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Jim Carrey pourrait incarner George Jetson dans un film live-action attendu
L’icône du cinéma Jim Carrey serait en négociations pour interpréter George Jetson dans un long-métrage en prises de vues réelles adapté de la célèbre série animée des années 1960. Colin Trevorrow pourrait diriger et coécrire le scénario aux côtés de Joe Epstein, marquant un retour attendu d’un univers culte de Hanna-Barbera.
Un projet ambitieux pour un classique de l’animation
Jim Carrey en négociations pour un rôle iconique
Publicités
Selon les informations publiées par The Wrap, l’acteur Jim Carrey serait en discussions pour incarner George Jetson dans un film live-action inspiré de la série animée légendaire de Hanna-Barbera. Connu pour ses rôles comiques et sa capacité à incarner des personnages excentriques et attachants, Carrey pourrait insuffler une nouvelle vie à ce personnage emblématique de l’ère spatiale.Colin Trevorrow à la barre
Le réalisateur Colin Trevorrow, reconnu pour son travail sur des franchises à grand spectacle, serait également en négociations pour diriger le projet et co-écrire le scénario avec Joe Epstein. Si aucun détail supplémentaire n’a encore été révélé, cette association promet un mélange d’humour et d’innovations visuelles, fidèle à l’esprit futuriste et coloré de la série originale.Retour sur l’univers des Jetsons
Une série pionnière de Hanna-Barbera
Publicités
Les Jetsons ont été créés dans les années 1960 comme la version futuriste des Flintstones, projetant les téléspectateurs dans un univers de science-fiction humoristique. La série animée, produite par Hanna-Barbera, a d’abord été diffusée entre 1962 et 1963, puis relancée pour deux saisons supplémentaires entre 1985 et 1987, capturant une nouvelle génération de spectateurs avec ses inventions délirantes et son style unique.Des voix emblématiques de l’animation
George O’Hanlon, Penny Singleton, Janet Waldo, Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, Don Messick et Jean Vander Pyl ont prêté leurs voix aux personnages originaux, tandis que Frank Welker a rejoint la distribution dans les années 1980. Ces talents ont contribué à faire des Jetsons une référence culturelle, célébrée pour son humour et sa vision anticipatrice de la vie dans le futur.Les enjeux d’une adaptation live-action
Adapter un classique avec soin
Publicités
Adapter une série animée culte comme Les Jetsons en film live-action représente un défi artistique et technique majeur. Les créateurs devront conserver l’esprit léger et humoristique de la série tout en modernisant les décors et les effets spéciaux pour répondre aux attentes d’un public contemporain. La présence de Jim Carrey laisse présager une interprétation à la fois comique et attachante de George Jetson.L’importance du casting et de la réalisation
Le choix de Colin Trevorrow comme réalisateur suggère que le film pourrait combiner action, effets visuels spectaculaires et humour. Sa collaboration avec Joe Epstein sur le scénario permettra d’assurer une continuité avec l’univers original tout en proposant de nouvelles intrigues adaptées aux standards du cinéma d’aujourd’hui.Les perspectives pour le cinéma et les fans
Une attente forte des spectateurs
Publicités
Les fans de la série, jeunes et moins jeunes, suivent ce projet avec un vif intérêt. Le film live-action représente non seulement un hommage à une œuvre culte, mais aussi une opportunité de présenter l’univers des Jetsons à une nouvelle génération, qui n’a pas connu la série originale à la télévision.Un futur prometteur pour la franchise
Au-delà de la simple adaptation, ce long-métrage pourrait relancer l’intérêt pour l’univers des Jetsons, inspirant d’éventuelles suites ou produits dérivés. Avec Jim Carrey et un réalisateur expérimenté à bord, le projet dispose de tous les ingrédients pour devenir un succès critique et commercial.Si les négociations se concrétisent, Jim Carrey prêtera sa voix et son talent comique à George Jetson, donnant vie à un personnage emblématique des années 1960. Le film live-action dirigé par Colin Trevorrow devrait mêler humour, innovation visuelle et hommage à la série originale. Les fans de la franchise peuvent déjà anticiper une nouvelle aventure dans le futur coloré et déjanté des Jetsons.
#adaptation #Cinéma #ColinTrevorrow #comédie #filmLiveAction #GeorgeJetson #HannaBarbera #JimCarrey #JoeEpstein #sérieAnimée #scienceFiction #TheJetsons
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Jim Carrey pourrait incarner George Jetson dans un film live-action attendu
L’icône du cinéma Jim Carrey serait en négociations pour interpréter George Jetson dans un long-métrage en prises de vues réelles adapté de la célèbre série animée des années 1960. Colin Trevorrow pourrait diriger et coécrire le scénario aux côtés de Joe Epstein, marquant un retour attendu d’un univers culte de Hanna-Barbera.
