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AMG Goes Ranking – Immolation By Grin ReaperThe life of the unpaid, overworked metal reviewer is not an easy one. The reviewing collective at AMG lurches from one new release to the next, errors and n00bs strewn in our wake. But what if, once in a while, the collective paused to take stock and consider the discography of those bands that shaped many a taste? What if multiple aspects of the AMG collective personality shared with the slavering masses their personal rankings of that discography, and what if the rest of the personality used a Google sheet some kind of dark magic to produce an official guide to, and an all-around definitive aggregated ranking of, that band’s entire discography? Well, if that happened, we imagine it would look something like this…
Formed in 1988, Immolation emerged shortly after death metal’s dawn of aggression. Alongside Incantation, Suffocation, and Mortician, Immolation cemented themselves as a cornerstone of New York’s death metal scene in the early 90s. Since then, the band has erected a kingdom of consistency, releasing cut after unholy cut of complex arrangements, unwavering hostility, and anti-religious ruminations about the failures of gods. Key to Immolation’s dependable, high-quality output are mainstays bassist/vocalist Ross Dolan and guitarist Robert Vigna, who have both been with the band since inception. Even Immolation’s other members prove steadfast, with drummer Steve Shalaty searing skins since 2003 and Alex Bouks lending his axe since 2016. Through eleven full-length releases, Immolation has proven that their ability to harness ruin and forge death metal majesty is nigh unparalleled.
With twelfth album Descent arriving soon, staffers old and new clamored to share their opinions on how Immolation’s back catalog stacks up. Unlike rankings mostly prescribed by overwhelming consensus on their highs and lows, Immolation presents a discography with nothing to atone for, providing fertile ground for healthy, well-considered discourse. Without further ado, then, let’s put our ears to the door of a world below and divine these diabolical rankings!
– Grin Reaper
The Rankings
Grin Reaper
In my book, nobody does pure death metal better than Immolation. More consistent than Suffocation and Incantation and more uncompromising than Morbid Angel and Cryptopsy,1 Immolation scoffs at AMG’s Law of Diminishing Recordings™ as they reign atop an unimpeachable discography that lacks a single turd. Seriously. The ‘worst’ album Immolation ever put out still rivals or surpasses the best from most other death metal outfits, and their indomitable march to dismantle the weak and unworthy entrenches them as one of my all-time favorite acts. Jesus wept—Immolation never fucking flinched.
#11. Harnessing Ruin (2005) — Something has to be last, and Harnessing Ruin gets my tap. Songwriting-wise, Immolation drops a strong effort with acerbically grim leads and a rousing introduction to new drummer Steve Shalaty. Guitars supply the album highlights—from the gnarled riffing in “Our Savior Sleeps” and the sludgy sway on “Son of Iniquity” to the scalding solo on “Dead to Me,” Bob Vigna and Bill Taylor sizzle with hell’s fire across Harnessing Ruin. Unfortunately, the album’s production holds it back, and the muffled mix lacks the bite of Unholy Cult. Also, the longest songs cluster at the end, dragging the back half a touch.
#10. Kingdom of Conspiracy (2013) — Kingdom of Conspiracy just ekes ahead of Harnessing Ruin, clocking three minutes briefer despite having one more track. To my ears, Kingdom of Conspiracy features Immolation’s brightest, most modern production. This offers a boon to Dolan’s grating growls and the tormented guitar tandem of Vigna and Taylor, but it also buries the bass and pushes the drums further away from the dead corpse smacks that characterize my favorite Immolation bass drum tones. As one might expect from the bottom end of such an excellent discography, Kingdom of Conspiracy does little wrong, but lacks the heretical heft that defines Immolation’s best material.
#9. Shadows in the Light (2007) — Concluding what I consider Immolation’s middle period, Shadows in the Light chronologically bridges their weakest link, Harnessing Ruin, and powerhouse Nuclear Blast debut, Majesty and Decay. Shadows in the Light drastically improves on Harnessing Ruin’s production, wading out of the former’s forlorn pall and laying down brimstone-tinged bangers like one-two punch “Passion Kill” and “World Agony.” A sense of immediacy pervades Shadows that, while not lacking in the lowest-ranked albums, burns even hotter here, filling its forty minutes with writhing leads and furious drumming that typifies what Immolation does so damned well.
#8. Failures for Gods (1999) — Failures for Gods falling to #8 proves just how potent Immolation’s discography is, as the album would be a crown jewel in countless other discographies. On the surface, Failures for Gods has everything Immolation fans could ask for: punishing grooves, tortured guitars, and vocals that could command the armies of hell. Despite that, Failures for Gods feels like it holds back from the devastating offensive that would launch a year later, instead rehashing rather than progressing what Immolation accomplished on their first two albums. Still, Failures introduced drummer Alex Hernandez, and though his masterstrokes would be heard on Close, songs like “God Made Filth” and “The Devil I Know” heralded the storm to come.
#7. Dawn of Possession (1991) — Pure fucking evil rarely sounds this intoxicating. Steeped in an unpolished production that’s coarse yet clear, Dawn of Possession hooks ears and souls alike, flaying them with its hellish implements. Though it’s Immolation’s most straightforward album, tracks like “Into Everlasting Fire, “Those Left Behind,” and “Immolation” exemplify why suburban mothers clutch their pearls when they happen upon their precious babes listening to death metal. Dawn of Possession was my entry point for Immolation, and it encompasses everything the band offers without guile. I still recommend it for the uninitiated, particularly those who enjoy straight-up OSDM with a side of heresy.
#6. Unholy Cult (2002) — Where Failures for Gods luxuriates in gloomy menace and Close to a World Below reeks of sulfurous damnation, Unholy Cult blurs the line between the two. Starting with a slow build on opener “Of Martyrs and Men,” Unholy Cult careens between ominous drawls and infernal fervor with a substantially improved production over Immolation’s 90s output. “Unholy Cult” remains the second-longest song these death peddlers have penned, and it looms large, rooted in the front half of the album. From there, the tracks rumble and blitz up to closer “Bring Them Down,” a funky barnburner that highlights Dolan’s basswork amidst Immolation’s blazing backdrop.
#5. Majesty and Decay (2010) — Immolation unleashed a juggernaut for their first platter with Nuclear Blast. Blistering, contemplative, and brimming with moldering melody, Majesty and Decay swats with the divine laze of a celestial being, uncoiling at its leisure but devastating in its wrath once roused. Tracks like “A Glorious Epoch” and “The Rapture of Ghosts” toe this line, where beefy chugs pound beneath soaring, anthemic guitars. Meanwhile, the likes of “The Purge” and “A Token of Malice” hit with the force of a thunderclap, unrelenting in their fury. I originally had Majesty and Decay in the same tier as Atonement and Acts of God, but the busy mix and unimaginatively titled “Intro” and “Interlude” hold it back.2
#4. Atonement (2017) — With no song running past the five-minute mark, Atonement exhibits Immolation’s dedication to excising the fat and gristle. Vigna’s crooked leads and crushing riffs mesh perfectly with new guitarist Alex Bouks’ calculated anarchy, and together they synchronize in exquisite harmony. Along with Majesty and Decay, Atonement might be the closest Immolation comes to achieving accessibility. Typically, my favorite straight-up death metal furnishes little room for nuance, and though Immolation doesn’t have a reputation for subtlety, Atonement expertly doles out moments of relief (the end of “When the Jackals Come,” the intro to “Lower”) that almost lull you into safety before the bottom drops out and sends you to hell.
#3. Acts of God (2022) — When I first saw Immolation flaunting fifteen tracks totaling over fifty minutes, I thought their best days were behind them. Bloat is never a good sign, particularly from a band with such a pristine track record. I happily resign to being wrong, though, as Acts of God not only subverted but demolished my expectations. Immolation’s allure lies in the intricacies of their music. Dolan’s patristic admonishment of humanity, Vigna and Bouks’ serpentine noodling, and Shalaty’s tempestuous brutalization of the kit define the band’s sound, yet here the music is more direct and urgent than ever. Rather than missing any beats, Immolation sounds ruinously revitalized.
#2. Here in After (1996) — Though not a significant shift away from Dawn of Possession, Immolation struck nails to gold with Here in After. Compared to later releases, Here in After radiates a few extra degrees of chaos, with deranged soloing that reminds of Slayer’s vision of hell and a slightly more impassioned vocal performance from Dolan. To be clear, his vocals are one of my favorite aspects of Immolation’s sound, and his matter-of-fact, comprehensible gutturals against such malicious metal engenders wonderful drama. The edge to his voice on “Nails to Gold” and “Christ’s Cage” adds a dimension of metaphysical dread that is the chef’s kiss throughout Here in After’s inflamed impiety.
#1. Close to a World Below (2000) — I can’t fathom any other Immolation album topping this blasphemous bonanza than Close to a World Below. Opening with my favorite Immolation track “Higher Coward,” the album bursts forth with an unapologetic eruption of sinuous guitars, vicious growls, and an unyielding onslaught by drummer Alex Hernandez. The drum tones alone deserve a spotlight, but the cataclysmic bombardment of stick on skin violence stops me dead in my tracks anytime one of Close to a World Below’s songs pops up. Immolation distills the essence of what worked so well on previous albums and folds those layers into a perfect performance across eight insidiously immaculate tracks. “Father, You’re Not a Father,” “Unpardonable Sin,” and the closing title track resonate with especially inspired performances, but the entirety of Close to a World Below boils over with the most unhinged and malignant performance of Immolation’s career. Being damned never sounded so Iconic.
Lavender Larcenist
#11. Harnessing Ruin (2005) — Immolation does not have a bad album, but Harnessing Ruin feels like a band chugging along in a bit of an in-between space. The production is muddled here, especially after Unholy Cult and Close to a World Below, but “Our Savior Sleeps” still retains that Immolation heft while “At Mourning’s Twilight” is an inspired closer with an incredible solo at the midpoint. Harnessing Ruin would be the best album of many other bands’ careers, but it is only a lower-tier album for a band as storied as Immolation.
#10. Shadows in the Light (2007) — Shadows in the Light follows Harnessing Ruin in terms of feeling like a band spinning its wheels (as much as a band as talented as Immolation can). Even then, “Passion Kill” is a classic Immolation track with an incredible breakdown that will make a fan out of any listener. “World Agony” follows with a dissonant wailing riff backing as it drops headfirst into a rolling bulldozer of a track. Unfortunately, there isn’t much else to Shadows in the Light that helps it stand out amongst the rest of Immolation’s discography, but it still makes for a solid death metal record with some memorable tracks that have stood the test of time.
#9. Failures for Gods (1999) — Failures for Gods is a solid album that is no slouch in the songwriting department, but it is marred by some truly busted production. Everything feels muddy, oddly loud, and compressed at the same time. “No Jesus, No Beast” is a monster, and the title track features that classic evil tone that becomes so apparent in late-stage Immolation, but the production handicaps this album at every turn. Great songwriting goes a long way, but in a race this tight, poor production brings Failures for Gods low.
#8. Kingdom of Conspiracy (2013) — Kingdom of Conspiracy shaves off a bit of Majesty and Decay’s technicality to its detriment. It is the closest Immolation has come to creating an album that is more groove than tech. As a result, it is probably one of their more approachable records, but it is the weakest of their current era. “Keep the Silence” is a monster of a track, and Kingdom has more than enough material to make it worth a listen. I think this is an album more fans should revisit, and newbies should start with, because it is hooky, heavy, and groovy in ways that will tickle your evil organ.
#7. Dawn of Possession (1991) — Dawn of Possession is an incredible debut from a band that is clearly young and ready to fuck the world up. Robert Vigna’s trademark style is immediately apparent, and Immolation’s blend of groove, dizzying technicality, and evil vibes is on display out of the gate. Craig Smilowski’s drumming is absurd in its rhythm and technical flourishes, but the album lacks the atmosphere that Immolation became famous for later in their career. Dawn of Possession is a fantastic debut that is only brought down by the extent to which its tracks bleed together. Something Immolation struggles with throughout their career.
#6. Here in After (1996) — Here in After sees the band refine their skills and write tighter songs that hit harder while adding just a little dash of that trademark Immolation vibe. The groove is starting to creep in, and tracks like “Christ’s Cage” showcase the band playing with the truly evil tone that pervades their most recent work. Album opener “Nailed to Gold” is a classic for the band, and Here in After is a quintessential Immolation album. Ross Dolan’s vocals have switched from Dawn’s nastier tone to his trademark bellow, and Vigna’s pirouetting shredwork is here to stay. Here in After is Immolation in classic form.
#5. Close to a World Below (2000) — Opening with “Higher Coward”, Close to a World Below starts on a high note and never stops delivering. The production foibles of Failures are ironed out, and Immolation sounds like a band ready to bulldoze society. “Unpardonable Sin” is as heavy as it is frantic with its switches back and forth between dissonant groove and face-melting speed. “Lost Passion” crescendos into trademark Immolation wankery in the best way, but Close to a World Below still suffers from some odd production. Dolan’s vocals feel slightly different track to track, but this is an album with some of Immolation’s best songs to date.
#4. Unholy Cult (2002) — Something about Unholy Cult just clicks for me. “Of Martyrs and Men” is that pure, wonderful, evil shit. After an explosive intro, the track moves into one of Immolation’s most crushing riffs. The title track is a slice of hell in a way the band hasn’t played with since “Christ’s Cage”, an eight-minute epic that is as catchy as it is devastating. Vigna flips from this vibrato-tremolo guitar riff right into an all-out assault and back to massive Immolation grooves without a hitch. Unholy Cult is stuffed with great tracks and feels like a first step towards the second half of Immolation’s career, where atmosphere and groove hold more sway over pure technicality.
#3. Majesty and Decay (2010) — Majesty and Decay is where modern Immolation comes into full form. Part truly diabolical atmosphere, part neutron star heavy, all technical and groovy as hell. “Intro” gives listeners a glimpse into the band’s future. “A Glorious Epoch” has one of the best riffs, basically ever, making for a track that gets my blood boiling without fail. “A Token of Malice” is astounding in its technicality while being a freight train of destruction with Vigna riding shotgun. Majesty and Decay is also the best Immolation has sounded up to this point, where the production finally feels consistent, clear, and absolutely brutal.
#2. Atonement (2017) — Likely an album that will grace the top tier on every list, Atonement feels like the quintessential Immolation album. If I were to introduce the band to anyone, I would probably start here. “When the Jackals Come” is one of the band’s best tracks, and “Lower” is just astounding in how brutal Immolation still is decades later. It also keeps things at a slim and trim forty-four minutes, and album closer “Epiphany” puts a perfect bow on this devil baby. There isn’t a track worth skipping on Atonement, a feat made all the more impressive when it is a band ten albums into their career.
#1. Acts of God (2022) — Where do I start with Acts of God? To me, it is the perfect combination of creativity, groove, technicality, and that evil Immolation sound we have come to know and cherish. As one of Immolation’s longest albums, you would think the well has run dry, but the intro “Abandoned” and interlude “And The Flames Wept” add so much cohesion to the album and drape the entire affair in a veil of depravity. Acts of God features some of Immolation’s biggest and baddest riffs, while also pushing their atmosphere to new heights. Their most evil album, their most creative, and maybe even their heaviest. “Noose of Thorns” is led by a diabolical descending riff that drops into high-pitched tapping that sets the tone so well you can’t help but feel pulled by hell’s destructive currents. “Immoral Stain” is dripping with malice; you can hear it seep into every riff and lyric. “Let the Darkness In” features a bouncing, infectious groove that immediately flips into Vigna’s trademark dissonant wails. Acts of God is Immolation’s magnum opus in every sense, and somehow my favorite album by a band that feels like they can do no wrong.
Mark Z.
Immolation feel like old friends. I discovered them early in my extreme metal journey and was immediately captivated by Bob Vigna’s unconventional riffing style and Ross Dolan’s commanding (and surprisingly comprehensible) growl. No matter what’s happened in the metal scene, it’s always been comforting to know that Immolation have been there, touring relentlessly while consistently delivering their trademark brand of dissonant death metal and never releasing a true dud. In the world of old school death metal, they’re the one band I could always count on. Because of that, they’ll always have a special place in my ever-blackening heart.
#11. Shadows in the Light (2007) — Not a bad album, just a relatively bland one. While there are some inspired ideas, most of the tracks have little of the dark atmosphere or interesting songwriting found on their earlier material. Nonetheless, it’s a testament to Immolation’s quality that even their worst album still has stuff as good as the lumbering grooves of “Passion Kill” or the growl-along catchiness of “World Agony,” which is one of the group’s best songs.
#10. Harnessing Ruin (2005) — Arguably Immolation’s most accessible album, Harnessing Ruin shows them trying to find their place in the mid-2000s death metal scene by writing some more direct songs than usual. Just like with Shadows in the Light, however, this album sags in its back half and lacks the darkness or quality of the first few records. There’s good stuff here, but this record also feels bleak and oddly dated, possibly due to the generic mid-2000s artwork, plain production job, or the misguided use of whispered vocals in “Dead to Me” and “Son of Iniquity.”
#9. Kingdom of Conspiracy (2013) — The fucking drums, man. The drum sound here is borderline overbearing, and given that this record is already pretty fast, the overall experience is a relentless and punishing one that largely crushes nuance beneath the heel of its boot. Fortunately, the riffing is still strong, and the album’s generally fast nature makes the slower, commanding marches of “Keep the Silence” and “All That Awaits Us” hit all the harder.
#8. Majesty and Decay (2010) — After a relatively lackluster era in the mid-2000s, Immolation signed to Nuclear Blast and seemed hell-bent on redemption with Majesty and Decay. Compared to its immediate predecessors, this record has an improved production job, more dynamic songwriting, and a better sense of structure (with the band employing an intro track and interlude for the first time). While the title track’s Gateways to Annihilation vibes make it one of the band’s best slower songs, the album as a whole would be better if some of the weaker tracks were shaved off and a few others were tightened up a bit.
#7. Acts of God (2022) — This is a very good album with two main issues: It’s too long, and it has the misfortune of having to follow up Atonement. Not even an Immolation album needs to be 52 minutes long, and compared to its predecessor, the production is stuffier and the songs aren’t as strong. As a whole, however, this is still a blasphemous good time that maintains a consistently high level of quality throughout, with “The Age of No Light” and “Overtures of the Wicked” being especially powerful cuts.
#6. Unholy Cult (2002) — Immolation’s fifth album represents a bridge between the apocalyptic malevolence of their early material and the polished hostility of their later work. It’s also potentially their most vicious and chaotic release, with the opening track “Of Martyrs and Men” even featuring some borderline-mathcore riffs. While at times tough to untangle, Unholy Cult ultimately succeeds as a 41-minute shrapnel blast of ideas that somehow combines the epic and the violent into an utterly compelling whole.
#5. Failures for Gods (1999) — The start of Immolation’s long partnership with producer Paul Orofino, Failures for Gods is held back a bit by his lack of prior experience with death metal, with the bass drums sounding like bouncing basketballs. Stylistically and structurally, however, this is essentially Here in After Part II, with twisted and brooding compositions that vary between being grandiose and cutthroat. While a bit front-loaded, Failures is still a brilliant record. In a just world, “No Jesus, No Beast” would be the closer at every Immolation show.
#4. Dawn of Possession (1991) — Immolation’s debut essentially gave their death-thrash demo tracks a murkier production job and placed them alongside newer songs that would hint at the band’s dissonance to come. As such, Dawn of Possession is the most traditional death metal album in the band’s catalog while also being one of the most distinct and stylistically diverse. While Bob Vigna would only improve as a songwriter from here, Dawn’s numerous classic tracks and otherworldly sense of blasphemy make it easy to love, warts and all.
#3. Atonement (2017) — How the fuck is this album so good? Late-career albums aren’t supposed to be this good, but this is the rare lightning-strike release where everything hits just right: the production, the songwriting, the performances, and even the cover art (which marks the return of the band’s classic logo). It’s like they found a way to increase the quality of everything while sacrificing nothing, resulting in a record that’s powerful yet understated, hooky yet stuffed with riffs, and listenable yet extreme. It may be slightly front-loaded, but it’s still one of my favorite death metal albums of the 2010s.
#2. Here in After (1996) — Arriving five years after their debut, Here in After shows Immolation truly coming into their own, with Bob Vigna’s dark, dissonant arrangements and Ross Dolan’s menacing, intelligible growl both emerging in full force. The improved songwriting is apparent right from the flawless opener, “Nailed to Gold,” which could be one of the Top 10 death metal songs ever. While the twisted structures that follow are less immediately accessible, it all eventually coalesces into a masterfully crafted whole, demonstrating a keen sense of flow and diversity while exuding a timeless, unheavenly darkness that only Immolation could conjure.
#1. Close to a World Below (2000) — There are certain albums so good that they transcend not only their own band’s discography, but also the rest of their genre. Close to a World Below is one of those albums. Never before or since has an album sounded so much like being in hell, with a suffocating and merciless production job that somehow still allows every note to be heard in all its unholy glory. Drummer Alex Hernandez delivers a once-in-a-career performance that sounds like he’s bashing every part of his kit at once, and Bob Vigna somehow manages to write his catchiest material while still delivering riffs more warped than ever. The record also has one of the best openings of all time, with a sullen voice asking, “Didn’t you say. . . Jesus was coming?” before a blasting onslaught tramples any hope of ever making it to heaven. Fukk it, send me below!
Spicie Forrest
Having begun my metal journey in nü territory, there are holes in my metallic knowledge you could drive a commercial truck through.3 While Immolation has long been a name vaguely known to me, it wasn’t until Atonement that I actually heard any of their music. So, when the call for a ranking came in, I saw an excellent opportunity to dive deeply into a storied discography and see what I’ve been missing.
#11. Harnessing Ruin (2005) — While comparably unremarkable, even the bottom end of this list is still good. The truth is, Immolation has never put out a bad album. With such a consistent base quality, placing albums in a numbered order became a game of sudden death. The nail in the coffin for Harnessing Ruin? The whispering vocals on “Dead to Me” and “Son of Iniquity.”
#10 Unholy Cult (2002) — How the hell do you follow up Close to a World Below? By comparison—and even in isolation—Unholy Cult feels lackluster and unremarkable. I’d likely still recognize most of this as Immolation in a playlist, and it’s still very solid death metal by any measure, but there’s precious little here that demands my attention or elevates it above background music. Additionally, pacing shifts, as on “Reluctant Messiah” and “Bring Them Down,” make it difficult to find a groove or flow through the album.
#9 Failures for Gods (1999) — The first three albums Immolation released are all, more or less, of a piece. Failures for Gods maintains much of the quality from earlier releases, from the searing, whiplash solo work and deep riffage of “No Jesus, No Beast” and “Failures for Gods” to the brooding, intimidating tone of “The Devil I Know.” There’s a bit of staleness that creeps into Failures for Gods, though. Aside from some odd, Spanish-inflected acoustic riffing on the title track, not much here stands out from their earlier work or in retrospect.
#8 Shadows in the Light (2007) — Immolation’s output through the mid-00s is, for me, their least engaging, but Shadows in the Light sees them begin to turn things around toward the high quality they’d been known for in the early years. The percussion on Shadows in the Light caught me by surprise, reminding me mightily of Slipknot’s self-titled. Steve Shalaty’s kit work feels alive and visceral, just itching to incite a riot. This holds especially true on “Passion Kill” and “Breathing the Dark.”
#7 Kingdom of Conspiracy (2013) — Kingdom of Conspiracy is an odd duck in Immolation’s discography. This 2013 release has proven divisive not only for its shift in theme,4 but for its notably clean production, as well. While I do appreciate the clarity and snappiness, it is a tad sterile. Ross Dolan’s vocals are hurt the most by this, making him sound toothless and tired. Highlights like “All That Awaits Us” and “God Complex” still hit hard, but as a whole, Kingdom of Conspiracy just doesn’t have the searing identity of records higher on this list.
#6 Here in After (1996) — Being the sophomore album is a tough break. The pressure’s on, expectations are high. Here in After largely holds the line and even improves on the debut in some ways—the title track and “Christ’s Cage” are absolute powerhouses, wielding the weight of worlds like feathers. That said, Here in After does not feel as compositionally tight or structurally sound as Dawn of Possession. Additionally, much of the solo work feels jarring and a skosh too chaotic for my sensibilities, especially on “Nailed to Gold” and “Burn with Jesus.”
#5 Majesty and Decay (2010) — A continuation of the upward shift in quality from Shadows in the Light, Majesty and Decay sees Immolation beginning to explore the more tempered, measured sound so prevalent in their contemporary output. Some tracks, like “A Thunderous Consequence” and “Power and Shame,” fall flat in their attempts to create atmosphere, but “Divine Code” and “A Glorious Epoch” show exactly how menacing and powerful Immolation can be and truly embody the title of the album.
#4 Dawn of Possession (1991) — This served as the standard by which all else was measured. Apocalyptic and vicious, Immolation’s debut was a revelation. There’s a ferocity on Dawn of Possession that only a young band eager to share their vision can produce. And in so doing, Immolation marred the tapestry forever. Injecting their relentless assault with streaks of virtuosity, Dawn of Possession became the bar not only for the band, but for thousands of inspired musicians in the decades since. Immolation has tweaked and tempered their blueprint in the 35 years since, but the core has always remained.
#3 Acts of God (2022) — I’m normally not a fan of intros, but “Abandoned” sets the stage perfectly for the brutal and utterly savage cudgeling to come. Fully returning to the unchecked hatred for Christians and their gods, Acts of God is contemptuous and caustic in way that hasn’t been heard since Close to a World Below. Most impressive here is Immolation’s success in merging the pomp and circumstance of their modern output with the rage of their early work. While not strictly their best release, Acts of God is a quintessential work, defining the true identity of Immolation.
#2 Close to a World Below (2000) — Already known for their malicious, uncompromising sound, Immolation cranks all the dials to eleven on Close to a World Below. It’s seething, it’s virulent, it’s fucking hostile. If this masterpiece ever lets up, it’s only to parade and mock the mangled corpse of Christ before grabbing a bigger hammer. Every second of this album drips with scorn, from the indictment of “Father, You’re Not a Father,” to the blasphemy of “Unpardonable Sin.” I get chills at the start of “Higher Coward” every fucking time, and they don’t go away until long after “Close to a World Below” fades out.
#1 Atonement (2017) — The first Immolation album I ever heard, Atonement still remains untouched. The imperial confidence and contempt—the sheer power—left me speechless, and I still return to it, nearly ten years later. Atonement is more atmospheric than much of their other work, but the result is a heretofore unknown level of weight and heft, no doubt aided by its more vibrant and textured production. Like the change in the air before a coming storm, Atonement feels like a harbinger of ruin, and at times like the disaster itself. Barns burn on tracks like “Destructive Currents” and “Rise the Heretics,” but Immolation truly shines in patient malevolence. Highlights like “When the Jackals Come,” “Thrown to the Fire,” and “Lower” are in no rush to grind your bones to paste. Atonement is the full realization of what was hinted on Majesty and Decay, and it is breathtaking to behold.
Angry Metal Guy Staff Ranking
Thanks to the dark magic of profane arithmetic, we present the aggregate staff ranking below:
- Harnessing Ruin (2005)
- Shadows in the Light (2007)
- Kingdom of Conspiracy (2013)
- Failures for Gods (1999)
- Unholy Cult (2002)
- Dawn of Possession (1991)
- Majesty and Decay (2010)
- Here in After (1996)
- Acts of God (2022)
- Atonement (2017)
- Close to a World Below (2000)
For any ignorant, curious, or non-practicing heathens out there that need to bathe in the everlasting fire, look no further than AMG’s Immolation primer:
#2026 #ActsOfGod #AmericanMetal #AMGGoesRanking #AMGRankings #Apr26 #Atonement #CloseToAWorldBelow #Cryptopsy #DawnOfPossession #DeathMetal #FailuresForGods #HarnessingRuin #HereInAfter #Immolation #Incantation #KingdomOfConspiracy #MajestyAndDecay #ManillaRoad #MorbidAngel #Mortician #NuclearBlast #ShadowsInTheLight #Slayer #Suffocation #UnholyCult -
Writing a Book is Basically Alchemy
If you’ve spent any time studying alchemy, then you probably already know this—but it’s not just about turning lead into gold.
For many of us, myself included, alchemy is a profound metaphor for personal transformation. But when you really get down into the “Great Work,” you’ll find there’s two main branches that offer rather different perspectives on the Art: Personal Alchemy and Laboratory Alchemy.
One is concerned with the internal—the shifting of the soul and the refinement of character. Spiritual gold. The other is concerned with the external—the physical transformation of whatever substance is in the crucible… which is probably herbs rather than a chunk of gold. Spoiler alert: lots of Alchemy involves herbs.
In my own practice, I’ve found that these things don’t really exist in isolation. They are mirrors of each other. When you do the hard, internal work, the external world begins to shift in response. Likewise, when you labor over the physical craft, your inner landscape changes along with it. It’s pretty much as close as you can get to seeing “as above, so below” happen right in front of you. Admittedly, however, it’s sometimes hard to truly grasp until you’ve lived through it.
Accidental Alchemy?
I’ll be honest: I never actually set out to write an alchemy book.
You can see where my journey started with one of my very first blog posts: What is a Fluid Condenser. And then that became a series of blog posts, which turned into a manuscript, then a book proposal, and then… well, more words than I ever thought I was capable of writing on a single topic. But the point is, somewhere along the way, this project began to exert its own gravity. It transformed.
And as the book transformed, it transformed me!
The process of writing—along with the endless research, soul-searching, and experimental practice—pushed me to seek out knowledge I never intended to uncover. It forced me to become a better practitioner, to think about concepts on much deeper levels, and [hopefully] to become a better writer so that I could have the right words to properly communicate what I had learned. And in that sense, I can safely say that writing a book is, in itself, an act of alchemy. You put the “lead” of your raw ideas into a spiritual fire… and if you’re patient enough, something awesome comes out the other side.
Remember, patience is key…
Introducing…
But I’ve been patient! That’s why I am so incredibly proud to finally announce the release of Fluid Condensers: Unlocking the Mysteries of Gold, Alchemy, and Magick.
This is my very first published work. I’m pretty proud of it, but I’m obviously biased. Some folks got pre-release copies and have already read it, so here’s what they’ve said:
“Like an alchemist seeking the Philosopher’s Stone, Arkadian has brought refinement to the understanding of these vehicles of ethereal and cosmic energies, providing the reader with information that is accessible and applicable.”
–Coby Michael, author of The Poison Path Herbal
“Fluid Condensers: Unlocking the Mysteries of Gold, Alchemy, and Magick by Aerik Arkadian is a true and faithful guide to finding the golden thread. The term “fluid condenser” may be new to you but I suspect that most of you will discover that you already use them. This book will deepen your current understanding and expand your options in your workings.”
–Ivo Dominguez Jr., author of Four Elements of the Wise
“In his debut book, Aerik skillfully weaves the past into the practical now for the everyday practitioner. Unveiling the enigma of alchemy through condensers, it is my fervent belief that this is a ‘must-have’ on every occultists’ collection. Know the past. Learn the theories. Practice your Art. Become elevated in your soul through the transformative, esoteric powers of alchemy.”
–Oracle Hekataios, author of Strix Craft
Oh, right, so let me show you the book.
The cover, which Crossed Crow did an awesome job at designing, is remarkably shiny.
One of the biggest hurdles between moving from pure theory to practice is… well… the practice part. I tried to incorporate a sufficient amount of exercises—28 of them to be exact—to avoid that.
Some are meditations, some involve physically preparing fluid condensers or magickal tools, but all of them are designed to help support the knowledge you’ll be reading about.
If you actually go through them in order, you’ll learn by doing.
And as the name would imply, there’s a giant chapter on gold and the role it has played, not just in magick, but in the world.
Likewise, there is obviously a huge chapter on Alchemy.
But wait, there’s more! Thirteen total chapters. How is that for a magickal number? Plus there are appendices and reference charts in the back for all different types of magickal needs.
“With its collection of recipes and in-depth instructions for the creation of a variety of fluid condensers, I foresee this becoming one of the most often returned to books by magical practitioners of all stripes. It truly is a book worthy of the Great Art.”
–Kamden Cornell, author of The Tameless Path and On Pins and Needles
“Aerik has this wonderful ability to explain abstract magickal concepts, turning them into practical knowledge, and I always leave his classes with an abundance of information and inspirations. He is demonstrating that amazing ability again in his new book. Lightheartedly written, easy to understand even for the absolute beginners, Fluid Condensers is a must-read book for anyone who wants to add some extra oomph to their magickal practices.”
–Eimi OstaraMoon, Poison Path Witch, Honey Bee Steward of Poison and Bee
“It is so nice to see an entire book devoted to the subject and with such depth of coverage. The author places in our hands an invaluable key to the successful practice of both Magick and Alchemy that often passes by unnoticed by many. Here is a full-on book that details both theory and practice with easy to follow instructions from the simple to the complex. The universality of the concept can cross all lines separating Faith, Creed or Lineage because they work. I won’t hesitate to recommend this book to my own students.”
–Robert Allen Bartlett, author of Real Alchemy and founder of The Spagyricus Institute
“Aerik Arkadian provides an exhaustive overview of the magical use of fluid condensers. Full of recipes and practical tips, this book is a must-have for anyone looking to incorporate fluid condensers into their occult practice.”
–Jack Chanek, author of Tarot for the Magically Inclined and Qabalah for Wiccans
So… if that didn’t convince you that it’s worth reading, I don’t know what will!
Here’s some links where you can get it.
AMAZON CROSSED CROWI know, I know… that whole alchemy metaphor in the beginning of this post was just an excuse to introduce my book. But guys, I’m really excited about this.
I hope you read it and enjoy it!
#alchemy #books #fluidCondensers #gold #magick #occult #reading #witchcraft -
Council draws up major new plan to reshape Swansea city centre and waterfront
A new long‑term plan for the city centre
The draft document, called Future Swansea, sets out how the council wants the city centre and waterfront to develop over the next 8–10 years. According to the Cabinet report, it replaces the previous 2016 framework and will help shape the next Local Development Plan, covering everything from public spaces and walking routes to new homes, jobs and major redevelopment sites.
The plan covers the whole stretch from the seafront to Dyfatty Junction and from the River Tawe to Westway, including key gateways such as St Helens Road and the St Thomas Waterfront site.
Derricks Music, The Midas Touch and the entrance to Picton Arcade — a snapshot of Swansea’s independent shops and long‑standing traders.
(Image: Swansea Council)Building on recent regeneration
The council says the plan is designed to pull together the next phase of work following a decade of major projects, including the Swansea Arena, the Kingsway and Orchard Street improvements, and new office space at 71/72 Kingsway. More schemes are already underway — such as the Castle Square redevelopment and Copr Bay phase two — with others in the pipeline, including the Civic Centre and St Thomas former station sites.
The new plan aims to bring these strands together into a single long‑term direction for the city centre and waterfront.
Consultation expected to start this month
Cabinet members will decide on February 19 whether to put the plan out to public consultation. If approved, the consultation would run from late February through most of March. A shorter, easy‑read version will also be published so people can see what’s being proposed without having to read the full technical document.
The draft has already been shaped by earlier engagement with more than 1,200 residents, businesses and organisations, according to the Cabinet report.
Swansea’s beachfront and coastal skyline, with the Meridian Tower overlooking the bay and the city stretching into the hills.
(Image: Swansea Council)What the plan focuses on
The council says the plan aims to make Swansea a “vibrant, green and liveable ‘City on the Beach’,” with better public spaces, improved walking and cycling routes, and stronger links between the city centre, the seafront and the river.
It also highlights potential changes around Swansea Market, the Quadrant, St Mary’s, High Street Station and the routes connecting the city centre to the waterfront. These ideas are at an early stage and will be refined after public feedback.
‘A real opportunity to shape the future’
Cllr Robert Francis‑Davies, cabinet member for investment, regeneration, events and tourism, said the consultation would give residents “a real opportunity to shape the future of their city centre and waterfront.”
He said Swansea had already seen significant change in recent years and the new plan “sets out the next steps in creating a greener, more vibrant and more welcoming city for everyone.”
Morris Buildings and a bilingual city signpost pointing to key Swansea landmarks including the LC, the Waterfront Museum and the railway station.
(Image: Swansea Council)What happens next
If Cabinet signs off the consultation, the draft plan and summary version will be published later this month. Residents will then be able to give feedback until the end of March. The council will review all responses before presenting a final version of the plan to Cabinet for adoption as policy.
Details of how to take part will be announced shortly.
#CityByTheSea #CityOnTheBeach #placemaking #regeneration #Swansea #SwanseaCityCentre #SwanseaWaterfront -
Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump’s Racism and Epstein Fallout
Good Afternoon!!
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Trump’s disgusting Truth Social post of a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Trump left it up for at least 12 hours before someone at the White House finally deleted it. Of course Trump, who is a hateful and repulsive racist, won’t apologize.
The Washington Post: Trump refuses to apologize over video showing the Obamas as apes.
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Donald Trump declined to apologize for sharing a social media video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, saying he did not realize the image of the former president and first lady was tacked on to the end of the clip.
The president said Friday that he had watched and passed along the video — which focused on claims of voter fraud until the final seconds of the clip — to unidentified “people” to post to his Truth Social account, but that he “didn’t see the whole thing,” including the brief portion that showed the heads of the Obamas edited onto the bodies of apes.
In response to a question from The Washington Post about whether he would heed the calls of some Republicans to apologize for posting the video, which was widely condemned as racist and offensive, Trump said he would not.
“No, I didn’t make a mistake,” Trump said on his way to Palm Beach, Florida, for the weekend. “I look at a lot of — thousands of things. And I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine.”
Trump referred to the controversial video, which was online for about 12 hours before being deleted, as “a very strong post in terms of voter fraud.” [….]
…[T]he pushback was swift, including from Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), the chamber’s only Black Republican, who also serves as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Scott called the post “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Several other GOP senators and House members joined Scott in condemning the video, with some calling on Trump to apologize….
Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday, Trump dismissed the notion that the post and his handling of it could hurt him with the minority voters he had made gains with during the 2024 election. He touted criminal justice reform legislation passed during his first term, as well as his efforts to ensure funding to historically Black colleges and universities.
We’ll see. I think Trump expects to be able to rig the 2026 election anyway.
Hanna Kiros at The Atlantic (gift link): The Obama Meme on Trump’s Truth Social Was Exactly What It Looked Like.
Donald Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. Yesterday, 16 minutes before midnight, the president’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president and that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording. Its first minute shows a clip promoting the lie that voting-machine tampering handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Then, someone seems to swipe up, and the clip depicting the Obamas as apes flashes into focus. [The post was removed after about 12 hours.]….
In the interim, hundreds if not thousands of people responded to the clip with enthusiasm. Immediately after the video was first posted on Truth Social, the memecoin $APEBAMA was minted. Within 12 hours, more than $4 million worth of $APEBAMA had been traded back and forth. In an X group with the same name that now has hundreds of members, the pinned tweet implies that the meme stock will succeed because of how outrageous the video is: “this is pretty much on par with him calling Obama a nigga.” Some members posted their own depictions of Obama as a monkey or ape. The ape video’s apparent creator, the X user @xerias_x, reposted the full video to their X account early this morning. Besides the Obamas, the video shows a menagerie of Democratic politicians as animals, bowing down to Trump, who appears as a lion. It now has more than 1 million views. (@xerias_x also seems to be the originator of an AI-generated video Trump reposted in October that shows the president raining down what appears to be excrement on protesters from the sky.)
The “joke” that Trump’s account spread is plainly sinister. The idea that Black people sit somewhere between white people and apes has long been used to justify cruelty. In 1377, a historian wrote that Africans “have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals,” meaning they “are, as a whole, submissive to slavery.” Cartoons circulated during the Civil War were printed with images similar to the one Trump posted: One labels a monkey holding a book upside down as a NEGRO-MAN; another depicts a Black man on all fours, accompanied by the words WHAR’S JEFF DAVIS. In 1906, a man born in what was then the Belgian Congo, Ota Benga, was displayed at the Bronx Zoo in a cage with an orangutan. In 1975, white teenagers harassed Black students desegregating a Boston public school with the chant “Two, four, six, eight, assassinate the nigger apes.”
The ape caricature still colors how Black people are received in America. But this morning, the administration played the video off for laughs. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in response to a comment request before the Truth Social posts were removed. (The Lion King features a monkey named Rafiki, but no apes appear in the film.)
There is absolutely no question that Trump is a vicious racist.
In other news, there are so many fascinating revelations coming out of the latest release from the FBI’s Epstein files. I haven’t had the patience to actually try searching through them myself, but I’ve been following what reporters are finding. Some of the latest examples:
Allison Quinn at The Daily Beast: Epstein’s Top Secret Relationship With Trained Russian Spy Revealed.
Jeffrey Epstein had a years-long relationship with an FSB-trained Russian official who sought his help connecting with a well-known hacker in 2016.
The late sex trafficker’s corresponJeffrdence with Sergei Belyakov is among the strangest revelations in the millions of case files released by the Justice Department last month.
Belyakov, a former deputy economic minister, helped Epstein secure visas to visit Russia, provided him with a dossier on a Russian woman Epstein had complained was trying to blackmail “a group of powerful businessmen,” and reported to Epstein about his work for the Russian government.
Epstein’s frequent bids to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov feature heavily in the newly released files—his assistant reminds him in one September 2011 email that he’d told his bodyguard he “had an appointment with Putin” coming up—but he appears to have had Belyakov at his beck and call.
In one January 2016 email under the subject, “My new position,” Belyakov told Epstein he’d started working at the Russian Direct Investment Fund–now led by Kirill Dmitriev, one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted envoys, and a key player in ongoing peace talks with the Trump administration to end Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Much of their correspondence focused on investment opportunities and potential investors, though it’s unclear to what extent Belyakov involved Epstein in his work beyond the emails documented in the latest files.
The pair met several times in person over the years. In numerous email exchanges from 2014 through 2018, they reference personal meetings they had together, along with sporadic phone calls.
Epstein described Belyakov as a “very good friend” in a 2015 email to billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel as he tried to arrange for the pair to meet. Belyakov also apparently put Epstein in touch with other Russian officials, with emails showing he helped Epstein apply for a Russian visa in 2014 to meet with then-Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak and Alexei Simanovsky, the deputy head of Russia’s Central Bank at the time.
There’s more interesting stuff at the link.
J Oliver Conroy at The Guardian: The Epstein files reveal that a vast global conspiracy actually exists – sort of.
The millions of Jeffrey Epstein files dumped last Friday by the US Department of Justice will provide journalists, conspiracy theorists and interested members of the public with months of reading. And what they will read is enraging.
What makes these files so infuriating, however, is not just Epstein’s horrific predatory behavior, which is well-known, but the more mundane examples of elite conduct that the documents continue to expose. They vividly illustrate a world whose existence many everyday people, whether fevered with visions of the Illuminati or just jaundiced by banal anti-establishment cynicism, already suspected exists: an informal global club of powerful, ultra-rich people who all seemingly know each other, help one another out, and protect each other from the consequences of their depravity.
The new files will probably not provide satisfying answers to questions about, say, whether any of Epstein’s famous friends participated in his sex trafficking, or if his death in custody in 2019 was truly a suicide, as authorities have said. But conspiracy theorists may still feel vindicated – and to some extent they should, Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, said.
Although the documents may not expose an actual criminal conspiracy, he said, they confirm the belief behind most conspiracy theories: that elites “get special treatment, that they’re shielded from the rules that are supposed to apply to everyone equally, and that there is a kind of corruption in the broadest sense of the word”.
The new material is the largest, and possibly last, tranche of the so-called Epstein files, though the government is keeping as many as 3m more pages under wraps. Yet even the initial revelations of these files deepen the astonishing constellation of ties between Epstein and members of the global elite – including tech billionaires; a former US president; British, Norwegian and Saudi royalty or royal courtiers; current and former US cabinet secretaries and governors; and prominent business executives and academics….
[T]he files, especially Epstein’s typo-filled email and text-message correspondences, are fascinating – and ultimately grim – in what they show of how elites act in private, among themselves. At the least, many of Epstein’s powerful acquaintances remained friendly with him years after the notoriously lenient sweetheart bargain, in 2008, in which he pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, and as survivors continued to accuse Epstein of further crimes.
Again, there is lots more enraging material at the link.
AP: Epstein revelations have toppled top figures in Europe while US fallout is more muted.
LONDON (AP) — A prince, an ambassador, senior diplomats, top politicians. All brought down by the Jeffrey Epstein files. And all in Europe, rather than the United States.
The huge trove of Epstein documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice has sent shock waves through Europe’s political, economic and social elites — dominating headlines, ending careers and spurring political and criminal investigations.
Former U.K. Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson was fired and could go to prison. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces a leadership crisis over the Mandelson appointment. Senior figures have fallen in Norway, Sweden and Slovakia. And, even before the latest batch of files, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, brother of King Charles III, lost his honors, princely title and taxpayer-funded mansion.
Apart from the former Prince Andrew, none of them faces claims of sexual wrongdoing. They have been toppled for maintaining friendly relationships with Epstein after he became a convicted sex offender.
“Epstein collected powerful people the way others collect frequent flyer points,” said Mark Stephens, a specialist in international and human rights law at Howard Kennedy in London. “But the receipts are now in public, and some might wish they’d traveled less.”
The documents were published after a public frenzy over Epstein became a crisis for President Donald Trump’s administration and led to a rare bipartisan effort to force the government to open its investigative files. But in the U.S., the long-sought publication has not brought the same public reckoning with Epstein’s associates — at least so far.
Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said that in Britain, “if you’re in those files, it’s immediately a big story.”
“It suggests to me we have a more functional media, we have a more functional accountability structure, that there is still a degree of shame in politics, in terms of people will say: ‘This is just not acceptable, this is just not done,’” he said.
In other words, our media sucks and many of our politicians are shameless. I can’t argue with that.
A couple of Trump cabinet members captured in the files:
CBS News: Lutnick and Epstein were in business together, Epstein files show.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said he had “limited interactions” with Jeffrey Epstein, but documents show they were in business together as recently as 2014.
Lutnick and Epstein each signed on behalf of limited liability companies that agreed on Dec. 28, 2012, to acquire stakes in a now-shuttered advertising technology company called Adfin, documents released among the so-called Epstein files show.
Epstein and Lutnick’s signatures appear on neighboring pages in the contract, with Epstein signing for his Southern Trust Company, Inc. and Lutnick for a limited liability company called CVAFH I. The documents list nine shareholders in total.
Lutnick, the former chairman of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald who at one point lived next door to Epstein, told the New York Post in October that he and his wife Allison had cut ties with Epstein in 2005, deciding after taking a tour of Epstein’s New York townhouse, “I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
However, it appears Epstein and Lutnick continued to maintain contact and emails show they arranged calls and planned to have drinks in 2011.
The following year, the couple and their four children planned a visit to Epstein’s island, Little St. James, emails show. Lutnick was invited for lunch on Dec. 24, 2012, and later, Epstein’s assistant wrote on behalf of Epstein, “it was nice seeing you.”
Their Adfin deal was signed four days later.
Lutnick is such a fucking liar.
Farah Tomazin at The Daily Beast: RFK Jr.’s Bizarre Trip With Epstein and Ghislaine Exposed in Files.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Dakotas with child sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, according to the latest tranche of documents released by the Justice Department.
As the fallout over the Epstein files continues, an email exchange between the two sex predators centers on the now-Trump Cabinet secretary, one of the many prominent people whose friendship the pair cultivated over the years.
The exchange took place in 2012, seven years before Epstein died in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial.
In one email, Epstein writes to Maxwell about a trip involving “dinosaur and fossill hunitng (sic) with jack horner on the ranch, found 90 million year old clams and fossils.”
“Right up your alley,” he adds.
The following day, Maxwell replies: “Love that – didn’t we go fossil hunting with him and Bobby Kennedy in N Dakota?”
“Yes,” Epstein replies.
Maxwell, a former British socialite now serving 20 years for her crimes, also disclosed the fossil hunt during an interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last year, apparently catching him off guard when she said of Epstein: “Bobby Kennedy knew him.”
One more from Amelia Gentleman at The Guardian on women in the Epstein files: Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club.
Pluck an email at random from the millions in the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library. It is a Saturday evening in February 2013, and Jeffrey Epstein is messaging Bill Gates’s assistant about guests for a dinner he wants to organise.’
“People for Bill,” the email begins. Epstein starts listing possible candidates: the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the film director Woody Allen, the prime minister of Qatar, a couple of Harvard academics, the billionaire CEO of Hyatt hotels, a White House communications director, a former US secretary of defence.
He names 10 powerful men, before suggesting “Anne Hathaway (really)”. Epstein has to make it clear, with the bracketed word, that he is not joking when he proposes that a woman might join them at the table. The lists ends tentatively: “victoria secret models?” Epstein wonders: “Who on the list do you think he would enjoy the most?”
The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.
A typical email from Epstein to a woman might say: “Take a selfie of your pussy and send.”
Spend three days rummaging through the chaotic, sprawling, sordid pit of information contained in the Epstein files, and you learn valuable lessons about how this modern global patriarchy operates: through flattery, the exchange of favours and occasional curt reminders of who owes what to whom.
For women, these files offer an unprecedented chance to eavesdrop on conversations from which they are usually excluded. They provide salutary insights into what a set of distinguished global figures think and say about women when they assume the women aren’t listening.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
I’ll end with a few tales of Trump idiocy:
Jonathan Karl at ABC News: Trump wants Penn Station, Dulles Airport named after him in funding deal with Schumer, sources say.
President Donald Trump last month told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that he would be willing to unfreeze $16 billion in funding for a major infrastructure project in New York if Schumer would agree to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles Airport after him, two sources familiar with the conversation told ABC News.
The Hudson Tunnel Project — which would connect New York City and New Jersey — had already started. The project includes building nine miles of new passenger rail track and rehabilitating the North River Tunnel, according to the commission responsible for it.
Officials in New York and New Jersey said if the money isn’t freed-up by Friday, the project would stop, leaving approximately 1,000 construction jobs in jeopardy.
Sources told ABC that Schumer rejected Trump’s offer.
Daniel Dale at CNN: ‘I did that’: Trump takes credit for a prisoner release that happened before he even ran for president.
At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Donald Trump spoke from prepared remarks as he discussed the persecution of Mariam Ibrahim. Ibrahim was unjustly imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014, in a case centered on her Christian faith, until she was released that same year following a global outcry.
Trump correctly said: “Believers all over the planet rallied to Mariam’s cause, prayed for her protection, and successfully pressured for her release.”
But then the president appeared to ad-lib – and claimed that he was the one who got Ibrahim freed.
“I did that. I did that. I did that with one phone call, actually,” he said. “And she had such support, it was so easy. And when I explained it to the powers that be: ‘Yes, sir, we will do it right away.’ I just wish I knew earlier. But it’s a big world with a lot of people.”
For years, Trump has told fictional stories that feature unnamed people referring to him as “sir.” This was another one.
Ibrahim was released in 2014, during the Obama administration. Trump did not become president until January 2017. He was not even a presidential candidate until June 2015. There has never been the slightest indication that a private citizen in the US, a businessman and celebrity at the time, was the person who convinced Sudanese authorities to let her out of prison.
A former Obama administration official who served on the National Security Council in 2014 told CNN on Friday: “I neither had at the time nor have now any knowledge of Trump’s involvement whatsoever. It’d be very surprising if he were.”
Jack Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service, first raised skepticism about Trump’s story on Thursday.
Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor who is a prominent conservative legal scholar, said in a Friday email: “As Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2014, I advocated for Mariam Ibrahim. I do not recall Donald Trump being involved in the case or assisting our Commission’s efforts. Of course, he was not President at the time.
Jack Revell at The Daily Beast: Military Pressured to See ‘Melania’ Against Their Will.
Thousands of active-duty military personnel may have been “pressured” into seeing the Melania documentary at cinemas around the country, a watchdog has warned.
The $75 million Amazon film opened last week to $7 million at the box office—despite universally terrible reviews.
According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, those numbers have been artificially inflated by pressure from MAGA-aligned officers leaning on their troops to buy tickets.
“People are scared,” Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the MRFF, said. Weinstein said he has received letters from members of the U.S. military at eight facilities worldwide, complaining that their superiors encouraged or pressured them to see the film.
He told Business Insider. “They were pressured to see the movie. Your military superior, that’s not your shift manager at Taco Bell or Starbucks. They have complete and total control over you.”
The MRFF, a non-profit founded in 2005 to promote the separation of church and state within the military, has roughly 100,000 members.
“Nobody that I know wanted to go except for those that did not want to get jacked up by our unit commander for not attending,” one of those members told Weinstein in a letter seen by journalist Jonathan Larsen.
That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?
#BobbyKennedyJr #DonaldTrump #DullesAirport #EpsteinFiles #GhislaineMaxwell #HowardLutnick #HudsonTunnelProject #JeffreyEpstein #MariamIbrahim #MelaniaDocumentary #PennStation #PeterMandleson #PrinceAndrew #Racism #USMilitary #VideoDepictingObamasAsApes #womenInEpsteinWorld -
Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump’s Racism and Epstein Fallout
Good Afternoon!!
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Trump’s disgusting Truth Social post of a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Trump left it up for at least 12 hours before someone at the White House finally deleted it. Of course Trump, who is a hateful and repulsive racist, won’t apologize.
The Washington Post: Trump refuses to apologize over video showing the Obamas as apes.
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Donald Trump declined to apologize for sharing a social media video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, saying he did not realize the image of the former president and first lady was tacked on to the end of the clip.
The president said Friday that he had watched and passed along the video — which focused on claims of voter fraud until the final seconds of the clip — to unidentified “people” to post to his Truth Social account, but that he “didn’t see the whole thing,” including the brief portion that showed the heads of the Obamas edited onto the bodies of apes.
In response to a question from The Washington Post about whether he would heed the calls of some Republicans to apologize for posting the video, which was widely condemned as racist and offensive, Trump said he would not.
“No, I didn’t make a mistake,” Trump said on his way to Palm Beach, Florida, for the weekend. “I look at a lot of — thousands of things. And I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine.”
Trump referred to the controversial video, which was online for about 12 hours before being deleted, as “a very strong post in terms of voter fraud.” [….]
…[T]he pushback was swift, including from Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), the chamber’s only Black Republican, who also serves as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Scott called the post “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Several other GOP senators and House members joined Scott in condemning the video, with some calling on Trump to apologize….
Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday, Trump dismissed the notion that the post and his handling of it could hurt him with the minority voters he had made gains with during the 2024 election. He touted criminal justice reform legislation passed during his first term, as well as his efforts to ensure funding to historically Black colleges and universities.
We’ll see. I think Trump expects to be able to rig the 2026 election anyway.
Hanna Kiros at The Atlantic (gift link): The Obama Meme on Trump’s Truth Social Was Exactly What It Looked Like.
Donald Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. Yesterday, 16 minutes before midnight, the president’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president and that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording. Its first minute shows a clip promoting the lie that voting-machine tampering handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Then, someone seems to swipe up, and the clip depicting the Obamas as apes flashes into focus. [The post was removed after about 12 hours.]….
In the interim, hundreds if not thousands of people responded to the clip with enthusiasm. Immediately after the video was first posted on Truth Social, the memecoin $APEBAMA was minted. Within 12 hours, more than $4 million worth of $APEBAMA had been traded back and forth. In an X group with the same name that now has hundreds of members, the pinned tweet implies that the meme stock will succeed because of how outrageous the video is: “this is pretty much on par with him calling Obama a nigga.” Some members posted their own depictions of Obama as a monkey or ape. The ape video’s apparent creator, the X user @xerias_x, reposted the full video to their X account early this morning. Besides the Obamas, the video shows a menagerie of Democratic politicians as animals, bowing down to Trump, who appears as a lion. It now has more than 1 million views. (@xerias_x also seems to be the originator of an AI-generated video Trump reposted in October that shows the president raining down what appears to be excrement on protesters from the sky.)
The “joke” that Trump’s account spread is plainly sinister. The idea that Black people sit somewhere between white people and apes has long been used to justify cruelty. In 1377, a historian wrote that Africans “have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals,” meaning they “are, as a whole, submissive to slavery.” Cartoons circulated during the Civil War were printed with images similar to the one Trump posted: One labels a monkey holding a book upside down as a NEGRO-MAN; another depicts a Black man on all fours, accompanied by the words WHAR’S JEFF DAVIS. In 1906, a man born in what was then the Belgian Congo, Ota Benga, was displayed at the Bronx Zoo in a cage with an orangutan. In 1975, white teenagers harassed Black students desegregating a Boston public school with the chant “Two, four, six, eight, assassinate the nigger apes.”
The ape caricature still colors how Black people are received in America. But this morning, the administration played the video off for laughs. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in response to a comment request before the Truth Social posts were removed. (The Lion King features a monkey named Rafiki, but no apes appear in the film.)
There is absolutely no question that Trump is a vicious racist.
In other news, there are so many fascinating revelations coming out of the latest release from the FBI’s Epstein files. I haven’t had the patience to actually try searching through them myself, but I’ve been following what reporters are finding. Some of the latest examples:
Allison Quinn at The Daily Beast: Epstein’s Top Secret Relationship With Trained Russian Spy Revealed.
Jeffrey Epstein had a years-long relationship with an FSB-trained Russian official who sought his help connecting with a well-known hacker in 2016.
The late sex trafficker’s corresponJeffrdence with Sergei Belyakov is among the strangest revelations in the millions of case files released by the Justice Department last month.
Belyakov, a former deputy economic minister, helped Epstein secure visas to visit Russia, provided him with a dossier on a Russian woman Epstein had complained was trying to blackmail “a group of powerful businessmen,” and reported to Epstein about his work for the Russian government.
Epstein’s frequent bids to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov feature heavily in the newly released files—his assistant reminds him in one September 2011 email that he’d told his bodyguard he “had an appointment with Putin” coming up—but he appears to have had Belyakov at his beck and call.
In one January 2016 email under the subject, “My new position,” Belyakov told Epstein he’d started working at the Russian Direct Investment Fund–now led by Kirill Dmitriev, one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted envoys, and a key player in ongoing peace talks with the Trump administration to end Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Much of their correspondence focused on investment opportunities and potential investors, though it’s unclear to what extent Belyakov involved Epstein in his work beyond the emails documented in the latest files.
The pair met several times in person over the years. In numerous email exchanges from 2014 through 2018, they reference personal meetings they had together, along with sporadic phone calls.
Epstein described Belyakov as a “very good friend” in a 2015 email to billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel as he tried to arrange for the pair to meet. Belyakov also apparently put Epstein in touch with other Russian officials, with emails showing he helped Epstein apply for a Russian visa in 2014 to meet with then-Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak and Alexei Simanovsky, the deputy head of Russia’s Central Bank at the time.
There’s more interesting stuff at the link.
J Oliver Conroy at The Guardian: The Epstein files reveal that a vast global conspiracy actually exists – sort of.
The millions of Jeffrey Epstein files dumped last Friday by the US Department of Justice will provide journalists, conspiracy theorists and interested members of the public with months of reading. And what they will read is enraging.
What makes these files so infuriating, however, is not just Epstein’s horrific predatory behavior, which is well-known, but the more mundane examples of elite conduct that the documents continue to expose. They vividly illustrate a world whose existence many everyday people, whether fevered with visions of the Illuminati or just jaundiced by banal anti-establishment cynicism, already suspected exists: an informal global club of powerful, ultra-rich people who all seemingly know each other, help one another out, and protect each other from the consequences of their depravity.
The new files will probably not provide satisfying answers to questions about, say, whether any of Epstein’s famous friends participated in his sex trafficking, or if his death in custody in 2019 was truly a suicide, as authorities have said. But conspiracy theorists may still feel vindicated – and to some extent they should, Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, said.
Although the documents may not expose an actual criminal conspiracy, he said, they confirm the belief behind most conspiracy theories: that elites “get special treatment, that they’re shielded from the rules that are supposed to apply to everyone equally, and that there is a kind of corruption in the broadest sense of the word”.
The new material is the largest, and possibly last, tranche of the so-called Epstein files, though the government is keeping as many as 3m more pages under wraps. Yet even the initial revelations of these files deepen the astonishing constellation of ties between Epstein and members of the global elite – including tech billionaires; a former US president; British, Norwegian and Saudi royalty or royal courtiers; current and former US cabinet secretaries and governors; and prominent business executives and academics….
[T]he files, especially Epstein’s typo-filled email and text-message correspondences, are fascinating – and ultimately grim – in what they show of how elites act in private, among themselves. At the least, many of Epstein’s powerful acquaintances remained friendly with him years after the notoriously lenient sweetheart bargain, in 2008, in which he pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, and as survivors continued to accuse Epstein of further crimes.
Again, there is lots more enraging material at the link.
AP: Epstein revelations have toppled top figures in Europe while US fallout is more muted.
LONDON (AP) — A prince, an ambassador, senior diplomats, top politicians. All brought down by the Jeffrey Epstein files. And all in Europe, rather than the United States.
The huge trove of Epstein documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice has sent shock waves through Europe’s political, economic and social elites — dominating headlines, ending careers and spurring political and criminal investigations.
Former U.K. Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson was fired and could go to prison. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces a leadership crisis over the Mandelson appointment. Senior figures have fallen in Norway, Sweden and Slovakia. And, even before the latest batch of files, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, brother of King Charles III, lost his honors, princely title and taxpayer-funded mansion.
Apart from the former Prince Andrew, none of them faces claims of sexual wrongdoing. They have been toppled for maintaining friendly relationships with Epstein after he became a convicted sex offender.
“Epstein collected powerful people the way others collect frequent flyer points,” said Mark Stephens, a specialist in international and human rights law at Howard Kennedy in London. “But the receipts are now in public, and some might wish they’d traveled less.”
The documents were published after a public frenzy over Epstein became a crisis for President Donald Trump’s administration and led to a rare bipartisan effort to force the government to open its investigative files. But in the U.S., the long-sought publication has not brought the same public reckoning with Epstein’s associates — at least so far.
Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said that in Britain, “if you’re in those files, it’s immediately a big story.”
“It suggests to me we have a more functional media, we have a more functional accountability structure, that there is still a degree of shame in politics, in terms of people will say: ‘This is just not acceptable, this is just not done,’” he said.
In other words, our media sucks and many of our politicians are shameless. I can’t argue with that.
A couple of Trump cabinet members captured in the files:
CBS News: Lutnick and Epstein were in business together, Epstein files show.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said he had “limited interactions” with Jeffrey Epstein, but documents show they were in business together as recently as 2014.
Lutnick and Epstein each signed on behalf of limited liability companies that agreed on Dec. 28, 2012, to acquire stakes in a now-shuttered advertising technology company called Adfin, documents released among the so-called Epstein files show.
Epstein and Lutnick’s signatures appear on neighboring pages in the contract, with Epstein signing for his Southern Trust Company, Inc. and Lutnick for a limited liability company called CVAFH I. The documents list nine shareholders in total.
Lutnick, the former chairman of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald who at one point lived next door to Epstein, told the New York Post in October that he and his wife Allison had cut ties with Epstein in 2005, deciding after taking a tour of Epstein’s New York townhouse, “I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
However, it appears Epstein and Lutnick continued to maintain contact and emails show they arranged calls and planned to have drinks in 2011.
The following year, the couple and their four children planned a visit to Epstein’s island, Little St. James, emails show. Lutnick was invited for lunch on Dec. 24, 2012, and later, Epstein’s assistant wrote on behalf of Epstein, “it was nice seeing you.”
Their Adfin deal was signed four days later.
Lutnick is such a fucking liar.
Farah Tomazin at The Daily Beast: RFK Jr.’s Bizarre Trip With Epstein and Ghislaine Exposed in Files.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Dakotas with child sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, according to the latest tranche of documents released by the Justice Department.
As the fallout over the Epstein files continues, an email exchange between the two sex predators centers on the now-Trump Cabinet secretary, one of the many prominent people whose friendship the pair cultivated over the years.
The exchange took place in 2012, seven years before Epstein died in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial.
In one email, Epstein writes to Maxwell about a trip involving “dinosaur and fossill hunitng (sic) with jack horner on the ranch, found 90 million year old clams and fossils.”
“Right up your alley,” he adds.
The following day, Maxwell replies: “Love that – didn’t we go fossil hunting with him and Bobby Kennedy in N Dakota?”
“Yes,” Epstein replies.
Maxwell, a former British socialite now serving 20 years for her crimes, also disclosed the fossil hunt during an interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last year, apparently catching him off guard when she said of Epstein: “Bobby Kennedy knew him.”
One more from Amelia Gentleman at The Guardian on women in the Epstein files: Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club.
Pluck an email at random from the millions in the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library. It is a Saturday evening in February 2013, and Jeffrey Epstein is messaging Bill Gates’s assistant about guests for a dinner he wants to organise.’
“People for Bill,” the email begins. Epstein starts listing possible candidates: the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the film director Woody Allen, the prime minister of Qatar, a couple of Harvard academics, the billionaire CEO of Hyatt hotels, a White House communications director, a former US secretary of defence.
He names 10 powerful men, before suggesting “Anne Hathaway (really)”. Epstein has to make it clear, with the bracketed word, that he is not joking when he proposes that a woman might join them at the table. The lists ends tentatively: “victoria secret models?” Epstein wonders: “Who on the list do you think he would enjoy the most?”
The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.
A typical email from Epstein to a woman might say: “Take a selfie of your pussy and send.”
Spend three days rummaging through the chaotic, sprawling, sordid pit of information contained in the Epstein files, and you learn valuable lessons about how this modern global patriarchy operates: through flattery, the exchange of favours and occasional curt reminders of who owes what to whom.
For women, these files offer an unprecedented chance to eavesdrop on conversations from which they are usually excluded. They provide salutary insights into what a set of distinguished global figures think and say about women when they assume the women aren’t listening.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
I’ll end with a few tales of Trump idiocy:
Jonathan Karl at ABC News: Trump wants Penn Station, Dulles Airport named after him in funding deal with Schumer, sources say.
President Donald Trump last month told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that he would be willing to unfreeze $16 billion in funding for a major infrastructure project in New York if Schumer would agree to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles Airport after him, two sources familiar with the conversation told ABC News.
The Hudson Tunnel Project — which would connect New York City and New Jersey — had already started. The project includes building nine miles of new passenger rail track and rehabilitating the North River Tunnel, according to the commission responsible for it.
Officials in New York and New Jersey said if the money isn’t freed-up by Friday, the project would stop, leaving approximately 1,000 construction jobs in jeopardy.
Sources told ABC that Schumer rejected Trump’s offer.
Daniel Dale at CNN: ‘I did that’: Trump takes credit for a prisoner release that happened before he even ran for president.
At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Donald Trump spoke from prepared remarks as he discussed the persecution of Mariam Ibrahim. Ibrahim was unjustly imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014, in a case centered on her Christian faith, until she was released that same year following a global outcry.
Trump correctly said: “Believers all over the planet rallied to Mariam’s cause, prayed for her protection, and successfully pressured for her release.”
But then the president appeared to ad-lib – and claimed that he was the one who got Ibrahim freed.
“I did that. I did that. I did that with one phone call, actually,” he said. “And she had such support, it was so easy. And when I explained it to the powers that be: ‘Yes, sir, we will do it right away.’ I just wish I knew earlier. But it’s a big world with a lot of people.”
For years, Trump has told fictional stories that feature unnamed people referring to him as “sir.” This was another one.
Ibrahim was released in 2014, during the Obama administration. Trump did not become president until January 2017. He was not even a presidential candidate until June 2015. There has never been the slightest indication that a private citizen in the US, a businessman and celebrity at the time, was the person who convinced Sudanese authorities to let her out of prison.
A former Obama administration official who served on the National Security Council in 2014 told CNN on Friday: “I neither had at the time nor have now any knowledge of Trump’s involvement whatsoever. It’d be very surprising if he were.”
Jack Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service, first raised skepticism about Trump’s story on Thursday.
Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor who is a prominent conservative legal scholar, said in a Friday email: “As Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2014, I advocated for Mariam Ibrahim. I do not recall Donald Trump being involved in the case or assisting our Commission’s efforts. Of course, he was not President at the time.
Jack Revell at The Daily Beast: Military Pressured to See ‘Melania’ Against Their Will.
Thousands of active-duty military personnel may have been “pressured” into seeing the Melania documentary at cinemas around the country, a watchdog has warned.
The $75 million Amazon film opened last week to $7 million at the box office—despite universally terrible reviews.
According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, those numbers have been artificially inflated by pressure from MAGA-aligned officers leaning on their troops to buy tickets.
“People are scared,” Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the MRFF, said. Weinstein said he has received letters from members of the U.S. military at eight facilities worldwide, complaining that their superiors encouraged or pressured them to see the film.
He told Business Insider. “They were pressured to see the movie. Your military superior, that’s not your shift manager at Taco Bell or Starbucks. They have complete and total control over you.”
The MRFF, a non-profit founded in 2005 to promote the separation of church and state within the military, has roughly 100,000 members.
“Nobody that I know wanted to go except for those that did not want to get jacked up by our unit commander for not attending,” one of those members told Weinstein in a letter seen by journalist Jonathan Larsen.
That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?
#BobbyKennedyJr #DonaldTrump #DullesAirport #EpsteinFiles #GhislaineMaxwell #HowardLutnick #HudsonTunnelProject #JeffreyEpstein #MariamIbrahim #MelaniaDocumentary #PennStation #PeterMandleson #PrinceAndrew #Racism #USMilitary #VideoDepictingObamasAsApes #womenInEpsteinWorld -
Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump’s Racism and Epstein Fallout
Good Afternoon!!
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Trump’s disgusting Truth Social post of a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Trump left it up for at least 12 hours before someone at the White House finally deleted it. Of course Trump, who is a hateful and repulsive racist, won’t apologize.
The Washington Post: Trump refuses to apologize over video showing the Obamas as apes.
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Donald Trump declined to apologize for sharing a social media video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, saying he did not realize the image of the former president and first lady was tacked on to the end of the clip.
The president said Friday that he had watched and passed along the video — which focused on claims of voter fraud until the final seconds of the clip — to unidentified “people” to post to his Truth Social account, but that he “didn’t see the whole thing,” including the brief portion that showed the heads of the Obamas edited onto the bodies of apes.
In response to a question from The Washington Post about whether he would heed the calls of some Republicans to apologize for posting the video, which was widely condemned as racist and offensive, Trump said he would not.
“No, I didn’t make a mistake,” Trump said on his way to Palm Beach, Florida, for the weekend. “I look at a lot of — thousands of things. And I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine.”
Trump referred to the controversial video, which was online for about 12 hours before being deleted, as “a very strong post in terms of voter fraud.” [….]
…[T]he pushback was swift, including from Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), the chamber’s only Black Republican, who also serves as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Scott called the post “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Several other GOP senators and House members joined Scott in condemning the video, with some calling on Trump to apologize….
Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday, Trump dismissed the notion that the post and his handling of it could hurt him with the minority voters he had made gains with during the 2024 election. He touted criminal justice reform legislation passed during his first term, as well as his efforts to ensure funding to historically Black colleges and universities.
We’ll see. I think Trump expects to be able to rig the 2026 election anyway.
Hanna Kiros at The Atlantic (gift link): The Obama Meme on Trump’s Truth Social Was Exactly What It Looked Like.
Donald Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. Yesterday, 16 minutes before midnight, the president’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president and that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording. Its first minute shows a clip promoting the lie that voting-machine tampering handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Then, someone seems to swipe up, and the clip depicting the Obamas as apes flashes into focus. [The post was removed after about 12 hours.]….
In the interim, hundreds if not thousands of people responded to the clip with enthusiasm. Immediately after the video was first posted on Truth Social, the memecoin $APEBAMA was minted. Within 12 hours, more than $4 million worth of $APEBAMA had been traded back and forth. In an X group with the same name that now has hundreds of members, the pinned tweet implies that the meme stock will succeed because of how outrageous the video is: “this is pretty much on par with him calling Obama a nigga.” Some members posted their own depictions of Obama as a monkey or ape. The ape video’s apparent creator, the X user @xerias_x, reposted the full video to their X account early this morning. Besides the Obamas, the video shows a menagerie of Democratic politicians as animals, bowing down to Trump, who appears as a lion. It now has more than 1 million views. (@xerias_x also seems to be the originator of an AI-generated video Trump reposted in October that shows the president raining down what appears to be excrement on protesters from the sky.)
The “joke” that Trump’s account spread is plainly sinister. The idea that Black people sit somewhere between white people and apes has long been used to justify cruelty. In 1377, a historian wrote that Africans “have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals,” meaning they “are, as a whole, submissive to slavery.” Cartoons circulated during the Civil War were printed with images similar to the one Trump posted: One labels a monkey holding a book upside down as a NEGRO-MAN; another depicts a Black man on all fours, accompanied by the words WHAR’S JEFF DAVIS. In 1906, a man born in what was then the Belgian Congo, Ota Benga, was displayed at the Bronx Zoo in a cage with an orangutan. In 1975, white teenagers harassed Black students desegregating a Boston public school with the chant “Two, four, six, eight, assassinate the nigger apes.”
The ape caricature still colors how Black people are received in America. But this morning, the administration played the video off for laughs. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in response to a comment request before the Truth Social posts were removed. (The Lion King features a monkey named Rafiki, but no apes appear in the film.)
There is absolutely no question that Trump is a vicious racist.
In other news, there are so many fascinating revelations coming out of the latest release from the FBI’s Epstein files. I haven’t had the patience to actually try searching through them myself, but I’ve been following what reporters are finding. Some of the latest examples:
Allison Quinn at The Daily Beast: Epstein’s Top Secret Relationship With Trained Russian Spy Revealed.
Jeffrey Epstein had a years-long relationship with an FSB-trained Russian official who sought his help connecting with a well-known hacker in 2016.
The late sex trafficker’s corresponJeffrdence with Sergei Belyakov is among the strangest revelations in the millions of case files released by the Justice Department last month.
Belyakov, a former deputy economic minister, helped Epstein secure visas to visit Russia, provided him with a dossier on a Russian woman Epstein had complained was trying to blackmail “a group of powerful businessmen,” and reported to Epstein about his work for the Russian government.
Epstein’s frequent bids to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov feature heavily in the newly released files—his assistant reminds him in one September 2011 email that he’d told his bodyguard he “had an appointment with Putin” coming up—but he appears to have had Belyakov at his beck and call.
In one January 2016 email under the subject, “My new position,” Belyakov told Epstein he’d started working at the Russian Direct Investment Fund–now led by Kirill Dmitriev, one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted envoys, and a key player in ongoing peace talks with the Trump administration to end Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Much of their correspondence focused on investment opportunities and potential investors, though it’s unclear to what extent Belyakov involved Epstein in his work beyond the emails documented in the latest files.
The pair met several times in person over the years. In numerous email exchanges from 2014 through 2018, they reference personal meetings they had together, along with sporadic phone calls.
Epstein described Belyakov as a “very good friend” in a 2015 email to billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel as he tried to arrange for the pair to meet. Belyakov also apparently put Epstein in touch with other Russian officials, with emails showing he helped Epstein apply for a Russian visa in 2014 to meet with then-Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak and Alexei Simanovsky, the deputy head of Russia’s Central Bank at the time.
There’s more interesting stuff at the link.
J Oliver Conroy at The Guardian: The Epstein files reveal that a vast global conspiracy actually exists – sort of.
The millions of Jeffrey Epstein files dumped last Friday by the US Department of Justice will provide journalists, conspiracy theorists and interested members of the public with months of reading. And what they will read is enraging.
What makes these files so infuriating, however, is not just Epstein’s horrific predatory behavior, which is well-known, but the more mundane examples of elite conduct that the documents continue to expose. They vividly illustrate a world whose existence many everyday people, whether fevered with visions of the Illuminati or just jaundiced by banal anti-establishment cynicism, already suspected exists: an informal global club of powerful, ultra-rich people who all seemingly know each other, help one another out, and protect each other from the consequences of their depravity.
The new files will probably not provide satisfying answers to questions about, say, whether any of Epstein’s famous friends participated in his sex trafficking, or if his death in custody in 2019 was truly a suicide, as authorities have said. But conspiracy theorists may still feel vindicated – and to some extent they should, Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, said.
Although the documents may not expose an actual criminal conspiracy, he said, they confirm the belief behind most conspiracy theories: that elites “get special treatment, that they’re shielded from the rules that are supposed to apply to everyone equally, and that there is a kind of corruption in the broadest sense of the word”.
The new material is the largest, and possibly last, tranche of the so-called Epstein files, though the government is keeping as many as 3m more pages under wraps. Yet even the initial revelations of these files deepen the astonishing constellation of ties between Epstein and members of the global elite – including tech billionaires; a former US president; British, Norwegian and Saudi royalty or royal courtiers; current and former US cabinet secretaries and governors; and prominent business executives and academics….
[T]he files, especially Epstein’s typo-filled email and text-message correspondences, are fascinating – and ultimately grim – in what they show of how elites act in private, among themselves. At the least, many of Epstein’s powerful acquaintances remained friendly with him years after the notoriously lenient sweetheart bargain, in 2008, in which he pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, and as survivors continued to accuse Epstein of further crimes.
Again, there is lots more enraging material at the link.
AP: Epstein revelations have toppled top figures in Europe while US fallout is more muted.
LONDON (AP) — A prince, an ambassador, senior diplomats, top politicians. All brought down by the Jeffrey Epstein files. And all in Europe, rather than the United States.
The huge trove of Epstein documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice has sent shock waves through Europe’s political, economic and social elites — dominating headlines, ending careers and spurring political and criminal investigations.
Former U.K. Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson was fired and could go to prison. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces a leadership crisis over the Mandelson appointment. Senior figures have fallen in Norway, Sweden and Slovakia. And, even before the latest batch of files, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, brother of King Charles III, lost his honors, princely title and taxpayer-funded mansion.
Apart from the former Prince Andrew, none of them faces claims of sexual wrongdoing. They have been toppled for maintaining friendly relationships with Epstein after he became a convicted sex offender.
“Epstein collected powerful people the way others collect frequent flyer points,” said Mark Stephens, a specialist in international and human rights law at Howard Kennedy in London. “But the receipts are now in public, and some might wish they’d traveled less.”
The documents were published after a public frenzy over Epstein became a crisis for President Donald Trump’s administration and led to a rare bipartisan effort to force the government to open its investigative files. But in the U.S., the long-sought publication has not brought the same public reckoning with Epstein’s associates — at least so far.
Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said that in Britain, “if you’re in those files, it’s immediately a big story.”
“It suggests to me we have a more functional media, we have a more functional accountability structure, that there is still a degree of shame in politics, in terms of people will say: ‘This is just not acceptable, this is just not done,’” he said.
In other words, our media sucks and many of our politicians are shameless. I can’t argue with that.
A couple of Trump cabinet members captured in the files:
CBS News: Lutnick and Epstein were in business together, Epstein files show.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said he had “limited interactions” with Jeffrey Epstein, but documents show they were in business together as recently as 2014.
Lutnick and Epstein each signed on behalf of limited liability companies that agreed on Dec. 28, 2012, to acquire stakes in a now-shuttered advertising technology company called Adfin, documents released among the so-called Epstein files show.
Epstein and Lutnick’s signatures appear on neighboring pages in the contract, with Epstein signing for his Southern Trust Company, Inc. and Lutnick for a limited liability company called CVAFH I. The documents list nine shareholders in total.
Lutnick, the former chairman of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald who at one point lived next door to Epstein, told the New York Post in October that he and his wife Allison had cut ties with Epstein in 2005, deciding after taking a tour of Epstein’s New York townhouse, “I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
However, it appears Epstein and Lutnick continued to maintain contact and emails show they arranged calls and planned to have drinks in 2011.
The following year, the couple and their four children planned a visit to Epstein’s island, Little St. James, emails show. Lutnick was invited for lunch on Dec. 24, 2012, and later, Epstein’s assistant wrote on behalf of Epstein, “it was nice seeing you.”
Their Adfin deal was signed four days later.
Lutnick is such a fucking liar.
Farah Tomazin at The Daily Beast: RFK Jr.’s Bizarre Trip With Epstein and Ghislaine Exposed in Files.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Dakotas with child sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, according to the latest tranche of documents released by the Justice Department.
As the fallout over the Epstein files continues, an email exchange between the two sex predators centers on the now-Trump Cabinet secretary, one of the many prominent people whose friendship the pair cultivated over the years.
The exchange took place in 2012, seven years before Epstein died in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial.
In one email, Epstein writes to Maxwell about a trip involving “dinosaur and fossill hunitng (sic) with jack horner on the ranch, found 90 million year old clams and fossils.”
“Right up your alley,” he adds.
The following day, Maxwell replies: “Love that – didn’t we go fossil hunting with him and Bobby Kennedy in N Dakota?”
“Yes,” Epstein replies.
Maxwell, a former British socialite now serving 20 years for her crimes, also disclosed the fossil hunt during an interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last year, apparently catching him off guard when she said of Epstein: “Bobby Kennedy knew him.”
One more from Amelia Gentleman at The Guardian on women in the Epstein files: Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club.
Pluck an email at random from the millions in the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library. It is a Saturday evening in February 2013, and Jeffrey Epstein is messaging Bill Gates’s assistant about guests for a dinner he wants to organise.’
“People for Bill,” the email begins. Epstein starts listing possible candidates: the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the film director Woody Allen, the prime minister of Qatar, a couple of Harvard academics, the billionaire CEO of Hyatt hotels, a White House communications director, a former US secretary of defence.
He names 10 powerful men, before suggesting “Anne Hathaway (really)”. Epstein has to make it clear, with the bracketed word, that he is not joking when he proposes that a woman might join them at the table. The lists ends tentatively: “victoria secret models?” Epstein wonders: “Who on the list do you think he would enjoy the most?”
The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.
A typical email from Epstein to a woman might say: “Take a selfie of your pussy and send.”
Spend three days rummaging through the chaotic, sprawling, sordid pit of information contained in the Epstein files, and you learn valuable lessons about how this modern global patriarchy operates: through flattery, the exchange of favours and occasional curt reminders of who owes what to whom.
For women, these files offer an unprecedented chance to eavesdrop on conversations from which they are usually excluded. They provide salutary insights into what a set of distinguished global figures think and say about women when they assume the women aren’t listening.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
I’ll end with a few tales of Trump idiocy:
Jonathan Karl at ABC News: Trump wants Penn Station, Dulles Airport named after him in funding deal with Schumer, sources say.
President Donald Trump last month told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that he would be willing to unfreeze $16 billion in funding for a major infrastructure project in New York if Schumer would agree to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles Airport after him, two sources familiar with the conversation told ABC News.
The Hudson Tunnel Project — which would connect New York City and New Jersey — had already started. The project includes building nine miles of new passenger rail track and rehabilitating the North River Tunnel, according to the commission responsible for it.
Officials in New York and New Jersey said if the money isn’t freed-up by Friday, the project would stop, leaving approximately 1,000 construction jobs in jeopardy.
Sources told ABC that Schumer rejected Trump’s offer.
Daniel Dale at CNN: ‘I did that’: Trump takes credit for a prisoner release that happened before he even ran for president.
At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Donald Trump spoke from prepared remarks as he discussed the persecution of Mariam Ibrahim. Ibrahim was unjustly imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014, in a case centered on her Christian faith, until she was released that same year following a global outcry.
Trump correctly said: “Believers all over the planet rallied to Mariam’s cause, prayed for her protection, and successfully pressured for her release.”
But then the president appeared to ad-lib – and claimed that he was the one who got Ibrahim freed.
“I did that. I did that. I did that with one phone call, actually,” he said. “And she had such support, it was so easy. And when I explained it to the powers that be: ‘Yes, sir, we will do it right away.’ I just wish I knew earlier. But it’s a big world with a lot of people.”
For years, Trump has told fictional stories that feature unnamed people referring to him as “sir.” This was another one.
Ibrahim was released in 2014, during the Obama administration. Trump did not become president until January 2017. He was not even a presidential candidate until June 2015. There has never been the slightest indication that a private citizen in the US, a businessman and celebrity at the time, was the person who convinced Sudanese authorities to let her out of prison.
A former Obama administration official who served on the National Security Council in 2014 told CNN on Friday: “I neither had at the time nor have now any knowledge of Trump’s involvement whatsoever. It’d be very surprising if he were.”
Jack Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service, first raised skepticism about Trump’s story on Thursday.
Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor who is a prominent conservative legal scholar, said in a Friday email: “As Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2014, I advocated for Mariam Ibrahim. I do not recall Donald Trump being involved in the case or assisting our Commission’s efforts. Of course, he was not President at the time.
Jack Revell at The Daily Beast: Military Pressured to See ‘Melania’ Against Their Will.
Thousands of active-duty military personnel may have been “pressured” into seeing the Melania documentary at cinemas around the country, a watchdog has warned.
The $75 million Amazon film opened last week to $7 million at the box office—despite universally terrible reviews.
According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, those numbers have been artificially inflated by pressure from MAGA-aligned officers leaning on their troops to buy tickets.
“People are scared,” Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the MRFF, said. Weinstein said he has received letters from members of the U.S. military at eight facilities worldwide, complaining that their superiors encouraged or pressured them to see the film.
He told Business Insider. “They were pressured to see the movie. Your military superior, that’s not your shift manager at Taco Bell or Starbucks. They have complete and total control over you.”
The MRFF, a non-profit founded in 2005 to promote the separation of church and state within the military, has roughly 100,000 members.
“Nobody that I know wanted to go except for those that did not want to get jacked up by our unit commander for not attending,” one of those members told Weinstein in a letter seen by journalist Jonathan Larsen.
That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?
#BobbyKennedyJr #DonaldTrump #DullesAirport #EpsteinFiles #GhislaineMaxwell #HowardLutnick #HudsonTunnelProject #JeffreyEpstein #MariamIbrahim #MelaniaDocumentary #PennStation #PeterMandleson #PrinceAndrew #Racism #USMilitary #VideoDepictingObamasAsApes #womenInEpsteinWorld -
Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump’s Racism and Epstein Fallout
Good Afternoon!!
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Trump’s disgusting Truth Social post of a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Trump left it up for at least 12 hours before someone at the White House finally deleted it. Of course Trump, who is a hateful and repulsive racist, won’t apologize.
The Washington Post: Trump refuses to apologize over video showing the Obamas as apes.
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Donald Trump declined to apologize for sharing a social media video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, saying he did not realize the image of the former president and first lady was tacked on to the end of the clip.
The president said Friday that he had watched and passed along the video — which focused on claims of voter fraud until the final seconds of the clip — to unidentified “people” to post to his Truth Social account, but that he “didn’t see the whole thing,” including the brief portion that showed the heads of the Obamas edited onto the bodies of apes.
In response to a question from The Washington Post about whether he would heed the calls of some Republicans to apologize for posting the video, which was widely condemned as racist and offensive, Trump said he would not.
“No, I didn’t make a mistake,” Trump said on his way to Palm Beach, Florida, for the weekend. “I look at a lot of — thousands of things. And I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine.”
Trump referred to the controversial video, which was online for about 12 hours before being deleted, as “a very strong post in terms of voter fraud.” [….]
…[T]he pushback was swift, including from Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), the chamber’s only Black Republican, who also serves as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Scott called the post “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Several other GOP senators and House members joined Scott in condemning the video, with some calling on Trump to apologize….
Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday, Trump dismissed the notion that the post and his handling of it could hurt him with the minority voters he had made gains with during the 2024 election. He touted criminal justice reform legislation passed during his first term, as well as his efforts to ensure funding to historically Black colleges and universities.
We’ll see. I think Trump expects to be able to rig the 2026 election anyway.
Hanna Kiros at The Atlantic (gift link): The Obama Meme on Trump’s Truth Social Was Exactly What It Looked Like.
Donald Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. Yesterday, 16 minutes before midnight, the president’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president and that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording. Its first minute shows a clip promoting the lie that voting-machine tampering handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Then, someone seems to swipe up, and the clip depicting the Obamas as apes flashes into focus. [The post was removed after about 12 hours.]….
In the interim, hundreds if not thousands of people responded to the clip with enthusiasm. Immediately after the video was first posted on Truth Social, the memecoin $APEBAMA was minted. Within 12 hours, more than $4 million worth of $APEBAMA had been traded back and forth. In an X group with the same name that now has hundreds of members, the pinned tweet implies that the meme stock will succeed because of how outrageous the video is: “this is pretty much on par with him calling Obama a nigga.” Some members posted their own depictions of Obama as a monkey or ape. The ape video’s apparent creator, the X user @xerias_x, reposted the full video to their X account early this morning. Besides the Obamas, the video shows a menagerie of Democratic politicians as animals, bowing down to Trump, who appears as a lion. It now has more than 1 million views. (@xerias_x also seems to be the originator of an AI-generated video Trump reposted in October that shows the president raining down what appears to be excrement on protesters from the sky.)
The “joke” that Trump’s account spread is plainly sinister. The idea that Black people sit somewhere between white people and apes has long been used to justify cruelty. In 1377, a historian wrote that Africans “have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals,” meaning they “are, as a whole, submissive to slavery.” Cartoons circulated during the Civil War were printed with images similar to the one Trump posted: One labels a monkey holding a book upside down as a NEGRO-MAN; another depicts a Black man on all fours, accompanied by the words WHAR’S JEFF DAVIS. In 1906, a man born in what was then the Belgian Congo, Ota Benga, was displayed at the Bronx Zoo in a cage with an orangutan. In 1975, white teenagers harassed Black students desegregating a Boston public school with the chant “Two, four, six, eight, assassinate the nigger apes.”
The ape caricature still colors how Black people are received in America. But this morning, the administration played the video off for laughs. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in response to a comment request before the Truth Social posts were removed. (The Lion King features a monkey named Rafiki, but no apes appear in the film.)
There is absolutely no question that Trump is a vicious racist.
In other news, there are so many fascinating revelations coming out of the latest release from the FBI’s Epstein files. I haven’t had the patience to actually try searching through them myself, but I’ve been following what reporters are finding. Some of the latest examples:
Allison Quinn at The Daily Beast: Epstein’s Top Secret Relationship With Trained Russian Spy Revealed.
Jeffrey Epstein had a years-long relationship with an FSB-trained Russian official who sought his help connecting with a well-known hacker in 2016.
The late sex trafficker’s corresponJeffrdence with Sergei Belyakov is among the strangest revelations in the millions of case files released by the Justice Department last month.
Belyakov, a former deputy economic minister, helped Epstein secure visas to visit Russia, provided him with a dossier on a Russian woman Epstein had complained was trying to blackmail “a group of powerful businessmen,” and reported to Epstein about his work for the Russian government.
Epstein’s frequent bids to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov feature heavily in the newly released files—his assistant reminds him in one September 2011 email that he’d told his bodyguard he “had an appointment with Putin” coming up—but he appears to have had Belyakov at his beck and call.
In one January 2016 email under the subject, “My new position,” Belyakov told Epstein he’d started working at the Russian Direct Investment Fund–now led by Kirill Dmitriev, one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted envoys, and a key player in ongoing peace talks with the Trump administration to end Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Much of their correspondence focused on investment opportunities and potential investors, though it’s unclear to what extent Belyakov involved Epstein in his work beyond the emails documented in the latest files.
The pair met several times in person over the years. In numerous email exchanges from 2014 through 2018, they reference personal meetings they had together, along with sporadic phone calls.
Epstein described Belyakov as a “very good friend” in a 2015 email to billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel as he tried to arrange for the pair to meet. Belyakov also apparently put Epstein in touch with other Russian officials, with emails showing he helped Epstein apply for a Russian visa in 2014 to meet with then-Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak and Alexei Simanovsky, the deputy head of Russia’s Central Bank at the time.
There’s more interesting stuff at the link.
J Oliver Conroy at The Guardian: The Epstein files reveal that a vast global conspiracy actually exists – sort of.
The millions of Jeffrey Epstein files dumped last Friday by the US Department of Justice will provide journalists, conspiracy theorists and interested members of the public with months of reading. And what they will read is enraging.
What makes these files so infuriating, however, is not just Epstein’s horrific predatory behavior, which is well-known, but the more mundane examples of elite conduct that the documents continue to expose. They vividly illustrate a world whose existence many everyday people, whether fevered with visions of the Illuminati or just jaundiced by banal anti-establishment cynicism, already suspected exists: an informal global club of powerful, ultra-rich people who all seemingly know each other, help one another out, and protect each other from the consequences of their depravity.
The new files will probably not provide satisfying answers to questions about, say, whether any of Epstein’s famous friends participated in his sex trafficking, or if his death in custody in 2019 was truly a suicide, as authorities have said. But conspiracy theorists may still feel vindicated – and to some extent they should, Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, said.
Although the documents may not expose an actual criminal conspiracy, he said, they confirm the belief behind most conspiracy theories: that elites “get special treatment, that they’re shielded from the rules that are supposed to apply to everyone equally, and that there is a kind of corruption in the broadest sense of the word”.
The new material is the largest, and possibly last, tranche of the so-called Epstein files, though the government is keeping as many as 3m more pages under wraps. Yet even the initial revelations of these files deepen the astonishing constellation of ties between Epstein and members of the global elite – including tech billionaires; a former US president; British, Norwegian and Saudi royalty or royal courtiers; current and former US cabinet secretaries and governors; and prominent business executives and academics….
[T]he files, especially Epstein’s typo-filled email and text-message correspondences, are fascinating – and ultimately grim – in what they show of how elites act in private, among themselves. At the least, many of Epstein’s powerful acquaintances remained friendly with him years after the notoriously lenient sweetheart bargain, in 2008, in which he pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, and as survivors continued to accuse Epstein of further crimes.
Again, there is lots more enraging material at the link.
AP: Epstein revelations have toppled top figures in Europe while US fallout is more muted.
LONDON (AP) — A prince, an ambassador, senior diplomats, top politicians. All brought down by the Jeffrey Epstein files. And all in Europe, rather than the United States.
The huge trove of Epstein documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice has sent shock waves through Europe’s political, economic and social elites — dominating headlines, ending careers and spurring political and criminal investigations.
Former U.K. Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson was fired and could go to prison. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces a leadership crisis over the Mandelson appointment. Senior figures have fallen in Norway, Sweden and Slovakia. And, even before the latest batch of files, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, brother of King Charles III, lost his honors, princely title and taxpayer-funded mansion.
Apart from the former Prince Andrew, none of them faces claims of sexual wrongdoing. They have been toppled for maintaining friendly relationships with Epstein after he became a convicted sex offender.
“Epstein collected powerful people the way others collect frequent flyer points,” said Mark Stephens, a specialist in international and human rights law at Howard Kennedy in London. “But the receipts are now in public, and some might wish they’d traveled less.”
The documents were published after a public frenzy over Epstein became a crisis for President Donald Trump’s administration and led to a rare bipartisan effort to force the government to open its investigative files. But in the U.S., the long-sought publication has not brought the same public reckoning with Epstein’s associates — at least so far.
Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said that in Britain, “if you’re in those files, it’s immediately a big story.”
“It suggests to me we have a more functional media, we have a more functional accountability structure, that there is still a degree of shame in politics, in terms of people will say: ‘This is just not acceptable, this is just not done,’” he said.
In other words, our media sucks and many of our politicians are shameless. I can’t argue with that.
A couple of Trump cabinet members captured in the files:
CBS News: Lutnick and Epstein were in business together, Epstein files show.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said he had “limited interactions” with Jeffrey Epstein, but documents show they were in business together as recently as 2014.
Lutnick and Epstein each signed on behalf of limited liability companies that agreed on Dec. 28, 2012, to acquire stakes in a now-shuttered advertising technology company called Adfin, documents released among the so-called Epstein files show.
Epstein and Lutnick’s signatures appear on neighboring pages in the contract, with Epstein signing for his Southern Trust Company, Inc. and Lutnick for a limited liability company called CVAFH I. The documents list nine shareholders in total.
Lutnick, the former chairman of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald who at one point lived next door to Epstein, told the New York Post in October that he and his wife Allison had cut ties with Epstein in 2005, deciding after taking a tour of Epstein’s New York townhouse, “I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
However, it appears Epstein and Lutnick continued to maintain contact and emails show they arranged calls and planned to have drinks in 2011.
The following year, the couple and their four children planned a visit to Epstein’s island, Little St. James, emails show. Lutnick was invited for lunch on Dec. 24, 2012, and later, Epstein’s assistant wrote on behalf of Epstein, “it was nice seeing you.”
Their Adfin deal was signed four days later.
Lutnick is such a fucking liar.
Farah Tomazin at The Daily Beast: RFK Jr.’s Bizarre Trip With Epstein and Ghislaine Exposed in Files.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Dakotas with child sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, according to the latest tranche of documents released by the Justice Department.
As the fallout over the Epstein files continues, an email exchange between the two sex predators centers on the now-Trump Cabinet secretary, one of the many prominent people whose friendship the pair cultivated over the years.
The exchange took place in 2012, seven years before Epstein died in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial.
In one email, Epstein writes to Maxwell about a trip involving “dinosaur and fossill hunitng (sic) with jack horner on the ranch, found 90 million year old clams and fossils.”
“Right up your alley,” he adds.
The following day, Maxwell replies: “Love that – didn’t we go fossil hunting with him and Bobby Kennedy in N Dakota?”
“Yes,” Epstein replies.
Maxwell, a former British socialite now serving 20 years for her crimes, also disclosed the fossil hunt during an interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last year, apparently catching him off guard when she said of Epstein: “Bobby Kennedy knew him.”
One more from Amelia Gentleman at The Guardian on women in the Epstein files: Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club.
Pluck an email at random from the millions in the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library. It is a Saturday evening in February 2013, and Jeffrey Epstein is messaging Bill Gates’s assistant about guests for a dinner he wants to organise.’
“People for Bill,” the email begins. Epstein starts listing possible candidates: the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the film director Woody Allen, the prime minister of Qatar, a couple of Harvard academics, the billionaire CEO of Hyatt hotels, a White House communications director, a former US secretary of defence.
He names 10 powerful men, before suggesting “Anne Hathaway (really)”. Epstein has to make it clear, with the bracketed word, that he is not joking when he proposes that a woman might join them at the table. The lists ends tentatively: “victoria secret models?” Epstein wonders: “Who on the list do you think he would enjoy the most?”
The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.
A typical email from Epstein to a woman might say: “Take a selfie of your pussy and send.”
Spend three days rummaging through the chaotic, sprawling, sordid pit of information contained in the Epstein files, and you learn valuable lessons about how this modern global patriarchy operates: through flattery, the exchange of favours and occasional curt reminders of who owes what to whom.
For women, these files offer an unprecedented chance to eavesdrop on conversations from which they are usually excluded. They provide salutary insights into what a set of distinguished global figures think and say about women when they assume the women aren’t listening.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
I’ll end with a few tales of Trump idiocy:
Jonathan Karl at ABC News: Trump wants Penn Station, Dulles Airport named after him in funding deal with Schumer, sources say.
President Donald Trump last month told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that he would be willing to unfreeze $16 billion in funding for a major infrastructure project in New York if Schumer would agree to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles Airport after him, two sources familiar with the conversation told ABC News.
The Hudson Tunnel Project — which would connect New York City and New Jersey — had already started. The project includes building nine miles of new passenger rail track and rehabilitating the North River Tunnel, according to the commission responsible for it.
Officials in New York and New Jersey said if the money isn’t freed-up by Friday, the project would stop, leaving approximately 1,000 construction jobs in jeopardy.
Sources told ABC that Schumer rejected Trump’s offer.
Daniel Dale at CNN: ‘I did that’: Trump takes credit for a prisoner release that happened before he even ran for president.
At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Donald Trump spoke from prepared remarks as he discussed the persecution of Mariam Ibrahim. Ibrahim was unjustly imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014, in a case centered on her Christian faith, until she was released that same year following a global outcry.
Trump correctly said: “Believers all over the planet rallied to Mariam’s cause, prayed for her protection, and successfully pressured for her release.”
But then the president appeared to ad-lib – and claimed that he was the one who got Ibrahim freed.
“I did that. I did that. I did that with one phone call, actually,” he said. “And she had such support, it was so easy. And when I explained it to the powers that be: ‘Yes, sir, we will do it right away.’ I just wish I knew earlier. But it’s a big world with a lot of people.”
For years, Trump has told fictional stories that feature unnamed people referring to him as “sir.” This was another one.
Ibrahim was released in 2014, during the Obama administration. Trump did not become president until January 2017. He was not even a presidential candidate until June 2015. There has never been the slightest indication that a private citizen in the US, a businessman and celebrity at the time, was the person who convinced Sudanese authorities to let her out of prison.
A former Obama administration official who served on the National Security Council in 2014 told CNN on Friday: “I neither had at the time nor have now any knowledge of Trump’s involvement whatsoever. It’d be very surprising if he were.”
Jack Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service, first raised skepticism about Trump’s story on Thursday.
Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor who is a prominent conservative legal scholar, said in a Friday email: “As Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2014, I advocated for Mariam Ibrahim. I do not recall Donald Trump being involved in the case or assisting our Commission’s efforts. Of course, he was not President at the time.
Jack Revell at The Daily Beast: Military Pressured to See ‘Melania’ Against Their Will.
Thousands of active-duty military personnel may have been “pressured” into seeing the Melania documentary at cinemas around the country, a watchdog has warned.
The $75 million Amazon film opened last week to $7 million at the box office—despite universally terrible reviews.
According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, those numbers have been artificially inflated by pressure from MAGA-aligned officers leaning on their troops to buy tickets.
“People are scared,” Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the MRFF, said. Weinstein said he has received letters from members of the U.S. military at eight facilities worldwide, complaining that their superiors encouraged or pressured them to see the film.
He told Business Insider. “They were pressured to see the movie. Your military superior, that’s not your shift manager at Taco Bell or Starbucks. They have complete and total control over you.”
The MRFF, a non-profit founded in 2005 to promote the separation of church and state within the military, has roughly 100,000 members.
“Nobody that I know wanted to go except for those that did not want to get jacked up by our unit commander for not attending,” one of those members told Weinstein in a letter seen by journalist Jonathan Larsen.
That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?
#BobbyKennedyJr #DonaldTrump #DullesAirport #EpsteinFiles #GhislaineMaxwell #HowardLutnick #HudsonTunnelProject #JeffreyEpstein #MariamIbrahim #MelaniaDocumentary #PennStation #PeterMandleson #PrinceAndrew #Racism #USMilitary #VideoDepictingObamasAsApes #womenInEpsteinWorld -
Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump’s Racism and Epstein Fallout
Good Afternoon!!
Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about Trump’s disgusting Truth Social post of a video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Trump left it up for at least 12 hours before someone at the White House finally deleted it. Of course Trump, who is a hateful and repulsive racist, won’t apologize.
