FirstCircle

On DVD of course. Fans of Rutger Hauer seem to think it's one of his best, and no, it's not that SciFi one (which is one of my favorite films of all time). I got it on inter-library loan from a library on the other side of the state. Now I have three weeks to watch it, though I could of course rip it and just watch whenever.

Today I got a bunch of laundry and food shopping done. At the grocery store I asked for cash back and the magnitude of the ask seemed to surprise the cashier a little. I got two $50s, which doesn't seem like a big deal to me, so maybe it was just having to handle currency that caused her a momentary bout of confusion?

A few days ago I took a long drive to a small city (a college town) where I recalled there being a cool used bookstore. I turned out it was still there though the Main St. as I recall it (from several years ago) had changed quite a bit - small indie coffee shops taken over by big chains &etc. Things were very quiet in the summer off-season. I browsed for maybe an hour, chatted with the elderly shopkeeper, and scored three deals on books, one a hefty hardcover (with perfect dust-jacket) by a famous Soviet-era writer that would easily sell, on eBay, for 5x what I paid.

I asked the shopkeeper for one of their bookmarks and I received one. Nice, but it's of lower quality than their earlier versions - this one is flimsy and made of uncoated paper and only about 5" long - not of the necessary bookmark length for large hardcover tomes. It was free though.

Today I also mowed the lawn with the battery-powered mower. I say "lawn", but there's been little rain so it's just a smattering of tall, resilient weeds that got mowed. I'm still impressed by how much the mower can do on a single charge with just one battery.

A construction contractor declined to bid on my house re-siding job because I wouldn't accept a "time & materials" so-called "bid" and wouldn't pay $anything in advance of the work being done. These guys are all snakes. I may just have to paint over the crummy siding or learn how to do the work myself which would honestly be a good thing (for me - learning) though that's probably too interesting to talk about here.

The home, which was run by an order of Catholic nuns and closed in 1961, was one of many such institutions that housed tens of thousands of orphans and unmarried pregnant women who were forced to give up their children throughout much of the 20th century.

In 2014, historian Catherine Corless tracked down death certificates for nearly 800 children who died at the home in Tuam between the 1920s and 1961 — but could only find a burial record for one child.

Mayor Lisa Brown issued a 9:30 p.m. curfew, the first such measure since protestors in 2020 marched to support George Floyd.

“Everyone must abide by this curfew. Limited exceptions apply, including law enforcement, emergency personnel, media, people leaving the soccer game at the Podium, residents living in the area, and people going to and from work,” Brown’s directive read.

She made the call in response to hundreds of demonstrators blocked federal agents in Spokane Wednesday evening from leaving a downtown immigration office reportedly with refugees who were detained at court hearings earlier in the day.

The protestors, including former Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart, gathered outside the facility on West Cataldo Avenue in the afternoon just north of Riverfront Park to prevent a bus with the young men from departing to the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.

A second protest at Riverfront Park broke out hours after the Stuckart-led event and riot-clad officers began shooting tear gas and making arrests.

Protestors in the park were joined by City Councilman Paul Dillon as officers began deploying gas and pushing against the participants.

At the earlier protest on Cataldo, some protesters deflated the bus’s tires and blocked law enforcement from leaving in patrol cars on the opposite side of the building.

A Spokane Police Department officer spoke over the regional SWAT car speaker system at 7:13 p.m. and ordered everyone present to disperse. The officer gave the demonstrators five minutes to do so. Few left the scene when police warned at 7:22 p.m. that they would use force if the crowd did not leave.

The fracas is arguably the most extreme local showing of resistance, among others in Los Angeles and across the country, to President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdowns since he took office for the second time in January.

The Cataldo crowd included several prominent politicians, activists and community leaders, including Spokane County Democratic Party Chair Naida Spencer; state Rep. Timm Orsmby; Spokane City Council candidate Sarah Dixit; union advocate and a former Democratic candidate for local, state and federal offices Ted Cummings; Thrive International Director Mark Finney and Latinos en Spokane Director Jennyfer Mesa.

Washington Sen. Patty Murray grilled Collins about a lack of transparency under his leadership, including a new policy that prevented her from meeting with veterans and health care providers at the Seattle VA hospital in April. She also questioned his goal of cutting 15% of the department’s workforce while accelerating the rollout of the electronic health record system that has hamstrung Spokane’s Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center since it became the testing ground at the end of the first Trump administration.

“As you know, fixing EHR and getting it right for our veterans is about patient safety,” Murray said, using the acronym for the system. “Did you ask these VA clinicians and hospitals about how those cuts would affect future EHR deployments?”

