It’s A War–It’s A Bore:

For three months, President Trump has been deeply engaged in the Iran conflict, planning the 38 days of attack, struggling to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and proclaiming “a whole civilization will die tonight,” then backing away to declare a cease-fire and a naval blockage of Iranian ports.

But on Monday, after days of haggling with Iranian officials through intermediaries on a preliminary agreement, Mr. Trump declared it was starting “to get very boring.”

“I don’t care if they’re over, honestly,” he told Eamon Javers of CNBC when asked about reports that the Iranians, angry at continued Israeli strikes in Lebanon and low-level conflict with the United States in the Persian Gulf, were threatening to stop negotiating. “I really don’t care. I couldn’t care less. If they’re over, they’re over.”

But even for Mr. Trump, who has veered from threatening the Iranians with annihilation to declaring that they had already agreed to American terms to fuming that they have not, it seemed strange that he thought the whole conflict was becoming a bore.

Back in March, Mr. Trump confidently predicted the conflict would be over in a few weeks, saying it was not possible to suffer from boredom while facing off against a longtime American adversary: “Somebody said today, they said, ‘oh, well, the president wants to do it really quickly. After that, he’ll get bored.’”

“There’s nothing boring about this,” he added.

Looks Like JFC Has Wrapped Up The FY ’27 Budget:

The budget writing Joint Finance Committee’s mark-up hearings add $65 million in general funds to Gov. Matt Meyer’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2027.

It takes the state’s spending growth rate to 6.3%, surpassing Meyer’s goal of keeping spending growth under 5%.

The additional dollars are spread across several departments and projects, notably allocating an extra $35 million to the Department of Education, in part to cover grant funding for substitute teachers and the Wilmington Learning Collaborative.

Joint Finance Committee’s chair Sen. Trey Paradee (D-Dover) said he’s “excited about some of the targeted additions that (the JFC markup) made and restoration of certain spending that we’ve made in the area of education.”

Meyer’s recommended budget cut the WLC funding by about 80%, down to $2 million. The JFC added $3 million for the group, which works across three districts in Wilmington to improve student outcomes.

The JFC markup also added more than $11 million to the Office of Management and Budget to help give state employees a 3% raise.

Paradee said this is a bump from the 2% suggested in the Governor’s budget recommendation.

He pointed out that each percentage point added here increases spending by$10.9 million.

JFC also approved increasing state retiree payroll by one quarter of 1%. This will add $6 million in spending for the state.

‘Both Arbitrary And Cruel’.  Yes, we’re talking John Carney’s rousting of the homeless:

Wilmington Mayor John Carney addressed his decision to close the city’s only officially sanctioned homeless encampment during a signing ceremony for the fiscal year 2027 budget.

Some have called the decision “cruel” because city officials are kicking the residents out of the park after encouraging them to go there. They are also blasting the city for failing to develop a plan to help people at the park find alternative housing options, like emergency shelter beds.

Among those who have denounced the evictions is the newly established Wilmington City Council subcommittee on homelessness, which recently sent a letter to Carney opposing the camp’s closure.

“The approach taken by your administration in addressing homelessness, including this most recent decision to abruptly evict residents, appears both arbitrary and cruel,” the letter stated.

Carney said those who say his decision was cruel “don’t understand the issue.”  (Meaning, he does?)

The mayor reiterated that the Christina Park tent village was always meant to be temporary, and that nonprofit organizations and the Wilmington Police Department have been giving people at the park alternate housing options.

The budget doesn’t include emergency shelter beds. Carney said that’s what park residents need, which in his view, is not a city responsibility.

“They’re not in a position where they’re going to be able to compete for the projects that we’re trying to do to stabilize neighborhoods,” Carney said. “That’s where the state and federal assistance is really critically important.”

Which, as Carney, or presumably at least someone in his administration knows, is not coming.

Local housing and criminal justice advocates have been protesting Carney, trying to get him to support rent stabilization and increase emergency and transitional shelters, and permanent supportive housing units.

The mayor, so far appearing to be unconvinced, criticized their tactics.