The Washington Post: Trump refuses to apologize over video showing the Obamas as apes.
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — President Donald Trump declined to apologize for sharing a social media video that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, saying he did not realize the image of the former president and first lady was tacked on to the end of the clip.
The president said Friday that he had watched and passed along the video — which focused on claims of voter fraud until the final seconds of the clip — to unidentified “people” to post to his Truth Social account, but that he “didn’t see the whole thing,” including the brief portion that showed the heads of the Obamas edited onto the bodies of apes.
In response to a question from The Washington Post about whether he would heed the calls of some Republicans to apologize for posting the video, which was widely condemned as racist and offensive, Trump said he would not.
“No, I didn’t make a mistake,” Trump said on his way to Palm Beach, Florida, for the weekend. “I look at a lot of — thousands of things. And I looked at the beginning of it. It was fine.”
Trump referred to the controversial video, which was online for about 12 hours before being deleted, as “a very strong post in terms of voter fraud.” [….]
…[T]he pushback was swift, including from Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina), the chamber’s only Black Republican, who also serves as chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Scott called the post “the most racist thing I’ve seen out of this White House.” Several other GOP senators and House members joined Scott in condemning the video, with some calling on Trump to apologize….
Speaking to reporters on board Air Force One on Friday, Trump dismissed the notion that the post and his handling of it could hurt him with the minority voters he had made gains with during the 2024 election. He touted criminal justice reform legislation passed during his first term, as well as his efforts to ensure funding to historically Black colleges and universities.
We’ll see. I think Trump expects to be able to rig the 2026 election anyway.
Hanna Kiros at The Atlantic (gift link): The Obama Meme on Trump’s Truth Social Was Exactly What It Looked Like.
Donald Trump supercharged his political career by claiming that Barack Obama wasn’t American. Yesterday, 16 minutes before midnight, the president’s account on Truth Social posted a video that suggests Obama isn’t even human. It briefly shows the head of the first Black president and that of his wife superimposed onto the bodies of apes. They dance along to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
The video, which Trump’s account shared twice, seems to be a screen recording. Its first minute shows a clip promoting the lie that voting-machine tampering handed Joe Biden the presidency in 2020. Then, someone seems to swipe up, and the clip depicting the Obamas as apes flashes into focus. [The post was removed after about 12 hours.]….
In the interim, hundreds if not thousands of people responded to the clip with enthusiasm. Immediately after the video was first posted on Truth Social, the memecoin $APEBAMA was minted. Within 12 hours, more than $4 million worth of $APEBAMA had been traded back and forth. In an X group with the same name that now has hundreds of members, the pinned tweet implies that the meme stock will succeed because of how outrageous the video is: “this is pretty much on par with him calling Obama a nigga.” Some members posted their own depictions of Obama as a monkey or ape. The ape video’s apparent creator, the X user @xerias_x, reposted the full video to their X account early this morning. Besides the Obamas, the video shows a menagerie of Democratic politicians as animals, bowing down to Trump, who appears as a lion. It now has more than 1 million views. (@xerias_x also seems to be the originator of an AI-generated video Trump reposted in October that shows the president raining down what appears to be excrement on protesters from the sky.)
The “joke” that Trump’s account spread is plainly sinister. The idea that Black people sit somewhere between white people and apes has long been used to justify cruelty. In 1377, a historian wrote that Africans “have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals,” meaning they “are, as a whole, submissive to slavery.” Cartoons circulated during the Civil War were printed with images similar to the one Trump posted: One labels a monkey holding a book upside down as a NEGRO-MAN; another depicts a Black man on all fours, accompanied by the words WHAR’S JEFF DAVIS. In 1906, a man born in what was then the Belgian Congo, Ota Benga, was displayed at the Bronx Zoo in a cage with an orangutan. In 1975, white teenagers harassed Black students desegregating a Boston public school with the chant “Two, four, six, eight, assassinate the nigger apes.”
The ape caricature still colors how Black people are received in America. But this morning, the administration played the video off for laughs. “This is from an internet meme video depicting President Trump as the King of the Jungle and Democrats as characters from the Lion King,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in response to a comment request before the Truth Social posts were removed. (The Lion King features a monkey named Rafiki, but no apes appear in the film.)
There is absolutely no question that Trump is a vicious racist.
In other news, there are so many fascinating revelations coming out of the latest release from the FBI’s Epstein files. I haven’t had the patience to actually try searching through them myself, but I’ve been following what reporters are finding. Some of the latest examples:
Allison Quinn at The Daily Beast: Epstein’s Top Secret Relationship With Trained Russian Spy Revealed.
Jeffrey Epstein had a years-long relationship with an FSB-trained Russian official who sought his help connecting with a well-known hacker in 2016.
The late sex trafficker’s corresponJeffrdence with Sergei Belyakov is among the strangest revelations in the millions of case files released by the Justice Department last month.
Belyakov, a former deputy economic minister, helped Epstein secure visas to visit Russia, provided him with a dossier on a Russian woman Epstein had complained was trying to blackmail “a group of powerful businessmen,” and reported to Epstein about his work for the Russian government.
Epstein’s frequent bids to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov feature heavily in the newly released files—his assistant reminds him in one September 2011 email that he’d told his bodyguard he “had an appointment with Putin” coming up—but he appears to have had Belyakov at his beck and call.
In one January 2016 email under the subject, “My new position,” Belyakov told Epstein he’d started working at the Russian Direct Investment Fund–now led by Kirill Dmitriev, one of Vladimir Putin’s most trusted envoys, and a key player in ongoing peace talks with the Trump administration to end Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Much of their correspondence focused on investment opportunities and potential investors, though it’s unclear to what extent Belyakov involved Epstein in his work beyond the emails documented in the latest files.
The pair met several times in person over the years. In numerous email exchanges from 2014 through 2018, they reference personal meetings they had together, along with sporadic phone calls.
Epstein described Belyakov as a “very good friend” in a 2015 email to billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel as he tried to arrange for the pair to meet. Belyakov also apparently put Epstein in touch with other Russian officials, with emails showing he helped Epstein apply for a Russian visa in 2014 to meet with then-Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Storchak and Alexei Simanovsky, the deputy head of Russia’s Central Bank at the time.
There’s more interesting stuff at the link.
J Oliver Conroy at The Guardian: The Epstein files reveal that a vast global conspiracy actually exists – sort of.
The millions of Jeffrey Epstein files dumped last Friday by the US Department of Justice will provide journalists, conspiracy theorists and interested members of the public with months of reading. And what they will read is enraging.
What makes these files so infuriating, however, is not just Epstein’s horrific predatory behavior, which is well-known, but the more mundane examples of elite conduct that the documents continue to expose. They vividly illustrate a world whose existence many everyday people, whether fevered with visions of the Illuminati or just jaundiced by banal anti-establishment cynicism, already suspected exists: an informal global club of powerful, ultra-rich people who all seemingly know each other, help one another out, and protect each other from the consequences of their depravity.
The new files will probably not provide satisfying answers to questions about, say, whether any of Epstein’s famous friends participated in his sex trafficking, or if his death in custody in 2019 was truly a suicide, as authorities have said. But conspiracy theorists may still feel vindicated – and to some extent they should, Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, said.
Although the documents may not expose an actual criminal conspiracy, he said, they confirm the belief behind most conspiracy theories: that elites “get special treatment, that they’re shielded from the rules that are supposed to apply to everyone equally, and that there is a kind of corruption in the broadest sense of the word”.
The new material is the largest, and possibly last, tranche of the so-called Epstein files, though the government is keeping as many as 3m more pages under wraps. Yet even the initial revelations of these files deepen the astonishing constellation of ties between Epstein and members of the global elite – including tech billionaires; a former US president; British, Norwegian and Saudi royalty or royal courtiers; current and former US cabinet secretaries and governors; and prominent business executives and academics….
[T]he files, especially Epstein’s typo-filled email and text-message correspondences, are fascinating – and ultimately grim – in what they show of how elites act in private, among themselves. At the least, many of Epstein’s powerful acquaintances remained friendly with him years after the notoriously lenient sweetheart bargain, in 2008, in which he pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl for prostitution, and as survivors continued to accuse Epstein of further crimes.
Again, there is lots more enraging material at the link.
AP: Epstein revelations have toppled top figures in Europe while US fallout is more muted.
LONDON (AP) — A prince, an ambassador, senior diplomats, top politicians. All brought down by the Jeffrey Epstein files. And all in Europe, rather than the United States.
The huge trove of Epstein documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice has sent shock waves through Europe’s political, economic and social elites — dominating headlines, ending careers and spurring political and criminal investigations.
Former U.K. Ambassador to Washington Peter Mandelson was fired and could go to prison. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faces a leadership crisis over the Mandelson appointment. Senior figures have fallen in Norway, Sweden and Slovakia. And, even before the latest batch of files, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, brother of King Charles III, lost his honors, princely title and taxpayer-funded mansion.
Apart from the former Prince Andrew, none of them faces claims of sexual wrongdoing. They have been toppled for maintaining friendly relationships with Epstein after he became a convicted sex offender.
“Epstein collected powerful people the way others collect frequent flyer points,” said Mark Stephens, a specialist in international and human rights law at Howard Kennedy in London. “But the receipts are now in public, and some might wish they’d traveled less.”
The documents were published after a public frenzy over Epstein became a crisis for President Donald Trump’s administration and led to a rare bipartisan effort to force the government to open its investigative files. But in the U.S., the long-sought publication has not brought the same public reckoning with Epstein’s associates — at least so far.
Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said that in Britain, “if you’re in those files, it’s immediately a big story.”
“It suggests to me we have a more functional media, we have a more functional accountability structure, that there is still a degree of shame in politics, in terms of people will say: ‘This is just not acceptable, this is just not done,’” he said.
In other words, our media sucks and many of our politicians are shameless. I can’t argue with that.
A couple of Trump cabinet members captured in the files:
CBS News: Lutnick and Epstein were in business together, Epstein files show.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said he had “limited interactions” with Jeffrey Epstein, but documents show they were in business together as recently as 2014.
Lutnick and Epstein each signed on behalf of limited liability companies that agreed on Dec. 28, 2012, to acquire stakes in a now-shuttered advertising technology company called Adfin, documents released among the so-called Epstein files show.
Epstein and Lutnick’s signatures appear on neighboring pages in the contract, with Epstein signing for his Southern Trust Company, Inc. and Lutnick for a limited liability company called CVAFH I. The documents list nine shareholders in total.
Lutnick, the former chairman of the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald who at one point lived next door to Epstein, told the New York Post in October that he and his wife Allison had cut ties with Epstein in 2005, deciding after taking a tour of Epstein’s New York townhouse, “I will never be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.”
However, it appears Epstein and Lutnick continued to maintain contact and emails show they arranged calls and planned to have drinks in 2011.
The following year, the couple and their four children planned a visit to Epstein’s island, Little St. James, emails show. Lutnick was invited for lunch on Dec. 24, 2012, and later, Epstein’s assistant wrote on behalf of Epstein, “it was nice seeing you.”
Their Adfin deal was signed four days later.
Lutnick is such a fucking liar.
Farah Tomazin at The Daily Beast: RFK Jr.’s Bizarre Trip With Epstein and Ghislaine Exposed in Files.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went hunting for dinosaur bones in the Dakotas with child sex traffickers Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, according to the latest tranche of documents released by the Justice Department.
As the fallout over the Epstein files continues, an email exchange between the two sex predators centers on the now-Trump Cabinet secretary, one of the many prominent people whose friendship the pair cultivated over the years.
The exchange took place in 2012, seven years before Epstein died in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial.
In one email, Epstein writes to Maxwell about a trip involving “dinosaur and fossill hunitng (sic) with jack horner on the ranch, found 90 million year old clams and fossils.”
“Right up your alley,” he adds.
The following day, Maxwell replies: “Love that – didn’t we go fossil hunting with him and Bobby Kennedy in N Dakota?”
“Yes,” Epstein replies.
Maxwell, a former British socialite now serving 20 years for her crimes, also disclosed the fossil hunt during an interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last year, apparently catching him off guard when she said of Epstein: “Bobby Kennedy knew him.”
One more from Amelia Gentleman at The Guardian on women in the Epstein files: Sex and snacks, but no seat at the table: the role of women in Epstein’s sordid men’s club.
Pluck an email at random from the millions in the Department of Justice’s Epstein Library. It is a Saturday evening in February 2013, and Jeffrey Epstein is messaging Bill Gates’s assistant about guests for a dinner he wants to organise.’
“People for Bill,” the email begins. Epstein starts listing possible candidates: the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, the film director Woody Allen, the prime minister of Qatar, a couple of Harvard academics, the billionaire CEO of Hyatt hotels, a White House communications director, a former US secretary of defence.
He names 10 powerful men, before suggesting “Anne Hathaway (really)”. Epstein has to make it clear, with the bracketed word, that he is not joking when he proposes that a woman might join them at the table. The lists ends tentatively: “victoria secret models?” Epstein wonders: “Who on the list do you think he would enjoy the most?”
The Epstein files reveal a patriarchy in action. This is a world where the men are rich and powerful, and the women are not. The emails showcase the private behaviour of a male ruling class, as they network, joke and trade information. Women exist at the periphery, tolerated because they organise the diaries of the busy men, they arrange food, they grace a table, they provide sex.
A typical email from Epstein to a woman might say: “Take a selfie of your pussy and send.”
Spend three days rummaging through the chaotic, sprawling, sordid pit of information contained in the Epstein files, and you learn valuable lessons about how this modern global patriarchy operates: through flattery, the exchange of favours and occasional curt reminders of who owes what to whom.
For women, these files offer an unprecedented chance to eavesdrop on conversations from which they are usually excluded. They provide salutary insights into what a set of distinguished global figures think and say about women when they assume the women aren’t listening.
Read the rest at The Guardian.
I’ll end with a few tales of Trump idiocy:
Jonathan Karl at ABC News: Trump wants Penn Station, Dulles Airport named after him in funding deal with Schumer, sources say.
President Donald Trump last month told Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that he would be willing to unfreeze $16 billion in funding for a major infrastructure project in New York if Schumer would agree to rename New York’s Penn Station and Washington’s Dulles Airport after him, two sources familiar with the conversation told ABC News.
The Hudson Tunnel Project — which would connect New York City and New Jersey — had already started. The project includes building nine miles of new passenger rail track and rehabilitating the North River Tunnel, according to the commission responsible for it.
Officials in New York and New Jersey said if the money isn’t freed-up by Friday, the project would stop, leaving approximately 1,000 construction jobs in jeopardy.
Sources told ABC that Schumer rejected Trump’s offer.
Daniel Dale at CNN: ‘I did that’: Trump takes credit for a prisoner release that happened before he even ran for president.
At the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Donald Trump spoke from prepared remarks as he discussed the persecution of Mariam Ibrahim. Ibrahim was unjustly imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014, in a case centered on her Christian faith, until she was released that same year following a global outcry.
Trump correctly said: “Believers all over the planet rallied to Mariam’s cause, prayed for her protection, and successfully pressured for her release.”
But then the president appeared to ad-lib – and claimed that he was the one who got Ibrahim freed.
“I did that. I did that. I did that with one phone call, actually,” he said. “And she had such support, it was so easy. And when I explained it to the powers that be: ‘Yes, sir, we will do it right away.’ I just wish I knew earlier. But it’s a big world with a lot of people.”
For years, Trump has told fictional stories that feature unnamed people referring to him as “sir.” This was another one.
Ibrahim was released in 2014, during the Obama administration. Trump did not become president until January 2017. He was not even a presidential candidate until June 2015. There has never been the slightest indication that a private citizen in the US, a businessman and celebrity at the time, was the person who convinced Sudanese authorities to let her out of prison.
A former Obama administration official who served on the National Security Council in 2014 told CNN on Friday: “I neither had at the time nor have now any knowledge of Trump’s involvement whatsoever. It’d be very surprising if he were.”
Jack Jenkins, a reporter for Religion News Service, first raised skepticism about Trump’s story on Thursday.
Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor who is a prominent conservative legal scholar, said in a Friday email: “As Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2014, I advocated for Mariam Ibrahim. I do not recall Donald Trump being involved in the case or assisting our Commission’s efforts. Of course, he was not President at the time.
Jack Revell at The Daily Beast: Military Pressured to See ‘Melania’ Against Their Will.
Thousands of active-duty military personnel may have been “pressured” into seeing the Melania documentary at cinemas around the country, a watchdog has warned.
The $75 million Amazon film opened last week to $7 million at the box office—despite universally terrible reviews.
According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, those numbers have been artificially inflated by pressure from MAGA-aligned officers leaning on their troops to buy tickets.
“People are scared,” Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the MRFF, said. Weinstein said he has received letters from members of the U.S. military at eight facilities worldwide, complaining that their superiors encouraged or pressured them to see the film.
He told Business Insider. “They were pressured to see the movie. Your military superior, that’s not your shift manager at Taco Bell or Starbucks. They have complete and total control over you.”
The MRFF, a non-profit founded in 2005 to promote the separation of church and state within the military, has roughly 100,000 members.
“Nobody that I know wanted to go except for those that did not want to get jacked up by our unit commander for not attending,” one of those members told Weinstein in a letter seen by journalist Jonathan Larsen.
That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?
#BobbyKennedyJr #DonaldTrump #DullesAirport #EpsteinFiles #GhislaineMaxwell #HowardLutnick #HudsonTunnelProject #JeffreyEpstein #MariamIbrahim #MelaniaDocumentary #PennStation #PeterMandleson #PrinceAndrew #Racism #USMilitary #VideoDepictingObamasAsApes #womenInEpsteinWorld -
Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation – Library of Congress
Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation
Release Date: 29 Jan 2026
Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation
‘Glory,’ ‘The Karate Kid,’ ‘Philadelphia,’ ‘Frida,’ ‘Inception,’ ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel,’ ‘The Incredibles’ and ‘Clueless’ Among Titles Selected for RecognitionThe Library of Congress has selected 25 films for the National Film Registry due to their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance to preserve the nation’s film heritage, the Library announced today.
The selections for 2025 date back to the silent film era with six silent films dating from 1896 to 1926 – a significant number of films in this class. The newest film added to the registry is from 2014 with filmmaker Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” which included meticulous historical research at the Library of Congress to create visually striking scenery.
Iconic Hollywood films from the last 50 years selected for the registry this year include “The Karate Kid,” “Glory,” “Philadelphia,” “Inception,” and the teen comedy “Clueless.” Classic Hollywood selections include the 1954 musical “White Christmas” that enshrined the chart-topping song of the same name in American popular culture, and perhaps the last great musical of the Golden Age of Hollywood, “High Society” from 1956 featuring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and Grace Kelly in her last movie.
Four documentaries were selected for the registry this year, including Ken Burns’ “Brooklyn Bridge,” Nancy Buirski’s “The Loving Story,” George Nierenberg’s “Say Amen, Somebody” and Danny Tedesco’s “The Wrecking Crew.”
“When we preserve films, we preserve American culture for generations to come. These selections for the National Film Registry show us that films are instrumental in capturing important parts of our nation’s story,” said Acting Librarian of Congress Robert R. Newlen. “We are proud to continue this important work, adding a broad range of 25 films to the National Film Registry as a collective effort in the film community to protect our cinematic heritage.”
The selections for 2025 bring the number of titles in the registry to 925. Some of the film titles are among the 2 million moving image collection items held in the Library of Congress. Others are preserved in coordination with copyright holders or other film archives.
Looking back on “The Karate Kid,” actor Ralph Macchio said the characters were key to cementing the film in pop culture history.
“The magic of Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi and me as the Daniel LaRusso character, that sort of give and take, that instant soulful magic was happening from our first meeting, Macchio told the Library of Congress. “Those scenes in Miyagi’s yard, the chores, the waxing on of the car, the painting the fences, the sanding the floor, all of that is now a part of cinematic pop culture. For me, the heart and soul of the film is in those two characters.”
Writer and director Amy Heckerling recalled how she made the 1995 teen comedy and satire “Clueless,” which has been called a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s classic novel “Emma.”
“I’m often asked, how did I decide to make ‘Emma’ into an updated film, which is kind of backwards because what I wanted was to write the kind of characters that really amused me, people that were very comfortable, ardent and optimistic. I would get up, read the news and then just want to cry and be depressed. So, I thought, what if you really were always positive? How would that be? And what if you were doing things and you just knew that you were right?” Heckerling told the Library of Congress. “I remembered reading ‘Emma’ when I was in college, so I re-read it. It was like Jane Austen was pulling up from the grave and saying I already got it!”
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will host a television special Thursday, March 19, starting at 8 p.m. ET to screen a selection of films named to the registry this year. TCM host and film historian Jacqueline Stewart, who is chair of the National Film Preservation Board, will introduce the films.
Stewart leads the board in studying and recommending films across a wide variety of genres and eras for the Librarian of Congress to consider for the registry.
“It is very meaningful that the National Film Registry is adding six silent film titles, showing the range of topics and styles in the earliest years of American filmmaking,” Stewart said. “And it is especially exciting to see that the top title nominated by the public for this year, ‘The Thing,’ has been added to the National Film Registry, along with ‘The Truman Show’ and ‘The Incredibles’ which also had very strong public support.”
Films Selected for the 2025 National Film Registry
(chronological order)- The Tramp and the Dog (1896)
- The Oath of the Sword (1914)
- The Maid of McMillan (1916)
- The Lady (1925)
- Sparrows (1926)
- Ten Nights in a Barroom (1926)
- White Christmas (1954)
- High Society (1956)
- Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
- Say Amen, Somebody (1982)
- The Thing (1982)
- The Big Chill (1983)
- The Karate Kid (1984)
- Glory (1989)
- Philadelphia (1993)
- Before Sunrise (1995)
- Clueless (1995)
- The Truman Show (1998)
- Frida (2002)
- The Hours (2002)
- The Incredibles (2004)
- The Wrecking Crew (2008)
- Inception (2010)
- The Loving Story (2011)
- The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Public Nominations for the National Film Registry
The public submitted 7,559 titles for consideration this year. The public can submit nominations throughout the year on the Library’s web site. Nominations for next year will be accepted until Aug. 15, 2026. Cast your vote at loc.gov/film.
Ken Burns’ First Major Film Joins National Film Registry
“Brooklyn Bridge” is the first documentary by Ken Burns to join the National Film Registry. Burns recently discussed his inspiration for the film and his process with the Library of Congress.
“My best friend was a book distributor and he gave me a copy of David McCullough’s, ‘The Great Bridge,’ the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. I devoured it in one sitting. And I said, oh, we should make a story about what this book is about, not just about the construction, which that book was, but this century as a symbol of strength, ingenuity, vitality and promise. I had no idea that that it would take so many years of my time to do it,” Burns said. “I was just drawn to the story and the idea that you could wake the past up with old photographs and first-person voices, as well as a traditional third-person narrator.
“The ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ film was my first film that had sort of widespread distribution. And I can’t think of a day where I didn’t learn something new. I felt in some ways like every first film is reinventing the wheel. You can be influenced by other people, but you really, in the end, have to do it. Everything was how you wake the story up, how you take a photograph. And in those days it was all analog. We were hand shooting all of the archives. That was a very long process, traveling to them in person. There was no digitization. There was no getting it over the internet. It was all firsthand. We filmed for the ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ at 163 different sources.”
Coincidentally, the Library of Congress has been an important resource for nearly all of Burns’ films for archival footage and historical accuracy.
“With the exception of ‘The American Revolution,’ which is a subject that predates photography, we’ve used the Library of Congress in every single film we’ve worked on. I spent between eight and nine weeks, Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 4:30 in the paper print collection, filming on an easel with gloves and magnets,” Burns said.
“When I think about the National Film Registry and all the films that are contained in it, I think of it as a giant mirror of the United States, reflecting back all of the complexity, all of the intimacy, all of the variety of the people and ideas and forces and movements that have taken place over our history. And you realize what an extraordinary repository it is.”
Wes Anderson Draws on Library for ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’
Similarly, Anderson uses significant historical research to create visually striking stories and scenery, as displayed by “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” He too used the Library’s collections to create his film.
“There’s a specific set of postcards in the Library of Congress Photochrome Prints collection. They’re photographs from the turn of the century and hand-tinted. When we were first starting to figure out how to tell this story, the views and images that we were looking for, the architecture and the landscapes that we wanted, they don’t exist anymore,” Anderson said. “We went through the entire Photochrome collection, which is a lot of images. We made our own versions of things, but much of what is in our film comes directly from that collection from the Library of Congress.”
The 2025 National Film Registry
(descriptions in chronological order)“The Tramp and the Dog” (1896)
“The Tramp and the Dog,” a silent film from Chicago’s Selig Polyscope Company, is considered director William Selig’s most popular early work. Filmed in Rogers Park, it is recognized as the first commercial film made in Chicago. Previously a lost film, it was rediscovered in 2021 at the National Library of Norway. The film depicts a tramp who attempts to steal a pie from a backyard windowsill, only to be met by a broom-wielding housewife and her dog, who foils the crime. The film is one of the first known as “pants humor,” where a character loses (or almost loses) his pants during an altercation. This scene inspired future comedy gags showing drifters and tramps losing their pants to dogs chasing them.
“The Oath of the Sword” (1914)
A three-reel silent drama, “The Oath of the Sword” depicts the tragic story of two young lovers separated by an ocean. Masao follows his ambitions, studying abroad at the University of California, Berkeley, while Hisa remains in Japan, caring for her ill father. This earliest known Asian American film production featured Japanese actors playing Japanese characters and was produced by the Los Angeles-based Japanese American Film Company. Made at a time when Hollywood studios were not yet the dominant storytellers of the American film industry, “The Oath of the Sword” highlights the significance of early independent film productions created by and for Asian American communities. James Card, the founding curator at the George Eastman Museum, acquired “The Oath of the Sword” in 1963. The museum made a black and white photochemical preservation in 1980. In 2023, a new preservation reproducing the original tinting was done in collaboration with the Japanese American National Museum, and the film has since become widely admired.
“The Maid of McMillan” (1916)
Known to be the first student film on record, this whimsical, silent romance film was shot on campus in 1916 by students in the Thyrsus Dramatic Club at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Club members Donald Stewart (Class of 1917) and George D. Bartlett (Class of 1920) wrote the screenplay. The original nitrate print of “The Maid of McMillan” was rediscovered in 1982, and two 16mm prints were made; the original nitrate was likely destroyed at this time. In 2021, with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation, one of those 16mm prints was scanned at 4k and reprinted onto 35mm helping to secure the film’s survival and legacy.
“The Lady” (1925)
When “The Lady” debuted in theaters in 1925, the silent film era had hit its stride, and this movie represents a powerhouse of artists at their peak. Director Frank Borzage was a well-established expert in drawing out intense expressions of deep emotion and longing in his actors. He did just that with the film’s lead actress, Norma Talmadge, also at the height of her career, both in front of and behind the camera. Talmadge produced “The Lady”through her production company and commissioned one of the most prolific screenwriters, Frances Marion, to deliver a heartfelt story of a woman seeking to find the son she had to give up, to protect him from his evil grandfather. “The Lady” was restored by the Library of Congress in 2022.
“Sparrows” (1926)
As a silent actress, producer and key founder in the creation of the American film industry, Mary Pickford’s performance in “Sparrows” represents her ability to master the genre she helped nourish: sentimental melodramas full of adventure and thrills, with dashes of comedy and heartfelt endings. Pickford plays Molly, the eldest orphan held within the swampy squalor of the Deep South, who moves heaven and earth to save the other orphan children from a Dickensian world of forced labor. The film takes some departures from the visual styles found in Pickford’s other films, invoking an unusual tone of despair while deploying camera angles and lighting akin to German Expressionist cinema. “Sparrows” was preserved by the Library of Congress in collaboration with the Mary Pickford Company in 2020.
“Ten Nights in a Barroom” (1926)
Featuring an all-Black cast, “Ten Nights in a Barroom” was produced in 1926 by the Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia and is the earliest of only two surviving films made by the company. This silent film is based on the stage melodrama adapted from the 1854 novel “Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There” by Timothy Shay Arthur. Released in 2015 by Kino Lorber as part of the five-disc set “Pioneers of African-American Cinema,” the compilation was produced by the Library of Congress, in association with the British Film Institute, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Modern Art, National Archives, Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Southern Methodist University and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preserved by George Eastman Museum.
“White Christmas” (1954)
While the chart-topping song “White Christmas” was first performed by Bing Crosby for the 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” its composer, Irving Berlin, was later inspired to center the song in the 1954 musical “White Christmas.” Crosby, along with Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen Rohe and director Michael Curtiz, embedded “White Christmas” in American popular culture as a best-selling single and the top-grossing film of 1954, as well as regular holiday viewing throughout the decades. The story of two World War II veterans-turned-entertainers and a singing sister act preparing a show for a retired general, the film and its grand musical numbers were captured in VistaVision, a widescreen process developed by Paramount Pictures and first used for “White Christmas.”
“High Society” (1956)
Often referred to as the last great musical of the Golden Age of Hollywood, “High Society” features an all-star cast including Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong (and his band), along with a memorable score of Cole Porter classics. Set in Newport, Rhode Island, the film showcases the Newport Jazz Festival (established in 1954) and features a remarkable version of Cole Porter’s “Now You Has Jazz.” It includes the first big-screen duet by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, singing “Well, Did You Evah?” This was Grace Kelly’s last movie before she retired from acting and married the Prince of Monaco; she wore her Cartier engagement ring while filming.
“Brooklyn Bridge” (1981)
With “Brooklyn Bridge,” Ken Burns introduced himself to the American public, telling the story of the New York landmark’s construction. As with later subjects like the Civil War, jazz and baseball, Burns connects the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to American identity, values and aspirations. Released theatrically and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, “Brooklyn Bridge” marked the beginning of Burns’ influential career in public media. More than just a filmmaker, Burns has become a trusted public historian. His storytelling presents facts, but maybe more importantly, invites reflection on what America is, where it’s been, and where it’s going. His influence is felt not only in classrooms and through public broadcasting, but across generations who see history as something alive and relevant.
“Say Amen, Somebody” (1982)
George Nierenberg’s documentary is a celebration of the historical significance and spiritual power of gospel music. With inspirational music, joyful songs and brilliant singers, the movie focuses on the men and women who pioneered gospel music and strengthened its connections to African American community and religious life. Prior to production, Nierenberg, who is white, spent over a year in African American churches and communities, gaining the trust of the performers. Restored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2020, the film features archival footage, photographs, stirring performances and reflections from the father of gospel Thomas A. Dorsey and its matron Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith. Nierenberg shows the struggles and sacrifices it takes to make a living in gospel, including criticism endured by women who sought to pursue careers as professional gospel singers while raising their families.
“The Thing” (1982)
Moody, stark, often funny and always chilling, this science fiction horror classic follows Antarctic scientists who uncover a long-dormant, malevolent extraterrestrial presence. “The Thing” revolutionized horror special effects and offers a brutally honest portrait of the results of paranoia and exhaustion when the unknown becomes inescapable. “The Thing” deftly adapts John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella “Who Goes There?” and influenced “Stranger Things” and “Reservoir Dogs.” It remains a tense, thrilling and profoundly unsettling work of cinema. — DrWeb adds, a long-time favorite.
“The Big Chill” (1983)
Lawrence Kasdan’s best picture-nominated “The Big Chill” offers an intimate portrait of friends reunited after the suicide of one of their own and features actors who defined cinema in the 1980s – Glenn Close, William Hurt, Jo Beth Williams, Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum and Meg Tilly. This powerful ensemble portrays American stereotypes of the time – the yuppie, the drug dealer, the TV star – and deftly humanizes them. Through humor, tenderness, honesty and an amazing soundtrack, it shows formerly idealistic Americans making and dealing with the constant compromises of adulthood, while buoying one another with uncompromising love and friendship. –DrWeb adds, proud of his film, helped work on it years ago, in South Carolina.
“The Karate Kid” (1984)
An intimate story about family and friendship, “The Karate Kid” also succeeds as a hero’s journey, a sports movie and a teen movie – a feel-good movie, but not without grit. The film offers clearly defined villains, romance and seemingly unachievable goals, but also an elegant character-driven drama that is relatable and touching. A father who has lost his son meets the displaced son of a single mother and teaches him about finding balance and avoiding the pitfalls of violence and revenge. Race and class issues are presented honestly and are dealt with reasonably. Our hero practices a lot, gets frustrated, gets hurt, but still succeeds. It’s as American as they come, and it’s a classic.
“Glory” (1989)
“Glory,” described by Leonard Maltin as “one of the finest historical dramas ever made,” portrays a historical account of the 54th Regiment, a unit of African American soldiers who fought for the North in the Civil War. Authorized by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the regiment consisted of an all-Black troop commanded by white officers. Matthew Broderick plays the young colonel who trains the troop, and Denzel Washington (in an Academy Award-winning performance) is among an impressive cast that includes Morgan Freeman, Cary Elwes and Andre Braugher. American Civil War historian James M. McPherson said the film “accomplishes a remarkable feat in sensitizing a lot of today’s Black students to the role that their ancestors played in the Civil War in winning their own freedom.”
“Philadelphia” (1993)
“Philadelphia” stars Tom Hanks in one of the first mainstream studio movies to confront the HIV/AIDS crisis. In the film, law partner Andrew Beckett (Hanks) is fired from his firm when they discover that he is gay and has AIDS. He hires personal attorney Joe Miller (Denzel Washington) to help him with litigation against his former employer. Director Jonathan Demme is quoted as saying, “The film is not necessarily just about AIDS, but rather everyone in this country is entitled to justice.” The film won two Oscars: one for Hanks and the other for Bruce Springsteen’s original song, “The Streets of Philadelphia.” Through the song’s mainstream radio and MTV airplay, it brought the film and its conversation around the HIV/AIDS pandemic to a wider audience.
“Before Sunrise” (1995)
Richard Linklater has explored a wide range of narrative storytelling styles while consistently capturing ordinary, everyday American life. However, his innovative use of time as a defining and recurring cinematic tool has become one of his most significant accomplishments. As the first film in his “Before” trilogy – three films, each shot nine years apart – “Before Sunrise” unfolds as one of cinema’s most sustained explorations of love and the passage of time, highlighting the human experience through chance encounters and conversation. With his critically acclaimed 12-year production of the film “Boyhood” (2014) and a new 20-year planned production underway, his unique use of the medium of film to demonstrate time passing demonstrates an unprecedented investment in actors and narrative storytelling.
“Clueless” (1995)
A satire, comedy and loose Jane Austen literary adaptation dressed in teen movie designer clothing, “Clueless,” directed by Amy Heckerling, rewards both the casual and hyper-analytical viewer. It’s impossible to miss its peak-1990s colorful, high-energy, soundtrack-focused on-screen dynamism, and repeated viewings reveal its unpretentiously presented and extraordinarily layered and biting social commentary about class, privilege and power structures. Heckerling and the incredible cast never talk down to the audience, creating main characters that viewers root for, despite the obvious digs at the ultrarich. The film centers on Cher (Alicia Silverstone) as a well-intentioned, fashion-obsessed high school student who is convinced she has life figured out. In the age of MTV, the film’s popularity launched Paul Rudd’s career and Silverstone’s iconic-1990s status. The soundtrack, curated by Karyn Rachtman, helped solidify the film as a time capsule of clothing, music, dialogue and teenage life.
“The Truman Show” (1998)
Before social media and reality television, there was “The Truman Show.” Jim Carrey breaks from his usual comedic roles to star in this dramatic film about a man who, unbeknownst to him, is living his life on a soundstage filmed for a popular reality show. Adopted at birth by the television studio, Truman Burbank (Carrey) grew up in the (fictitious) town of Seahaven Island with his family and friends playing roles (paid actors). Cameras are all over the soundstage and follow his activities 24/7. Almost 30 years since its release, the film continues to be a study in sociology, philosophy and psychology, and has inspired university classes on media influence, the human condition and reality television.
“Frida” (2002)
Salma Hayek produced and starred in this biopic of Frida Kahlo, adapted from the book “Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo” by Hayden Herrera. The film explores Kahlo’s rise as an artist in Mexico City and the impact disability and chronic pain from an accident as a young adult had on her life and work. The film centers around her tumultuous and passionate relationships, most significantly with her husband, painter Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). Directed by Julie Taymor, the film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Actress. It won awards for Best Makeup and Best Original Score for Elliot Goldenthal, who also won a Golden Globe in the same category.
“The Hours” (2002)
Director Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” weaves the novel “Mrs. Dalloway” into three women’s stories of loneliness, depression and suicide. Virginia Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman (who won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her performance), is working on the novel while struggling with what is now known as bipolar disorder. Laura, played by Julianne Moore (nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role), is unfulfilled in her life as a 1950s housewife and mother. Clarissa (played by Meryl Streep) is – like Mrs. Dalloway – planning a party, but for her close friend who is dying of AIDS. The film is based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It earned nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won a Golden Globe for Best Picture.
“The Incredibles” (2004)
With an all-star cast and memorable soundtrack, this Academy Award-winning Pixar hit uses thrilling action sequences to tell the story of a family trying to live normal lives while hiding their superpowers. For the first time, Pixar hired an outside director, Brad Bird, who drew inspiration from spy films and comic books from the 1960s. The animation team developed a new design element to capture realistic human anatomy, hair, skin and clothing, which Pixar struggled with in early films like “Toy Story.” The film spawned merchandise, video games, Lego sets and more. The sequel, “Incredibles 2,” was also a huge hit, and together, both films generated almost $2 billion at the box office.
“The Wrecking Crew” (2008)
“The Wrecking Crew” is a documentary that showcases a group of Los Angeles studio musicians who played on many hit songs and albums of the 1960s and early 1970s, including “California Dreamin’,” “The Beat Goes On,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” and “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Through interviews, music, footage and his own narration, director Denny Tedesco reveals how the Wrecking Crew members – including his father, guitarist Tommy Tedesco – were the unsung heroes of some of America’s most famous songs. Production for the film began in 1996, and the film was completed in 2008. Due to the high cost of song licenses, the official release was delayed until 2015, when a successful Kickstarter campaign raised over $300,000 to pay for the music rights.
“Inception” (2010)
Writer and director Christopher Nolan once again challenges audiences with multiple interconnected narrative layers while delivering thrilling action sequences and stunning visual effects. “Inception” asks the question, “Can you alter a person’s thoughts by manipulating their dreams?” Taking almost 10 years to write, the film was praised for its aesthetic significance and Nolan’s ability to create scenes using cameras rather than computer-generated imagery. A metaphysical heist film with an emotional core driven by grief and guilt, “Inception” offers a meditation on how dreams influence identity, and it resonates deeply in an age of digital simulation, blurred realities and uncertainty. The film earned $830 million at the box office and won four Academy Awards.
“The Loving Story” (2011)
Nancy Buirski’s acclaimed documentary gives an in-depth and deeply personal look at the true story of Richard Loving (a white man) and Mildred Loving (a Black and Native American woman), who were forbidden by law to marry in the state of Virginia in the 1960s. Their Supreme Court case, Loving vs. Virginia, was one of the most significant in history, and paved the way for future multiracial couples to marry. The movie captures the immense challenges the Lovings faced to keep their family and marriage together, through a combination of 16mm footage, personal photographs, accounts from their lawyers and family members, and audio from the Supreme Court oral arguments.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014)
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” stands as one of Wes Anderson’s most successful films and demonstrates his own brand of unique craftsmanship, resulting in a visually striking and emotionally resonant story. As one of the most stylistically distinctive American filmmakers of the last half-century, Anderson uses historically accurate color and architecture to paint scenes to elicit nostalgia and longing from audiences, while at the same time weaving in political and social upheaval into the film. The film is an example of Anderson as a unique artist who uses whimsy, melancholy, innovative storytelling and a great deal of historical research, which is on display in this visually rich gem of a movie.
About the National Film RegistryCongress established the National Film Preservation Board in 1988 to advise the Librarian of Congress on national preservation policies and annual selections for the National Film Registry, and the Library was given a mandate to preserve the mint record of America’s cinematic heritage.
Under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act, each year the Librarian of Congress names 25 motion pictures to the National Film Registry that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant. The films must be at least 10 years old. More information about the National Film Registry can be found at loc.gov/film.
The Librarian makes the annual registry selections after conferring with the distinguished members of the National Film Preservation Board and a cadre of Library specialists. Also considered were 7,559 titles nominated by the public. Nominations for next year will be accepted through Aug. 15, 2026, at loc.gov/film.
Many titles named to the registry have already been preserved by the copyright holders, filmmakers or other archives. In cases where a selected title has not already been preserved, the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center works to ensure the film will be preserved by some entity and available for future generations, either through the Library’s motion picture preservation program or through collaborative ventures with other archives, motion picture studios and independent filmmakers.
The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center is located at the Library’s Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, a state-of-the-art facility where the nation’s library acquires, preserves and provides access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of films, television programs, radio broadcasts and sound recordings (loc.gov/avconservation). It is home to more than 10.8 million collection items.
About the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov; access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov; and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
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Media Contacts: Brett Zongker, [email protected] | Deb Fiscella, [email protected]
PR 26-008, 01-29-26. ISSN 0731-3527
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation
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Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation – Library of Congress
Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation
Release Date: 29 Jan 2026
Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation
‘Glory,’ ‘The Karate Kid,’ ‘Philadelphia,’ ‘Frida,’ ‘Inception,’ ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel,’ ‘The Incredibles’ and ‘Clueless’ Among Titles Selected for RecognitionThe Library of Congress has selected 25 films for the National Film Registry due to their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance to preserve the nation’s film heritage, the Library announced today.
The selections for 2025 date back to the silent film era with six silent films dating from 1896 to 1926 – a significant number of films in this class. The newest film added to the registry is from 2014 with filmmaker Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” which included meticulous historical research at the Library of Congress to create visually striking scenery.
Iconic Hollywood films from the last 50 years selected for the registry this year include “The Karate Kid,” “Glory,” “Philadelphia,” “Inception,” and the teen comedy “Clueless.” Classic Hollywood selections include the 1954 musical “White Christmas” that enshrined the chart-topping song of the same name in American popular culture, and perhaps the last great musical of the Golden Age of Hollywood, “High Society” from 1956 featuring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and Grace Kelly in her last movie.
Four documentaries were selected for the registry this year, including Ken Burns’ “Brooklyn Bridge,” Nancy Buirski’s “The Loving Story,” George Nierenberg’s “Say Amen, Somebody” and Danny Tedesco’s “The Wrecking Crew.”
“When we preserve films, we preserve American culture for generations to come. These selections for the National Film Registry show us that films are instrumental in capturing important parts of our nation’s story,” said Acting Librarian of Congress Robert R. Newlen. “We are proud to continue this important work, adding a broad range of 25 films to the National Film Registry as a collective effort in the film community to protect our cinematic heritage.”
The selections for 2025 bring the number of titles in the registry to 925. Some of the film titles are among the 2 million moving image collection items held in the Library of Congress. Others are preserved in coordination with copyright holders or other film archives.
Looking back on “The Karate Kid,” actor Ralph Macchio said the characters were key to cementing the film in pop culture history.
“The magic of Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi and me as the Daniel LaRusso character, that sort of give and take, that instant soulful magic was happening from our first meeting, Macchio told the Library of Congress. “Those scenes in Miyagi’s yard, the chores, the waxing on of the car, the painting the fences, the sanding the floor, all of that is now a part of cinematic pop culture. For me, the heart and soul of the film is in those two characters.”
Writer and director Amy Heckerling recalled how she made the 1995 teen comedy and satire “Clueless,” which has been called a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s classic novel “Emma.”
“I’m often asked, how did I decide to make ‘Emma’ into an updated film, which is kind of backwards because what I wanted was to write the kind of characters that really amused me, people that were very comfortable, ardent and optimistic. I would get up, read the news and then just want to cry and be depressed. So, I thought, what if you really were always positive? How would that be? And what if you were doing things and you just knew that you were right?” Heckerling told the Library of Congress. “I remembered reading ‘Emma’ when I was in college, so I re-read it. It was like Jane Austen was pulling up from the grave and saying I already got it!”
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will host a television special Thursday, March 19, starting at 8 p.m. ET to screen a selection of films named to the registry this year. TCM host and film historian Jacqueline Stewart, who is chair of the National Film Preservation Board, will introduce the films.
Stewart leads the board in studying and recommending films across a wide variety of genres and eras for the Librarian of Congress to consider for the registry.
“It is very meaningful that the National Film Registry is adding six silent film titles, showing the range of topics and styles in the earliest years of American filmmaking,” Stewart said. “And it is especially exciting to see that the top title nominated by the public for this year, ‘The Thing,’ has been added to the National Film Registry, along with ‘The Truman Show’ and ‘The Incredibles’ which also had very strong public support.”
Films Selected for the 2025 National Film Registry
(chronological order)- The Tramp and the Dog (1896)
- The Oath of the Sword (1914)
- The Maid of McMillan (1916)
- The Lady (1925)
- Sparrows (1926)
- Ten Nights in a Barroom (1926)
- White Christmas (1954)
- High Society (1956)
- Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
- Say Amen, Somebody (1982)
- The Thing (1982)
- The Big Chill (1983)
- The Karate Kid (1984)
- Glory (1989)
- Philadelphia (1993)
- Before Sunrise (1995)
- Clueless (1995)
- The Truman Show (1998)
- Frida (2002)
- The Hours (2002)
- The Incredibles (2004)
- The Wrecking Crew (2008)
- Inception (2010)
- The Loving Story (2011)
- The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Public Nominations for the National Film Registry
The public submitted 7,559 titles for consideration this year. The public can submit nominations throughout the year on the Library’s web site. Nominations for next year will be accepted until Aug. 15, 2026. Cast your vote at loc.gov/film.
Ken Burns’ First Major Film Joins National Film Registry
“Brooklyn Bridge” is the first documentary by Ken Burns to join the National Film Registry. Burns recently discussed his inspiration for the film and his process with the Library of Congress.
“My best friend was a book distributor and he gave me a copy of David McCullough’s, ‘The Great Bridge,’ the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. I devoured it in one sitting. And I said, oh, we should make a story about what this book is about, not just about the construction, which that book was, but this century as a symbol of strength, ingenuity, vitality and promise. I had no idea that that it would take so many years of my time to do it,” Burns said. “I was just drawn to the story and the idea that you could wake the past up with old photographs and first-person voices, as well as a traditional third-person narrator.
“The ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ film was my first film that had sort of widespread distribution. And I can’t think of a day where I didn’t learn something new. I felt in some ways like every first film is reinventing the wheel. You can be influenced by other people, but you really, in the end, have to do it. Everything was how you wake the story up, how you take a photograph. And in those days it was all analog. We were hand shooting all of the archives. That was a very long process, traveling to them in person. There was no digitization. There was no getting it over the internet. It was all firsthand. We filmed for the ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ at 163 different sources.”
Coincidentally, the Library of Congress has been an important resource for nearly all of Burns’ films for archival footage and historical accuracy.
“With the exception of ‘The American Revolution,’ which is a subject that predates photography, we’ve used the Library of Congress in every single film we’ve worked on. I spent between eight and nine weeks, Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 4:30 in the paper print collection, filming on an easel with gloves and magnets,” Burns said.
“When I think about the National Film Registry and all the films that are contained in it, I think of it as a giant mirror of the United States, reflecting back all of the complexity, all of the intimacy, all of the variety of the people and ideas and forces and movements that have taken place over our history. And you realize what an extraordinary repository it is.”
Wes Anderson Draws on Library for ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’
Similarly, Anderson uses significant historical research to create visually striking stories and scenery, as displayed by “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” He too used the Library’s collections to create his film.
“There’s a specific set of postcards in the Library of Congress Photochrome Prints collection. They’re photographs from the turn of the century and hand-tinted. When we were first starting to figure out how to tell this story, the views and images that we were looking for, the architecture and the landscapes that we wanted, they don’t exist anymore,” Anderson said. “We went through the entire Photochrome collection, which is a lot of images. We made our own versions of things, but much of what is in our film comes directly from that collection from the Library of Congress.”
The 2025 National Film Registry
(descriptions in chronological order)“The Tramp and the Dog” (1896)
“The Tramp and the Dog,” a silent film from Chicago’s Selig Polyscope Company, is considered director William Selig’s most popular early work. Filmed in Rogers Park, it is recognized as the first commercial film made in Chicago. Previously a lost film, it was rediscovered in 2021 at the National Library of Norway. The film depicts a tramp who attempts to steal a pie from a backyard windowsill, only to be met by a broom-wielding housewife and her dog, who foils the crime. The film is one of the first known as “pants humor,” where a character loses (or almost loses) his pants during an altercation. This scene inspired future comedy gags showing drifters and tramps losing their pants to dogs chasing them.
“The Oath of the Sword” (1914)
A three-reel silent drama, “The Oath of the Sword” depicts the tragic story of two young lovers separated by an ocean. Masao follows his ambitions, studying abroad at the University of California, Berkeley, while Hisa remains in Japan, caring for her ill father. This earliest known Asian American film production featured Japanese actors playing Japanese characters and was produced by the Los Angeles-based Japanese American Film Company. Made at a time when Hollywood studios were not yet the dominant storytellers of the American film industry, “The Oath of the Sword” highlights the significance of early independent film productions created by and for Asian American communities. James Card, the founding curator at the George Eastman Museum, acquired “The Oath of the Sword” in 1963. The museum made a black and white photochemical preservation in 1980. In 2023, a new preservation reproducing the original tinting was done in collaboration with the Japanese American National Museum, and the film has since become widely admired.
“The Maid of McMillan” (1916)
Known to be the first student film on record, this whimsical, silent romance film was shot on campus in 1916 by students in the Thyrsus Dramatic Club at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Club members Donald Stewart (Class of 1917) and George D. Bartlett (Class of 1920) wrote the screenplay. The original nitrate print of “The Maid of McMillan” was rediscovered in 1982, and two 16mm prints were made; the original nitrate was likely destroyed at this time. In 2021, with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation, one of those 16mm prints was scanned at 4k and reprinted onto 35mm helping to secure the film’s survival and legacy.
“The Lady” (1925)
When “The Lady” debuted in theaters in 1925, the silent film era had hit its stride, and this movie represents a powerhouse of artists at their peak. Director Frank Borzage was a well-established expert in drawing out intense expressions of deep emotion and longing in his actors. He did just that with the film’s lead actress, Norma Talmadge, also at the height of her career, both in front of and behind the camera. Talmadge produced “The Lady”through her production company and commissioned one of the most prolific screenwriters, Frances Marion, to deliver a heartfelt story of a woman seeking to find the son she had to give up, to protect him from his evil grandfather. “The Lady” was restored by the Library of Congress in 2022.
“Sparrows” (1926)
As a silent actress, producer and key founder in the creation of the American film industry, Mary Pickford’s performance in “Sparrows” represents her ability to master the genre she helped nourish: sentimental melodramas full of adventure and thrills, with dashes of comedy and heartfelt endings. Pickford plays Molly, the eldest orphan held within the swampy squalor of the Deep South, who moves heaven and earth to save the other orphan children from a Dickensian world of forced labor. The film takes some departures from the visual styles found in Pickford’s other films, invoking an unusual tone of despair while deploying camera angles and lighting akin to German Expressionist cinema. “Sparrows” was preserved by the Library of Congress in collaboration with the Mary Pickford Company in 2020.
