Matt Stoller: America has a ‘number go up’ strategy for Wall Street, and that means we can’t build.. Our top national priority is keeping stock prices rising and that’s why we don’t build anything. It’s Agatha financialization all along.
My doctor thinks going for tests is a hobby for me. My dude, I am not going to a cardiologist or pulmonologist for baseline tests, if there is no indication of anything wrong. I have other things to do.
The greatest line in movie history.. Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone.”
What goes around comes around: Revolving restaurants are making a comeback
This article, by Diana Budds at the NYTimes, features the restaurant on top of the Marriott Marquis on Times Square. The restaurant recently reopened after closing in 2020.
I ate there a few times in the early 90s; it was nice. The rotation is so slow as to be imperceptible, though (as the article notes) if you went to the bathroom, which was in the non-rotating hub of the restaurant, it was easy to get confused to find your way back to your table. Especially if you had a few drinks.
There were a pair of concentric pony-walls on the perimeter of the dining areas, the inside one rotating, the outside one not rotating. Tables butted up against the inside pony-wall, and it was very easy to mistakenly put your cigarettes, lighter and drink down on the outside pony-wall and wonder a few minutes where the hell they’d gone to and you’d have to wait a half-hour for them to come around again on the turntable, by which time your cigarette had burned down the ice in the drinks had melted.
The Marriott Marquis also had a rotating lounge inside the lobby. A waitress told me the sections of the lounge were color-coded so they could find customer tables.
Even in the 90s, the design of the place seemed old-fashioned — so much orange! — but of course I loved that.
Scientists discovered a plaid frog in the Suriname rain forest. (Moss and Fog) — “I thought it was a scrap of flannel,” said Dr. Elise van Drohm, lead researcher on the expedition. “Then it blinked and leapt like a tiny, toxic fashion statement.” Follow the link for gorgeous frog photos.
RIP Val Kilmer. He played many roles, but I’ve long known and loved him as Doc Holliday in “Tombstone.”
Ian Welsh: Trump is "speed-running" America's "imperial decline"
Trump’s Negotiating Is Failing.
Welsh says Trump is “picking too many fights all once, his tariff threats are incoherent and unplanned, he’s defunding research and forcing brilliant scientists and engineers and scholars out of the US, has no industrial policy worth speaking of and is destroying America’s governing capacity with capricious cuts to the federal bureaucracy.”
Perhaps most damaging of all, Trump is giving every other nation of the world “reason to route around America like it’s damage: to stop using the US dollar, to move to using local currencies for trade and to stop buying American goods and services, and yes, to stop selling to the US.”
Soon, Welsh says, other nations will stop enforcing American intellectual property law, which will sabotage the US tech sector. (Cory Doctorow advocates for this.)
My $0.02: But what about companies like Nvidia, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.! Companies like that are powerful engines of growth and will keep America strong!
Oh, yeah? Why would they want to stay in the US?
Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself (Nikita Mazurov, Matt Sledge / The Intercept)
What Is It Like Living With Long COVID? (Nicole Pajer / AARP) — Thanks, Julie!
Is There Life After Death? Jewish Thinking on the Afterlife
For a long time, I’ve thought that we Jews did not believe in an afterlife — that we believed we should live well and do what’s right for its own sake, not for the sake of entering heaven after we die.
Turns out that this is just one of a multitude of afterlife beliefs in Jewish tradition — many Jews believe in reincarnation, many believe in resurrection on Judgment day and some even believe our souls are transported to Jerusalem through a network of subterranean tunnels while being beaten to a pulp by demons (which sounds like no fun at all).
I’m sticking with “do right because it’s the right thing to do.” I like the sound of that. If we are rewarded in an afterlife, that’s a bonus. But I think that when our brains stop it’s lights out.
Re-learning how to read books
I read very few books in the late 2010s, while consuming massive quantities of articles and posts. That bothered me. A few years ago, I learned that book-reading is a skill, different from reading articles and certainly very different from reading social media posts. I retaught that skill to myself. Now I’m up to about a dozen books a year and I can live with that.
I generally read two books at once. I like to do one fiction and one non-fiction.
When I was a teen-ager, I read five books a week. I had more free time then.
Cory: The AOC-Sanders anti-oligarch tour is all about organizing
Cory Doctorow at Pluralistic: Obama ran a grassroots political campaign but put his “organization into an induced coma between elections,” thereby losing “an important source of discipline and feedback” … “Obama ran like a populist, but governed like Chuck Schumer.”
For me, one of the big lessons of 2024 is that political campaigns and primary fights aren’t just a means for the people to choose candidates; they are also a means for the candidates and parties to learn what the people want and adjust strategy and messaging accordingly. Harris and the Democrats deprived themselves of that opportunity and we are all paying the penalty.
J.D. Shapiro, who wrote the screenplay for “Battlefield Earth,” apologizes for writing “the suckiest movie ever” (NY Post) — I believe this gentleman is not sincere in his apology and in fact has no regrets. Heh. (Thanks, Cory!)
Excellent history and photo essay on Tristan de Cunha, the "remotest [inhabited] island in the world," population 265 as of 2016
Not a single ship visited Tristan da Cunha from 1909 until 1919, until the HMS Yarmouth finally stopped by to inform the islanders of the outcome of World War I. Accessible on by sea, Tristan da Cunha is in fact an archipelago, the remotest inhabited one in the world, although only the main island was settled by man, with a permanent population of 265 residents as of September 2016.
There is no airstrip; the island is accessible only by a difficult six-day boat voyage from South Africa.
They don’t have home internet, but they do have an internet cafe. Or did in 2016.