Un projet ambitieux pour un classique de l’animation
Jim Carrey en négociations pour un rôle iconique
Publicités
Selon les informations publiées par The Wrap, l’acteur Jim Carrey serait en discussions pour incarner George Jetson dans un film live-action inspiré de la série animée légendaire de Hanna-Barbera. Connu pour ses rôles comiques et sa capacité à incarner des personnages excentriques et attachants, Carrey pourrait insuffler une nouvelle vie à ce personnage emblématique de l’ère spatiale.Colin Trevorrow à la barre
Le réalisateur Colin Trevorrow, reconnu pour son travail sur des franchises à grand spectacle, serait également en négociations pour diriger le projet et co-écrire le scénario avec Joe Epstein. Si aucun détail supplémentaire n’a encore été révélé, cette association promet un mélange d’humour et d’innovations visuelles, fidèle à l’esprit futuriste et coloré de la série originale.Retour sur l’univers des Jetsons
Une série pionnière de Hanna-Barbera
Publicités
Les Jetsons ont été créés dans les années 1960 comme la version futuriste des Flintstones, projetant les téléspectateurs dans un univers de science-fiction humoristique. La série animée, produite par Hanna-Barbera, a d’abord été diffusée entre 1962 et 1963, puis relancée pour deux saisons supplémentaires entre 1985 et 1987, capturant une nouvelle génération de spectateurs avec ses inventions délirantes et son style unique.Des voix emblématiques de l’animation
George O’Hanlon, Penny Singleton, Janet Waldo, Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, Don Messick et Jean Vander Pyl ont prêté leurs voix aux personnages originaux, tandis que Frank Welker a rejoint la distribution dans les années 1980. Ces talents ont contribué à faire des Jetsons une référence culturelle, célébrée pour son humour et sa vision anticipatrice de la vie dans le futur.Les enjeux d’une adaptation live-action
Adapter un classique avec soin
Publicités
Adapter une série animée culte comme Les Jetsons en film live-action représente un défi artistique et technique majeur. Les créateurs devront conserver l’esprit léger et humoristique de la série tout en modernisant les décors et les effets spéciaux pour répondre aux attentes d’un public contemporain. La présence de Jim Carrey laisse présager une interprétation à la fois comique et attachante de George Jetson.L’importance du casting et de la réalisation
Le choix de Colin Trevorrow comme réalisateur suggère que le film pourrait combiner action, effets visuels spectaculaires et humour. Sa collaboration avec Joe Epstein sur le scénario permettra d’assurer une continuité avec l’univers original tout en proposant de nouvelles intrigues adaptées aux standards du cinéma d’aujourd’hui.Les perspectives pour le cinéma et les fans
Une attente forte des spectateurs
Publicités
Les fans de la série, jeunes et moins jeunes, suivent ce projet avec un vif intérêt. Le film live-action représente non seulement un hommage à une œuvre culte, mais aussi une opportunité de présenter l’univers des Jetsons à une nouvelle génération, qui n’a pas connu la série originale à la télévision.Un futur prometteur pour la franchise
Au-delà de la simple adaptation, ce long-métrage pourrait relancer l’intérêt pour l’univers des Jetsons, inspirant d’éventuelles suites ou produits dérivés. Avec Jim Carrey et un réalisateur expérimenté à bord, le projet dispose de tous les ingrédients pour devenir un succès critique et commercial.Si les négociations se concrétisent, Jim Carrey prêtera sa voix et son talent comique à George Jetson, donnant vie à un personnage emblématique des années 1960. Le film live-action dirigé par Colin Trevorrow devrait mêler humour, innovation visuelle et hommage à la série originale. Les fans de la franchise peuvent déjà anticiper une nouvelle aventure dans le futur coloré et déjanté des Jetsons.
#adaptation #Cinéma #ColinTrevorrow #comédie #filmLiveAction #GeorgeJetson #HannaBarbera #JimCarrey #JoeEpstein #sérieAnimée #scienceFiction #TheJetsons
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Jim Carrey pourrait incarner George Jetson dans un film live-action attendu
L’icône du cinéma Jim Carrey serait en négociations pour interpréter George Jetson dans un long-métrage en prises de vues réelles adapté de la célèbre série animée des années 1960. Colin Trevorrow pourrait diriger et coécrire le scénario aux côtés de Joe Epstein, marquant un retour attendu d’un univers culte de Hanna-Barbera.
