Yglesias: “We have to pass the bill so people can find out what’s in it” was truly one of the most vindicated political takes of my lifetime.

Tweet: the “inverse lyceum” of Elon Musk.

Snopes on the claim that Hitler pardoned 8000 political supporters when he became Chancellor: not a one-to-one match but broadly analogous to Trump’s pardoning of J6ers.

The Cairo: “the city’s first “residential skyscraper“, the 164-foot-tall brick building spurred local regulations and federal legislation limiting building height in the city that continue to shape Washington’s skyline.”

My basic guesses about the strange behavior of Musk — (a) foreigner who doesn’t have a native understanding of the U.S. or U.S system of governance; (b) engineer-type personality who doesn’t quite get real-life people concerns; (c) successful person who thinks because he knows one thing well, he knows also unrelated things well.

Yglesias: The much-feared gentrification of the Democratic Party due to the entry of more affluent voters has manifested not in a retreat from taxes and the safety net but in waning commitment to growth and material prosperity as values.

Saul Bellow reflecting on writing Augie March et al. (New Yorker, 2005): “The restraint of the first two books had driven me mad—I hadn’t become a writer to tread the straight and narrow. I had been storing up stuff for years and this was my dream opportunity for getting it all out. I was also up to my eyes in mental debt. By this I mean that in becoming a writer I hoped to bring out somehow my singular reactions to existence. Why else write? I had prepared and overprepared myself by reading, study, and fact-storage or idea-storage and I was now trying to discharge all this freight. Paris (Europe) may have set me off.” 

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e …… he …………e …… he
nt …… t …………nt …… t
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POST: Michael J. Gerhardt, a professor of constitutional law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, said the administration’s response to Boasberg’s order could be oneof the first real assertions of judicial defiance by the president.

“We might just be there,” Gerhardt said, calling the administration’s rationale for allowing the deportation flights to complete their mission “really hard to believe.”

Can’t be gainsaid, an incredible sound – You Came, You Saw, You Conquered.

“I’m just asking how you think my equitable powers do not attach to a plane that has departed the U.S., even if it’s in international airspace,”…

Heavens, straight up propaganda from the Post, it looks like. Rarely take note of a byline, but this is David Lynch.

I “had to get up.” I didn’t have anything I needed to be up for, yet I “had to get up” because “pleasures were like nails,” according to Socrates, “nailing the soul to the body,” which was probably a roughly accurate way to think of how pleasures were, I supposed at the time, pleasures innuring us to being pleased and making us expect to be pleased; and of course lying here was a definite pleasure; and so likely I would feel at once, upon dying, the sudden wrenching up of the weight of all those nails, that had been pounded into me during moments of pleasure like this; I would feel in reverse, and all at once, the pleasure of all those mornings I didn’t get immediately up.

But, again, I didn’t actually “have to” get up (I had no commitments, no work or appointments); in this case, the only question determining whether I would or would not get up involved what I thought death was and what I thought its importance to be.

I lay there thinking of the arrangement of my coverings and considering if the arrangement was quite optimally suited to my comfort. I lay there thinking of how I had slept: not well. I lay there thinking — growing gradually more cognizant of how much I was thinking and of how active what I called my mind was becoming relative to what I called my body. If I wanted to get up, I didn’t have to actually will myself to get up, I supposed, which would probably be ineffective in any case: all I had to do was what I was doing: continue thinking, and then the rest of my body would get infected with the brain’s activity and I would be up. Although in that case there was nothing for me to do in order to get up, as I was already thinking, and had no choice in the matter. I was thinking more and more, and soon this thinking would attain a critical mass and result in me getting up.

Now, on occasions when I did feel I had a choice in whether or not I could return to sleep, I would try to remember my dreams more vividly, which seemed to me signposts back to unconscious. If I could simply remember the dream better, I was thinking, I would find myself within it again, I would pick up where I left off, dreaming and therefore also sleeping again. The dream I had woken with could not, after all, be so very far away — and remembering was very close to dreaming, these must be abutting, even adjoining compartments, I believed — so if I could only press a bit harder on the gate, if I could only hop over the low stone wall, step in through the shared bathroom… After all, I wasn’t trying to use my mind to do something magical; to, for example, teleport, or levitate; the only super power I now requested of my mind was that it transition between two of its actual functions: that it go from remembering a dream to actual dreaming … but it inevitably appeared, again, that I in fact had no choice in the matter: I continued to remember I had dreamed and I failed to turn my memories of dreams into dreaming.

I knew that I was tired enough that, if I could only stop thinking, I would probably return to sleep, which I desired, not having anything I “had” to do. But thinking had now become an inescapable crown, like the inevitable sunlight itself, with its message that I would be getting up. Even if I told myself not to, even were I to absolutely insist, the magic carpet would be in effect: my legs would swing over, and I would be half-up.

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Namaqualand: Arid region in Namibia, South Africa.

Wide-ranging Elizabeth Nelson conversation on the high lonesome sound* — with exciting Bill Kirchen digression — along with a reveal of her video for Are You Loathesome Tonight?

(*surprised there’s a wiktionary entry for that.)

Hiliarious/ doomed: she doesn’t think anyone at the white house is shorting the DOW.

Hilarious/ doomed: U.S. President literally hawking.

Seem to recall these lines (Iliad 24.80-82) being quoted in Plato’s Ion…? But they also leap out at one anyway.

ἣ δὲ μολυβδαίνῃ ἰκέλη ἐς βυσσὸν ὄρουσεν,
ἥ τε κατ᾽ ἀγραύλοιο βοὸς κέρας ἐμβεβαυῖα
ἔρχεται ὠμηστῇσιν ἐπ᾽ ἰχθύσι κῆρα φέρουσα.

The fish hook “brings fate to the flesh-eating fish.” The only time I can think of fish feasting on flesh is book 21, in which they set upon Astropalaios (who has been killed by Achilles and tossed in the river) and start eating the fat around his kidneys. In this instance, however, it is probably less a statement about the fishes than it is about Astropalaios, who is the grandson of a river, being ironically mistreated by a river’s inhabitants.

Ezra Klein: Kevin Drum was an inspiration to so many of us. A lot of the later turns towards wonkery and chart-blogging has its roots in his work. He influenced a generation of young writers — he was fair and independent and took the evidence seriously and and he did the work to see old things in new ways. He will be so missed.

Yglesias: The real origin of the Ukraine War is that the runaway success of Poland’s economy is a clear formula that Ukraine wanted to imitate by launching the process of joining the European Union, an outcome Putin deemed intolerable.