Some random "America turns 250" stuff

*  NPR explains that coffee was very important in America at the time of its independence.  I don't think I knew that before.  Sure, I think everyone knew it was big for the French revolution, but the American one, not so much:

"The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower" in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.

"The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it," McDonald says. "A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century."

The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier....

In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.

" 'No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I'le make you Coffee.' Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better," Adams wrote.

Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.

She studied advertisements from the 1760s and '70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, "coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is."

A big reason? It was cheaper. "Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers."

 *  Seems to me that Trump managed to make international interest in the celebration as low as it could conceivably go.   It was just too embarrassing to watch.

*  Speaking of Trump, the spectacular depth and heartlessness of his grifting makes it hard to believe that he still has the support of the people who lost savings on his useless Trump crypto:

Nearly 1 million people who bought President Trump’s memecoin have lost money through the end of June, according to a report by the cryptocurrency analytics firm Nansen. Their losses total $3.81 billion.

The analytics firm’s assessment was calculated this week after Mr. Trump signed an annual financial disclosure showing that he walked away with a $636 million payout on the same crypto bet, part of a haul of at least $2.2 billion from all of his business ventures in 2025.

The odds were always in his favor. Mr. Trump profited whether the price of his memecoin went up or down. He collected returns whenever anyone traded the tokens, as he repeatedly pushed his followers to do, using his Truth Social account to promote the coin.

Most crypto transactions are publicly visible, recorded on a digital ledger called the blockchain. That allows analysts to trace purchases of digital coins from individual crypto accounts, known as wallets. Nansen’s data shows that, as of the end of June, 988,905 buyers of the $TRUMP memecoin have lost money, representing roughly two out of every three buyers.

Cumulatively, these 988,905 wallets have lost a total of $3.81 billion, including buyers who have held on to their stash and recorded paper losses, according to Nansen. The coin was trading at $1.76 as of Friday, down 97 percent from its peak price of $75.35.

 I guess I could join in with those who don't have much sympathy with the people who were grifted - although is it wrong to not sympathise at least a little with dumb people losing their money due to cult like trust in such a morally ugly figure?  I'll leave that question up to a philosophy podcast!

I do have sympathy to any exasperated children who find their parent is now penniless due to the grift the kids are only now learning about, however. 

 Update:

Oh, they're still alive?

Gee, when you get into your 60's, it comes as a bit of a surprise that people who you used to hear on the radio in the 60's are still alive.    Yeah, I know, two Beatles are still with us, but because they've always been touring and making new stuff, their continued living status is no surprise.

But the one I do find surprising when I'm reminded he's still kicking around, because you don't hear of him all that often, is Tom Jones.   

And now, just looking around some papers, I see that Herb Alpert is still alive too!  Aged 91.  Spanish Flea still springs readily to mind.  I'm sure my parents had it on LP.

Speaking of ageing performers, I did see a video a few months ago about how Franki Valli, looking extremely decrepit and as if the victim of elder abuse, was still going on stage and lip synching to his old songs in a highly cringeworthy way.   (And he was still trying to tour as recently as May this year.😐)

Anyway, in other "must surely be on death's door" news, the fact that Mitch McConnell was rushed into hospital three weeks ago after being unconscious at home and his wife went to China three days later for a "long planned" trip is very, very odd.  (McConnell is still in hospital, but no one has seen proof of effective life.)

Asian movie time

I watched the Taiwanese movie A Foggy Tale on Netflix on the weekend, and can strongly recommend it.

It's so well made, from directing, acting and production design points of view.  Set in Taiwan in 1953, it has a real sense of place, and the story serves as a reminder that the country lived under harsh political conditions at the time.  From Wikipedia:

Two years after the 28 February incident, the KMT retreated from mainland China to Taiwan during the closing stages of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. Wanting to consolidate its rule on its remaining territories, the KMT imposed harsh political suppression measures, which included enacting martial law, executing suspected leftists or those they suspected to be sympathetic toward the communists.^[5] Others targeted included Taiwanese locals and indigenous peoples who participated in the 28 February incident, such as Uyongʉ Yata'uyungana, and those accused of dissidence for criticizing the government.^[6]

The KMT carried out persecutions against those who criticized or opposed the government, accusing them of attempting to subvert the regime, while dramatically expanding the scope of punishment throughout this period.^[7] It made use of the Taiwan Garrison Command (TGC), a secret police, as well as other intelligence units by enacting special criminal laws as tools for the government to purge dissidents.^[8] Basic human rights and the right to privacy were disregarded, with mass pervasive monitoring of the people, filings of sham criminal cases against anyone suspected of being a dissident, as well as labelling any individuals who did not conform to a pro-regime stance as being communist spies, often without merit.^[9] Others were labeled as Taiwanese separatists and prosecuted for treason.^[10] It is estimated that about 3,000 to 4,000 civilians were executed by the government during the White Terror.^[1] The government was also suspected of carrying out extrajudicial killings against exiles in other countries.^[a]

The story gets very emotional, but (fortunately) doesn't end on a depressing note.

I kept finding while watching that certain aspects of the direction and story reminded me of certain Spielberg films and techniques.  I wonder if any other viewer had the same feeling. 

I sense a connection...

Seems harsh

OK, there would be some TikTok content that probably deserves caning, but a young couple kissing in a car?

 A young couple in Indonesia’s conservative Aceh province have been publicly caned after a Sharia court convicted them of violating Islamic law by kissing during a TikTok livestream.

The court ordered the couple, a 22-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman, to be whipped with a rattan cane 21 times each for kissing without being married. At least 100 people witnessed the caning, carried out by a group of people wearing robes and hoods on a stage in Bustanussalatin City Park in Banda Aceh.

The couple were arrested in April after a livestream from 27 February, in which they kissed in a car in Banda Aceh, went viral and prompted reports to local sharia authorities. 

This and that (mainly from Youtube)

*   I was right - as this guy notes, The Count of Monte Cristo has, for some odd reason, had a resurgence of online approval and discussion in recent months.   Not entirely sure I should read it, all the same, given my better understanding of its nature from the video.

*   I now also understand more about The Odyssey, from this other guy's video.  I see Mary Beard has put out one about it, too.   She's hoping she can like Christopher Nolan's movie, but we shall see.  (I haven't watched the video fully yet, though.) 

*  This is possibly the most dramatic earthquake video I have ever seen.  Poor people.

*  Away from Youtube, the never ending uncertainty about how to deal with prostate cancer risk continues:

A growing number of prostate cancer experts argue that calling the lowest-risk prostate cancer "cancer" does more harm than good. A new UCLA-led study found removing the cancer label could dramatically reduce overtreatment and encourage more men to get screened, potentially leading to significantly fewer deaths from aggressive prostate cancer.

Using a model based on U.S. population data, the researchers estimated that relabeling Grade Group 1 (GG1) prostate cancer—the earliest and lowest-risk form of the disease—as a precancerous condition could reduce unnecessary treatment and prevent nearly 2,400 prostate cancer deaths annually. The researchers found this benefit would largely come from more men choosing PSA screening, as relabeling GG1 could reduce concerns about overdiagnosis and unnecessary treatment among patients and clinicians.

A large body of research has shown that a pure GG1 cannot cause symptoms or metastasize. Guidelines therefore recommend active surveillance (including PSA testing, MRI and periodic biopsies) rather than treatment for nearly all men diagnosed with GG1. Nevertheless, up to 40% of men in the United States with GG1 continue to get treatment....

Unlike aggressive prostate cancers that can spread throughout the body, GG1 prostate cancer, also known as Gleason 6 prostate cancer, typically grows slowly over years or decades, or not at all. These tumors do not cause symptoms or become life-threatening unless a higher-grade cancer develops in the prostate.

But the diagnosis itself can be difficult for patients to process.