Un projet ambitieux pour un classique de l’animation
Jim Carrey en négociations pour un rôle iconique
Publicités
Selon les informations publiées par The Wrap, l’acteur Jim Carrey serait en discussions pour incarner George Jetson dans un film live-action inspiré de la série animée légendaire de Hanna-Barbera. Connu pour ses rôles comiques et sa capacité à incarner des personnages excentriques et attachants, Carrey pourrait insuffler une nouvelle vie à ce personnage emblématique de l’ère spatiale.Colin Trevorrow à la barre
Le réalisateur Colin Trevorrow, reconnu pour son travail sur des franchises à grand spectacle, serait également en négociations pour diriger le projet et co-écrire le scénario avec Joe Epstein. Si aucun détail supplémentaire n’a encore été révélé, cette association promet un mélange d’humour et d’innovations visuelles, fidèle à l’esprit futuriste et coloré de la série originale.Retour sur l’univers des Jetsons
Une série pionnière de Hanna-Barbera
Publicités
Les Jetsons ont été créés dans les années 1960 comme la version futuriste des Flintstones, projetant les téléspectateurs dans un univers de science-fiction humoristique. La série animée, produite par Hanna-Barbera, a d’abord été diffusée entre 1962 et 1963, puis relancée pour deux saisons supplémentaires entre 1985 et 1987, capturant une nouvelle génération de spectateurs avec ses inventions délirantes et son style unique.Des voix emblématiques de l’animation
George O’Hanlon, Penny Singleton, Janet Waldo, Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, Don Messick et Jean Vander Pyl ont prêté leurs voix aux personnages originaux, tandis que Frank Welker a rejoint la distribution dans les années 1980. Ces talents ont contribué à faire des Jetsons une référence culturelle, célébrée pour son humour et sa vision anticipatrice de la vie dans le futur.Les enjeux d’une adaptation live-action
Adapter un classique avec soin
Publicités
Adapter une série animée culte comme Les Jetsons en film live-action représente un défi artistique et technique majeur. Les créateurs devront conserver l’esprit léger et humoristique de la série tout en modernisant les décors et les effets spéciaux pour répondre aux attentes d’un public contemporain. La présence de Jim Carrey laisse présager une interprétation à la fois comique et attachante de George Jetson.L’importance du casting et de la réalisation
Le choix de Colin Trevorrow comme réalisateur suggère que le film pourrait combiner action, effets visuels spectaculaires et humour. Sa collaboration avec Joe Epstein sur le scénario permettra d’assurer une continuité avec l’univers original tout en proposant de nouvelles intrigues adaptées aux standards du cinéma d’aujourd’hui.Les perspectives pour le cinéma et les fans
Une attente forte des spectateurs
Publicités
Les fans de la série, jeunes et moins jeunes, suivent ce projet avec un vif intérêt. Le film live-action représente non seulement un hommage à une œuvre culte, mais aussi une opportunité de présenter l’univers des Jetsons à une nouvelle génération, qui n’a pas connu la série originale à la télévision.Un futur prometteur pour la franchise
Au-delà de la simple adaptation, ce long-métrage pourrait relancer l’intérêt pour l’univers des Jetsons, inspirant d’éventuelles suites ou produits dérivés. Avec Jim Carrey et un réalisateur expérimenté à bord, le projet dispose de tous les ingrédients pour devenir un succès critique et commercial.Si les négociations se concrétisent, Jim Carrey prêtera sa voix et son talent comique à George Jetson, donnant vie à un personnage emblématique des années 1960. Le film live-action dirigé par Colin Trevorrow devrait mêler humour, innovation visuelle et hommage à la série originale. Les fans de la franchise peuvent déjà anticiper une nouvelle aventure dans le futur coloré et déjanté des Jetsons.
#adaptation #Cinéma #ColinTrevorrow #comédie #filmLiveAction #GeorgeJetson #HannaBarbera #JimCarrey #JoeEpstein #sérieAnimée #scienceFiction #TheJetsons
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Jim Carrey pourrait incarner George Jetson dans un film live-action attendu
L’icône du cinéma Jim Carrey serait en négociations pour interpréter George Jetson dans un long-métrage en prises de vues réelles adapté de la célèbre série animée des années 1960. Colin Trevorrow pourrait diriger et coécrire le scénario aux côtés de Joe Epstein, marquant un retour attendu d’un univers culte de Hanna-Barbera.
Un projet ambitieux pour un classique de l’animation
Jim Carrey en négociations pour un rôle iconique
Publicités
Selon les informations publiées par The Wrap, l’acteur Jim Carrey serait en discussions pour incarner George Jetson dans un film live-action inspiré de la série animée légendaire de Hanna-Barbera. Connu pour ses rôles comiques et sa capacité à incarner des personnages excentriques et attachants, Carrey pourrait insuffler une nouvelle vie à ce personnage emblématique de l’ère spatiale.Colin Trevorrow à la barre
Le réalisateur Colin Trevorrow, reconnu pour son travail sur des franchises à grand spectacle, serait également en négociations pour diriger le projet et co-écrire le scénario avec Joe Epstein. Si aucun détail supplémentaire n’a encore été révélé, cette association promet un mélange d’humour et d’innovations visuelles, fidèle à l’esprit futuriste et coloré de la série originale.Retour sur l’univers des Jetsons
Une série pionnière de Hanna-Barbera
Publicités
Les Jetsons ont été créés dans les années 1960 comme la version futuriste des Flintstones, projetant les téléspectateurs dans un univers de science-fiction humoristique. La série animée, produite par Hanna-Barbera, a d’abord été diffusée entre 1962 et 1963, puis relancée pour deux saisons supplémentaires entre 1985 et 1987, capturant une nouvelle génération de spectateurs avec ses inventions délirantes et son style unique.Des voix emblématiques de l’animation
George O’Hanlon, Penny Singleton, Janet Waldo, Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, Don Messick et Jean Vander Pyl ont prêté leurs voix aux personnages originaux, tandis que Frank Welker a rejoint la distribution dans les années 1980. Ces talents ont contribué à faire des Jetsons une référence culturelle, célébrée pour son humour et sa vision anticipatrice de la vie dans le futur.Les enjeux d’une adaptation live-action
