We don’t have beach reading in the Midwest, lacking in oceans

Since FDotM mentioned how social media can cut into your book-reading time, I thought I’d say that for me, it isn’t true. I can read a book any time I want, and I do. It is my custom to read for an hour before bed, or sometimes over lunch, and I chew through books pretty fast.

Sometimes I pick up trash reads. The latest was one called Pistols: A Deep Sea Thriller (hint: you know it’s going to be a throw-away when they need to include the genre in the title; sometimes you can just look at the cover). It’s totally ridiculous. It’s about stomatopods that are exposed to toxic waste and swim around, snipping people in half and cooking them with high intensity sonic bursts. My favorite part was when the scientist character has to explain why they also have toxic slime, and starts babbling about ubiquitination, before he has done any kind of analysis of tissue, or even seen one of the monsters. Cheesy, but sometimes you need something silly.

I’ve also been on a Madeline Miller kick lately, and that’s definitely not cheesy trash. I recently re-read The Song of Achilles, which was magnificent and nearly made me cry. Circe is also really, really good and well worth your while. I’m going on a collecting trip in the old Lake Agassiz lands up north this weekend, and picked up her short story, Galatea for those moments when I’m not chasing spiders.

See? Being an internet nerd is not incompatible with actively reading for entertainment.

Go ahead. Prove your bookworm cred by telling me all the stuff you read for fun. Don’t be shy, and admit to your popcorn reading as well as your high-brow stuff.

Wisconsin isn’t a popular site for reality

I wish we could vaccinate some people with a heavy dose of reality.

The state next to mine, Wisconsin, has gone insane. The raging anti-vax hysteria

The Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature on Wednesday voted to stop Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ administration from requiring seventh graders to be vaccinated against meningitis.

The state Senate and Assembly, with all Republicans in support and Democrats against, voted to block the proposal. There is no current meningitis vaccination requirement for Wisconsin students.

The Legislature’s vote also makes it easier for parents to get an exemption from a chicken pox vaccine requirement that is in place for all K-6 students. Evers’ administration wanted to require parents seeking a chicken pox vaccination exemption to provide proof that their child has previously been infected.

WHY? These are well-established, safe vaccines against terrible diseases. They work. But somehow, Republicans have got it in their heads that reasonable evidence-based medicine is bad.

This is getting personal, too. My daughter and son-in-law and my little 4 year old granddaughter all live in Wisconsin, and she’ll be attending Wisconsin public schools in a year. I don’t want her to get chicken pox or meningitis. Of course, I trust her parents to get her vaccinated even in the absence of a public health requirement — it’s all the other kids we have to worry about.

Social media confusion!

There are too many options for social media so far. Twitter is dying of a surfeit of Nazis and an incompetent overlord; Bluesky I haven’t tried, but I don’t trust it, since it’s run by the old overlord, and will probably follow the same trajectory; I’ve been on Mastodon for a while, and am comfortable with it; the new kid on the block is Threads, which is owned by the repulsive Zuckerberg. Let’s see what the First Dog on the Moon has to say about it!

I think the final category, “Owner seeks dominion over the Earth,” is definitive, which means I’ll stick with the distributed community of federated websites that lacks an owner.

History is cruel

Putin is, apparently, a student of history who has learned one lesson: “Russia will be saved not by pity but by cruelty.” I wouldn’t want to be in Yevgeny Prigozhin’s shoes right now, because Putin is probably planning to go all Peter the Great on him.

Russian leaders have always fashioned themselves as hideously cruel demi-gods, none more so than Putin’s hero Tsar Peter the Great, who went mano-a-mano with his own Prigozhin and an ersatz 17th century Wagner Group known as the Streltsy, a cadre of some 50,000 powerful soldier-tradesmen skilled in murder, embezzlement, and racketeering.

Although the Streltsy were sworn to protect the government, all the legitimized raping and pillaging made it difficult for them to decide who was in charge. Historian Robert Massie described them as “a kind of collective dumb animal, never quite sure who was its proper master, but ready to rush and bite anyone who challenged its own privileged position.”

