May 042026
 

Yesterday, I was fairly stressed, and my body responded by sleeping for 12 hours. Apparently, I needed to. After midnight, I emailed Virgil’s facility to schedule a visit for next Sunday (and emailed Trinette to let her know, since ordinarily she would come here that day.)

Apparently, there are 42 Democrats in the House who think the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is a good idea. I don’t, and this article nails why I don’t.

Robert Reich writes about different incarnations of capitalism, which one we need to have, and why. I’m pretty sure, of all of them, it’s the one farthest to the left – and this is a discussion in which speaking of left vs. right is appropriate.

Andy Borowitz isn’t always funny. That’s often true on Sundays, when he does interviews, which can only be accessed by paid subscribers. But last Sunday, he decided his topic (essentially the First Amendment) was too important to limit his audience. This is unusual enough for me to want to share it. the video portion is just over a half hour, and there is a transcript. As usual on Substack, you will need to unmute it if you choose to watch. It’s about a documentary – but it isn’t itself the documentary. (A short digression – if we did have over a thousand members of the House of Representatives – maybe they could meet in the ballroom and remodel the House floor for state occasions.)

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Mar 212026
 

Yesterday, I thought it was going to be a light email day – until I looked in my spam. My tutamail address is still learning what is and isn’t spam – and yesterday it was wrong a lot. But I did make it through the day. Let me throw this out for y’all – I’ve been thinking about asking whether anyone would mind if I started taking one day a week off. (Tuesdays would be good for me, since I’m always wrung out on Mondays.) Think about it and let me know what you think.

Archived from the Old Gray Lady. Pretty much everything the MSM is putting out now is more opinion than fact. Bu this piece is actually labelled as opinion. But it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s more fact in it than in most “news” articles.

Quite short – and just one expat’s view from a small country – but a voice which should count.

Archived from Huff Post. States, particularly blue states, are already putting precautions in motion to circumvent anything the Apricot Antichrist might attempt to do to invalidate the 2026 midterms. (I have no idea whether Wendy Weiser at the Brennan Center is any relation to Phil Weiser, my state Attorney General.)

Video: No effing wonder the GOP wants to get rid of Jon Ossoff. (And probably Sheldon Whitehouse for the same reason – but Rhode Island is blue – so they’re throwing all their money into Georgia. And I hope Ossoff has good security. I would not put violence past them.)

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Jun 072025
 

Yesterday, Andy Borowitz “reported” that Zelenskyy offered to broker peace between Trump**(*) and Musk. Axios reported that Abrego Garcia is coming back but will be charged with smuggling undocumenteds in to the US.

I did watch this video with Joyce Vance and Dahlia Lithwick, which is about 35 minutes. The CC is mostly pretty good, though some specialized terms are amusingly rendered (like “Seacott”), and there is a transcript. I think there are some insights in it which may not have occurred to us.

This is from The Lever News – one of many sites I somehow got subscribed to (probably through signing a petition) and have not yet unsubscribed. This is the first thing from them I have seen which I thought was worthy of sharing, and which no one else has yet published that I have seen. I’ll be very interested in what our medical professionals have to say about it. I will say I would imagine this side effect is one of the very last things one would think of, considering what the medication is prescribed for, and even if it happened in the study group, may not have been reported for that reason. I was recently prescribed Alendronate sodium for osteoporossis myself (it comes in various strengths, depending in part on whether it is administered daily or weekly – mine is weekly) and I joked that I didn’t expect it to come with an encyclopedia. But it did come with a piece of paper about 3 feet long and 18 inches wide, printed on both sides in very small print, with thorough instructions, thorough information on possible side effects, even some graphs and charts which I found very impressive. I’d be surprised if the FDA is habitually careless – at least under a sane administration. But unlikely things do happen sometimes.

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