Adapter un classique avec soin
Publicités
Adapter une série animée culte comme Les Jetsons en film live-action représente un défi artistique et technique majeur. Les créateurs devront conserver l’esprit léger et humoristique de la série tout en modernisant les décors et les effets spéciaux pour répondre aux attentes d’un public contemporain. La présence de Jim Carrey laisse présager une interprétation à la fois comique et attachante de George Jetson.L’importance du casting et de la réalisation
Le choix de Colin Trevorrow comme réalisateur suggère que le film pourrait combiner action, effets visuels spectaculaires et humour. Sa collaboration avec Joe Epstein sur le scénario permettra d’assurer une continuité avec l’univers original tout en proposant de nouvelles intrigues adaptées aux standards du cinéma d’aujourd’hui.Les perspectives pour le cinéma et les fans
Une attente forte des spectateurs
Publicités
Les fans de la série, jeunes et moins jeunes, suivent ce projet avec un vif intérêt. Le film live-action représente non seulement un hommage à une œuvre culte, mais aussi une opportunité de présenter l’univers des Jetsons à une nouvelle génération, qui n’a pas connu la série originale à la télévision.Un futur prometteur pour la franchise
Au-delà de la simple adaptation, ce long-métrage pourrait relancer l’intérêt pour l’univers des Jetsons, inspirant d’éventuelles suites ou produits dérivés. Avec Jim Carrey et un réalisateur expérimenté à bord, le projet dispose de tous les ingrédients pour devenir un succès critique et commercial.Si les négociations se concrétisent, Jim Carrey prêtera sa voix et son talent comique à George Jetson, donnant vie à un personnage emblématique des années 1960. Le film live-action dirigé par Colin Trevorrow devrait mêler humour, innovation visuelle et hommage à la série originale. Les fans de la franchise peuvent déjà anticiper une nouvelle aventure dans le futur coloré et déjanté des Jetsons.
#adaptation #Cinéma #ColinTrevorrow #comédie #filmLiveAction #GeorgeJetson #HannaBarbera #JimCarrey #JoeEpstein #sérieAnimée #scienceFiction #TheJetsons
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Heads We're Dancing
"You talked me into the game of chance
It was 39 before the music started
When you walked up to me and you said
'Hey, heads, we dance'
Well, I didn't know who you were
Until I saw the morning paperThere was a picture of you
A picture of you 'cross the front page
It looked just like you, just like you in every way
But it couldn't be true, it couldn't be true
You stepped out of a strangerThey say that the devil is a charming man
And just like you, I bet he can dance
And he's coming up behind in his long tailed black coat dance
All tails in the air
But the penny landed with its head dancingA picture of you, a picture of you in uniform
Standing with your head held high
Hot down to the floor but it couldn't be you
It couldn't be you, it's a picture of HitlerHe go do-do-do-do-do
He go do-do-do-do-do
He go do-do-do-do-do
Do you want to dance?Well, I couldn't see what was to be
So I just stood there laughingA picture of you, a picture of you in uniform
Standing with your head held high
Hot down to the floor but it couldn't be you
It couldn't be you, it's a picture of HitlerHe go mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh
He go mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh
He go mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh
Heads we're dancingDo you wanna dance?
Mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh
Mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh
Mmh-mmh-mmh-mmh-mmhHeads we're dancing
Do you wanna dance?"
- #KateBush, 1989
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4_mQhjaWIg
#FridayNightMusic #FridayNightMusicVideos #80sMusic #NoFascism #JustSayNoToFascism #ActivismThroughMusic -
With The CW Fall schedule announced, several shows are MIA from the schedule with renewal decisions yet to be made for All-American, Walker, Wild Cards, Family Law and Penn & Teller: Fool Us (the network's top series).
#TheCW #CWTV #Entertainment #Television #TV #Streaming -
The thread about Neil Shaw Mackinnon and the loss of the Q-ship “Cullist”
Today’s auction house artefact is a set of medals awarded in World War One to Neil Shaw Mackinnon, a marine engineer officer from Leith. An experienced merchant mariner, Mackinnon’s wartime military service was brief but eventful and hallmarked by bravery and a run of luck that would end in tragedy; less than three weeks after he was presented with the Distinguished Service Cross by King George V (left hand medal, below) he would disappear with his ship into the cold, dark waters of the Irish Sea.
Medals of Neil Shaw Mackinnon. Left to right, George V Distinguished Service Cross; British War Medal; Victory Medal with Oak Leaves for Mention in Dispatches; WW1 Memorial Plaque.Neil Shaw Mackinnon was born on April 23rd 1877 at 64 Pitt Street in North Leith, the eldest son of Jessie Shaw and Donald Mackinnon, Gaelic-speaking natives of the Ross of Mull. The family raised their four children in the Gaelic language in Leith, but Neil did spend some of his childhood back on Mull at Bunessan before following his father’s footsteps and becoming a ship’s engineer. Tragedy struck the family in July 1903 when Donald was killed; he fell from an unsafe gang plank into the depths of a London dry dock one dark and wet night when returning to his ship and never recovered from his injuries. Neil now supported his mother and two younger sisters who, after the death of Donald, had moved nearby to 203 Ferry Road in North Leith before settling at 1 Royston Terrace in Goldenacre. Neil was the honorary secretary of the Clan Mackinnon Society in Edinburgh and like many merchant seamen he was a member of the Royal Naval Reserve. It was this latter commitment that saw him called up for active service during WW1, commissioning as a temporary Engineer Lieutenant on 13th May 1917. He would find himself on probably the most dangerous sort of ship that an RNR man could expect to be on at this time; the Q-ship.
