George Santos
Kevin McCarthy, the Weakest Speaker ever, is refusing to call out the the fantasist Congressman George Santos, whose entire resume, life history, Jewishness, and good works are a lie. You can tell a fantasist, by the way, when he lies about easy to check stuff when there is nothing to be gained. I had one working for me in the corporate world, who lied about stuff like being related to a famous hockey player, or owning a home on an exclusive Florida island; like Santos, he lied about being a college athlete as well. You would think we would have no place in Congress, in either party, for a fantasist, whose word has less to rely on in it than the barking of a dog; so McCarthy's desire to keep Santos-- he needs his vote-- is quite a Tell. I Flash on a device, of which I don't even know how I know about it (!), the Hydrometer. Perhaps they used to sell them in the Edmund Scientific Catalog. You can read the density, the specific gravity, of a liquid by how high or low the hydrometer floats. George Santos is a hydrometer which sinks merrily out of sight. As for Kevin McCarthy's mindset, I Flash on a line you always hear in New York City about some famous old deli or another: The food is terrible, and the portions are too small.
Eric Adams and Ambulances
I detest Eric Adams; he is the worst, most dishonorable Mayor we have had since Giuliani-- whom he resembles in his grudgy dishonesty. But, across a series of awful actions, his proposal to have his ambulance corps roll up the homeless is the worst. I worked on New York City ambulances for five years, so I know this. When we got a call for an emotionally disturbed person (EDP), the cops are dispatched with us by protocol, to make sure the scene is safe, that the person is not dangerous. I sometimes witnessed the cops beating those people, and in the years since I retired, they have sometimes killed them. Also, while almost everyone else can refuse medical attention, even of course a homeless person, for conditions including shortness of breath or chest pain, by signing a "RMA" form, an EDP is presumed incompetent and cannot. Then there is the destination at the end of the ride: EDP's are taken to the psych departments of New York's most frightening public hospitals such as Bellevue. I have spent many hours in those departments, where very large, strangely gentle men, some of them with knife scars, work as orderlies, whose job it is to wrestle uncooperative EDP's to the ground. The main difference between these orderlies, and NYPD, is that they commit violence reluctantly, while the cops often seem gung ho to get to the arga-warga. I have never actually seen the inside of one of the cells in which the EDP will be held for 48 or possibly 72 hours. Somehow, the EMT's never knew which number was correct, and on a Google search just now I found both answers on authoritative looking sites. My personal conclusion, having run hundreds of those calls in my five years as an EMT, is that if a friend or relative was acting out, I would do everything imaginable to get them private help, before I would call 911 and launch them into that system.
So Adams wants to treat all homeless people as EDP's. First of all, I figured out long ago that all problems must be solved as far upstream as possible. In a society in which homelessness is again increasing exponentially, and developers are routinely (due to the general Tammany-style corruption) getting approval for thousand unit luxury skyscrapers even though hundreds of rent-stabilized tenants will be evicted; where affordable replacement housing is not being built; where preventive services are unavailable for people with psychological ailments who are unhoused; launching them all into the Bellevue psych eval system is not only morally wrong, but shockingly short-sighted. Adams is not trying to solve any of those problems upstream; he is exacerbating them all. One of my favorite quotes was Talleyrand supposely telling Napoleon that a killing he ordered was "not only a crime, but a mistake". Bellevue doesn't want, and can't handle, all those people. If forced to, it will warehouse them the required hours, then put them back on the street. To get them off the street more permanently, you would need concentration camps, or simple mass murder. If I was an EMT today, and Adams' modest proposal was adopted, I would resign rather than run those calls. Soviet psychiatry, evil as it was, was actually more merciful than what Adams is trying to accomplish here.
Rings of Power
It was kind of a terrible, amateurish show, on a service, Amazon, which knows how to do much better than that. The reason is clear: Jeff Bezos took a personal interest, and believes his own press. If he had let the people handle it who actually knew what they were doing, it would have been much better. It was a billionaire's vanity project. And that, kids, is how Money can make Smart People Stupid.
Fine dining
When I was a child and a young person, my parents took us sometimes to famous restaurants where I felt (now and then) we didn't belong: we didn't know how to dress, how to hold the silverware, what wine went with what. It was a hugely awkward experience. Some of the waiters would look pained; others would tell you, rather snarkily, "One does not chill red wine" or "You are ordering two starches". The one exception I remember was Lutece, which had a culture of kindness. Nobody ever made you feel bad there, and every night the chef walked around to talk to the people at every table.
However, even Lutece probably was concealing gross inequality in the kitchen, where your fancy food has always tended to be made by the underpaid and even the unpaid. Articles and op eds last week around the closure of Noma, said to be the world's greatest restaurant (I had never heard of it) analyzed this from every angle. Noma of Copenhagen, despite its well-heeled clientele, who scheduled international travel around reservations there, could not break even paying its people a living wage. Like many of those places, it featured one or more expensive frivolous dishes which were labor intensive; Noma's was a painstakingly assembled insect made from pieces of fruit. While nothing human is (supposedly) alien to me, I cannot walk in the shoes of the human who enjoys the spectacle of being seen to order and pay for the Noma fruit beetle, made originally by unpaid interns hoping to break through to an actual career in upscale restaurants. The Times article on Noma contained a Pushy Quote: "Everything luxetarian is built on someone's back; somebody has to pay".
One of the huge, rewarding personal decisions which followed from personal emancipation as an adult: no more fancy restaurants. Since the pandemic, I don't go out much any more, but yesterday my wife and I hit the John Pappas cafe, in the East Hampton parking lot. I had the turkey burger deluxe, and she had the flounder. The place has a large menu, and no Weird Hand-Assembled Shit. Best of all, if anybody cared about the way we held our forks, they kept it to themselves.