“American warplanes dropped bombs on three nuclear sites in Iran on Saturday, President Trump announced on Saturday night, bringing the U.S. military directly into the war after days of uncertainty about whether he would intervene.”

The NYT reports.

“All planes are now outside of Iran air space,” he said in a post on social media, adding that a “full payload” of bombs had been dropped on Fordo, the heavily fortified underground facility in Iran that is critical to its nuclear program. “All planes are safely on their way home.”

Sunrise — 5:20, 5:39.

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"It’s 1975, and ‘Jaws’ just came out. Here’s what critics had to say. When the film premiered 50 years ago, movie reviewers hailed Steven Spielberg’s work as a masterpiece — most of the time."

A Washington Post headline that makes it seem as though it's a special thing to be able to access the contemporaneous reviews of an old movie. Obviously, it's not. It used to be.

And is there anything special about a movie being 50 years old (or some other round number)? It used to matter because it might make the movie suddenly more available.

As for "Jaws," I've never seen it. I've always imagined that it would bore me. I still feel that way. Waiting around for a shark to attack someone? I don't see the point. I don't have a tag for sharks. I have to give this post my "fish" tag. Have I ever seen a movie about fish? I don't think so.

"There are people that come, and they’ve been on it for three years, and they’re just so tired of feeling nauseous and constipated."

"They have come to Mountain Trek to get off of it. To learn accumulated lifestyle habits, so that they don’t then gain all the weight back."

Said Kirkland Shave, co-owner of the wellness retreat Mountain Trek, quoted in "The Ozempic era is forcing wellness retreats for the elite to change/Attendees might be looking to wean off weight-loss drugs or mitigate side effects such as digestive discomfort and muscle loss" (WaPo)(free-access link).

I've never gone on a wellness retreat — though I have watched Season 3 of "The White Lotus" — but I was interested enough to click through to the Mountain Trek website and to momentarily bask in the idea of the place. But as with all travel, you have to do the hard creative work of imagining what it's really like there.

"Feras Hamdan, a 36-year-old Ohio doctor, turned himself in... after allegedly forcing Republican Representative Max Miller off the road in a road rage incident."

"While authorities have not disclosed Hamdan's alleged motive in detail, law enforcement indicated that his actions appeared intentional and targeted.... The police report says that Hamdan allegedly honked his horn, shouted threats, and made aggressive gestures toward Miller while pursuing his vehicle. Witnesses said that Hamdan repeatedly attempted to block Miller's car from changing lanes before forcing it off the road. On the 911 call, Miller, who is Jewish, reported that a man driving a Tesla cut him off, displayed a Palestinian flag, and threatened, 'I'm going to cut your throat and your daughter's,' before adding, 'You're a dirty Jew.'..."

From "Who Is Feras Hamdan? Doctor Who Allegedly Drove Congressman Off Road" (Newsweek).

Issa Elkhatib, Hamdan's attorney, in a statement on Facebook: 'The allegations against my client, Dr. Feras Hamdan, are not only baseless and outrageous, but they also amount to defamatory attacks on his character and reputation. Dr. Hamdan is a respected physician, a devoted husband, a loving father, and an upstanding member of his community. He has no prior criminal history and has dedicated his life to serving others with integrity and compassion. It is reprehensible that Congressman Max Miller would exploit Dr. Hamdan's good name as a political pawn to score political points and fabricate a narrative of false victimhood.'"

"In a rambling, conspiratorial letter addressed to the FBI, alleged assassin Vance Boelter claimed Gov. Tim Walz instructed him to kill U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar so that Walz could run for the U.S. Senate..."

"... according to two people familiar with the contents of the letter. The letter... is incoherent, one and a half pages long, confusing and hard to read, according to two people familiar with the letter’s contents.... Federal prosecutors allege the letter was left behind in a Buick that Boelter deserted near his home in Green Isle, Minn. It also allegedly contained Boelter’s confession that he carried out the shootings that killed state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and injured Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette...."