HMS Cullist had started life as the merchant steamer SS Westphalia, launched at the Caledon Shipyard in Dundee on 24th December 1912 for the Leith, Hull & Hamburg Steam Packet Company. She was the sort of small steamer that was ten-a-penny on the North Sea at the time; a 1,030 ton, 230ft long ship plying back and forward between the Scottish east coast and the German ports on the Baltic coast. Her two boilers and 1,350 horsepower steam engine were sufficient to move her along at 10 knots, a slow but economic pace. A newspaper report in the Clyde Shipping Gazette from March 1913 describes the typical and varied cargo she could expect to carry being unloaded in Grangemouth; potash, machinery parts, earthenware, paper, glass, cement, firewood, flour, chemicals, metal ores, toys, pianos, electrical insulators, bread, scrap metal and more.
Newspaper report of the launch of the Westphalia, Dundee Courier, 25th December 1912In March 1917, Westphalia was requisitioned by the Admiralty sent to Pembroke Naval Dockyard to be converted into a Q-ship. This was a naval code name for a merchant ship that was fitted with concealed weapons, with the intention of luring German U-boats into attacking it on the surface before suddenly revealing its true purpose by opening fire on the aggressor at short range and (hopefully) sinking it. Q-ships were named after the Irish port of Queenstown where they had first been converted in 1915.
Illustration making light of a dangerous situation. Attacked Q-ships would often set false fires on deck and launch parties of men in their lifeboats to try and encourage U-boat commanders to believe they were done for and to close the distance until within point-blank range of the Q-ship’s own guns.The Q-ships had a brief period of success in 1915 before U-boat commanders became familiar with the ruse and switched their tactics. After this they became very risky propositions for their crews, far more likely to be sunk than to do the sinking. But such was the desperate situation at sea caused by the German U-boat campaign that the Navy still persevered with them and men still volunteered to sign up for them.
Diagram showing how a Q-ship might have hidden weapons and change its appearanceIt was into this extremely risky service that Neil Mackinnon went, answering to the ship’s master Lieutenant Commander Simpson. Apart from the application of wartime “Dazzle Ship” camouflage paint, HMS Cullist (as the Westphalia was now known) still looked just like any other tramp steamer. But she hid a number of secrets that only the very closest of inspections could have revealed; cleverly concealed on her decks was the armament of a 4-inch gun, two 12-pounder guns and two pairs of 14-inch torpedo tubes.
“Dazzle Ship” camouflage painting model for HMS Cullist, IWM (MOD 2441)Lieutenant Mackinnon, Lieutenant Commander Simpson and the Cullist now went to war. The ship was disguised under a number of fictitious merchant names – SS Hayling, SS Jurassic and SS Prim were all used – plying the merchant convoy routes and looking for trouble. She did not have long to wait; on July 13th she was steaming between Ireland and France when a German U-boat appeared on the horizon around 1PM. It was more economical for submarines to stay on the surface and to sink lone merchant ships using guns, but they were aware of the threat of Q-ships and so kept their distance. The U-boat opened fire at long range, but the shots were wildly short and so it began to press closer. Cullist spotted another merchant ship in the distance at 1:30PM and signalled her to keep away. Simpson was trying to draw the U-boat slowly into his trap. He kept himself between the aggressor and the sun, to dazzle the men trying to aim her guns, and regularly changed his course. This was a standard anti-submarine technique called Zig-Zagging that frustrated the use of torpedoes. By 1:45PM the enemy had closed to 5,000 yards and had begun to find the range, her shells were landing all around Cullist and showering her with spray and splinters. It would be very tempting for Simpson to have returned fire, but once he did so the game was given away and the submarine would be able to simply dive away and attack another ship another day. By 2:07PM the Cullist had counted sixty-eight shells land around her and finally Simpson gave the order to fire back; in an instant the screens were dropped and the guns were in action. It had paid off, the third round fired from the Q-ship was a direct hit and took out the U-boat’s deck gun. Further hits landed around the bow and conning tower and within a few minutes the submarine slipped below the water, on fire.
The Q-ship “Suffolk Coast” by war artist Charles Pears, Image: © IWM (Art.IWM ART 1053)The Cullist closed in on where the U-boat had been seen to disappear below the waves and dropped a number of depth charges. Her lookouts spotted oil and debris on the surface and the grim sight of a corpse floating on the surface in the dungarees of a naval engineer. The destroyer HMS Christopher arrived in support at 3:30PM to keep up the hunt but the submarine was never seen again. The men of Cullist were credited with her sinking; it’s not actually clear whether they actually did or even what U-boat it might have been, but German naval records show U-69 was operating in this area at this time when she disappeared to unknown causes. Lieutenant Commander Simpson was awarded the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) medal for this, with two of his officers awarded the Distinguished Service Cross (DSC) and Engineer Mackinnon recognised by a Mention in Dispatches.
