Thousands of “Kennedy Files” documents posted online this this week disappointed assassination conspiracy theorists, but “historians are finding many newly revealed secrets.” ( Jennifer Schuessler and Julian E. Barnes / NYTimes) — Documents reveal the pervasive influence of the CIA.
The Underlying Problem (Hamilton Nolan) — “This is happening because some people are too rich.”
The significant thing about the way that Elon Musk is presently dismantling our government is not the existence of his own political delusions, or his own self-interested quest to privatize public functions, or his own misreading of economics; it is the fact that he is able to do it. And he is able to do it because he has several hundred billion dollars. If he did not have several hundred billion dollars he would just be another idiot with bad opinions. Because he has several hundred billion dollars his bad opinions are now our collective lived experience.
And it’s not just Musk:
We have allowed too few people to accumulate too much wealth. The imbalance has grown so severe that a tiny number of individuals with twelve-figure net worths have the means to purchase so much political power that they can effectively make the federal government’s decisions.
What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler (Political Wire)
How did Snow White become the year’s most cursed movie? (Adrian Horton / The Guardian) — The anti-woke brigades are triggered that Disney cast an American actor of Colombian descent as Snow White. Pro-Palestinian advocates hate the casting of Gal Godot. Peter Dinklage hates the whole seven-dwarfs thing. And more.
I remember seeing the 1937 movie when I was a little kid, more than 55 years ago, and even then it seemed corny and old-fashioned.
I wanted to hate the 2025 update but the trailer looks pretty good.
Now that Ghost has launched its ActivityPub beta, I’m very curious to see what a long Ghost post looks like when it’s viewed from Mastodon.
Every read-it-later app I see plus my RSS reader is adding AI summarization features. I don’t need an app to read for me; I have been reading since I was six years old.
My latest on Fierce Network: Nvidia GTC: Top Telco Takeaways: AI-RAN, 6G, AI factories and oh! those cute robots
El Cajon nurse can’t shake COVID-19’s unrelenting grip: ‘I have lost relationships’
Nicole Baca, a 40-year-old registered nurse in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon, talks with the Union-Tribune’s Paul Sisson about her struggle with Long Covid. Her symptoms closely resemble people close to me:
Today, she’s grateful if she can take a walk at Ocean Beach with her husband, an act that requires meticulous pre-planning to avoid the racing pulse that can make her dangerously dizzy.
“Once, I had an episode where I almost passed out in a neighbor’s driveway,” she said. “I bent down to pick something up that was on the ground, and everything started to turn white.”
…
This never-ending fight started in June of 2020 when she found herself becoming strangely confused during a shift in a COVID-19 unit at the San Diego hospital where she worked. These were the days when health care workers were isolating themselves from their families, often staying in hotel rooms when off duty.
“My last day at work, I caught myself forgetting what I was doing, and I felt like I was on cold medicine, but I wasn’t,” she said. “I developed shortness of breath, a fever, fatigue, extreme bone pain, cough, diarrhea and dizziness.
“I was stumbling into the walls of my hotel room. Weirdly enough, I never lost my sense of taste or smell like most people did at the time.”
Most see such symptoms gradually resolve. For Baca, they worsened, permanently causing her body to overreact to small changes in elevation. Just standing up sends her pulse racing, the heart monitor in her Apple Watch warning of a dangerously erratic heartbeat. Such cardiac overcorrection causes her blood pressure to drop, increasing the chances that she will faint.
I am embarking on my fourth business trip in the past year after a four year hiatus. I feel I have regained the art of rapid packing — but maybe I should wait on saying that until I get to the hotel and find out that I’ve only packed right shoes.
We watched another episode of “The Rockford Files” last night. I am continually amazed at how well that show holds up 50 years later.
I want Rockford’s car. Of course I do. But I also want all of his sports jackets.
When watching early 70s mysteries, part of the treat is seeing the lineup of guest stars who would become big stars later in the decade, as well as formerly big stars at the end of their careers. Last night’s episode featured Suzanne Somers as a wealthy expatriate. This was only a year after she played the blonde in the T-Bird in American Graffiti, and she still doesn’t have a speaking role here. Jill Clayburgh plays a bubbly hippie artist’s model.