Two songs

Share your favorite The Police song! 👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/2fqW2v1nDE

— 🎸 Rock History 🎸 (@historyrock_) May 18, 2026

This ...



And this one ...

The pay off

DOJ sets up $1.8B ‘anti-weaponization’ fund after Trump drops IRS lawsuit

[...] The massive fund would give Jan. 6 rioters pardoned by Trump a mechanism to seek taxpayer payouts for their claims of government overreach. The fund could even issue “formal apologies” to people who made claims against the government, the announcement said. The fund will stop processing claims by Dec. 15, 2028, about a month before Trump’s second term is set to end ...

You know, so Trump can use our taxpayer dollars to reward his police-beating followers ...

"Democrats, where are you?"

I took a lot of history classes in school, and so this comes as no surprise. The ancient world and the middle ages are rife with antisemitism. What's depressing is that people just don't think about it. I guess they are too much in love with having a group they can "justifiably" hate.

Every Time I Think of You

The Babys. On the muzak at the grocery store today.

Horseshoe Theory

Horseshoe theory

The Anti Israel Horseshoe Theory: How Israel is Reshaping the 2026 Midterms

[...] The 2026 midterm elections are becoming the first modern American election cycle in which hostility toward Israel is no longer confined to the political fringes. Instead, anti-Israel rhetoric has become a strange meeting point between the populist extreme right and the activist extreme left. Two movements that agree on almost nothing else, yet increasingly speak a common language when it comes to Israel.

This is not merely a foreign policy debate. It is becoming a defining cultural and ideological fault line inside American politics itself.

Political scientists call this phenomenon “horseshoe theory,” the idea that the far left and far right, rather than remaining opposites, eventually bend toward one another at the extremes. In 2026, Israel sits directly at the point where that horseshoe closes ....

I've watched my party - the Democrats - become more and more anti-Israel, even though the vast majority of Jewish Americans are Democrats, trying (I think dishonestly) to link Israel to the colonialism and oppression of our own European history.

And the Republicans have always been conflicted, having some members who are pro-Israel for their own religious reasons, while also having a history of hating Jews (the KKK, etc.).

I think, at the end of the day, both the Democratic party and the Republican party have deep reservoirs of antisemitism that they refuse to acknowledge and deal with. So they deflect and it persists.

Israel isn't the bad guy (or the good guy). Israel is the litmus test Americans find easy to use for their own varied purposes.

The latest grift

Endangered Species Day

For a Coming Extinction - W.S. Merwin

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And foreordaining as stars
Our sacrifices

Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

Oceana

Today is Endangered Species Day.



The Republicans don't seem to care anymore about the environment, the Trump administration only wants to exploit it for money, and even most Democrats seem to only see it as an energy topic. It's our ecosystem, made up of the plants and animals that share the world with us - I think we should be preserving it, not plundering it.

Trip to China

"My precious"

I'm shocked, shocked, I say! Of course he doesn't give a poop about our financial situations. And, come on - he doesn't give a poop about the nuclear thing either. That's just his "acceptable" excuse for starting the war. But he does care about one thing ... his precious ... the big beautiful ballroom.

War movies

Retired general Mark Hertling discusses war movies. Strange though it may seem, I have some past posts about war movies, like Ten for the 4th. It's interesting to hear a military person's opinion of some of the films.

AI Chatbots

Mother's Day

Happy #MothersDay 🦦🦊🦝🐐💕

From fluffy kits to tiny pups to miniature hatchlings, the spring season is a time when these adorable newborns steal the spotlight (or sunlight).☀️

How well do you know wildlife species and their offspring? Take our quiz 📲: https://t.co/Ectwj8m0Kq pic.twitter.com/BArnKhCCOk

— National Wildlife Federation (@NWF) May 10, 2026

California

Hosted by Ezra Klein, a discussion between Democrats running for governor of California. It was on one subject .... how to affect the affordability of housing in the state.

At first I found it kind of boring, but towards the end they started talking about homelessness ... a big concern in CA ... and it helped me zero in on who I might vote for (voting has already started).

I mentioned before that I thought I would vote for Tom Steyer, and I still like him best, I think, but I also liked what Katie Porter and Matt Mahan had to say.

One thing mentioned during the talk was the scary California Forever project. It's creepy that a guy from the Czech Republic, former Goldman Sachs employee in the UK, wh has been here just over 10 years, thinks he knows what's best for this stste....

Ezra Klein on GLP-1 drugs

I'm interested in this as I did take one of these drugs for about a year.

If I had to choose

You can bring ONLY 1 back to life! 👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/HzPDEOaF2B

— 🎸 Rock History 🎸 (@historyrock_) May 7, 2026

David Bowie :)



The Man Who Sold the World, at the BBC Radio Theatre in London on June 27, 2000.

Dark Matter

The latest science fiction book I'm reading from the library is Dark Matter by Blake Crouch.

Here's a bit about it from Wikipedia ...

Dark Matter is a thriller science fiction novel by American writer Blake Crouch .... The story is about a physicist who is kidnapped and sent to a parallel universe in which another version of his life unfolds because of a different choice he made fifteen years prior. The book draws on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which posits that every possible outcome of every event creates a new universe or world that runs parallel to our own ...

The book has been made into a tv series at Apple TV+. I haven't seen it, but here is a trailer of the show ...



I'm only a little ways into the book but it seems good so far.

Now it's $1 billion

Senate GOP eyes $1 billion for Trump ballroom security as part of ICE, border patrol package

Senate Republicans are looking to give the US Secret Service $1 billion to shore up security for President Donald Trump’s future White House ballroom, as part of a broader immigration enforcement package.

Two GOP-led Senate committees unveiled late Monday their roughly $70 billion package to fund US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol, which they plan to pass with only Republican votes

The Senate Judiciary and Homeland Security committees are aiming to spend roughly $38 billion for ICE and around $26 billion for US Customs and Border Patrol functions and upgrades, according to legislative text released by the panels. The funding would run through the end of September 2029.

The Judiciary Committee also tucked in the additional $1 billion in Secret Service funding that could go toward Trump’s ballroom project ...

People are losing health care benefits, food assistance, and gas is through the roof, but ... the ballroom!