Greenwald assured me Trump was a non-interventionist and more of a pacifist than Biden, but here we are.
Open Thread: Musical Readership Capture
The Washington Post reviews a new bio – ‘How Talking Heads stumbled their way to success’:
… Talking Heads… made its debut on June 5, 1975, at CBGB on the city’s Lower East Side. There was nothing new about a band built around guitar, drums and bass — Cream, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Led Zeppelin and the Who used that format to churn out some of the era’s most bombastic music — but this group seemed slightly bewildered at having found themselves onstage. They were as different from the titans of rock as a sneeze is from a hurricane. Bassist Tina Weymouth seemed especially unsure of herself, which is hardly surprising since she had been playing for less than six months. Drummer Chris Frantz’s skills were rudimentary at best, as were those of the singer-guitarist, David Byrne; when Byrne opened his mouth to sing, as one critic said, “his voice rises as though he’s about to yell at his mother.”
Jonathan Gould’s well-wrought, insightful “Burning Down the House” traces the band from its fumbling early days to the kind of heady success that creates its own problems. Its three members had met at the Rhode Island School of Design, parted company, moved about, formed and left bands, and finally jelled as Talking Heads (there’s no “the” in that name), a group that not only survived but even got booked at clubs such as CBGB despite a lack of everything one might need to succeed in the music biz. Byrne recalls that they were “less a band than an outline for a band” as they stumbled through quirky, quizzical songs and wore clothes that looked as though their moms had picked them out.
Oddly, their awkward demeanor was a big part of their appeal. Since Weymouth had only recently learned how to play the bass, she kept her place in the music by staring at Byrne with such intensity as to suggest to the audience that he was someone who was really worth looking at. Within a year, the group was joined by Jerry Harrison, who had actually taken piano lessons as a child and whose keyboard and guitar playing “thickened” the band’s sound, to use Gould’s word. Indeed, the arrival of Harrison shifted Talking Heads away from “the anxious intensity of a guitar trio” to the tempo and syncopation common to soul and funk. Gould should know something about that; he is the author of books on Otis Redding as well as another group that transformed itself by adapting the sounds of Black America, the Beatles…
Harrison may have added heft to the band’s minimalist sound, but it was the arrival of producer Brian Eno that transformed them from club favorites to international stars. For one thing, Gould posits, Eno “was much more interested in the sound of singing than in the meaning of what was being sung,” so he downplayed the prominence of vocals in a song’s final mix. Eno’s approach had a special appeal for the band’s front man, and the all-new Heads took on a vitality fueled by his new persona. Gould quotes a critic who put it crisply: “Byrne’s vocal style is that of a man terrified by experience, yet obsessed with the need to plunge in anyway.”…
The Horrors (Open Thread)
Senator Murphy summed it up succinctly:
Donald Trump, a weak and dangerously reckless president, has put the United States on a path to a war in the Middle East that the country does not want, the law does not allow, and our security does not demand.
— Chris Murphy (@chrismurphyct.bsky.social) June 22, 2025 at 12:53 AM
Did anyone else see Kegsbreath’s grotesque and obsequious “briefing” this morning? I just cannot with this shit. Gonna watch just birds for a few days.
Open thread.
Saturday Night Kind Of Open Thread
Here’s a sort of open thread for anyone who wants to talk about anything but the Iran bombing. You know, in case anyone is hoping to get some sleep tonight and wants to talk about something else.
I’ll start, but please don’t feel you need to limit the conversation to this.
I have less than a month left of Apple TV+ before I lose my $2.99 rate, so I’ll be cancelling until any of the shows I loved come back with another season. I probably have enough treadmill time for one show.
Loved Slow Horses. Loved Shrinking, which I just finished. Really liked The Morning Show.
I don’t want to watch Severance or anything that will remind me of the current times. Any suggestions for the Apple+ TV show?
Mostly open thread.
War for Ukraine Day 1,213: Da Fuq De Doin Ova Der?
I really don’t have much to say about the news. We don’t know much. Specifically, whether they got the weaponeering right to actually achieve any real effects. The reporting last week was that no one had ever tried a strike like the one just made on Fordow. Specifically, that conventional penetrators wouldn’t work or multiple strikes would be required, which might not be possible so only a low yield “tactical” nuclear penetrator. But that had been ruled out. The White House denied the reporting.
The Guardian on Wednesday claimed that the U.S. military has reservations regarding the success of using a bunker-buster bomb, a nonnuclear weapon, to eliminate Iran’s Fordo nuclear facility, buried deep in a mountain. Two defense officials were reportedly briefed that only a tactical nuclear weapon could reach the facility, but The Guardian noted that Trump is not considering using a tactical nuke.
