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It's not in session today either, or on Wednesday. In the meantime it sure does look as though the Constitutional Crisis that has been hand wrung as potentially coming for so long, is in full action now, thank you Alito and the Corrupt Court of Supremes. I mean, look at and try to parse this shyte what Justice Alito is saying here -- https://www.thebulwark.com/p/conservative-legal-philosophy-was - Donald Trump attempted a coup, and failed. - The criminal justice system is attempting to hold him accountable for this clear violation of the law. - But doing so might lead to some other president to attempt a coup. - So if someone attempts a coup they must not be prosecuted. - Because if you prosecute them, they might attempt another coup. Alito continues to suggest that barring criminal prosecutions of a former president would be a good thing for democracy. But by all means lets pearl clutch over the university students as stupid, ignorant and antisemitic for demanding their school and nation stop conduction ethnic cleansing.

Yes, the report addresses the events in Canada as extensively as the other assassinations and attempts at assassination in some other nations. You can read the piece in entirety, in which the Canadian assassination plots are addressed, as, is stated, the link is a Share Link.

Has anyone read these? I never have, as I've always had too much else in the stack demanding immediate or at least asap reading. I had wanted to to read The Year Civilization Collapsed very much. And now I want to read The Survival of Civilizations just as much. I particularly want to read them as the first is one of the Big Befores -- the orange stinkin' pile and Covid, and the other After that -- though certainly as of this spring the courts have put the USA in full Constitutional Crisis, which has been glumly predicted and talked for at least a decade, but now everyone's strangely silent on that topic. Cline, Eric. (2014) 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed Sequel, (2024) After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/cline-collapse-book-history-armageddon.html

This one has just been published: https://tech.cornell.edu/news/ari-juels-publishes-new-crypto-thriller-novel/

https://tech.cornell.edu/news/ari-juels-publishes-new-crypto-thriller-novel/

Just a very few days before the television series adapted from his Shardlake novel, Dissolution, airs. The Shardlake series is one of the best of historical fiction series, such as Druon's The Accursed Kings, P.F. Chisholms' Sir Robert Carey Mysteries, Robert Merle's Fortunes of France, Penman's Plantagenet series, and even, for something completely different, yes, this is an excellent historical fiction series, Michael Pearce's Mamur Zept novels.

EXCLUSIVE An assassination plot on American soil reveals a darker side of Modi’s India Shared/gift link -- goes behind subscription paywall: https://wapo.st/3w3RrgT This is a long, in depth report. Concluding paragraphs: There is a breakout section, which might be called a Sidebar, but the WaPo captions as a 'carousel' --

The thing you all should keep in mind that this report is coming from Israel, saying they believe this is the case. ICC has made no announcements. Nor will Israel say where they got this idea. ~~~~~~~~~~ Some excellent reporting going on about the situation going on currently on Columbia University campus, the students negotiations with the Board, etc. That people airily dismiss these as just naive and ignorant students -- on the contrary. They know their stuff. They are coherent and clear and logical. They also understand the powers -- all the different ones -- which rule their university, and what the university does in all its various interests, of which far more have little or nothing to do with teaching, than those that do. Which is a enormously more than their detractors know, understand or give a damn. Did anyone listen to Mike Johnson's address to them? That guy can't even put two words together much less know what the West Bank is. The students' detractors, like so many politicians and others, cannot comprehend the trajectory that turned Israel from being an electoral value or an advantage, into a liability. These are the people, who have 1) paid no attention the history of Palestinian dispossession since 1947 to the present; 2) who close their eyes and ears to who the people are, who are objecting to this dispossession; 3) who additionally close their eyes and ears to what bibi, likud &co have been doing to Israel itself for three+ decades; 4) the concerted propaganda campaign that insists objection to the mass murder in Gaza is support for Hamas and is an antisemitic expression. These are the kids that got into Columbia. Many of them are very smart cookies, just like many are legacy students, like many of them also have very rich daddies.