“Ten Nights in a Barroom” (1926)
Featuring an all-Black cast, “Ten Nights in a Barroom” was produced in 1926 by the Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia and is the earliest of only two surviving films made by the company. This silent film is based on the stage melodrama adapted from the 1854 novel “Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There” by Timothy Shay Arthur. Released in 2015 by Kino Lorber as part of the five-disc set “Pioneers of African-American Cinema,” the compilation was produced by the Library of Congress, in association with the British Film Institute, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Modern Art, National Archives, Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Southern Methodist University and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preserved by George Eastman Museum.
“White Christmas” (1954)
While the chart-topping song “White Christmas” was first performed by Bing Crosby for the 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” its composer, Irving Berlin, was later inspired to center the song in the 1954 musical “White Christmas.” Crosby, along with Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen Rohe and director Michael Curtiz, embedded “White Christmas” in American popular culture as a best-selling single and the top-grossing film of 1954, as well as regular holiday viewing throughout the decades. The story of two World War II veterans-turned-entertainers and a singing sister act preparing a show for a retired general, the film and its grand musical numbers were captured in VistaVision, a widescreen process developed by Paramount Pictures and first used for “White Christmas.”
“High Society” (1956)
Often referred to as the last great musical of the Golden Age of Hollywood, “High Society” features an all-star cast including Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong (and his band), along with a memorable score of Cole Porter classics. Set in Newport, Rhode Island, the film showcases the Newport Jazz Festival (established in 1954) and features a remarkable version of Cole Porter’s “Now You Has Jazz.” It includes the first big-screen duet by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, singing “Well, Did You Evah?” This was Grace Kelly’s last movie before she retired from acting and married the Prince of Monaco; she wore her Cartier engagement ring while filming.
“Brooklyn Bridge” (1981)
With “Brooklyn Bridge,” Ken Burns introduced himself to the American public, telling the story of the New York landmark’s construction. As with later subjects like the Civil War, jazz and baseball, Burns connects the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to American identity, values and aspirations. Released theatrically and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, “Brooklyn Bridge” marked the beginning of Burns’ influential career in public media. More than just a filmmaker, Burns has become a trusted public historian. His storytelling presents facts, but maybe more importantly, invites reflection on what America is, where it’s been, and where it’s going. His influence is felt not only in classrooms and through public broadcasting, but across generations who see history as something alive and relevant.
“Say Amen, Somebody” (1982)
George Nierenberg’s documentary is a celebration of the historical significance and spiritual power of gospel music. With inspirational music, joyful songs and brilliant singers, the movie focuses on the men and women who pioneered gospel music and strengthened its connections to African American community and religious life. Prior to production, Nierenberg, who is white, spent over a year in African American churches and communities, gaining the trust of the performers. Restored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2020, the film features archival footage, photographs, stirring performances and reflections from the father of gospel Thomas A. Dorsey and its matron Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith. Nierenberg shows the struggles and sacrifices it takes to make a living in gospel, including criticism endured by women who sought to pursue careers as professional gospel singers while raising their families.
“The Thing” (1982)
Moody, stark, often funny and always chilling, this science fiction horror classic follows Antarctic scientists who uncover a long-dormant, malevolent extraterrestrial presence. “The Thing” revolutionized horror special effects and offers a brutally honest portrait of the results of paranoia and exhaustion when the unknown becomes inescapable. “The Thing” deftly adapts John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella “Who Goes There?” and influenced “Stranger Things” and “Reservoir Dogs.” It remains a tense, thrilling and profoundly unsettling work of cinema. — DrWeb adds, a long-time favorite.
“The Big Chill” (1983)
Lawrence Kasdan’s best picture-nominated “The Big Chill” offers an intimate portrait of friends reunited after the suicide of one of their own and features actors who defined cinema in the 1980s – Glenn Close, William Hurt, Jo Beth Williams, Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum and Meg Tilly. This powerful ensemble portrays American stereotypes of the time – the yuppie, the drug dealer, the TV star – and deftly humanizes them. Through humor, tenderness, honesty and an amazing soundtrack, it shows formerly idealistic Americans making and dealing with the constant compromises of adulthood, while buoying one another with uncompromising love and friendship. –DrWeb adds, proud of his film, helped work on it years ago, in South Carolina.
“The Karate Kid” (1984)
An intimate story about family and friendship, “The Karate Kid” also succeeds as a hero’s journey, a sports movie and a teen movie – a feel-good movie, but not without grit. The film offers clearly defined villains, romance and seemingly unachievable goals, but also an elegant character-driven drama that is relatable and touching. A father who has lost his son meets the displaced son of a single mother and teaches him about finding balance and avoiding the pitfalls of violence and revenge. Race and class issues are presented honestly and are dealt with reasonably. Our hero practices a lot, gets frustrated, gets hurt, but still succeeds. It’s as American as they come, and it’s a classic.
“Glory” (1989)
“Glory,” described by Leonard Maltin as “one of the finest historical dramas ever made,” portrays a historical account of the 54th Regiment, a unit of African American soldiers who fought for the North in the Civil War. Authorized by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the regiment consisted of an all-Black troop commanded by white officers. Matthew Broderick plays the young colonel who trains the troop, and Denzel Washington (in an Academy Award-winning performance) is among an impressive cast that includes Morgan Freeman, Cary Elwes and Andre Braugher. American Civil War historian James M. McPherson said the film “accomplishes a remarkable feat in sensitizing a lot of today’s Black students to the role that their ancestors played in the Civil War in winning their own freedom.”
“Philadelphia” (1993)
“Philadelphia” stars Tom Hanks in one of the first mainstream studio movies to confront the HIV/AIDS crisis. In the film, law partner Andrew Beckett (Hanks) is fired from his firm when they discover that he is gay and has AIDS. He hires personal attorney Joe Miller (Denzel Washington) to help him with litigation against his former employer. Director Jonathan Demme is quoted as saying, “The film is not necessarily just about AIDS, but rather everyone in this country is entitled to justice.” The film won two Oscars: one for Hanks and the other for Bruce Springsteen’s original song, “The Streets of Philadelphia.” Through the song’s mainstream radio and MTV airplay, it brought the film and its conversation around the HIV/AIDS pandemic to a wider audience.
“Before Sunrise” (1995)
Richard Linklater has explored a wide range of narrative storytelling styles while consistently capturing ordinary, everyday American life. However, his innovative use of time as a defining and recurring cinematic tool has become one of his most significant accomplishments. As the first film in his “Before” trilogy – three films, each shot nine years apart – “Before Sunrise” unfolds as one of cinema’s most sustained explorations of love and the passage of time, highlighting the human experience through chance encounters and conversation. With his critically acclaimed 12-year production of the film “Boyhood” (2014) and a new 20-year planned production underway, his unique use of the medium of film to demonstrate time passing demonstrates an unprecedented investment in actors and narrative storytelling.
“Clueless” (1995)
A satire, comedy and loose Jane Austen literary adaptation dressed in teen movie designer clothing, “Clueless,” directed by Amy Heckerling, rewards both the casual and hyper-analytical viewer. It’s impossible to miss its peak-1990s colorful, high-energy, soundtrack-focused on-screen dynamism, and repeated viewings reveal its unpretentiously presented and extraordinarily layered and biting social commentary about class, privilege and power structures. Heckerling and the incredible cast never talk down to the audience, creating main characters that viewers root for, despite the obvious digs at the ultrarich. The film centers on Cher (Alicia Silverstone) as a well-intentioned, fashion-obsessed high school student who is convinced she has life figured out. In the age of MTV, the film’s popularity launched Paul Rudd’s career and Silverstone’s iconic-1990s status. The soundtrack, curated by Karyn Rachtman, helped solidify the film as a time capsule of clothing, music, dialogue and teenage life.
“The Truman Show” (1998)
Before social media and reality television, there was “The Truman Show.” Jim Carrey breaks from his usual comedic roles to star in this dramatic film about a man who, unbeknownst to him, is living his life on a soundstage filmed for a popular reality show. Adopted at birth by the television studio, Truman Burbank (Carrey) grew up in the (fictitious) town of Seahaven Island with his family and friends playing roles (paid actors). Cameras are all over the soundstage and follow his activities 24/7. Almost 30 years since its release, the film continues to be a study in sociology, philosophy and psychology, and has inspired university classes on media influence, the human condition and reality television.
“Frida” (2002)
Salma Hayek produced and starred in this biopic of Frida Kahlo, adapted from the book “Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo” by Hayden Herrera. The film explores Kahlo’s rise as an artist in Mexico City and the impact disability and chronic pain from an accident as a young adult had on her life and work. The film centers around her tumultuous and passionate relationships, most significantly with her husband, painter Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). Directed by Julie Taymor, the film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Actress. It won awards for Best Makeup and Best Original Score for Elliot Goldenthal, who also won a Golden Globe in the same category.
“The Hours” (2002)
Director Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” weaves the novel “Mrs. Dalloway” into three women’s stories of loneliness, depression and suicide. Virginia Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman (who won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her performance), is working on the novel while struggling with what is now known as bipolar disorder. Laura, played by Julianne Moore (nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role), is unfulfilled in her life as a 1950s housewife and mother. Clarissa (played by Meryl Streep) is – like Mrs. Dalloway – planning a party, but for her close friend who is dying of AIDS. The film is based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It earned nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won a Golden Globe for Best Picture.
“The Incredibles” (2004)
With an all-star cast and memorable soundtrack, this Academy Award-winning Pixar hit uses thrilling action sequences to tell the story of a family trying to live normal lives while hiding their superpowers. For the first time, Pixar hired an outside director, Brad Bird, who drew inspiration from spy films and comic books from the 1960s. The animation team developed a new design element to capture realistic human anatomy, hair, skin and clothing, which Pixar struggled with in early films like “Toy Story.” The film spawned merchandise, video games, Lego sets and more. The sequel, “Incredibles 2,” was also a huge hit, and together, both films generated almost $2 billion at the box office.
“The Wrecking Crew” (2008)
“The Wrecking Crew” is a documentary that showcases a group of Los Angeles studio musicians who played on many hit songs and albums of the 1960s and early 1970s, including “California Dreamin’,” “The Beat Goes On,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” and “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Through interviews, music, footage and his own narration, director Denny Tedesco reveals how the Wrecking Crew members – including his father, guitarist Tommy Tedesco – were the unsung heroes of some of America’s most famous songs. Production for the film began in 1996, and the film was completed in 2008. Due to the high cost of song licenses, the official release was delayed until 2015, when a successful Kickstarter campaign raised over $300,000 to pay for the music rights.
“Inception” (2010)
Writer and director Christopher Nolan once again challenges audiences with multiple interconnected narrative layers while delivering thrilling action sequences and stunning visual effects. “Inception” asks the question, “Can you alter a person’s thoughts by manipulating their dreams?” Taking almost 10 years to write, the film was praised for its aesthetic significance and Nolan’s ability to create scenes using cameras rather than computer-generated imagery. A metaphysical heist film with an emotional core driven by grief and guilt, “Inception” offers a meditation on how dreams influence identity, and it resonates deeply in an age of digital simulation, blurred realities and uncertainty. The film earned $830 million at the box office and won four Academy Awards.
“The Loving Story” (2011)
Nancy Buirski’s acclaimed documentary gives an in-depth and deeply personal look at the true story of Richard Loving (a white man) and Mildred Loving (a Black and Native American woman), who were forbidden by law to marry in the state of Virginia in the 1960s. Their Supreme Court case, Loving vs. Virginia, was one of the most significant in history, and paved the way for future multiracial couples to marry. The movie captures the immense challenges the Lovings faced to keep their family and marriage together, through a combination of 16mm footage, personal photographs, accounts from their lawyers and family members, and audio from the Supreme Court oral arguments.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014)
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” stands as one of Wes Anderson’s most successful films and demonstrates his own brand of unique craftsmanship, resulting in a visually striking and emotionally resonant story. As one of the most stylistically distinctive American filmmakers of the last half-century, Anderson uses historically accurate color and architecture to paint scenes to elicit nostalgia and longing from audiences, while at the same time weaving in political and social upheaval into the film. The film is an example of Anderson as a unique artist who uses whimsy, melancholy, innovative storytelling and a great deal of historical research, which is on display in this visually rich gem of a movie.
About the National Film RegistryCongress established the National Film Preservation Board in 1988 to advise the Librarian of Congress on national preservation policies and annual selections for the National Film Registry, and the Library was given a mandate to preserve the mint record of America’s cinematic heritage.
Under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act, each year the Librarian of Congress names 25 motion pictures to the National Film Registry that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant. The films must be at least 10 years old. More information about the National Film Registry can be found at loc.gov/film.
The Librarian makes the annual registry selections after conferring with the distinguished members of the National Film Preservation Board and a cadre of Library specialists. Also considered were 7,559 titles nominated by the public. Nominations for next year will be accepted through Aug. 15, 2026, at loc.gov/film.
Many titles named to the registry have already been preserved by the copyright holders, filmmakers or other archives. In cases where a selected title has not already been preserved, the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center works to ensure the film will be preserved by some entity and available for future generations, either through the Library’s motion picture preservation program or through collaborative ventures with other archives, motion picture studios and independent filmmakers.
The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center is located at the Library’s Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, a state-of-the-art facility where the nation’s library acquires, preserves and provides access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of films, television programs, radio broadcasts and sound recordings (loc.gov/avconservation). It is home to more than 10.8 million collection items.
About the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov; access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov; and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
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Media Contacts: Brett Zongker, [email protected] | Deb Fiscella, [email protected]
PR 26-008, 01-29-26. ISSN 0731-3527
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation
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Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation – Library of Congress
Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation
Release Date: 29 Jan 2026
Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation
‘Glory,’ ‘The Karate Kid,’ ‘Philadelphia,’ ‘Frida,’ ‘Inception,’ ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel,’ ‘The Incredibles’ and ‘Clueless’ Among Titles Selected for RecognitionThe Library of Congress has selected 25 films for the National Film Registry due to their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance to preserve the nation’s film heritage, the Library announced today.
The selections for 2025 date back to the silent film era with six silent films dating from 1896 to 1926 – a significant number of films in this class. The newest film added to the registry is from 2014 with filmmaker Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” which included meticulous historical research at the Library of Congress to create visually striking scenery.
Iconic Hollywood films from the last 50 years selected for the registry this year include “The Karate Kid,” “Glory,” “Philadelphia,” “Inception,” and the teen comedy “Clueless.” Classic Hollywood selections include the 1954 musical “White Christmas” that enshrined the chart-topping song of the same name in American popular culture, and perhaps the last great musical of the Golden Age of Hollywood, “High Society” from 1956 featuring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and Grace Kelly in her last movie.
Four documentaries were selected for the registry this year, including Ken Burns’ “Brooklyn Bridge,” Nancy Buirski’s “The Loving Story,” George Nierenberg’s “Say Amen, Somebody” and Danny Tedesco’s “The Wrecking Crew.”
“When we preserve films, we preserve American culture for generations to come. These selections for the National Film Registry show us that films are instrumental in capturing important parts of our nation’s story,” said Acting Librarian of Congress Robert R. Newlen. “We are proud to continue this important work, adding a broad range of 25 films to the National Film Registry as a collective effort in the film community to protect our cinematic heritage.”
The selections for 2025 bring the number of titles in the registry to 925. Some of the film titles are among the 2 million moving image collection items held in the Library of Congress. Others are preserved in coordination with copyright holders or other film archives.
Looking back on “The Karate Kid,” actor Ralph Macchio said the characters were key to cementing the film in pop culture history.
“The magic of Pat Morita as Mr. Miyagi and me as the Daniel LaRusso character, that sort of give and take, that instant soulful magic was happening from our first meeting, Macchio told the Library of Congress. “Those scenes in Miyagi’s yard, the chores, the waxing on of the car, the painting the fences, the sanding the floor, all of that is now a part of cinematic pop culture. For me, the heart and soul of the film is in those two characters.”
Writer and director Amy Heckerling recalled how she made the 1995 teen comedy and satire “Clueless,” which has been called a modern retelling of Jane Austen’s classic novel “Emma.”
“I’m often asked, how did I decide to make ‘Emma’ into an updated film, which is kind of backwards because what I wanted was to write the kind of characters that really amused me, people that were very comfortable, ardent and optimistic. I would get up, read the news and then just want to cry and be depressed. So, I thought, what if you really were always positive? How would that be? And what if you were doing things and you just knew that you were right?” Heckerling told the Library of Congress. “I remembered reading ‘Emma’ when I was in college, so I re-read it. It was like Jane Austen was pulling up from the grave and saying I already got it!”
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) will host a television special Thursday, March 19, starting at 8 p.m. ET to screen a selection of films named to the registry this year. TCM host and film historian Jacqueline Stewart, who is chair of the National Film Preservation Board, will introduce the films.
Stewart leads the board in studying and recommending films across a wide variety of genres and eras for the Librarian of Congress to consider for the registry.
“It is very meaningful that the National Film Registry is adding six silent film titles, showing the range of topics and styles in the earliest years of American filmmaking,” Stewart said. “And it is especially exciting to see that the top title nominated by the public for this year, ‘The Thing,’ has been added to the National Film Registry, along with ‘The Truman Show’ and ‘The Incredibles’ which also had very strong public support.”
Films Selected for the 2025 National Film Registry
(chronological order)- The Tramp and the Dog (1896)
- The Oath of the Sword (1914)
- The Maid of McMillan (1916)
- The Lady (1925)
- Sparrows (1926)
- Ten Nights in a Barroom (1926)
- White Christmas (1954)
- High Society (1956)
- Brooklyn Bridge (1981)
- Say Amen, Somebody (1982)
- The Thing (1982)
- The Big Chill (1983)
- The Karate Kid (1984)
- Glory (1989)
- Philadelphia (1993)
- Before Sunrise (1995)
- Clueless (1995)
- The Truman Show (1998)
- Frida (2002)
- The Hours (2002)
- The Incredibles (2004)
- The Wrecking Crew (2008)
- Inception (2010)
- The Loving Story (2011)
- The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Public Nominations for the National Film Registry
The public submitted 7,559 titles for consideration this year. The public can submit nominations throughout the year on the Library’s web site. Nominations for next year will be accepted until Aug. 15, 2026. Cast your vote at loc.gov/film.
Ken Burns’ First Major Film Joins National Film Registry
“Brooklyn Bridge” is the first documentary by Ken Burns to join the National Film Registry. Burns recently discussed his inspiration for the film and his process with the Library of Congress.
“My best friend was a book distributor and he gave me a copy of David McCullough’s, ‘The Great Bridge,’ the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. I devoured it in one sitting. And I said, oh, we should make a story about what this book is about, not just about the construction, which that book was, but this century as a symbol of strength, ingenuity, vitality and promise. I had no idea that that it would take so many years of my time to do it,” Burns said. “I was just drawn to the story and the idea that you could wake the past up with old photographs and first-person voices, as well as a traditional third-person narrator.
“The ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ film was my first film that had sort of widespread distribution. And I can’t think of a day where I didn’t learn something new. I felt in some ways like every first film is reinventing the wheel. You can be influenced by other people, but you really, in the end, have to do it. Everything was how you wake the story up, how you take a photograph. And in those days it was all analog. We were hand shooting all of the archives. That was a very long process, traveling to them in person. There was no digitization. There was no getting it over the internet. It was all firsthand. We filmed for the ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ at 163 different sources.”
Coincidentally, the Library of Congress has been an important resource for nearly all of Burns’ films for archival footage and historical accuracy.
“With the exception of ‘The American Revolution,’ which is a subject that predates photography, we’ve used the Library of Congress in every single film we’ve worked on. I spent between eight and nine weeks, Monday through Friday, 8:30 to 4:30 in the paper print collection, filming on an easel with gloves and magnets,” Burns said.
“When I think about the National Film Registry and all the films that are contained in it, I think of it as a giant mirror of the United States, reflecting back all of the complexity, all of the intimacy, all of the variety of the people and ideas and forces and movements that have taken place over our history. And you realize what an extraordinary repository it is.”
Wes Anderson Draws on Library for ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’
Similarly, Anderson uses significant historical research to create visually striking stories and scenery, as displayed by “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” He too used the Library’s collections to create his film.
“There’s a specific set of postcards in the Library of Congress Photochrome Prints collection. They’re photographs from the turn of the century and hand-tinted. When we were first starting to figure out how to tell this story, the views and images that we were looking for, the architecture and the landscapes that we wanted, they don’t exist anymore,” Anderson said. “We went through the entire Photochrome collection, which is a lot of images. We made our own versions of things, but much of what is in our film comes directly from that collection from the Library of Congress.”
The 2025 National Film Registry
(descriptions in chronological order)“The Tramp and the Dog” (1896)
“The Tramp and the Dog,” a silent film from Chicago’s Selig Polyscope Company, is considered director William Selig’s most popular early work. Filmed in Rogers Park, it is recognized as the first commercial film made in Chicago. Previously a lost film, it was rediscovered in 2021 at the National Library of Norway. The film depicts a tramp who attempts to steal a pie from a backyard windowsill, only to be met by a broom-wielding housewife and her dog, who foils the crime. The film is one of the first known as “pants humor,” where a character loses (or almost loses) his pants during an altercation. This scene inspired future comedy gags showing drifters and tramps losing their pants to dogs chasing them.
“The Oath of the Sword” (1914)
A three-reel silent drama, “The Oath of the Sword” depicts the tragic story of two young lovers separated by an ocean. Masao follows his ambitions, studying abroad at the University of California, Berkeley, while Hisa remains in Japan, caring for her ill father. This earliest known Asian American film production featured Japanese actors playing Japanese characters and was produced by the Los Angeles-based Japanese American Film Company. Made at a time when Hollywood studios were not yet the dominant storytellers of the American film industry, “The Oath of the Sword” highlights the significance of early independent film productions created by and for Asian American communities. James Card, the founding curator at the George Eastman Museum, acquired “The Oath of the Sword” in 1963. The museum made a black and white photochemical preservation in 1980. In 2023, a new preservation reproducing the original tinting was done in collaboration with the Japanese American National Museum, and the film has since become widely admired.
“The Maid of McMillan” (1916)
Known to be the first student film on record, this whimsical, silent romance film was shot on campus in 1916 by students in the Thyrsus Dramatic Club at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Club members Donald Stewart (Class of 1917) and George D. Bartlett (Class of 1920) wrote the screenplay. The original nitrate print of “The Maid of McMillan” was rediscovered in 1982, and two 16mm prints were made; the original nitrate was likely destroyed at this time. In 2021, with funding from the National Film Preservation Foundation, one of those 16mm prints was scanned at 4k and reprinted onto 35mm helping to secure the film’s survival and legacy.
“The Lady” (1925)
When “The Lady” debuted in theaters in 1925, the silent film era had hit its stride, and this movie represents a powerhouse of artists at their peak. Director Frank Borzage was a well-established expert in drawing out intense expressions of deep emotion and longing in his actors. He did just that with the film’s lead actress, Norma Talmadge, also at the height of her career, both in front of and behind the camera. Talmadge produced “The Lady”through her production company and commissioned one of the most prolific screenwriters, Frances Marion, to deliver a heartfelt story of a woman seeking to find the son she had to give up, to protect him from his evil grandfather. “The Lady” was restored by the Library of Congress in 2022.
“Sparrows” (1926)
As a silent actress, producer and key founder in the creation of the American film industry, Mary Pickford’s performance in “Sparrows” represents her ability to master the genre she helped nourish: sentimental melodramas full of adventure and thrills, with dashes of comedy and heartfelt endings. Pickford plays Molly, the eldest orphan held within the swampy squalor of the Deep South, who moves heaven and earth to save the other orphan children from a Dickensian world of forced labor. The film takes some departures from the visual styles found in Pickford’s other films, invoking an unusual tone of despair while deploying camera angles and lighting akin to German Expressionist cinema. “Sparrows” was preserved by the Library of Congress in collaboration with the Mary Pickford Company in 2020.
“Ten Nights in a Barroom” (1926)
Featuring an all-Black cast, “Ten Nights in a Barroom” was produced in 1926 by the Colored Players Film Corporation of Philadelphia and is the earliest of only two surviving films made by the company. This silent film is based on the stage melodrama adapted from the 1854 novel “Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There” by Timothy Shay Arthur. Released in 2015 by Kino Lorber as part of the five-disc set “Pioneers of African-American Cinema,” the compilation was produced by the Library of Congress, in association with the British Film Institute, George Eastman Museum, Museum of Modern Art, National Archives, Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Southern Methodist University and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Preserved by George Eastman Museum.
“White Christmas” (1954)
While the chart-topping song “White Christmas” was first performed by Bing Crosby for the 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” its composer, Irving Berlin, was later inspired to center the song in the 1954 musical “White Christmas.” Crosby, along with Danny Kaye, Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen Rohe and director Michael Curtiz, embedded “White Christmas” in American popular culture as a best-selling single and the top-grossing film of 1954, as well as regular holiday viewing throughout the decades. The story of two World War II veterans-turned-entertainers and a singing sister act preparing a show for a retired general, the film and its grand musical numbers were captured in VistaVision, a widescreen process developed by Paramount Pictures and first used for “White Christmas.”
“High Society” (1956)
Often referred to as the last great musical of the Golden Age of Hollywood, “High Society” features an all-star cast including Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong (and his band), along with a memorable score of Cole Porter classics. Set in Newport, Rhode Island, the film showcases the Newport Jazz Festival (established in 1954) and features a remarkable version of Cole Porter’s “Now You Has Jazz.” It includes the first big-screen duet by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, singing “Well, Did You Evah?” This was Grace Kelly’s last movie before she retired from acting and married the Prince of Monaco; she wore her Cartier engagement ring while filming.
“Brooklyn Bridge” (1981)
With “Brooklyn Bridge,” Ken Burns introduced himself to the American public, telling the story of the New York landmark’s construction. As with later subjects like the Civil War, jazz and baseball, Burns connects the building of the Brooklyn Bridge to American identity, values and aspirations. Released theatrically and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, “Brooklyn Bridge” marked the beginning of Burns’ influential career in public media. More than just a filmmaker, Burns has become a trusted public historian. His storytelling presents facts, but maybe more importantly, invites reflection on what America is, where it’s been, and where it’s going. His influence is felt not only in classrooms and through public broadcasting, but across generations who see history as something alive and relevant.
“Say Amen, Somebody” (1982)
George Nierenberg’s documentary is a celebration of the historical significance and spiritual power of gospel music. With inspirational music, joyful songs and brilliant singers, the movie focuses on the men and women who pioneered gospel music and strengthened its connections to African American community and religious life. Prior to production, Nierenberg, who is white, spent over a year in African American churches and communities, gaining the trust of the performers. Restored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2020, the film features archival footage, photographs, stirring performances and reflections from the father of gospel Thomas A. Dorsey and its matron Mother Willie Mae Ford Smith. Nierenberg shows the struggles and sacrifices it takes to make a living in gospel, including criticism endured by women who sought to pursue careers as professional gospel singers while raising their families.
“The Thing” (1982)
Moody, stark, often funny and always chilling, this science fiction horror classic follows Antarctic scientists who uncover a long-dormant, malevolent extraterrestrial presence. “The Thing” revolutionized horror special effects and offers a brutally honest portrait of the results of paranoia and exhaustion when the unknown becomes inescapable. “The Thing” deftly adapts John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella “Who Goes There?” and influenced “Stranger Things” and “Reservoir Dogs.” It remains a tense, thrilling and profoundly unsettling work of cinema. — DrWeb adds, a long-time favorite.
“The Big Chill” (1983)
Lawrence Kasdan’s best picture-nominated “The Big Chill” offers an intimate portrait of friends reunited after the suicide of one of their own and features actors who defined cinema in the 1980s – Glenn Close, William Hurt, Jo Beth Williams, Kevin Kline, Jeff Goldblum and Meg Tilly. This powerful ensemble portrays American stereotypes of the time – the yuppie, the drug dealer, the TV star – and deftly humanizes them. Through humor, tenderness, honesty and an amazing soundtrack, it shows formerly idealistic Americans making and dealing with the constant compromises of adulthood, while buoying one another with uncompromising love and friendship. –DrWeb adds, proud of his film, helped work on it years ago, in South Carolina.
“The Karate Kid” (1984)
An intimate story about family and friendship, “The Karate Kid” also succeeds as a hero’s journey, a sports movie and a teen movie – a feel-good movie, but not without grit. The film offers clearly defined villains, romance and seemingly unachievable goals, but also an elegant character-driven drama that is relatable and touching. A father who has lost his son meets the displaced son of a single mother and teaches him about finding balance and avoiding the pitfalls of violence and revenge. Race and class issues are presented honestly and are dealt with reasonably. Our hero practices a lot, gets frustrated, gets hurt, but still succeeds. It’s as American as they come, and it’s a classic.
“Glory” (1989)
“Glory,” described by Leonard Maltin as “one of the finest historical dramas ever made,” portrays a historical account of the 54th Regiment, a unit of African American soldiers who fought for the North in the Civil War. Authorized by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the regiment consisted of an all-Black troop commanded by white officers. Matthew Broderick plays the young colonel who trains the troop, and Denzel Washington (in an Academy Award-winning performance) is among an impressive cast that includes Morgan Freeman, Cary Elwes and Andre Braugher. American Civil War historian James M. McPherson said the film “accomplishes a remarkable feat in sensitizing a lot of today’s Black students to the role that their ancestors played in the Civil War in winning their own freedom.”
“Philadelphia” (1993)
“Philadelphia” stars Tom Hanks in one of the first mainstream studio movies to confront the HIV/AIDS crisis. In the film, law partner Andrew Beckett (Hanks) is fired from his firm when they discover that he is gay and has AIDS. He hires personal attorney Joe Miller (Denzel Washington) to help him with litigation against his former employer. Director Jonathan Demme is quoted as saying, “The film is not necessarily just about AIDS, but rather everyone in this country is entitled to justice.” The film won two Oscars: one for Hanks and the other for Bruce Springsteen’s original song, “The Streets of Philadelphia.” Through the song’s mainstream radio and MTV airplay, it brought the film and its conversation around the HIV/AIDS pandemic to a wider audience.
“Before Sunrise” (1995)
Richard Linklater has explored a wide range of narrative storytelling styles while consistently capturing ordinary, everyday American life. However, his innovative use of time as a defining and recurring cinematic tool has become one of his most significant accomplishments. As the first film in his “Before” trilogy – three films, each shot nine years apart – “Before Sunrise” unfolds as one of cinema’s most sustained explorations of love and the passage of time, highlighting the human experience through chance encounters and conversation. With his critically acclaimed 12-year production of the film “Boyhood” (2014) and a new 20-year planned production underway, his unique use of the medium of film to demonstrate time passing demonstrates an unprecedented investment in actors and narrative storytelling.
“Clueless” (1995)
A satire, comedy and loose Jane Austen literary adaptation dressed in teen movie designer clothing, “Clueless,” directed by Amy Heckerling, rewards both the casual and hyper-analytical viewer. It’s impossible to miss its peak-1990s colorful, high-energy, soundtrack-focused on-screen dynamism, and repeated viewings reveal its unpretentiously presented and extraordinarily layered and biting social commentary about class, privilege and power structures. Heckerling and the incredible cast never talk down to the audience, creating main characters that viewers root for, despite the obvious digs at the ultrarich. The film centers on Cher (Alicia Silverstone) as a well-intentioned, fashion-obsessed high school student who is convinced she has life figured out. In the age of MTV, the film’s popularity launched Paul Rudd’s career and Silverstone’s iconic-1990s status. The soundtrack, curated by Karyn Rachtman, helped solidify the film as a time capsule of clothing, music, dialogue and teenage life.
“The Truman Show” (1998)
Before social media and reality television, there was “The Truman Show.” Jim Carrey breaks from his usual comedic roles to star in this dramatic film about a man who, unbeknownst to him, is living his life on a soundstage filmed for a popular reality show. Adopted at birth by the television studio, Truman Burbank (Carrey) grew up in the (fictitious) town of Seahaven Island with his family and friends playing roles (paid actors). Cameras are all over the soundstage and follow his activities 24/7. Almost 30 years since its release, the film continues to be a study in sociology, philosophy and psychology, and has inspired university classes on media influence, the human condition and reality television.
“Frida” (2002)
Salma Hayek produced and starred in this biopic of Frida Kahlo, adapted from the book “Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo” by Hayden Herrera. The film explores Kahlo’s rise as an artist in Mexico City and the impact disability and chronic pain from an accident as a young adult had on her life and work. The film centers around her tumultuous and passionate relationships, most significantly with her husband, painter Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). Directed by Julie Taymor, the film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Actress. It won awards for Best Makeup and Best Original Score for Elliot Goldenthal, who also won a Golden Globe in the same category.
“The Hours” (2002)
Director Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours” weaves the novel “Mrs. Dalloway” into three women’s stories of loneliness, depression and suicide. Virginia Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman (who won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for her performance), is working on the novel while struggling with what is now known as bipolar disorder. Laura, played by Julianne Moore (nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role), is unfulfilled in her life as a 1950s housewife and mother. Clarissa (played by Meryl Streep) is – like Mrs. Dalloway – planning a party, but for her close friend who is dying of AIDS. The film is based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It earned nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and won a Golden Globe for Best Picture.
“The Incredibles” (2004)
With an all-star cast and memorable soundtrack, this Academy Award-winning Pixar hit uses thrilling action sequences to tell the story of a family trying to live normal lives while hiding their superpowers. For the first time, Pixar hired an outside director, Brad Bird, who drew inspiration from spy films and comic books from the 1960s. The animation team developed a new design element to capture realistic human anatomy, hair, skin and clothing, which Pixar struggled with in early films like “Toy Story.” The film spawned merchandise, video games, Lego sets and more. The sequel, “Incredibles 2,” was also a huge hit, and together, both films generated almost $2 billion at the box office.
“The Wrecking Crew” (2008)
“The Wrecking Crew” is a documentary that showcases a group of Los Angeles studio musicians who played on many hit songs and albums of the 1960s and early 1970s, including “California Dreamin’,” “The Beat Goes On,” “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” and “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Through interviews, music, footage and his own narration, director Denny Tedesco reveals how the Wrecking Crew members – including his father, guitarist Tommy Tedesco – were the unsung heroes of some of America’s most famous songs. Production for the film began in 1996, and the film was completed in 2008. Due to the high cost of song licenses, the official release was delayed until 2015, when a successful Kickstarter campaign raised over $300,000 to pay for the music rights.
“Inception” (2010)
Writer and director Christopher Nolan once again challenges audiences with multiple interconnected narrative layers while delivering thrilling action sequences and stunning visual effects. “Inception” asks the question, “Can you alter a person’s thoughts by manipulating their dreams?” Taking almost 10 years to write, the film was praised for its aesthetic significance and Nolan’s ability to create scenes using cameras rather than computer-generated imagery. A metaphysical heist film with an emotional core driven by grief and guilt, “Inception” offers a meditation on how dreams influence identity, and it resonates deeply in an age of digital simulation, blurred realities and uncertainty. The film earned $830 million at the box office and won four Academy Awards.
“The Loving Story” (2011)
Nancy Buirski’s acclaimed documentary gives an in-depth and deeply personal look at the true story of Richard Loving (a white man) and Mildred Loving (a Black and Native American woman), who were forbidden by law to marry in the state of Virginia in the 1960s. Their Supreme Court case, Loving vs. Virginia, was one of the most significant in history, and paved the way for future multiracial couples to marry. The movie captures the immense challenges the Lovings faced to keep their family and marriage together, through a combination of 16mm footage, personal photographs, accounts from their lawyers and family members, and audio from the Supreme Court oral arguments.
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014)
“The Grand Budapest Hotel” stands as one of Wes Anderson’s most successful films and demonstrates his own brand of unique craftsmanship, resulting in a visually striking and emotionally resonant story. As one of the most stylistically distinctive American filmmakers of the last half-century, Anderson uses historically accurate color and architecture to paint scenes to elicit nostalgia and longing from audiences, while at the same time weaving in political and social upheaval into the film. The film is an example of Anderson as a unique artist who uses whimsy, melancholy, innovative storytelling and a great deal of historical research, which is on display in this visually rich gem of a movie.
About the National Film RegistryCongress established the National Film Preservation Board in 1988 to advise the Librarian of Congress on national preservation policies and annual selections for the National Film Registry, and the Library was given a mandate to preserve the mint record of America’s cinematic heritage.
Under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act, each year the Librarian of Congress names 25 motion pictures to the National Film Registry that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant. The films must be at least 10 years old. More information about the National Film Registry can be found at loc.gov/film.
The Librarian makes the annual registry selections after conferring with the distinguished members of the National Film Preservation Board and a cadre of Library specialists. Also considered were 7,559 titles nominated by the public. Nominations for next year will be accepted through Aug. 15, 2026, at loc.gov/film.
Many titles named to the registry have already been preserved by the copyright holders, filmmakers or other archives. In cases where a selected title has not already been preserved, the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center works to ensure the film will be preserved by some entity and available for future generations, either through the Library’s motion picture preservation program or through collaborative ventures with other archives, motion picture studios and independent filmmakers.
The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center is located at the Library’s Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia, a state-of-the-art facility where the nation’s library acquires, preserves and provides access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of films, television programs, radio broadcasts and sound recordings (loc.gov/avconservation). It is home to more than 10.8 million collection items.
About the Library of Congress
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov; access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov; and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
# # #
Media Contacts: Brett Zongker, [email protected] | Deb Fiscella, [email protected]
PR 26-008, 01-29-26. ISSN 0731-3527
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Library Names 25 Films to the National Film Registry for Preservation
#25FilmsEachYear #LibraryOfCongress #NationalAudioVisuaConservationCenter #NationalFIlmPeservationBoard #NationalFilmRegistry #TheBigChill #TheThing #USCongress #WorldSLargestLibrary -
#Reading in Week One of 2026 | Dec 29 – Jan 04 | ~2300 words | ~13,200 characters | Tag to mute: #BokBooks |
━━━━━━━━━━●●○○○ Roberta - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1962
A person gets someone to arrange an illegal operation for them. Roberta has dissociative issues. Robert, her previous identity, keeps talking to her, usually saying unpleasant things. And whenever someone in real life argues with Roberta, she knows they're Robert in disguise, and she shoots them. Now Robert says she has to go on the lam. How many people does Roberta have to shoot to make Robert go away?●●●◐○ Divide and Rule - L. Sprague de Camp (nva) 1939
An alien race that humans call hoppers (because they look like skinny upright kangaroos) conquered Earth three centuries ago. They allow humans to have factories and power plants (both overseen by hoppers, with sensitive personnel truth-drug-checked weekly), but not guns or motor vehicles. Nations have been broken up. Human society looks feudal in the post-US East. Main character Sir Howard van Slyck, future Duke of Poughkeepsie, goes around in plate armor made by Packard. Radio and films still exists, but not television (this is a 1939 story).Howard goes walkabout after one bad day when his older brother was arrested, tried for doing science research, and executed. He hooks up with Haas, a traveler from the West who acts like a cowboy, who's also on a walkabout due to him accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, and the man's friends vowing vengeance. The pair rescue a woman from one of the bad nobles around, and find she's part of the anti-hopper Underground that neither knew existed.
Turns out that hoppers aren't a smart race, but many centuries ago a mutant genius appeared among them. During his long, four-hundred-year life, he single-handedly jumped from early-1800s tech into the age of electronics. His most important invention was a helmet that could induce concentration in its wearers, and with time and focus, even mentally slow individuals could accomplish much, like building starships and conquering worlds.
Naturally this thinking cap is a weakness, and with an out-of-left-field plan originally devised by Howard's executed brother, humanity is able to overthrow the aliens.
●●●◐○ Appointment in Tomorrow - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1951
World War Three, though short, had knocked society for a loop. With Old Science tarnished, leaders in New Washington and bomb-shocked society in general turned to New Science. In stepped the Thinkers, with new mental science and emotional disciplines.The Thinkers had built the giant supercomputer Maizie (cyberneticists said it couldn't be done) that advised the government, in nigh-holy advice sessions. They'd built the nuclear-electric rockets (rocket scientists were stunned) that took humans to Mars, where humanity had contacted the learned men of an elder civilization and brought their wisdom back to Earth.
Pity it was all a hoax.
Odd that the Number Two in the Thinkers had drunk the Kool-Aid, and wanted to make the dreams real, and had contacted the Institute for Advanced Studies to see if some real scientists would quietly help him do that. Strange that the Number Two at the Institute, tired of being ignored, had decided to join the Thinkers who were the power behind the throne, claiming he'd rise through the ranks and then reform the organization. Would either plan work out?
●●●○○ An Unexpected Adventure - Martin Brant (nvt) 2017
Jennifer – a legal assistant who thinks her chest is flat and droopy, her stomach too paunchy, her hips too big – falls for a man. Dan's a nurse, and she finds him a caring soul. Until one day he surprises her by taking her to a nudist beach. She can't cope and insists he take her home.Over time, Jen learns to accept herself, and becomes a nudist with him in the privacy of their apartments. A group of Dan's colleagues are also nudists, and after having a couple over for a nude coffee, then going to a nude dinner with the whole set, and finally visiting that nude beach, Jen becomes a real nudist.
A simple, if clichéd, story of someone accepting herself and others, and getting over imperfect bodies to live a freer life.
●●●◐○ The Emperor's New Towel - Mel Cowan (ss) 2025
James had hit on a topic of conversation for defensive smalltalk: naturism. He'd regale his colleagues of his visits to nude beaches in the South of France, and discourse at length about the benefits of going clothes-free. The truth was that he didn't even walk around his apartment naked: he was purely a theoretical naturist. And all went well for years. Until one day Kate joined the accounting firm, and James trotted out his topic:⎡ Instead of the usual glazed-over expression, Kate's eyes lit up. "Oh my gosh, you're a naturist? Me too! That's amazing!" ⎦
Kate invited James to her naturist club next weekend, and James could see no way not to accept. He got through stripping in the changing room, and made his fraudulent debut, only to freeze when he got to the main pool and saw dozens of naked bodies all around him. He faked comfort getting a lounger beside Kate, and pretended that his pale body had ever seen the sun.
After some swimming (“You crashed into my crocodile”) and the barbecue buffet (James fumbled a serving spoon, depositing a glob of potato salad on the naked man ahead of him in line), and him knocking his cup of lemonade into Kate's lap, James was not having a grand time. It was only during the volleyball game that James slowly realized that everyone knew that this was his first time at a nudist camp… and nobody cared. It turned out to be a nice day.
◍◍◍◍◍ January 2026 Begins
●●●◐○ Agent - E C Tubb (ss) 1955
Looie acquired artists for you. Singers, dancers, ventriloquists, whatever: for a fee, he'd find them for you. So he was more than satisfied when two odd, tall men with strange accents offered him bags of gold, even if their request — “We are interested in buying some humans” — was a bit raw. And they took anyone, no talent required.Sam was Looie's fixer. When the Health Department tracked Looie down and told him people were complaining about the slaughterhouse smells coming from the old warehouse Looie had rented to the peculiar tall men, it was Sam who sent to check things out. And things were pretty much as you expect.
◐○○○○ Dɔrə's Song - Victor Forna (ss) 2021
Imagine Mother Earth personified as a human woman. Then imagine bloody gouges being made everywhere in her skin to mine coal and minerals. And her being stabbed all over to extract oil. And imagine her suffering being so great that her spirit flees her body, taking human form as a woman named Karinε.Except, of course, that this isn't being presented as metaphor, but as fact. She married a human, producing a daughter, Dɔrə. And when the ecosystem was dying, and the Last Man was lamenting how all this was happening to him — because of course it had nothing to do with him — Karinε dies, and Dɔrə leaves to create a new world with life, but without people, since clearly that part had been a mistake.
At least that's my probably-wrong interpretation of the story, because between the psychedelic imagery and depressing-poetry language, I was skimming at best. I've no idea why the Earth Goddess names are in International Phonetic Alphabet.
●●○○○ Shot in the Buff - Joan H. Dash (nov) 2008
Catie Bingham isn't technically stupid. She worked as a soil scientist for some years before meeting her rich husband and quitting (having money gives you less motivation to endure job and coworker annoyances). It's just that her unwarranted faith in the goodness of strangers makes her frequently look stupid.Catie's grandparents lived in a nudist camp. Or did: the story begins with Catie scattering her Grampa's ashes, then taking her Gramma home. On the same day that happened, one of the camp residents was shot dead when he answered his cottage door. Because 31-year-old Catie was, with her parents, a member of the camp until she was 16 (at which point she quit coming, because too many men leered at her), and she takes care of her grandmother, she's allowed to wear clothing in the camp. So when she went to gawk at the crime scene, a clothed young cop thought she must similarly be a police official, and showed her in to the cottage. Thus Catie became involved with the murder case.
Anyway, Catie's assumption of the kindness of strangers allows her to talk to a reporter, who writes a hit piece on the nudist camp, and why it shouldn't exist. It makes her talk to a trio of drunk yahoos, who quickly advance to threats of rape. It makes her not report a man who may be following her. It makes her interpret the order (of a state police officer who came her friend) to "go straight home and lock your doors until your husband gets back" as allowing a stop at a pharmacy, which gets her kidnapped.
So yes, at least half of the story is an idiot plot. And frankly the central mystery is weak. But the non-villain characters are decent, with some interesting quirks, and the nudist camp bits were okay, and resulted in one of the younger cops deciding to visit as a guest. So the novel doesn't quite sink to a single-star rating.¹
●●●◐○ The Improper Authorities - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1959
Ronald lives in the converted coach house near the big house where his eccentric aunt lives. In return, he's expected to do small favors for her, like fix her doorbell. He goes to the basement, and finds the doorbell was never hooked into the house's electric system, but runs on batteries, which he replaces, but not before noticing an oddity.Dust motes are swirling around the wire attached to a peculiar battery sitting on the shelf. Disrupted, they return to their path, as if they were iron filings following magnetic lines around an electric wire. But dust isn't magnetic. Is there some sort of… gravitic… flow in the wire?
Yes, he finds when he takes the battery to his room and conducts experiments. Ronald finds that by wrapping the wire around the battery, he can get it to double its weight, held one way — or negate it, held the other. More turns of the wire multiply the effect. What to do. Studying it is more likely to destroy the battery — wherever it came from — than replicate it. But if he tells a university or the government, they're likely to take it from him, if they even believe him. Then Ronald has an idea…
●●◐○○ Old Man Henderson - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
Joey's mother just baked fresh bed, and she tells Joey to deliver a hot loaf to Mister Henderson, which the ten-year-old resentfully does. Henderson is called "The Story" behind his back, because he always tells the same tale of his glory days to people, in the same practiced phrases. Joey can't take it this time, and rudely quotes the old man's story back to him before he gets started this time. Joey's been to the Moon twice, his parents have been to Venus, and is father is currently working on Mars. Why should he care to hear how Old Man Henderson got the plaque on his wall? Who cares about the first man to walk on the moon?●●●●○ Time Patrol - Poul Anderson (nvt) 1955
The first appearance of Manse Everard of the Time Patrol series, shows the young man answering a classified ad in 1954 USA, undergoing an array of tests for suitability, and joining the service. After a few years of training, he gets his first case, which he himself instigated. Manse was newly graduated, awaiting his first field assignment, his only job for now being to monitor a bunch of newspapers for oddities that might indicate time travel interference.Except he didn't find the evidence in a newspaper, but a book of Victorian stories, one of which seemed to show an Anglo-Saxon burial mound being unearthed, and a chest of metal bars being found, with the man who opened it dying a week later from what the story writer hinted might be a curse, but that looked like radiation poisoning to Everard.
Manse reported the story, and since their were never enough agents, he was assigned to check it out. Sector Headquarters in 1894 assigned Everard a man from Manse's academy class, Charles Whitcomb, a British pilot who joined in 1947. They went to sixth-century Britain and investigated, finding the latest (but the pair's first) meddler who wanted to remake history and change the world.
We also learn that it's not only the other side that wants to change history, that some people aren't suited to be Time Patrol agents, and some are destined for more. Solid tale.
━━━━━━━━━━
Week One's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
00+7 ss | 00+2 nvt | 00+1 nva | 00+1 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━[1] Yes, I'm using circles, but that's because stars seem less common in fonts, and some tests on various devices showed character-not-found glyphs instead.
━━━━━━━━━━Weeks have seven days, so weeks spanning New Year's Day will always have four or more days in either the old year ending or the new year beginning. Year 2026 is a double winner, beginning by claiming the last three days of 2025 for its first ISO-counted week, and ending by claiming the first three days from 2027 for its Week Fifty-Three. That's the maximum possible steal on both ends.
-
#Reading in Week One of 2026 | Dec 29 – Jan 04 | ~2300 words | ~13,200 characters | Tag to mute: #BokBooks |
━━━━━━━━━━●●○○○ Roberta - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1962
A person gets someone to arrange an illegal operation for them. Roberta has dissociative issues. Robert, her previous identity, keeps talking to her, usually saying unpleasant things. And whenever someone in real life argues with Roberta, she knows they're Robert in disguise, and she shoots them. Now Robert says she has to go on the lam. How many people does Roberta have to shoot to make Robert go away?●●●◐○ Divide and Rule - L. Sprague de Camp (nva) 1939
An alien race that humans call hoppers (because they look like skinny upright kangaroos) conquered Earth three centuries ago. They allow humans to have factories and power plants (both overseen by hoppers, with sensitive personnel truth-drug-checked weekly), but not guns or motor vehicles. Nations have been broken up. Human society looks feudal in the post-US East. Main character Sir Howard van Slyck, future Duke of Poughkeepsie, goes around in plate armor made by Packard. Radio and films still exists, but not television (this is a 1939 story).Howard goes walkabout after one bad day when his older brother was arrested, tried for doing science research, and executed. He hooks up with Haas, a traveler from the West who acts like a cowboy, who's also on a walkabout due to him accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, and the man's friends vowing vengeance. The pair rescue a woman from one of the bad nobles around, and find she's part of the anti-hopper Underground that neither knew existed.
Turns out that hoppers aren't a smart race, but many centuries ago a mutant genius appeared among them. During his long, four-hundred-year life, he single-handedly jumped from early-1800s tech into the age of electronics. His most important invention was a helmet that could induce concentration in its wearers, and with time and focus, even mentally slow individuals could accomplish much, like building starships and conquering worlds.
Naturally this thinking cap is a weakness, and with an out-of-left-field plan originally devised by Howard's executed brother, humanity is able to overthrow the aliens.
●●●◐○ Appointment in Tomorrow - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1951
World War Three, though short, had knocked society for a loop. With Old Science tarnished, leaders in New Washington and bomb-shocked society in general turned to New Science. In stepped the Thinkers, with new mental science and emotional disciplines.The Thinkers had built the giant supercomputer Maizie (cyberneticists said it couldn't be done) that advised the government, in nigh-holy advice sessions. They'd built the nuclear-electric rockets (rocket scientists were stunned) that took humans to Mars, where humanity had contacted the learned men of an elder civilization and brought their wisdom back to Earth.
Pity it was all a hoax.
Odd that the Number Two in the Thinkers had drunk the Kool-Aid, and wanted to make the dreams real, and had contacted the Institute for Advanced Studies to see if some real scientists would quietly help him do that. Strange that the Number Two at the Institute, tired of being ignored, had decided to join the Thinkers who were the power behind the throne, claiming he'd rise through the ranks and then reform the organization. Would either plan work out?
●●●○○ An Unexpected Adventure - Martin Brant (nvt) 2017
Jennifer – a legal assistant who thinks her chest is flat and droopy, her stomach too paunchy, her hips too big – falls for a man. Dan's a nurse, and she finds him a caring soul. Until one day he surprises her by taking her to a nudist beach. She can't cope and insists he take her home.Over time, Jen learns to accept herself, and becomes a nudist with him in the privacy of their apartments. A group of Dan's colleagues are also nudists, and after having a couple over for a nude coffee, then going to a nude dinner with the whole set, and finally visiting that nude beach, Jen becomes a real nudist.