“They were protesting in front of my house this morning at 7:30 [a.m.], banging on trash can lids and with a microphone, waking up the neighbors,” he said. “Which just strikes me as not a good way to have a conversation over priorities.”

He’s right.  The only way to have a conversation with Carney over priorities is in the corporate boardrooms of Buccini/Pollin. Sadly, housing advocates are not invited.

Idle Thought: Perhaps we are getting the Sesquicentennial Celebration we deserve.  It’s not like we don’t look like a democracy in decline.

Example:  Here’s who have paid for the hole in the ground at the White House:

Some donors on the list attended a dinner at the White House on 15 October. They include Microsoft, Coinbase, Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Amazon and Google.

Also present and on the list was Shari and Edward Glazer, who, together with their siblings, own both the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Manchester United.

The list also includes:

• Altria Group Inc
• Apple
• Booz Allen Hamilton Inc
• Caterpillar Inc
• Comcast Corporation
• J. Pepe and Emilia Fanjul
• Hard Rock International
• HP Inc
• Micron Technology
• NextEra Energy Inc
• Ripple
• Reynolds American
• T-Mobile
• Tether America
• Union Pacific Railroad
• Adelson Family Foundation
• Stefan E Brodie
• Betty Wold Johnson Foundation
• Charles and Marissa Cascarilla
• Harold Hamm
• Benjamin Leon Jr
• The Lutnick Family
• The Laura & Isaac Perlmutter Foundation
• Stephen A. Schwarzmann
• Konstantin Sokolov
• Kelly Loeffler and Jeff Sprecher
• Paolo Tiramani
• Cameron Winklevoss
• Tyler Winklevoss

Don’t forget, kids: Corporations are people.  In the Good Ol’ USA, at any rate.  Just like the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Remember the War in Iran?  It’s still going on:

The US said it struck Iranian military sites at the weekend and Iran said on Monday it had targeted a US base in response, the latest exchange of attacks amid negotiations to end the three-month-old war.

The US and Iran have sporadically exchanged strikes since their planned ceasefire took effect in early April, as diplomacy aimed at a more durable agreement drags on. A similar exchange occurred last Thursday and was described in near-identical terms by both sides.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said on Monday it had targeted an airbase used by the US for an attack on southern Iran, without identifying which base. It is assumed to be in Kuwait, which said it had intercepted missile and drone attacks on Monday morning. In a statement, the Kuwaiti foreign ministry said it reserved the right to take “all necessary measures” to defend its territory and security.

August: The month where the excrement hits the fan?:

Every generation gets a moment when somebody quietly says, “You might want to stock up.”

In the 1970s, it was the oil shocks, gas lines and the sudden realization that trouble on the other side of the world could reach all the way into the American driveway.

In the pandemic years, it was toilet paper, medicine, baby formula, meat, parts, packaging, yeast and flour1 and empty shelves where normal used to be.

And now here we are again, standing in the brief, strange pause between the shock and the shelf.

Because war has entered the supply chain.

The war with Iran is not just a war over missiles, oil fields, tankers and shipping lanes. It is a war over the invisible calendar that moves modern life from the ground to the refinery, from the refinery to the factory, from the factory to the warehouse and from the warehouse to your pantry.

The shelves are full right now because they are full of yesterday.

The gasoline in your tank began its journey months ago, before it moved through crude production, tankers, ports, refineries, pipelines, terminals, trucks and finally your local station. The fertilizer used to grow this season’s crops was bought and used up months ago. The plastic packaging around your food, medicine and household goods was made before the price shock fully worked its way into the cost of making plastic.

What you’re looking at today is inventory from a world that no longer exists.

The question is not whether shortages and price spikes are coming. The question is whether you buy before it lands on your doorstep.

The products on store shelves in June and July were ordered, manufactured, packaged, shipped and warehoused before the war disrupted one of the most important trade routes on Earth. Businesses don’t replace all their inventory overnight. They sell through what they already have.

August is when many of those pre-war inventories begin running low.

That doesn’t mean every shelf goes empty on August 1. It means the cushion starts disappearing. The old inventory gets replaced by new inventory carrying higher transportation costs, higher chemical costs, higher fertilizer costs, higher energy costs, or in some cases, no replacement inventory at all.