Israeli Officials Believe I.C.C. Is Preparing Arrest Warrants Over War https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/28/world/middleeast/icc-arrest-warrants-israel-hamas.html

Louisiana mayor signs approval for white suburb of Baton Rouge to secede from the city of Baton Rouge (the capital, btw, of Louisiana!). https://www.brproud.com/news/local-news/east-baton-rouge-parish/what-you-need-to-know-about-st-george-new-louisiana-city-will-be-in-east-baton-rouge-parish/#:~:text=(BRPROUD) — The city of,permit the city to incorporate.

Bones of 1800s battlefield [Waterloo] dead may have been dug up for fertilizer and for sugar factories rending the sugar from the sugar beet, which substituting for cane sugar became lucrative in Europe in the 19th c. Bones from medieval battlefields and bones from Bubonic Plague death pits were also dug up, as well as the pits of the hundreds of thousands of horses and mules killed in the battles. Bones of Contention: The Industrial Exploitation of Human Bones in the Modern Age by Bernard Wilkin and Robin Schäfer. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2024/04/28/soldier-bones-waterloo-fertilizer-sugar/

A correction to certain allegations made about the US voter, here is this, going back to February already: Voters Support the U.S. Calling for Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza and Conditioning Military Aid to Israel This despite the millions poured into the IDF-Israeli propaganda machine since last fall. https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/2/27/voters-support-the-us-calling-for-permanent-ceasefire-in-gaza-and-conditioning-military-aid-to-israel#:~:text=After being presented with these,de-escalation of violence in Many charts and graphs within the report. This is a huge dilemma for Biden and the Dems. See the situation in swing state Michigan and the tale of Deerborn's mayor and his voters, which is delineated in the WaPo this morning. This Michigan mayor turned down a meeting with Biden’s campaign manager. That move sent a message. Navigating between residents’ rage over Gaza and Democrats’ fears of another Trump term, Abdullah Hammoud must decide whether to back President Biden. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/28/5000-miles-away-michigan-mayor-center-gaza-storm/ The comments, going on 2000 by now, generally do not back this war, but are terrified that not voting for Biden no matter what means we know what. A real cliff hanger for the election.

And yet the media almost always headlines these protest and demonstrations a antisemitic action which makes the Jewish kids terrified for their lives. Then the story itself, complete with interviews with the students, inform us, careful and considered in their speech and thoughts, that what is going on IS NOT THAT AT ALL. And over and over and over, that the student groups and the students are Jewish, Muslim and everything else too, who are protesting, and they are protesting the schools' programs deeply invested in arming Israel, and for a ceasefire, and for a two-state solution. ETA: It has just now, duh! come to me that these university kids grew up knowing any time they went to school they could be killed dead. Some of them probably were in a classroom with a threat or had the school of someone they know or are related to, shot up even. If they are African American, Latino, or Gay, or you name it, if they grew up female, they knew any time any where they could end up dead and / or raped and battered. They watched on tv George Floyd and Treyvon Martin killed. As someone just recently remarked to me, for these kids it's trauma all the way down.

And this too -- https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/27/opinions/yale-student-palestinian-protests-berlin/index.html

New York Review of Books Newsletter This lays out what has been going on with D.C. - Johnson, the NYPD and the students at Columbia on their campus. BTW, NYU has boarded up all approaches to the Stern Business School I saw today.