A simple, if clichéd, story of someone accepting herself and others, and getting over imperfect bodies to live a freer life.
●●●◐○ The Emperor's New Towel - Mel Cowan (ss) 2025
James had hit on a topic of conversation for defensive smalltalk: naturism. He'd regale his colleagues of his visits to nude beaches in the South of France, and discourse at length about the benefits of going clothes-free. The truth was that he didn't even walk around his apartment naked: he was purely a theoretical naturist. And all went well for years. Until one day Kate joined the accounting firm, and James trotted out his topic:⎡ Instead of the usual glazed-over expression, Kate's eyes lit up. "Oh my gosh, you're a naturist? Me too! That's amazing!" ⎦
Kate invited James to her naturist club next weekend, and James could see no way not to accept. He got through stripping in the changing room, and made his fraudulent debut, only to freeze when he got to the main pool and saw dozens of naked bodies all around him. He faked comfort getting a lounger beside Kate, and pretended that his pale body had ever seen the sun.
After some swimming (“You crashed into my crocodile”) and the barbecue buffet (James fumbled a serving spoon, depositing a glob of potato salad on the naked man ahead of him in line), and him knocking his cup of lemonade into Kate's lap, James was not having a grand time. It was only during the volleyball game that James slowly realized that everyone knew that this was his first time at a nudist camp… and nobody cared. It turned out to be a nice day.
◍◍◍◍◍ January 2026 Begins
●●●◐○ Agent - E C Tubb (ss) 1955
Looie acquired artists for you. Singers, dancers, ventriloquists, whatever: for a fee, he'd find them for you. So he was more than satisfied when two odd, tall men with strange accents offered him bags of gold, even if their request — “We are interested in buying some humans” — was a bit raw. And they took anyone, no talent required.Sam was Looie's fixer. When the Health Department tracked Looie down and told him people were complaining about the slaughterhouse smells coming from the old warehouse Looie had rented to the peculiar tall men, it was Sam who sent to check things out. And things were pretty much as you expect.
◐○○○○ Dɔrə's Song - Victor Forna (ss) 2021
Imagine Mother Earth personified as a human woman. Then imagine bloody gouges being made everywhere in her skin to mine coal and minerals. And her being stabbed all over to extract oil. And imagine her suffering being so great that her spirit flees her body, taking human form as a woman named Karinε.Except, of course, that this isn't being presented as metaphor, but as fact. She married a human, producing a daughter, Dɔrə. And when the ecosystem was dying, and the Last Man was lamenting how all this was happening to him — because of course it had nothing to do with him — Karinε dies, and Dɔrə leaves to create a new world with life, but without people, since clearly that part had been a mistake.
At least that's my probably-wrong interpretation of the story, because between the psychedelic imagery and depressing-poetry language, I was skimming at best. I've no idea why the Earth Goddess names are in International Phonetic Alphabet.
●●○○○ Shot in the Buff - Joan H. Dash (nov) 2008
Catie Bingham isn't technically stupid. She worked as a soil scientist for some years before meeting her rich husband and quitting (having money gives you less motivation to endure job and coworker annoyances). It's just that her unwarranted faith in the goodness of strangers makes her frequently look stupid.Catie's grandparents lived in a nudist camp. Or did: the story begins with Catie scattering her Grampa's ashes, then taking her Gramma home. On the same day that happened, one of the camp residents was shot dead when he answered his cottage door. Because 31-year-old Catie was, with her parents, a member of the camp until she was 16 (at which point she quit coming, because too many men leered at her), and she takes care of her grandmother, she's allowed to wear clothing in the camp. So when she went to gawk at the crime scene, a clothed young cop thought she must similarly be a police official, and showed her in to the cottage. Thus Catie became involved with the murder case.
Anyway, Catie's assumption of the kindness of strangers allows her to talk to a reporter, who writes a hit piece on the nudist camp, and why it shouldn't exist. It makes her talk to a trio of drunk yahoos, who quickly advance to threats of rape. It makes her not report a man who may be following her. It makes her interpret the order (of a state police officer who came her friend) to "go straight home and lock your doors until your husband gets back" as allowing a stop at a pharmacy, which gets her kidnapped.
So yes, at least half of the story is an idiot plot. And frankly the central mystery is weak. But the non-villain characters are decent, with some interesting quirks, and the nudist camp bits were okay, and resulted in one of the younger cops deciding to visit as a guest. So the novel doesn't quite sink to a single-star rating.¹
●●●◐○ The Improper Authorities - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1959
Ronald lives in the converted coach house near the big house where his eccentric aunt lives. In return, he's expected to do small favors for her, like fix her doorbell. He goes to the basement, and finds the doorbell was never hooked into the house's electric system, but runs on batteries, which he replaces, but not before noticing an oddity.Dust motes are swirling around the wire attached to a peculiar battery sitting on the shelf. Disrupted, they return to their path, as if they were iron filings following magnetic lines around an electric wire. But dust isn't magnetic. Is there some sort of… gravitic… flow in the wire?
Yes, he finds when he takes the battery to his room and conducts experiments. Ronald finds that by wrapping the wire around the battery, he can get it to double its weight, held one way — or negate it, held the other. More turns of the wire multiply the effect. What to do. Studying it is more likely to destroy the battery — wherever it came from — than replicate it. But if he tells a university or the government, they're likely to take it from him, if they even believe him. Then Ronald has an idea…
●●◐○○ Old Man Henderson - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
Joey's mother just baked fresh bed, and she tells Joey to deliver a hot loaf to Mister Henderson, which the ten-year-old resentfully does. Henderson is called "The Story" behind his back, because he always tells the same tale of his glory days to people, in the same practiced phrases. Joey can't take it this time, and rudely quotes the old man's story back to him before he gets started this time. Joey's been to the Moon twice, his parents have been to Venus, and is father is currently working on Mars. Why should he care to hear how Old Man Henderson got the plaque on his wall? Who cares about the first man to walk on the moon?●●●●○ Time Patrol - Poul Anderson (nvt) 1955
The first appearance of Manse Everard of the Time Patrol series, shows the young man answering a classified ad in 1954 USA, undergoing an array of tests for suitability, and joining the service. After a few years of training, he gets his first case, which he himself instigated. Manse was newly graduated, awaiting his first field assignment, his only job for now being to monitor a bunch of newspapers for oddities that might indicate time travel interference.Except he didn't find the evidence in a newspaper, but a book of Victorian stories, one of which seemed to show an Anglo-Saxon burial mound being unearthed, and a chest of metal bars being found, with the man who opened it dying a week later from what the story writer hinted might be a curse, but that looked like radiation poisoning to Everard.
Manse reported the story, and since their were never enough agents, he was assigned to check it out. Sector Headquarters in 1894 assigned Everard a man from Manse's academy class, Charles Whitcomb, a British pilot who joined in 1947. They went to sixth-century Britain and investigated, finding the latest (but the pair's first) meddler who wanted to remake history and change the world.
We also learn that it's not only the other side that wants to change history, that some people aren't suited to be Time Patrol agents, and some are destined for more. Solid tale.
━━━━━━━━━━
Week One's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
00+7 ss | 00+2 nvt | 00+1 nva | 00+1 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━[1] Yes, I'm using circles, but that's because stars seem less common in fonts, and some tests on various devices showed character-not-found glyphs instead.
━━━━━━━━━━Weeks have seven days, so weeks spanning New Year's Day will always have four or more days in either the old year ending or the new year beginning. Year 2026 is a double winner, beginning by claiming the last three days of 2025 for its first ISO-counted week, and ending by claiming the first three days from 2027 for its Week Fifty-Three. That's the maximum possible steal on both ends.
-
#Reading in Week One of 2026 | Dec 29 – Jan 04 | ~2300 words | ~13,200 characters | Tag to mute: #BokBooks |
━━━━━━━━━━●●○○○ Roberta - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1962
A person gets someone to arrange an illegal operation for them. Roberta has dissociative issues. Robert, her previous identity, keeps talking to her, usually saying unpleasant things. And whenever someone in real life argues with Roberta, she knows they're Robert in disguise, and she shoots them. Now Robert says she has to go on the lam. How many people does Roberta have to shoot to make Robert go away?●●●◐○ Divide and Rule - L. Sprague de Camp (nva) 1939
An alien race that humans call hoppers (because they look like skinny upright kangaroos) conquered Earth three centuries ago. They allow humans to have factories and power plants (both overseen by hoppers, with sensitive personnel truth-drug-checked weekly), but not guns or motor vehicles. Nations have been broken up. Human society looks feudal in the post-US East. Main character Sir Howard van Slyck, future Duke of Poughkeepsie, goes around in plate armor made by Packard. Radio and films still exists, but not television (this is a 1939 story).Howard goes walkabout after one bad day when his older brother was arrested, tried for doing science research, and executed. He hooks up with Haas, a traveler from the West who acts like a cowboy, who's also on a walkabout due to him accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, and the man's friends vowing vengeance. The pair rescue a woman from one of the bad nobles around, and find she's part of the anti-hopper Underground that neither knew existed.
Turns out that hoppers aren't a smart race, but many centuries ago a mutant genius appeared among them. During his long, four-hundred-year life, he single-handedly jumped from early-1800s tech into the age of electronics. His most important invention was a helmet that could induce concentration in its wearers, and with time and focus, even mentally slow individuals could accomplish much, like building starships and conquering worlds.
Naturally this thinking cap is a weakness, and with an out-of-left-field plan originally devised by Howard's executed brother, humanity is able to overthrow the aliens.
●●●◐○ Appointment in Tomorrow - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1951
World War Three, though short, had knocked society for a loop. With Old Science tarnished, leaders in New Washington and bomb-shocked society in general turned to New Science. In stepped the Thinkers, with new mental science and emotional disciplines.The Thinkers had built the giant supercomputer Maizie (cyberneticists said it couldn't be done) that advised the government, in nigh-holy advice sessions. They'd built the nuclear-electric rockets (rocket scientists were stunned) that took humans to Mars, where humanity had contacted the learned men of an elder civilization and brought their wisdom back to Earth.
Pity it was all a hoax.
Odd that the Number Two in the Thinkers had drunk the Kool-Aid, and wanted to make the dreams real, and had contacted the Institute for Advanced Studies to see if some real scientists would quietly help him do that. Strange that the Number Two at the Institute, tired of being ignored, had decided to join the Thinkers who were the power behind the throne, claiming he'd rise through the ranks and then reform the organization. Would either plan work out?
●●●○○ An Unexpected Adventure - Martin Brant (nvt) 2017
Jennifer – a legal assistant who thinks her chest is flat and droopy, her stomach too paunchy, her hips too big – falls for a man. Dan's a nurse, and she finds him a caring soul. Until one day he surprises her by taking her to a nudist beach. She can't cope and insists he take her home.Over time, Jen learns to accept herself, and becomes a nudist with him in the privacy of their apartments. A group of Dan's colleagues are also nudists, and after having a couple over for a nude coffee, then going to a nude dinner with the whole set, and finally visiting that nude beach, Jen becomes a real nudist.
A simple, if clichéd, story of someone accepting herself and others, and getting over imperfect bodies to live a freer life.
●●●◐○ The Emperor's New Towel - Mel Cowan (ss) 2025
James had hit on a topic of conversation for defensive smalltalk: naturism. He'd regale his colleagues of his visits to nude beaches in the South of France, and discourse at length about the benefits of going clothes-free. The truth was that he didn't even walk around his apartment naked: he was purely a theoretical naturist. And all went well for years. Until one day Kate joined the accounting firm, and James trotted out his topic:⎡ Instead of the usual glazed-over expression, Kate's eyes lit up. "Oh my gosh, you're a naturist? Me too! That's amazing!" ⎦
Kate invited James to her naturist club next weekend, and James could see no way not to accept. He got through stripping in the changing room, and made his fraudulent debut, only to freeze when he got to the main pool and saw dozens of naked bodies all around him. He faked comfort getting a lounger beside Kate, and pretended that his pale body had ever seen the sun.
After some swimming (“You crashed into my crocodile”) and the barbecue buffet (James fumbled a serving spoon, depositing a glob of potato salad on the naked man ahead of him in line), and him knocking his cup of lemonade into Kate's lap, James was not having a grand time. It was only during the volleyball game that James slowly realized that everyone knew that this was his first time at a nudist camp… and nobody cared. It turned out to be a nice day.
◍◍◍◍◍ January 2026 Begins
●●●◐○ Agent - E C Tubb (ss) 1955
Looie acquired artists for you. Singers, dancers, ventriloquists, whatever: for a fee, he'd find them for you. So he was more than satisfied when two odd, tall men with strange accents offered him bags of gold, even if their request — “We are interested in buying some humans” — was a bit raw. And they took anyone, no talent required.Sam was Looie's fixer. When the Health Department tracked Looie down and told him people were complaining about the slaughterhouse smells coming from the old warehouse Looie had rented to the peculiar tall men, it was Sam who sent to check things out. And things were pretty much as you expect.
◐○○○○ Dɔrə's Song - Victor Forna (ss) 2021
Imagine Mother Earth personified as a human woman. Then imagine bloody gouges being made everywhere in her skin to mine coal and minerals. And her being stabbed all over to extract oil. And imagine her suffering being so great that her spirit flees her body, taking human form as a woman named Karinε.Except, of course, that this isn't being presented as metaphor, but as fact. She married a human, producing a daughter, Dɔrə. And when the ecosystem was dying, and the Last Man was lamenting how all this was happening to him — because of course it had nothing to do with him — Karinε dies, and Dɔrə leaves to create a new world with life, but without people, since clearly that part had been a mistake.
At least that's my probably-wrong interpretation of the story, because between the psychedelic imagery and depressing-poetry language, I was skimming at best. I've no idea why the Earth Goddess names are in International Phonetic Alphabet.
●●○○○ Shot in the Buff - Joan H. Dash (nov) 2008
Catie Bingham isn't technically stupid. She worked as a soil scientist for some years before meeting her rich husband and quitting (having money gives you less motivation to endure job and coworker annoyances). It's just that her unwarranted faith in the goodness of strangers makes her frequently look stupid.Catie's grandparents lived in a nudist camp. Or did: the story begins with Catie scattering her Grampa's ashes, then taking her Gramma home. On the same day that happened, one of the camp residents was shot dead when he answered his cottage door. Because 31-year-old Catie was, with her parents, a member of the camp until she was 16 (at which point she quit coming, because too many men leered at her), and she takes care of her grandmother, she's allowed to wear clothing in the camp. So when she went to gawk at the crime scene, a clothed young cop thought she must similarly be a police official, and showed her in to the cottage. Thus Catie became involved with the murder case.
Anyway, Catie's assumption of the kindness of strangers allows her to talk to a reporter, who writes a hit piece on the nudist camp, and why it shouldn't exist. It makes her talk to a trio of drunk yahoos, who quickly advance to threats of rape. It makes her not report a man who may be following her. It makes her interpret the order (of a state police officer who came her friend) to "go straight home and lock your doors until your husband gets back" as allowing a stop at a pharmacy, which gets her kidnapped.
So yes, at least half of the story is an idiot plot. And frankly the central mystery is weak. But the non-villain characters are decent, with some interesting quirks, and the nudist camp bits were okay, and resulted in one of the younger cops deciding to visit as a guest. So the novel doesn't quite sink to a single-star rating.¹
●●●◐○ The Improper Authorities - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1959
Ronald lives in the converted coach house near the big house where his eccentric aunt lives. In return, he's expected to do small favors for her, like fix her doorbell. He goes to the basement, and finds the doorbell was never hooked into the house's electric system, but runs on batteries, which he replaces, but not before noticing an oddity.Dust motes are swirling around the wire attached to a peculiar battery sitting on the shelf. Disrupted, they return to their path, as if they were iron filings following magnetic lines around an electric wire. But dust isn't magnetic. Is there some sort of… gravitic… flow in the wire?
Yes, he finds when he takes the battery to his room and conducts experiments. Ronald finds that by wrapping the wire around the battery, he can get it to double its weight, held one way — or negate it, held the other. More turns of the wire multiply the effect. What to do. Studying it is more likely to destroy the battery — wherever it came from — than replicate it. But if he tells a university or the government, they're likely to take it from him, if they even believe him. Then Ronald has an idea…
●●◐○○ Old Man Henderson - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
Joey's mother just baked fresh bed, and she tells Joey to deliver a hot loaf to Mister Henderson, which the ten-year-old resentfully does. Henderson is called "The Story" behind his back, because he always tells the same tale of his glory days to people, in the same practiced phrases. Joey can't take it this time, and rudely quotes the old man's story back to him before he gets started this time. Joey's been to the Moon twice, his parents have been to Venus, and is father is currently working on Mars. Why should he care to hear how Old Man Henderson got the plaque on his wall? Who cares about the first man to walk on the moon?●●●●○ Time Patrol - Poul Anderson (nvt) 1955
The first appearance of Manse Everard of the Time Patrol series, shows the young man answering a classified ad in 1954 USA, undergoing an array of tests for suitability, and joining the service. After a few years of training, he gets his first case, which he himself instigated. Manse was newly graduated, awaiting his first field assignment, his only job for now being to monitor a bunch of newspapers for oddities that might indicate time travel interference.Except he didn't find the evidence in a newspaper, but a book of Victorian stories, one of which seemed to show an Anglo-Saxon burial mound being unearthed, and a chest of metal bars being found, with the man who opened it dying a week later from what the story writer hinted might be a curse, but that looked like radiation poisoning to Everard.
Manse reported the story, and since their were never enough agents, he was assigned to check it out. Sector Headquarters in 1894 assigned Everard a man from Manse's academy class, Charles Whitcomb, a British pilot who joined in 1947. They went to sixth-century Britain and investigated, finding the latest (but the pair's first) meddler who wanted to remake history and change the world.
We also learn that it's not only the other side that wants to change history, that some people aren't suited to be Time Patrol agents, and some are destined for more. Solid tale.
━━━━━━━━━━
Week One's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
00+7 ss | 00+2 nvt | 00+1 nva | 00+1 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━[1] Yes, I'm using circles, but that's because stars seem less common in fonts, and some tests on various devices showed character-not-found glyphs instead.
━━━━━━━━━━Weeks have seven days, so weeks spanning New Year's Day will always have four or more days in either the old year ending or the new year beginning. Year 2026 is a double winner, beginning by claiming the last three days of 2025 for its first ISO-counted week, and ending by claiming the first three days from 2027 for its Week Fifty-Three. That's the maximum possible steal on both ends.
-
#Reading in Week One of 2026 | Dec 29 – Jan 04 | ~2300 words | ~13,200 characters | Tag to mute: #BokBooks |
━━━━━━━━━━●●○○○ Roberta - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1962
A person gets someone to arrange an illegal operation for them. Roberta has dissociative issues. Robert, her previous identity, keeps talking to her, usually saying unpleasant things. And whenever someone in real life argues with Roberta, she knows they're Robert in disguise, and she shoots them. Now Robert says she has to go on the lam. How many people does Roberta have to shoot to make Robert go away?●●●◐○ Divide and Rule - L. Sprague de Camp (nva) 1939
An alien race that humans call hoppers (because they look like skinny upright kangaroos) conquered Earth three centuries ago. They allow humans to have factories and power plants (both overseen by hoppers, with sensitive personnel truth-drug-checked weekly), but not guns or motor vehicles. Nations have been broken up. Human society looks feudal in the post-US East. Main character Sir Howard van Slyck, future Duke of Poughkeepsie, goes around in plate armor made by Packard. Radio and films still exists, but not television (this is a 1939 story).Howard goes walkabout after one bad day when his older brother was arrested, tried for doing science research, and executed. He hooks up with Haas, a traveler from the West who acts like a cowboy, who's also on a walkabout due to him accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, and the man's friends vowing vengeance. The pair rescue a woman from one of the bad nobles around, and find she's part of the anti-hopper Underground that neither knew existed.
Turns out that hoppers aren't a smart race, but many centuries ago a mutant genius appeared among them. During his long, four-hundred-year life, he single-handedly jumped from early-1800s tech into the age of electronics. His most important invention was a helmet that could induce concentration in its wearers, and with time and focus, even mentally slow individuals could accomplish much, like building starships and conquering worlds.
Naturally this thinking cap is a weakness, and with an out-of-left-field plan originally devised by Howard's executed brother, humanity is able to overthrow the aliens.
●●●◐○ Appointment in Tomorrow - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1951
World War Three, though short, had knocked society for a loop. With Old Science tarnished, leaders in New Washington and bomb-shocked society in general turned to New Science. In stepped the Thinkers, with new mental science and emotional disciplines.The Thinkers had built the giant supercomputer Maizie (cyberneticists said it couldn't be done) that advised the government, in nigh-holy advice sessions. They'd built the nuclear-electric rockets (rocket scientists were stunned) that took humans to Mars, where humanity had contacted the learned men of an elder civilization and brought their wisdom back to Earth.
Pity it was all a hoax.
Odd that the Number Two in the Thinkers had drunk the Kool-Aid, and wanted to make the dreams real, and had contacted the Institute for Advanced Studies to see if some real scientists would quietly help him do that. Strange that the Number Two at the Institute, tired of being ignored, had decided to join the Thinkers who were the power behind the throne, claiming he'd rise through the ranks and then reform the organization. Would either plan work out?
●●●○○ An Unexpected Adventure - Martin Brant (nvt) 2017
Jennifer – a legal assistant who thinks her chest is flat and droopy, her stomach too paunchy, her hips too big – falls for a man. Dan's a nurse, and she finds him a caring soul. Until one day he surprises her by taking her to a nudist beach. She can't cope and insists he take her home.Over time, Jen learns to accept herself, and becomes a nudist with him in the privacy of their apartments. A group of Dan's colleagues are also nudists, and after having a couple over for a nude coffee, then going to a nude dinner with the whole set, and finally visiting that nude beach, Jen becomes a real nudist.
A simple, if clichéd, story of someone accepting herself and others, and getting over imperfect bodies to live a freer life.
●●●◐○ The Emperor's New Towel - Mel Cowan (ss) 2025
James had hit on a topic of conversation for defensive smalltalk: naturism. He'd regale his colleagues of his visits to nude beaches in the South of France, and discourse at length about the benefits of going clothes-free. The truth was that he didn't even walk around his apartment naked: he was purely a theoretical naturist. And all went well for years. Until one day Kate joined the accounting firm, and James trotted out his topic:⎡ Instead of the usual glazed-over expression, Kate's eyes lit up. "Oh my gosh, you're a naturist? Me too! That's amazing!" ⎦
Kate invited James to her naturist club next weekend, and James could see no way not to accept. He got through stripping in the changing room, and made his fraudulent debut, only to freeze when he got to the main pool and saw dozens of naked bodies all around him. He faked comfort getting a lounger beside Kate, and pretended that his pale body had ever seen the sun.
After some swimming (“You crashed into my crocodile”) and the barbecue buffet (James fumbled a serving spoon, depositing a glob of potato salad on the naked man ahead of him in line), and him knocking his cup of lemonade into Kate's lap, James was not having a grand time. It was only during the volleyball game that James slowly realized that everyone knew that this was his first time at a nudist camp… and nobody cared. It turned out to be a nice day.
◍◍◍◍◍ January 2026 Begins
●●●◐○ Agent - E C Tubb (ss) 1955
Looie acquired artists for you. Singers, dancers, ventriloquists, whatever: for a fee, he'd find them for you. So he was more than satisfied when two odd, tall men with strange accents offered him bags of gold, even if their request — “We are interested in buying some humans” — was a bit raw. And they took anyone, no talent required.Sam was Looie's fixer. When the Health Department tracked Looie down and told him people were complaining about the slaughterhouse smells coming from the old warehouse Looie had rented to the peculiar tall men, it was Sam who sent to check things out. And things were pretty much as you expect.
◐○○○○ Dɔrə's Song - Victor Forna (ss) 2021
Imagine Mother Earth personified as a human woman. Then imagine bloody gouges being made everywhere in her skin to mine coal and minerals. And her being stabbed all over to extract oil. And imagine her suffering being so great that her spirit flees her body, taking human form as a woman named Karinε.Except, of course, that this isn't being presented as metaphor, but as fact. She married a human, producing a daughter, Dɔrə. And when the ecosystem was dying, and the Last Man was lamenting how all this was happening to him — because of course it had nothing to do with him — Karinε dies, and Dɔrə leaves to create a new world with life, but without people, since clearly that part had been a mistake.
At least that's my probably-wrong interpretation of the story, because between the psychedelic imagery and depressing-poetry language, I was skimming at best. I've no idea why the Earth Goddess names are in International Phonetic Alphabet.
●●○○○ Shot in the Buff - Joan H. Dash (nov) 2008
Catie Bingham isn't technically stupid. She worked as a soil scientist for some years before meeting her rich husband and quitting (having money gives you less motivation to endure job and coworker annoyances). It's just that her unwarranted faith in the goodness of strangers makes her frequently look stupid.Catie's grandparents lived in a nudist camp. Or did: the story begins with Catie scattering her Grampa's ashes, then taking her Gramma home. On the same day that happened, one of the camp residents was shot dead when he answered his cottage door. Because 31-year-old Catie was, with her parents, a member of the camp until she was 16 (at which point she quit coming, because too many men leered at her), and she takes care of her grandmother, she's allowed to wear clothing in the camp. So when she went to gawk at the crime scene, a clothed young cop thought she must similarly be a police official, and showed her in to the cottage. Thus Catie became involved with the murder case.
Anyway, Catie's assumption of the kindness of strangers allows her to talk to a reporter, who writes a hit piece on the nudist camp, and why it shouldn't exist. It makes her talk to a trio of drunk yahoos, who quickly advance to threats of rape. It makes her not report a man who may be following her. It makes her interpret the order (of a state police officer who came her friend) to "go straight home and lock your doors until your husband gets back" as allowing a stop at a pharmacy, which gets her kidnapped.
So yes, at least half of the story is an idiot plot. And frankly the central mystery is weak. But the non-villain characters are decent, with some interesting quirks, and the nudist camp bits were okay, and resulted in one of the younger cops deciding to visit as a guest. So the novel doesn't quite sink to a single-star rating.¹
●●●◐○ The Improper Authorities - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1959
Ronald lives in the converted coach house near the big house where his eccentric aunt lives. In return, he's expected to do small favors for her, like fix her doorbell. He goes to the basement, and finds the doorbell was never hooked into the house's electric system, but runs on batteries, which he replaces, but not before noticing an oddity.Dust motes are swirling around the wire attached to a peculiar battery sitting on the shelf. Disrupted, they return to their path, as if they were iron filings following magnetic lines around an electric wire. But dust isn't magnetic. Is there some sort of… gravitic… flow in the wire?
Yes, he finds when he takes the battery to his room and conducts experiments. Ronald finds that by wrapping the wire around the battery, he can get it to double its weight, held one way — or negate it, held the other. More turns of the wire multiply the effect. What to do. Studying it is more likely to destroy the battery — wherever it came from — than replicate it. But if he tells a university or the government, they're likely to take it from him, if they even believe him. Then Ronald has an idea…
●●◐○○ Old Man Henderson - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
Joey's mother just baked fresh bed, and she tells Joey to deliver a hot loaf to Mister Henderson, which the ten-year-old resentfully does. Henderson is called "The Story" behind his back, because he always tells the same tale of his glory days to people, in the same practiced phrases. Joey can't take it this time, and rudely quotes the old man's story back to him before he gets started this time. Joey's been to the Moon twice, his parents have been to Venus, and is father is currently working on Mars. Why should he care to hear how Old Man Henderson got the plaque on his wall? Who cares about the first man to walk on the moon?●●●●○ Time Patrol - Poul Anderson (nvt) 1955
The first appearance of Manse Everard of the Time Patrol series, shows the young man answering a classified ad in 1954 USA, undergoing an array of tests for suitability, and joining the service. After a few years of training, he gets his first case, which he himself instigated. Manse was newly graduated, awaiting his first field assignment, his only job for now being to monitor a bunch of newspapers for oddities that might indicate time travel interference.Except he didn't find the evidence in a newspaper, but a book of Victorian stories, one of which seemed to show an Anglo-Saxon burial mound being unearthed, and a chest of metal bars being found, with the man who opened it dying a week later from what the story writer hinted might be a curse, but that looked like radiation poisoning to Everard.
Manse reported the story, and since their were never enough agents, he was assigned to check it out. Sector Headquarters in 1894 assigned Everard a man from Manse's academy class, Charles Whitcomb, a British pilot who joined in 1947. They went to sixth-century Britain and investigated, finding the latest (but the pair's first) meddler who wanted to remake history and change the world.
We also learn that it's not only the other side that wants to change history, that some people aren't suited to be Time Patrol agents, and some are destined for more. Solid tale.
━━━━━━━━━━
Week One's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
00+7 ss | 00+2 nvt | 00+1 nva | 00+1 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━[1] Yes, I'm using circles, but that's because stars seem less common in fonts, and some tests on various devices showed character-not-found glyphs instead.
━━━━━━━━━━Weeks have seven days, so weeks spanning New Year's Day will always have four or more days in either the old year ending or the new year beginning. Year 2026 is a double winner, beginning by claiming the last three days of 2025 for its first ISO-counted week, and ending by claiming the first three days from 2027 for its Week Fifty-Three. That's the maximum possible steal on both ends.
-
#Reading in Week One of 2026 | Dec 29 – Jan 04 | ~2300 words | ~13,200 characters | Tag to mute: #BokBooks |
━━━━━━━━━━●●○○○ Roberta - Margaret St. Clair (ss) 1962
A person gets someone to arrange an illegal operation for them. Roberta has dissociative issues. Robert, her previous identity, keeps talking to her, usually saying unpleasant things. And whenever someone in real life argues with Roberta, she knows they're Robert in disguise, and she shoots them. Now Robert says she has to go on the lam. How many people does Roberta have to shoot to make Robert go away?●●●◐○ Divide and Rule - L. Sprague de Camp (nva) 1939
An alien race that humans call hoppers (because they look like skinny upright kangaroos) conquered Earth three centuries ago. They allow humans to have factories and power plants (both overseen by hoppers, with sensitive personnel truth-drug-checked weekly), but not guns or motor vehicles. Nations have been broken up. Human society looks feudal in the post-US East. Main character Sir Howard van Slyck, future Duke of Poughkeepsie, goes around in plate armor made by Packard. Radio and films still exists, but not television (this is a 1939 story).Howard goes walkabout after one bad day when his older brother was arrested, tried for doing science research, and executed. He hooks up with Haas, a traveler from the West who acts like a cowboy, who's also on a walkabout due to him accidentally killing a man in a bar fight, and the man's friends vowing vengeance. The pair rescue a woman from one of the bad nobles around, and find she's part of the anti-hopper Underground that neither knew existed.
Turns out that hoppers aren't a smart race, but many centuries ago a mutant genius appeared among them. During his long, four-hundred-year life, he single-handedly jumped from early-1800s tech into the age of electronics. His most important invention was a helmet that could induce concentration in its wearers, and with time and focus, even mentally slow individuals could accomplish much, like building starships and conquering worlds.
Naturally this thinking cap is a weakness, and with an out-of-left-field plan originally devised by Howard's executed brother, humanity is able to overthrow the aliens.
●●●◐○ Appointment in Tomorrow - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1951
World War Three, though short, had knocked society for a loop. With Old Science tarnished, leaders in New Washington and bomb-shocked society in general turned to New Science. In stepped the Thinkers, with new mental science and emotional disciplines.The Thinkers had built the giant supercomputer Maizie (cyberneticists said it couldn't be done) that advised the government, in nigh-holy advice sessions. They'd built the nuclear-electric rockets (rocket scientists were stunned) that took humans to Mars, where humanity had contacted the learned men of an elder civilization and brought their wisdom back to Earth.
Pity it was all a hoax.
Odd that the Number Two in the Thinkers had drunk the Kool-Aid, and wanted to make the dreams real, and had contacted the Institute for Advanced Studies to see if some real scientists would quietly help him do that. Strange that the Number Two at the Institute, tired of being ignored, had decided to join the Thinkers who were the power behind the throne, claiming he'd rise through the ranks and then reform the organization. Would either plan work out?
●●●○○ An Unexpected Adventure - Martin Brant (nvt) 2017
Jennifer – a legal assistant who thinks her chest is flat and droopy, her stomach too paunchy, her hips too big – falls for a man. Dan's a nurse, and she finds him a caring soul. Until one day he surprises her by taking her to a nudist beach. She can't cope and insists he take her home.Over time, Jen learns to accept herself, and becomes a nudist with him in the privacy of their apartments. A group of Dan's colleagues are also nudists, and after having a couple over for a nude coffee, then going to a nude dinner with the whole set, and finally visiting that nude beach, Jen becomes a real nudist.
A simple, if clichéd, story of someone accepting herself and others, and getting over imperfect bodies to live a freer life.
●●●◐○ The Emperor's New Towel - Mel Cowan (ss) 2025
James had hit on a topic of conversation for defensive smalltalk: naturism. He'd regale his colleagues of his visits to nude beaches in the South of France, and discourse at length about the benefits of going clothes-free. The truth was that he didn't even walk around his apartment naked: he was purely a theoretical naturist. And all went well for years. Until one day Kate joined the accounting firm, and James trotted out his topic:⎡ Instead of the usual glazed-over expression, Kate's eyes lit up. "Oh my gosh, you're a naturist? Me too! That's amazing!" ⎦
Kate invited James to her naturist club next weekend, and James could see no way not to accept. He got through stripping in the changing room, and made his fraudulent debut, only to freeze when he got to the main pool and saw dozens of naked bodies all around him. He faked comfort getting a lounger beside Kate, and pretended that his pale body had ever seen the sun.
After some swimming (“You crashed into my crocodile”) and the barbecue buffet (James fumbled a serving spoon, depositing a glob of potato salad on the naked man ahead of him in line), and him knocking his cup of lemonade into Kate's lap, James was not having a grand time. It was only during the volleyball game that James slowly realized that everyone knew that this was his first time at a nudist camp… and nobody cared. It turned out to be a nice day.
◍◍◍◍◍ January 2026 Begins
●●●◐○ Agent - E C Tubb (ss) 1955
Looie acquired artists for you. Singers, dancers, ventriloquists, whatever: for a fee, he'd find them for you. So he was more than satisfied when two odd, tall men with strange accents offered him bags of gold, even if their request — “We are interested in buying some humans” — was a bit raw. And they took anyone, no talent required.Sam was Looie's fixer. When the Health Department tracked Looie down and told him people were complaining about the slaughterhouse smells coming from the old warehouse Looie had rented to the peculiar tall men, it was Sam who sent to check things out. And things were pretty much as you expect.
◐○○○○ Dɔrə's Song - Victor Forna (ss) 2021
Imagine Mother Earth personified as a human woman. Then imagine bloody gouges being made everywhere in her skin to mine coal and minerals. And her being stabbed all over to extract oil. And imagine her suffering being so great that her spirit flees her body, taking human form as a woman named Karinε.Except, of course, that this isn't being presented as metaphor, but as fact. She married a human, producing a daughter, Dɔrə. And when the ecosystem was dying, and the Last Man was lamenting how all this was happening to him — because of course it had nothing to do with him — Karinε dies, and Dɔrə leaves to create a new world with life, but without people, since clearly that part had been a mistake.
At least that's my probably-wrong interpretation of the story, because between the psychedelic imagery and depressing-poetry language, I was skimming at best. I've no idea why the Earth Goddess names are in International Phonetic Alphabet.
●●○○○ Shot in the Buff - Joan H. Dash (nov) 2008
Catie Bingham isn't technically stupid. She worked as a soil scientist for some years before meeting her rich husband and quitting (having money gives you less motivation to endure job and coworker annoyances). It's just that her unwarranted faith in the goodness of strangers makes her frequently look stupid.Catie's grandparents lived in a nudist camp. Or did: the story begins with Catie scattering her Grampa's ashes, then taking her Gramma home. On the same day that happened, one of the camp residents was shot dead when he answered his cottage door. Because 31-year-old Catie was, with her parents, a member of the camp until she was 16 (at which point she quit coming, because too many men leered at her), and she takes care of her grandmother, she's allowed to wear clothing in the camp. So when she went to gawk at the crime scene, a clothed young cop thought she must similarly be a police official, and showed her in to the cottage. Thus Catie became involved with the murder case.
Anyway, Catie's assumption of the kindness of strangers allows her to talk to a reporter, who writes a hit piece on the nudist camp, and why it shouldn't exist. It makes her talk to a trio of drunk yahoos, who quickly advance to threats of rape. It makes her not report a man who may be following her. It makes her interpret the order (of a state police officer who came her friend) to "go straight home and lock your doors until your husband gets back" as allowing a stop at a pharmacy, which gets her kidnapped.
So yes, at least half of the story is an idiot plot. And frankly the central mystery is weak. But the non-villain characters are decent, with some interesting quirks, and the nudist camp bits were okay, and resulted in one of the younger cops deciding to visit as a guest. So the novel doesn't quite sink to a single-star rating.¹
●●●◐○ The Improper Authorities - Fritz Leiber (ss) 1959
Ronald lives in the converted coach house near the big house where his eccentric aunt lives. In return, he's expected to do small favors for her, like fix her doorbell. He goes to the basement, and finds the doorbell was never hooked into the house's electric system, but runs on batteries, which he replaces, but not before noticing an oddity.Dust motes are swirling around the wire attached to a peculiar battery sitting on the shelf. Disrupted, they return to their path, as if they were iron filings following magnetic lines around an electric wire. But dust isn't magnetic. Is there some sort of… gravitic… flow in the wire?
Yes, he finds when he takes the battery to his room and conducts experiments. Ronald finds that by wrapping the wire around the battery, he can get it to double its weight, held one way — or negate it, held the other. More turns of the wire multiply the effect. What to do. Studying it is more likely to destroy the battery — wherever it came from — than replicate it. But if he tells a university or the government, they're likely to take it from him, if they even believe him. Then Ronald has an idea…
●●◐○○ Old Man Henderson - Kris Neville (ss) 1951
Joey's mother just baked fresh bed, and she tells Joey to deliver a hot loaf to Mister Henderson, which the ten-year-old resentfully does. Henderson is called "The Story" behind his back, because he always tells the same tale of his glory days to people, in the same practiced phrases. Joey can't take it this time, and rudely quotes the old man's story back to him before he gets started this time. Joey's been to the Moon twice, his parents have been to Venus, and is father is currently working on Mars. Why should he care to hear how Old Man Henderson got the plaque on his wall? Who cares about the first man to walk on the moon?●●●●○ Time Patrol - Poul Anderson (nvt) 1955
The first appearance of Manse Everard of the Time Patrol series, shows the young man answering a classified ad in 1954 USA, undergoing an array of tests for suitability, and joining the service. After a few years of training, he gets his first case, which he himself instigated. Manse was newly graduated, awaiting his first field assignment, his only job for now being to monitor a bunch of newspapers for oddities that might indicate time travel interference.Except he didn't find the evidence in a newspaper, but a book of Victorian stories, one of which seemed to show an Anglo-Saxon burial mound being unearthed, and a chest of metal bars being found, with the man who opened it dying a week later from what the story writer hinted might be a curse, but that looked like radiation poisoning to Everard.
Manse reported the story, and since their were never enough agents, he was assigned to check it out. Sector Headquarters in 1894 assigned Everard a man from Manse's academy class, Charles Whitcomb, a British pilot who joined in 1947. They went to sixth-century Britain and investigated, finding the latest (but the pair's first) meddler who wanted to remake history and change the world.
We also learn that it's not only the other side that wants to change history, that some people aren't suited to be Time Patrol agents, and some are destined for more. Solid tale.
━━━━━━━━━━
Week One's numbers added to year-to-date totals:
00+7 ss | 00+2 nvt | 00+1 nva | 00+1 nov | #books
━━━━━━━━━━[1] Yes, I'm using circles, but that's because stars seem less common in fonts, and some tests on various devices showed character-not-found glyphs instead.
━━━━━━━━━━Weeks have seven days, so weeks spanning New Year's Day will always have four or more days in either the old year ending or the new year beginning. Year 2026 is a double winner, beginning by claiming the last three days of 2025 for its first ISO-counted week, and ending by claiming the first three days from 2027 for its Week Fifty-Three. That's the maximum possible steal on both ends.
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Wednesday Reads: Is Trump’s Power Waning?
Good Day!!
I haven’t been feeling well for the past several days, and I’ve only been following the news superficially. There is so much going on, but I’ll do my best. Here’s the latest.
Trump is scheduled to give a speech from the White House tonight at 9PM.
AP: Trump is previewing his 2026 agenda in an address to the nation as his popularity wanes.
President Donald Trump intends to preview his agenda for next year and beyond in a live speech from the White House on Wednesday night. His remarks are coming at a crucial time as he tries to rebuild his steadily eroding popularity.
The White House offered few details about what the Republican president intends to emphasize in the 9 p.m. EST speech. Public polling shows most U.S. adults are frustrated with his handling of the economy as inflation picked up after his tariffs raised prices and hiring slowed.
Trump’s mass deportations of immigrants have also proved unpopular even as he is viewed favorably for halting crossings along the U.S. border with Mexico. The public has generally been nonplussed by his income tax cuts and globe-trotting efforts to end conflicts, attack suspected drug boats near Venezuela and attract investment dollars into the United States.
In 2026, Trump and his party face a referendum on their leadership as the nation heads into the midterm elections that will decide control of the House and the Senate.
Trump has said that he thinks more Americans would back him if they simply heard him describe his track record. Administration officials say investment commitments for new factories will reverse the recent decline in manufacturing jobs and that consumer activity will improve dramatically as people receive increased tax refunds next year.
“It has been a great year for our Country, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” Trump said in a Tuesday social media post announcing the speech.
Sorry, Grandpa. Your economy sucks because of your idiotic tariffs, your cruel mass deportations, and your general incompetence.
The New York Times: Trump Dangles Cash Payments to Buoy Voters’ Views of the Economy.
Tariffs are unpopular, prices remain stubbornly high and Americans are souring on President Trump’s handling of the economy.
So Mr. Trump has reprised a familiar political strategy: promise people cash.
The president has repeatedly floated the idea of sending one-time $2,000 rebate checks to many families.Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
The White House is trying to tamp down Americans’ economic anxieties by dangling the prospect of checks and other paydays next year, hoping that the money might assuage voters who blame the president for their rising cost of living.
Mr. Trump, who is set to address the nation on Wednesday night, has repeatedly teased the idea of sending one-time $2,000 rebate checks to many families, funded using money collected from his sweeping global tariffs. But he has not devised a detailed plan for providing the rebates, an expensive policy that Republicans in Congress must approve and one that they have not yet considered.
The president has also begun hyping up the tax refunds that Americans are slated to receive in 2026. For many people, these cash payments are expected to be larger than they were last year, after Republicans adopted a sprawling set of tax cuts in July.
Both Mr. Trump and members of his administration have periodically drawn an equivalence between the supposed tariff rebates and the enacted tax law. They have claimed the money could bolster the economy and alleviate some of the financial strains on families, even at a time when Mr. Trump maintains that much of the talk about affordability is a “hoax.”
“Next year is projected to be the largest tax refund season ever, and we’re going to be giving back refunds out of the tariffs, because we’ve taken in literally trillions of dollars,” Mr. Trump said at a cabinet meeting last week. “And we’re going to be giving a nice dividend to the people, in addition to reducing debt.”
But economists take a dimmer view. Even if Americans were to delight in a series of new government-issued checks, the payments would hardly address the reasons that prices remain so high — including a shortage in housing that has driven up rents and mortgages and the global tariffs that have made imports more expensive. And the money that may soon be sloshing around the economy could end up worsening inflation, undermining Mr. Trump’s own economic goals.
Alex Durante, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, said that simply “pumping money” into the economy — without any other underlying changes — threatened to “just generate a cycle where you continue to get higher prices.”
Paul Krugman at his Substack: An A+++++ Economy, My A++. Trump made big boasts but he isn’t delivering.
When Politico recently asked Donald Trump to grade the current U.S. economy, he replied “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” He made this boast at a time when actual economic data were still scarce, a consequence of the government shutdown that stopped or delayed key information about the state of the job market.
Yesterday the report on employment during the month of November finally arrived. And the message of the report on the state of the US economy was clear: A+++++ my A++. While it’s too soon to declare that we’re in a recession, the data are at least pre-recessionary: that is, the numbers are weak enough that we should be seriously worried that a recession is coming. And that’s a state of affairs completely at odds with Trump’s rose-colored — spray-tanned? — picture.
I’ll talk about the reasons the gap between Trump’s big boasts and the glum reality matters in a minute. First, however, let’s talk about what we learned from yesterday’s report.
Most importantly, the data show a weak labor market. Employment isn’t falling off a cliff, but job growth has been weak and hasn’t kept pace with the number of people seeking work. The headline unemployment rate in November was 4.6 percent, up from an average of 4 percent in 2024. That number is close to triggering the Sahm Rule, an economic rule of thumb devised by Claudia Sahm, a former economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, that has historically been highly successful at identifying the early stages of a recession.
We can’t do a strict application of the Sahm Rule yet because Sahm’s method is based on the average unemployment rate over the past three months. Unfortunately, the shutdown prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics from collecting key data in October. But if we do an interpolation of October’s unemployment rate by averaging over September’s rate of 4.4% and November’s rate of 4.6%, we can estimate that October’s unemployment rate was 4.5%. And those 3 months of unemployment numbers bring us within a whisker of the unemployment rise that, according to the Sahm Rule, signals that a recession is on the horizon.
The state of the economy looks even worse if we take a wider view of the labor market. The BLS calculates 6 different measures of unemployment. The most commonly cited number is U-3 — the number of workers who are actively seeking jobs but haven’t found them. But the broadest measure is U-6, which includes underemployed workers stuck in part-time employment and discouraged workers who have temporarily given up job search. And U-6 has risen sharply since January, when Trump took office:
Source: BLS
Further evidence consistent with a poor and deteriorating job market is data showing that the number of job-seekers who are long-term unemployed – that is, have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more – has risen by almost a third (from 1.45 million to 1.91 million) since 2024. This means that the unemployed are finding it harder to find jobs.
Read more details at the Substack link.
Most Americans aren’t stupid. They can see how much prices have gone up on necessities like food and electricity. Trump is losing popularity even with his MAGA base.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: "I think the midterms are gonna be very hard for Republicans. I'm one of the people that's willing to admit the truth and say I don't see Republicans winning the midterms right now, so that doesn't bode well for Mike Johnson."
Marjorie Taylor Greene was once one of Trump’s biggest supporters; now she’s turned on him. Victoria Craw at The Washington Post: Marjorie Taylor Greene says ‘dam is breaking’ within GOP against Trump.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) on Tuesday said President Donald Trump has “real problems” within the Republican Party, adding in an interview with CNN that the president is out of touch with voters on key issues such as affordability.
Greene told Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” that the “dam is breaking” in terms of Trump’s hold onsupport within the party and that she expects Republicans to struggle in next year’s midterm elections.
Citingthe backlash to Trump’s comments on the death of director Rob Reiner, the 13 HouseRepublicans who voted with Democrats to overturn Trump’s executive order on collective bargaining and Indiana Republicans’ rejection of the president’s redistricting push, Greene said she expected “pushback” within the party to grow as lawmakers enter the campaign phase for the upcoming elections.
“I think the midterms are going to be very hard for Republicans,” Greene said. “I’m one of the people that’s willing to admit the truth and say I don’t see Republicans winning the midterms right now.” [….]
Greene had carved out a high-profile role as one of Trump’s most vocal allies, first in the “Make America Great Again” movement and then with her support for the “America First” agenda. But after weeks of speaking out against the president on several issues, Greene and Trump had an acrimonious public split last month after she joined with Democrats on a discharge position to compel a House vote calling on the Justice Department to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein….
Speaking to The Washington Post this week, Greene described herself as a “bellwether” who is closely attuned to Trump’s base. “I say it, and then within four to six months, everybody’s saying the same thing,” she said….
“He’s got real problems with Republicans within the House and the Senate that will be breaking with him on more things to come,” she added.
Greene also said Trump’s supporters “didn’t appreciate” the president’s reaction to the death of Rob Reiner, who was found stabbed to death alongside his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner, in their Los Angeles home Sunday. The couple’s son Nick Reiner faces two counts of first-degree murder, among other charges, in their deaths.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: "What I'd like to see from the president is empathy for Americans. Donald Trump is a billionaire and he's the president. When he looks into a camera and says 'affordability is a hoax,' he's talking to Americans that are suffering and have been for many years now."
Moderate Republicans in the House are rebelling against Speaker Mike Johnson and his determination not to extend the ACA subsidies.
Meredith Lee Hill writes at Politico about another sign of Trump’s waning popularity and power: Frustrated GOP moderates join Democrats to force Obamacare extension vote.
Four House Republicans joined Democrats Wednesday to force a House vote on a straight three-year extension of the enhanced Obamacare tax credits that will expire Dec. 31, delivering a sharp rebuke to Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders.
Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York, Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania and Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania signed the discharge petition filed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — hours after House GOP leaders rejected attempts by Fitzpatrick and other Republican moderates to seek a floor vote on extending the subsidies used by more than 20 million Americans.
Fitzpatrick said in a late-night House Rules Committee meeting Tuesday that “the only thing worse than a clean extension … would be expiration, and I would make that decision.” Lawler added that “the only feasible path forward is a discharge petition” if GOP leader reject a floor vote.
Under House rules, a completed discharge petition is subject to a waiting period, meaning no vote could happen until next month — though Johnson could choose to move sooner.
“We have worked for months to craft a two-party solution to address these expiring healthcare credits,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement Wednesday. “Our only request was a Floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected. … Unfortunately, it is House leadership themselves that have forced this outcome.”
Jeffries told reporters Wednesday his discharge petition is “the most straightforward path to ensuring that tens of millions of Americans don’t have their health care ripped away from them because of the expiration of the Affordable Care Act tax credits.”
"It's idiotic, it's political malpractice," Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) told reporters Tuesday of Johnson refusing to give them an ACA extension vote.Lawler, and other moderate Republicans didn't rule out joining Democrats to force a vote on a three-year extension of the subsidies, Axios reported.
— Ken Bazinet (@kenbazinet.bsky.social) 2025-12-16T21:38:46.444Z
Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon about the Republican rebellion: Republicans are quiet quitting on Trump.
Donald Trump is worried that Republicans aren’t as afraid of him as they used to be. Despite his self-billing as a dealmaker, the president has only ever had one tool to control his party: fear. GOP politicians have been afraid of career damage and literal physical harm if they crossed him. Trump is not above reminding elected officials that he has unhinged followers who are known to be violent. But as his approval ratings fall and the 2026 midterm elections inch closer, it seems Republicans are slightly less worried about the president’s wrath.
The first indicator was the House vote on Nov. 18 to release the Epstein files against Trump’s expressed wishes. But the biggest sign that the president’s grip on power is weakening came last week, when a majority of Republicans in the Indiana statehouse struck down a gerrymandering bill Trump had demanded.
As I argued in the latest Standing Room Only newsletter, this context helps explain why Trump responded to the death of beloved director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele with an ugliness that’s shocking — even for this president. Although the Los Angeles Police Department had arrested the couple’s son for the apparent homicide, Trump insinuated on Truth Social that it was one of his own followers who killed the Reiners out of revenge for their anti-Trump activism. He doubled down when asked about it by reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. The message was hard to miss: If you oppose Trump, he wishes you dead.