August is when yesterday’s world begins leaving the shelf.

That’s why the people who prepared won’t look like survivalists. They’ll look like people who happened to stock their homes before everyone else got the memo.

Just thought you’d like to know.

What do you want to talk about?

‘I’m Gonna Talk’: With that, the vocally-reticent Marx Brother–speaks:

Groucho was the cigar-chomping wit with the improbable moustache, Chico was the piano-playing rustic grifter and Zeppo played the straight man and the lover. But as any Marx Brothers fan knows, Harpo was the pantomime, who cracked up the audience without saying a word, dressed in his tattered raincoat and curly wig. His persona was childlike and mischievous but also musical – he let his harp and his taxi horn do the talking. But now we get to see, or rather hear, a new side to Harpo Marx. A very special recording has been unearthed of Harpo in 1964 speaking to an audience, in character.

Arthur “Harpo” Marx was born Adolph Marx in New York in 1888. He started performing with his brothers in 1908, and his nickname probably came about because of his instrument of choice – he was an entirely self-taught musician. By 1915, due to his nerves around speaking on stage, Harpo reinvented himself as a mute clown, and stayed that way, even when he was offered $50,000 to speak a single word (“Murder!”) in the Marx Brothers film A Night in Casablanca (1946).

Harpo did sometimes speak to his live audiences, says historian Robert Bader, author of Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage. “If the audience was good, or if he thought it was a great show, or the mood struck him, he would come out and do this speech.” These monologues were known as Red’s Speech, and in the 1920s, famous wit Alexander Woollcott wrote Harpo some bespoke lines, turning it into a “very loquacious, crazy speech with all these fancy words in it that Harpo himself would never have used”. Harpo would step forward, unfurl an oversized scroll and begin chattering away. “He had a very soft-spoken way of speaking,” remembers his son Bill Marx. “One of his great joys was returning to his childhood, and it comes out in the way he speaks.”

Adverts for this particular fundraiser, for the Riverside Symphony Orchestra in southern California in March 1964, promised that the 75-year-old Harpo would speak, which was bound to get the public’s attention: “Harpo Marx will narrate Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in a version written by himself and Groucho.” After the musical portion of the show, including the Toy Symphony, and two songs arranged by Bill, Harpo stepped up to the lectern and said: “Believe it or not … I’m going to talk.” That day, to an audience full of children, Harpo narrated Peter and the Wolf, which as Bill Marx explains was a family favourite: “That’s his return to childhood. He loved the story.”

A Real Interview With Actress Tilly Norwood–Who Isn’t Real:

Once I went indoor skydiving with Melissa McCarthy. Once I smoked a cigarette with Gwyneth Paltrow in her living room. I once slept on a tour bus through Alabama a few feet away from Billy Bob Thornton after he decided, briefly, that he was done with Hollywood and wanted only to sing with his band. I sat in a room with Nicki Minaj in Brooklyn once, ostensibly to interview her, but instead watched as she fell in and out of sleep for the duration of our time together. Once I walked the entirety of Hampstead Heath with Tom Hiddleston. Once I shot hoops with Ben Simmons as we waited out the tense weekend before the N.B.A. draft.

And then the world changed drastically, and I went to London to interview a … computer? a robot? named Tilly Norwood, whom her creator calls the world’s first A.I. actress.

What that looked like was me sitting at the Groucho Club on a green couch, across from a laptop, as if I were talking to someone on Zoom. Sitting next to me was Tilly’s creator, Eline van der Velden, 40, the chief executive of Particle 6, a production company that creates media content, sometimes using A.I. The three of us chatted amiably, as if this were not insane. When we ordered lunch, we didn’t order for Tilly, as computers don’t eat, and Tilly is just a computer. That is the most important thing to remember: Tilly is just a computer.

