Owning the libs
So, Rufus, let me get this straight: in order to get a rise out of me, you're dying of coronavirus? Refusing to get vaccinated and shit? Way to go, dude. I am speechless with....admiration?
The New York courts
A truism that courts quote often enough it became a bit dull is that not only justice is important, but the appearance of justice as well. I have a speech I have given clients for twenty years, about how most of the cases I litigate seem to come out fairly, that I can only point to five inexplicable results in forty years out of two hundred trials and hearings, and that if I ever concluded that a fair trial wasn't possible, I would quit and do something else. This may always have been part bravado, but I believed it more than halfway as I said it....but my confidence is eroding. I have seen some outcomes these last five years which make me lose faith in appearances: people with so much money they can get away with anything, courtrooms where it seems to matter who you are and who you know, whole categories of litigation where the client is largely screwed (housing court), laws which may be dropping from the books through inattention (New York's environmental), courts appointed by putative Democrats for years that are strangely Republican, and courts where phony ontologies are everything and epistemology means nothing. And that's just local, before we even talk about what happened to the Supreme Court in Trump Universe. But then it occurs to me that just quitting, and living my life, would make me complicit....
Rudy Guiliani
But at least the NY appeals court suspended Giuliani, yay. I suspect that he crossed a line somewhere, and personally irritated them. His personal issues may also have made him vulnerable; his famous predecessor, Roy Cohn (also once Donald Trump's attorney) got away with lying, cheating and stealing for decades, but was disbarred just as he was dying of AIDS.
Jeff Bezos
Wow, that wacky cowboy hat.....There's a sort of mildly interesting game involved in guessing which dystopian movie best predicts the future. Bezos and all the other cute little Billionaires venturing into space makes me think of Elysium, where the Earth is overwhelmed, poisoned, overcrowded and murder-ridden, but the rich all live safely in space, until Matt Damon shows up.
Nomadland
Speaking as we were of Bezos, Nomadland is a really good movie. Frances McDormand delivers a huge performance, you feel the solitude, you get right down into the dead-husbands-tackle-box as van furniture, the compassionate attempt to get the temporary boss to buy the pretty stones from the homeless teenagers, the heartbreaking broken dish*. But the movie leaves out the political background, the inequality, the economic reasons all these people have no homes...and it idealizes Amazon, just a little, and was filmed with in actual warehouses with the behemoth's cooperation. I have a great idea for a movie I'm gonna go pitch: it will be all about Leon Trotsky, as quirky eggheaded outsider, bit lonely but great sense of humor, and oh boy, that romance with Frida Kahlo! We just won't mention the Russian Revolution...we need conflict, we can just mention he had an Uncle (Joe) who didn't like him....imply its a Mafia family...yeah, we could do that.
* Q. For Fifty Bonus Points, name the last great broken dish scene in American film. A. Mary Tyler Moore breaks a dish in Ordinary People (1980), directed by Robert Redford.