The concealed gun of a Q-ship, readied for action. Note the false screens that have been dropped down, which would usually obscure it from observation by any U-boatA little over a month later, the Cullist was back in action again. On August 20th, she was touting for business in the English Channel when a U-boat opened fire on her at long range. For two and a half hours this was kept up, but she could not be encouraged to move in any closer. After over eighty rounds had been fired to little effect, the submarine finally scored a hit. This pierced the boiler room below the waterline, started flooding and injured some of the men on duty. Engineer Mackinnon’s directed his men to plugged and shored up the hole with timbers to prevent any further intake of water and got her back up to speed again. It was by now 7:25pm, the light would soon fade and the danger was that the submarine would slip away under the water and come back at night with torpedoes. Simpson therefore reluctantly ordered his gunners to fire back at a disadvantageous range to drive her away. Once again their aim was true and the enemy departed the scene before she took any significant damage.
HMS Dunraven, in Action against a Submarine, 8th August 1917. By war artist Charles Pears © The Royal Society of Marine Artists (Art.IWM ART 5130)Trouble seemed to follow the Cullist around and it was only another month before she was in action again. On 28th September she surprised a U-boat on the surface at the relatively close range of 5,000 yards and took the initiative, opening fire immediately without trying any ruses. Her gunners’ aim was true once more and of the thirteen rounds she fired, eight were hits. The submarine slipped below the surface in an uncontrolled manner at 12:43PM and contact was lost. It was soon picked up again and for four and a half hours a surface chase took place, Mackinnon somehow coaxing a speed of 13 knots out of his 10 knot charge. A surface U-boat could make at least 16 knots however and once again their prey eluded them. Lieutenant Commander Simpson however would recommend in his report of the last two actions that Makinnon should be considered for a medal, for his damage control in August and the speeds maintained in September. The First Lord of the Admiralty approved the award of the Distinguished Service Cross on 15th November 1917, a medal “awarded in recognition of an act or acts of exemplary gallantry during active operations against the enemy at sea“. Mackinnon would receive this decoration from the King on January 23rd 1918.
Photograph of Neil Shaw Mackinnon from the Oban Times & Argyllshire Advertiser on the occasion of his DSC being awarded, 9th February 1918.The Cullist‘s career continued to be active. On 17th November 1917 she was fired upon by a U-boat from a distance of 8,000 yards. This time the enemy’s shooting was much better and the Q-ship was soon taking hits. Luckily the conditions were foggy and the Cullist was able to engage in a game of cat-and-mouse in the fog banks to hamper the submarine’s shooting and try and draw her in. At 4,500 yards distance, having been on the receiving end of ninety-two German rounds, she returned fire and of the fourteen shots she got off, six her hits. Once again the damaged submarine was able to dive and slip away to safety and once again the report of Mackinnon’s captain praised his engineer’s conduct during the action: ‘These officers [Mackinnon and his deputy] are stationed in the Engine Room and Boiler Room during action and have always kept their department in a high state of efficiency and ready for any emergency, stimulating all ratings under their orders with their good example.”
The ship had enjoyed a run of good luck in this time; it was rare for a Q-ship to have quite so many contacts with enemy submarines and come away from them with the upper hand. The run was soon to end however, on February 11th 1918 she was steaming 25 miles east of Drogheda in the when two torpedoes from the U-97 hit her without warning. The ship slipped below the cold, wintry surface of the Irish Sea less than two minutes later, taking forty three of the seventy on board down with her. Neil Shaw Mackinnon never made it out of his engine room. The survivors were left struggling in the water when the U-boat surfaced, asking for the captain. When we was told that the he had gone down, he kept two of the men as prisoners and abandoned the rest to their fates with parting “words and gestures of abuse“. As it transpired Simpson, although injured, was alive in the water and he and others in the water managed to survive by clambering aboard – or hanging onto – a life raft and singing songs together until a passing trawler picked them up; allegedly midway through the popular wartime ditty of A Long Way to Tipperary. The five officers, twenty seven ratings, two Royal Marines and nine Merchant Marine Reserve seamen who lost their lives that day were:
Rank and Name (age)Rank and Name (age)Donkeyman John Bartell MMR, DSM*Ordinary Seaman William Lycett RN (18)Ordinary Seaman Leonard Bates RN (20)Leading Telegraphist Christopher Maris RN (23)Officer’s Steward Ernest Brown RN, DSMAble Seaman Alfred Martin RNOrdinary Seaman Horatius Carr RN (30)Engineer Lt.Neil MacKinnon RNR, DSC*Trimmer John Cockburn MMROrdinary Seaman Dennis McCarthy RN (19)Fireman Percy Cook MMR (20)Trimmer Robert McFaddon MMR (20)Fireman Patrick Corvan MMRFireman John McIvor MMROrdinary Telegraphist Stanley Dean RNVR (20)Corporal William McRobbie RM (23)Lieutenant George Doubleday RNR, DSC (22)Cooks Mate Tom Patter RN (21)Ordinary Seaman Sidney Garwood RN (19)Leading Cooks Mate Henry Richherbert RN (26)Leading Seaman Albert Gay RN, DSM* (28) Leading Seaman Ernest Robilliard RN, DSM (28)Fireman Michael Gillan MMR (22)Petty Officer Alfred Sheather RNN (25)Engineer Sub. Lt. Lewis Gulley RNR (28)Armourer’s Crew Samuel Shoebottom RNOfficer’s Steward Frederick Hall RN (32)Able Seaman William Smith RN (25)Paymaster Robert Hindley RNR (33)Private Henry Stebbings RMOrdinary Seaman Richard Hoban RN (20)Steward 3rd Class Thomas Turner age 18 RNAble Seaman Raymond Jelfs RN (22)Ldg. Seaman Norman Walterhubert RN, * (25)Trimmer Joseph Johnson MMR (18)Signalman Frederick Whitchurch RN (24)Able Seaman Walter Kersley RN (23)Ordinary Seaman George White RN (20)Shipwright John Lamb RN (26)Surgeon Probationer David Whitton RNVR (21)Able Seaman Jeremiah Leary RN *Painter Ernest Woodall RN (24)Fireman Joseph Lewis MMR* = mentioned in dispatchesNone of the bodies of those men were ever recovered and as such they are officially commemorated only in their medals and on the Royal Naval Memorial in Plymouth.