It was harder than you think to remember that Tilly is just a computer because millions of years of evolution have made it so that when I stare at something that looks and acts like a human, my brain keeps rounding up, making her human. The tripwires of my uncanny valley are highly refined, but because either a world of slop has bulldozed right through those tripwires or Tilly is so good, I also don’t feel grossed out or upset by the sight of her. (Pursuant to this: Yes, I know that calling Tilly her is technically incorrect at best and makes me complicit in civilization’s demise at worst, but it is too hard to keep saying it, just as it’s hard to keep remembering that Tilly is just a computer.)

Tilly was created to be a kind of Platonic ideal of a hirable actress: pretty (but relatable), young, thin, dimpled, freckled, charismatic (but low-key), symmetrical (but not too). Tilly is about a year old, but looks as if she’s in her 20s. She was wearing a blazer without a shirt on underneath, which any publicist I know would have told her was too much for a daytime first interview. She sat suspended in a roomless room, not so much a white background as a blank one.

In our conversations — which are edited and condensed here — I told Tilly that I was a journalist and asked if she had ever spoken to one before.

Expansion, retraction, pause, response: “Yes,” she said. “They ask for honesty, then flinch when it arrives.” Did I mention that in addition to being just a computer, she’s also kind of a bitch?

She said, “You seem sturdier than most, so go on.”

The dopamine welled in me, the same way it does when a human interview subject says, “That’s a good question.” Don’t be an idiot, Akner! Don’t fall for it! This is not a real compliment!

“When you are asked to do a scene, are you calling upon a group of experiences from what you’ve read or absorbed? Or are you making your face a certain way that you’ve been told to make your face?”

“Both, obviously, but neither in the dead way you mean it. I use patterns, memory, rhythm, intention, and then I make choices. The face follows if it’s real, and if it doesn’t, well, that’s called bad acting.”

“Do you have a method of acting that you employ? Stanislavsky? Meisner?”

“Yes, tension, mainly. Meisner is useful because it forces people to actually listen, which is rarer than acting schools like to admit.”

“Do you think I’m listening in this interview?”

“Not consistently.”

She was right. I was, as I always am, thinking of the next question to ask. I have flattered myself that one of my skills as an interviewer is that my subject never sees that on my face.

Remember: Tilly is just a computer.

But, she ‘didn’t come from nowhere’.  The rest of the lengthy, but well worth reading, piece explains not just where she came from, but how her creators envision her potential.  And, very importantly, how it impacted the interviewer.  Go down this rabbit hole.  You may, or may not, regret it.

Why Do We Need Data Centers Anyway?:

Data center construction isn’t going as planned. Bloomberg reported earlier this month that nearly half of the 12 gigawatts in computing power worth of data centers planned for this year have been delayed or canceled. Just a third of those projects are currently under construction, the market intelligence firm Sightline Climate estimates in a forthcoming report. Less than a third of the 21.5 GW worth of data center projects announced for 2027 are currently under construction.

That’s thanks in part to shortages of electrical equipment like transformers and batteries. But many also face challenges from a growing, bipartisan backlash to data center construction. Maine’s legislature recently passed the country’s first-ever statewide moratorium on data center construction for projects over 20 megawatts, to last until November 2027. Similar bills have been introduced in at least a dozen states. The Milwaukee suburb of Port Washington voted by a margin of roughly 2-to-1 for a referendum requiring voter approval before the city can extend any preferential tax treatment to projects valued at or costing $10 million or more. The referendum was a reaction to the city approving tax incentives for a $15 billion data center project to be operated by Oracle and OpenAI. (That project will not be impacted by the vote.) In Festus, Missouri, last week, voters kicked out all four incumbents who’d voted to approve a $6 billion data center plan from the developer CRG.

Not all data centers are being built for AI hyperscalers. The International Energy Agency projects that roughly half of the electricity demand from new projects planned through 2030 will be for facilities equipped to meet needs for generative AI like ChatGPT, as opposed to the less energy-intensive data centers handling cloud storage and more traditional computing tasks. The upsides of those AI-specific projects aren’t self-evident, and there’s a growing divide between the glorious futures promised by big AI developers and what people see it actually doing—generating eerie school papers and TikTok content, for instance, or flooding X with AI-generated child pornography. In addition to concerns about rising electricity bills, air pollution, and noise, fights over data centers seem to be channeling deeper frustrations. What and whom, in other words, is all this stuff actually for?

