"He has a photo of his late friend Hunter S Thompson and a doll of Donald Trump climbing into a cage with the American flag inside it — the 'horrible cage,' he explains of the US presidency."

"On the coffee table I spot a magnifying glass, a book on Jack the Ripper and an ashtray with 'Hello C***y' written on it. This rented house is where Depp had been living for months but he knows that he has to move. Somebody of his infamy simply cannot live near Carnaby Street without getting stuck indoors. 'I can be isolated and happier than a clam,' he explains. 'But I don’t get out much. I’m stuck with my thoughts; just thinking, writing or watching weird shit on YouTube. It can’t be healthy... But there is never any way to hide, and I just feel uncomfortable causing this weird form of attention I do, because I’m really shy.' How is that compatible with his career? 'Well, fame is the last thing I ever chased...'... Does he miss having the children about? 'Oh man, my kids growing up in the south of France in their youth?... I was Papa. I cannot tell you how much I loved being Papa.... Then, suddenly, Papa was out the window. I was Dad. But Papa was awesome and I’m getting old enough for Papa to possibly come back. Some motherf***er’s going to have to call me Papa!'"

From "Johnny Depp: ‘I was a crash test dummy for MeToo’/Over a rambling four-hour session with Jonathan Dean, the actor opens up about the Amber Heard trials, his painful childhood, 40 years of fame and the friends who turned their backs on him" (London Times)

"But the fact of the matter is, I had expected by now you would hear harsher rhetoric and seeing more missile attacks. "

"Why would the Iranians be downplaying the amount of damage done? Well, they're probably wildly embarrassed about this. Here was the national treasure of Iran, right? The nuclear program was the symbol of its strength and its resistance to the United States. The caretakers of the nuclear program, both the mullahs and the military, and the civilian president and administration had no higher responsibility than protecting this as the ultimate defense for the Iranian state. And here they've now lost that ability, at least for a while. And there's another possible explanation... which is they could be downplaying it so that it doesn't force their hand into a massive response, one that would put them on an escalation ladder with the United States...."

Said David Sanger — on today's episode of the NYT podcast "The Daily," "The U.S. Bombed Iran. Now What?" (Podscribe) — answering the question "What has been the response from the Iranians so far?"

Do you want your car out there working for you — picking up strangers and driving them around — when you're not in it supervising the goings-on?

Elon Musk says Tesla’s fleet will be part Uber, part Airbnb

Tesla owners can easily add their vehicles to the autonomous fleet through the app when not using them.

They’ll earn money—often more than their monthly payment, while Tesla takes a small cut pic.twitter.com/j0tD7V3Onl

— Dima Zeniuk (@DimaZeniuk) June 22, 2025

It took me a moment to understand "They’ll earn money—often more than their monthly payment." I confess my first thought was "monthly payment" for what? Then I realized that people were being prompted to go into debt to buy cars that could work for them — robot slaves. Why stop at one if they're all expected to earn more than "their" car-loan payment? But you can see Musk smirking about the money he will make if people buy multiple Teslas in pursuit of the dream of a fleets of Teslas that crowd the streets of their town in the desperate, unending search for dollars to fend off the repo man.

Things I asked Grok: 1. What's the plot of the movie "Repo Man"? 2. Propose a remake of "Repo Man" where the cars are self-driving Teslas that people have gone into debt to buy because they believed in the AirBnB business model, recently proposed, where the car earns money for you while you're not even in it and people are hoping the cars will earn enough to pay off the loan they took to buy it, which was successful until supply way exceeded demand and thousands of car owners were caught short. 3. Would Elon Musk like this movie?

Grok answers: here.

"Lefty upstart Zohran Mamdani has leapfrogged over former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the city’s ranked choice Democratic primary for mayor..."

"... according to a stunning new poll released Monday. In its hypothetical initial round of voting, Cuomo’s lead shrinks to 3 percentage points, with 35% of likely Democratic voters supporting him compared to 32% for Mamdani and 13% for city Comptroller Brad Lander, the Emerson College Polling/Pix 11/The Hill survey found.... [S]ince no one garners the more than 50% of the vote needed to win outright, the ranked choice system kicks in. That means that even if a voter’s first choice is eliminated in successive rounds of calculations, their other picks could still be in the mix and emerge as the eventual overall winner. Mamdani finally surpasses Cuomo in the eighth round [!!!!!] of the simulated ranked choice voting — 51.8% to 48.2% — in the latest poll conducted June 18-20...."

