-tall outdoor mural featuring the pardoned Trump supporters, colour-coded to distinguish their actions: violent rioters appear in red, those who damaged property are shown in blue, and the remaining individuals are depicted in white. The combined effect resembles a Star and Stripes that has imploded.

. . .