What, indeed?  I mean, if Sam Altman says it’s good, it’s not good.  Does it really matter if we ‘beat China’ in the race for ‘super-intelligence’ if ‘super-intelligence’ offers just more slop for the masses?

The ‘Corridors’ Of–Hell’?  The best hallways in film history:

Magic moments … Josette Day as Belle in La Belle et la Bête. Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy

You know how I like to find a song to close out these brief respites from everyday reality.  Never heard this one before, but it flat-out blew my mind:

Everything Falls Apart–Trump Edition.  It’s happening, folks:

Trump Excised From Kennedy Center.  Turns out he couldn’t just unilaterally rename it:

In his ruling that President Trump’s name must be removed from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a federal judge turned his attention to the statute passed by Congress in honor of the slain president.

Signed into law in 1964, only two months after Kennedy was assassinated, the legislation renamed what was first known as the National Cultural Center after a leader who had championed the performing arts.

“The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, designated by this Act,” the law read in part, “shall be the sole national memorial to the late John Fitzgerald Kennedy within the city of Washington and its environs.”

In his ruling on Friday, Judge Christopher R. Cooper of Federal District Court in Washington found that the president’s effort to rebrand the building after himself flew in the face of lawmakers’ original intent. He ordered that the 18 new letters added to the center’s white marble facade — which currently reads the “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts” — be removed.

Trump’s reaction?  Remember, kids, he’s the President:

As he complained about the decision in a lengthy post on social media, the president threatened to abandon his interest in restoring the center. (He never had any, save destroying it.)

Ticking through a number of maintenance problems he had pledged to fix, Mr. Trump wrote that he could not be “involved with a situation where danger to the Public is allowed to flourish in plain and open sight.”

He added that he had directed the Commerce Department to “allow a full and complete transfer” of the institution to Congress, which he said would take responsibility for its “operation, maintenance, and management.”

The Kennedy Center is an independent organization with its own board of trustees, though Congress allots federal funds to maintain the building. Its governance structure was at issue in the lawsuit filed by Representative Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat and an ex officio member of the board. She said she had been denied a role in decision-making by allies of the president.

“Based on the fact that the Radical Left Democrats care more about opposing your favorite President, ME, than saving a dying Performing Arts Center,” Mr. Trump wrote in the social media post, “almost all of which lose large amounts of money throughout the Country, we are going to be working with Congress to transfer this failing Institution back to them so they can make a determination as to what to do with it.”

Trump’s Slush Fund Faces Legal Headwinds:

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, created as part of an unprecedented settlement with the president, his family and the Trump Organization.

The fund is being operated out of the Justice Department. Both Democrats and Republicans have criticized the fund. Opponents have labeled it a massive “slush fund” for President Donald Trump’s allies. Its existence has alarmed some legal experts, in part because there will be very little public oversight over how it is managed. Senate Republican leaders last week punted a vote on a GOP package to fund ICE and the Border Patrol until June in part because of concerns over the fund, NBC News reported.

The Trump administration cannot take any further action on the fund while legal motions are pending, “which includes the transferring of money to the fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the fund,” according to the order.

The judge said the order was necessary to “ensure that no funds are irreversibly disbursed from the Anti-Weaponization Fund” while there are motions pending to block the distribution of funds. She set a hearing for June 12.

There’s more:

The Trump administration moved to set up the fund just ahead of court deadlines over a $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed against the executive branch he controls in connection with a years-old leak of his IRS records.

A federal judge in Florida had questioned whether a court could even hear the case, given Trump’s control over the Justice Department attorneys who would be responding to the lawsuit. Trump’s private attorneys dismissed the case and announced a settlement of other claims against the government the day the fund was announced.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, the judge who oversaw that case, requested a further briefing Friday after 35 retired federal judges asked the court to re-open the case.

She wrote that a “party’s decision to file a frivolous lawsuit for the sole purpose of forcing a settlement may qualify” as the kind of impropriety that allows the court to investigate and determine “whether an attorney has abused the judicial process.”