I'm reading "Shocking poll shows Mamdani overtaking Cuomo in NYC’s ranked choice primary" (NY Post).

"Kilmar Abrego Garcia will likely be placed in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody due to an immigration detainer the government has on him, despite a Tennessee judge on Sunday ordering his release in his criminal case..."

"While U.S. Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes' on Sunday denied the government's motion to detain Abrego Garcia, she acknowledged that if released, 'there is no suggestion that the action taken by the government will be anything other than detaining him in ICE custody pending further removal proceedings.' In her 51-page order, Judge Holmes said the government failed to prove there is a 'serious risk' that Abrego Garcia will flee or that he will obstruct justice in the case. Holmes also said the government's evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13 'consists of general statements, all double hearsay' from cooperating witnesses. Holmes said Abrego Garcia 'has no criminal history' of any kind and said that his 'reputed gang membership' is contradicted by the government's own evidence that was presented during a hearing two weeks ago.... 'Even without discounting the weight of the testimony of the first and second male cooperators for the multiple layers of hearsay, their testimony and statements defy common sense,' Holmes said...."

ABC News reports.

The ABC headline seems designed to cause a hasty reader to think ICE would be violating the judge's order: "ICE will likely detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia despite judge's motion to have him released."

The judge didn't make a motion. The judge denied the government's motion but, as you see above, said "there is no suggestion that the action taken by the government will be anything other than detaining him in ICE custody pending further removal proceedings."

And weren't there also earlier versions of this story that made people think the judge was requiring the government to set Abrego Garcia free? Yes, here.

"Mr. Trump had been under pressure from the noninterventionist wing of his party to stay out of the conflict, and was having lunch that day..."

".... with one of the most outspoken opponents of a bombing campaign, Stephen K. Bannon, fueling speculation that he might hold off. It was almost entirely a deception. Mr. Trump had all but made up his mind to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the military preparations were well underway for the complex attack. Less than 30 hours after Ms. Leavitt relayed his statement [that he would make a decision about whether or not to strike Iran 'within the next two weeks'] he would give the order for an assault.... Mr. Trump’s 'two weeks' statement was just one aspect of a broader effort at political and military misdirection that took place over eight chaotic days, from the first Israeli strikes against Iran to the moment when a fleet of B-2 stealth bombers took off from Missouri for the first American military strikes inside Iran since that country’s theocratic revolution in 1979...."

From "Shifting Views and Misdirection: How Trump Decided to Strike Iran/When Israel began its assault on Iran, President Trump kept his distance. But within days he was on a path that led to an extensive bombing mission aided by political and military ruses" (NYT).

Sunrise — 5:33.

Talk about whatever you like in the comments EXCEPT Iran. Go one post down for that.

And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"It’s not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!"

Wrote President Trump, on Truth Social.

"We’re not at war with Iran. We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program," said JD Vance.

Quoted in "Vance says U.S. 'not at war with Iran, we're at war with Iran's nuclear program'/President Donald Trump said Saturday night that the U.S. had dropped bombs on three Iranian nuclear sites, the first time the U.S. has directly attacked Iran" (NBC News).

I'm interested in that rhetorical device: "We’re not at war with Iran. We’re at war with Iran’s nuclear program." 

I believe it's called paradiastole — or redescription. Other examples: 

George W. Bush, 2003: "We’re not occupying Iraq. We’re liberating it."

Barack Obama, 2013: "This is not a war on terror. It’s a campaign against specific networks like al-Qaeda."

Bill Clinton, 1999: "This is not a war. It’s a humanitarian intervention."

Benjamin Netanyahu, 2014: "We’re not fighting the Palestinian people. We’re fighting Hamas.”

Ronald Reagan, 1980s: "We’re not waging war against Nicaragua. We’re supporting freedom fighters."

"I am having a hard time understanding the following Logan Pearsall Smith quote: 'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.'"