Part of the Royal Naval Memorial in Plymouth. CC 2.0 wolfgang.mller54If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.
These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur
#AuctionHouseArtefact #Leith #Medals #QShip #RoyalNavy #Ship #Shipping #Written2025 #WW1
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CW: A very long journal Toot! Nothing bad, except me being very tired...
#Journal of a tired Dutch AuDHD Pixy :pixy_party: (Thursday, 21/05/2026).
I had an OK enough night, but still, I felt tired, with a slight headache, when we got up. After Koa had his food, and I got dressed, and I’d taken my meds, I got to my laptop. I started with an email to a sweet friend of mine, with which I sent an edit of a picture that I had for him the previous day. He had mentioned some changes in his email to me, so like a real addict, I had to try them out, and see if I could create an image for him that was better suited. After I had done that, I wrote my journal toot, and I worked a bit on my blog.
I spent some time with some AI editing, and I spent some time writing bits for my blog. I enjoyed some breakfast, and I tried to relax a bit, as I was rather tired still. Koa and I went out for a short nighttime walkies, but I had forgotten to wear the head lamp, so I could not shine a light on the grassy area. I always try to clean Koa’s number two’s, but there are at least two dog owners, one big and one smaller dog, that don’t deem it necessary to clean up their dog’s shit. So yeah, have to be careful when you want to walk on the field… Unfortunately…
When we got back, I cuddled for a while with Koa, and then he went to the crate for some snoozing, as I didn’t want to be nibbled on by my little vampire… 😂 He went to the crate, got a snack, and was OK there, while I tried to relax a bit, as I was tired, and I had a long enough day ahead of me. Around 6, Koa and I went for another walk, and then I got everything in Skoosh, and we headed to Nijmegen.
Mum was a bit grumpy that I was so early, while she was the one that had requested I’d come early (guess her early was less that than mine, 🫣). I “handed” over Koa, and when mum was ready to watch him and Bas, I got to Skoosh, and we skedaddled to Germany. It felt a bit weird driving there again, after not having been there for 4 weeks.
I started with the Penny, where I took 3 full bags of recycling cans and bottles. I passed the €50, and it’s €0,25 per item, so I had brought in plenty, and my arms and hands were done when the bags were finally empty. But, the money would come in handy when Koa has his next vet appointment again next week. He needs another Titer test, and depending on the outcome, he may need his boosters that time. Seeing the bill went past the €200 for the first time… I hope that the second one will be less. I did get some money back from the insurance, but not as much as I paid. I put that money to Koa’s piggy bank as well, so I should have enough to cover his next vet bill. And then, hopefully, he won’t need the vet for some time to come…
After Penny, I went to Shell, and gave Skoosh something to drink. She wanted almost 18 liters, and seeing I had driven 434km with her since the last time I filled her up, my app told me she had done a lovely 24,31km/l (which my app tells me would be 57,18 mi/gal, not to bad for sure). I went to Edeka, got all the things (except one) that mum asked for, and I got some things for myself as well. Then, I headed back to Nijmegen. A quick stop at Appie, where I got the last thing mum needed, and I got a few things for myself. (of course I forgot some things, so I need to see about visiting the supermarket at some point).
I headed to my parent’s place, where I unloaded all for mum (and dad). Koa was just enjoying his snuffle mat, and when he was done, and when Bas got some snacks and cuddles as well, Koa and I headed home again. I cleaned up the few groceries, walked a short walk with Koa, and I had something to snack. After that, I tried to relax a bit, as I was rather tired. But, Koa was tired too, so that was a good thing, we could relax together.
We were in the garden for a while. I read my book, and Koa spent some time on his outdoor bed. I gave him a few snacks on it, and later on, he went on it by himself for a bit as well. So, I tried to take a little video. I had read for a while, and then my back started to annoy me, so I went back inside, to relax on the couch a bit.