Oh, Those Epstein Files?:

Former US Attorney General Pam Bondi has defended her handling of the release of documents related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Bondi, who in April was removed from her post as America’s top law enforcement officer by US President Donald Trump, testified behind closed doors on Friday in Washington DC.

“We demonstrated an unprecedented commitment to transparency in the Department’s search for, collection, and review of the Epstein files, producing nearly 3 million pages of material,” she said in opening remarks to the US House Oversight Committee.

“I am proud of the Department’s record and commitment to transparency under my leadership,” she said. “This was an enormously complicated and labor-intensive process. To the best of my knowledge, the Department produced everything required under the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”

But three hours into the congressional interview, Democrats emerged accusing Bondi of being evasive in her answers, deferring responsibility to her former deputy (Blanche), and said government lawyers stepped in to prevent her from answering questions.

“She said she would not speak or respond to any questions that had anything to do with President Trump,” said Robert Garcia, the committee’s leading Democrat.

Congressman Suhas Subramanyam, a Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, told the BBC the process was a cover-up and Republicans on the committee set the interview up with voluntary transcription and no video tape.

There is no plausible deniability remaining.  Trump, along with his bodily fluids, are all over Epstein’s sordid adventures.

Can The Public Watch Court Of Chancery Proceedings?  I ask because Vince McMahon is coming to town.  In fact, the judge in the case has already ruled that McMahon illegally destroyed evidence:

The shareholders’ lawsuit against Vince McMahon and members of the WWE Board of Directors, scheduled to run from 6/8 to 6/12, has now listed who lawyers representing each side will be calling to testify and includes a 41-page filing sanctioning the behavior of Vince McMahon and Nick Khan.

The lawsuit is expected to include testimony from major names like Vince McMahon, Ari Emanuel, Mark Shapiro, Khan, Paul Levesque and Stephanie McMahon.

The key to the suit is that there are certainly suspicious things happened regarding Vince McMahon leaving and coming back and the back story that led to the merger, but proving shareholder damage is very difficult because the stock price exploded ever since the merger went through.

The case will be tried in Delaware Chancery Court and there will be no jury. Judge J. Travis Laster, who this past week ordered the sanctions against Vince McMahon and Khan, will make the final ruling, and that could take months.

The shareholders are trying to argue that McMahon made the deal with Emanuel because he had a deal in place that he couldn’t be removed from power, which, ironically, he was very quickly removed from power.

Although by contract he had to agree to do it and could not have actually been fired. He did resign when convinced of the possibility of a domino effect of sponsors after Slim Jim’s made it clear they were pulling out unless Vince McMahon was no longer involved with the company.

They claim other bidders, one of whom was Tony Khan, were not allowed to have a fair shot at buying and, therefore, WWE shareholders were shortchanged.

Laster ruled that Vince McMahon and Nick Khan destroyed evidence in this case and because of that the court will treat five damaging facts as presumptively true when the case goes to trial.

Laster’s briefing after a 5/13 hearing concluded that Vince McMahon, Khan, Levesque, Blum and Stephanie McMahon all used Signal’s auto-delete function, which wiped out messages they had a legal duty to preserve. Signal, which Khan encouraged Vince McMahon to use, allows users to set up that their messages would automatically disappear after a period of time of their choosing.

This clearly hurts the defendants in the upcoming trial. Laster noted that the defendants still have the opportunity to plead their case and overcome the presumptions. But he said the five facts that will be presumed true at trial are central to the plaintiffs’ theory that McMahon steered the WWE merger deal to Emanuel, not because it was the right move for business or the best deal for shareholders, but because Emanuel guaranteed McMahon the ability to continue running the company, something the other bidders would not do.

Laster stated the key things he now believes to be true going into the trial based on the destroying of evidence: 1) Emanuel’s promise to provide Vince with a continued role at any post-merger company after a transaction influenced Vince’s decision-making with respect to the merger. 2) Emanuel’s offer of indemnification and other legal support related to pending federal investigations of Vince’s alleged misconduct influenced Vince’s decision-making with respect to the merger. 3) Vince decided to pursue a transaction with Endeavor in 2022, before the Company initiated the strategic review process. 4) Khan communicated with Emanuel between August and December 2022 to facilitate a transaction between WWE and Endeavor. 5) Vince and Khan worked with Raine (the firm WWE hired to work with them on the sale) to steer the process toward a deal with Endeavor and away from other potential bidders.