"Googling didn't help much other than whose quote it is. What exactly does the above quote mean?"

Wrote someone at the English Language & Usage website, 12 years ago.

I'm reading that because I was reading — not living — this 2017 New Yorker article: "Philip Larkin and Me: A Friendship with Holes in It": "I remember him one day snatching from my mantelpiece a bookmark, on which was inscribed Logan Pearsall Smith’s remark 'People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.' He threw it down in a little fit of anger, protesting that nothing is more important than life."

These days, someone who couldn't even understand the quote — perhaps someone new to English and mystified by "is the thing" — would probably ask A.I.

I talked to A.I., which is not living, and I said: Understanding the quote (and the love for or objection to it) on a deeper level requires you to come to terms with the question whether you are not living when you are reading.

And then, getting into my A.I.-induced flow, I said: Smith is making a joke out of the implication that to read is not to live. Presumably other people, like Paul's grandfather, in "A Hard Day's Night," say that those who are reading are not living. Instead of fighting with that assertion, Smith says he'd rather read. That's a cheeky response. But it infuriates Larkin. 

"As a gay man I applaud this decision. The court may be acting in bad faith, they may be hostile to gay rights, but..."

"... this ruling will help protect gay kids and gender non-conforming kids from this insane gender ideology that suggests that they may have been born in the wrong bodies if they don't fit some retrograde heterosexual gender role. You can't argue on one hand that gender is 'fluid' and on the other that it is somehow fixed in small children who have yet to experience puberty. This is madness, especially as we know these medical procedures lead to a lifetime of medical issues and a shorter lifespan. Only an adult can make these decisions for themselves."

Writes John02116 in the comments section to the Megan McArdle column, "The ACLU bet big on a trans rights case. Its loss was predictable. A Supreme Court ruling shows trans advocates failed to see the fragility of the liberal consensus" (WaPo)(free-access link so you can see the big disconnect between the column and the comments).

An even more strongly worded comment comes from JR Colorado:

"Operation Midnight Hammer."

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Dan “Razin” Caine describes OPERATION MIDNIGHT HAMMER.

Iran’s nuclear facilities got nailed.pic.twitter.com/tx1bQo2525

— Paul A. Szypula 🇺🇸 (@Bubblebathgirl) June 22, 2025

How does it happen that the lawyer addresses the judge as "honey"?

NEW: Lawyer is speechless after he accidentally calls a Colorado judge "honey" while arguing whether or not a violent s*xual assault counts as one act or can be broken into multiple acts.

So awkward.

Judge Terry Fox was seen holding back laughter during the incident.

Lawyer:… pic.twitter.com/6FJQyIiPds

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) June 21, 2025

I can see at the link that one theory is that something about the judge or the kind of argument they were having felt so much like talking to his wife that the endearment he uses on his wife popped in on its own.

Another guess would be that he's one of those men who use "honey" on women when he's putting them in their place. It's a diminishment, not an endearment. 

But what a screwup! He not only let the word slip out, he expended a lot of his time — his client's time — apologizing and attempting to recover.  

"At the moment, perhaps the greatest drama in the world of popular history is..."

"... the question of whether the 89-year-old Robert Caro can finish the fifth and final volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography, a titanic undertaking that has consumed 50 years of his life. His personal papers, some of which he has already given to the New York Historical, so far constitute 150 linear feet of file boxes, and one wonders how many more prodigious biographies Caro could have produced over those 50 years if a chatbot had been able to synthesize some portion of that material for him. Then again, without a mania to touch every single source himself, and to pour the rigor of all that relentless reading into his prose, an A.I.-assisted Robert Caro would not have been Robert Caro at all."

From "A.I. Is Poised to Rewrite History. Literally. The technology’s ability to read and summarize text is already making it a useful tool for scholarship. How will it change the stories we tell about the past?" (NYT).

What Trump posted on Truth Social 3 hours before his post telling us "We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan."

Cocky deflection:

I caught a glimpse of my own obituary.

In the email this morning, the Google alert I've had on my name for decades brings this:

I send that image to Meade (along with the link to the website the alert wants me to click), and this conversation follows: