"May I say, well done in the Americas. You were superb, absolutely superb. Put that little ratbag in his place."

Said Rod Stewart, quoted in "Rod Stewart hails King Charles for putting ‘ratbag’ Trump ‘in his place’/The singer made the remark during a line-up at a 50th anniversary concert for the King’s Trust at the Royal Albert Hall, London" (London Times).

Did King Charles put Trump in his place? Maybe it's like that "bike rage" incident with Benedict Cumberbatch we were talking about yesterday. Two entirely nonviolent men stopped to exchange a few sharp words. 

The commenters over there at the London Times are going after Rod. Top-rated comment: "Rod Stewart put the King and Queen in a very embarrassing position by making political comments in a receiving line. It just shows he has no class whatsoever and doesn’t have the brains he was born with."

And: "Ah, Rod Stewart who made millions for being a hedonistic rockstar boasted about numerous, groupies, and rampant infidelity calling somebody else a 'ratbag' while shaking hand with the highest example of infidelity. Must have his picture in the dictionary next to hypocrite!"

Is this the first appearance of the word "ratbag" on this blog? No, it came up here, where I quoted the NYT obituary for Barry Humphries ("Dame Edna"). The NYT has printed "ratbag" a few times. In a 1984 piece about travel guidebooks, it has: "[I]n a section on 'picturesque patterns of speech'... the 'Maverick Guide to Australia' tells us that a bicyclist there is called a bikey, that to grizzle means to complain and that a ratbag is an eccentric character."

Well, Trump surely is an eccentric character. He should own it. Kind of cool too — isn't it? — in the American way of thinking — to have Rod Stewart calling you a "ratbag."

ADDED: Let's also consider the notion of putting someone "in their place." It reflects a background belief that people have a social rank or a station in life. For Rod Stewart — who, I hear, started from gasoline alley — to praise the King — a person of the highest rank — for putting someone "in their place" is pretty funny. And, we're told, the King just laughed. And didn't that put Rod in his place?

Take me back, carry me back down the gasoline alley where I started from....

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"This day is historic in Alberta history. It’s the first step to the next step — we’ve gotten by Round 3 and now we’re in the Stanley Cup final."

Said Mitch Sylvestre, head of Stay Free Alberta, at the Elections Alberta office today, with 7 trucks to delivering what is said to be almost 302,000 signatures — 178,000 signatures are needed to trigger a vote.

Quoted in "Alberta separatist group submits signatures for referendum on leaving Canada" (MSN). 

Daniel Béland, a McGill University poli sci professor, said: "Right now, support for independence in Alberta is rather low. Less than 30% and much lower if we only focus on hard-core supporters...."

"And it is a vicious cycle: the more women and non-binary people do the overwhelming majority of resistance work..."

"... the more men take in the wrong-headed message that this work is not for them...."

Writes Saul Austerlitz, author of "How to Assemble an Activist," in "How do we get more men to join the anti-Trump resistance? My activist group is about 80% women. Where did all the men go – and how can we get them back?" (Guardian).

My first thought was: Don't push the "and non-binary people" talk. But anyway isn't it funny that you're so vitally interested in the male/female split and simultaneously hot to insert "and non-binary people"? 

"My unscientific conclusion is that the men who have already drifted away, whatever their reasons, are unlikely to come back. Instead, now is an ideal time to extend an invitation to the men in our circles who hover on the edges, shouting fruitlessly at their TV screen or social-media feed, not knowing yet how much good they can do – or how much better they will feel

"About 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged...."

".... according to a survey published Monday. Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans, according to a survey published Monday by NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news outlets. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were also more likely than older people to think the incident was staged, according to the report."

WaPo reports, in "Many Americans think Trump assassination attempts were fake, survey finds/About 1 in 4 say the correspondents’ dinner shooting was staged, the poll found, including roughly a third of Democrats, as conspiracy theories spread widely online."

Is it Trump's fault?

"A character doesn't know if they're in a comedy or a drama. They're just living their life, right?"

"And so if funny things happen around this character, then the movie or the show is a comedy. But if it's tragic or scary or whatever, it leans towards drama. Sometimes it's a mixture of both. But I think if you can tell a character knows they're in a comedy, it's intrinsically less funny. I like somebody like Alan Arkin or Peter Sellers—they always seem very true to their characters. You couldn't tell whether Alan Arkin was doing something intensely dramatic or something crazily funny. He'd play different characters but he was equally committed to both of them and never letting on. He was never winking like, 'I'm in a comedy. Here we go. Watch this joke. You're going to laugh.'"

"It was crazy. It was such a pompous road rage it almost felt like it had been staged. He was calling Benedict 'deluded' and 'a liar.'"

"Benedict still managed to charm everyone watching even though he was having a meltdown. They went at each other about five times. It was really busy, and they blocked the lane so no one else could get through. The masked guy was obviously some kind of vigilante. He was really taken aback when he saw it was Benedict Cumberbatch, but he doubled down on his rage. Everyone was just stood there with jaws dropped. These school kids asked 'is that Dr Strange?' and asked for a picture with him. Benedict said 'not at the moment, in a minute'; he was lovely with them, they were awe struck. I don’t condone dangerous driving, but for this guy to follow him and cause an incident like this was worse than Benedict slowly cutting that light."

Said the person who caught it on video, quoted in "Benedict Cumberbatch in bike rage row after running red light/A ‘vigilante’ cyclist called him deluded and a liar during the ten-minute altercation, which was filmed by a passer-by" (London Times).

 

Sunrise... with moon.

Write about whatever you like in the comments.

"So, what I notice when you talk with people is you seem like a tough guy, but you're really sensitive."

"You're an incredible listener, obviously. You learn all these things and you're putting together—this is my impression—a kind of map of the world, a map of knowledge through all these different people's eyes. My question for you is: how do you see culture shifting? Because I think you're really sensitive to it, and you're kind of like one of these signal fish—you notice what's happening in the environment and you're going to guide the school of fish accordingly. Do you think the culture is shifting toward better use of these exceptional — or natural — capacities that we already have, or do you think we're shifting away from it and we're going to run away in fear?"

Says Julia Mossbridge, a cognitive neuroscientist, beginning her interview with Joe Rogan by asking him a question.

Rogan gives a good answer:

I could plainly read that this anti-Pratt ad seems like a pro-Pratt ad, and I still thought, surely this must be a clever pro-Pratt ad.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen an attack ad that comes off as an endorsement like this one https://t.co/MU0rAHM0Gc

— Dr. Ben Braddock (@GraduatedBen) May 10, 2026

Vance or Rubio? "According to multiple people close to the president, Mr. Trump asks advisers who they prefer..."

"... before frequently musing that he should just have Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio run together on the same presidential ticket in 2028. Mr. Trump’s advisers say he is simply having fun polling people, and that 2028 is not at the top of his mind at all.... According to several people close to both men, Mr. Vance and Mr. Rubio, who are friends, do not want to be seen as competing against each other for the 2028 presidential nomination.... By several accounts, the two actually do get along. It is not uncommon to see them laughing together at White House events. They talk about sports and family when they are together. They are also both very aware of the chatter about their reputations and respective futures...."

I'm reading "Vance or Rubio? Trump Muses on Successor as the ‘Kids’ Fill Bigger Roles. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are boosting their profiles, generating speculation about who’s lining up for the 2028 presidential nomination" (NYT).

I'd like to see both of them running, and I'd like them to find a new way that could be fascinatingly cooperative. I'm inferring that they both strongly support each other and are used to working together. They don't have to compete against each other at all. Each could recommend the other. Debates could have both of them arguing for essentially the same thing but giving the people the opportunity to choose which one will be the presidential nominee and which the vice presidential nominee.

A Spencer Pratt joke about free buses.

Zohran Mamdani: The NY subway will be free.

Spencer Pratt: The LA busses will be free... from urine, feces, stabbing, and attacks.@spencerpratt "So that's kind of similar. We both have free things for public transportation." pic.twitter.com/eWmPOsynrM

— jay plemons (@jayplemons) May 9, 2026

"In the book, [Jon] Krakauer describes [Sandy] Hill as a 'millionaire socialite-cum-climber' and claims sherpas carried her espresso maker..."

"... with beans from her favourite New York restaurant, and newspaper clippings about herself to be handed out at the Everest base camp. 'A great many people were offended by her ostentatious displays of wealth and by the shameless way she chased the limelight,' Krakauer wrote in the book, which sold in its millions. [Hill] later said that the 'espresso maker' was actually an eight-inch manual stovetop percolator.... The book also depicted an anonymous couple in the group, referred to as X and Y, who had an affair on the expedition. 'That was me. I am Madam X,' Hill has confirmed, while her partner was a snowboarder. The liaison angered the sherpas as they believed it brought bad karma and caused the storm...."

I'm reading "'Villain' of Into Thin Air breaks silence on Everest tragedy/The New York socialite Sandy Hill speaks for the first time about what happened on the mountain 30 years ago and the depression that followed her ordeal" (London Times).

"At Notion, the $11 billion business software developer he founded 13 years ago, [Ivan Zhao] hired a high-schooler."

"'We had to ask his parents for permission,' he explained. 'This guy has no experience working anywhere, but he is so talented, and he just grew up with YouTube, grew up with language models, so he knows how to access information given the tools in front of him.' The move was a small example, Zhao argued, of what he referred to as a new 'abundance approach' unlocked by powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools. 'We’ve become a lot less picky about your capabilities and years of experience,' he explained. 'We are almost doing the reverse of what we were doing before.' Where once Zhao hired mostly mid-career, mid-level workers, Notion... now targets either very young or senior operators. The former are high on 'agency' (the enthusiasm to try things and embrace new tools); the latter often have high taste (a sense of what works and what doesn’t, refined through years of experience)...."

So begins "America’s white-collar jobs bloodbath gathers pace/US business has embraced AI, but predictions of mass unemployment may be based on the false premise that there’s a fixed amount of work to be done" (London Times).

"The worst part about AI is that it is giving the experience of competence to people who are stupid."

"These people who now are firing off 30-page Claude AI slop documents and they think they're smart and brilliant. They're following up with you, asking you to read them, and you check them out. None of it makes sense! These are people who, before AI, they were incompetent people. They couldn't even make a document, they couldn't write a good 2-page document, they couldn't organize their thoughts. Because they couldn't do that, they actually couldn't produce any output. And now they can produce output. They produce extremely long outputs that are terrible. It's because they, for the first time in their lives, have the experience of competence. It's making the rest of us miserable."

Says Jake Abrams, on TikTok. I prefer to read his comment as text, but you might want to observe him and see if it affects your reaction to what he's saying. I saw this first as video and decided to blog it but took the trouble to make a transcript because I find the video distracting. He drops the microphone at the end.

Clearly, he thinks he is one of the smart people. He doesn't like the stupid people horning in on the space that belonged to him and his people — you know, the ones who were always producing documents that gave off the impression of competence. Have those documents been making much sense? Were they concise? 

Now that everyone can produce long documents that look good superficially, what's going to happen? If people continue to read documents, will they separate out the search for what was written by A.I. or will they judge everything skeptically? It's more likely that they will use A.I. to read the documents and to assess them critically. In the end, who's going to feel that they are "smart and brilliant"? Is Abrams afraid that those he wants to view as stupid, perhaps because they didn't go to a good college, are going to play the game of using A.I. better than those who thought they had it made because they did go to a good college?

We'll see who picks up the tools and uses them best. 

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.