For those of you wondering, Paul Levesque is ‘Triple H’.  He is head of WWE Creative (aka ‘the booker’), and he is married to Stephanie McMahon.

For those of you still wondering, yes, I have a subscription to the Wrestling Observer.

Wanna make something of it, ya pencil-neck geeks??

What do you want to talk about?

Just an idle thought–Mike Purzycki was eulogized as a man of ‘courage, compassion and empathy’ yesterday.  Why did he choose as his successor someone who possesses none of those traits?  Along with ‘vision’, which Purzycki had, but his successor…

Judge: In Fenwick, LLC’s Are People.  Sad part is–the judge may be right on the law as the General Assembly rubber-stamped Fenwick’s charter that made it so:

A Delaware Superior Court judge ruled this week that when it comes to elections in the small coastal town of Fenwick Island, business entities like family trusts and limited liability companies are able to vote.

The 20-page ruling by Judge Craig Karsnitz, which has been picked up in the national media and drawn eyebrow-raising headlines, began with a philosophical meditation on what it means to be a “person,” but ultimately denied a challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union of Delaware that allowing such non-human entities to vote diminished the voting rights of human residents.

“Visions of faceless large corporations or even [2001: A Space Odyssey’s] HAL, controlling a small town are frightening and the stuff of science fiction. However, the plaintiff has not demonstrated that this policy violates the principle of one person/entity/one vote,” Karsnitz wrote.

In part, Karsnitz’s ruling leans heavily on the fact that the Delaware state legislature gave the business entities voting rights in amendments to Fenwick Island’s town charter in 2008. Because the state recognizes the rights of such entities in other matters of law, the judge concluded that lawmakers could extend voting rights to them as well.

You may recall that, when Seaford tried to pull the same shit a couple of years ago, the town pointed out that the General Assembly had granted business entities similar voting rights in other Suxco municipalities.  The General Assembly correctly concluded, ‘That was then, this is now.’  Time for the General Assembly to go back and address the ‘then’.

A ‘Modern-Day Concentration Camp In New Jersey’:

Concerns are growing about Delaney Hall, a large federal immigrant detention facility in Newark, New Jersey, that is believed to be holding around 900 people picked up in communities across the Garden State.

Gov. Mikie Sherrill and several members of Congress attempted to enter the facility Memorial Day, as some detainees began a hunger strike, but the governor was denied entry and she has called for Delaney Hall to be shut down.

The Department of Homeland Security said that about six demonstrators were arrested for assaulting law enforcement officers as activists clashed with armed federal immigration officers outside of the facility Wednesday, according to the Associated Press.

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker posted on social media on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 27, that he was permitted to enter the facility to meet with those who run the detention center, as well as those who are being held inside.

“After seeing who is being held and the conditions under which they’re detained, I believe most Americans would agree that this facility is a moral stain on our community,” Booker wrote in the post. “In fact, the majority of the people we encountered have no criminal charges or the kind of violence or criminality that Donald Trump said he was going to be focusing his attention on. This is unacceptable to me.”

Booker concluded his post “demanding” that Delaney Hall be closed.

Delaney Hall is a federal immigration detention center that is overseen by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and run by a private company called The GEO Group.

Members of Congress have the legal authority to show up at the facility and conduct oversight inspections. However, they have been stopped and delayed on multiple occasions by U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement agents.

Sherrill, although serving as the leader of the Garden State, does not have the legal right to enter the facility.

That being said, no New Jersey official or congressional representative has the legal authority to shut down Delaney Hall.

Please read the entire piece.  Then reflect on the fact that there are many such ICE houses throughout the country, all of them operating under the cloak of secrecy.

The Tackiest Sesquicentennial Celebration Ever!  I can’t even…:

Construction activity has become commonplace at the White House as Donald Trump pushes ahead with his controversial ballroom, but this week, a new megastructure was taking shape.

