I mentioned in April that I stumbled across an advertisement for Postmodern Jukebox doing an Australian tour, and I bought tickets. The concert was last night.
It was pretty great - talented musicians and singers doing the PMJ cabaret thing of new songs done in various styles and re-workings - with a frentic tap dancer thrown in or light entertainment! (She appeared on a couple of recent Youtube videos on its channel.)
The audience was strongly tilted to older ages - over 50's - and it did amuse me a bit to hear an older audience be as enthusiastic as they were. I guess it's the general retro vibe of PMJ that attracts, and the performers do tend to be, mostly, in the over 30 range? But there were some younger people in the audience as well, including my daughter, who enjoyed it as much as her parents did.
The sound mix was very shaky on the first song (vocals completely overwhelmed by the band), but it got better as the songs went on, and was not a problem overall.
I also got to try out a new phone camera (I will talk about that in a separate post), and yeah, when you compare it to concert photos I took many years on much crappier phones, you can see how much technology has improved. (Although this is first upper mid range/lower top range phone I have bought, ever.)
I watch fewer Youtube travel vlog couple videos than previously. I got sick of Kara and Nate long ago for being too enthusiastic about everything, coming across as pretty privileged rich kids, and doing stupid physical challenges in which I have zero interest; I watched Eric and Allison (of Endless Adventures) for longer, but their recent stuff has become less interesting, even though they are a more down to Earth couple, if sometimes looking a little, um, sleazy?; Flora and Note I quite like for their cheerfulness and Asia centric stuff, despite his excessive tattoos, but I don't need to watch everything they put out.
I do watch some of One Pack Wanderers, who are currently driving around Australia again. They seem to me to be really great with the video quality, but (and this is half the point of this post), oh my God, I reckon at least half of their viewership must be males (like me) who melt at watching Tia smiling and looking happy. (Still photos don't do her justice, you have to watch her on video.) She is pure, intensified, charisma on legs - she should try her luck at acting as I'm pretty sure no one can resist liking her all round demeanour.
But, especially with the younger couples who do this (from the ones I have mentioned - Flora and Nate, and Tia and her guy with the name I can never remember), I do get the feeling after a while that they need to stop having fun and get down to the business of procreation. Especially Tia!
Sure, travelling while young is fun and can be entertaining for us as well, but I don't want them to miss out on the fun of having kids, as well as my self interest in ensuring there are future aged care workers to look after me and my cohort in 20 years time!
I'm joking about the latter - kind of, as I really don't expect aged care centres to be well managed by Chinese robots - but this is the simple regret I always feel at the news of decreasing birthrates everywhere (and especially amongst the young.) Sure, stupid older people (unfortunately, back to my cohort) have ensured that climate change is going to cause continuing nightmares around the world for the next few centuries, but the entire globe isn't going to become uninhabitable. With any luck. And there's a lot of empty space in Tasmania still!
But having children is still fun and natural - it's a great experience (although never without risk of tragedy or disappointment, of course.) And I don't really understand why people wouldn't assume this is true if they like having dogs and cats for company. Kids are like a more advanced version of them. :)
Am I the only person who keeps wanting to tell they young folk on Youtube to stop having that kind of fun, and have a (kind of more important) type of fun?
Queensland's prison population is booming, according to a new report that also warns almost half of inmates are returning to custody within two years of their release.
The state's auditor-general has found Queensland Corrective Services (QCS) is not effectively planning or facilitating the rehabilitation and reintegration of its prisoners.
In its latest report, the audit office noted there were 11,278 inmates as of June last year, which was a 54 per cent increase from a decade earlier.
The recidivism rate is particularly bad amongst indigenous prisoners:
...the audit office also highlighted First Nations prisoners in Queensland were returning to custody at a greater rate than non-First Nations prisoners.
"In 2024−25, 55 per cent of First Nations people returned to custody in Queensland within two years compared to 36 per cent of non-First Nations people," it said.
"Only Northern Territory and New South Wales reported higher rates in the same period." ...
The auditor-general made five recommendations, including that the QCS strengthen its planning approach to prisoner rehabilitation and reintegration.
It also called for QCS to begin planning and support of the reintegration of a prisoner from the time they started their time in custody.
An enormous problem that is often talked about in the context of youth offending in particular is the number of people in custody with reduced mental functioning due to having suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. Let Claude give us some figures:
Banksia Hill Detention Centre (WA) study — the landmark Australian study, published in BMJ Open 2018:
36% of young people in detention were diagnosed with FASD, one of the highest recorded rates globally, and 89% of youth detainees had at least one form of severe neurodevelopmental impairment, increasing their risk of justice involvement
Of those diagnosed with FASD, 74% were Indigenous
Northern Territory — from the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the NT:
In 2016, a multidisciplinary assessment of 16 children who had been in detention in the NT found 56% met diagnostic criteria for FASD
Context on overrepresentation: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders comprise 49% of young people in detention but only 5.8% of the Australian population aged 10–17
Policy commentary — a 2011 parliamentary inquiry made the connection explicit: "It would appear that a significant number of Indigenous people who end up in detention centres and prisons are there partly as a result of the failure of governments to identify FASD as an issue underpinning their offending behaviour. As a result, punitive rather than remedial responses have prevailed"
Community prevalence baseline — outside detention, in the Fitzroy Valley (WA), a 2010 survey of 7 to 8 year old children showed 19% had FASD, among the highest rates observed worldwide, giving some sense of the underlying prevalence in the source communities.
General population comparison — the recent national estimate puts general population FASD prevalence at 3.64%, so the youth justice figures represent roughly 10x that rate.
One caveat worth flagging for any submission or advice: these are largely single-site studies (Banksia Hill, small NT samples) rather than a national justice-system census, so they're best cited as strong indicative evidence of gross overrepresentation rather than a precise national statistic. If you want, I can pull the BMJ Open Banksia Hill paper itself (Bower et al. 2018) or look into whether Queensland has any equivalent detention-based FASD prevalence data specifically, since the studies above are mostly WA/NT.
What a difficult problem to solve.
A long term start would be to heavily concentrate on trying to reduce FASD.
As to the type of post incarceration support system that can work well amongst indigenous in particular, though...that's a tough one.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.”
Fox News reported that Trump had gone further in an interview, saying he had told Iranian officials if they closed the strait, “you won’t have a country”.
“You
won’t even make it back to your f---ing country ... we’ll take over the
rest of the country,” he said, according to Fox News. “We may take over
the strait, if we have to. I’ll blow the shit out of them.”
But, of course, a host of greedy, morally bankrupt MAGA/Right wing broadcasters will spin this as reasonable intervention in a negotiation process.
The only thing of interest from it was Douthat acknowledging that he was the one talking to Vance in a pub when a wine glass popped off a shelf (in poltergeist-like fashion) and smashed to the floor while they were talking Catholicism.
But as for the rest of the content, Douthat pushed back on Vance with all the strength of a wet tissue when talking about the (obvious) immorality of the Trump administration. As someone in comments said:
What a softball, creampuff, servile interview.
Several times, Douthat led the conversation to points where he could have easily, quite naturally, have asked Vance tough (or even mildly awkward) questions. Every single time, he led the conversation back to safe, anodyne, uncontroversial, near-irrelevant territory. You'd hardly know they were talking about a war, its appalling cost and unintended consequences, at all.
Gee, you'd think they (or their assistants) agreed beforehand what was and wasn't politically "proper" to talk about. This is far from the first time Douthat has struck me as a diligent stenographer and publicist for MAGA Republicans. He is quite obvious in his rhetorical intentions here.
When the Qatari luxury aircraft was gifted to Trump (and which, I suspect, they probably now treat as a failed bribe, given that they didn't exactly relish being drawn into the Iran war), estimates varied a lot as to how long it would take to retrofit to "Air Force One" standards, given the amount of additional security and command post stuff that had to be crammed into it. But it seemed clear it would take a long time:
Three aviation experts told NBC News the conversion would cost over $1 billion and take years to complete, and one analyst, Richard Aboulafia, suggested it would take even longer and cost more. CNN-cited experts separately said the security and communications requirements made it unlikely the work could be finished quickly without compromising capability.
