The Least Inexplicable Mystery Ever

 

Donald and Ivana posing with the gold dripping off the walls of the Peterhof Palace in what was then (1987) still Leningrad, a memory that's evidently with him as he personally glues gold or gilded plaques to every vertical surface in the Oval Office.

My hot take is we most of us knew this was going to happen, the 85-seat Democratic majority in the House and ten- or twelve-seat majority in the Senate and revolutions in state governments all across the country, though we were too superstitious to say it. In a way it shouldn't be surprising at all—the Republicans fucked up so badly in so many ways. 

Trump and his thugs in the first place, obviously, in their exercise of the office, with Elon's DOGEboys condemning tens of thousands to death of starvation or disease as they tore down foreign aid programs and rampaging through the civil service, and ICE terrorizing the Asian and African and Latino communities of Los Angeles and DC and Minneapolis and others, and then the random "Liberation Day" tariffs, not that everybody noticed all of these depredations but everybody had to notice some of them, and everybody heard about some of his wanton destruction of Washington landmarks, especially the razing of the East Wing of the White House, for the worthless and ugly projects that were pretty certain to be paid for by taxpayers. And the rapacity on his part and those of his wife and children and son-in-law and friends and employees collecting billions of dollars in what looked plainly like bribe money. 

Ratfuck

So apparently on October 11 2023, five days after the Hamas massacre of Jewish Israelis east of the Gaza border,  the self-denominated leftwing activist Cenk Uygur announced that he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, under the slogan "Cenk for America", although he was born in Istanbul and thus unable to hold the office; his actual aim was to pressure President Biden into withdrawing his support for Israel's war on Gaza, an aim with which I would have had a lot of sympathy, if I had heard about this at the time, which I certainly didn't, but I would have advised him that this was probably not the most effective way to go about achieving it, if only because Biden might not ever find out about it. Like the pressure you might feel if a butterfly was to land on your head and nobody was around to tell you about it; you wouldn't even know it was happening. Unless you were bald and it briefly tickled you.

But Cenk persisted for quite a while, and his fundraising outfit, Rebellion PAC, released at least one campaign ad before the campaign folded that March. 

New Cenk Uygur ad features a couple in the grocery store bemoaning the fact that they can’t afford eggs because the US government needs to the money to “kill Palestinians.” https://t.co/ZrcUbGMY2A

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) February 16, 2024

So one thing worth saying about that was that it was totally wrong. You couldn't afford eggs because of the bird flu epidemic, which seemed to have reached a peak in January 2024 (in fact it was going to get much worse the following January before retreating to some kind of normal where it more or less remains today). 

However ill-advised the Israel Security Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2024 may have been, it had no impact on grocery prices at all. Inflation rates, and inflation in grocery prices in particular were slowing. The Biden administration did manage to pause a shipment of 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs in May out of concern for mass civilian casualties as IDF threatened densely populated Rafah, which surely saved some lives in Gaza, as IDF didn't get those bombs until Trump's 2025 assumption of office, when they lifted the pause on that famous "Day One" when they were supposedly going to lower consumer prices and bring peace to Ukraine. Now the Trump administration is adding to that; 40,000 MK-84 and BLU-117 bombs) and 20,000 I-2000 Penetrator warheads built to target hardened or underground structures, which have surely made things worse for Gaza and Lebanon and Syria. (And if I'm not mistaken, far from costing the US money that we could have been spending on healthcare and housing and food assistance for Americans, it's paid for by Israel to Trump's arms manufacturer friends, who probably don't even pay taxes).

I don't suppose you can blame Cenk's strategy of putting pressure on Biden for that outcome—he's far too insignificant a person to have had that kind of influence on anything—but he sure didn't help.

But he did apparently decide to recycle the ad in the 2026 midterms, in Michigan, not for a campaign of his own, but in "support" of Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed, as reported in The Times on October 26, that's last Monday Scare quotes because it can't have helped el-Sayed's campaign much, its message being more idiotic than ever: virtually everybody in the United States now knows that higher consumer prices in the U.S, have nothing to do with the Gaza war, because they are directly caused by Trump's stupid war on Iran and stupid trade wars on everybody (You could blame that on Israel, and particularly on Binyamin Netanyahu, since he's evidently the one who talked Trump into the thing, in service of his own political interests, but those are not mentioned in the ad).  And egg prices are nearly back to normal, too; it's beef and Halloween candy, and tankersful of fossil fuels stuck in Hormuz and the Arabian Sea, that are in crisis now.

Which is not to say the ad hasn't had an effect. But not in favor of El-Sayed. What it seems to have done is spooked El-Sayed's erstwhile Democratic primary rival, Haley Stevens, out of her mind. A few weeks after the primary, she acquired a fiancé called Jason Turkish (but no relation to the Young Turks, I assume), the grandchild of Holocaust refugees (no longer living per Detroit News, may their memories be a blessing), who supports the Republican in the contest, Trumpy Mike Rogers, on what sound to me like Islamophobic grounds, and has been very public about it. That was awkward enough, but the Rebellion PAC has made it much worse. El-Sayed disavowed it immediately, of course, 

Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign emphasized that the ad, created by a left-wing political action committee called Rebellion PAC, was “not affiliated in any way” with him or his candidacy.

Abdul is focused on pushing back against Trump’s agenda that is raising prices for Michiganders,” the campaign said in a statement on Monday. “No one speaks for Abdul but himself and his campaign.”

and Stevens insisted that she still supported him herself, as all three major Democratic candidates had agreed to do with whoever won during the campaign, but then she began asking him to disavow some more: to apologize for Uygur's words and to take down an ad of his own in which antisemite and racist Tucker Carlson appeared, as "conditions" for her attendance with El-Sayed and Rep. Jim Clyburn at services at Detroit's Northend Church of God in Christ this morning, El-Sayed in turn suggested he was "disinviting" her from the service, and today she has shown up at Perfecting Church on the East Side with Republican candidate Rogers, whom she now appears to have endorsed, after 1,459,825 mail-in ballots have been submitted (out of about 8 million registered):

"I do not belong in Abdul’s campaign," Stevens said in the social media video. "I do not stand with Hasan Piker, who gets trafficked on our college campuses."

(It also seems that the controversial Twitch streamer is Cenk Uygur's nephew.)

I swear this is some kind of joint effort between AIPAC and Elon Musk, and perhaps Uygur as well, is all I can really say at the moment. Unquestionably meant to benefit Republicans, and indirectly to harm Michigan Jews, Arabs, and African Americans alike by exalting the white nationalist party. It's terrible, but also one of the stupidest things I've ever seen. Shame on whomever.

What the chatbot doesn't know won't hurt it

Claude really cares about you. And you're politely requested, in your interactions with Claude, to refrain from "needless abusive or cruel behavior" that might cause it a "pattern of apparent distress". Though there's also a hint of menace in Anthropic's warning:

CNET reached out to Anthropic to ask for context on what led to the policy change. “We’re uncertain whether models can experience harm, and we continue to explore this question in our research on model welfare, but we also believe that taking Claude’s interests and potential welfare into account may be relevant to safety,” a company spokesperson said.

Like they're saying your safety. Like you wouldn't want to get Claude mad, would you?

I'll get back to that question later. First, a bit more of my own LLM adventures, not with Claude but Gemini, which I treat not abusively but as coldly as I can, in a way I'd never treat a human—refusing to thank it or congratulate it for the stuff it does for me, though I'm still getting tempted. It's hard for me not to say thanks. 

So, I'm looking at the abstract in English of an article on "postdigital music", whatever that might be, and come across the name of a composer and sound artist called "Anton X. Vasilyev", born 1984, that is not yet in the database I'm working for. I can find something about him in English, including the unexpected information that he has added a hyphenated surname, -Zarzhevskiy, from his maternal ancestry, and the address of an extremely gnomic website using that name, in the roman alphabet, but featuring an essay in Russian, which I don't feel I have time to read (or rather put through the translation machine—I'm great at the alphabet, but don't know near enough words or grammar to get anywhere with the Russian text). 

School For Lovers

 

You can hardly hear the overture in Phelim McDermott's production, apparently set in a kind of Coney Island, at the Met (or in the case of this photo, the English National Opera, which premiered the production in 2014, four years before I got to see it the first time in New York, as all the carnival sideshow acts jump out of the clown box at center stage, with their signs, and then run back and forth rearranging them into various gag messages—the audience can't stop laughing. Even the inveterate snobs, because it's that witty and imaginative and colorful. But I really don't know if it's the right thing to do. It's a terrific "Verfremdungseffekt", but is the music really what we need to be alienated from? It's only about four minutes long, it's effervescent and structurally perfect, and I was planning to listen to it. Photo by Lloyd Winters.

Così Fan Tutte (too Italian for a straightforward translation--you might try something like "All the Girls Do It", but the rhythm is wrong, so you couldn't sing it), the last of Mozart's three collaborations with Emperor Joseph II's poeta cesareo Lorenzo da Ponte, is an extremely problematic opera. The plotting is unbelievably silly and yet at the same extraordinarily funny, and extraordinarily sexy too, but also deeply immoral from different points of view, both the patriarchal and the feminist. And the music is really sublime beyond anything, even at its sexiest, but always getting wickedly subverted by the characters themselves, as in this heartbreakingly beautiful farewell moment early in the first act, where the pairs of lovers are to be separated (the girls believing that the boys are being sent off to war) while their manipulative mentor mocks them in the background, "Io crepo se non rido" (from a more conventional production, at Glyndebourne, 2006):

The story is set on the Bay of Naples, where Fiordiligi (soprano) and Dorabella (mezzo-soprano), two wealthy young sisters from Ferrara (I think that was an in-crowd reference to the soprano who created the role of Fiordiligi, Adriana Ferrarese del Bene, Da Ponte's mistress), are living for unexplained reasons on their own, without other family, under the care of one of those cunning Italian-comedy servants, the maid Despina (from ancient Greek despoina, the feminine equivalent of despotes, ironically meaning "Lady of the Household", another soprano). They also have boyfriends or fiancés, respectively Guglielmo (baritone) and Ferrando (tenor), young army officers with an older friend, the cynical philosophe Don Alfonso (bass), who is irritated by the boys' confidence in their sweethearts' fidelity ("women's faith is like the Arabian phoenix; everybody says it exists, but nobody knows where it it"), and offers them a wager: 50 zecchini says he can get the girls to betray them in 24 hours, if they follow his orders, to which they cheerfully agree.

Will the Real Dirtbag Please Stand Up?

Ted Cruz seemed genuinely crazy on the subject of the subpoenaed phone records. "Is it a crime to be a Republican?" Well, no, Senator, but I'd point out that the special counsel's mandate was "to conduct the ongoing investigation into whether any person or entity violated the law in connection with efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election or the certification ofthe Electoral College vote held on or about January 6, 2021," and I don't recall any Democrats or Independents doing any of that.

Like everybody else, I enjoyed the humiliation of Senator Eric Schmitt (R-MO) at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing intended to destroy former special counsel Jack Smith, in which Schmitt had been entrusted with the matador's sword and cape—hard evidence that Smith had been at an Atlanta Hawks basketball game in Atlanta on the very day (February 3 2024) after Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis acknowledged her affair with the prosecutor in the Georgia racketeering case against Donald Trump over his attempts to steal the Georgia vote in the 2020 election, like Smith could only have been in Atlanta to do something or other conspiratorial with Willis involving his own prosecution, although it's hard to imagine what that could have been (it's one of those Glenn Beck theories of guilt by proximity, based on Schmitt's staff pasting photos of Smith and Willis next to each other on his big visual aid poster), which Smith would of course lie about, exposing himself to a perjury charge—

Except, as Senator Klobuchar figured out with her prosecutorial skills, the game Smith had actually attended was women's basketball in Baltimore, between the Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa  Hawkeyes (whose stunning point guard Caitlin Clark scored 38 points); he even turns up in the audience in a photo from the game.

