This is tragic but it is not an anomaly.
The killing of aid workers in Gaza has been systemic.
- Scott Paul of Oxfam,
commenting on the death of seven World Central Kitchen workers
This week's featured post is "Will the World Central Kitchen attack change anything?"
This week everybody was talking about signs and wonders
This morning, all eyes are on the narrow corridor of the total eclipse, which stretches from Texas in the South to Maine in the North, and goes through Dallas, Cleveland, and Buffalo along the way.
I've never experienced a total eclipse myself (and won't see this one either), but I imagine there must be a significant oh-wow effect to seeing the Sun go dark in the middle of the sky. It's not hard to see why pre-scientific peoples tried to read portents into such an event, just as they read meaning into the appearance of comets and other celestial phenomena.
It's much harder for me to understand why so many people are still doing it. We know what causes eclipses and can predict them hundreds of years in advance.
Friday, Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted:
God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.
and then doubled down yesterday:
Many have mocked and scoffed at this post and even put community notes. Jesus talked about that in Luke 12:54-56. Yes eclipses are predictable and earthquakes happen and we know when comets are passing by, however God created all of these things and uses them to be signs for those of us who believe.
First off, MTG should re-read Luke 12:54-56. I don't think it says what she thinks it does.
But more importantly, I think signs and wonders appeal to charlatans like MTG precisely because they have no content of their own. The event itself is striking, but its meaning is wide open for whatever claims people want to make.
So America should repent? OK, how about we repent our long history of racism? our wasteful burning of fossil fuels? our cruelty towards refugees who arrive at our border seeking help? our willingness to let people die of preventable causes rather than provide medical care? the vast gulf between our rich and our poor?
No? Not what you wanted us to repent? Show me what part of the eclipse points out same-sex marriage or drag shows or socialism or letting people use the "wrong" bathrooms.
And what counts as a sign that demands interpretation? As several people have pointed out, the recent earthquake was centered in New Jersey, not far from the Bedminster golf club of a noted Bible salesman. Could that be what God is angry about?
Oh, and what about this sign? During the previous administration, God sent an actual plague that killed over a million Americans. The deaths continue to be concentrated in counties that support that leader. Is that something to interpret?
When MTG talks about "those of us who believe", she means authoritarian communities, where some leader is empowered to define a sign and attach an interpretation to it without debate. As soon as the meaning is open to discussion, though, the underlying emptiness of the "sign" quickly becomes apparent.
and the World Central Kitchen attack
This is the subject of the featured post.
and Caitlin Clark
In the women's NCAA basketball tournament, both the Iowa/Connecticut final-four game Friday and the Iowa/South Carolina championship last night set records for TV ratings. Final numbers for last night's game aren't in yet, but Friday's game drew 14.2 million viewers, making it the most-watched basketball game ever on ESPN.
Friday's blockbuster matchup with a controversial finish peaked at 17 million viewers, surpassing every NBA Finals and MLB World Series game last year. It was only topped by five college football games in 2023. Meanwhile, no Daytona 500 race or Masters Tournament final round has exceeded Friday's numbers since 2013. Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals between the Toronto Raptors and Golden State Warriors beat Iowa vs. UConn with 18.59 million viewers, but it was aired on ABC.
People who don't watch sports usually don't grasp the soap-opera aspect of being a fan. You watch not just for the competition and the beauty of the sport, but because you're in the middle of a story and want to see how it comes out. Like soap opera, each episode/game answers some questions, but raises others that will keep you watching future games.
Women's sports have languished behind men's sports largely because of the inherent chicken/egg problem of attracting new fans: If you haven't been watching, you don't know what questions the next game is supposed to be answering.
This year, the stardom of Iowa's Caitlin Clark got women's basketball over the hump. Once you started watching, you also began to wonder about Paige Bueckers, Angel Reese, Kamilla Cardoso, and a bunch of other stars. You might continue to follow them in the WNBA or watch next year's college games.
Women's basketball is on the map now.
and trials
It increasingly looks like Trump is actually going to face a criminal trial. The fake-business-records-to-cover-up-paying-off-the-porn-star case is due to start next week.
That may not be the case you'd really like to see. The Mar-a-Lago documents case is more open-and-shut, and the two January 6 conspiracy cases go to the heart of Trump's assault on democracy. But it is a real indictment of a real crime. If any other ex-president faced such a thing, it would be extraordinary. We've just gotten used to taking Trump's wrongdoing for granted.
You can tell Trump himself is worried, because he's acting out. He's been attacking the judge's adult daughter, and now says that he is willing to go to jail on the free-speech principle that he can attack anybody he wants, no matter what the judge's gag order says.
Trump says a lot of things, and most of them turn out not to be true. I think he'll whimper like a small child if he has to go to a real jail. I also think Judge Merchan will have to do something to establish who is in control of his courtroom.
The drama of Trump's bond isn't over yet. So, two weeks ago, he was supposed to come up with nearly half a billion dollars to secure the civil fraud judgment against him while he appealed. But then at the last minute, a NY appeals court lowered it to $175 million and gave him ten more days to come up with it, which he appeared to do.
The coverage came from Knight Specialty Insurance, whose CEO is Don Hankey, the "king of subprime car loans" and a major Republican donor. State AG Letitia James noticed that Knight is "not an admitted carrier in New York, and lacks the certificate of qualification required by New York Insurance Law Section 1111" so she challenged the sufficiency of the bond.
So now the question isn't whether Trump has the money, it's whether Knight does.
Steve Bannon, you may recall, was criminally charged in a scheme to defraud people who wanted to build chunks of Trump's border wall with private funding. Trump pardoned him, so he wasn't convicted with his co-conspirators, one of whom was recently sentenced to more than four years in prison. (Think about the weirdness of that for a second: Somebody defrauds your supporters, so you pardon them.)
But presidential pardons don't get you out of state court, so Bannon is scheduled to go to trial in New York in May.
and you also might be interested in ...
The House goes back to work today, which means something will have to happen with Ukraine funding. Speaker Mike Johnson is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't, so he might as well do the right thing. But we'll see.
A group of psychologists, gerontologists, and other mental-health professionals explain why Trump's dementia symptoms are far more worrying than anything about Biden.
what I feel is happening right now is that we're being gaslit. The press is pathologizing Biden's normal signs of aging, and they're normalizing Trump's blatant signs of of dementia. And so the people are really being told a kind of double lie. Either it’s twice as many people believe Biden is not as cognitively fit as Trump. Or we have the tired old “two old men” narrative, you know, we have a gerontocracy. And the point is that, look, we're talking about a tale of two brains here. Biden's brain is aging, Trump's brain is dementing. We're comparing apples to rotted oranges here. They're not the same.
One example I found persuasive is the Nancy/Nikki incident:
The Dementia Care Society says that a sign of advanced dementia is when you start combining people and generations. You literally mash people together into one person. ... Trump showed us the combination of people when he made Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley one person. It wasn't a slip of the tongue, okay? It wasn't that he meant to say one name and he said the other. He gave a speech about the person I'm running against in this primary who was responsible for security at the Capitol. He actually confused the two people. You see the difference?
The Trump Media stock meltdown seems to be underway. It began publicly trading under the symbol DJT on March 26, and jumped up above $70 a share on the 27th. It closed Friday at $40.59. Last I checked this morning, it was $36.52.
DJT's main problem is that the underlying business is worthless. The usual start-up story is that a company may be losing money right now, but its revenues and user base are growing fast, so profitability is going to happen eventually. DJT is losing money now, isn't growing, and has no plausible plan to ever make money.
Meanwhile, it's paying six-figure salaries to a small band of Trump loyalists, and a bunch of stakeholders are suing each other.
WaPo speculates on Trump's plan to end the Ukraine War, which he has said he could do in 24 hours. The gist: Russia gets to keep Crimea and some section of eastern Ukraine. Ukraine gets ... I'm not sure what. And the US drops its sanctions in an effort to make Russia less dependent on China.
The Munich analogy gets way over-used, but this does sound awfully Munich-like.
After much angst and fanfare, No Labels is not going to run a candidate in 2024.
The underlying problem of No Labels is that it reads the electorate wrong. Yes, most people do wish that the two major parties would compromise and govern, rather than posture and logjam. But that desire for compromise has no content on particular issues. There is no centrist philosophy that informs centrist positions on economic and cultural matters, and no centrist vision of America's future.
Worse, most of the specific positions centrist politicians stake out are actually compromises already proposed by Democrats and rejected by Republicans. Take the budget deficit. Want to split the difference between Democratic tax increases and Republican spending cuts? Good luck with that; Obama already tried it.
The lack of a No Labels candidate means RFK Jr. is the only significant third-party option. I think the way to run against him is to let him talk. He's a loon who never met a conspiracy theory he didn't like. The more people see him, the less they're going to want him to be president.
Jon Tester's seat in Montana might decide the Senate majority. (Democrats currently hold a 51-49 advantage, but the seat Joe Manchin is retiring from is considered unwinnable.) This week WaPo published a weird and complicated story about the main Republican challlenger, former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy.
It's about the bullet in his forearm, which he says he picked up in Afghanistan but never reported. Then he later told a park ranger a story about shooting himself accidentally in a national park. That lie was technically a crime, but the statute of limitations has passed. As to why he covered up the wound to begin with, I'm still confused.
and let's close with something natural
One of the best photo contests online is Smithsonian Magazine's. Here we see a glacial lake in Denali National Park in Alaska.
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