I am very tired & not particularly in the mood for this today. The heat is fierce & getting worse. It'll stay in the 90s all week & might break 100 by the weekend. No relief in sight, either, just more foul heat & humidity.
The Sleep is still on me, not quite as strong as it was, but it's coupled with difficulty falling asleep. So, that's always fun. The end result is I am basically not into doing this today, but since it'd be a damn shame to break the streak, we'll do something. So let's see what pops up.
Matt Taibbi remains a damn hack. He was trumpeted to me a decade ago as a new Hunter Thompson, & his work in 2008 on the financial crisis was superlative, but he's always struck me as a guy who was far too in love with the smell of his own bullshit for me to take too seriously. And he's just an okay writer, as far as that goes. He pissed away a sweet gig with Rolling Stone only to have to come crawling back to a magazine that hasn't been worth reading in 20 years.
On the flipside, Radley Balko is a very good writer & an excellent journalist. He's doing ongoing work about how goddamn awful the legal/court system in dear old Mississippi is. Here's a good Twitter thread concerning an update to this ridiculous story.
Another little nugget in the Jeffery Epstein suicide drama is this. In short, the jail was short on guards so the person watching Epstein was neither fully trained nor fully qualified. Just brilliant. One thing about the upper echelons of American government that you can always count on is when push comes to shove, when something weird happens, don't look for evil or conspiracy. Look for incompetence, laziness & parsimony.
In just basic awfulness & mendacity, the Trump Administration is planning on making it harder for legal immigrants who use government benefits to obtain their legal status, or a "green card". This illustrates something I've thought since Lou Dobbs was howling about Azltan in the mid Aughts. That is, conservatives are lying when they say they only have a problem with illegal immigration. If hey could, they'd get rid of legal immigrants, as well. The raid in the chicken plants in Mississippi last week show that: scoop up everyone & sort 'em out later. Like the gun nuts who go grocery shopping loaded for bear, they want that fear.
Okay, on last dumb thing. Universal Pictures decided to cancel the release of an upcoming movie called The Hunt, which was (apparently) about a group of rural Americans who were kidnapped by some rich people do a sort of "Most Dangerous Game" type of thing. The eternal victims at FOX News decided this was evil Hollywood picking on poor, innocent Trump supporters by showing how great it was that the "liberal elite" was hunting down "deplorables" for sport. And, of course, the dipstick in the White House is glued to FOX like your increasingly racist grandpa & uttered one his weird morning Twitter storms, stirred up the howler monkeys, & got the movie pulled even though no one knew anything about it beyond the trailer. No, really.
And, of course, plenty of moist conservatives & weak-minded centrists are orgasming over this decision, noting that it's a bad idea to show liberals shooting conservatives in these heady times, even though none of 'em have seen past the trailer, & even the trailer doesn't show what they think it shows. If you lived through the Bush Jr. Era & was paying attention, this all seems very familiar. My man Roy Edroso has some excellent thoughts on this.
Anyhow, enough of all that. As I said, I'm tired & deflated. I go see the Psych Doc tomorrow to tell him the Wellbutrin ain't doing shit. I believe I'll eat supper, take a shower, & call it a night. Carry on.
