Little Notes & Short Posts

Trump claims he’s getting arrested tomorrow.

Trump posted to his TruthSocial network over the weekend claiming he was getting arrested for the Stormy Daniels thing on Tuesday, and calling for protests.

He said, “Now illegal leaks from a corrupt and highly political Manhattan district attorneys office, which has allowed new records to be set in violent crime and whose leader is funded by George Soros, indicate that, with no crime being able to be proven, and based on an old and fully debunked (by numerous other prosecutors!) fairytale, the far and away leading Republican candidate and former president of the United States of America, will be arrested on Tuesday of next week. Protest, take our nation back!”

(Back when I was in school we got yelled at for writing run-on sentences like that. 😒)

Is he actually getting arrested tomorrow? Pfft, who knows. Probably soon, though. Some people are mad because he might be getting arrested over this first, as opposed to a “more serious” crime like staging an insurrection or election fraud. Please remember that the Stormy Daniels case isn’t about him banging a porn star, it’s a campaign finance fraud case. The dude misappropriated election funds to pay off Daniels.

“Oh, this isn’t serious, it involves an icky, slutty girl.” Man, grow up. He stole campaign money to bribe someone to keep their mouth shut about a scandal. It’s serious.

Whether it’s provable and results in an arrest is another matter, but it looks like they’re going to give it a try sometime this week, so I guess keep an eye out for that.

Reminder: If you want a fun way to keep on Trump indictment news, sign up at indictment.fyi, a little website/newsletter spun together by Dan Sinker, the fellow who, among other things, ran impeachment.fyi back when Trump was getting impeached (both times).

Little Notes & Short Posts

Say Yes! to Michigan

The Michigan Senate voted today to end their “right to work” law that let workers enjoy the benefits of union membership without paying union dues. It just needs Gov. Whitmer’s signature to make it official.

👉 Detroit News: Michigan Senate approves repeal of right-to-work law – “The Michigan Senate was approving landmark victories for organized labor Tuesday evening by repealing the 2012 right-to-work law that made union membership optional at unionized workplaces and re-establishing a prevailing wage standard for state projects.”

The point of this law was only ever to weaken unions by taking a chunk out of their funding, which comes from union dues. Why would you pay union dues if you’re getting the benefits anyway? Don’t want to join a union? Don’t go to work for a union shop. Oh, they pay better? And you get better benefits and more sick and vacation days and whatnot? Then shut up, pay your dues, and work there. Pretty straightforward.

You can add this to the list of things Michigan is doing right lately, like protecting abortion rights and protecting LGBTQ+ rights.

TV & Movies

Inside Man

Inside Man is a four-part murder mystery miniseries available on Netflix, starring David Tennant, Stanley Tucci, Dolly Wells, Lydia West, and Lyndsey Marshal. It’s also written by Steven Moffat of Doctor Who and Sherlock fame.

We watched it over the weekend and it is… extremely Moffat-y. Whoo, boy. All Moffat’s tropes are here in spades.

It’s not bad. I mean, look at the cast up there. You could have those folks read your grocery list and it would be riveting. There are a couple of just stand-out supporting roles, like Atkins Estimond’s Dillon, who stole just about every scene he was in, and Kate Dickie’s Morag, who was also delightful. There’s a handful of clever twists. It’s pretty funny.

But the whole thing relies on a small handful of people being just farcically stupid. To be fair, the cast does a spectacular job trying to sell some of this stupidity, and the plot whizzes briskly past the idiocy, trying to cover it up with a lot of style and amusing one-liners.

It’s also a deeply cynical four hours. It’s a lot like Moffat read The Killing Joke one time and was like “Yeah, it really does only take one bad day to turn you into a nutball killer!” despite the fact that the whole point of that book was that the Joker was wrong. Then he went and wrote a four-hour miniseries based on that and the fact that no one will let him make anymore Sherlock episodes.

It wasn’t terrible – definitely not the worst four hours of TV I’ve ever watched. It was funny and a fair amount of fun, and David Tennant, Stanley Tucci, and Dolly Wells were amazing. If you’re willing to overlook the idiot-ball plot, you’ll enjoy it. And it looks like it’s being set up for further series, probably with Stanley Tucci’s “detective” character making a return, so that might be interesting.

Reading & Books

GNU Terry Pratchett

“Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?”
– Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
– Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

“Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.”
– Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

“If you trust in yourself… and believe in your dreams… and follow your star… you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy.”
– Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men

“Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It’s the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.”
– Terry Pratchett, Eric

Little Notes & Short Posts

Anti-Trans Legislation

Vox: The GOP’s coordinated national campaign against trans rights, explained – “Though many of the bills being proposed will never become law, they serve a practical purpose for Republicans. Whether or not they are enacted, they allow conservative state legislatures to perform opposition to the ‘woke left’ and ensure evangelical voters show up to vote — even after the religious right achieved its decades-long goal of overturning Roe v. Wade last year. A recent report from Mother Jones showed that leading religious-right organizations are playing a prominent role in creating and promoting the bills.”

I keep stumbling across articles minimizing what’s happening with anti-trans legislation on the state level, and just so you know, yeah, some of it is performative. But never doubt for one single second that they absolutely mean to make being transgender illegal. The end goal here is the eradication of an entire kind of people from public life. And when they’re done with transgender people, they’ll come for gay people. And non-white people. And non-Christian people. And women. They’re coming for all of us.