Thursday, November 20, 2025

The Left Hand Cringe


In one of the cringiest moments of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s meeting in the Oval Office this week, Trump reached over and grabbed MBS’s left hand, blurting out “I don’t give a hell where that hand has been.”

Watching this, I gasped.

From my time living in Afghanistan, I know that among Moslems, the left hand has traditionally been considered unclean because it is used for personal hygiene, like cleaning oneself after using the toilet. 

So was this what Trump was referring to when he said he didn’t care where that hand had been? It’s hard for me to believe that a buffoon like Trump would know about sensitive Islamic traditions, though I suppose he could have been briefed.

On the other hand (so to speak), considering that MBS is the guy the CIA believes ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, it doesn’t really matter which hand Trump clasped because both of them are covered with blood.

And in either case, Trump was saying he just doesn’t care.

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Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Seat of Dishonor

So Mohammed bin Salman, the man the CIA says ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi is given the most elaborate reception at the White House that Trump can muster. He sits next to Trump in an Oval Office so encrusted with gold that it would make Genghis Khan jealous.

Then a reporter from ABC, Mary Bruce, asks about that murder and is viciously denounced by Trump for disrespecting the visitor. Later, a still angry Trump says the network’s license should be revoked.

This is just another day in Trump’s America, where he brags about how open he is with the press — except of course when a reporter asks questions he doesn’t like. For example, why he hasn’t ordered the release of the Epstein files, which was the ABC reporter Bruce’s second sin yesterday, according to Trump.

Meanwhile, the House and the Senate both voted to release those very Epstein files, so that seemingly never-ending sex-trade saga may be reaching its climax. But given the buildup, you’ve got to wonder if the versions that finally surface might feel more like an anticlimax.

The evil person at the center of all this, Epstein, is dead, so the most important question here is whether there ever will be any real justice brought upon the rest of those who victimized so many young women and girls in this sordid matter. For one possible answer, just look what happened to the alleged perpetrator of Jamal Khashoggi’s killing.

He ended up in the seat of honor next to the President.

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Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Tuesday Mix

(Tokyo 2007)

HEADLINES:

  • Judge says James Comey indictment may be tainted by ‘profound investigative missteps’ (CNN)

  • The ‘Easy Way’ to Crush the Mainstream Media (Atlantic)

  • Border Patrol Fans Out Across Charlotte, N.C., Arresting More Than 130 People in Two Days (NYT)

  • Kash Patel’s Bureau of Vengeance (New Yorker)

  • ‘He got tired of me winning’: How Thomas Massie outmaneuvered Trump on Epstein (Politico)

  • Economic angst unites Americans in a time of polarization, according to a new poll (AP)

  • Fight over abortion could doom Congress’s health care plans (WP)

  • Trump considers talks with Venezuela’s Maduro even as U.S. ramps up military pressure (NBC)

  • Acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson resigns (ABC)

  • New international student enrolment drops 17% at US universities (BBC)

  • Standard Medicare Part B monthly premium to jump 9.7% in 2026 (CNBC)

  • Marjorie Taylor Greene and ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ (The Bulwark)

  • In Major Breakthrough, U.N. Security Council Adopts U.S. Peace Plan for Gaza (NYT)

  • Palestinian deaths in Israeli custody have surged. A prison guard describes rampant abuse (AP)

  • China expands desert nuclear test site as Trump revives nuclear tension (WP)

  • Taiwan will begin distributing millions of civil defense handbooks to households across the island this week, in an unprecedented effort to prepare residents for potential emergencies, including the possibility of a Chinese attack. (Reuters)

  • Bill Clinton Issued A Statement Responding To Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein Allegations (BuzzFeed)

  • The Plan to Bring Down a Giant — How right-wing forces struck a coordinated blow to the BBC. (CJR)

  • UC Berkeley scientists hail breakthrough in decoding whale communication (SFGate)

  • Raccoons Are Showing Early Signs of Domestication (Scientific American)

  • A guerrilla gardener installed a pop-up wetland in the LA River. (NPR)

  • The Man Yelling ‘Iceberg!’ on the Hollywood Titanic (NYT)

  • How AI Helped One Student Make the Movie He Couldn’t Afford (Hollywood Reporter)

  • Google’s AI Mode can now help you visualize your travel plans (Verge)

  • Empathetic, Available, Cheap: When A.I. Offers What Doctors Don’t (NYT)

  • Detroit Lions Rookie Asks For Thanksgiving Off (Onion)

 

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Monday, November 17, 2025

Trump Folds

I don’t know what’s in the Epstein Files, or whether anyone will suffer politically outside of the de-Duked Andrew, but I guess we’re finally going to find out.

The opposition to Trump’s stonewalling led by the remarkably transformed Margery Taylor Greene looks to have prevailed in this matter.

But watch out Venezuela. Nothing tempts a would-be-king more than a foreign conquest when things start going badly at home.

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Sunday, November 16, 2025

The Base Cracks

Late Saturday night, I discovered that country singer Zach Bryan has a new song called “No Kings” in circulation and it is exactly what its title indicates it would be — a repudiation of Trump and his authoritarian moves.

Bryan, you might recall, generated controversy recently with another song called “Bad News,” That one criticized ICE raids, and drew a shocked and confused reaction from Trump’s MAGA base.

I could be wrong about this, but the decision by young progressive country music stars like Bryan and Kacey Musgravesto speak out against Trump is an indication that all is not well in MAGA-land.

And that brings us to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her split with Trump over health insurance and inflation has now widened to include the Epstein Files.

Unlike Trump’s break-up with Elon Musk earlier this year, the Greene rebellion may be opening a politically significant division between Trump’s billionaire class friends and those struggling to keep up with the rising costs of housing, groceries, health care and raising children.

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Saturday, November 15, 2025

Weir(d) News

Parkinson’s disease is linked to vivid, frequent, and often distressing dreams, a condition known as REM Behavior Disorder (RBD), where people physically act out their dreams. This occurs because the normal paralysis that accompanies REM sleep is impaired in people with Parkinson’s. Medications can sometimes worsen these symptoms, but the disease process itself is a major factor. — Google

***

Okay here goes. I had another weirdly vivid dream last night, the most recent in a long string of such dreams, but this one was a happy one. It started out with the arrival of two young women who were to sleep next to me in my room.

Don’t get too excited, this dream was strictly platonic.

And the origin of this part of the dream is clear. Just before going to bed last night, I watched the charming 2018 TV film, No Sleep ‘Til Christmas, starring Odette Annable.

These young women, who in my dream were sparkly, figured later on in the story. First we woke up and got ready for work. I took them with me to a large office downtown with hundreds of people, few of whom I knew but all of whom seemed to know me.

It was a media company, not unlike The Morning Show on Apple TV, but more like two places I actually worked, Excite@Home and Wired News. For some reason the girls had to sit under desks at the front of the office, so I left them there and went to the back, where my group sat.

When I located my cubicle, there was no chair and no phone. Somehow I knew my super power was speaking loudly, which in the dream I proceeded to do.

Soon, a guy appeared, carrying a large office chair upside down on his head. Someone else brought a phone in his pocket.

I looked around at my employees and saw they were all young men who simply didn’t know what to do; some had clearly been playing video games but the others seemed earnest but clueless.

So I began speaking loudly again and like magic stuff started to happen. Stories materialized, good stories. A guy with a list showed up. I pronounced that henceforth we would be producing one big weird story each day and that again, henceforth, we would be rebranding ourselves as Weird News.

I also said we would be diversifying. This is where the two young women I’d been sleeping next to came back into play. I thought about how to introduce them to my all-male news team.

I couldn’t say “These are my girls,” because that made it seem like they were my daughters. I couldn’t say “These are my women,” because first off they weren’t mine and secondly, that might make me sound like a sick Jeffrey-Epstein-type character.

Then I remembered that the young women sparkled, so I announced “I’m bringing some Sparkles into the newsroom!

Everyone cheered and we rebranded ourselves Sparkle News. And with that, I woke up.

Though somewhat exhausted from expending so much effort in my dream, I also was happy that it had been so much better a dream than the night before.

In that dream, I’d been responsible for a six-month-old baby and I was carrying it on a bus when it suddenly disappeared. I looked everywhere in all the nooks and crannies of the city but no luck. It was a missing persons case so I used my investigative skills to trace the baby back to the bus, to the back of the bus specifically and a group of women from Central America.

Once I realized this I ran and ran but by the time I got to the back of the bus, they’d all been deported.

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Friday, November 14, 2025

Surviving This


Statisticians often use the term “return to the mean” to describe how extreme outcomes are likely to be followed by more typical ones over time. 

The phrase pops up in sports when a baseball player who normally hits 15 home runs a season suddenly explodes for 40 one year before returning to his usual level the following season.

You’ll also encounter the phrase in discussions about the weather or the stock market but less often when it comes to politics.

That’s why it caught my attention during a recent webinar when Patrick Ball, Director of Research for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) used the concept in regards to the rise of authoritarianism in countries with a background of democracy and democratic values.

He said that such societies tend to turn away from authoritarian leaders ultimately and return to their democratic roots.

Ball knows what he is talking about. He’s been closely analyzing the human rights abuses in societies around the world for 35 years. He and his fellow data scientists at HRDAG are currently focusing on such abuses here in the U.S.

The group recently issued a public statement, “In the Face of Tyranny: Taking a Stand as Data Scientists.”

Ball’s analysis gave me something rare these days — a sense of hope that we, as Americans, will get through this dark period in our political history one way or another.

And hope is what we need.

Note: You can check out HRDAG’s “Structural Zero” here on Substack. Working with HRDAG these past few years has been especially rewarding.

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