From "Letter to FBI from shooting suspect made wild claims about Klobuchar and Walz, sources say/People with direct knowledge of a letter Vance Boelter addressed to the FBI say it is rambling and conspiratorial" (Minnesota Star Tribune).

Show us the letter. I'd like to form my own opinion and not just hear an assertion that it's "incoherent." The other day, I wasted time reading a prominent column with the headline stating that a new Supreme Court opinion was "incoherent." I almost blogged about it just to critique the deceptive use of the concept of incoherence.

"Punks had earned a reputation for evil and expressed it in their outfits and in their music. But back then, within certain circles, evil was used colloquially as good."

"I was intrigued by the bad guys and wanted to see what happened when a woman photographed a man, as the opposite was the norm in those days."

Said Marcia Resnick, quoted in "Marcia Resnick, photographer of punk’s heyday, dies at 74/She also took photos of actor John Belushi before his fatal drug overdose" (WaP)(free-access link, so you can see the photographs).

There was also this 1978 book "Re-visions" — "an autobiographical book of photography exploring female adolescence... One image showed a loaf of bread held against a woman’s groin, with the accompanying text: 'She first learned the facts of life from a friend while on a class trip to the bread factory.'

"There are a lot of conversations happening right now. People know the movement is stuck. They know we’ve gone too far. They know we’ve lost the thread."

Said said Dana Beyer, "a physician and longtime trans activist in Maryland," quoted in "How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost/The inside story of the case that could set the movement back a generation" (NYT)(free-access link).

How is Gavin Newsom in debates?

I wondered, reading this quote from Newsom: "Since you’re so eager to talk about me, how about saying it to my face. Let’s debate. Time and place?"

He wrote that on X, and I'm reading it this morning in "Vance Blames L.A. Violence on California Democrats and Disparages Padilla/Vice President JD Vance said during a Los Angeles stop that Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass had encouraged protesters to engage in violence. He also criticized Senator Alex Padilla and called him by the wrong name" (NYT).

Maybe Vance should take Newsom up on that offer. It would focus attention on the administration's arguments. It's not as if the Vice President would have to go on to other debates with other other opponents on all sorts of issues. This is the Governor of California, and immigration enforcement and opposition to it are centered in California. This could be a unique debate.

How would the debate go? I asked Grok to compare the debating skill of the 2 men and to predict the outcome: here. (NOTE: bad link is fixed).

Please think it through before taking my poll:

Should Vance take up Newsom's challenge and debate?

Yes

No

 

pollcode.com free polls

The first sunrise of summer.

That happened at 5:20 a.m.

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Naked as a clam.

I'm reading "Don’t sleep naked — the nine best tips on how to sleep in the heat/Struggling to drop off then waking at the crack of dawn? Boiling nights can be a challenge. Here’s what to do" (London Times).

9 tips are needed because air conditioning is not one of them. In first place is the one that begins the headline, "Don’t sleep naked." We're told "Wearing loose-fitting cotton PJs is a better option than sleeping in the nude, according to the sleep consultant Alison Jones, a spokeswoman for the sleep technology company Sealy. 'A light fabric helps to wick away moisture so that you are less likely to feel clammy,' Jones says."

I think the phrase "Don't sleep naked" is just click bait. If cotton were good for "wicking away moisture" then those who like the freedom of naked sleeping could just cover ourselves with a cotton sheet. But didn't cotton lose that reputation. Hikers these days are advised to avoid cotton. It may wick moisture, but it stays damp. And isn't that what we mean by feeling "clammy"?

By the way, were clams called "clams" because they were seen as clammy or did the word "clammy" postdate the use of "clam" as the name for the familiar mollusk, so that things were being called "clammy" because they seemed clamlike?

"I know of one landscaper that lost the whole crew he had, and he is just totally out of business, all of a sudden."

That quote is featured at the beginning of yesterday's NYT "Daily" podcast, An Interview With Trump’s Border Czar, Tom Homan."

The quote is presented in a context that feels intended to generate empathy for those who've been affected by the "increasingly aggressive raids." But that "landscaper" — that is, person in the landscaping business — was, apparently, competing unfairly with anyone in that business who is dutifully following federal law and not hiring those in the country illegally.

We have to get a long way into that interview with Tom Homan before we hear the perspective of the ethical businessperson, but it is in there:

"We want diversity of opinion. We don't want diversity of facts. And how do we train and teach our kids to distinguish between those things?"

"That, I think, is one of the big tasks of social media. By the way, it will require some government, I believe, some government regulatory constraints around some of these business models in a way that's consistent with the First Amendment, but that also says, look, there is a difference between these platforms letting all voices be heard versus a business model that elevates the most hateful voices or the most polarizing voices or the most dangerous, in the sense of inciting violence...."

Said Barack Obama, in a conversation with a historian a few days ago. Video at the link.

So it seems he thinks it's "the big task of social media" to teach children to distinguish between fact and opinion. But what does it mean to say "We don't want diversity of facts"? Does it mean you don't want differences of opinion about what the facts are?

It must, because facts are facts. There is no diversity of facts. Whatever is true is true, even if not one human being knows the truth. The facts are out there, to be found, and you can think you've found the facts and be wrong. There's a sense in which to say "We don't want diversity of facts" is to say we want to be able to be able to cling to mistaken findings of fact and even to silence those who want to continue to search for the truth.

I'm irritated by how casually Obama dropped in "By the way, it will require some government." Perhaps he knew his audience at the event was eager to hear about a role for government. But he did not say that government should enforce an official version of the facts — e.g., the covid vaccine is safe and effective, the 2020 election was fair and square. Instead of content-based regulation of speech, he's talking about the manner of the speech. Is it "hateful," "polarizing," or "dangerous"? He adds the phrase "in the sense of inciting violence" to gesture at some concern for the First Amendment.

Obama's speech is incredibly convoluted and mushy. That sentence that begins "By the way" — what is he proposing? Government control of the social media algorithm to suppress the voices it deems polarizing? Yeah, I think we know what that means: Suppress my political opponents, like you did before Elon Musk bought Twitter. Can we agree about that fact or is that an opinion?

***

I'm giving this post my old "alternative facts" tag. Remember "alternative facts"?

Joe Biden — who declared Juneteenth a federal holiday — celebrates Juneteenth.

At the Reedy Church, yesterday, in Galveston, Texas:

"Delaware is a strange state. Delaware is the first state, but it also is a state that was a slave state, by great shame. But it fought on the side of the North, and it didn't get to the South like Maryland and two other states. And so even when the when we did Juneteenth, didn't affect people in Delaware because they weren't they weren't in the Confederacy nor the Confederate. Wasn't until the Emancipation Proclamation was occurred. What I'm trying to say is that uh I uh I I just learned a lot in the community and uh that's where I worked on East Side that's why I worked as a lawyer and that's why I got involved in public life...."

The actual fact he didn't even approach is that the Emancipation Proclamation didn't abolish slavery in Delaware. It took the Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery in Delaware, so on Juneteenth — June 19, 1865 — the Delaware slaves were still slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment was not ratified until December 6, 1865. 

But here's Joe Biden in Galveston on Juneteenth, talking about Delaware, calling it a strange state, and not getting anywhere near what's so strange about Delaware that relates to Juneteenth.

Meanwhile, President Trump "celebrated" Juneteenth by writing this on Truth Social: "Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed. The workers don’t want it either! Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"

At the Juneteenth Café...

 ... you can talk about whatever you want.

"Some people, including those self-identified liberals worried about going too far, will see reducing the number of people who choose to transition as a good thing..."

"... as proof that only mythical 'real' trans people — those who feel that they must transition, no matter how hard it may be — are seeking treatment. But I ask you to imagine that teenager, the one who has to leave Tennessee or this country. The one who has to go through 'natal' puberty when everything about it feels wrong. The one who spends those hours in front of the mirror not trying to make their hair look good but trying to hide body parts that make them hate themselves. The one who adjusts, stuffing their desire, their shame and their hope into some dark closet of the mind."

Writes M. Gessen, in "The Supreme Court Fails to See Transgender Teens" (NYT)(free-access link).