Collins replied that the planned layoffs and the computer system’s accelerated rollout “are separate,” brushing aside concerns about cutting staff and terminating support contracts while more aggressively deploying a system that has contributed to thousands of cases of patient harm, according to the VA’s own internal data.

Ken Kizer, who ran the Veterans Health Administration during the 1990s and oversaw the last major overhaul of VA health care, has said it would be “lunacy” to ramp up the system’s rollout while conducting mass layoffs.

It will soon be illegal in Spokane for an employer to ask a prospective employee if they’re homeless or reject their application solely because they do not have a permanent address.

The Spokane City Council voted 6-1 Monday in favor of the law, titled “Ban the Address” as a riff on “Ban the box” laws that prohibit inquiries about an applicant’s prior convictions. Councilman Jonathan Bingle was the sole vote against.

City officials believe Spokane is the first in the nation to pass such a law.

“Housing status should never define someone’s potential,” Councilman Paul Dillon said. “Employment really is a critical way we have to reduce homelessness and help people get back on their feet.”

Oyer has since told various media outlets that her firing came shortly after she declined to recommend restoring gun rights to actor Mel Gibson, a supporter of President Donald Trump. She is one of several Justice Department officials slated to testify on Monday afternoon before a hearing organized by Democrats in the House of Representatives and Senate about the Trump administration's treatment of the Justice Department and law firms who act in cases disliked by the Republican president.

Democratic U.S. Senator Adam Schiff of California called the mobilization of the Marshals to deliver a letter an effort to "intimidate and silence" Oyer, while U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland compared it to a move "ripped straight from the gangster playbook."

In addition to supporting jobs that address oil patch pollution, these federal dollars are used on wells that lack any owner to pay for reclamation. Left unplugged, such orphaned oil and gas wells leak huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere and can contaminate local water sources with salty water and benzene.

The Interior Department estimates that there are about 157,000 documented orphaned oil and gas wells nationwide. This figure is likely a dramatic undercount: The Environmental Protection Agency stated in an April 2021 report that there could be as many as 3.4 million abandoned wells nationally.

“Undocumented orphaned wells may emit nearly 63 million grams of methane per hour into the atmosphere,” according to a November 2024 report, “the equivalent of over 3.6 million gasoline-powered passenger cars driven per year.”

Orphaned wells represent the final stage in what ProPublica recently described as the oil industry’s “playbook”: When oil wells are no longer productive, large companies sell them off to smaller companies and thereby shed their obligation to plug those wells.

The increasingly marginal wells change hands, eventually landing with operators who lack the financial means to plug them. And when these companies go bankrupt, the wells become orphaned, meaning that the plugging costs then fall on American taxpayers.

Christian fascists distort Christianity to sacralize white supremacy, the U.S. empire and capitalism, as well as demonizing those who oppose them as satanic. These heretics — I speak as a dvinity school graduate — deform the Gospels in the same way Jewish fascists deform the Torah. In fact, according to the eschatology of the Christian fascists, Jews in Israel in the “End Times” will be converted to Christianity or exterminated, which exposes their deep antisemitic roots and open embrace of Nazi theorists such as Carl Schmidt and sympathizers such as Rousas John Rushdoony.

Jewish supremacy, like the supremacy of the Christian fascists, is, these fanatics claim, sanctified by God. The slaughter of the Palestinians, who Benjamin Netanyahu compared to the biblical Amalekites, are the incarnate of evil and deserve to be massacred. Euro-Americans in the American colonies used the same biblical passage to justify the genocide of Native Americans. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those inside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism or Christian nationalism speak.

The decision to add the US to the first 2025 watchlist was made in response to what the group described as the “Trump administration’s assault on democratic norms and global cooperation”.

In the news release announcing the US’s addition, the organization cited recent actions taken by the Trump administration that they argue will likely “severely impact constitutional freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression, and association”.

The group cited several of the administration’s actions such as the mass termination of federal employees, the appointment of Trump loyalists in key government positions, the withdrawal from international efforts such as the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council, the freezing of federal and foreign aid and the attempted dismantling of USAid.

The organization warned that these decisions “will likely impact civic freedoms and reverse hard-won human rights gains around the world”.

The group also pointed to the administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, and the Trump administration’s unprecedented decision to control media access to presidential briefings, among others.

Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?

There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism—nor is it autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy. Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism. Understanding patrimonialism is essential to defeating it. In particular, it has a fatal weakness that Democrats and Trump’s other opponents should make their primary and relentless line of attack.

The Tesla, the ad promises, "goes from zero to 1939 in three seconds."

The image has been displayed on at least one bus stop in Bethnal Green, London, by a group called Everyone Hates Elon.