Now it has been delivered, but has to undergo commissioning flights. So, it's taken less than a year. I'm no aviation expert, but I'm deeply suspicious that it the work has as thorough as it should be.
The aircraft from Qatar will "serve as a bridge until the [long-term] VC-25B is delivered," according to earlier communications from the Air Force.
The plane was delivered well before expectations. The Air Force
originally estimated the plane would be delivered in 2028 but said by
modifying requirements it could deliver the first aircraft in 2027. The
modifications "were carefully crafted to prioritize mission over
aesthetics, leaving much of the previous head of state interior layout
minimally changed," the Air Force said.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Ken Wilsbach praised the delivery.
"Many
thought it could not be done, but the United States Air Force was able
to execute and provide a secure, reliable airborne command post on an
accelerated timeline," he said.
Given the recent experience of Trumpian ordered refurbishment works done in an artificial hurry (see the reflecting pool), I strongly suspect it will later be revealed that this aircraft does not have all the features an Air Force One ideally should.
I wonder if some whistleblower will eventually confirm my suspicions....
A major flu outbreak has sickened
nearly 160 troops at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas less than two
months after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that U.S. troops
would no longer be required to be vaccinated for the flu, defense
officials said.
The outbreak at the
base in San Antonio raced through an Air Force Basic Military Training
wing, where new recruits sleep on bunk beds in open bays and share meals
at large communal tables....
In the weeks since Mr. Hegseth’s vaccine policy took effect on April 21,
only about 40 percent of Air Force trainees have opted to take the
vaccine, which had long been mandatory, an Air Force official said.
In
the aftermath of the outbreak, the Air Force issued an exception to the
voluntary vaccine policy, requiring that all recruits at Lackland get
flu shots — part of a broader effort to stem the virus’s spread.
Mr. Hegseth cast his decision to make the flu vaccine optional as a matter of religious freedom and medical autonomy.
“Under the disastrous Biden administration, this Pentagon waged an unrelenting war on our warriors on many fronts, including when it came to denying them simple medical autonomy and the freedom to express their religious convictions,” he said in a video announcing his decision in April.
He described the longstanding flu vaccine requirement as an “absurd, overreaching” mandate that had served to “weaken our warfighting capabilities.”
I'm very curious as to what has happened to the average of political viewpoints in the military under Trump. We would have to start on the assumption that the average member has long leaned Right/conservative, but I would also assume the average recruit under Trump is far more to the Right than historical averages.
BUT: I can't imagine that the Iran war has engendered much happiness amongst those who have been deployed around the region, doing nothing much to no obvious good end. Surely their Trump allegiance would be being tested...
* In another New York Times article, Hegseth's politicisation is further covered:
So far this year, Mr. Hegseth has blocked the promotions of at least 40 senior officers to general and admiral ranks. About half of those are women or members of minority groups.
The Common Good Economy: A New CompassMariana Mazzucato Allen Lane (2026)
The
500 richest individuals on the planet added a record US$2.2 trillion to
their fortunes in 2025 alone, while more than two billion people
experienced moderate or severe food insecurity. The charity Oxfam
International, based in Nairobi, estimates that the super-rich
in high-income countries extract around $30 million per hour from low-
and middle-income nations, where roughly 85% of people in the world
live.
As ever more people struggle to keep a roof over their
heads, public money is increasingly being absorbed by military spending,
which reached a staggering $2.7 trillion in 2024. Government-sponsored
investments into ‘high-tech solutions’ are concentrated in this industry
of death, further fuelling ecological devastation through mineral
extraction and fossil-fuel use.
These figures offer only a glimpse into the profound irrationality of
a society in which the production of goods and services — even those
most essential to life — is subordinated to an abstract and violent
logic of capitalist profit.
Building on her earlier influential
ideas on technological change and the role of the state in innovation,
economist Mariana Mazzucato argues that today’s environmental and social
crises stem from an economy that is organized around extraction and
shielded from meaningful democratic accountability. The Common Good Economy presents a road map for the urgent transformation that our societies must undertake.
The book challenges the dominant narratives of power and value that
many of us have internalized through the framework of neoclassical
economics. Rather than treating capitalist markets as natural
developments that allow for freedom and collective opportunity,
Mazzucato draws on the work of economic historian Karl Polanyi to
emphasize how markets are politically constructed and deeply embedded,
often in ways that undermine the common good.