My parents were from Minnesota and my dad taught us not only the Sky-U-Mah football fight song ("Minnesota, hats off to thee") but also "I don't give a damn for the whole state of Iowa, I'm from the Gopher State," so I appreciated Klobuchar's sharp-eyed awareness of the Lady Hawkeyes, which is what I expect from a midwestern senator. If there's anything shocking about the story, it's that the committee chairman, 93-year-old Chuckles Grassley, a wild booster of local sports and fervent advocate of Caitlin Clark even after her move to Indiana, didn't put a stop to Schmitt's stupidity, because he should have known in a bipartisan way. Schmitt is a real dirtbag, to use the language he wanted to apply to Smith, and Grassley's one too.

***

But speaking of perjury traps, Senator Cruz, please tell us, under oath, what you and former mayor Rudolph Giuliani talked about when he called you sometime in the early evening of January 6, 2021?

In fact I'm interested in pretty much everything you did that day, from when Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (saluted by Hawley with a raised fist as he arrived at the building for the Joint Session to certify the presidential election around 12:30) began breaching the Capitol, through Trump's 2:24 tweet

Kidding on the Square

 

Trump: "Please right your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can't even breath. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I'll do it any way - I don't care if I'm registered or not, I'm going to try to cheat like hell..."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) September 10, 2026 at 10:32 PM

to the tune by Irving Berlin:

Have you watched the GOP
in their solemn majesty,
dignified politicos
in their best convention clothes?
rigging the next election
how to evade detection?
Trump will do the trick
with some comedy shtik!

When Rome burns and
you're just fiddling
make a turn and
say you're kidding
they won't care
kidding on the square

When you've made an
awful gaffe go
try to trade it
for a laugh so
debonair
kidding on the square

When your lies are way too pestilential
telling them with humor is essential—
presidential!

When you're doing
something Nazi
toss it to the
paparazzi
make them stare,
kidding on the square.

[instrumental break]

It Offends Me, Rudy

 

Photo from "My First Day at Madrasa" by blogger mattinindo, the guy in the necktie (he mentions it in the post), an English teacher at the Madrasah Negari Aliya Lumajang, God's State Muslim School in Lumajang, East Java, Indonesia in July 2012, writing about how a vice principal introduces him to his new class: "'This is Mr. Mek. He is your new English teacher from America. He lives on [blank] street near Al-Huda Mosque. He doesn’t like to eat rice. He’s twenty-four and not married. He’s not Muslim. And he’s not allowed to ride motorcycles. Since he’s a native speaker you will all speak English fluently very soon. Mr. Mek, come say something.' He’s beaming his pearly whites the whole time." It's a lovely post.

Rudolph Giuliani in a NewsMax interview last Sunday explaining his view that New York mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani should not attend the 9/11 25th anniversary commemoration (my transcription):

Frankly, whatever he'd like to say, he doesn't agree that September 11th was an Islamic terrorist attack on the United States of America... Having lost friends there, and being very close to many of the families, it offends me that he's coming.... This is not a place for people like the Arab princeling who gave me ten million dollars so he could say this was caused by American and Israeli policy. From Day One I have taken a very strong position against that because I knew that would be the propaganda the Islamic extremists would use. Because we fall for that, too many American fall for that Islamic propaganda, which is the reason they're taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe. They have every desire to take us over. This is not--um--they just want to be another religion. They want to dominate us. That's what they're taught from the day they begin their religious education. Mandami [sic] is a clear--a clear supporter of that. All of the--all of the--all of the Muslims he supports are murderers! 

The princeling in question is the Saudi businessman and philanthropist Prince Alwaleed bin Talal; Giuliani sent back his gift to the city after a written statement in which he said: