Yes! Push that piss baby billionaire right over the edge!

Elon Musk had another bad week. He was interviewed, and the interviewer asked mildly challenging questions, and poor little Elon melted down publicly. It’s what he always done. He has the most fragile ego.

I agree with Jamelle Bouie that we need to push harder.

As he points out at the end, all of Musk’s enterprises seem to be papier mache facades. OK, SpaceX has a good technological core because he bought good engineers, but everything else is falling apart (and even SpaceX is floundering lately). He’s not worth a trillion dollars…and that already fell apart fast. Now is the time to make him squirm more over Tesla and Hyperloop and Neuralink and his fake androids and the hash he’s made of Twitter. He’s so mentally unstable it’ll prompt an unseemly collapse.

Then we have to work on Bezos…

Political discrimination against beer!

I’ve never been much of an alcohol drinker — the example of my alcoholic grandfather kept me wary of the stuff — but I’ve gotten even more extreme over the course of the last few years and am a teetotaler now. I just figure I don’t need to add to the problems of aging with something that’s stacking on other difficulties.

But there is one event that might make me temporarily end my abstinence. When Donald Trump dies, I’m going to have a margarita. Just one. I might even be moved to dance.

If the conservative powers-that-be have their way, such behavior would be illegal.

A popular brewery that promised free beer to its patrons upon the death of President Donald Trump is having its alcohol permit revoked.

The Wisconsin Department of Revenue is planning to shut down the Minocqua Brewing Company by August 4, according to a newsletter published Sunday by brewery owner Kirk Bangstad, who described the business as “the state’s most progressive brewery.”

Please let it be known to MAGA that conservatives want to prohibit the sale of beer.

Kangaroo court is in session

“COVID “”Cures”””

Anthony Fauci was hauled up in a senate hearing where ignorant, ideologically-poisoned buffoons like Rand Paul harangued him with absurd accusations. He rightly responded by taking the fifth — there is no point in arguing with delusional idiots. At one point, Paul had Fauci’s lawyer thrown out of the hearing.

Dr Anthony Fauci, who served as a key adviser to Donald Trump and Joe Biden during the Covid-19 pandemic, has refused to answer questions at a high-profile congressional hearing, accusing a Republican senator of having an “unhinged obsession” with him.

Fauci, the veteran former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid), invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination when appearing before a Senate committee on Wednesday.

Fauci said Republican Kentucky senator Rand Paul had, who called the hearing, led a years-long investigation into himself and the origins of the pandemic aimed at “embarrassing and intimidating me”, and ultimately landing him “behind bars”.

This is the way. Paul’s harassment was ultimately fruitless, except that the current political regime gave him the opportunity to try and browbeat an 85 year old scientist who had espoused a rational, evidence-based approach to the COVID pandemic. Fauci’s approach reflected the scientific consensus.

A 2024 survey of virologists from the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute found that most believed the pandemic began as a so-called spillover event, or a virus jumping from an infected animal to a human. Similarly, a group of virologists argued in the Journal of Virology that the “preponderance” of evidence points to a natural origin, even as the “lab leak” theory received outsized attention. Gain-0f-function research, meanwhile, has split the scientific community for years.

There is no good evidence for the lab leak hypothesis. It’s just a xenophobic contrivance made up to place the blame on China. It’s a political distortion of the evidence.

What was most bizarre is that Rand Paul exposed Fauci’s diary, in which he stated his opinions about certain political figures (and some journalists) without any diplomatic hesitations.

The scheduled hearing comes just days after Paul released what he described as Fauci’s “diary”, a more than 1,100-page document characterized as revealing Fauci’s inner conflicts about the lab leak theory. Scientists have said this is a normal part of scientific debate.

The diary also contained entries about Trump, who he advised closely during the early days of the pandemic. He described the president as “rambling”, “crazy”, “desperate”, “bumbling”, “incompetent”, “an idiot”, “a true embarrassment”, “totally nuts” and “truly an obnoxious adolescent”.

Hey, that was also just an echo of the scientific consensus! Trump is a bumbling incompetent. Some of us have been unabashedly saying that in public for many years. I would just rebuke Fauci for hiding his feelings away in his private notes. Let it all hang out, Anthony! It’s not as if being reserved about your true feelings has spared you any suffering at the hands of morons like Paul.

The true purpose of the hearing was obvious — the goal was to intimidate scientists from speaking out about biomedical approaches to disease, and to pander to all the frauds and influencers who profit off medical misinformation.

Gary Peters, a Democratic senator of Michigan, described the hearing as damaging to science and ignoring ongoing public health threats, such as the outbreak of the food-borne parasite cyclospora and measles, both at record highs.

“It’s attempting to turn one person into a scapegoat for a crisis that that hundreds of officials across the Biden and Trump administrations’ were responsible for handling,” said Peters, who did not ask Fauci any questions. “This is only going to deter other scientific experts from public service.”

While the politicians are scapegoating Fauci, they’re giving a free pass to the MAHA goons who have enabled a cyclospora outbreak, watered down food safety regulations, and fueled criminal anti-vax mythologies that are allowing a measles comeback. The USA is at risk of losing our measles elimination status, thanks to people like RFK jr.

These people ought to be more self-aware. If they can drag the guy who successfully led the fight against the pandemic, I’m hoping we have the opportunity someday to turn the tables and confront the disease enablers with the butcher’s bill. There’s a better case to be made that they caused millions of deaths.

Too hot

My Wednesdays all this month have been consumed with running errands to Alexandria, which have been worsened by the fact that the AC in our car is dead. I’ve just spent a couple of hours in a car with windows rolled down and a roaring hot wind blowing past me. I’m slumped in a puddle of sweat right now.

OK, a distraction: anyone else remember the Hot Stuff comics? How about Wendy, the good little witch, and Casper, the friendly ghost? That’s the trinity that provided me with all of my theological training. It wasn’t any less contradictory and silly than the nonsense the Lutheran church tried to stuff me with, and it was more amusing and more ethical than anything in the Bible.

I can be even more delusional!

Jake Paul has inspired me. He’s this terrible YouTuber who made a lot of money with stupid prank videos aimed at kids who then bought his way into a boxing “career”, where he paid washed-up boxers to fight him, but not too hard. His last big match, he had his jaw shattered by his opponent. So now he’s talking about going to Stanford to get some football experience (hint: that’s not why you go to Stanford) or going straight to the pros, the Cleveland Browns or the Dallas Cowboys. He’s out of his mind. He dropped out of high school, so forget Stanford. Football is a tough sport, especially pro football, and he hasn’t trained for the skills you need to play the game. He is so incredibly delusional.

But then…he gets specific and says he wants to play “slot receiver”, whatever that is. And Rick Strom lets us know that the expected weight range for that position is 190-205 pounds.

Wait a minute. I’m in that weight range. I’m going to be looking for something to do in the Spring, maybe that’s a retirement option for me. It’s no more insane that a 70 year old man (with 80 year old knees) might try to turn pro football slot receiver than that Jake Paul might go for it.

One difference: my top choice would be the Seattle Seahawks, with the Minnesota Vikings as backup possibility. Call me, team.

They’ll kill anything

We found another Argiope down the street. She’d made a spectacular catch.

Her web is in a great location, because she had a second dragonfly trussed up and awaiting consumption.

These are top predators in their community, except for the birds. But the birds don’t want to stick their beaks in a sticky web.

A review of The Odyssey I can respect

Emily Wilson has written a review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey! She’s the author of an excellent translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, one that Nolan himself mentioned as an inspiration, so she is one of the best qualified people to judge the movie.

She starts off diplomatically.

Christopher Nolan’s $250 million action movie version of Homer’s ancient Greek poem is an entertaining way to hide from the high temperatures for a few hours. Nolan’s trademark jumps and twists in the narrative structure are relatively easy to follow, and appropriate for The Odyssey, a narrative of tales nested in tales. My teenagers had a good time. Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display – and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.

Uh-oh. I think she had mixed feelings about the movie.

As in his previous films, Nolan is interested in the discontinuities of space and time, in magic, tricks, craft, technology, rivalry, substitution, masks, miscommunication, what we remember and what we choose to forget. Yet again, survival is portrayed as a kind of triumph. Yet again, there are long, claustrophobic scenes of drowning and near-drowning, and technically impressive episodes in which buildings are engulfed in flames and vehicles explode. Yet again, we watch a male character’s desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object. I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality. Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion. My eyes stayed dry, even for Argos the dog – whose adorableness as a puppy is predictably amped up to suit our animal-loving times. If only the human characters had been treated with such serious attention.

It’s been playing at the Morris Theater for going on two weeks, and one thing I’ve noticed while working concessions is how loud this movie is. Thumping, shrieking, clanging at high volume while I’m trying to take a popcorn order — it’s been an epic struggle. But yes, I agree about the flatness of the characters. One of the most notable moments of acting in the film is when Ann Hathaway’s Penelope cuts loose and expresses the complexity of her feelings — anger, resentment, confusion — to Tom Holland’s Telemachus, but mostly she’s seen as a quiet, reserved figure behind a screen.

I also expected more from Argos. In the movie, the suitors toss the old dog onto a dung pile, and when Odysseus returns, the dog notices…and simply dies. Blink and you’ll miss it. It was an opportunity to humanize Matt Damon’s Odysseus, and it was allowed to pass.

Another complaint: the Americanization of the violence.

But the representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world. We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it – a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar – but Nolan doesn’t. The Trojans are dehumanised by their masks; we know none of them by name or face. The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors or slaves. During the sack of Troy – which he supposedly organised – Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.

I just finished reading a translation of The Odyssey last night — Emily Wilson’s, in fact — and that jumped out at me. In the bloody massacre of the suitors, as Odysseus goes on his killing spree, Homer doesn’t dwell on the gore, but instead names each man as they are murdered, and sometimes goes on to talk about their fathers, and maybe some notable feature of their character. Many of them are terrified and beg for mercy. It’s a much more impactful way of dramatizing the slaughter, rather than showing a knife going into Antinous’s throat.

The book also details many events that the movie omitted. I’d forgotten what a compulsive liar Odysseus was. Multiple times he lies to people he encounters, giving his cover story about being from Crete, with elaborate details about his background. When he finally meets Penelope again, the first thing he does is spin a long story about his alias, all of it entirely unnecessary, but “liar” is one of his epithets, so I guess he has to do it.

Also omitted from the movie is his treatment of the female slaves who slept with the suitors. He gets his head household slave to rat them out, puts them to work cleaning out all the dead bodies and gore in his palace, and then pitilessly hangs them so they die kicking and struggling. It’s not a pretty story, but fortunately, Matt Damon did not have to deal with such complications.

Wilson has her gripes, especially with the screenplay, but still ends on an upbeat note.

Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek. Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language and history departments. Nolan, who studied English at University College London – where students still study The Odyssey as a first year ‘foundational text’ – is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.

The movie got me to re-read The Odyssey, so I’m an example of that. I’ve always championed the importance of the humanities in education, so nothing new there, and sorry, no, I’m not going to study ancient Greek, but maybe more people will.

It’s a great essay from an expert. If it’s too long for you, Wilson has also posted an abbreviated bullet-point version of her main points on BlueSky. Also do see the movie — your local theaters appreciate it — but I think it would be a good idea to bring earplugs.