On Thursday, Fox News senior White House correspondent Jaqui Heinrich reported that the White House told her otherwise.
“I was just told by a top official here that none of that report is true, that none of the options are off the table, and the U.S. military is very confident that bunker busters could get the job done at Fordo,” Heinrich said.
We won’t know anything until there’s more reporting, until CENTCOM does a battle damage assessment, and then someone releases it.
US personnel within the CENTCOM area of responsibility (AOR) are in for a very long ugly early morning and several very long days.
What we do know is that this strike is not in response to an attack on the US. This is not self defense. It is unconstitutional and illegal, not that that is anything new over the past six months.
The cost:
💔 In the Rivne region, Ukrainian soldier Serhii Dobrovolskyi has died — just days after returning home from russian captivity.
Serhii was 43. He had been considered missing in action since 2023, but was freed during the recent large prisoner swap at the end of May.
Source: mayor Vladyslav Sukhliak.— Olena Halushka (@halushka.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Here’s last night’s air defense tally:
260 out of 280 targets shot down, jammed or lost track of in last night’s air attack on democratic Ukraine by fascist Russia. A 92.8% rate overall, 93.75% for drones but 55% for aeroballistic/cruise missiles. Drones can be deadly, but missiles remain the greatest threat.
— Euan MacDonald (@euanmacdonald.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 3:46 AM
When Putin says “where a Russian soldier steps, it’s ours,” he’s talking about Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, Moldova, the Caucasus, and countries like Kazakhstan, says Zelensky.
— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 10:14 AM
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.
War for Ukraine Day 1,213: Da Fuq De Doin Ova Der?Post + Comments (25)
Trump: Bombing for Peace
“I have just bombed you. This war I just started is now over. Time for peace!”
Followed by his new mantra: Thank you for your attention to this matter.
I don’t even begin to know what to say about this.
I have no words.
Open thread.
Heartbreaking Read: ‘Abandoned by Trump, a farmer and a migrant search for a better future’
Abandoned by Trump, a farmer and a migrant search for a better future – Washington Post www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio…
— Michael Huggins (@michaelhugg2591.bsky.social) June 21, 2025 at 11:59 AM
The Washington Post at its best [gift link]:
KIRK, COLORADO – There was a saying he’d heard, about how every farmer rooted for all the other farmers to do well, too, until one of those others started farming next door. So JJ Ficken didn’t talk much about the grant money with other farmers.
But his bills had mounted, and his ambitions had unraveled, and in Kirk, a town of 61, it was easy to feel alone. Now on that afternoon in mid-April, JJ, 37, unstrapped the bags of seed corn on his trailer for a customer…
The federal government had promised JJ a $200,000 grant, spread across two years, to cover the cost of a seasonal farmhand from Latin America. In a place where local, legal help was nearly impossible to keep, the extra worker would give him the freedom to handle more jobs and invest in his own equipment. It was an opportunity that could transform his family’s future, but, JJ explained to his friend, President Donald Trump had frozen the money.
“Good,” the man said, grinning. “Too much spending here and there. I’m okay with a little hurt.”…
Hurt was something JJ already understood. It had been part of the landscape long before Trump took office. JJ was an American farmer, perpetually subject to weather, labor, loans, overhead, markets, health, politics. None of it was predictable, and all of it was a threat. The industry’s survival has long depended on the deals made between millions of Americans willing to brave all that uncertainty and a federal government willing to sustain them, through grants, subsidies, insurance, financing, payouts and disaster relief.
But then Trump, in the earliest days of his second term, threatened to break tens of thousands of those deals, suspending billions in agricultural funding and decimating the staffs that managed it. Swept up in the freeze was JJ and the $50 million grant program he’d signed up for along with 140 other farmers across the country. All of them had agreed to hire and, in many cases, house domestic workers or lawful immigrants willing to take jobs that Americans would not, but with the reimbursements in doubt, farmers worried they’d miss payrolls, default on loans or face bankruptcy. Many feared the checks would never come.
“I tried to do things right,” JJ said, because he could have taken on an undocumented laborer at any time for $14 an hour, as many of his neighbors had, but he didn’t believe in supporting illegal immigration. Almost nothing mattered more to him than his word, and he’d kept it to the U.S. government: He’d committed to buy a plane ticket for a 24-year-old from Guatemala named Otto Vargas. He’d rented him a single-wide. He’d bought him an old pickup to use. He’d spent tens of thousands of dollars to do what the grant required, covering most of it with a line of credit at 8.5 percent interest.
Now, he didn’t know if Otto would ever get here, or if the government would ever pay him back…