How often does one read a book review that provokes outright guffaws? Here is one. With ‘Only the Brave,’ Danielle Steel confronts the Holocaust A courageous young nurse resists romance to save others from the Nazis Review by Ron Charles Shared/gift link: https://wapo.st/3w1Gyfx

Former lawmakers have ideas on fixing Congress. The outlook is bleak, but these ex-members of Congress agree on at least a bunch of small fixes to change incentives https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/27/congress-polarization-bipartisanship/

What does gangster-state Montenegro have in common with Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds and Paul Manafort and bananas and cocaine? And by golly, the USA helped! And Holy Cow, so did/does Russia and Putin! Who woulda thought? And China too. O my! This kind of in depth reporting about figures and places generally barely heard of by people over here, yet having effects upon us from Italy to Canada -- not to mention South America -- is something the London Review of Books does better than just about anyone. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/alexander-clapp/rip-their-skin-off The Europol SKY ECC Report is a big part of this story. So it's worth checking out on one's own, when learning of this the many online links concerning this Europol encryption app , -- starting with https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/cocaine-cartel-uncovered-sky-ecc-busted-in-bosnia-and-herzegovina This cross-hemispheric drug smuggling and state propping violence is abetted by Concluding paragraph:

I'm not so sure about how successful that was, as a reader who was there, in so many ways, and who has always been friendly with Bill. He's really good at where he's not actually involved in so many ways. He likes that position - distance, big overview from afar that is about how we look now. But I was here, and have been ever since, and his writing didn't work for me with that. What those two events, Kennedys assassination and 9/11 had in common was the endless loops of what people didn't know -- just the image of what happened. A picture can be worth a thousand words, but I really and truly swear that endless 9/11 loop was superficial only, and not what it was for us. Then, well -- hey the response by Bush? to put up enormous billboards on the sides of high rises here downtown, where I lived, less than a mile above the Towers, which I knew well, had even worked in them, which told us to get credit cards and go shopping as the best way to counter and defeat the enemy? God I hated him and Cheney -- and still do.

People tried and made a real mess of it. Particularly since it got started way too soon. Immediately in sf/f genre, for instance, many proposed the Fall of the Towers as the impetus for a plot in which somebody takes advantage to disappear and begin a new life ... w/o taking into account that even in ye olden days of 9/11 digital records were so extensive disappearing and creating a new identity was so difficult one needed deeply expensive and deep connections to do so -- and the government had them. So making it just personal romantic journey was ridiculous. Not to mention disparaging of the people who lost their lives and what their families went through. BTW, of such proposals for fiction I ever saw, not one was proposed by anyone who lives here and went through it. The weird politics of 9/11, though almost as forgotten as Katrina, are still playing out right this moment too, in so many ways. See -- for a single instance, Giuliani.

So then I thought of Pat Barker's The Women of Troy (2021), drawn from Euripides’s play, he Trojan Women, and Sophocles earlier play, Antigone, and its sequel, The Silence of the Girls (2018), which draws upon The Iliad Whereas I’ve not been interested by Barker's much praised, other consequences and aftermath of period war books, I was riveted by these two when they were published. Why? Evidently no matter what we know, or how we write, this Bronze Age legendarium of heroes, warriors and divinities, of 3000 B.C. -- 5000 years ago! -- stubbornly retain residual nimbi of glamor and glory. Despite reviewers, particularly very snooty academic (male) fellows, snobbishly informing readers that Barker hasn't a clue about the divine, or how important it is in the world view of everyone in the Bronze Age, as these women in her retellings, don't bow before either the divine or the (male) diviners. Ha!

I finally just finished watching this. I liked and admired both seasons very much, but for some reason had a difficult time getting myself to watch it. This is one of those shows that doesn't benefit from having a week between release of episodes. It began right before going away for about a month, so when I returned there were lots of things to watch, and also, jetlagged, it was hard to get back into. Then at one point I caught up to where season 2 was. After a week, I was entirely meh at getting back to it again. Now that all rest of the episodes are up, I watched one of the remaining eps each night, and everything seemed to be snappier -- and a lot more involving. I dunno.

You nailed it! Thanks.

The Duke's great family is broke, so they commit more crimes to keep the coffers filled and continue the style of ife to which centuries of criming has made possible.

Shōgun Won the Attention War https://www.vulture.com/article/shogun-subtitles-translation-memes-success.html