And like Wagner Group’s 25,000-50,000 Kremlin-sponsored mercenary soldiers, the Streltsy, whose chief concern was also making money, made the doomed move to knock off their boss. Peter tortured thousands of them and their wives and children to death, with the Streltsy’s Prigozhin, Major Karpakov, strapped to a spit and twirled over a fire.

Peter sent his personal physician Dr. Carbonari to ensure Karpakov was slow-roasted. Let my notes from the historians in Russia’s state archive describe what happened next: “Karpakov was removed from the spit to rest before going back on the fire…Carbonari accidentally left his knife in the cell…Karparkov could no longer take the torture…Used the knife to slit his throat…But he was too weak and failed…Carbonari discovered him and he was returned to torture.”

But Putin allowed Prigozhin and the Wagner Group to peacefully retire to Belarus, you might say. I suspect that one reason for that is that it will give Putin an excuse to annex Belarus next. If his army can survive Ukraine, that is.

The people who have all the money have no art

I have fond memories of taking my newly wed wife on a date to see Raiders of the Lost Ark at the theater in downtown Eugene, back in the day. I also have fond memories of putting my toddler son Alaric in a little red wagon and trundling him over the Willamette River pedestrian bridge to the Valley River Center mall to see the next Indiana Jones movie…and also the Star War with all the Ewoks in it. These were movies made for entertaining fun, and were the background of my young adulthood. I think they also made my kids happy.

This past week, the latest Indiana Jones movie, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, is playing here in Morris, and it’ll probably be playing next week as well. I haven’t felt even the most subtle stirrings of sentimentality to motivate me to go. The movie studios have milked me dry.

Also playing: Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. I hope the theater is cleaning up — it’s a co-op, and I’m a member, but here I am, a guy who loves going to the movies, and I’m not at all interested. I’ve even got a free ticket tacked to the refrigerator, and the impulse just isn’t there any more.

One reason is that I’m aware that Indiana Jones is a terrible role model and a very bad scientist built on colonialist preconceptions, part of trope that has been thriving since H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

The basic outlines of the adventure genre will be familiar to Indy fans, though its structure is heavily beholden to the colonialist politics of Haggard’s era: A brilliant White man, very often a professor, deploys personal reserves of cleverness, resilience and unrelenting determination in the service of exploration, discovery and resource extraction. That narrative template guides these stories even when the author attempts to push back on their ideological implications. Think, for example, about how the Indiana Jones films use the Nazi menace to distract from the fact that our hero is almost always appropriating the treasures of Indigenous or pre-colonial peoples. It’s as if they felt obliged to remind us that there’s always a worse White man, as a sort of alibi. It makes perfect sense, from this perspective, that Indiana Jones’s least-successful films are the ones that, like “Temple of Doom,” leave the Nazis out.

That contributes to my lack of interest, for sure. I feel a little bit guilty for enjoying a tale of a swashbuckling college professor fighting Nazis and also, unfortunately, looting non-white people’s history. Unfortunately, the pleasure part of “guilty pleasure” started to fizzle out as I also realized that every single movie is centered on garbage pseudoscience/pseudoarchaeology — the Ark of the Covenant with its vengeful ghosts, an evil Hindu priest who can magic hearts out of his victims, a goblet that grants eternal life, the crystal skulls of telepathic space aliens, and now in the latest, an ancient widget that allows one to travel in time. When you lay it bare like that, stripped of its gallant romanticized hero, they just look stupid. Maybe I can suspend disbelief once or twice, but not for 42 years. The well has gone dry.

I can’t help but feel that Hollywood has lost the script. It’s no longer about creativity and leaps of imagination — it’s about franchises, and repeating the same thing over and over again to wring out every last drop of profit. Indiana Jones should have been retired after the third one, going out on a high note — you could even argue that the first one was enough, time to move on. Star Wars, the same story: wasn’t the first trilogy more than enough, take a break and develop some new “intellectual properties”. Don’t get me started on superhero movies. I am so over the endless permutations of Batman. And now they’ve got this “multiverse” nonsense as an excuse to slap new costumes on tired old musclebound heroes.

