"We Do Not Have The Responsibility Of Making Gay Life Look Good To Straights So That They Will Accept

The Santa Anas

There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension. What it means is that tonight a Santa Ana will begin to blow, a hot wind from the northeast whining down through the Cajon and San Gorgonio Passes, blowing up sand storms out along Route 66, drying the hills and the nerves to flash point. For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today knows it too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior. I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. The Pacific turned ominously glossy during a Santa Ana period, and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf. The heat was surreal. The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called “earthquake weather”. My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake. “On nights like that,” Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.” That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it comes down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about “nervousness,” about “depression.” In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children become unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn. A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be; some talk about friction and others suggest solar disturbances. In any case the positive ions are there, and what an excess of positive ions does, in the simplest terms, is make people unhappy. One cannot get much more mechanistic than that. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1969, Joan Didion.

The New Republic

Three-Star General Issues Red Alert About Musk’s Foreign Entanglements

Retired Lieutenant General Russel Honoré says the SpaceX CEO could be compromised by his business dealings in China.

A three-star U.S. Army general thinks that Elon Musk’s foreign business relationships could make him a significant threat to national security.

Retired Lieutenant General Russel Honoré argued in a Sunday New York Times column that the SpaceX CEO’s willingness to capitulate to Chinese demands over the years should make his recent influence within Trump’s circle all the more questionable.

Honoré referenced 2023 quotes from Musk’s DOGE buddy Vivek Ramaswamy to make his case. “I have no reason to think Elon won’t jump like a circus monkey when Xi Jinping calls in the hour of need,” Ramaswamy said in an interview. “It’s deeply concerning that @elonmusk met with China’s foreign minister yesterday to oppose decoupling and referred to the U.S. & Communist China as ‘conjoined twins,’” he wrote in another statement that year. “The U.S. needs leaders who aren’t in China’s pocket.”

Ramaswamy has since made amends with Musk, but his concerns still apply. Musk and SpaceX have already been flagged thrice by the Air Force, the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General, and the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and security for failing to disclose his meetings with foreign leaders, something his current security clearance requires him to do. And his China business isn’t going anywhere either.

Musk has borrowed at least $1.4 billion from Chinese government–controlled banks to pay for his massive Tesla “gigafactory” in Shanghai. He borrowed this money knowing full well that China’s laws allow the Chinese Communist Party to demand information from any company doing business in China in exchange for doing business there—a huge red flag for Honoré.

“Mr. Musk’s business dealings in China could require him to hand over sensitive classified information, learned either through his business interests or his proximity to President-elect Donald Trump. No federal agency has accused him of disclosing such material, but as Mr. Ramaswamy put it, China has recognized that U.S. companies are fickle,” Honoré wrote. “Mr. Musk’s relationship with China’s leaders could prove a problem for America’s national security given that SpaceX has a near monopoly on the United States’ rocket launches … the last thing the United States needs is for China to potentially have an easier way of obtaining classified intelligence and national security information.”

This has drawn the ire of Democrats and Republicans alike. In 2022, Senator Marco Rubio accused Tesla of obstructing justice for the CCP, and in 2023 he introduced a bill to stop NASA and other federal agencies from giving contracts to companies connected to the Chinese Communist Party. Two Democratic senators very recently called for a probe into Musk’s “reliability as a government contractor and a clearance holder” because of his reported phone call with Vladimir Putin.

The line between civilian and elected official has become blurrier as Musk further cements himself as part of Trump’s inner circle. As Honoré wrote, the world’s richest man funding Trump’s return to the presidency “does not give the incoming White House the license to look the other way at the national security risks he may pose.”

Social scientists spent almost a decade observing MAGA, trying to figure out what makes them follow the Orange Pus Knot. In the end they finally conceded that the answer presented itself vividly and without question.

Among the latest discoveries in Pompeii:

A house with a private bathhouse , complete with hot, warm and cold rooms, and a plunge pool.

In a room were found the skeletons of a woman of about 40 years and a man of about 20 as well a pair of gold and natural pearl earrings.

The wonderful Pompeian red on the walls

Frescoes, various valuable objects, and gold coins.

Pompeii Parco Archeologico

@ancientcharm

To Hemingway

[...] this was a writer who had in his time made the English language new, changed the rhythms of the way both his own and the next few generations would speak and write and think. The very grammar of a Hemingway sentence dictated, or was dictated by, a certain way of looking at the world, a way of looking but not joining, a way of moving through but not attaching, a kind of romantic individualism distinctly adapted to its time and source.

So pervasive was the effect of this Hemingway diction that it became the voice not only of his admirers but even of those whose approach to the world was in no way grounded in romantic individualism. “A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details,” Orwell had written in “Politics and the English Language” in 1946. “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain,” Hemingway had written in A Farewell to Arms in 1929. “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity.” Last Words, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, Joan Didion.

Nobody:

JD Vance:

Item: big jar of serotonin