So far, his escalation doesn’t seem to be intimidating Republicans. Indiana Republicans were subject to an onslaught of death threats and abuse that including text messages sent to the friends of the grandson of one state senator. Most voted against Trump’s gerrymandering bill anyway. While Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., pretended not to have heard Trump’s response to Reiner’s death, as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye documented, most right-wing media, including Fox News, actually criticized Trump for his behavior.
These are promising signs, but it’s not worth holding your breath waiting for GOP politicians to openly turn on a president who demands absolute loyalty. Instead of public rebellion, most Republicans seem to be engaged in a form of quiet quitting. They won’t go out of their way to resist Trump, but they are losing enthusiasm for defending him. They’re struggling to hide their frustration or their scheming for a post-Trump world. Overall, the posture is one of lying low, waiting for the old man to be gone so they can begin the project of rebuilding the GOP and their own careers in a post-Trump era.
Read the rest at Salon.
Trump is also becoming noticeably less involved in actually running the government (gift link): The White House Is a Lost Cause.
There is a presidency at work in Washington, but it is not clear that there is a president at work in the Oval Office.
Ask Donald Trump about the goings on of his administration, and there is a good chance he’ll defer to a deputy rather than answer the question. “I don’t know her,” he said when asked about his nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, earlier this year. “I listened to the recommendation of Bobby,” he said, pointing to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.
Ask Trump for insight into why his administration made a choice or to explain a particular decision, and he’ll be at a loss for words. Ask him to comment on a scandal? He’ll plead ignorance. “I know nothing about it,” Trump said last week, when asked about the latest tranche of photographs released from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.
None of this on its own means the president isn’t working or paying attention to the duties of his office. But consider the rest of the evidence. He is by most accounts isolated from the outside world. He does not travel the country and rarely meets with ordinary Americans outside the White House. He is shuttled from one Trump resort to another to play golf and hold court with donors, supporters and hangers-on.
Ronald Reagan took regular meetings with congressional leaders to discuss his legislative agenda; George H.W. Bush spearheaded negotiations with the nation’s allies and led the United States to war in Iraq; and George W. Bush was, for better or worse, “the decider” who performed leadership for the cameras as much as he tried to exercise it from the Oval Office. Trump is a ubiquitous cultural presence, but there is no outward sign that he is an active participant in running the national government. He was mostly absent during discussions of his signature legislation — the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act — and practically AWOL during the monthlong government shutdown.
It is difficult for any president to get a clear read on the state of the nation; it takes work and discipline to clear the distance between the office and the people. But Trump, in his second term, does not seem to care about the disconnect. Abraham Lincoln once remarked that it would “never do for a president to have guards with drawn sabers at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor.” A president has to be engaged — attentive to both the government and the public he was elected to serve.
Trump is neither. He is uninterested in anyone except his most devoted fans, and would rather collect gifts from foreign businessmen than take the reins of his administration. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview with Vanity Fair, commenting on the work of Elon Musk in the first months of the year. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
A bit more:
Russell Vought
Instead, the work of the White House has been delegated to a handful of high-level advisers. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the de facto shadow president for domestic affairs. As one senior government official told ProPublica, “It feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.” It was Vought who orchestrated the administration’s assault on the federal bureaucracy, including the wholesale destruction of U.S.A.I.D. It was Vought who either froze or canceled hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for anti-poverty programs, H.I.V. reduction initiatives and research into science, medicine and technology. And it is Vought who has been pushing the boundaries of executive power as he attempts to turn the federal government into little more than an extension of the personal will of the president — as channeled through himself, of course.
If Vought is the nation’s shadow president for domestic policy, then Stephen Miller is its shadow president for internal security. Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, is using the president’s authority to try to transform the ethnic mix of the country — to make America white again, or at least whiter than it is now. He is the primary force behind the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection into a roving deportation force. He has pushed both agencies to step up their enforcement operations, targeting schools, restaurants, farms and other work sites and detaining anyone agents can get their hands on, regardless of citizenship or legal status. It is Miller who is behind the militarization of ICE, the use of the National Guard to occupy Democrat-led cities and assist deportation efforts, and the plan to blanket the United States with a network of detention camps for unauthorized immigrants and anyone else caught in his dragnet.
In other words, the Nazis are running White House policy. Use the gift link to read more.
The latest White House mess is the Vanity Fair profile of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
Matt Dixon at NBC News: White House scrambles to address Susie Wiles’ explosive Vanity Fair interviews.
Susie Wiles generally helps quietly shape headlines. She is rarely the focus of them.
That changed in dramatic fashion Tuesday after Vanity Fair published a deeply reported profile of the 68-year-old White House chief of staff, whose decades-long career in politics has been defined by a measured, steady-the-ship tone, never one that could be construed as undermining her boss.
In the two-part Vanity Fair piece — which included 11 interviews over nearly a year, with the White House’s cooperation — Wiles comes off as far more candid than her public persona. She not only speaks openly about both President Donald Trump and those who make up the core of his administration, but appears to acknowledge that at times she has been at odds with some of the policies that have been central to Trump’s second term. While not unusual for a chief of staff to disagree with the president they serve, those concerns generally remain part of private conversations.
Susie Wiles
Wiles revealed there had been “huge disagreements” over implementing tariffs, acknowledged that the administration must “look harder” at its process for mass deportation and said she had to “get on board” with Trump’s decision to give blanket pardons to Jan. 6 defendants. She said she initially believed only those who did not commit violent acts should be pardoned.
The profile prompted an all-hands-on-deck pushback from the White House and Trump’s political orbit. The central talking point became that the profile lacked context, and supporters blasted the outlet for being unfair rather than offering any direct refutation of the authenticity of quotes or what was reported.
Wiles herself also offered rare public condemnation.
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” she posted on social media. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
In an interview with the New York Post, Trump defended his top staffer.
“I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided,”he said.
Trump added “she’s fantastic” when asked if he continues to have full confidence in Wiles.
More interesting stories:
AP: Trump orders blockade of ‘sanctioned oil tankers’ into Venezuela, ramping up pressure on Maduro.
CNN: Second near midair collision reported near Venezuela involving US Air Force tanker.
The Independent: Bari Weiss’ much-hyped CBS News town hall with Erika Kirk was a massive ratings flop.
Jacob Ware at Lawfare: A Terrorism of Vengeance. Understanding incels, school shooters, and the new category of terrorism, “nihilistic violent extremism.”
Politico: Judge lets Trump’s ballroom construction proceed.
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
#ACASubsidies #DonaldTrump #MarjorieTaylorGreene #ModerateHouseRepublicans #PaulKrugman #RussellVought #StephenMiller #SusieWiles #USEconomy
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Wednesday Reads: Is Trump’s Power Waning?
Good Day!!
I haven’t been feeling well for the past several days, and I’ve only been following the news superficially. There is so much going on, but I’ll do my best. Here’s the latest.
Trump is scheduled to give a speech from the White House tonight at 9PM.
AP: Trump is previewing his 2026 agenda in an address to the nation as his popularity wanes.
President Donald Trump intends to preview his agenda for next year and beyond in a live speech from the White House on Wednesday night. His remarks are coming at a crucial time as he tries to rebuild his steadily eroding popularity.
The White House offered few details about what the Republican president intends to emphasize in the 9 p.m. EST speech. Public polling shows most U.S. adults are frustrated with his handling of the economy as inflation picked up after his tariffs raised prices and hiring slowed.
Trump’s mass deportations of immigrants have also proved unpopular even as he is viewed favorably for halting crossings along the U.S. border with Mexico. The public has generally been nonplussed by his income tax cuts and globe-trotting efforts to end conflicts, attack suspected drug boats near Venezuela and attract investment dollars into the United States.
In 2026, Trump and his party face a referendum on their leadership as the nation heads into the midterm elections that will decide control of the House and the Senate.
Trump has said that he thinks more Americans would back him if they simply heard him describe his track record. Administration officials say investment commitments for new factories will reverse the recent decline in manufacturing jobs and that consumer activity will improve dramatically as people receive increased tax refunds next year.
“It has been a great year for our Country, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” Trump said in a Tuesday social media post announcing the speech.
Sorry, Grandpa. Your economy sucks because of your idiotic tariffs, your cruel mass deportations, and your general incompetence.
The New York Times: Trump Dangles Cash Payments to Buoy Voters’ Views of the Economy.
Tariffs are unpopular, prices remain stubbornly high and Americans are souring on President Trump’s handling of the economy.
So Mr. Trump has reprised a familiar political strategy: promise people cash.
The president has repeatedly floated the idea of sending one-time $2,000 rebate checks to many families.Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
The White House is trying to tamp down Americans’ economic anxieties by dangling the prospect of checks and other paydays next year, hoping that the money might assuage voters who blame the president for their rising cost of living.
Mr. Trump, who is set to address the nation on Wednesday night, has repeatedly teased the idea of sending one-time $2,000 rebate checks to many families, funded using money collected from his sweeping global tariffs. But he has not devised a detailed plan for providing the rebates, an expensive policy that Republicans in Congress must approve and one that they have not yet considered.
The president has also begun hyping up the tax refunds that Americans are slated to receive in 2026. For many people, these cash payments are expected to be larger than they were last year, after Republicans adopted a sprawling set of tax cuts in July.
Both Mr. Trump and members of his administration have periodically drawn an equivalence between the supposed tariff rebates and the enacted tax law. They have claimed the money could bolster the economy and alleviate some of the financial strains on families, even at a time when Mr. Trump maintains that much of the talk about affordability is a “hoax.”
“Next year is projected to be the largest tax refund season ever, and we’re going to be giving back refunds out of the tariffs, because we’ve taken in literally trillions of dollars,” Mr. Trump said at a cabinet meeting last week. “And we’re going to be giving a nice dividend to the people, in addition to reducing debt.”
But economists take a dimmer view. Even if Americans were to delight in a series of new government-issued checks, the payments would hardly address the reasons that prices remain so high — including a shortage in housing that has driven up rents and mortgages and the global tariffs that have made imports more expensive. And the money that may soon be sloshing around the economy could end up worsening inflation, undermining Mr. Trump’s own economic goals.
Alex Durante, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, said that simply “pumping money” into the economy — without any other underlying changes — threatened to “just generate a cycle where you continue to get higher prices.”
Paul Krugman at his Substack: An A+++++ Economy, My A++. Trump made big boasts but he isn’t delivering.
When Politico recently asked Donald Trump to grade the current U.S. economy, he replied “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” He made this boast at a time when actual economic data were still scarce, a consequence of the government shutdown that stopped or delayed key information about the state of the job market.
Yesterday the report on employment during the month of November finally arrived. And the message of the report on the state of the US economy was clear: A+++++ my A++. While it’s too soon to declare that we’re in a recession, the data are at least pre-recessionary: that is, the numbers are weak enough that we should be seriously worried that a recession is coming. And that’s a state of affairs completely at odds with Trump’s rose-colored — spray-tanned? — picture.
I’ll talk about the reasons the gap between Trump’s big boasts and the glum reality matters in a minute. First, however, let’s talk about what we learned from yesterday’s report.
Most importantly, the data show a weak labor market. Employment isn’t falling off a cliff, but job growth has been weak and hasn’t kept pace with the number of people seeking work. The headline unemployment rate in November was 4.6 percent, up from an average of 4 percent in 2024. That number is close to triggering the Sahm Rule, an economic rule of thumb devised by Claudia Sahm, a former economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, that has historically been highly successful at identifying the early stages of a recession.
We can’t do a strict application of the Sahm Rule yet because Sahm’s method is based on the average unemployment rate over the past three months. Unfortunately, the shutdown prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics from collecting key data in October. But if we do an interpolation of October’s unemployment rate by averaging over September’s rate of 4.4% and November’s rate of 4.6%, we can estimate that October’s unemployment rate was 4.5%. And those 3 months of unemployment numbers bring us within a whisker of the unemployment rise that, according to the Sahm Rule, signals that a recession is on the horizon.
The state of the economy looks even worse if we take a wider view of the labor market. The BLS calculates 6 different measures of unemployment. The most commonly cited number is U-3 — the number of workers who are actively seeking jobs but haven’t found them. But the broadest measure is U-6, which includes underemployed workers stuck in part-time employment and discouraged workers who have temporarily given up job search. And U-6 has risen sharply since January, when Trump took office:
Source: BLS
Further evidence consistent with a poor and deteriorating job market is data showing that the number of job-seekers who are long-term unemployed – that is, have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more – has risen by almost a third (from 1.45 million to 1.91 million) since 2024. This means that the unemployed are finding it harder to find jobs.
Read more details at the Substack link.
Most Americans aren’t stupid. They can see how much prices have gone up on necessities like food and electricity. Trump is losing popularity even with his MAGA base.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: "I think the midterms are gonna be very hard for Republicans. I'm one of the people that's willing to admit the truth and say I don't see Republicans winning the midterms right now, so that doesn't bode well for Mike Johnson."
Marjorie Taylor Greene was once one of Trump’s biggest supporters; now she’s turned on him. Victoria Craw at The Washington Post: Marjorie Taylor Greene says ‘dam is breaking’ within GOP against Trump.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) on Tuesday said President Donald Trump has “real problems” within the Republican Party, adding in an interview with CNN that the president is out of touch with voters on key issues such as affordability.
Greene told Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” that the “dam is breaking” in terms of Trump’s hold onsupport within the party and that she expects Republicans to struggle in next year’s midterm elections.
Citingthe backlash to Trump’s comments on the death of director Rob Reiner, the 13 HouseRepublicans who voted with Democrats to overturn Trump’s executive order on collective bargaining and Indiana Republicans’ rejection of the president’s redistricting push, Greene said she expected “pushback” within the party to grow as lawmakers enter the campaign phase for the upcoming elections.
“I think the midterms are going to be very hard for Republicans,” Greene said. “I’m one of the people that’s willing to admit the truth and say I don’t see Republicans winning the midterms right now.” [….]
Greene had carved out a high-profile role as one of Trump’s most vocal allies, first in the “Make America Great Again” movement and then with her support for the “America First” agenda. But after weeks of speaking out against the president on several issues, Greene and Trump had an acrimonious public split last month after she joined with Democrats on a discharge position to compel a House vote calling on the Justice Department to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein….
Speaking to The Washington Post this week, Greene described herself as a “bellwether” who is closely attuned to Trump’s base. “I say it, and then within four to six months, everybody’s saying the same thing,” she said….
“He’s got real problems with Republicans within the House and the Senate that will be breaking with him on more things to come,” she added.
Greene also said Trump’s supporters “didn’t appreciate” the president’s reaction to the death of Rob Reiner, who was found stabbed to death alongside his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner, in their Los Angeles home Sunday. The couple’s son Nick Reiner faces two counts of first-degree murder, among other charges, in their deaths.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: "What I'd like to see from the president is empathy for Americans. Donald Trump is a billionaire and he's the president. When he looks into a camera and says 'affordability is a hoax,' he's talking to Americans that are suffering and have been for many years now."
Moderate Republicans in the House are rebelling against Speaker Mike Johnson and his determination not to extend the ACA subsidies.
Meredith Lee Hill writes at Politico about another sign of Trump’s waning popularity and power: Frustrated GOP moderates join Democrats to force Obamacare extension vote.
Four House Republicans joined Democrats Wednesday to force a House vote on a straight three-year extension of the enhanced Obamacare tax credits that will expire Dec. 31, delivering a sharp rebuke to Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders.
Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York, Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania and Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania signed the discharge petition filed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — hours after House GOP leaders rejected attempts by Fitzpatrick and other Republican moderates to seek a floor vote on extending the subsidies used by more than 20 million Americans.
Fitzpatrick said in a late-night House Rules Committee meeting Tuesday that “the only thing worse than a clean extension … would be expiration, and I would make that decision.” Lawler added that “the only feasible path forward is a discharge petition” if GOP leader reject a floor vote.
Under House rules, a completed discharge petition is subject to a waiting period, meaning no vote could happen until next month — though Johnson could choose to move sooner.
“We have worked for months to craft a two-party solution to address these expiring healthcare credits,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement Wednesday. “Our only request was a Floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected. … Unfortunately, it is House leadership themselves that have forced this outcome.”
Jeffries told reporters Wednesday his discharge petition is “the most straightforward path to ensuring that tens of millions of Americans don’t have their health care ripped away from them because of the expiration of the Affordable Care Act tax credits.”
"It's idiotic, it's political malpractice," Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) told reporters Tuesday of Johnson refusing to give them an ACA extension vote.Lawler, and other moderate Republicans didn't rule out joining Democrats to force a vote on a three-year extension of the subsidies, Axios reported.
— Ken Bazinet (@kenbazinet.bsky.social) 2025-12-16T21:38:46.444Z
Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon about the Republican rebellion: Republicans are quiet quitting on Trump.
Donald Trump is worried that Republicans aren’t as afraid of him as they used to be. Despite his self-billing as a dealmaker, the president has only ever had one tool to control his party: fear. GOP politicians have been afraid of career damage and literal physical harm if they crossed him. Trump is not above reminding elected officials that he has unhinged followers who are known to be violent. But as his approval ratings fall and the 2026 midterm elections inch closer, it seems Republicans are slightly less worried about the president’s wrath.
The first indicator was the House vote on Nov. 18 to release the Epstein files against Trump’s expressed wishes. But the biggest sign that the president’s grip on power is weakening came last week, when a majority of Republicans in the Indiana statehouse struck down a gerrymandering bill Trump had demanded.
As I argued in the latest Standing Room Only newsletter, this context helps explain why Trump responded to the death of beloved director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele with an ugliness that’s shocking — even for this president. Although the Los Angeles Police Department had arrested the couple’s son for the apparent homicide, Trump insinuated on Truth Social that it was one of his own followers who killed the Reiners out of revenge for their anti-Trump activism. He doubled down when asked about it by reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. The message was hard to miss: If you oppose Trump, he wishes you dead.
So far, his escalation doesn’t seem to be intimidating Republicans. Indiana Republicans were subject to an onslaught of death threats and abuse that including text messages sent to the friends of the grandson of one state senator. Most voted against Trump’s gerrymandering bill anyway. While Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., pretended not to have heard Trump’s response to Reiner’s death, as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye documented, most right-wing media, including Fox News, actually criticized Trump for his behavior.
These are promising signs, but it’s not worth holding your breath waiting for GOP politicians to openly turn on a president who demands absolute loyalty. Instead of public rebellion, most Republicans seem to be engaged in a form of quiet quitting. They won’t go out of their way to resist Trump, but they are losing enthusiasm for defending him. They’re struggling to hide their frustration or their scheming for a post-Trump world. Overall, the posture is one of lying low, waiting for the old man to be gone so they can begin the project of rebuilding the GOP and their own careers in a post-Trump era.
Read the rest at Salon.
Trump is also becoming noticeably less involved in actually running the government (gift link): The White House Is a Lost Cause.
There is a presidency at work in Washington, but it is not clear that there is a president at work in the Oval Office.
Ask Donald Trump about the goings on of his administration, and there is a good chance he’ll defer to a deputy rather than answer the question. “I don’t know her,” he said when asked about his nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, earlier this year. “I listened to the recommendation of Bobby,” he said, pointing to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.
Ask Trump for insight into why his administration made a choice or to explain a particular decision, and he’ll be at a loss for words. Ask him to comment on a scandal? He’ll plead ignorance. “I know nothing about it,” Trump said last week, when asked about the latest tranche of photographs released from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.
None of this on its own means the president isn’t working or paying attention to the duties of his office. But consider the rest of the evidence. He is by most accounts isolated from the outside world. He does not travel the country and rarely meets with ordinary Americans outside the White House. He is shuttled from one Trump resort to another to play golf and hold court with donors, supporters and hangers-on.
Ronald Reagan took regular meetings with congressional leaders to discuss his legislative agenda; George H.W. Bush spearheaded negotiations with the nation’s allies and led the United States to war in Iraq; and George W. Bush was, for better or worse, “the decider” who performed leadership for the cameras as much as he tried to exercise it from the Oval Office. Trump is a ubiquitous cultural presence, but there is no outward sign that he is an active participant in running the national government. He was mostly absent during discussions of his signature legislation — the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act — and practically AWOL during the monthlong government shutdown.
It is difficult for any president to get a clear read on the state of the nation; it takes work and discipline to clear the distance between the office and the people. But Trump, in his second term, does not seem to care about the disconnect. Abraham Lincoln once remarked that it would “never do for a president to have guards with drawn sabers at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor.” A president has to be engaged — attentive to both the government and the public he was elected to serve.
Trump is neither. He is uninterested in anyone except his most devoted fans, and would rather collect gifts from foreign businessmen than take the reins of his administration. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview with Vanity Fair, commenting on the work of Elon Musk in the first months of the year. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
A bit more:
Russell Vought
Instead, the work of the White House has been delegated to a handful of high-level advisers. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the de facto shadow president for domestic affairs. As one senior government official told ProPublica, “It feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.” It was Vought who orchestrated the administration’s assault on the federal bureaucracy, including the wholesale destruction of U.S.A.I.D. It was Vought who either froze or canceled hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for anti-poverty programs, H.I.V. reduction initiatives and research into science, medicine and technology. And it is Vought who has been pushing the boundaries of executive power as he attempts to turn the federal government into little more than an extension of the personal will of the president — as channeled through himself, of course.
If Vought is the nation’s shadow president for domestic policy, then Stephen Miller is its shadow president for internal security. Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, is using the president’s authority to try to transform the ethnic mix of the country — to make America white again, or at least whiter than it is now. He is the primary force behind the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection into a roving deportation force. He has pushed both agencies to step up their enforcement operations, targeting schools, restaurants, farms and other work sites and detaining anyone agents can get their hands on, regardless of citizenship or legal status. It is Miller who is behind the militarization of ICE, the use of the National Guard to occupy Democrat-led cities and assist deportation efforts, and the plan to blanket the United States with a network of detention camps for unauthorized immigrants and anyone else caught in his dragnet.
In other words, the Nazis are running White House policy. Use the gift link to read more.
The latest White House mess is the Vanity Fair profile of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
Matt Dixon at NBC News: White House scrambles to address Susie Wiles’ explosive Vanity Fair interviews.
Susie Wiles generally helps quietly shape headlines. She is rarely the focus of them.
That changed in dramatic fashion Tuesday after Vanity Fair published a deeply reported profile of the 68-year-old White House chief of staff, whose decades-long career in politics has been defined by a measured, steady-the-ship tone, never one that could be construed as undermining her boss.
In the two-part Vanity Fair piece — which included 11 interviews over nearly a year, with the White House’s cooperation — Wiles comes off as far more candid than her public persona. She not only speaks openly about both President Donald Trump and those who make up the core of his administration, but appears to acknowledge that at times she has been at odds with some of the policies that have been central to Trump’s second term. While not unusual for a chief of staff to disagree with the president they serve, those concerns generally remain part of private conversations.
Susie Wiles
Wiles revealed there had been “huge disagreements” over implementing tariffs, acknowledged that the administration must “look harder” at its process for mass deportation and said she had to “get on board” with Trump’s decision to give blanket pardons to Jan. 6 defendants. She said she initially believed only those who did not commit violent acts should be pardoned.
The profile prompted an all-hands-on-deck pushback from the White House and Trump’s political orbit. The central talking point became that the profile lacked context, and supporters blasted the outlet for being unfair rather than offering any direct refutation of the authenticity of quotes or what was reported.
Wiles herself also offered rare public condemnation.
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” she posted on social media. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
In an interview with the New York Post, Trump defended his top staffer.
“I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided,”he said.
Trump added “she’s fantastic” when asked if he continues to have full confidence in Wiles.
More interesting stories:
AP: Trump orders blockade of ‘sanctioned oil tankers’ into Venezuela, ramping up pressure on Maduro.
CNN: Second near midair collision reported near Venezuela involving US Air Force tanker.
The Independent: Bari Weiss’ much-hyped CBS News town hall with Erika Kirk was a massive ratings flop.
Jacob Ware at Lawfare: A Terrorism of Vengeance. Understanding incels, school shooters, and the new category of terrorism, “nihilistic violent extremism.”
Politico: Judge lets Trump’s ballroom construction proceed.
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
#ACASubsidies #DonaldTrump #MarjorieTaylorGreene #ModerateHouseRepublicans #PaulKrugman #RussellVought #StephenMiller #SusieWiles #USEconomy
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Wednesday Reads: Is Trump’s Power Waning?
Good Day!!
I haven’t been feeling well for the past several days, and I’ve only been following the news superficially. There is so much going on, but I’ll do my best. Here’s the latest.
Trump is scheduled to give a speech from the White House tonight at 9PM.
AP: Trump is previewing his 2026 agenda in an address to the nation as his popularity wanes.
President Donald Trump intends to preview his agenda for next year and beyond in a live speech from the White House on Wednesday night. His remarks are coming at a crucial time as he tries to rebuild his steadily eroding popularity.
The White House offered few details about what the Republican president intends to emphasize in the 9 p.m. EST speech. Public polling shows most U.S. adults are frustrated with his handling of the economy as inflation picked up after his tariffs raised prices and hiring slowed.
Trump’s mass deportations of immigrants have also proved unpopular even as he is viewed favorably for halting crossings along the U.S. border with Mexico. The public has generally been nonplussed by his income tax cuts and globe-trotting efforts to end conflicts, attack suspected drug boats near Venezuela and attract investment dollars into the United States.
In 2026, Trump and his party face a referendum on their leadership as the nation heads into the midterm elections that will decide control of the House and the Senate.
Trump has said that he thinks more Americans would back him if they simply heard him describe his track record. Administration officials say investment commitments for new factories will reverse the recent decline in manufacturing jobs and that consumer activity will improve dramatically as people receive increased tax refunds next year.
“It has been a great year for our Country, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” Trump said in a Tuesday social media post announcing the speech.
Sorry, Grandpa. Your economy sucks because of your idiotic tariffs, your cruel mass deportations, and your general incompetence.
The New York Times: Trump Dangles Cash Payments to Buoy Voters’ Views of the Economy.
Tariffs are unpopular, prices remain stubbornly high and Americans are souring on President Trump’s handling of the economy.
So Mr. Trump has reprised a familiar political strategy: promise people cash.
The president has repeatedly floated the idea of sending one-time $2,000 rebate checks to many families.Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times
The White House is trying to tamp down Americans’ economic anxieties by dangling the prospect of checks and other paydays next year, hoping that the money might assuage voters who blame the president for their rising cost of living.
Mr. Trump, who is set to address the nation on Wednesday night, has repeatedly teased the idea of sending one-time $2,000 rebate checks to many families, funded using money collected from his sweeping global tariffs. But he has not devised a detailed plan for providing the rebates, an expensive policy that Republicans in Congress must approve and one that they have not yet considered.
The president has also begun hyping up the tax refunds that Americans are slated to receive in 2026. For many people, these cash payments are expected to be larger than they were last year, after Republicans adopted a sprawling set of tax cuts in July.
Both Mr. Trump and members of his administration have periodically drawn an equivalence between the supposed tariff rebates and the enacted tax law. They have claimed the money could bolster the economy and alleviate some of the financial strains on families, even at a time when Mr. Trump maintains that much of the talk about affordability is a “hoax.”
“Next year is projected to be the largest tax refund season ever, and we’re going to be giving back refunds out of the tariffs, because we’ve taken in literally trillions of dollars,” Mr. Trump said at a cabinet meeting last week. “And we’re going to be giving a nice dividend to the people, in addition to reducing debt.”
But economists take a dimmer view. Even if Americans were to delight in a series of new government-issued checks, the payments would hardly address the reasons that prices remain so high — including a shortage in housing that has driven up rents and mortgages and the global tariffs that have made imports more expensive. And the money that may soon be sloshing around the economy could end up worsening inflation, undermining Mr. Trump’s own economic goals.
Alex Durante, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, said that simply “pumping money” into the economy — without any other underlying changes — threatened to “just generate a cycle where you continue to get higher prices.”
Paul Krugman at his Substack: An A+++++ Economy, My A++. Trump made big boasts but he isn’t delivering.
When Politico recently asked Donald Trump to grade the current U.S. economy, he replied “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” He made this boast at a time when actual economic data were still scarce, a consequence of the government shutdown that stopped or delayed key information about the state of the job market.
Yesterday the report on employment during the month of November finally arrived. And the message of the report on the state of the US economy was clear: A+++++ my A++. While it’s too soon to declare that we’re in a recession, the data are at least pre-recessionary: that is, the numbers are weak enough that we should be seriously worried that a recession is coming. And that’s a state of affairs completely at odds with Trump’s rose-colored — spray-tanned? — picture.
I’ll talk about the reasons the gap between Trump’s big boasts and the glum reality matters in a minute. First, however, let’s talk about what we learned from yesterday’s report.
Most importantly, the data show a weak labor market. Employment isn’t falling off a cliff, but job growth has been weak and hasn’t kept pace with the number of people seeking work. The headline unemployment rate in November was 4.6 percent, up from an average of 4 percent in 2024. That number is close to triggering the Sahm Rule, an economic rule of thumb devised by Claudia Sahm, a former economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, that has historically been highly successful at identifying the early stages of a recession.
We can’t do a strict application of the Sahm Rule yet because Sahm’s method is based on the average unemployment rate over the past three months. Unfortunately, the shutdown prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics from collecting key data in October. But if we do an interpolation of October’s unemployment rate by averaging over September’s rate of 4.4% and November’s rate of 4.6%, we can estimate that October’s unemployment rate was 4.5%. And those 3 months of unemployment numbers bring us within a whisker of the unemployment rise that, according to the Sahm Rule, signals that a recession is on the horizon.
The state of the economy looks even worse if we take a wider view of the labor market. The BLS calculates 6 different measures of unemployment. The most commonly cited number is U-3 — the number of workers who are actively seeking jobs but haven’t found them. But the broadest measure is U-6, which includes underemployed workers stuck in part-time employment and discouraged workers who have temporarily given up job search. And U-6 has risen sharply since January, when Trump took office:
Source: BLS
Further evidence consistent with a poor and deteriorating job market is data showing that the number of job-seekers who are long-term unemployed – that is, have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more – has risen by almost a third (from 1.45 million to 1.91 million) since 2024. This means that the unemployed are finding it harder to find jobs.
Read more details at the Substack link.
Most Americans aren’t stupid. They can see how much prices have gone up on necessities like food and electricity. Trump is losing popularity even with his MAGA base.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: "I think the midterms are gonna be very hard for Republicans. I'm one of the people that's willing to admit the truth and say I don't see Republicans winning the midterms right now, so that doesn't bode well for Mike Johnson."
Marjorie Taylor Greene was once one of Trump’s biggest supporters; now she’s turned on him. Victoria Craw at The Washington Post: Marjorie Taylor Greene says ‘dam is breaking’ within GOP against Trump.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) on Tuesday said President Donald Trump has “real problems” within the Republican Party, adding in an interview with CNN that the president is out of touch with voters on key issues such as affordability.
Greene told Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” that the “dam is breaking” in terms of Trump’s hold onsupport within the party and that she expects Republicans to struggle in next year’s midterm elections.
Citingthe backlash to Trump’s comments on the death of director Rob Reiner, the 13 HouseRepublicans who voted with Democrats to overturn Trump’s executive order on collective bargaining and Indiana Republicans’ rejection of the president’s redistricting push, Greene said she expected “pushback” within the party to grow as lawmakers enter the campaign phase for the upcoming elections.
“I think the midterms are going to be very hard for Republicans,” Greene said. “I’m one of the people that’s willing to admit the truth and say I don’t see Republicans winning the midterms right now.” [….]
Greene had carved out a high-profile role as one of Trump’s most vocal allies, first in the “Make America Great Again” movement and then with her support for the “America First” agenda. But after weeks of speaking out against the president on several issues, Greene and Trump had an acrimonious public split last month after she joined with Democrats on a discharge position to compel a House vote calling on the Justice Department to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein….
Speaking to The Washington Post this week, Greene described herself as a “bellwether” who is closely attuned to Trump’s base. “I say it, and then within four to six months, everybody’s saying the same thing,” she said….
“He’s got real problems with Republicans within the House and the Senate that will be breaking with him on more things to come,” she added.
Greene also said Trump’s supporters “didn’t appreciate” the president’s reaction to the death of Rob Reiner, who was found stabbed to death alongside his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner, in their Los Angeles home Sunday. The couple’s son Nick Reiner faces two counts of first-degree murder, among other charges, in their deaths.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: "What I'd like to see from the president is empathy for Americans. Donald Trump is a billionaire and he's the president. When he looks into a camera and says 'affordability is a hoax,' he's talking to Americans that are suffering and have been for many years now."
Moderate Republicans in the House are rebelling against Speaker Mike Johnson and his determination not to extend the ACA subsidies.
Meredith Lee Hill writes at Politico about another sign of Trump’s waning popularity and power: Frustrated GOP moderates join Democrats to force Obamacare extension vote.
Four House Republicans joined Democrats Wednesday to force a House vote on a straight three-year extension of the enhanced Obamacare tax credits that will expire Dec. 31, delivering a sharp rebuke to Speaker Mike Johnson and other GOP leaders.
Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Mike Lawler of New York, Rob Bresnahan of Pennsylvania and Ryan Mackenzie of Pennsylvania signed the discharge petition filed by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — hours after House GOP leaders rejected attempts by Fitzpatrick and other Republican moderates to seek a floor vote on extending the subsidies used by more than 20 million Americans.
Fitzpatrick said in a late-night House Rules Committee meeting Tuesday that “the only thing worse than a clean extension … would be expiration, and I would make that decision.” Lawler added that “the only feasible path forward is a discharge petition” if GOP leader reject a floor vote.
Under House rules, a completed discharge petition is subject to a waiting period, meaning no vote could happen until next month — though Johnson could choose to move sooner.
“We have worked for months to craft a two-party solution to address these expiring healthcare credits,” Fitzpatrick said in a statement Wednesday. “Our only request was a Floor vote on this compromise, so that the American People’s voice could be heard on this issue. That request was rejected. … Unfortunately, it is House leadership themselves that have forced this outcome.”
Jeffries told reporters Wednesday his discharge petition is “the most straightforward path to ensuring that tens of millions of Americans don’t have their health care ripped away from them because of the expiration of the Affordable Care Act tax credits.”
"It's idiotic, it's political malpractice," Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) told reporters Tuesday of Johnson refusing to give them an ACA extension vote.Lawler, and other moderate Republicans didn't rule out joining Democrats to force a vote on a three-year extension of the subsidies, Axios reported.
— Ken Bazinet (@kenbazinet.bsky.social) 2025-12-16T21:38:46.444Z
Amanda Marcotte writes at Salon about the Republican rebellion: Republicans are quiet quitting on Trump.
Donald Trump is worried that Republicans aren’t as afraid of him as they used to be. Despite his self-billing as a dealmaker, the president has only ever had one tool to control his party: fear. GOP politicians have been afraid of career damage and literal physical harm if they crossed him. Trump is not above reminding elected officials that he has unhinged followers who are known to be violent. But as his approval ratings fall and the 2026 midterm elections inch closer, it seems Republicans are slightly less worried about the president’s wrath.
The first indicator was the House vote on Nov. 18 to release the Epstein files against Trump’s expressed wishes. But the biggest sign that the president’s grip on power is weakening came last week, when a majority of Republicans in the Indiana statehouse struck down a gerrymandering bill Trump had demanded.
As I argued in the latest Standing Room Only newsletter, this context helps explain why Trump responded to the death of beloved director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele with an ugliness that’s shocking — even for this president. Although the Los Angeles Police Department had arrested the couple’s son for the apparent homicide, Trump insinuated on Truth Social that it was one of his own followers who killed the Reiners out of revenge for their anti-Trump activism. He doubled down when asked about it by reporters in the Oval Office on Monday. The message was hard to miss: If you oppose Trump, he wishes you dead.
So far, his escalation doesn’t seem to be intimidating Republicans. Indiana Republicans were subject to an onslaught of death threats and abuse that including text messages sent to the friends of the grandson of one state senator. Most voted against Trump’s gerrymandering bill anyway. While Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., pretended not to have heard Trump’s response to Reiner’s death, as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye documented, most right-wing media, including Fox News, actually criticized Trump for his behavior.
These are promising signs, but it’s not worth holding your breath waiting for GOP politicians to openly turn on a president who demands absolute loyalty. Instead of public rebellion, most Republicans seem to be engaged in a form of quiet quitting. They won’t go out of their way to resist Trump, but they are losing enthusiasm for defending him. They’re struggling to hide their frustration or their scheming for a post-Trump world. Overall, the posture is one of lying low, waiting for the old man to be gone so they can begin the project of rebuilding the GOP and their own careers in a post-Trump era.
Read the rest at Salon.
Trump is also becoming noticeably less involved in actually running the government (gift link): The White House Is a Lost Cause.
There is a presidency at work in Washington, but it is not clear that there is a president at work in the Oval Office.
Ask Donald Trump about the goings on of his administration, and there is a good chance he’ll defer to a deputy rather than answer the question. “I don’t know her,” he said when asked about his nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, earlier this year. “I listened to the recommendation of Bobby,” he said, pointing to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.
Ask Trump for insight into why his administration made a choice or to explain a particular decision, and he’ll be at a loss for words. Ask him to comment on a scandal? He’ll plead ignorance. “I know nothing about it,” Trump said last week, when asked about the latest tranche of photographs released from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.
None of this on its own means the president isn’t working or paying attention to the duties of his office. But consider the rest of the evidence. He is by most accounts isolated from the outside world. He does not travel the country and rarely meets with ordinary Americans outside the White House. He is shuttled from one Trump resort to another to play golf and hold court with donors, supporters and hangers-on.
Ronald Reagan took regular meetings with congressional leaders to discuss his legislative agenda; George H.W. Bush spearheaded negotiations with the nation’s allies and led the United States to war in Iraq; and George W. Bush was, for better or worse, “the decider” who performed leadership for the cameras as much as he tried to exercise it from the Oval Office. Trump is a ubiquitous cultural presence, but there is no outward sign that he is an active participant in running the national government. He was mostly absent during discussions of his signature legislation — the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act — and practically AWOL during the monthlong government shutdown.
It is difficult for any president to get a clear read on the state of the nation; it takes work and discipline to clear the distance between the office and the people. But Trump, in his second term, does not seem to care about the disconnect. Abraham Lincoln once remarked that it would “never do for a president to have guards with drawn sabers at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor.” A president has to be engaged — attentive to both the government and the public he was elected to serve.
Trump is neither. He is uninterested in anyone except his most devoted fans, and would rather collect gifts from foreign businessmen than take the reins of his administration. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview with Vanity Fair, commenting on the work of Elon Musk in the first months of the year. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
A bit more:
Russell Vought
Instead, the work of the White House has been delegated to a handful of high-level advisers. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the de facto shadow president for domestic affairs. As one senior government official told ProPublica, “It feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.” It was Vought who orchestrated the administration’s assault on the federal bureaucracy, including the wholesale destruction of U.S.A.I.D. It was Vought who either froze or canceled hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for anti-poverty programs, H.I.V. reduction initiatives and research into science, medicine and technology. And it is Vought who has been pushing the boundaries of executive power as he attempts to turn the federal government into little more than an extension of the personal will of the president — as channeled through himself, of course.
If Vought is the nation’s shadow president for domestic policy, then Stephen Miller is its shadow president for internal security. Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, is using the president’s authority to try to transform the ethnic mix of the country — to make America white again, or at least whiter than it is now. He is the primary force behind the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection into a roving deportation force. He has pushed both agencies to step up their enforcement operations, targeting schools, restaurants, farms and other work sites and detaining anyone agents can get their hands on, regardless of citizenship or legal status. It is Miller who is behind the militarization of ICE, the use of the National Guard to occupy Democrat-led cities and assist deportation efforts, and the plan to blanket the United States with a network of detention camps for unauthorized immigrants and anyone else caught in his dragnet.
In other words, the Nazis are running White House policy. Use the gift link to read more.
The latest White House mess is the Vanity Fair profile of Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
Matt Dixon at NBC News: White House scrambles to address Susie Wiles’ explosive Vanity Fair interviews.
Susie Wiles generally helps quietly shape headlines. She is rarely the focus of them.
That changed in dramatic fashion Tuesday after Vanity Fair published a deeply reported profile of the 68-year-old White House chief of staff, whose decades-long career in politics has been defined by a measured, steady-the-ship tone, never one that could be construed as undermining her boss.
In the two-part Vanity Fair piece — which included 11 interviews over nearly a year, with the White House’s cooperation — Wiles comes off as far more candid than her public persona. She not only speaks openly about both President Donald Trump and those who make up the core of his administration, but appears to acknowledge that at times she has been at odds with some of the policies that have been central to Trump’s second term. While not unusual for a chief of staff to disagree with the president they serve, those concerns generally remain part of private conversations.
Susie Wiles
Wiles revealed there had been “huge disagreements” over implementing tariffs, acknowledged that the administration must “look harder” at its process for mass deportation and said she had to “get on board” with Trump’s decision to give blanket pardons to Jan. 6 defendants. She said she initially believed only those who did not commit violent acts should be pardoned.
The profile prompted an all-hands-on-deck pushback from the White House and Trump’s political orbit. The central talking point became that the profile lacked context, and supporters blasted the outlet for being unfair rather than offering any direct refutation of the authenticity of quotes or what was reported.
Wiles herself also offered rare public condemnation.
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” she posted on social media. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
In an interview with the New York Post, Trump defended his top staffer.
“I think from what I hear, the facts were wrong, and it was a very misguided interviewer, purposely misguided,”he said.
Trump added “she’s fantastic” when asked if he continues to have full confidence in Wiles.
More interesting stories:
AP: Trump orders blockade of ‘sanctioned oil tankers’ into Venezuela, ramping up pressure on Maduro.
CNN: Second near midair collision reported near Venezuela involving US Air Force tanker.
The Independent: Bari Weiss’ much-hyped CBS News town hall with Erika Kirk was a massive ratings flop.
Jacob Ware at Lawfare: A Terrorism of Vengeance. Understanding incels, school shooters, and the new category of terrorism, “nihilistic violent extremism.”
Politico: Judge lets Trump’s ballroom construction proceed.
That’s it for me today. What’s on your mind?
#ACASubsidies #DonaldTrump #MarjorieTaylorGreene #ModerateHouseRepublicans #PaulKrugman #RussellVought #StephenMiller #SusieWiles #USEconomy
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King Crimson Play “Three of a Perfect Pair”
Listen to this track by highly adaptable and roster rotating progressive rock architects King Crimson. It’s “Three of a Perfect Pair”, the title track from the band’s 1984 record of the same name. That release was, very appropriately, the third and final entry in a trilogy of albums starting with 1981’s Discipline and followed up by Beat in 1982. These three releases represented a new phase for the band after a seven year hiatus that preceded it; the Discipline era. This was an unexpected eventuality considering that founder, guitarist, and chief creative instigator Robert Fripp hadn’t originally intended to regroup under the King Crimson name.
At the dawn of the 1980s, Fripp sought out musicians he’d worked with before and admired as he put a new band together to explore fresh musical ideas in a new era. This included vocalist, guitarist, and lyricist Adrian Belew who, like Fripp, had played with David Bowie and Talking Heads. Bassist and Chapman stick master Tony Levin won his spot after proving himself with Fripp after both played on Peter Gabriel’s first two solo records. Triple-A drummer Bill Bruford rounded out the lineup, having played with the big three in progressive rock by the early 1980s. Bruford had been a member of Yes and he’d played live with Genesis. He also participated in the last iterations of King Crimson from 1972-1974 before the hiatus.
The experience and playing styles of all four musicians brought freshness to the music, and a new incarnation and era for King Crimson commenced. Going under that name seemed to work for Fripp from a musical standpoint. It certainly made commercial sense. That said, the music they made was a progression from earlier incarnations of the band. Their new sound included as much post punk, new wave, gamelan, and funk influences as it did prog rock. Belew’s approach to lyric writing and his background in more pop-centric music became a defining force. The music they made during this period is just as complex and intriguingly hypnotic as ever. But the songs are more compact and focused even as the band retains its experimental edge.
The chemistry of this incarnation of King Crimson indicated that they were musically sturdy and sympatico as a group. In fact, the new ensemble represented the first time since the band’s inception that a King Crimson lineup remained stable from one album to the next. This is not to say it was all smooth sailing. With new musicians come new dynamics, perspectives, strengths and weaknesses, and essential roles that have to mesh for the music to work well. They had to negotiate all that between them. For the most part, the split was between Belew—who served as the songs guy—and Fripp, who was more interested in overall texture, improvisation, and rhythmic pulse.
With the levels of talent and well-known strong personalities involved, it stands to reason that maintaining the tension between these poles took considerable effort. Even the album that shares the song’s title is marked by the friction between two different approaches to making the record. One side is the more accessible. The other, as described by Fripp himself, is “excessive”. This single appeared on the former side, although it still reflects the band’s penchant for complex shifting time signatures and looped sonic patterns. Paired together, they created something entirely new.
As for this specific tune, “Three of a Perfect Pair” is as close to a conventional pop song as King Crimson gets. A big part of that is down to its very pop song theme of relationships between a man and a woman, although this being King Crimson, it subverts convention from there. Lyrically, this song tells the story of a relationship defined by conflict, driven by character flaws, differing priorities, and communication breakdowns.
“Three of a Perfect Pair” could be interpreted as a love song exploring the nuts and bolts of being in a committed relationship while painstakingly working through repeating patterns of disconnection. This aspect of love goes beyond the romance celebrated more often in pop music. Instead, it goes into far darker and more mature territories. This is true even if the split between he and she seem a bit dated today, with the man falling down due to his flawed intellectual perspectives, and the woman doing the same because of her moods.
He has his contradicting views
She has her cyclothymic moods
They make a study in despair
Three of a perfect pair …~ “Three of a Perfect Pair” by King Crimson
Either way, the title and phrase “three of a perfect pair” seems like an expression of dysfunction itself. What is the third party that stands with the two people that makes their relationship such a study in despair? One interpretation is that it’s the dysfunction itself that becomes a presence in a relationship burdened by a lack of communication. When conflict and disconnection become defining features of the way people interact, it can feel as if there is a third presence standing between them like an unholy ghost.
Another take on this is the opposite; that the third presence is the hope that the two parties can come to some kind of compromise and sense of clarity. The third member of the “pair” represents the possibilities, perspectives, and truths that have the power to smash the deadlock if the two people could only see it. It’s the road they could take together if they could only get out of their own ways to discover it. Between the two interpretations, it’s hard to choose which one is the less tragic.
Either way, it’s a perfect mess—like being in a band sometimes is.
King Crimson would go on hiatus again at Fripp’s prompting after the release of this third record in their Discipline period. All four musicians in that configuration would reunite by the mid-Nineties as parts of a “double trio” with two other musicians who doubled the band’s bass and drum parts. Talk about excessive! But this had been the nature of King Crimson from the beginning; a context for musicians in various combinations of personalities and instrumentation to come up with something unique between them, differing playing styles, approaches, tensions, and all.
For more about King Crimson’s long history as a unique musical entity, check out the trailer for the 2022 documentary film In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50. Director Toby Amies shot the film during the anniversary tour between 2018 and 2020. Instead of a straightforward chronicle of the band through the years, the movie reveals some (well, quite a lot) of the fractiousness involved in being a member of King Crimson in present day circumstances, some of those caused by a decades-long history of unresolved tension between members. Because of that, the film makes for some fascinating, uncomfortable, hilarious, and poignant viewing.
As he once did in 1974 and again by 1984, Robert Fripp intended to lay King Crimson to rest by 2022—really this time. But at the time of this writing, there have been whisperings of a new King Crimson album to follow up 2003’s The Power to Believe. Learn about it right here.
Enjoy!
#80sMusic #adrianBelew #kingCrimson #postPunk #progRock #robertFripp
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Four Theses on the Hoplite Wars
Over on his website historian Bret Devereaux has started a series on debates about early Greek warfare. The first post in that series is well worth reading. It puts me in a dilemma because I see some things differently than he does, but I can’t spare the time for such a lengthy and carefully footnoted essay. So I will respond with four theses about those academic controversies, using vivid bloggy writing and linking to my earlier posts and academic publications. I will follow his lead by avoiding discussion of Victor Davis Hanson’s political project although I had to address it in my review of The Other Greeks. Hanson’s ideas about early Greek warfare were not original in 1989. His great achievement was expressing them in clear and contemporary language which spread outside the lecture hall and the seminar room.
First, I agree with Devereaux that there were two debates: one about what happened on ancient Greek battlefields, and the other whether Greek warfare was basically the same everywhere from 750 to 432 BCE, or varied across time and space. These two debates are not inherently connected and many people have put forward theories about combat mechanics. Roel Konijnendijk ignored the debate about massed shoves or metaphorical pushes in his monograph on early Greek warfare without that affecting his argument.
Second, I think that the first debate is undecided, while the second ended in a decisive victory by the Krentz-van Wees school (the former heretics). Neither the California School (Victor Davis Hanson and sympathizers) with their ideas about rugby scrums, nor the Krentz-van Wees school with their ideas about loose crowds of soldiers, had ideas about how battles worked which convince most thoughtful observers. This is understandable since none of them had much experience in combat sports and none sought out people with that experience before forming their basic views.
Third, in many ways, the intense scholarly debate about combat mechanics, and emotional language like “orthodoxy” and “heretics,” disguised how much the parties agreed about. The debate about ancient Greek warfare from 1989 to 2013 was a classical philologist’s game (and incidentally an American and British man’s game). Victor Davis Hanson made an argument based on texts describing southern mainland Greece, supplemented with a casual use of archaeology and art from the wider Greek world, and critics responded with more rigorous arguments about the same type of evidence. They didn’t have to learn about Egyptian paintings or the Stele of the Vultures or weapons in Italian tombs. Even an adventurous scholar like Hans van Wees leaned heavily on a single comparison (with war in Highland New Guinea before the gun) and that was one of the most controversial aspects of his theories. The two sides were in agreement about how to fight, like Georgian duelists counting out their paces in some foggy field.
Fourth, the debate drastically shifted in 2013. On one hand, van Wees’ former student Josho Brouwers published a book on early Greek warfare which centered archaeology and put Greece in its broader cultural context. Archaic Greece was not much like Pericles’ Athens, proud of its separation from and superiority to barbarians, and more like the Norse world of the Viking Age, eagerly learning from, mixing with, and robbing Slavs, Persians, Romans, Franks, and Irish. Many cultures in the eastern Mediterranean had lines of spearmen with bronze helmets and large shields, and the ancients said that many nations other than Greeks had hoplites or men “armed like Greeks.” Trying to decide whether the hoplites on the Amathus bowl are Greeks, Carians, or Phoenicians is fruitless.
On the other hand, hoplite reenactment began to grow more organized and scientific, and the spread of high-speed Internet made it easier to share videos. Since about 2013, it has become more common to try out theories about moving troops, pushing with shields, or fighting in lines. These trials cannot replace traditional scholarship: nobody dies in them and they are not always carried out or written up with academic strictness. However, we can now say that it is indeed possible for whole lines of men with shields to push on each other without suffocating because we tried it; just like we can refute the myth of the heavily burdened hoplite because we looked at ancient artifacts and they were small and light. Its easier to agree on the weight of helmet than on how to interpret the Iliad. Since about 2013, new empirical evidence has started to flow into debates about early Greek warfare, and archaeologists and specialists in Italy or Anatolia have published lively work which goes farther than Krentz or van Wees dared to. The debate since 2013 has not been stalled just because a few people still hold to the old California School or because nobody can agree about just what happened when two lines of spearmen came together.
