Unfinished Thoughts

After my recent post on bookshelves, I was sitting at my desk and staring absently at the bookshelves holding probably 85% of the books in the house (adult division). Because I am of a certain age, I have a LOT of physical books and, outside of reference textbooks, I have read every single one of them. On top of these, there are another 30 or so that are e-book only. As I scanned over them though, I started to wonder: why am I reading a lot of these books? * A brief pause: I had started writing the above paragraph a few weeks ago but never really finished enough to even make it worth posting here, in " Unfinished Thoughts. " But then I read this article in The Atlantic: Reading Is a Vice The article itself is about how reading habits have declined precipitously and what people have been doing to reverse or at least halt the trend. And it touches on something important: which is that reading for pleasure is not - and has never really ever been - about self-improvement, being a...

Theory: ICE on the ground in cities is meant to accustom (and build an “excuse” – such as it is) for the public so when the midterms come around, the paramilitary thugs on the street are already in place to help out with voter intimidation. Who in their right mind will risk going out to vote unless they look like they are of northern European extraction? My unfinished idea today is that the reason that Seattle hasn’t been targeted much harder for ICE raids is that Washington has mail in voting. As in, the entire state votes by mail and there is really no opportunity in the state to vote in person even if you wanted to. Thus, there isn’t any real “efficiency” to wasting your agents intimidating a population that, due to logistical reasons, it doesn’t really make much sense to bother with. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze to use a modern idiom. ICE raids could be happening in rural areas, where a LOT of illegal immigrants are working in industri...

  I'm not even sure where this ranks on the weirdest stories of the past 12 months but... Live Updates: Venezuelan Opposition Leader Gives Trump Her Peace Prize The first question from the dinner table was: Does she think Trump will make her president? Me : Yes. Follow up: Do you think it will work? Me : Maybe, but that dude is known to welsh on promises so I wouldn't hold my breath. But as I said that, something else popped into my head and I blurted out: "He will absolutely wear that to the State of the Union speech." I want there to be a prop bet on one of those politics betting sites for this. I NEED that action!!

It's time that the United States - and the MAGA party in particular - own its policy that if you don't work, you don't deserve healthcare. I was listening to NPR (I know, I know...) and there was a story about the ACA premiums exploding with the expiration of subsidies. They interviewed a doddering retiree (on Medicare, naturally) and it really should be quoted in full here: QUIRMBACH: Here, extending help for ACA enrollees does not have a lot of support. Stepping away from the game, Rita Schulte, a retiree who's on Medicare, the federal health program that covers most seniors, says the Obamacare enhanced subsidies should only be extended a short time, if at all. Schulte says for people who aren't retired like her, she wants bigger changes in the Affordable Care Act that lower costs for taxpayers. RITA SCHULTE: If they'd ever get it overhauled, maybe we wouldn't need all this extra help from the government because you can't rely on the governmen...

More of a stub than usual... Any honest political observer would have understood Texas Governor Greg "Hot Wheels" Abbott's scheme of bussing illegal immigrants to places like NYC, Martha's Vineyard and Chicago was both 1) appalling and 2) politically, perhaps the most brilliant stunt of the election cycle.  Outside of the Democratic party's continued insistence on doing this... :  ... the bussing of migrants might have been the single most effective campaign tactic to bring home just how broken the border had become. Leaving aside that the Republicans torpedoed the immigration bill to keep it as an issue.  Because let's be very honest: it's very easy for the cities and states 1000+ miles away from the border to loudly virtue signal about the humanity of illegal immigrants when they don't have to deal with even close to the same magnitude of problems that emanate from an unsecured border. Martha's Vineyard cried for the National Guard, Chicago added...

I recently became aware of the subreddit called  /bookshelvesdetective . Ostensibly, the idea is to post a full photo of a bookshelf (either your own or an acquaintance) and then ask the community to ferret out the persona behind them from the aggregated titles and decorative bric-a-brac. It's entertaining as a reader on several levels: mildly voyeuristic, intellectual dong-measuring-contest, genuine curiosity. It's also quite obvious that many of the posters are showing off. Or trying to, anyway. But isn't that what most people who have bookshelves displayed use them for? Maybe "showing off" isn't quite the right phrase and instead more precisely it should be trying to signal their interests, tastes and so on. Think of a the salesperson's office festooned with books on "winning" by ex-pro athletes, shitty volumes written by assholes like Jack Welch and so on. Heck, remember the COVID days of public intellectuals appearing on Zoom? We got to look...