Reading

Ron DeSantis’s Fourth of July Party Prep List

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/ron-desantiss-fourth-of-july-party-prep-list
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 03:00

June 15-22

  • Order fireworks from AmericanMadeFireWorks.com
  • Screen bakeries to find one that hasn’t made cakes for gay weddings, Disney princess-themed parties, birthdays held at woke public schools, Disney Strange World-themed parties, gender reveal celebrations, parties for people who have been to Disney World, retirement parties for DEI trainers, or for Disney President Bob Iger
  • Call Eduardo and crew to schedule extra landscaping for July 2

June 23-30

  • Open fireworks from AmericanMadeFireWorks.com. Sharpie over “Made in China”
  • Make invitation list from secret donors file of dear family friends
  • Screen bands to find one that hasn’t played gay weddings, concerts held at woke universities, bar mitzvahs, Juneteenth parties, quinceañeras, Gay Pride events, any event that has served Bud Light, or for Disney President Bob Iger
  • Sign band.

Sacré Vert

https://www.monbiot.com/2023/06/29/sacre-vert/
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 01:57
French environmental action puts the UK to shame. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 24th June 2023 While we remain transfixed by a handful of needy egotists in Westminster and the crises they manufacture, across the Channel a revolution is happening. It’s a quiet, sober, thoughtful revolution, but a revolution nonetheless. France is seeking […]

The Oceans are Sending an SOS

https://steadystate.org/the-oceans-are-sending-an-sos/
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:02
by Gary Gardner

Media coverage of the loss of the Titan submersible last week turned the world’s attention to the oceans—that vast, mysterious realm that sits below the surface of our landlocked consciousness. Two factoids in the coverage caught my attention.

The first, emerging from chatter about the extent of the search effort, is that international law requires vessels to respond to an at-sea distress call if they are able to,

The post The Oceans are Sending an SOS appeared first on Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.


Colin Kidd: Intimated Disunion

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/colin-kidd/intimated-disunion
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
The unionist fondness for Union Jacks does not preclude violent resistance to the British state when its policy conflicts with the interests of Protestant Ulster. Under the auspices of the Ulster Covenant of 1912 – a document signed by quarter of a million people determined to use any means necessary to prevent Irish Home Rule – unionists drilled and acquired munitions.


Josephine Quinn: Drowned in a Bowl of Blood

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/josephine-quinn/drowned-in-a-bowl-of-bl…
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
Christian evangelicals​ in the United States sometimes like to identify the ancient Persian emperor Cyrus the Great with Donald Trump. Both are vessels for God’s plan on earth. This may seem surprising: Trump is no more obviously Christian than Cyrus, who died half a millennium before Christ was born, and neither would score highly on a morality test. But, it turns out, the leakier the vessel, the greater the god.


Tom Crewe: Short Cuts

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/tom-crewe/short-cuts
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
What are the consequences for politics if the supposed grown-ups are outside the room? For Osborne, Balls, Stewart and Campbell, it means power without responsibility, armchair politics with advertising revenue, status acquired in public service leveraged for private gain. With their lofty commentary and self-promotion, they seem more likely to intensify than to counter cynicism about and distrust in our institutions. 


Rye Dag Holmboe: Cloak and Suit and Slipper

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/rye-dag-holmboe/cloak-and-suit-and-slip…
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
The vogue in the 1930s and 1940s for unknown, native and ‘primitive’ art means that Morris Hirshfield is remembered (when he is remembered) as an unworldly Jewish tailor who one day decided to pick up a paintbrush. In Richard Meyer’s account, however, Hirshfield was a canny operator who knew how to play on distinctions between high and low culture.


Blake Morrison: Warty-Fingered Klutzburger

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/blake-morrison/warty-fingered-klutzburg…
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
Richard Ford’s Frank might be more low-key than other sequential protagonists in modern American fiction – Nathan Zuckerman, Harry Angstrom, Olive Kitteridge, Lucy Barton – and at the end of Be Mine he’s still claiming to be in limbo as a character: ‘I do not believe I have an essential self.’ But he understands what he sees, and his cartographic analysis (and, despite himself, his self-analysis) is incisive.


Tony Wood: Against Relics

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/tony-wood/against-relics
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
The first two decades of the USSR saw what was then the fastest and largest instance of urban growth in human history. In just thirteen years, the population living in cities and towns more than doubled from 26 million to 56 million. Modernisation was achieved at a tremendous human cost, with gruelling constraints imposed on the bulk of the population, even as it opened up new horizons.


Tim Parks: Buttockitis

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n14/tim-parks/buttockitis
Created
Fri, 30/06/2023 - 00:00
Three hundred​ characters in 260 pages. How do you possibly keep track of so many names, so much intrigue? It’s hard to imagine a reader of Camilo José Cela’s masterpiece, The Hive, who hasn’t asked this question – who hasn’t wondered, after twenty or thirty pages, whether or how to go on. Do you just accept the confusion? Or, alternatively, keep elaborate notes – perhaps sketching out, as I did, a web of relations on a very large sheet of paper?