Research has shown that men diagnosed with GG1 typically experience stress and anxiety, and many choose surgery or radiation even when active surveillance would be the most appropriate option. Those treatments can cause long-term complications, including urinary, bowel and sexual dysfunction. In addition, patients unnecessarily lose access to life insurance because of the cancer diagnosis.

The authors also note that calling these tumors "cancer" contributes to overtreatment because patients may assume the disease is more dangerous than it is. 

Meltdown watch

Instability in Britain

There has been a fair bit of commentary following Starmer's resignation about political instability in Britain.   None that I have seen on TV or Youtube has, however, raised the question of their first past the post electoral system, which I think is such an obvious point to consider.

I asked Claude.ai about this, and it found there are organisations in the UK that have been talking about the problem with the system, and they have been for years.  However, when I pressed it further, it still seems to me that there must be a lack of media commentary and concern over it, which I find puzzling.

 I will cut and paste a bit from its answers:

The headline-grabbing version: one piece I found, written in direct response to Keir Starmer's resignation, frames it as the latest in a string of upheavals, noting that with Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and now Starmer's departure, the UK will be on its seventh PM in ten years, and argues that while individual leaders matter, the deeper instability is structural — rooted in FPTP producing national outcomes that bear little relation to how people actually voted, with Labour's 34% vote share in 2024 translating into two-thirds of seats, and arguing that this kind of artificial majority doesn't produce real stability because stability requires genuine popular support. Electoral Reform Society 

The "system built for two parties, now serving five" argument: Electoral Reform Society/Unlock Democracy-aligned commentary argues FPTP is struggling to cope with contemporary politics because the combined Labour-Conservative vote share has been declining for decades and fell sharply at the May 2026 local elections, with five parties now polling within close range of each other nationally — a situation the system wasn't designed for, producing council results that bear little resemblance to how people actually voted. The argument is that for each additional party that becomes competitive, the gap between votes and seats widens dramatically faster under FPTP than under the more proportional systems used for the Scottish Parliament or Senedd. Unlock Democracy....

The clearest "influential, mainstream" figure: Sir John Curtice. He's Britain's most-cited polling and elections expert (Strathclyde professor, BBC election-night fixture), and his comments are about as close to a neutral, authoritative voice as exists on this. He's said the UK's two-party system is facing its biggest challenge yet, and that if that challenge persists "it would seem inevitable that there will be renewed debate about the merits of the first-past-the-post electoral system." More pointedly, commenting on the May 2026 local elections, he warned that if a party's vote share falls while becoming more geographically spread, the system "will murder you" — a structural diagnosis of FPTP itself, not a partisan point, made as the Conservative-Labour combined vote fell to roughly 30%, about half its historic norm, according to fellow academic Tim Bale. Electoral Reform SocietyMake Votes Matter  

It's like Americans decided it's cringe to celebrate the current state of America

I would like to read some happier news than that which supplies mere schadenfreude at Trump's and MAGA's expense, but the truly pathetic look of the Freedom 250 Fair in Washington is all that I've got, so beggars can't be choosers, as they say.

Academic waffle at its purest

I learned, while checking in on the Bluesky home of Professor Sandy O'Sullivan [the trans/non binary light skinned aboriginal who recently celebrated getting an Irish passport (as all Australian people indigenous do 😐) and "gender affirming surgery"  - which I would assume is breast removal - at the tender age of 60] that a university in Ireland is currently hosting the European Intersectional Humanities Summer School.  

While I (like all reasonable people) am appalled at the Right turning into an anti science conspiracy cult in the US, and rabidly anti-immigration populist in most of the West, and consider its ideological extremes are much more significant that those on the Left, in the interests of balance, it's still fair that from time to time I note the nutty vacuousness of Lefty academia in identity politics that produces nothing but hot air and well paid employment for people with nothing productive to do.   (I feel a bit guilty dissing O'Sullivan, who frequently appears emotionally fragile,  but have a look at a talk like this one on video that she has given, and I just have to question the funding of this corner of academia.)     

Anyway, lets read about the summer school and be amazed at the way words can be combined to say nothing of significance:    

The European Intersectional Humanities Summer School 2026 will be held in Maynooth University Arts & Humanities Institute from Monday, 22 June to Friday, 03 July. It will offer an innovative and transformative experience at the intersection of critical theory, social justice and humanities scholarship. Convened by Professor Anna Hickey-Moody, the Summer School will bring together scholars, activists and students for an immersive exploration of how intersectionality shapes and is shaped by the human experience across various fields of inquiry. Teaching alongside Professor Hickey-Moody will be A/Prof Loïc Bourdeau. As Associate Dean for Research & Engagement at Maynooth University (MU), Loïc brings extensive interdisciplinary expertise in creative methods, gender and sexuality research, languages, and the medical humanities. 

“Remixing”offers a methodological and conceptual framework for our interdisciplinary summer school grounded in the intersectional humanities. It foregrounds creativity, criticality, and relationality: remixing as praxis invites participants to work across historical periods, disciplinary boundaries, and cultural traditions, to produce new ways of thinking, making and imagining futures. In its most expansive form, remixing is not merely a technical process: the rearrangement or recombination of source materials, but a political and philosophical gesture. It challenges inherited hierarchies of knowledge, interrogates the power structures that have shaped archives, disciplines, and canons, and opens up space for voices, methodologies, and epistemologies that have been marginalised or excluded in colonial and postcolonial contexts.
 
Approaching the humanities through remixing allows participants to revisit history, philosophy, media, music, literature, languages and cultures not as fixed or closed narratives, disciplines or practices but as dynamic sets of traces and counter-narratives that can be recomposed to reveal suppressed perspectives, alternative genealogies, original grooves. Remixing in music and media provides a lens through which to understand circulation, appropriation, hybridity, and resistance: the ways cultural forms travel, transform, and accumulate political charge. In philosophy, remixing can mean bringing together disparate traditions, from Indigenous, African, or Asian philosophical lineages to continental and analytic thought, to unsettle universalist claims and expose the colonial assumptions embedded in dominant frameworks. In English, languages, and literature, remixing offers opportunities to reimagine texts through translation, adaptation, multilingual experimentation, and decolonial reading practices that foreground intersectional identities and experiences.

As a theme and method for our summer school, remixing encourages participants to work collaboratively and experimentally, drawing connections between past and present, theory and practice, the embodied and the textual. It emphasises process over perfection, dialogue over monologue, and creative inquiry over disciplinary closure. Crucially, it makes space for the emergence of intersectional futures, asking how collaborative remixing might contribute to repairing epistemic harm, redistributing authority, and generating new forms of storytelling, pedagogy, and cultural production. The summer school becomes a site where critical humanities scholarship meets artistic practice, where remixing is an opportunity not simply to reassemble what already exists, but to imagine otherwise. 

Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in collaborative learning environments, where they can critically interrogate dominant narratives and reimagine new possibilities for a more inclusive and equitable future. Through lectures, discussions of texts, and hands-on workshops, participants are invited to engage in deep reflection on the practical applications of intersectional thinking to fields like literature, history, media and cultural studies. The Intersectional Humanities Summer School at Maynooth University marks a significant step forward in creating spaces where the humanities can more meaningfully intersect with global struggles for justice, equity, and representation. 

With a focus on fostering inclusive, interdisciplinary dialogue, this immersive event features an exceptional lineup of distinguished guest appearances. These expert voices contribute to the rich landscape of discussions and practice-based workshops that address key themes of race, gender, identity, coloniality and the socio-political dynamics influencing the humanities today....

I wonder if "re-mixing", which is given the seal of approval by intersectionality academics, extends to allowing authors of any racial or ethnic mix write fiction or make music or art in a form originally generated by other races or ethnicities?  Because some writers a few years ago were being booed at writer's festivals for saying it was indeed OK.       

Anyway, I suppose it keeps some people off the streets.  But I would be much happier if their jobs were paid for by private funding, not public. 

A takedown of Tulsi's "look at me" swansong about Fauci

Read about it here.

The Right just lives in the alternative reality world of conspiracy - and no matter how many times they fail to prove anything in court, they continue believing them. 

An excellent discussion of the second Trump term

This half hour interview with Jon Stewart is really, really good.  And what a worrying picture it paints...

 

Some ancient Chinese argument

A few years ago, I noted here that the philosophy of Zhuangzi seemed worth a look (and I hadn't hear of him before.)

I have tried reading some of him since then, but to me, he came across as a smartass teenager arguing more to get attention than to paint a well considered position, so I didn't stick with it for long.

This essay, however, talking about his position of being against the Confucian view of meritocracy, is pretty interesting.   I'm not sure that it convinces me that Zhuangzi is worth following - but it is worth reading.  Take this part, for example:

Through such theatrics Zhuangzi developed a systematic critique of Confucianism’s moral justification of inequality, and the most essential part of that critique is his insistence that moral striving alienates us from life. For Zhuangzi, the drive to become xian invites a person to live for an abstraction, whether it be for reputation, moral purity or a sagely ideal of pursuing ‘the good’. This leads one to treat their own life as raw material for that abstract identity. One’s material body becomes an instrument for something immaterial.

In the Robber’s monologue, he lists celebrated Confucian exemplars: Bo Yi and Shu Qi, who starved themselves rather than serve an unjust ruler; Bi Gan, who remonstrated with King Zhou so forcefully that his heart was cut out; Wu Zixu, whose loyalty to his state, warning his King of a threat, ended with his corpse thrown into a river. These people are praised in Confucianism as exemplars of virtue, yet Zhuangzi treats them as tragic figures ‘trapped in the net of reputation and names’, who met their grisly ends precisely because of their inflexible pursuit of virtue.

What makes these figures disturbing is that they were consumed by their convictions. A system that ranks people by virtue necessarily creates incentives for self-exploitation. Once virtue becomes something that can be measured, ranked and exchanged for authority, it turns human life into a resource to be spent. In other words, Confucian xian turns cultivation into moral capital, and moral capital demands extraction from the self. Indeed, one can see this kind of self-extraction in our modern neoliberal ‘hustle culture’ even more clearly, where it is trendy to ‘rise and grind’ and forego basic necessities. 

An irritating man

The appeal of Karl Stefanovic as a lightweight TV host always evaded me.  And freed of network restraints, he's now podcasting his way to Right wing ignomy...

A progressive religion success story?

This article in The Guardian was interesting:

 ‘I’ve finally found God without all the extras’: behind the surge in people converting to Progressive Judaism

It's talking about conversions in England, and while it's not like it's a huge number, it is a tad unusual that they are happening at all at a time Israel politically has gone more Right wing:

Arif-Fear is part of a “surge” in the number of people converting to Progressive Judaism, a movement that represents about a third of British Jews. Figures shared with the Guardian show adult conversions rose from 78 in 2020 to 183 in 2025.

“There has been a lot of antisemitism and anti-Jewish feeling in the last three or four years. So you would have thought this is the last time that people would want to identify with the Jewish community, and yet, we’ve had a surge,” says Rabbi Jonathan Romain, convener of the Reform Beit Din, the rabbinic court for Progressive Judaism, and former rabbi of Maidenhead synagogue.

Romain says that, until recently, most converts did so for “romantic reasons”: they had Jewish partners and wanted to unify family life. But he believes the recent rise has been driven by three additional factors: the Covid-19 pandemic, the expansion of religious education in schools and DNA tests. ...

     

For Arif-Fear, what drew her towards Judaism was its progressive elements, and a culture in which questioning and debate were encouraged. “What really inspired me was the diversity and the pluralism in it,” she says. “I learned that you could be atheist and Jewish, and then they had Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Liberal, and that was really intriguing and inspiring for me.”

She adds: “So that inclusivity, that kind of dialogue, that questioning. It was just a really welcoming space. It’s LGBT-friendly, there are female rabbis, all of that. And people that were really proud of their faith but also felt very British at the same time.”