It’s not just me, either. I was shocked to discover that the ever-optimistic Mikey Neumann, of Movies with Mikey, failed to find a single moment of joy in his review of Space Jam 2 (a movie that was completely off my radar, admittedly, and would actively avert any interest I might have in going to the movies). This was entirely out of character for him, but I think I share his despair at the ongoing corporatization of art. Neumann can usually find something worthy in even the most dreadful dreck, but Space Jam 2 is the product of a soulless corporate beancounter who saw the entire legacy of Warner Bros. as a fantastic collection of assets, a pile of stuff he couldn’t appreciate but could sell at an ungodly profit.

There are still a few movies I look forward to seeing, but none of them are attached to a “franchise.” That word is killing movies, just as “franchise” has killed so many small, unique, interesting diners around the country. It’s a word that makes profit-seeking landlords and accountants drool, though — too bad it has the opposite effect on consumers.

Lorie Smith is a liar

I knew the Supreme Court was corrupt, but they aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. Their recent decision to allow businesses to discriminate against gay people was a total sham, in violation of basic principles even I, a legal ignoramus, recognize as baseless.

But what makes this clown show even worse is that the complaint at the heart of 303 Creative v. Elenis is completely made up. In Masterpiece, there really was a baker who really did discriminate against a gay couple, creating both standing and a fact pattern to discuss in court. With 303 Creative, however, the “facts” justifying the case are all make-believe. The plaintiff, Lorie Smith, sued on the grounds that she doesn’t want to make wedding websites for same-sex couples. But no one had actually requested that she do so, for one simple reason: She didn’t make wedding websites. Her lawsuit was purely hypothetical. Legally, she shouldn’t have had a right to sue at all.

To get around the fact that their client had no right to sue, ADF claimed she had received an inquiry from a man named “Stewart” who had some vague questions about maybe hiring 303 Creative in the future for a wedding to “Mike.” But it appears that the entire story may be fabricated. Melissa Gira Grant of the New Republic contacted Stewart, using the email and phone number included in the lawsuit. He denies having sent that request, pointing out that he is already married, to a woman.

Who needs facts anymore? Just make up any ol’ story you want, demand justice, and this Supreme Court will invent an excuse for you, as long as it aligns with their biases. I wasn’t surprised to learn that this particular decision was authored by Gorsuch, who is always happy to lie to promote his religious agenda.

This isn’t even the first opinion Gorsuch has written based on made-up “facts.” Last term, Gorsuch ruled in favor of a football coach who wanted to lead prayers at a public high school, in direct violation of the First Amendment. To get to the desired outcome, both Gorsuch flat-out lied about the situation. Gorsuch claims the coach merely “offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.” That, and this cannot be stated firmly enough, is a lie. As Sotomayor noted in her dissent, the coach actually held showy prayers at the 50-yard line during games. He made such a spectacle that “[m]embers of the public rushed the field to join Kennedy, jumping fences to access the field and knocking over student band members.” She even included helpful pictures, which is unusual in a dissent, to illustrate what a lying liar Gorsuch is.

The court is illegitimate and needs to be dissolved. Expect it to instead litter the law with phony precedents that will poison justice for years to come.

Mormonism is declining

Good. Can they die a little faster, please?

I always felt that living in Utah was like living in a nest of Scientologists — all this money-making scheming plastered over with a veneer of florid scripture written by a mountebank. I wouldn’t miss it if it disappeared altogether.

That’s nothing special about Mormonism, though. Look! All religions in the USA are dying slowly.

There are many factors behind this decline. Here’s one:

Meanwhile, the church’s close alliance with the GOP might be costing it members. As Notre Dame political science professor David Campbell, who was raised Mormon, told me, “There’s an allergic reaction among many Americans — particularly those who lean to the left politically — when religion and politics mix. We see it among Catholics. We see it among evangelicals. And we’re seeing it among Mormons.”

It gets messy when you include politics, though: the Republicans have become increasingly cult-like. That’s the next religion that needs to go!