She shows, for
instance, how the prioritization of short-term financial returns and
shareholder value has driven corporations to spend trillions buying back
their own shares instead of investing productively. She also highlights
how the housing crisis, even in wealthy countries such as the United
Kingdom, has been intensified by governments increasingly subsidizing
private landlords rather than funding social housing.
Although neoclassical economics reduces climate change and social
injustice to ‘externalities’ — indirect inconveniences unrelated to the
broader system — Mazzucato argues that today’s challenges require
centring our collective actions around the common good. In her words, it
means “getting economic relationships and structures right from the
start, instead of correcting and picking up the pieces afterwards”.
Would make Sinclair Davidson and old Judith Sloan grind their teeth, I'm sure.
Deaths of 3 rugby players in Malaysia expose brutal side of heatwave
The incidents have raised questions about whether more precautions need to be taken in countries like Malaysia where the weather is harsh
* Further to the "man, we need a better class of billionaire" category, Gina Rinehart made a splash by giving her new bestie Pauline Hanson a toy bulldozer and tried to get the audience to play along, and ended up very cringe (even to Hanson, I suspect.)
Of course she would want to gift land to Elon Musk. He can't afford to buy any:
The mining magnate, who made a “significant investment” in Musk’s SpaceX company earlier this week reportedly worth $1.4bn, said the trillionaire could be given free land at “sparsely or non-populated islands” near Townsville for SpaceX satellite construction and launches.
And of course she would want to invite Israeli arms manufacturing to Australia, because, you know, that government is so internationally popular with its use of arms at the moment:
Rinehart, who spoke after being introduced by Pauline Hanson, also said the land could be provided to skilled Israelis and their families to build “advanced war drones, and or other advances in defence, and or improve upon their Israeli style domes, and manufacture them here to sell to our country to help make our people and critical infrastructure safe”.
I wouldn't be completely surprised if she embraced again using nuclear bombs to help her mining efforts.
* I've said for years that combining solar farms with actually farming beneath the panels seemed a sensible approach, especially in hot countries like Australia. The Chinese are showing how it can be done with fish farming beneath. (Sure, it doesn't look all that attractive from above, but flat salt pans are exactly an appealing landscape either.)
is not exactly new, but it's well written and accurate:
Hitler dreamed of a 1,000-year Reich; Putin is said to have baroque dreams of territorial conquest meant to restore a dubiously historical empire he calls “Greater Russia”. Sure, there are people around Donald Trump who imagine using his rise to power to establish some sort of grand, civilizational project: there are the white nationalists who dream of a country purged of those they deem racially impure; there are the Christian nationalists who imagine a future theocracy in which women wear long braids and skirts, and don’t vote; there are the techno-reactionaries who imagine a future of interplanetary colonies, techno-assisted eugenics, and polygamous harems.
But Trump himself is conspicuously small in his dreams: his are comparatively little ambitions, not extending far beyond the reach of his ego and his senses.
He wants praise. He wants to see his name and his portrait everywhere. He wants to feel like a big man, to see those he feels have wronged him be penitent and upset. Maybe most of all, he wants to indulge in his own bad taste, repeatedly visiting the lowbrow staples of the 1980s, when he was young and at the height of his tabloid fame.
He loves the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. He loves the music of Bon Jovi and the Village People. And he loves the gaudy, clownish tokens of masculinity that appeal to very small children: big trucks, big muscles, and demonstrations of physical strength.
And so it felt fitting that on Trump’s 80th birthday, at an event nominally meant to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding but really functioning as a celebration for a very special boy, the White House hosted a cage fight for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The UFC is a competitive league for mixed martial arts – a vaguely sports-like endeavor that combines elements of kickboxing, wrestling, and traditional boxing, and seems designed to satiate a television audience’s appetite for maximum violence.
The event, planned for months, required a diversion of Secret Service resources, use of military musicians, and the construction of a large octagonal cage and audience arena on the White House’s south lawn, all at untold taxpayer expense and in likely violation of numerous ethics rules. On Saturday, the night before the event, the combatants posed shirtless, nose to nose, at the ceremonial weigh-in – a press event that seems primarily designed to pique the interest of online gambling markets – in front of the Lincoln Memorial.
Let's skip a little, and note her paragraphs on UFC itself:
Mixed martial arts is a frantic and unbeautiful spectacle, with none of the redeeming grace of boxing and little in the way of required strategies. The primary assets required seem to be physical size and a willingness to hurt someone....
The object seems to be to inflict repeated head injuries, which might help explain why so many of the fighters issued effusive praise for Trump. After his fight, one victor, a redhead with pronounced cauliflower ear named Bo Nickal, thanked the president first and God second.
Yeah well - I don't even see "the redeeming grace of boxing", to be honest - but I agree with her about UFC, which if I ruled the world would be banned.
OK, two final paragraphs sum it up:
That the event was the UFC – cynically primitive, a celebration of violence and brute strength – similarly reaffirms his values. The US is him now, the event seems to say.
Trump wages war at will without Congress. That is already plenty imperial. Now he presides over spectacles of violence carried out for his entertainment, like some dysfunctional Roman despot eating grapes at the Colosseum. Soon, he’ll be appointing his favorite horse to the cabinet.
OK, I have to admit, even though I said X was dominated by reactions against Disclosure Day, I have to admit it is allowing a genuine debate about the movie, and it's making it near impossible for me to stop thinking about it.
I don't think enough people are making the point that it's pretty great that there is a movie engendering a lot of debate about its message and interpretation. I know I have said this about certain movies before - that I really enjoy arguing/debating about them almost as much as viewing them.
I tend to think that it is a sign of good art - although the cynical view could be that it can also be the result of muddled messaging, and simply failing to make the intent clear. Even that can be debated as part of the process!
There are some more specific things I want to say about the movie, but still feel its a bit early to do so...
C'mon! If ever there was an easy way for God to prove his providence, it would have been for a summer storm to hit the UFC metal stadium in front of the White House with lightning at least once. A strike setting Trump's hair alight, or a tornado blowing it all away, would have reversed decades of church attendance decline.
* Man, this movie seems to have attracted a huge amount of commentary on social media - and I find it hard working out the numbers between those who enjoyed it and those who hated it.
* I predicted that those approaching from an American culture war Right point of view would find reasons to hate it - and I was very correct about that. X is dominated by hatred/dismissal of it - so much so that I suspect Musk might have even tweaked the algorithm to highlight it. But to be fair, there are some reviewers who I would presume are politically neutral or lean Left in their tastes who dislike it as well.
* Wait a minute, I guess I can check audience review numbers online. I see that on Rottentomatoes the critic reviews are running at 80% positive, and audience at 73% positive. Metacritic is running at 74% positive and audience at 5.2 (which seems low - but the break up is 33% negative and 38% positive and 29% mixed.) Not bad.
* I saw it last night with my daughter, and we both enjoyed it in somewhat trying circumstances (just about the most restless, toilet attending audience I can recall ever being in. Has streaming caused people to think everything about watching a movie at a cinema is just like watching a movie at home, so they not only text on their phone without compunction, but don't plan so they can avoid going to the toilet for two hours?)
I have some observations:
* Most of the criticism, in my view, comes from people thinking it would be a different kind of movie, and not judging it for what it is. People shouldn't take kids to it, not because it is violent or anything - it's just that it's a movie of mature themes.
* It is a quite "clingy" movie, in that I have continued to think about it a lot today, and not just because of social media. I do quite like that it is causing some debate, in a way. And I actually think I may need to see it again, with a smaller, less annoying, audience.
* I don't think it's perfect, and to do my own bit of judgement, there are background story elements that I would have liked emphasised more. Maybe some bits ended up on the cutting room floor, and an "extended edition" would add a bit more explanation.
* I think it is a bit of bad luck that it would have been written before the rise of "AI video for all", which has only been a thing for a couple of years, as there probably should have been a bit more emphasis on how that issue was not a problem for the disclosure.
* The ending did surprise me somewhat, but I thought it was fine.
* People might like to argue with me that I get hyper-critical about the scientific accuracy in some movies - like The Martian, Hail Mary Pass and Sunshine - but not in other movies. But it all depends on the story, and if you are dealing with speculative advanced technology, it often just has to be accepted uncritically as part of a story. Overall, the movie is thematically consistent with both Close Encounters and ET in that in all three, aliens have telepathic powers or technology. This makes accepting the technology in the latest one easier.
* There is something of an irony, isn't there, that there is a strong element of Right wing Christian commentary against the film (and Spielberg) on X in particular, when one theme in the film is whether disclosure of alien reality would hurt people's faith. Seems that if a mere movie speculating about that upsets them, they would have issues with alien reality!
Elon Musk
is on the verge of financial immortality: The world's richest man — and
potentially its first trillionaire — has built a sovereign corporate
kingdom that is too systemic to fail.
And yet, on the eve of SpaceX's monster IPO,
its CEO was hunkered down in his digital fiefdom stoking far-right
culture wars with an impunity unmatched in modern corporate history.
Why it matters: Musk's years in the public eye, marked by serial controversy and an accelerating embrace of white identitarian politics, have inured investors to conduct that would be disqualifying for almost any other CEO.
Nothing Musk says or does can dent Wall Street's appetite for a stake in his future-forging empire.
Look no further than SpaceX's $1.75 trillion IPO, where demand for shares has already vastly outstripped the available supply ahead of Friday's historic market debut.
Zoom in: Anti-immigration riots erupted in Belfast on Tuesday night after graphic footage of a brutal street stabbing, allegedly by a Sudanese migrant, ricocheted across X.
Masked
mobs set fire to vehicles, a city bus, and several homes, marching
through neighborhoods while chanting "foreigners out" and forcing
minority families to flee under police protection.
Musk, who posts near-daily about violence committed by migrants, shared British far-right activist Tommy Robinson's list of locations to protest against "another invader attack on our people."
"Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!" Musk declared to his 240 million followers, drawing allegations of incitement from British leaders.
Zoom out: Musk's
intervention in Belfast followed weeks of fixation on Henry Nowak, the
white British teenager whose murder by a British Sikh man ignited a
far-right backlash over claims of "anti-white" policing.
Musk's
anti-migrant activism extends across Western countries, where he
suggests elites are intentionally engineering the demographic erasure of
white populations — also known as the "Great Replacement" theory.
In
the U.S., Musk has been relentlessly focused on non-citizen voter
fraud, claiming that Democrats are harvesting illegal immigrant votes to
create a permanent, one-party state.
That includes in
California, where he joined MAGA allies this week in alleging, without
evidence, that Democrats committed massive fraud in the Los Angeles
mayoral primary.
Between the lines: Musk's
worldview relies on a singular, apocalyptic thesis: that Western
civilization — which he frequently equates with white culture — is being
systematically dismantled by mass migration, demographic change and
"woke" institutions.
He has clashed with world leaders like
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who has accused the tech
billionaire of using his platform to "whip up division" and interfere in
foreign democracies.
"Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their home town is what's making people angry, not "social media!" Musk posted Wednesday in response to allegations of incitement.
Musk
rejects characterizations of his rhetoric as racist or xenophobic,
arguing that those accusations have been weaponized to shut down debate
on migration and crime.
The big picture: As
Musk's personal net worth rockets toward the thirteen-figure mark, he
has achieved escape velocity from the traditional rules of corporate
governance.
A decade ago, a CEO amplifying white-identitarian
panic at home and overseas would have triggered a board crisis,
investor revolt and days of corporate cleanup.
Musk does it
daily, in public, in real time, on the platform he owns. His companies
have become critical infrastructure, and Trump-era politics have shifted the Overton window on the rhetoric of racial grievance.
If
SpaceX's massive valuation secures it an eventual spot in the S&P
500, ordinary Americans with standard index funds or retirement accounts
will soon own a stake in Musk's empire — whether they like it or not.
The bottom line: Asked
Wednesday why the world's richest man spends his days in a bitter
online culture war instead of enjoying his billions on a beach, Musk posted: "Nothing else matters if civilization falls."
Being strapped onto a Starship and shot into the sun would be an improvement for the whole solar system