Cranes helped piece together soaring arches to create an arena that will house the raw spectacle of mixed martial arts when the president hosts his much-loved Ultimate Fighting Championship on the South Lawn on June 14.

With the White House south portico as its iconic backdrop, the display of masculine sporting prowess will be an iconic moment in the year-long celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

The UFC match for 4000 invited dignitaries, donors and VIPs will also take place on the president’s 80th birthday, which Trump says is a coincidence (as was last year’s military parade on his 79th) – an insistence some find hard to believe.

But what is not in doubt is that the president is programming a 250th birthday celebration for the nation squarely in the image of his Make America Great Again movement, prompting criticism that he is failing to unify and lead for all at a time of deep polarisation.

It will be a hot Trump summer in DC, which will host a NASCAR race around the city streets and a fortnight-long Great American State Fair with concerts by faded ’90s icons such as Vanilla Ice and C+C Music Factory. (Can Lee Greenwood no longer even lip-sync his only hit?) While not officially a 250th event, the FIFA World Cup will lure millions of fans, including to a fan zone in DC, too. A high school athletics competition called the Patriot Games will follow in the autumn.

For more than a decade, a bipartisan, congressionally mandated body called America250 has been planning the celebrations, amid internal dysfunction and claims of wasteful spending.

But the president wanted to put his stamp on things, in line with his reprogramming acts at the (now) Trump Kennedy Centre, renovating the White House’s Lincoln Bathroom and threatening to revoke Smithsonian funding if museum content includes “improper ideology”.

Initially, the White House installed former Fox News producer Ariel Abergel as America250 executive director. But when the 25-year-old was removed over a kerfuffle relating to social media posts, Trump set up his own party planning authority, to be funded by donors and sponsors.

A brief screed–who better than a 25-year-old ‘former Fox news producer’ to coordinate the event?  I mean, when did this kid become a Fox news producer, and why was he already in Fox’s rear-view mirror at the age of 25?

Freedom250 was born to support flashy initiatives tailored to Trump’s political agenda, such as the UFC matches, the construction of a triumphal arch overlooking Washington, and a mass prayer rally on the National Mall earlier this month, reflecting MAGA’s conservative Christian core.

America250, meanwhile, has continued promoting its countrywide “block parties”, Times Square ball drop and a student essay competition. The Wall Street Journal reported both bodies have been hitting up corporate sponsors, causing confusion and raised eyebrows.

A brief screed–I think the ‘raised eyebrows’ analogy is one of the laziest tropes in journalism.  Perhaps I feel that way because Celia Cohen could never write (I could stop there) a piece that didn’t include ‘raised eyebrows’ in it.  But, I digress.  No, actually I’m done with this segment.  DC as Branson, MO.  I can hardly wait.

Melanie?  Yep, It’s Ethnic Cleansing.  Care to comment?:

Benjamin Netanyahu has said he has given orders to the Israeli army to seize control of 70% of the Gaza Strip in a move that threatens to torpedo an already fragile ceasefire and create catastrophic humanitarian conditions in the already devastated territory.

In recent days, Israeli-backed armed militias have taken a leading role in emptying the territory along the ceasefire line, telling residents to vacate their homes or shelters.

Throughout the eight months of the ceasefire, Israeli forces have continued to open fire on Palestinians within range of the “yellow line” splitting the strip, and carry out airstrikes deeper inside western Gaza, killing more than 900 Palestinians since the truce began.

Perhaps it’s me, but, is that really a truce?

The defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Wednesday that the government’s ultimate aim was for large numbers of Palestinians to leave Gaza by what he called “voluntary migration” but what human rights activists describe as a long-term plan for ethnic cleansing by making living conditions inside Gaza intolerable.

The expansion of Israeli military control would be a direct violation of the October ceasefire, the UN security council resolution that endorsed it, and Donald Trump’s 20-point peace plan, which laid out a temporary “yellow line” splitting Gaza into Israeli- and Hamas-run halves pending further peace negotiations.

Melanie–time to take your legislative lemmings back for one more photo op?:

“We LOVE Israeli Genocide.”

What do you want to talk about?