I just wanted to thank everyone for their kind donations. I have enough now for a month of acupuncture and chiro visits (the chiro cut me a deal because my co-pay is so high.)
So I wanted to let everyone know how much I appreciate it.
Fortunate son
Creedence:
Lucky guy
The Hermit of Mink Hollow:
Your dear John
Kim Richey:
Tom Wolfe’s works will live on! Really!!!
After hearing Tom Wolfe had died, I thought of that scene in The Bonfire of the Vanities where master of the universe Sherman McCoy, under arrest, is paraded past reporters with Styrofoam peanuts clinging to his expensive suit.
…They were all over his shirt and pants. The rain was streaming down his forehead and his cheeks. He started to wipe his face, but then he realized he would have to raise both hands and his jacket to do it, and he didn’t want them to see his handcuffs. So the water just rolled down…
No writer was better at using the third-person narrator to get inside the heads of his characters, at using specific details to show their states of mind, at dissecting their passions and pretensions. The fictional Sherman McCoy was no less vividly drawn than the real-life Leonard Bernstein in “Radical Chic,” and the real-life Ken Kesey in The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test.
I was working for a daily newspaper when Bonfire came out. The reporters and editors who actually read books — there were more than a few of us — were only mildly surprised by Wolfe’s seamless transition from nonfiction to fiction. In his nonfiction he combined first-rate reporting with cutting humor, a hyperactive prose style and a talent for socio-historical analysis. In his fiction, he used the same elements.
A lot of journalists back then wanted to write like Wolfe, just like folk musicians in the 1960s wanted to write like Bob Dylan, and short-story writers in the 1990s wanted to write like Denis Johnson.
And so what if Wolfe’s style was inimitable? He inspired a lot of us to find our own paths, to put our era in perspective, and he’s still influencing young writers who aspire to write something more ambitious than nuts-and-bolts journalism.
Footnote: Wolfe once told Rolling Stone: “I’ve taken what I think of as the ‘man from Mars approach’: I’ve just arrived from Mars, I have no idea what you’re doing, but I’m very interested.” Nowhere is this approach more successfully realized than in Acid Test, an amazing piece of journalism-sociology-history that’s still as exciting and insightful as it was when it was first published, fifty years ago.
Happy Hour: Coleman Hawkins – Mighty Like A Rose …
Panhandle Slim… Art for Folk…
Judge denies Manafort’s motion to dismiss
Manafort doesn’t have any good options, he may as well take the deal. But he won’t:
Paul Manafort has struck out again in his efforts to get Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s case against him thrown out or curtailed on the basis that Mueller’s investigation was improper.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Tuesday denied Manafort’s request that she throw out the indictment brought in the criminal case against him in Washington D.C. She had previously thrown out a civil lawsuit Manafort filed against Mueller seeking to narrow his investigation. Manafort’s motion to dismiss the case Mueller brought against him in Virginia is still pending.
Manafort had argued that since the charges Mueller brought against him stemmed from Ukraine lobbying work predating the 2016 campaign, they were outside the scope of the Russian collusion investigation for which Mueller had been appointed. Jackson, in her 36-page opinion, rejected Manafort’s claims that the Ukraine business dealings were outside Mueller’s scope.
Referring to Mueller’s appointment order, she said that the charges fell “squarely within that portion of the authority granted to the Special Counsel that Manafort finds unobjectionable: the order to investigate ‘any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign.’ (Manafort had also challenged the provision of the appointment order that said that Mueller could investigate matters “that arose or may arise directly” from the probe).
Additionally, Jackson said that the Justice Department regulations created for special counsel investigations are not enforceable for defendants in court.
‘You f*cked up, you trusted us!’
Trump really thought it was going to be that easy, didn’t he? Moron.
North Korea has announced it is suspending scheduled talks with South Korea due to US-South Korean military drills, which it called a “provocation”.
North Korea’s state-run Central News Agency (KCNA) said that the so-called ‘Max Thunder’ drills between the South Korean and US Air Force are simply a “rehearsal for [an] invasion of the North and a provocation amid warming inter-Korean ties,” Yonhap News Agency reported.
“This exercise targeting us, which is being carried out across South Korea, is a flagrant challenge to the Panmunjom Declaration and an intentional military provocation running counter to the positive political development on the Korean Peninsula. The [US] will also have to undertake careful deliberations about the fate of the planned North Korea-US summit in light of this provocative military ruckus jointly conducted with the South Korean authorities,” KCNA said.
The talks, scheduled for 16 May, were meant as a follow-up to the historic and opulent ceremony during which North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in signed the Panmunjom Declaration for Peace, Prosperity, and Unification of the Korean Peninsula during the Inter-Korean Summit on 27 April. The signing took place in the in the neutral territory between the two Koreas, the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), and officially ended the war that began when the north and south split in a battle over communism and democracy that began on 25 June 1950.
For news without context, tune into NPR
Do not report on Kushner in the Middle East without mentioning his family's West Bank settlement investments, his family's long-time ties to Netanyahu, and his many infractions as an amorphous "advisor", ranging from lying on security forms to the probable sale of state secrets
— Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) May 14, 2018
I fell asleep with the radio on and woke Monday to what I thought was the sound of my friend Swamp Rabbit pleading for a drink. But no, it was the squeaky little voice of Ivanka Trump’s Ken doll, Jared Kushner, who was telling the world via National Public Radio how terrific it was to be present in Israel for an event celebrating the movement of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, not many miles from the celebration, Israeli soldiers at the Gaza border were shooting Palestinians, who had responded to the embassy move — a strong signal that peace talks were dead — by burning tires and trying to breach the border fence. By day’s end, 58 had been killed and well over a thousand wounded.
NPR mentioned the slaughter a few times as they reported on the dignitaries at the new embassy site — Barbie and Ken, Trump toady Steve Mnuchin, mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, and so on — but the network made no mention of the web of corruption that binds Republican big shots to thugs like Israeli Prime Minister “Bibi” Netanyahu.
For context regarding the embassy move — for instance, why is it happening? — Twitter was a better place to start than NPR.
NPR is almost as useless as it is ubiquitous. It has some good reporters and covers a lot of territory, but its news directors were neutered years ago when the Breitbarts of the world began accusing the network of liberal bias.
Footnote: I’ll bet Robert Mueller wasn’t following the fete in Jerusalem. More likely, he was sifting through evidence of how Kushner has been manipulated by Israel and other foreign powers.