Trump's Courage
I have found many times that, when there were objective and significant grounds for disliking and distrusting a politician of an adverse party, many of the grounds disseminated by the party you favor nonetheless turn out to be false. In 2016 and for long after, I was inclined to believe that Donald Trump was a phony, a poseur, a mere child, a man of straws and figments. His energy, anger and vitality, pumping his fist and even giving what resembles a Nazi salute, after a would be assassin winged him a few days ago with an AR-15 bullet, signals that Trump is mad courageous, has become the person he aspires to be (or always was). The Trump I was led to believe existed, would have been sniveling and crawling away. Oh well.
J.D. Vance
Vance was a surprisingly brilliant choice of vice president. I also underestimated Trump by thinking he would only want a weakling in proximity, like Pence. Vance has been a strong sycophant instead of a dithering one; he sells his hypocrisy with energy. He also has the virtue of being very new on the scene, and therefore lacks the taint of scandal, compromise, indecision. He is all ambition and amorality.I Flash on four years of Trump and then eight more of Vance. I will be 82 years old.
Without opinion
This is a personal pet peeve; it memorably happened to me once. Appeals courts making sometimes quite impactful decisions without opinion are abdicating their responsibilities to give lawyers guidance. I remember, when a New York state appeals court dismissed a heavily politicized lawsuit of mine without a word, wondering if the finding was merely procedural, in which case I could fix what I imagined might be the flaw and bring it again; or on the merits, in which case refiling would be frivolous, and risk sanctions. How much time and energy does it require to write one sentence? I was left with the impression, that the real message was "You and your client are nobodies, standing up to the power hierarchy; we will protect it, and do not owe you any explanation".
Weirdness
When I was a child, I looked for the "silly season" articles in the daily papers, inserted to complete a column in a slow news time: The man who found his toilet bowl full of snakes, strange meteors, inexplicable animal behavior. Arguably, the present day subjugation of the Internet to the algorithm-driven production of clickbait was itself all silly-season even before the advent of AI. Now my news feed contains regular articles-- though I never click on them-- all from the Miami Herald, following the pattern "Strange Creature With _____ and a _______ Seen in ________ _________. It's a New Species". WTF? I imagine that this is more than mere clickbait-- though certainly that-- but also some propangandist's pleasant idea for convincing us that, despite the "sixth extinction", there is a net gain in types of animals on the polluted and warming planet. Ha.