Some of these theses might be controversial, especially the fourth. Its unfortunate that nobody in Josho Browers’ circle ended up in a stable research job, but not surprising at a time when institutions that study the ancient world are being demolished. While I am not shy about criticizing approaches to the ancient world which I disagree with, we all have a common interest in keeping people teaching and studying antiquity. While it can feel tedious to keep writing about hoplites, its also exciting that people without academic training are interested in what we have to say.
Good scholarship takes time! Help keep me blogging at least once a month by supporting this site.
Further Reading
Sean Manning, “War and Soldiers in the Achaemenid Empire: Some Historiographical and Methodological Considerations.” In Kai Ruffing, Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Sebastian Fink, and Robert Rollinger (eds.), Societies at War: Proceedings of the 10th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kassel September 26-28 2016 and Proceedings of the 8th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kiel November 11-15 2014 (Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Vienna, 2020) pp. 495-515 (PDF copy here)
Cross-Post: Ways Forward in the Study of Early Greek Warfare (Josho Brouwers’ take after reading the 2013 conference proceedings Men of Bronze)
(scheduled 15 November 2025)
-
Four Theses on the Hoplite Wars
Over on his website historian Bret Devereaux has started a series on debates about early Greek warfare. The first post in that series is well worth reading. It puts me in a dilemma because I see some things differently than he does, but I can’t spare the time for such a lengthy and carefully footnoted essay. So I will respond with four theses about those academic controversies, using vivid bloggy writing and linking to my earlier posts and academic publications. I will follow his lead by avoiding discussion of Victor Davis Hanson’s political project although I had to address it in my review of The Other Greeks. Hanson’s ideas about early Greek warfare were not original in 1989. His great achievement was expressing them in clear and contemporary language which spread outside the lecture hall and the seminar room.
First, I agree with Devereaux that there were two debates: one about what happened on ancient Greek battlefields, and the other whether Greek warfare was basically the same everywhere from 750 to 432 BCE, or varied across time and space. These two debates are not inherently connected and many people have put forward theories about combat mechanics. Roel Konijnendijk ignored the debate about massed shoves or metaphorical pushes in his monograph on early Greek warfare without that affecting his argument.
Second, I think that the first debate is undecided, while the second ended in a decisive victory by the Krentz-van Wees school (the former heretics). Neither the California School (Victor Davis Hanson and sympathizers) with their ideas about rugby scrums, nor the Krentz-van Wees school with their ideas about loose crowds of soldiers, had ideas about how battles worked which convince most thoughtful observers. This is understandable since none of them had much experience in combat sports and none sought out people with that experience before forming their basic views.
Third, in many ways, the intense scholarly debate about combat mechanics, and emotional language like “orthodoxy” and “heretics,” disguised how much the parties agreed about. The debate about ancient Greek warfare from 1989 to 2013 was a classical philologist’s game (and incidentally an American and British man’s game). Victor Davis Hanson made an argument based on texts describing southern mainland Greece, supplemented with a casual use of archaeology and art from the wider Greek world, and critics responded with more rigorous arguments about the same type of evidence. They didn’t have to learn about Egyptian paintings or the Stele of the Vultures or weapons in Italian tombs. Even an adventurous scholar like Hans van Wees leaned heavily on a single comparison (with war in Highland New Guinea before the gun) and that was one of the most controversial aspects of his theories. The two sides were in agreement about how to fight, like Georgian duelists counting out their paces in some foggy field.
Fourth, the debate drastically shifted in 2013. On one hand, van Wees’ former student Josho Brouwers published a book on early Greek warfare which centered archaeology and put Greece in its broader cultural context. Archaic Greece was not much like Pericles’ Athens, proud of its separation from and superiority to barbarians, and more like the Norse world of the Viking Age, eagerly learning from, mixing with, and robbing Slavs, Persians, Romans, Franks, and Irish. Many cultures in the eastern Mediterranean had lines of spearmen with bronze helmets and large shields, and the ancients said that many nations other than Greeks had hoplites or men “armed like Greeks.” Trying to decide whether the hoplites on the Amathus bowl are Greeks, Carians, or Phoenicians is fruitless.
On the other hand, hoplite reenactment began to grow more organized and scientific, and the spread of high-speed Internet made it easier to share videos. Since about 2013, it has become more common to try out theories about moving troops, pushing with shields, or fighting in lines. These trials cannot replace traditional scholarship: nobody dies in them and they are not always carried out or written up with academic strictness. However, we can now say that it is indeed possible for whole lines of men with shields to push on each other without suffocating because we tried it; just like we can refute the myth of the heavily burdened hoplite because we looked at ancient artifacts and they were small and light. Its easier to agree on the weight of helmet than on how to interpret the Iliad. Since about 2013, new empirical evidence has started to flow into debates about early Greek warfare, and archaeologists and specialists in Italy or Anatolia have published lively work which goes farther than Krentz or van Wees dared to. The debate since 2013 has not been stalled just because a few people still hold to the old California School or because nobody can agree about just what happened when two lines of spearmen came together.
Some of these theses might be controversial, especially the fourth. Its unfortunate that nobody in Josho Browers’ circle ended up in a stable research job, but not surprising at a time when institutions that study the ancient world are being demolished. While I am not shy about criticizing approaches to the ancient world which I disagree with, we all have a common interest in keeping people teaching and studying antiquity. While it can feel tedious to keep writing about hoplites, its also exciting that people without academic training are interested in what we have to say.
Good scholarship takes time! Help keep me blogging at least once a month by supporting this site.
Further Reading
Sean Manning, “War and Soldiers in the Achaemenid Empire: Some Historiographical and Methodological Considerations.” In Kai Ruffing, Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Sebastian Fink, and Robert Rollinger (eds.), Societies at War: Proceedings of the 10th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kassel September 26-28 2016 and Proceedings of the 8th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kiel November 11-15 2014 (Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Vienna, 2020) pp. 495-515 (PDF copy here)
Cross-Post: Ways Forward in the Study of Early Greek Warfare (Josho Brouwers’ take after reading the 2013 conference proceedings Men of Bronze)
(scheduled 15 November 2025)
-
Four Theses on the Hoplite Wars
Over on his website historian Bret Devereaux has started a series on debates about early Greek warfare. The first post in that series is well worth reading. It puts me in a dilemma because I see some things differently than he does, but I can’t spare the time for such a lengthy and carefully footnoted essay. So I will respond with four theses about those academic controversies, using vivid bloggy writing and linking to my earlier posts and academic publications. I will follow his lead by avoiding discussion of Victor Davis Hanson’s political project although I had to address it in my review of The Other Greeks. Hanson’s ideas about early Greek warfare were not original in 1989. His great achievement was expressing them in clear and contemporary language which spread outside the lecture hall and the seminar room.
First, I agree with Devereaux that there were two debates: one about what happened on ancient Greek battlefields, and the other whether Greek warfare was basically the same everywhere from 750 to 432 BCE, or varied across time and space. These two debates are not inherently connected and many people have put forward theories about combat mechanics. Roel Konijnendijk ignored the debate about massed shoves or metaphorical pushes in his monograph on early Greek warfare without that affecting his argument.
Second, I think that the first debate is undecided, while the second ended in a decisive victory by the Krentz-van Wees school (the former heretics). Neither the California School (Victor Davis Hanson and sympathizers) with their ideas about rugby scrums, nor the Krentz-van Wees school with their ideas about loose crowds of soldiers, had ideas about how battles worked which convince most thoughtful observers. This is understandable since none of them had much experience in combat sports and none sought out people with that experience before forming their basic views.
Third, in many ways, the intense scholarly debate about combat mechanics, and emotional language like “orthodoxy” and “heretics,” disguised how much the parties agreed about. The debate about ancient Greek warfare from 1989 to 2013 was a classical philologist’s game (and incidentally an American and British man’s game). Victor Davis Hanson made an argument based on texts describing southern mainland Greece, supplemented with a casual use of archaeology and art from the wider Greek world, and critics responded with more rigorous arguments about the same type of evidence. They didn’t have to learn about Egyptian paintings or the Stele of the Vultures or weapons in Italian tombs. Even an adventurous scholar like Hans van Wees leaned heavily on a single comparison (with war in Highland New Guinea before the gun) and that was one of the most controversial aspects of his theories. The two sides were in agreement about how to fight, like Georgian duelists counting out their paces in some foggy field.
Fourth, the debate drastically shifted in 2013. On one hand, van Wees’ former student Josho Brouwers published a book on early Greek warfare which centered archaeology and put Greece in its broader cultural context. Archaic Greece was not much like Pericles’ Athens, proud of its separation from and superiority to barbarians, and more like the Norse world of the Viking Age, eagerly learning from, mixing with, and robbing Slavs, Persians, Romans, Franks, and Irish. Many cultures in the eastern Mediterranean had lines of spearmen with bronze helmets and large shields, and the ancients said that many nations other than Greeks had hoplites or men “armed like Greeks.” Trying to decide whether the hoplites on the Amathus bowl are Greeks, Carians, or Phoenicians is fruitless.
On the other hand, hoplite reenactment began to grow more organized and scientific, and the spread of high-speed Internet made it easier to share videos. Since about 2013, it has become more common to try out theories about moving troops, pushing with shields, or fighting in lines. These trials cannot replace traditional scholarship: nobody dies in them and they are not always carried out or written up with academic strictness. However, we can now say that it is indeed possible for whole lines of men with shields to push on each other without suffocating because we tried it; just like we can refute the myth of the heavily burdened hoplite because we looked at ancient artifacts and they were small and light. Its easier to agree on the weight of helmet than on how to interpret the Iliad. Since about 2013, new empirical evidence has started to flow into debates about early Greek warfare, and archaeologists and specialists in Italy or Anatolia have published lively work which goes farther than Krentz or van Wees dared to. The debate since 2013 has not been stalled just because a few people still hold to the old California School or because nobody can agree about just what happened when two lines of spearmen came together.
Some of these theses might be controversial, especially the fourth. Its unfortunate that nobody in Josho Browers’ circle ended up in a stable research job, but not surprising at a time when institutions that study the ancient world are being demolished. While I am not shy about criticizing approaches to the ancient world which I disagree with, we all have a common interest in keeping people teaching and studying antiquity. While it can feel tedious to keep writing about hoplites, its also exciting that people without academic training are interested in what we have to say.
Good scholarship takes time! Help keep me blogging at least once a month by supporting this site.
Further Reading
Sean Manning, “War and Soldiers in the Achaemenid Empire: Some Historiographical and Methodological Considerations.” In Kai Ruffing, Kerstin Droß-Krüpe, Sebastian Fink, and Robert Rollinger (eds.), Societies at War: Proceedings of the 10th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kassel September 26-28 2016 and Proceedings of the 8th Symposium of the Melammu Project held in Kiel November 11-15 2014 (Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften: Vienna, 2020) pp. 495-515 (PDF copy here)
Cross-Post: Ways Forward in the Study of Early Greek Warfare (Josho Brouwers’ take after reading the 2013 conference proceedings Men of Bronze)
(scheduled 15 November 2025)
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QRP? Are we out of our minds?
If we believe in QRP – I mean really, really believe – then we can make it work. Admittedly it’s like betting on a race between a tortoise and a hare; where would you put your money? If you read accounts written by diehard QRPers, do you ever see stories such as: “I went to the park with my latest QRP rig today and called CQ for five hours but only got 2 QSOs. On the way home I tossed that stupid rig in the river and bought a big-boy radio instead”? Of course not. Diehards enjoy the outing as much as the contacts. They get a thrill out of tickling the ionosphere even if the big bad D-layer swallows their RF and has a malignant chuckle to itself.
I am not a diehard, but I do like to operate QRP whenever it yields a good probability of actually getting contacts. On the other hand, when propagation conditions are unfavorable, or I cannot erect an efficient antenna, I am willing to switch to warp power to get the job done.
The FCC has given us guidance in the form of the Part 97 rules, and to paraphrase them:
“Use (only) as much power as in necessary to make the contact”
There are different ways to interpret that guidance. For many QRO operators it means “fire up the amp and let ‘er rip; life’s too short …”. The word “only” in the above may occasionally fall on deaf ears. QRPers, on the other hand, might see things differently and ask: “How can we make this work without increasing power?”.
There are days when 5 watts into a tiny coil-loaded whip is all you need; for other days there are tricks that can be employed to make a teeny-weeny smidgen of RF create the illusion of a really big-boy signal. The big secret is that it doesn’t matter how much signal the P.A. of our radios – big, small or tiny – presents at the antenna jack. What really counts is how much signal appears at the receiving end.
A military ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) radio station puts out a huge amount of power, but the amount reaching a submarine somewhere beneath the world’s oceans is only a few watts – effectively QRP. QRO operators can emulate that idea by using a dummy load with a random wire antenna attached. No tuner needed, any old antenna will work and the radio will always see a low SWR. It is said to work just fine but with the caveat that you will lose about 1 S-unit in signal strength due to loss in the dummy load. Would it be possible to invert that situation and transmit a very low power signal that a receiving station would perceive to be more powerful?
Don’t announce your handicap
If we call CQ and identify ourselves as QRP we are telling the world we are transmitting a teeny-weeny smidgen of a signal and that negatively influences the receiving station’s perception. In his book “Winning through intimidation” author Robert Ringer tells of clever benevolent techniques he employed in his sales career to dazzle potential clients into having a glowing perception of him. So let’s not mention our piddling power and allow the receiving station to assume we are just another regular ham station, or maybe even a superstation.
Use an efficient antenna
When conditions are right you can make contacts with a wet noodle. In most cases it makes sense to assume conditions are unfavorable and plan for the worst. That means putting up an efficient antenna – one that converts as much of our feeble signal as possible into radiated RF. If we can put up a gain antenna, even 3dB of gain, we will double our effective radiated power.
Don’t use a vertical antenna
Well, ok if we have to use a vertical antenna it should be raised off the ground. A ground mounted vertical antenna requires a lot of radials to be efficient. If it is raised as little as 1 meter above ground less radials will be required – maybe as few as 2.
A vertical antenna radiates equally in every direction so our feeble signal is spread around 360 degrees. If that signal can be focused to favor a specific direction, the receiving station will perceive it to be stronger. Greg KJ6ER’s POTA PERformer can effectively focus a signal even more than he intended by sloping the radiator away from the direction we wish our signal to go. Modeling with EZNEC shows a front/back ratio of over 8dB can be obtained by this method. That means more of our signal is being directed towards where our target receiving stations are located.
Foxes hunt where the hens can be found
Choosing a band wisely improves the probability of successfully making contacts. If I have Internet access while operating portable, such as when activating a park for POTA, I check 2 things. First, which bands are indicated as having good propagation and, second, which bands have the most activators. If we call CQ on an empty band aren’t we boldy going where no ham has gone before?
Side by side
It can sometimes help if we park ourselves adjacent to another active frequency. I have used this technique myself hoping some of the big station’s hunters will hear my signal while tuning in to the other guy. For CW ops a 500Hz separation should be enough to avoid interfering with the other station; SSB ops will need to leave a bigger space.
It pays to advertise
It helps if people know we are going to be on-the-air. Perhaps we are planning to participate in a scheduled QRP event. During the event other QRP stations are actively seeking QRP stations to work. It is a good idea to post notice of our intention to participate ahead of time in online forums. When planning a QRP POTA activation, we can schedule the activation ahead of time on the POTA website (but don’t mention QRP!). Scheduling gives hunters advance notice of when to look out for us on-air. Some lucky QRP operators may even be on hunters’ Ham Alert lists.
The poodle and the bulldog
My current most used QRP radios include a QRP Labs low-band QMX – a cute little fella, but very fragile. Doesn’t like high SWR or any supply voltage over 12.00 volts. Also not very rugged, but it’s packed with features.
I rebuilt my QMX “Ready to Go” rig yet again. Maybe this time it will get more QSOs!I bought this old steam-powered Yaesu FT-817 from a guy called Fred Flintstone in 2001. Back then Yaesu thought it was a good idea to make customers pay extra for luxuries like a memory keyer and a mechanical filter to narrow the receiver bandwidth. Being (like many hams, it seems) a miser I chose to build my own add-ons to make this great little multiband rig more usable. It has made a lot of QSOs for me. I have revived it after it spent a long time on the shelf. I like to think of this radio as a bulldog while the QMX is a clever little poodle.
My 24 years old Yaesu FT-817 (non-ND) is still chugging along. Supports all bands from 160m to 70cm and it’s not too fussy about its supply voltage, BUT, it needs a little help!The K4ICY 2/4-stage audio filter plugs into the radio’s headphone jack and provides a narrow audio passband. It is based on a single chip quad op-amp. I built it inside a Hammond aluminum box because when in a plastic enclosure it picks up near-field RF and amplifies that too. It is powered by an internal 9V battery.
My build of the K3NG Arduino-based CW memory keyer is equipped with just one control. Turning the rotary encoder adjusts CW keying speed on the fly (a useful feature during a POTA activation). Clicking the rotary encoder knob sends a pre-recorded CQ message. It is powered by a single 18650 LiIon cell with built-in buck boost to bring the voltage up from 3.7 to 5 volts.
My Yaesu FT-817 (non-ND)’s little helpers – my build of a K4ICY audio filter and my build of a K3NG memory keyer.Where, outside the box, do we venture next? Stay tuned, or subscribe. And, if you have any suggestions or questions, please leave a comment below.
Help support HamRadioOutsidetheBox
No “tip-jar”, “buy me a coffee”, Patreon, or Amazon links here. I enjoy my hobby and I enjoy writing about it. If you would like to support this blog please follow/subscribe using the link at the bottom of my home page, or like, comment (links at the bottom of each post), repost or share links to my posts on social media. If you would like to email me directly you will find my email address on my QRZ.com page. Thank you!
The following copyright notice applies to all content on this blog.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. -
QRP? Are we out of our minds?
If we believe in QRP – I mean really, really believe – then we can make it work. Admittedly it’s like betting on a race between a tortoise and a hare; where would you put your money? If you read accounts written by diehard QRPers, do you ever see stories such as: “I went to the park with my latest QRP rig today and called CQ for five hours but only got 2 QSOs. On the way home I tossed that stupid rig in the river and bought a big-boy radio instead”? Of course not. Diehards enjoy the outing as much as the contacts. They get a thrill out of tickling the ionosphere even if the big bad D-layer swallows their RF and has a malignant chuckle to itself.
I am not a diehard, but I do like to operate QRP whenever it yields a good probability of actually getting contacts. On the other hand, when propagation conditions are unfavorable, or I cannot erect an efficient antenna, I am willing to switch to warp power to get the job done.
The FCC has given us guidance in the form of the Part 97 rules, and to paraphrase them:
“Use (only) as much power as in necessary to make the contact”
There are different ways to interpret that guidance. For many QRO operators it means “fire up the amp and let ‘er rip; life’s too short …”. The word “only” in the above may occasionally fall on deaf ears. QRPers, on the other hand, might see things differently and ask: “How can we make this work without increasing power?”.
There are days when 5 watts into a tiny coil-loaded whip is all you need; for other days there are tricks that can be employed to make a teeny-weeny smidgen of RF create the illusion of a really big-boy signal. The big secret is that it doesn’t matter how much signal the P.A. of our radios – big, small or tiny – presents at the antenna jack. What really counts is how much signal appears at the receiving end.
A military ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) radio station puts out a huge amount of power, but the amount reaching a submarine somewhere beneath the world’s oceans is only a few watts – effectively QRP. QRO operators can emulate that idea by using a dummy load with a random wire antenna attached. No tuner needed, any old antenna will work and the radio will always see a low SWR. It is said to work just fine but with the caveat that you will lose about 1 S-unit in signal strength due to loss in the dummy load. Would it be possible to invert that situation and transmit a very low power signal that a receiving station would perceive to be more powerful?
Don’t announce your handicap
If we call CQ and identify ourselves as QRP we are telling the world we are transmitting a teeny-weeny smidgen of a signal and that negatively influences the receiving station’s perception. In his book “Winning through intimidation” author Robert Ringer tells of clever benevolent techniques he employed in his sales career to dazzle potential clients into having a glowing perception of him. So let’s not mention our piddling power and allow the receiving station to assume we are just another regular ham station, or maybe even a superstation.
Use an efficient antenna
When conditions are right you can make contacts with a wet noodle. In most cases it makes sense to assume conditions are unfavorable and plan for the worst. That means putting up an efficient antenna – one that converts as much of our feeble signal as possible into radiated RF. If we can put up a gain antenna, even 3dB of gain, we will double our effective radiated power.
Don’t use a vertical antenna
Well, ok if we have to use a vertical antenna it should be raised off the ground. A ground mounted vertical antenna requires a lot of radials to be efficient. If it is raised as little as 1 meter above ground less radials will be required – maybe as few as 2.
A vertical antenna radiates equally in every direction so our feeble signal is spread around 360 degrees. If that signal can be focused to favor a specific direction, the receiving station will perceive it to be stronger. Greg KJ6ER’s POTA PERformer can effectively focus a signal even more than he intended by sloping the radiator away from the direction we wish our signal to go. Modeling with EZNEC shows a front/back ratio of over 8dB can be obtained by this method. That means more of our signal is being directed towards where our target receiving stations are located.
Foxes hunt where the hens can be found
Choosing a band wisely improves the probability of successfully making contacts. If I have Internet access while operating portable, such as when activating a park for POTA, I check 2 things. First, which bands are indicated as having good propagation and, second, which bands have the most activators. If we call CQ on an empty band aren’t we boldy going where no ham has gone before?
Side by side
It can sometimes help if we park ourselves adjacent to another active frequency. I have used this technique myself hoping some of the big station’s hunters will hear my signal while tuning in to the other guy. For CW ops a 500Hz separation should be enough to avoid interfering with the other station; SSB ops will need to leave a bigger space.
It pays to advertise
It helps if people know we are going to be on-the-air. Perhaps we are planning to participate in a scheduled QRP event. During the event other QRP stations are actively seeking QRP stations to work. It is a good idea to post notice of our intention to participate ahead of time in online forums. When planning a QRP POTA activation, we can schedule the activation ahead of time on the POTA website (but don’t mention QRP!). Scheduling gives hunters advance notice of when to look out for us on-air. Some lucky QRP operators may even be on hunters’ Ham Alert lists.
The poodle and the bulldog
My current most used QRP radios include a QRP Labs low-band QMX – a cute little fella, but very fragile. Doesn’t like high SWR or any supply voltage over 12.00 volts. Also not very rugged, but it’s packed with features.
I rebuilt my QMX “Ready to Go” rig yet again. Maybe this time it will get more QSOs!I bought this old steam-powered Yaesu FT-817 from a guy called Fred Flintstone in 2001. Back then Yaesu thought it was a good idea to make customers pay extra for luxuries like a memory keyer and a mechanical filter to narrow the receiver bandwidth. Being (like many hams, it seems) a miser I chose to build my own add-ons to make this great little multiband rig more usable. It has made a lot of QSOs for me. I have revived it after it spent a long time on the shelf. I like to think of this radio as a bulldog while the QMX is a clever little poodle.
My 24 years old Yaesu FT-817 (non-ND) is still chugging along. Supports all bands from 160m to 70cm and it’s not too fussy about its supply voltage, BUT, it needs a little help!The K4ICY 2/4-stage audio filter plugs into the radio’s headphone jack and provides a narrow audio passband. It is based on a single chip quad op-amp. I built it inside a Hammond aluminum box because when in a plastic enclosure it picks up near-field RF and amplifies that too. It is powered by an internal 9V battery.
My build of the K3NG Arduino-based CW memory keyer is equipped with just one control. Turning the rotary encoder adjusts CW keying speed on the fly (a useful feature during a POTA activation). Clicking the rotary encoder knob sends a pre-recorded CQ message. It is powered by a single 18650 LiIon cell with built-in buck boost to bring the voltage up from 3.7 to 5 volts.
My Yaesu FT-817 (non-ND)’s little helpers – my build of a K4ICY audio filter and my build of a K3NG memory keyer.Where, outside the box, do we venture next? Stay tuned, or subscribe. And, if you have any suggestions or questions, please leave a comment below.
Help support HamRadioOutsidetheBox
No “tip-jar”, “buy me a coffee”, Patreon, or Amazon links here. I enjoy my hobby and I enjoy writing about it. If you would like to support this blog please follow/subscribe using the link at the bottom of my home page, or like, comment (links at the bottom of each post), repost or share links to my posts on social media. If you would like to email me directly you will find my email address on my QRZ.com page. Thank you!
The following copyright notice applies to all content on this blog.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. -
Interview: Girder (UK)
18 minutesThe Nwothm
Forged in the seaside grit of Bournemouth and tempered by Brazilian fire, Girder are dragging true heavy metal back to the frontline. With their self-titled debut roaring loud and proud, the quartet channel chaos, camaraderie, and classic NWOBHM spirit into pure sonic steel. We caught up with them to talk origins, mayhem, and keeping metal true.
Interview
heNwothm: For those just discovering you, who or what is Girder—and what should they expect when they hit play?
Metal Matt: We’re a family of old school heavy metal maniacs; half English and half Brazillian! Our band is made up of 4 unique characters; Metal Dress on lead vocals, (myself) Metal Matt bass and vocals, Iron Paul on guitar and vocals and Hordak II on drums. If people like 80’s heavy metal, then they will love us!
Hordak II: When someone hit play they’ll listen to a range of heavy music, from hard rock to thrash metal, eventually melodic, but mostly old school metal. Just don’t expect anything close to nu metal. If they want modern metal, don’t listen to us.
TheNwothm: How did Girder form and what stories can you share from your early days?
Hordak II: Since when me and Metal Dress first met with Metal Matt at one of our gigs we started bumping into each other at other gigs and concerts very often, what showed is that we all had similar tastes in music. As soon as we joined ourselves to make music together we felt a really powerful connection that worked really well as a band.
Metal Matt: We formed the band three years ago, after my previous progressive rock band Crimson Creatures ended. I sang lead vocals and played bass in that band.
I met the Brazilian couple (now my best friends) Hordak II and Metal Dress a year or so before whilst watching their gothic, funeral project Morbus Fatalis. Like Hordak said, we bonded over our mutual love for heavy metal, and Metal Dress urged me to form a band with them on multiple occasions, but I declined since I was busy in two bands.The moment Crimson Creatures ended, I instantly phoned Hordak II to immediately form a heavy metal band whilst they were moving house!
We had a big meeting as Hordak II, Metal Dress and Metal Matt. We started writing ideas for our clothes, style and lyrics. We all agreed that we will never play Nu-Metal- and we would play Old/True heavy metal! I started writing the lyrics for Killers of the Night and 6:30 late at night round Metal Dress’ house, and in the morning, a boy got murdered down the street. As if my pen was writing about what was happening there and then! We agreed that we wanted a fourth member to play guitar. I met Iron Paul in a pub a week or so later, and thus we had the Girder lineup after several pints!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytZ9mDWHUAA&list=RDytZ9mDWHUAA&start_radio=1
TheNwothm: Bournemouth isn’t the first place people associate with dragons, slugs, and metal mayhem. How has your hometown shaped your sound or attitude?
Hordak II: Girder was basically forged in Boscombe, Bournemouth, a place that has one of the highest crime rates in the UK. Me and Metal Dress come from a big town in South America with lots of violence and crime too. So these were the subject of our first songs. But our music is not only about mayhem and crimes, as we also make music about fun and boozing at the beach, as that’s a big thing in Bournemouth too.
Metal Matt: We are all fans (especially Metal Dress) of going to the beach and having parties and BBQ’s, so that sunny, positive attitude blends naturally into our music. Being into progressive rock as much as I am into metal, I love that our area of Dorset has had famous names in the music scene like Lee Kerslake, Robert Fripp, Greg Lake and John Wetton to name a few. Tolkien even lived down here!
TheNwothm: What’s the story behind the name “Girder”? Was it a eureka moment or a pub-fuelled accident?
Metal Matt: Knowing us, probably the latter. I remember Iron Paul and I talking about song ideas and band names down the pub several times. I’m sure Iron Paul brought up the name, as we were looking for something unmistakingly metal. A girder? Brilliant! I’ll buy another round…
Hordak II: We wanted a name that expressed what our music is, so Girder fit perfectly either to the music we make, as well as to what we listen to and love watching.
TheNwothm: Dorset’s got beaches, fossils, and now a heavy metal band singing about murder and parties. How does the local culture feed into your themes?
Hordak II: Local culture has always much to add to our music, as it is part of our everyday life in the streets. We have the police around all the time. Last year a body was found in pieces at Boscombe beach cliff. At our free time we enjoy boozing and having fun around, so thats all in our music.
Metal Matt: As the main songwriter in the band, I tend to get inspired by Iron Paul’s experiences then Hordak II and Metal Dress’ experiences in Brazil. Whenever I’m not recording and writing song ideas about fantasy dragons or slugs, I’m taking inspiration from local murders and Brazilian drug crime. Unfortunately, we have a lot of local murders and it inspired me to write our songs ‘Killers of the Night’, ‘6:30’ and ‘Rekindle the Flame’.
TheNwothm: Do you feel connected to the wider UK metal scene, or is Girder more of a rogue unit doing its own thing?
Metal Matt: Kind of both. Hordak and Metal Dress will feel connected to their music scene in Curitriba back in Brazil, and Iron Paul would feel more connected to the local grassroots music scene. I’m friends with several London, Somerset and Southampton bands like Toldeo Steel and Sanguis Mortem, so it does feel like we have that dual connection with Curitriba and the Southern UK metal scene.
Hordak II: As Metal Matt says, we feel connected to our local scene and have already started to get connected to a wider scene, but there is much more still to be achieved, considering we have just over two years as a band and we are still quite new to the UK wider scene.
TheNwothm: What’s your take on the current state of British heavy metal? Any scenes or bands you’re watching closely? Do you think Nwothm is still relatively underground in the UK?
Hordak II: British heavy metal scene has always been one of the most influential in the world and it will probably always be. As a South American I can tell the scene over there is quite big too, but we don’t hear about those bands over here, whilst the British bands are known worldwide. Nwothm is underground in the UK and everywhere, as mainstream music industry has no room for true metal music anymore. However, it will always be a strong underground movement with worldwide connections, as true metal culture is widely spread all around the globe.
Metal Matt: I’m friends with a lot of Southern UK metal bands and I go to a lot of local gigs, and it feels alive and strong. It will never go away at this point- especially in the underground. I’m only watching what my friend’s bands are doing like Seven Sisters, Tailgunner, Sanguis Mortem, Desolator or Toldeo Steel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Y-kPqkSdU
TheNwothm: Let’s talk about the debut. “Girder” dropped in March 2025 so what was the first track you wrote for it, and did it set the tone for the rest?
Metal Matt: Girder, from the onset, was my chance to finally write metal music in a band, and the others wanted me to start writing songs quickly, so we had songs to practice.
At one point I was recording and pitching a new song idea every other week. I wrote and recorded demos for Headbanger’s Ball, Killers of the Night and 6:30 in a week and in that order. For the Girder demos, I play all the guitars, bass, programmed drums and vocal parts, as I prefer delivering finished song ideas that the band can twist and turn into our own, as opposed to just delivering a riff with no song structure or lyrics.
Hordak II: To my point of view we’ve got a few different styles in the album. Although all songs may be classified as “old school metal”, they vary on rhythms, speed and melody, so I would not say the first compositions set the tone for the others.
TheNwothm: “Headbanger’s Ball” kicks things off with a bang. Was that always meant to be the opener?
Hordak II: Yes! I’m glad you also felt it “kicks things off with a bang”! Good way to start an album!
Metal Matt: It was always meant to be the opener in my eyes, as it was the first song I wrote. We only properly started talking about the album sequence in recording. I convinced the others that the first three songs should be in the order we learnt and played them.
TheNwothm: “Killers of the Night” and “City Dealer” both sound like they could soundtrack a neon-lit brawl. Are there stories behind those tracks?
Metal Matt: A Girder brawl would be insane! Killers of the Night is about the local murders, rapes and stabbings in Bournemouth, and the message of looking out for each other and staying safe. Beware the killers of the night!
Hordak II: As Metal Matt says, Killers of the night was inspired by the sad reality of youngsters stabbing each other for stupid reasons, and at the same night we wrote it a 18 year old guy was stabbed to death less than a mile from us. By the way, there is a music video coming out soon for this one!
City dealer is about drug dealer gangs controlling communities at the outskirts of big towns in Brazil. Believe me, these gangsters can do more benefits for the local communities than than the government would ever do, and so they get the local residents to use fire weapons such as guns, rifles and machine guns to protect the drug business, including drug buyers and sellers, like an army that not even the police dare to tackle. Metal Dress has lived her childhood near one of these communities, where the sound of gun shots are a common thing to be heard daily.
TheNwothm: “Rekindle the Flame” stretches over five minutes. Was that your epic moment or a spontaneous jam that got out of hand?
Hordak II : It was indeed and epic moment.
Metal Matt: That’s my favourite song that I wrote for the album. I thought the others would hate the song when I presented the demo I had made, since this song is closer to my more progressive rock leaning solo music with some complex chords, funkier bits, genre-bending and a longer length that I thought would be a big ‘no-no’ in Girder land.
Fortunately, Iron Paul, Metal Dress and Hordak II loved this song! The concept I created, with the song telling the story of divorced couple reconciling and falling in love again by mutually murdering people and doing other horrible things, was very compelling. I wanted a song where Metal Dress and I sung as two different characters.
What I love about this first album of ours is that has proven that we can go in different directions with our songs: injecting more NWOBHM, glam, thrash, doom, prog, punk or death/black, and dare I say funk and jazz without angering the Hordak and Iron Paul!
Our second album is going to be pushing in multiple directions from shorter thrashier songs to radio hits to more experimental leaning arrangements.
TheNwothm: “Metal Changed, Not Me” feels like a statement. What inspired that track, and who were you aiming it at?
Metal Matt: Iron Paul, being the oldest and wisest member of Girder, once told us three how he fell out of touch with Metal for a while (probably the ambiguity of the 90s), and how it was like Metal changed style, but not him- he still wanted to hear stuff in the style of Motorhead and Judas Priest.
With this concept in mind, I wanted to write a really heavy song- almost a hate song! Which is funny as we tell people that this is our love ballad to metal, which it is, but it is also talking about the styles of music and metal that we do not like.
The song is also about going insane and having fun to heavy metal!
Once we started practicing the song, Hordak II mentioned how we have to mention that modern moshpits are kindergarten compared to moshpits he was in when he was younger!
Hordak II: Moshpit is one of the 80’s and 90’s heavy music trademarks. It was an expression of anarchy and chaos, with no patterns or organised movements and at the same time peaceful. The new metal generation twisted this culture to the opposite of what it used to be. Now moshpit became a circlepit and everyone follows the same direction, like everyone has to move and look to the same side. Now the peaceful chaos is gone. So it makes no more sense as an expression of freedom.
TheNwothm: The album closes with “Girder.” Was that a mission statement, a self-roast, or something else entirely?
Hordak II: It expresses how the four of us engaged at a band project and ended up like a family, where despite of the differences we love each other like siblings.
Metal Matt: We loved the idea of closing the album with a bang, and having our self titled song felt perfect! It ends the album like the ending to a big party. I wanted the self titled song to be about how the band formed in a semi-realistic way minus the dragons!
TheNwothm: What can you share about each of the band members?
Metal Matt: I’m Metal Matt. I’m the youngest member and I love women! I started playing bass, guitar and singing 7 years ago. I’m releasing my twelfth solo album (under my real name Matthew Cornes) very soon where I play all the instruments and sing, and I go from black metal to jazz to prog rock to 80s balladry. I also drew our Girder album cover and I do the artwork for my solo albums too. I am also in another rock band called Rhinefield and we are recording our first album in the next few weeks!
Hordak II and Metal Dress are the Brazillians. They came over to the UK to be closer to the music they love, and to form a metal band with some British blokes like Iron Paul and myself. Metal Dress loves the beach, and is like having an older sister. She loves putting on new outfits for our shows. Hordak II killed Hordak I, because he was jealous of Hordak I having Metal Dress to himself.
Iron Paul is the oldest member and has played guitar for longer than I have been alive! He loves a Les Paul, and he was forged in the fires of Hades!!! Iron Paul eats his own guitar strings and has beef with microphones and they end up falling down! He plays in a local covers band called Oktober Rust, but has played in many more!
Hordak II: I’m Hordak II. I started playing at the punk rock scene in Brazil in 1996 as a teenager. Soon after started playing also at thrash and death metal bands. Always very involved in the music scene of Curitiba, have produced festivals and played gigs all around South Brazil and Paraguay. Metal Dress also has a punk background having sung at punk, post punk and grunge bands in Brazil. Metal Dress and me have a duo project of funeral gothic music caller Morbus Fatalis, and we have just released our second album.
TheNwothm: What’s your go-to post-gig ritual: pub crawl, kebab run, or straight to the sea?
Metal Matt: Unpack, have a beer and chat to our fans, then straight to bed and sleep!
Hordak II: At summer time we’re definitely straight to the sea, but we also love to sit at a pub and watch a good rock’n’roll band performing. We’re very keen to watching local bands, even if they are of different styles. It is very important to support the local scene.
TheNwothm: What’s the dream tour setup for Girder? Any bands you’d love to share a stage with—or avoid at all costs?
Metal Matt: The dream tour setup would be pairing up with like minded fellow metalheads. We would love to go on tour with our friends Sanguis Mortem or Toledo Steel. I know Metal Dress and Iron Paul would want to tour with Seven Sisters, a London Nwothm band that we supported in Portsmouth this year. Great metal music!
We missed out on supporting Tailgunner a year or so ago in Bournemouth, which frustrated me, as I really enjoy their music, and I’m glad that they have been getting attention in the last few years. I know Hordak II and the other two would say this too- as Girder we want to keep playing new gigs with different styles of metal and music in general. We think it is important to be respectful of other artists even if we don’t like them.
Hordak II: We’re still working our way to play around the UK, as a first step. But we certainly intend to strike Europe within the next few of years, before we start looking at South America, where I’ve played most of my life. Touring around the world might feel like a distant dream for a band thats barely two years old, but the time is passing and when the right moment comes we’ll be ready. Anywhere we go we’ll be happy to play with local bands, to show them our support just like we enjoy playing with touring bands that come over here.
TheNwothm: Thinking ahead are there any shows or tours planned for the rest of 2025/2026?
Metal Matt: We are supporting London thrash metal band Thrasherwolf, who are playing on November 14th in Bournemouth with our friends Sanguis Mortem. Tickets can be found on SeeTickets or through our links attached to this interview. Apart from that, we are busy writing new songs for the second album. Even Hordak II has been writing songs this time, and Metal Dress and Iron Paul have had more input into my song ideas as well!
TheNwothm: Are you already penning ideas for your next release?
Hordak II: We already have two new songs at our current gigs, but we’re working on another few ones. We shall soon have the songs ready for the next album.
Metal Matt: We are expanding on the foundations we have made on our first album. We want to continue the mix of styles. Our songs will be covering themes such as beach parties, slugs, prostitutes, teaching metal (I’m a guitar/bass teacher too), dragons and death!
TheNwothm: How can our readers buy your music and merch?
Metal Matt: Come to our shows, we sell our merch there. For the time being, you can get our album digitally on Bandcamp!
TheNwothm: Where can fans follow you online?
Metal Matt: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Bandcamp!
TheNwothm: Anything else you would like to mention?
Metal Matt: As Hordak said earlier, we have a music video for ‘Killers of the Night’ coming out soon. You can check out the music video for our song ‘Fire to the Realm’ on our Girder YouTube channel right now! Thank you guys for interviewing us. Girder will continue to bring metal mayhem to the world!
Hordak II: GIRDERRR!!!!!
Metal Matt: GIRDERRRR!!!
Bandcamp: https://girder.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551896919110
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/girderband
Other: https://linktr.ee/girderband
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GirderHeavyMetal
#brazilianHeavyMetal #BritishHeavyMetal #CrimsonCreatures #Girder #GirderBand #GirderHeavyMetal #HeavyMetal #NewWaveOfTraditionalHeavyMetal #NWOTHM #SanguisMortem #sevenSisters #Tailgunner #thenwothm #ToledoSteel
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Interview: Girder (UK)
18 minutesThe Nwothm
Forged in the seaside grit of Bournemouth and tempered by Brazilian fire, Girder are dragging true heavy metal back to the frontline. With their self-titled debut roaring loud and proud, the quartet channel chaos, camaraderie, and classic NWOBHM spirit into pure sonic steel. We caught up with them to talk origins, mayhem, and keeping metal true.
Interview
heNwothm: For those just discovering you, who or what is Girder—and what should they expect when they hit play?
Metal Matt: We’re a family of old school heavy metal maniacs; half English and half Brazillian! Our band is made up of 4 unique characters; Metal Dress on lead vocals, (myself) Metal Matt bass and vocals, Iron Paul on guitar and vocals and Hordak II on drums. If people like 80’s heavy metal, then they will love us!
Hordak II: When someone hit play they’ll listen to a range of heavy music, from hard rock to thrash metal, eventually melodic, but mostly old school metal. Just don’t expect anything close to nu metal. If they want modern metal, don’t listen to us.
TheNwothm: How did Girder form and what stories can you share from your early days?
Hordak II: Since when me and Metal Dress first met with Metal Matt at one of our gigs we started bumping into each other at other gigs and concerts very often, what showed is that we all had similar tastes in music. As soon as we joined ourselves to make music together we felt a really powerful connection that worked really well as a band.
Metal Matt: We formed the band three years ago, after my previous progressive rock band Crimson Creatures ended. I sang lead vocals and played bass in that band.
I met the Brazilian couple (now my best friends) Hordak II and Metal Dress a year or so before whilst watching their gothic, funeral project Morbus Fatalis. Like Hordak said, we bonded over our mutual love for heavy metal, and Metal Dress urged me to form a band with them on multiple occasions, but I declined since I was busy in two bands.The moment Crimson Creatures ended, I instantly phoned Hordak II to immediately form a heavy metal band whilst they were moving house!
We had a big meeting as Hordak II, Metal Dress and Metal Matt. We started writing ideas for our clothes, style and lyrics. We all agreed that we will never play Nu-Metal- and we would play Old/True heavy metal! I started writing the lyrics for Killers of the Night and 6:30 late at night round Metal Dress’ house, and in the morning, a boy got murdered down the street. As if my pen was writing about what was happening there and then! We agreed that we wanted a fourth member to play guitar. I met Iron Paul in a pub a week or so later, and thus we had the Girder lineup after several pints!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytZ9mDWHUAA&list=RDytZ9mDWHUAA&start_radio=1
TheNwothm: Bournemouth isn’t the first place people associate with dragons, slugs, and metal mayhem. How has your hometown shaped your sound or attitude?
Hordak II: Girder was basically forged in Boscombe, Bournemouth, a place that has one of the highest crime rates in the UK. Me and Metal Dress come from a big town in South America with lots of violence and crime too. So these were the subject of our first songs. But our music is not only about mayhem and crimes, as we also make music about fun and boozing at the beach, as that’s a big thing in Bournemouth too.
Metal Matt: We are all fans (especially Metal Dress) of going to the beach and having parties and BBQ’s, so that sunny, positive attitude blends naturally into our music. Being into progressive rock as much as I am into metal, I love that our area of Dorset has had famous names in the music scene like Lee Kerslake, Robert Fripp, Greg Lake and John Wetton to name a few. Tolkien even lived down here!
TheNwothm: What’s the story behind the name “Girder”? Was it a eureka moment or a pub-fuelled accident?
Metal Matt: Knowing us, probably the latter. I remember Iron Paul and I talking about song ideas and band names down the pub several times. I’m sure Iron Paul brought up the name, as we were looking for something unmistakingly metal. A girder? Brilliant! I’ll buy another round…
Hordak II: We wanted a name that expressed what our music is, so Girder fit perfectly either to the music we make, as well as to what we listen to and love watching.
TheNwothm: Dorset’s got beaches, fossils, and now a heavy metal band singing about murder and parties. How does the local culture feed into your themes?
Hordak II: Local culture has always much to add to our music, as it is part of our everyday life in the streets. We have the police around all the time. Last year a body was found in pieces at Boscombe beach cliff. At our free time we enjoy boozing and having fun around, so thats all in our music.
Metal Matt: As the main songwriter in the band, I tend to get inspired by Iron Paul’s experiences then Hordak II and Metal Dress’ experiences in Brazil. Whenever I’m not recording and writing song ideas about fantasy dragons or slugs, I’m taking inspiration from local murders and Brazilian drug crime. Unfortunately, we have a lot of local murders and it inspired me to write our songs ‘Killers of the Night’, ‘6:30’ and ‘Rekindle the Flame’.
TheNwothm: Do you feel connected to the wider UK metal scene, or is Girder more of a rogue unit doing its own thing?
Metal Matt: Kind of both. Hordak and Metal Dress will feel connected to their music scene in Curitriba back in Brazil, and Iron Paul would feel more connected to the local grassroots music scene. I’m friends with several London, Somerset and Southampton bands like Toldeo Steel and Sanguis Mortem, so it does feel like we have that dual connection with Curitriba and the Southern UK metal scene.
Hordak II: As Metal Matt says, we feel connected to our local scene and have already started to get connected to a wider scene, but there is much more still to be achieved, considering we have just over two years as a band and we are still quite new to the UK wider scene.
TheNwothm: What’s your take on the current state of British heavy metal? Any scenes or bands you’re watching closely? Do you think Nwothm is still relatively underground in the UK?
Hordak II: British heavy metal scene has always been one of the most influential in the world and it will probably always be. As a South American I can tell the scene over there is quite big too, but we don’t hear about those bands over here, whilst the British bands are known worldwide. Nwothm is underground in the UK and everywhere, as mainstream music industry has no room for true metal music anymore. However, it will always be a strong underground movement with worldwide connections, as true metal culture is widely spread all around the globe.
Metal Matt: I’m friends with a lot of Southern UK metal bands and I go to a lot of local gigs, and it feels alive and strong. It will never go away at this point- especially in the underground. I’m only watching what my friend’s bands are doing like Seven Sisters, Tailgunner, Sanguis Mortem, Desolator or Toldeo Steel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Y-kPqkSdU
TheNwothm: Let’s talk about the debut. “Girder” dropped in March 2025 so what was the first track you wrote for it, and did it set the tone for the rest?
Metal Matt: Girder, from the onset, was my chance to finally write metal music in a band, and the others wanted me to start writing songs quickly, so we had songs to practice.
At one point I was recording and pitching a new song idea every other week. I wrote and recorded demos for Headbanger’s Ball, Killers of the Night and 6:30 in a week and in that order. For the Girder demos, I play all the guitars, bass, programmed drums and vocal parts, as I prefer delivering finished song ideas that the band can twist and turn into our own, as opposed to just delivering a riff with no song structure or lyrics.
Hordak II: To my point of view we’ve got a few different styles in the album. Although all songs may be classified as “old school metal”, they vary on rhythms, speed and melody, so I would not say the first compositions set the tone for the others.
TheNwothm: “Headbanger’s Ball” kicks things off with a bang. Was that always meant to be the opener?
Hordak II: Yes! I’m glad you also felt it “kicks things off with a bang”! Good way to start an album!
Metal Matt: It was always meant to be the opener in my eyes, as it was the first song I wrote. We only properly started talking about the album sequence in recording. I convinced the others that the first three songs should be in the order we learnt and played them.
TheNwothm: “Killers of the Night” and “City Dealer” both sound like they could soundtrack a neon-lit brawl. Are there stories behind those tracks?
Metal Matt: A Girder brawl would be insane! Killers of the Night is about the local murders, rapes and stabbings in Bournemouth, and the message of looking out for each other and staying safe. Beware the killers of the night!
Hordak II: As Metal Matt says, Killers of the night was inspired by the sad reality of youngsters stabbing each other for stupid reasons, and at the same night we wrote it a 18 year old guy was stabbed to death less than a mile from us. By the way, there is a music video coming out soon for this one!
City dealer is about drug dealer gangs controlling communities at the outskirts of big towns in Brazil. Believe me, these gangsters can do more benefits for the local communities than than the government would ever do, and so they get the local residents to use fire weapons such as guns, rifles and machine guns to protect the drug business, including drug buyers and sellers, like an army that not even the police dare to tackle. Metal Dress has lived her childhood near one of these communities, where the sound of gun shots are a common thing to be heard daily.
TheNwothm: “Rekindle the Flame” stretches over five minutes. Was that your epic moment or a spontaneous jam that got out of hand?
Hordak II : It was indeed and epic moment.
Metal Matt: That’s my favourite song that I wrote for the album. I thought the others would hate the song when I presented the demo I had made, since this song is closer to my more progressive rock leaning solo music with some complex chords, funkier bits, genre-bending and a longer length that I thought would be a big ‘no-no’ in Girder land.
Fortunately, Iron Paul, Metal Dress and Hordak II loved this song! The concept I created, with the song telling the story of divorced couple reconciling and falling in love again by mutually murdering people and doing other horrible things, was very compelling. I wanted a song where Metal Dress and I sung as two different characters.
What I love about this first album of ours is that has proven that we can go in different directions with our songs: injecting more NWOBHM, glam, thrash, doom, prog, punk or death/black, and dare I say funk and jazz without angering the Hordak and Iron Paul!
Our second album is going to be pushing in multiple directions from shorter thrashier songs to radio hits to more experimental leaning arrangements.
TheNwothm: “Metal Changed, Not Me” feels like a statement. What inspired that track, and who were you aiming it at?
Metal Matt: Iron Paul, being the oldest and wisest member of Girder, once told us three how he fell out of touch with Metal for a while (probably the ambiguity of the 90s), and how it was like Metal changed style, but not him- he still wanted to hear stuff in the style of Motorhead and Judas Priest.
With this concept in mind, I wanted to write a really heavy song- almost a hate song! Which is funny as we tell people that this is our love ballad to metal, which it is, but it is also talking about the styles of music and metal that we do not like.
The song is also about going insane and having fun to heavy metal!
Once we started practicing the song, Hordak II mentioned how we have to mention that modern moshpits are kindergarten compared to moshpits he was in when he was younger!
Hordak II: Moshpit is one of the 80’s and 90’s heavy music trademarks. It was an expression of anarchy and chaos, with no patterns or organised movements and at the same time peaceful. The new metal generation twisted this culture to the opposite of what it used to be. Now moshpit became a circlepit and everyone follows the same direction, like everyone has to move and look to the same side. Now the peaceful chaos is gone. So it makes no more sense as an expression of freedom.
TheNwothm: The album closes with “Girder.” Was that a mission statement, a self-roast, or something else entirely?
Hordak II: It expresses how the four of us engaged at a band project and ended up like a family, where despite of the differences we love each other like siblings.
Metal Matt: We loved the idea of closing the album with a bang, and having our self titled song felt perfect! It ends the album like the ending to a big party. I wanted the self titled song to be about how the band formed in a semi-realistic way minus the dragons!
TheNwothm: What can you share about each of the band members?
Metal Matt: I’m Metal Matt. I’m the youngest member and I love women! I started playing bass, guitar and singing 7 years ago. I’m releasing my twelfth solo album (under my real name Matthew Cornes) very soon where I play all the instruments and sing, and I go from black metal to jazz to prog rock to 80s balladry. I also drew our Girder album cover and I do the artwork for my solo albums too. I am also in another rock band called Rhinefield and we are recording our first album in the next few weeks!
Hordak II and Metal Dress are the Brazillians. They came over to the UK to be closer to the music they love, and to form a metal band with some British blokes like Iron Paul and myself. Metal Dress loves the beach, and is like having an older sister. She loves putting on new outfits for our shows. Hordak II killed Hordak I, because he was jealous of Hordak I having Metal Dress to himself.
Iron Paul is the oldest member and has played guitar for longer than I have been alive! He loves a Les Paul, and he was forged in the fires of Hades!!! Iron Paul eats his own guitar strings and has beef with microphones and they end up falling down! He plays in a local covers band called Oktober Rust, but has played in many more!
Hordak II: I’m Hordak II. I started playing at the punk rock scene in Brazil in 1996 as a teenager. Soon after started playing also at thrash and death metal bands. Always very involved in the music scene of Curitiba, have produced festivals and played gigs all around South Brazil and Paraguay. Metal Dress also has a punk background having sung at punk, post punk and grunge bands in Brazil. Metal Dress and me have a duo project of funeral gothic music caller Morbus Fatalis, and we have just released our second album.
TheNwothm: What’s your go-to post-gig ritual: pub crawl, kebab run, or straight to the sea?
Metal Matt: Unpack, have a beer and chat to our fans, then straight to bed and sleep!
Hordak II: At summer time we’re definitely straight to the sea, but we also love to sit at a pub and watch a good rock’n’roll band performing. We’re very keen to watching local bands, even if they are of different styles. It is very important to support the local scene.
TheNwothm: What’s the dream tour setup for Girder? Any bands you’d love to share a stage with—or avoid at all costs?
Metal Matt: The dream tour setup would be pairing up with like minded fellow metalheads. We would love to go on tour with our friends Sanguis Mortem or Toledo Steel. I know Metal Dress and Iron Paul would want to tour with Seven Sisters, a London Nwothm band that we supported in Portsmouth this year. Great metal music!
We missed out on supporting Tailgunner a year or so ago in Bournemouth, which frustrated me, as I really enjoy their music, and I’m glad that they have been getting attention in the last few years. I know Hordak II and the other two would say this too- as Girder we want to keep playing new gigs with different styles of metal and music in general. We think it is important to be respectful of other artists even if we don’t like them.
Hordak II: We’re still working our way to play around the UK, as a first step. But we certainly intend to strike Europe within the next few of years, before we start looking at South America, where I’ve played most of my life. Touring around the world might feel like a distant dream for a band thats barely two years old, but the time is passing and when the right moment comes we’ll be ready. Anywhere we go we’ll be happy to play with local bands, to show them our support just like we enjoy playing with touring bands that come over here.
TheNwothm: Thinking ahead are there any shows or tours planned for the rest of 2025/2026?
Metal Matt: We are supporting London thrash metal band Thrasherwolf, who are playing on November 14th in Bournemouth with our friends Sanguis Mortem. Tickets can be found on SeeTickets or through our links attached to this interview. Apart from that, we are busy writing new songs for the second album. Even Hordak II has been writing songs this time, and Metal Dress and Iron Paul have had more input into my song ideas as well!
TheNwothm: Are you already penning ideas for your next release?
Hordak II: We already have two new songs at our current gigs, but we’re working on another few ones. We shall soon have the songs ready for the next album.
Metal Matt: We are expanding on the foundations we have made on our first album. We want to continue the mix of styles. Our songs will be covering themes such as beach parties, slugs, prostitutes, teaching metal (I’m a guitar/bass teacher too), dragons and death!
TheNwothm: How can our readers buy your music and merch?
Metal Matt: Come to our shows, we sell our merch there. For the time being, you can get our album digitally on Bandcamp!
TheNwothm: Where can fans follow you online?
Metal Matt: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Bandcamp!
TheNwothm: Anything else you would like to mention?
Metal Matt: As Hordak said earlier, we have a music video for ‘Killers of the Night’ coming out soon. You can check out the music video for our song ‘Fire to the Realm’ on our Girder YouTube channel right now! Thank you guys for interviewing us. Girder will continue to bring metal mayhem to the world!
Hordak II: GIRDERRR!!!!!
Metal Matt: GIRDERRRR!!!
Bandcamp: https://girder.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551896919110
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/girderband
Other: https://linktr.ee/girderband
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GirderHeavyMetal
#brazilianHeavyMetal #BritishHeavyMetal #CrimsonCreatures #Girder #GirderBand #GirderHeavyMetal #HeavyMetal #NewWaveOfTraditionalHeavyMetal #NWOTHM #SanguisMortem #sevenSisters #Tailgunner #thenwothm #ToledoSteel
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Interview: Girder (UK)
18 minutesThe Nwothm
Forged in the seaside grit of Bournemouth and tempered by Brazilian fire, Girder are dragging true heavy metal back to the frontline. With their self-titled debut roaring loud and proud, the quartet channel chaos, camaraderie, and classic NWOBHM spirit into pure sonic steel. We caught up with them to talk origins, mayhem, and keeping metal true.
Interview
heNwothm: For those just discovering you, who or what is Girder—and what should they expect when they hit play?
Metal Matt: We’re a family of old school heavy metal maniacs; half English and half Brazillian! Our band is made up of 4 unique characters; Metal Dress on lead vocals, (myself) Metal Matt bass and vocals, Iron Paul on guitar and vocals and Hordak II on drums. If people like 80’s heavy metal, then they will love us!
Hordak II: When someone hit play they’ll listen to a range of heavy music, from hard rock to thrash metal, eventually melodic, but mostly old school metal. Just don’t expect anything close to nu metal. If they want modern metal, don’t listen to us.
TheNwothm: How did Girder form and what stories can you share from your early days?
Hordak II: Since when me and Metal Dress first met with Metal Matt at one of our gigs we started bumping into each other at other gigs and concerts very often, what showed is that we all had similar tastes in music. As soon as we joined ourselves to make music together we felt a really powerful connection that worked really well as a band.
Metal Matt: We formed the band three years ago, after my previous progressive rock band Crimson Creatures ended. I sang lead vocals and played bass in that band.
I met the Brazilian couple (now my best friends) Hordak II and Metal Dress a year or so before whilst watching their gothic, funeral project Morbus Fatalis. Like Hordak said, we bonded over our mutual love for heavy metal, and Metal Dress urged me to form a band with them on multiple occasions, but I declined since I was busy in two bands.The moment Crimson Creatures ended, I instantly phoned Hordak II to immediately form a heavy metal band whilst they were moving house!
We had a big meeting as Hordak II, Metal Dress and Metal Matt. We started writing ideas for our clothes, style and lyrics. We all agreed that we will never play Nu-Metal- and we would play Old/True heavy metal! I started writing the lyrics for Killers of the Night and 6:30 late at night round Metal Dress’ house, and in the morning, a boy got murdered down the street. As if my pen was writing about what was happening there and then! We agreed that we wanted a fourth member to play guitar. I met Iron Paul in a pub a week or so later, and thus we had the Girder lineup after several pints!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytZ9mDWHUAA&list=RDytZ9mDWHUAA&start_radio=1
TheNwothm: Bournemouth isn’t the first place people associate with dragons, slugs, and metal mayhem. How has your hometown shaped your sound or attitude?
Hordak II: Girder was basically forged in Boscombe, Bournemouth, a place that has one of the highest crime rates in the UK. Me and Metal Dress come from a big town in South America with lots of violence and crime too. So these were the subject of our first songs. But our music is not only about mayhem and crimes, as we also make music about fun and boozing at the beach, as that’s a big thing in Bournemouth too.
Metal Matt: We are all fans (especially Metal Dress) of going to the beach and having parties and BBQ’s, so that sunny, positive attitude blends naturally into our music. Being into progressive rock as much as I am into metal, I love that our area of Dorset has had famous names in the music scene like Lee Kerslake, Robert Fripp, Greg Lake and John Wetton to name a few. Tolkien even lived down here!
TheNwothm: What’s the story behind the name “Girder”? Was it a eureka moment or a pub-fuelled accident?
Metal Matt: Knowing us, probably the latter. I remember Iron Paul and I talking about song ideas and band names down the pub several times. I’m sure Iron Paul brought up the name, as we were looking for something unmistakingly metal. A girder? Brilliant! I’ll buy another round…
Hordak II: We wanted a name that expressed what our music is, so Girder fit perfectly either to the music we make, as well as to what we listen to and love watching.
TheNwothm: Dorset’s got beaches, fossils, and now a heavy metal band singing about murder and parties. How does the local culture feed into your themes?
Hordak II: Local culture has always much to add to our music, as it is part of our everyday life in the streets. We have the police around all the time. Last year a body was found in pieces at Boscombe beach cliff. At our free time we enjoy boozing and having fun around, so thats all in our music.
Metal Matt: As the main songwriter in the band, I tend to get inspired by Iron Paul’s experiences then Hordak II and Metal Dress’ experiences in Brazil. Whenever I’m not recording and writing song ideas about fantasy dragons or slugs, I’m taking inspiration from local murders and Brazilian drug crime. Unfortunately, we have a lot of local murders and it inspired me to write our songs ‘Killers of the Night’, ‘6:30’ and ‘Rekindle the Flame’.
TheNwothm: Do you feel connected to the wider UK metal scene, or is Girder more of a rogue unit doing its own thing?
Metal Matt: Kind of both. Hordak and Metal Dress will feel connected to their music scene in Curitriba back in Brazil, and Iron Paul would feel more connected to the local grassroots music scene. I’m friends with several London, Somerset and Southampton bands like Toldeo Steel and Sanguis Mortem, so it does feel like we have that dual connection with Curitriba and the Southern UK metal scene.
Hordak II: As Metal Matt says, we feel connected to our local scene and have already started to get connected to a wider scene, but there is much more still to be achieved, considering we have just over two years as a band and we are still quite new to the UK wider scene.
TheNwothm: What’s your take on the current state of British heavy metal? Any scenes or bands you’re watching closely? Do you think Nwothm is still relatively underground in the UK?
Hordak II: British heavy metal scene has always been one of the most influential in the world and it will probably always be. As a South American I can tell the scene over there is quite big too, but we don’t hear about those bands over here, whilst the British bands are known worldwide. Nwothm is underground in the UK and everywhere, as mainstream music industry has no room for true metal music anymore. However, it will always be a strong underground movement with worldwide connections, as true metal culture is widely spread all around the globe.
Metal Matt: I’m friends with a lot of Southern UK metal bands and I go to a lot of local gigs, and it feels alive and strong. It will never go away at this point- especially in the underground. I’m only watching what my friend’s bands are doing like Seven Sisters, Tailgunner, Sanguis Mortem, Desolator or Toldeo Steel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Y-kPqkSdU
TheNwothm: Let’s talk about the debut. “Girder” dropped in March 2025 so what was the first track you wrote for it, and did it set the tone for the rest?
Metal Matt: Girder, from the onset, was my chance to finally write metal music in a band, and the others wanted me to start writing songs quickly, so we had songs to practice.
At one point I was recording and pitching a new song idea every other week. I wrote and recorded demos for Headbanger’s Ball, Killers of the Night and 6:30 in a week and in that order. For the Girder demos, I play all the guitars, bass, programmed drums and vocal parts, as I prefer delivering finished song ideas that the band can twist and turn into our own, as opposed to just delivering a riff with no song structure or lyrics.
Hordak II: To my point of view we’ve got a few different styles in the album. Although all songs may be classified as “old school metal”, they vary on rhythms, speed and melody, so I would not say the first compositions set the tone for the others.
TheNwothm: “Headbanger’s Ball” kicks things off with a bang. Was that always meant to be the opener?
Hordak II: Yes! I’m glad you also felt it “kicks things off with a bang”! Good way to start an album!
Metal Matt: It was always meant to be the opener in my eyes, as it was the first song I wrote. We only properly started talking about the album sequence in recording. I convinced the others that the first three songs should be in the order we learnt and played them.
TheNwothm: “Killers of the Night” and “City Dealer” both sound like they could soundtrack a neon-lit brawl. Are there stories behind those tracks?
Metal Matt: A Girder brawl would be insane! Killers of the Night is about the local murders, rapes and stabbings in Bournemouth, and the message of looking out for each other and staying safe. Beware the killers of the night!
Hordak II: As Metal Matt says, Killers of the night was inspired by the sad reality of youngsters stabbing each other for stupid reasons, and at the same night we wrote it a 18 year old guy was stabbed to death less than a mile from us. By the way, there is a music video coming out soon for this one!
City dealer is about drug dealer gangs controlling communities at the outskirts of big towns in Brazil. Believe me, these gangsters can do more benefits for the local communities than than the government would ever do, and so they get the local residents to use fire weapons such as guns, rifles and machine guns to protect the drug business, including drug buyers and sellers, like an army that not even the police dare to tackle. Metal Dress has lived her childhood near one of these communities, where the sound of gun shots are a common thing to be heard daily.
TheNwothm: “Rekindle the Flame” stretches over five minutes. Was that your epic moment or a spontaneous jam that got out of hand?
Hordak II : It was indeed and epic moment.
Metal Matt: That’s my favourite song that I wrote for the album. I thought the others would hate the song when I presented the demo I had made, since this song is closer to my more progressive rock leaning solo music with some complex chords, funkier bits, genre-bending and a longer length that I thought would be a big ‘no-no’ in Girder land.
Fortunately, Iron Paul, Metal Dress and Hordak II loved this song! The concept I created, with the song telling the story of divorced couple reconciling and falling in love again by mutually murdering people and doing other horrible things, was very compelling. I wanted a song where Metal Dress and I sung as two different characters.
What I love about this first album of ours is that has proven that we can go in different directions with our songs: injecting more NWOBHM, glam, thrash, doom, prog, punk or death/black, and dare I say funk and jazz without angering the Hordak and Iron Paul!
Our second album is going to be pushing in multiple directions from shorter thrashier songs to radio hits to more experimental leaning arrangements.
TheNwothm: “Metal Changed, Not Me” feels like a statement. What inspired that track, and who were you aiming it at?
Metal Matt: Iron Paul, being the oldest and wisest member of Girder, once told us three how he fell out of touch with Metal for a while (probably the ambiguity of the 90s), and how it was like Metal changed style, but not him- he still wanted to hear stuff in the style of Motorhead and Judas Priest.
With this concept in mind, I wanted to write a really heavy song- almost a hate song! Which is funny as we tell people that this is our love ballad to metal, which it is, but it is also talking about the styles of music and metal that we do not like.
The song is also about going insane and having fun to heavy metal!
Once we started practicing the song, Hordak II mentioned how we have to mention that modern moshpits are kindergarten compared to moshpits he was in when he was younger!
Hordak II: Moshpit is one of the 80’s and 90’s heavy music trademarks. It was an expression of anarchy and chaos, with no patterns or organised movements and at the same time peaceful. The new metal generation twisted this culture to the opposite of what it used to be. Now moshpit became a circlepit and everyone follows the same direction, like everyone has to move and look to the same side. Now the peaceful chaos is gone. So it makes no more sense as an expression of freedom.
TheNwothm: The album closes with “Girder.” Was that a mission statement, a self-roast, or something else entirely?
Hordak II: It expresses how the four of us engaged at a band project and ended up like a family, where despite of the differences we love each other like siblings.
Metal Matt: We loved the idea of closing the album with a bang, and having our self titled song felt perfect! It ends the album like the ending to a big party. I wanted the self titled song to be about how the band formed in a semi-realistic way minus the dragons!
TheNwothm: What can you share about each of the band members?
Metal Matt: I’m Metal Matt. I’m the youngest member and I love women! I started playing bass, guitar and singing 7 years ago. I’m releasing my twelfth solo album (under my real name Matthew Cornes) very soon where I play all the instruments and sing, and I go from black metal to jazz to prog rock to 80s balladry. I also drew our Girder album cover and I do the artwork for my solo albums too. I am also in another rock band called Rhinefield and we are recording our first album in the next few weeks!
Hordak II and Metal Dress are the Brazillians. They came over to the UK to be closer to the music they love, and to form a metal band with some British blokes like Iron Paul and myself. Metal Dress loves the beach, and is like having an older sister. She loves putting on new outfits for our shows. Hordak II killed Hordak I, because he was jealous of Hordak I having Metal Dress to himself.
Iron Paul is the oldest member and has played guitar for longer than I have been alive! He loves a Les Paul, and he was forged in the fires of Hades!!! Iron Paul eats his own guitar strings and has beef with microphones and they end up falling down! He plays in a local covers band called Oktober Rust, but has played in many more!
Hordak II: I’m Hordak II. I started playing at the punk rock scene in Brazil in 1996 as a teenager. Soon after started playing also at thrash and death metal bands. Always very involved in the music scene of Curitiba, have produced festivals and played gigs all around South Brazil and Paraguay. Metal Dress also has a punk background having sung at punk, post punk and grunge bands in Brazil. Metal Dress and me have a duo project of funeral gothic music caller Morbus Fatalis, and we have just released our second album.
TheNwothm: What’s your go-to post-gig ritual: pub crawl, kebab run, or straight to the sea?
Metal Matt: Unpack, have a beer and chat to our fans, then straight to bed and sleep!
Hordak II: At summer time we’re definitely straight to the sea, but we also love to sit at a pub and watch a good rock’n’roll band performing. We’re very keen to watching local bands, even if they are of different styles. It is very important to support the local scene.
TheNwothm: What’s the dream tour setup for Girder? Any bands you’d love to share a stage with—or avoid at all costs?
Metal Matt: The dream tour setup would be pairing up with like minded fellow metalheads. We would love to go on tour with our friends Sanguis Mortem or Toledo Steel. I know Metal Dress and Iron Paul would want to tour with Seven Sisters, a London Nwothm band that we supported in Portsmouth this year. Great metal music!
We missed out on supporting Tailgunner a year or so ago in Bournemouth, which frustrated me, as I really enjoy their music, and I’m glad that they have been getting attention in the last few years. I know Hordak II and the other two would say this too- as Girder we want to keep playing new gigs with different styles of metal and music in general. We think it is important to be respectful of other artists even if we don’t like them.
Hordak II: We’re still working our way to play around the UK, as a first step. But we certainly intend to strike Europe within the next few of years, before we start looking at South America, where I’ve played most of my life. Touring around the world might feel like a distant dream for a band thats barely two years old, but the time is passing and when the right moment comes we’ll be ready. Anywhere we go we’ll be happy to play with local bands, to show them our support just like we enjoy playing with touring bands that come over here.
TheNwothm: Thinking ahead are there any shows or tours planned for the rest of 2025/2026?
Metal Matt: We are supporting London thrash metal band Thrasherwolf, who are playing on November 14th in Bournemouth with our friends Sanguis Mortem. Tickets can be found on SeeTickets or through our links attached to this interview. Apart from that, we are busy writing new songs for the second album. Even Hordak II has been writing songs this time, and Metal Dress and Iron Paul have had more input into my song ideas as well!
TheNwothm: Are you already penning ideas for your next release?
Hordak II: We already have two new songs at our current gigs, but we’re working on another few ones. We shall soon have the songs ready for the next album.
Metal Matt: We are expanding on the foundations we have made on our first album. We want to continue the mix of styles. Our songs will be covering themes such as beach parties, slugs, prostitutes, teaching metal (I’m a guitar/bass teacher too), dragons and death!
TheNwothm: How can our readers buy your music and merch?
Metal Matt: Come to our shows, we sell our merch there. For the time being, you can get our album digitally on Bandcamp!
TheNwothm: Where can fans follow you online?
Metal Matt: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Bandcamp!
TheNwothm: Anything else you would like to mention?
Metal Matt: As Hordak said earlier, we have a music video for ‘Killers of the Night’ coming out soon. You can check out the music video for our song ‘Fire to the Realm’ on our Girder YouTube channel right now! Thank you guys for interviewing us. Girder will continue to bring metal mayhem to the world!
Hordak II: GIRDERRR!!!!!
Metal Matt: GIRDERRRR!!!
Bandcamp: https://girder.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551896919110
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/girderband
Other: https://linktr.ee/girderband
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GirderHeavyMetal
#brazilianHeavyMetal #BritishHeavyMetal #CrimsonCreatures #Girder #GirderBand #GirderHeavyMetal #HeavyMetal #NewWaveOfTraditionalHeavyMetal #NWOTHM #SanguisMortem #sevenSisters #Tailgunner #thenwothm #ToledoSteel
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Interview: Girder (UK)
18 minutesThe Nwothm
Forged in the seaside grit of Bournemouth and tempered by Brazilian fire, Girder are dragging true heavy metal back to the frontline. With their self-titled debut roaring loud and proud, the quartet channel chaos, camaraderie, and classic NWOBHM spirit into pure sonic steel. We caught up with them to talk origins, mayhem, and keeping metal true.
Interview
heNwothm: For those just discovering you, who or what is Girder—and what should they expect when they hit play?
Metal Matt: We’re a family of old school heavy metal maniacs; half English and half Brazillian! Our band is made up of 4 unique characters; Metal Dress on lead vocals, (myself) Metal Matt bass and vocals, Iron Paul on guitar and vocals and Hordak II on drums. If people like 80’s heavy metal, then they will love us!
Hordak II: When someone hit play they’ll listen to a range of heavy music, from hard rock to thrash metal, eventually melodic, but mostly old school metal. Just don’t expect anything close to nu metal. If they want modern metal, don’t listen to us.
TheNwothm: How did Girder form and what stories can you share from your early days?
Hordak II: Since when me and Metal Dress first met with Metal Matt at one of our gigs we started bumping into each other at other gigs and concerts very often, what showed is that we all had similar tastes in music. As soon as we joined ourselves to make music together we felt a really powerful connection that worked really well as a band.
Metal Matt: We formed the band three years ago, after my previous progressive rock band Crimson Creatures ended. I sang lead vocals and played bass in that band.
I met the Brazilian couple (now my best friends) Hordak II and Metal Dress a year or so before whilst watching their gothic, funeral project Morbus Fatalis. Like Hordak said, we bonded over our mutual love for heavy metal, and Metal Dress urged me to form a band with them on multiple occasions, but I declined since I was busy in two bands.The moment Crimson Creatures ended, I instantly phoned Hordak II to immediately form a heavy metal band whilst they were moving house!
We had a big meeting as Hordak II, Metal Dress and Metal Matt. We started writing ideas for our clothes, style and lyrics. We all agreed that we will never play Nu-Metal- and we would play Old/True heavy metal! I started writing the lyrics for Killers of the Night and 6:30 late at night round Metal Dress’ house, and in the morning, a boy got murdered down the street. As if my pen was writing about what was happening there and then! We agreed that we wanted a fourth member to play guitar. I met Iron Paul in a pub a week or so later, and thus we had the Girder lineup after several pints!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytZ9mDWHUAA&list=RDytZ9mDWHUAA&start_radio=1
TheNwothm: Bournemouth isn’t the first place people associate with dragons, slugs, and metal mayhem. How has your hometown shaped your sound or attitude?
Hordak II: Girder was basically forged in Boscombe, Bournemouth, a place that has one of the highest crime rates in the UK. Me and Metal Dress come from a big town in South America with lots of violence and crime too. So these were the subject of our first songs. But our music is not only about mayhem and crimes, as we also make music about fun and boozing at the beach, as that’s a big thing in Bournemouth too.
Metal Matt: We are all fans (especially Metal Dress) of going to the beach and having parties and BBQ’s, so that sunny, positive attitude blends naturally into our music. Being into progressive rock as much as I am into metal, I love that our area of Dorset has had famous names in the music scene like Lee Kerslake, Robert Fripp, Greg Lake and John Wetton to name a few. Tolkien even lived down here!
TheNwothm: What’s the story behind the name “Girder”? Was it a eureka moment or a pub-fuelled accident?
Metal Matt: Knowing us, probably the latter. I remember Iron Paul and I talking about song ideas and band names down the pub several times. I’m sure Iron Paul brought up the name, as we were looking for something unmistakingly metal. A girder? Brilliant! I’ll buy another round…
Hordak II: We wanted a name that expressed what our music is, so Girder fit perfectly either to the music we make, as well as to what we listen to and love watching.
TheNwothm: Dorset’s got beaches, fossils, and now a heavy metal band singing about murder and parties. How does the local culture feed into your themes?
Hordak II: Local culture has always much to add to our music, as it is part of our everyday life in the streets. We have the police around all the time. Last year a body was found in pieces at Boscombe beach cliff. At our free time we enjoy boozing and having fun around, so thats all in our music.
Metal Matt: As the main songwriter in the band, I tend to get inspired by Iron Paul’s experiences then Hordak II and Metal Dress’ experiences in Brazil. Whenever I’m not recording and writing song ideas about fantasy dragons or slugs, I’m taking inspiration from local murders and Brazilian drug crime. Unfortunately, we have a lot of local murders and it inspired me to write our songs ‘Killers of the Night’, ‘6:30’ and ‘Rekindle the Flame’.
TheNwothm: Do you feel connected to the wider UK metal scene, or is Girder more of a rogue unit doing its own thing?
Metal Matt: Kind of both. Hordak and Metal Dress will feel connected to their music scene in Curitriba back in Brazil, and Iron Paul would feel more connected to the local grassroots music scene. I’m friends with several London, Somerset and Southampton bands like Toldeo Steel and Sanguis Mortem, so it does feel like we have that dual connection with Curitriba and the Southern UK metal scene.
Hordak II: As Metal Matt says, we feel connected to our local scene and have already started to get connected to a wider scene, but there is much more still to be achieved, considering we have just over two years as a band and we are still quite new to the UK wider scene.
TheNwothm: What’s your take on the current state of British heavy metal? Any scenes or bands you’re watching closely? Do you think Nwothm is still relatively underground in the UK?
Hordak II: British heavy metal scene has always been one of the most influential in the world and it will probably always be. As a South American I can tell the scene over there is quite big too, but we don’t hear about those bands over here, whilst the British bands are known worldwide. Nwothm is underground in the UK and everywhere, as mainstream music industry has no room for true metal music anymore. However, it will always be a strong underground movement with worldwide connections, as true metal culture is widely spread all around the globe.
Metal Matt: I’m friends with a lot of Southern UK metal bands and I go to a lot of local gigs, and it feels alive and strong. It will never go away at this point- especially in the underground. I’m only watching what my friend’s bands are doing like Seven Sisters, Tailgunner, Sanguis Mortem, Desolator or Toldeo Steel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Y-kPqkSdU
TheNwothm: Let’s talk about the debut. “Girder” dropped in March 2025 so what was the first track you wrote for it, and did it set the tone for the rest?
Metal Matt: Girder, from the onset, was my chance to finally write metal music in a band, and the others wanted me to start writing songs quickly, so we had songs to practice.
At one point I was recording and pitching a new song idea every other week. I wrote and recorded demos for Headbanger’s Ball, Killers of the Night and 6:30 in a week and in that order. For the Girder demos, I play all the guitars, bass, programmed drums and vocal parts, as I prefer delivering finished song ideas that the band can twist and turn into our own, as opposed to just delivering a riff with no song structure or lyrics.
Hordak II: To my point of view we’ve got a few different styles in the album. Although all songs may be classified as “old school metal”, they vary on rhythms, speed and melody, so I would not say the first compositions set the tone for the others.
TheNwothm: “Headbanger’s Ball” kicks things off with a bang. Was that always meant to be the opener?
Hordak II: Yes! I’m glad you also felt it “kicks things off with a bang”! Good way to start an album!
Metal Matt: It was always meant to be the opener in my eyes, as it was the first song I wrote. We only properly started talking about the album sequence in recording. I convinced the others that the first three songs should be in the order we learnt and played them.
TheNwothm: “Killers of the Night” and “City Dealer” both sound like they could soundtrack a neon-lit brawl. Are there stories behind those tracks?
Metal Matt: A Girder brawl would be insane! Killers of the Night is about the local murders, rapes and stabbings in Bournemouth, and the message of looking out for each other and staying safe. Beware the killers of the night!
Hordak II: As Metal Matt says, Killers of the night was inspired by the sad reality of youngsters stabbing each other for stupid reasons, and at the same night we wrote it a 18 year old guy was stabbed to death less than a mile from us. By the way, there is a music video coming out soon for this one!
City dealer is about drug dealer gangs controlling communities at the outskirts of big towns in Brazil. Believe me, these gangsters can do more benefits for the local communities than than the government would ever do, and so they get the local residents to use fire weapons such as guns, rifles and machine guns to protect the drug business, including drug buyers and sellers, like an army that not even the police dare to tackle. Metal Dress has lived her childhood near one of these communities, where the sound of gun shots are a common thing to be heard daily.
TheNwothm: “Rekindle the Flame” stretches over five minutes. Was that your epic moment or a spontaneous jam that got out of hand?
Hordak II : It was indeed and epic moment.
Metal Matt: That’s my favourite song that I wrote for the album. I thought the others would hate the song when I presented the demo I had made, since this song is closer to my more progressive rock leaning solo music with some complex chords, funkier bits, genre-bending and a longer length that I thought would be a big ‘no-no’ in Girder land.
Fortunately, Iron Paul, Metal Dress and Hordak II loved this song! The concept I created, with the song telling the story of divorced couple reconciling and falling in love again by mutually murdering people and doing other horrible things, was very compelling. I wanted a song where Metal Dress and I sung as two different characters.
What I love about this first album of ours is that has proven that we can go in different directions with our songs: injecting more NWOBHM, glam, thrash, doom, prog, punk or death/black, and dare I say funk and jazz without angering the Hordak and Iron Paul!
Our second album is going to be pushing in multiple directions from shorter thrashier songs to radio hits to more experimental leaning arrangements.
TheNwothm: “Metal Changed, Not Me” feels like a statement. What inspired that track, and who were you aiming it at?
Metal Matt: Iron Paul, being the oldest and wisest member of Girder, once told us three how he fell out of touch with Metal for a while (probably the ambiguity of the 90s), and how it was like Metal changed style, but not him- he still wanted to hear stuff in the style of Motorhead and Judas Priest.
With this concept in mind, I wanted to write a really heavy song- almost a hate song! Which is funny as we tell people that this is our love ballad to metal, which it is, but it is also talking about the styles of music and metal that we do not like.
The song is also about going insane and having fun to heavy metal!
Once we started practicing the song, Hordak II mentioned how we have to mention that modern moshpits are kindergarten compared to moshpits he was in when he was younger!
Hordak II: Moshpit is one of the 80’s and 90’s heavy music trademarks. It was an expression of anarchy and chaos, with no patterns or organised movements and at the same time peaceful. The new metal generation twisted this culture to the opposite of what it used to be. Now moshpit became a circlepit and everyone follows the same direction, like everyone has to move and look to the same side. Now the peaceful chaos is gone. So it makes no more sense as an expression of freedom.
TheNwothm: The album closes with “Girder.” Was that a mission statement, a self-roast, or something else entirely?
Hordak II: It expresses how the four of us engaged at a band project and ended up like a family, where despite of the differences we love each other like siblings.
Metal Matt: We loved the idea of closing the album with a bang, and having our self titled song felt perfect! It ends the album like the ending to a big party. I wanted the self titled song to be about how the band formed in a semi-realistic way minus the dragons!
TheNwothm: What can you share about each of the band members?
Metal Matt: I’m Metal Matt. I’m the youngest member and I love women! I started playing bass, guitar and singing 7 years ago. I’m releasing my twelfth solo album (under my real name Matthew Cornes) very soon where I play all the instruments and sing, and I go from black metal to jazz to prog rock to 80s balladry. I also drew our Girder album cover and I do the artwork for my solo albums too. I am also in another rock band called Rhinefield and we are recording our first album in the next few weeks!
Hordak II and Metal Dress are the Brazillians. They came over to the UK to be closer to the music they love, and to form a metal band with some British blokes like Iron Paul and myself. Metal Dress loves the beach, and is like having an older sister. She loves putting on new outfits for our shows. Hordak II killed Hordak I, because he was jealous of Hordak I having Metal Dress to himself.
Iron Paul is the oldest member and has played guitar for longer than I have been alive! He loves a Les Paul, and he was forged in the fires of Hades!!! Iron Paul eats his own guitar strings and has beef with microphones and they end up falling down! He plays in a local covers band called Oktober Rust, but has played in many more!
Hordak II: I’m Hordak II. I started playing at the punk rock scene in Brazil in 1996 as a teenager. Soon after started playing also at thrash and death metal bands. Always very involved in the music scene of Curitiba, have produced festivals and played gigs all around South Brazil and Paraguay. Metal Dress also has a punk background having sung at punk, post punk and grunge bands in Brazil. Metal Dress and me have a duo project of funeral gothic music caller Morbus Fatalis, and we have just released our second album.
TheNwothm: What’s your go-to post-gig ritual: pub crawl, kebab run, or straight to the sea?
Metal Matt: Unpack, have a beer and chat to our fans, then straight to bed and sleep!
Hordak II: At summer time we’re definitely straight to the sea, but we also love to sit at a pub and watch a good rock’n’roll band performing. We’re very keen to watching local bands, even if they are of different styles. It is very important to support the local scene.
TheNwothm: What’s the dream tour setup for Girder? Any bands you’d love to share a stage with—or avoid at all costs?
Metal Matt: The dream tour setup would be pairing up with like minded fellow metalheads. We would love to go on tour with our friends Sanguis Mortem or Toledo Steel. I know Metal Dress and Iron Paul would want to tour with Seven Sisters, a London Nwothm band that we supported in Portsmouth this year. Great metal music!
We missed out on supporting Tailgunner a year or so ago in Bournemouth, which frustrated me, as I really enjoy their music, and I’m glad that they have been getting attention in the last few years. I know Hordak II and the other two would say this too- as Girder we want to keep playing new gigs with different styles of metal and music in general. We think it is important to be respectful of other artists even if we don’t like them.
Hordak II: We’re still working our way to play around the UK, as a first step. But we certainly intend to strike Europe within the next few of years, before we start looking at South America, where I’ve played most of my life. Touring around the world might feel like a distant dream for a band thats barely two years old, but the time is passing and when the right moment comes we’ll be ready. Anywhere we go we’ll be happy to play with local bands, to show them our support just like we enjoy playing with touring bands that come over here.
TheNwothm: Thinking ahead are there any shows or tours planned for the rest of 2025/2026?
Metal Matt: We are supporting London thrash metal band Thrasherwolf, who are playing on November 14th in Bournemouth with our friends Sanguis Mortem. Tickets can be found on SeeTickets or through our links attached to this interview. Apart from that, we are busy writing new songs for the second album. Even Hordak II has been writing songs this time, and Metal Dress and Iron Paul have had more input into my song ideas as well!
TheNwothm: Are you already penning ideas for your next release?
Hordak II: We already have two new songs at our current gigs, but we’re working on another few ones. We shall soon have the songs ready for the next album.
Metal Matt: We are expanding on the foundations we have made on our first album. We want to continue the mix of styles. Our songs will be covering themes such as beach parties, slugs, prostitutes, teaching metal (I’m a guitar/bass teacher too), dragons and death!
TheNwothm: How can our readers buy your music and merch?
Metal Matt: Come to our shows, we sell our merch there. For the time being, you can get our album digitally on Bandcamp!
TheNwothm: Where can fans follow you online?
Metal Matt: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Bandcamp!
TheNwothm: Anything else you would like to mention?
Metal Matt: As Hordak said earlier, we have a music video for ‘Killers of the Night’ coming out soon. You can check out the music video for our song ‘Fire to the Realm’ on our Girder YouTube channel right now! Thank you guys for interviewing us. Girder will continue to bring metal mayhem to the world!
Hordak II: GIRDERRR!!!!!
Metal Matt: GIRDERRRR!!!
Bandcamp: https://girder.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551896919110
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/girderband
Other: https://linktr.ee/girderband
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GirderHeavyMetal
#brazilianHeavyMetal #BritishHeavyMetal #CrimsonCreatures #Girder #GirderBand #GirderHeavyMetal #HeavyMetal #NewWaveOfTraditionalHeavyMetal #NWOTHM #SanguisMortem #sevenSisters #Tailgunner #thenwothm #ToledoSteel
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Interview: Girder (UK)
18 minutesThe Nwothm
Forged in the seaside grit of Bournemouth and tempered by Brazilian fire, Girder are dragging true heavy metal back to the frontline. With their self-titled debut roaring loud and proud, the quartet channel chaos, camaraderie, and classic NWOBHM spirit into pure sonic steel. We caught up with them to talk origins, mayhem, and keeping metal true.
Interview
heNwothm: For those just discovering you, who or what is Girder—and what should they expect when they hit play?
Metal Matt: We’re a family of old school heavy metal maniacs; half English and half Brazillian! Our band is made up of 4 unique characters; Metal Dress on lead vocals, (myself) Metal Matt bass and vocals, Iron Paul on guitar and vocals and Hordak II on drums. If people like 80’s heavy metal, then they will love us!
Hordak II: When someone hit play they’ll listen to a range of heavy music, from hard rock to thrash metal, eventually melodic, but mostly old school metal. Just don’t expect anything close to nu metal. If they want modern metal, don’t listen to us.
TheNwothm: How did Girder form and what stories can you share from your early days?
Hordak II: Since when me and Metal Dress first met with Metal Matt at one of our gigs we started bumping into each other at other gigs and concerts very often, what showed is that we all had similar tastes in music. As soon as we joined ourselves to make music together we felt a really powerful connection that worked really well as a band.
Metal Matt: We formed the band three years ago, after my previous progressive rock band Crimson Creatures ended. I sang lead vocals and played bass in that band.
I met the Brazilian couple (now my best friends) Hordak II and Metal Dress a year or so before whilst watching their gothic, funeral project Morbus Fatalis. Like Hordak said, we bonded over our mutual love for heavy metal, and Metal Dress urged me to form a band with them on multiple occasions, but I declined since I was busy in two bands.The moment Crimson Creatures ended, I instantly phoned Hordak II to immediately form a heavy metal band whilst they were moving house!
We had a big meeting as Hordak II, Metal Dress and Metal Matt. We started writing ideas for our clothes, style and lyrics. We all agreed that we will never play Nu-Metal- and we would play Old/True heavy metal! I started writing the lyrics for Killers of the Night and 6:30 late at night round Metal Dress’ house, and in the morning, a boy got murdered down the street. As if my pen was writing about what was happening there and then! We agreed that we wanted a fourth member to play guitar. I met Iron Paul in a pub a week or so later, and thus we had the Girder lineup after several pints!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytZ9mDWHUAA&list=RDytZ9mDWHUAA&start_radio=1
TheNwothm: Bournemouth isn’t the first place people associate with dragons, slugs, and metal mayhem. How has your hometown shaped your sound or attitude?
Hordak II: Girder was basically forged in Boscombe, Bournemouth, a place that has one of the highest crime rates in the UK. Me and Metal Dress come from a big town in South America with lots of violence and crime too. So these were the subject of our first songs. But our music is not only about mayhem and crimes, as we also make music about fun and boozing at the beach, as that’s a big thing in Bournemouth too.
Metal Matt: We are all fans (especially Metal Dress) of going to the beach and having parties and BBQ’s, so that sunny, positive attitude blends naturally into our music. Being into progressive rock as much as I am into metal, I love that our area of Dorset has had famous names in the music scene like Lee Kerslake, Robert Fripp, Greg Lake and John Wetton to name a few. Tolkien even lived down here!
TheNwothm: What’s the story behind the name “Girder”? Was it a eureka moment or a pub-fuelled accident?
Metal Matt: Knowing us, probably the latter. I remember Iron Paul and I talking about song ideas and band names down the pub several times. I’m sure Iron Paul brought up the name, as we were looking for something unmistakingly metal. A girder? Brilliant! I’ll buy another round…
Hordak II: We wanted a name that expressed what our music is, so Girder fit perfectly either to the music we make, as well as to what we listen to and love watching.
TheNwothm: Dorset’s got beaches, fossils, and now a heavy metal band singing about murder and parties. How does the local culture feed into your themes?
Hordak II: Local culture has always much to add to our music, as it is part of our everyday life in the streets. We have the police around all the time. Last year a body was found in pieces at Boscombe beach cliff. At our free time we enjoy boozing and having fun around, so thats all in our music.
Metal Matt: As the main songwriter in the band, I tend to get inspired by Iron Paul’s experiences then Hordak II and Metal Dress’ experiences in Brazil. Whenever I’m not recording and writing song ideas about fantasy dragons or slugs, I’m taking inspiration from local murders and Brazilian drug crime. Unfortunately, we have a lot of local murders and it inspired me to write our songs ‘Killers of the Night’, ‘6:30’ and ‘Rekindle the Flame’.
TheNwothm: Do you feel connected to the wider UK metal scene, or is Girder more of a rogue unit doing its own thing?
Metal Matt: Kind of both. Hordak and Metal Dress will feel connected to their music scene in Curitriba back in Brazil, and Iron Paul would feel more connected to the local grassroots music scene. I’m friends with several London, Somerset and Southampton bands like Toldeo Steel and Sanguis Mortem, so it does feel like we have that dual connection with Curitriba and the Southern UK metal scene.
Hordak II: As Metal Matt says, we feel connected to our local scene and have already started to get connected to a wider scene, but there is much more still to be achieved, considering we have just over two years as a band and we are still quite new to the UK wider scene.
TheNwothm: What’s your take on the current state of British heavy metal? Any scenes or bands you’re watching closely? Do you think Nwothm is still relatively underground in the UK?
Hordak II: British heavy metal scene has always been one of the most influential in the world and it will probably always be. As a South American I can tell the scene over there is quite big too, but we don’t hear about those bands over here, whilst the British bands are known worldwide. Nwothm is underground in the UK and everywhere, as mainstream music industry has no room for true metal music anymore. However, it will always be a strong underground movement with worldwide connections, as true metal culture is widely spread all around the globe.
Metal Matt: I’m friends with a lot of Southern UK metal bands and I go to a lot of local gigs, and it feels alive and strong. It will never go away at this point- especially in the underground. I’m only watching what my friend’s bands are doing like Seven Sisters, Tailgunner, Sanguis Mortem, Desolator or Toldeo Steel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Y-kPqkSdU
TheNwothm: Let’s talk about the debut. “Girder” dropped in March 2025 so what was the first track you wrote for it, and did it set the tone for the rest?
Metal Matt: Girder, from the onset, was my chance to finally write metal music in a band, and the others wanted me to start writing songs quickly, so we had songs to practice.
At one point I was recording and pitching a new song idea every other week. I wrote and recorded demos for Headbanger’s Ball, Killers of the Night and 6:30 in a week and in that order. For the Girder demos, I play all the guitars, bass, programmed drums and vocal parts, as I prefer delivering finished song ideas that the band can twist and turn into our own, as opposed to just delivering a riff with no song structure or lyrics.
Hordak II: To my point of view we’ve got a few different styles in the album. Although all songs may be classified as “old school metal”, they vary on rhythms, speed and melody, so I would not say the first compositions set the tone for the others.
TheNwothm: “Headbanger’s Ball” kicks things off with a bang. Was that always meant to be the opener?
Hordak II: Yes! I’m glad you also felt it “kicks things off with a bang”! Good way to start an album!
Metal Matt: It was always meant to be the opener in my eyes, as it was the first song I wrote. We only properly started talking about the album sequence in recording. I convinced the others that the first three songs should be in the order we learnt and played them.
TheNwothm: “Killers of the Night” and “City Dealer” both sound like they could soundtrack a neon-lit brawl. Are there stories behind those tracks?
Metal Matt: A Girder brawl would be insane! Killers of the Night is about the local murders, rapes and stabbings in Bournemouth, and the message of looking out for each other and staying safe. Beware the killers of the night!
Hordak II: As Metal Matt says, Killers of the night was inspired by the sad reality of youngsters stabbing each other for stupid reasons, and at the same night we wrote it a 18 year old guy was stabbed to death less than a mile from us. By the way, there is a music video coming out soon for this one!
City dealer is about drug dealer gangs controlling communities at the outskirts of big towns in Brazil. Believe me, these gangsters can do more benefits for the local communities than than the government would ever do, and so they get the local residents to use fire weapons such as guns, rifles and machine guns to protect the drug business, including drug buyers and sellers, like an army that not even the police dare to tackle. Metal Dress has lived her childhood near one of these communities, where the sound of gun shots are a common thing to be heard daily.
TheNwothm: “Rekindle the Flame” stretches over five minutes. Was that your epic moment or a spontaneous jam that got out of hand?
Hordak II : It was indeed and epic moment.
Metal Matt: That’s my favourite song that I wrote for the album. I thought the others would hate the song when I presented the demo I had made, since this song is closer to my more progressive rock leaning solo music with some complex chords, funkier bits, genre-bending and a longer length that I thought would be a big ‘no-no’ in Girder land.
Fortunately, Iron Paul, Metal Dress and Hordak II loved this song! The concept I created, with the song telling the story of divorced couple reconciling and falling in love again by mutually murdering people and doing other horrible things, was very compelling. I wanted a song where Metal Dress and I sung as two different characters.
What I love about this first album of ours is that has proven that we can go in different directions with our songs: injecting more NWOBHM, glam, thrash, doom, prog, punk or death/black, and dare I say funk and jazz without angering the Hordak and Iron Paul!
Our second album is going to be pushing in multiple directions from shorter thrashier songs to radio hits to more experimental leaning arrangements.
TheNwothm: “Metal Changed, Not Me” feels like a statement. What inspired that track, and who were you aiming it at?
Metal Matt: Iron Paul, being the oldest and wisest member of Girder, once told us three how he fell out of touch with Metal for a while (probably the ambiguity of the 90s), and how it was like Metal changed style, but not him- he still wanted to hear stuff in the style of Motorhead and Judas Priest.
With this concept in mind, I wanted to write a really heavy song- almost a hate song! Which is funny as we tell people that this is our love ballad to metal, which it is, but it is also talking about the styles of music and metal that we do not like.
The song is also about going insane and having fun to heavy metal!
Once we started practicing the song, Hordak II mentioned how we have to mention that modern moshpits are kindergarten compared to moshpits he was in when he was younger!
Hordak II: Moshpit is one of the 80’s and 90’s heavy music trademarks. It was an expression of anarchy and chaos, with no patterns or organised movements and at the same time peaceful. The new metal generation twisted this culture to the opposite of what it used to be. Now moshpit became a circlepit and everyone follows the same direction, like everyone has to move and look to the same side. Now the peaceful chaos is gone. So it makes no more sense as an expression of freedom.
TheNwothm: The album closes with “Girder.” Was that a mission statement, a self-roast, or something else entirely?
Hordak II: It expresses how the four of us engaged at a band project and ended up like a family, where despite of the differences we love each other like siblings.
Metal Matt: We loved the idea of closing the album with a bang, and having our self titled song felt perfect! It ends the album like the ending to a big party. I wanted the self titled song to be about how the band formed in a semi-realistic way minus the dragons!
TheNwothm: What can you share about each of the band members?
Metal Matt: I’m Metal Matt. I’m the youngest member and I love women! I started playing bass, guitar and singing 7 years ago. I’m releasing my twelfth solo album (under my real name Matthew Cornes) very soon where I play all the instruments and sing, and I go from black metal to jazz to prog rock to 80s balladry. I also drew our Girder album cover and I do the artwork for my solo albums too. I am also in another rock band called Rhinefield and we are recording our first album in the next few weeks!
Hordak II and Metal Dress are the Brazillians. They came over to the UK to be closer to the music they love, and to form a metal band with some British blokes like Iron Paul and myself. Metal Dress loves the beach, and is like having an older sister. She loves putting on new outfits for our shows. Hordak II killed Hordak I, because he was jealous of Hordak I having Metal Dress to himself.
Iron Paul is the oldest member and has played guitar for longer than I have been alive! He loves a Les Paul, and he was forged in the fires of Hades!!! Iron Paul eats his own guitar strings and has beef with microphones and they end up falling down! He plays in a local covers band called Oktober Rust, but has played in many more!
Hordak II: I’m Hordak II. I started playing at the punk rock scene in Brazil in 1996 as a teenager. Soon after started playing also at thrash and death metal bands. Always very involved in the music scene of Curitiba, have produced festivals and played gigs all around South Brazil and Paraguay. Metal Dress also has a punk background having sung at punk, post punk and grunge bands in Brazil. Metal Dress and me have a duo project of funeral gothic music caller Morbus Fatalis, and we have just released our second album.
TheNwothm: What’s your go-to post-gig ritual: pub crawl, kebab run, or straight to the sea?
Metal Matt: Unpack, have a beer and chat to our fans, then straight to bed and sleep!
Hordak II: At summer time we’re definitely straight to the sea, but we also love to sit at a pub and watch a good rock’n’roll band performing. We’re very keen to watching local bands, even if they are of different styles. It is very important to support the local scene.
TheNwothm: What’s the dream tour setup for Girder? Any bands you’d love to share a stage with—or avoid at all costs?
Metal Matt: The dream tour setup would be pairing up with like minded fellow metalheads. We would love to go on tour with our friends Sanguis Mortem or Toledo Steel. I know Metal Dress and Iron Paul would want to tour with Seven Sisters, a London Nwothm band that we supported in Portsmouth this year. Great metal music!
We missed out on supporting Tailgunner a year or so ago in Bournemouth, which frustrated me, as I really enjoy their music, and I’m glad that they have been getting attention in the last few years. I know Hordak II and the other two would say this too- as Girder we want to keep playing new gigs with different styles of metal and music in general. We think it is important to be respectful of other artists even if we don’t like them.
Hordak II: We’re still working our way to play around the UK, as a first step. But we certainly intend to strike Europe within the next few of years, before we start looking at South America, where I’ve played most of my life. Touring around the world might feel like a distant dream for a band thats barely two years old, but the time is passing and when the right moment comes we’ll be ready. Anywhere we go we’ll be happy to play with local bands, to show them our support just like we enjoy playing with touring bands that come over here.
TheNwothm: Thinking ahead are there any shows or tours planned for the rest of 2025/2026?
Metal Matt: We are supporting London thrash metal band Thrasherwolf, who are playing on November 14th in Bournemouth with our friends Sanguis Mortem. Tickets can be found on SeeTickets or through our links attached to this interview. Apart from that, we are busy writing new songs for the second album. Even Hordak II has been writing songs this time, and Metal Dress and Iron Paul have had more input into my song ideas as well!
TheNwothm: Are you already penning ideas for your next release?
Hordak II: We already have two new songs at our current gigs, but we’re working on another few ones. We shall soon have the songs ready for the next album.
Metal Matt: We are expanding on the foundations we have made on our first album. We want to continue the mix of styles. Our songs will be covering themes such as beach parties, slugs, prostitutes, teaching metal (I’m a guitar/bass teacher too), dragons and death!
TheNwothm: How can our readers buy your music and merch?
Metal Matt: Come to our shows, we sell our merch there. For the time being, you can get our album digitally on Bandcamp!
TheNwothm: Where can fans follow you online?
Metal Matt: YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Bandcamp!
TheNwothm: Anything else you would like to mention?
Metal Matt: As Hordak said earlier, we have a music video for ‘Killers of the Night’ coming out soon. You can check out the music video for our song ‘Fire to the Realm’ on our Girder YouTube channel right now! Thank you guys for interviewing us. Girder will continue to bring metal mayhem to the world!
Hordak II: GIRDERRR!!!!!
Metal Matt: GIRDERRRR!!!
Bandcamp: https://girder.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61551896919110
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/girderband
Other: https://linktr.ee/girderband
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GirderHeavyMetal
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