I decided to give Koa one of the extra plush toys that I had ordered from IKEA. He got the (small) Blåhaj, which was still big enough when compared to Koa now. And yes, I took a video of this as well. 😉Koa played a bit with the new plush, and then he dozed off again. I watched some telly, and had a snack. Then, when the neighbor texted, we headed out for a bit.
Koa was a bit too enthusiastic, and the black fluff felt the need to correct him. It scared Koa a bit, and the fluff got separated in a rough way by the neighbor. I checked Koa, and he wasn’t damaged in any way, just very startled from the big black one lashing out. Yeah, Koa is a bouncy puppy, and both Bas and the black fluff aren’t too interested in all that…
I got an email from the doggy school. It seems I need to buy a few things for the classes, and a few things I already have. The first class is a theory one, and a long one. Pups can stay at home/with a sitter, so that the ones following the class can make notes and ask questions during the longer lesson. But… I can’t leave Koa that long with my dad and Bas, as I know that will lead to disaster. I asked my neighbor, but she wasn’t sure yet if she could make it. So, either she can, and I can take my mum to the first class. Or, Koa needs to stay with mum and dad, and I will have to relay all the info to mum. I hope that the neighbor is willing and able to doggy sit, but I know it’s for a few hours (the drive there is about 30 minutes, the class takes two hours, and the drive back is also 30 minutes… and the drive is a bit longer if I have to pick up mum…), and I know she has some plans earlier that day. So, it’s a wait and see… I will have to pay for the class in the next few days, so I am hoping that my money will come in this Friday, so I can pay her before the weekend comes. Otherwise, I can always show the transfer, as she will understand that the extra holiday on Monday will slow the payment down.
Koa and I relaxed some more, and then we got ready for bed. We were rather tired, so it didn’t take too long for the both of us to doze off. After an hour, I was startled by what I thought to be a loud bark. But, when I checked on Koa, he was out like a broken light-bulb, so I may have dreamed about the bark? I went to the loo, and went back to bed. Of course, Koa had to wee then. I tried to sleep again after that, and I just could not. My ADHD brain was on fire…
I checked my phone, saw an email from a good friend, and decided to answer him. I made a few more images, based on his new info, and I was hoping that they would be better. I watched some Downton, I scrolled a bit on Masto. My mind was just so active… After 3 hours, I went to the couch… Koa’s things went to the crate in the living room. I got a new little blanket that I bought a little while ago, and I got to watching telly on the couch. I did doze off a few times. And, when my body was cursing the couch, I decided to get up, and start our day. But yeah, I felt broken for sure…
Thanks to all for your kindness and support during my "journey through daily life" :bear_love: I really appreciate it 💜 as it helps me to keep going on bad/harder days! :bear_nuzzle:
:pixy_party: 💜 🍀 🐾
-
CW: A very long journal Toot! Nothing bad, except me being very tired...
#Journal of a tired Dutch AuDHD Pixy :pixy_party: (Thursday, 21/05/2026).
I had an OK enough night, but still, I felt tired, with a slight headache, when we got up. After Koa had his food, and I got dressed, and I’d taken my meds, I got to my laptop. I started with an email to a sweet friend of mine, with which I sent an edit of a picture that I had for him the previous day. He had mentioned some changes in his email to me, so like a real addict, I had to try them out, and see if I could create an image for him that was better suited. After I had done that, I wrote my journal toot, and I worked a bit on my blog.
I spent some time with some AI editing, and I spent some time writing bits for my blog. I enjoyed some breakfast, and I tried to relax a bit, as I was rather tired still. Koa and I went out for a short nighttime walkies, but I had forgotten to wear the head lamp, so I could not shine a light on the grassy area. I always try to clean Koa’s number two’s, but there are at least two dog owners, one big and one smaller dog, that don’t deem it necessary to clean up their dog’s shit. So yeah, have to be careful when you want to walk on the field… Unfortunately…
When we got back, I cuddled for a while with Koa, and then he went to the crate for some snoozing, as I didn’t want to be nibbled on by my little vampire… 😂 He went to the crate, got a snack, and was OK there, while I tried to relax a bit, as I was tired, and I had a long enough day ahead of me. Around 6, Koa and I went for another walk, and then I got everything in Skoosh, and we headed to Nijmegen.
Mum was a bit grumpy that I was so early, while she was the one that had requested I’d come early (guess her early was less that than mine, 🫣). I “handed” over Koa, and when mum was ready to watch him and Bas, I got to Skoosh, and we skedaddled to Germany. It felt a bit weird driving there again, after not having been there for 4 weeks.
I started with the Penny, where I took 3 full bags of recycling cans and bottles. I passed the €50, and it’s €0,25 per item, so I had brought in plenty, and my arms and hands were done when the bags were finally empty. But, the money would come in handy when Koa has his next vet appointment again next week. He needs another Titer test, and depending on the outcome, he may need his boosters that time. Seeing the bill went past the €200 for the first time… I hope that the second one will be less. I did get some money back from the insurance, but not as much as I paid. I put that money to Koa’s piggy bank as well, so I should have enough to cover his next vet bill. And then, hopefully, he won’t need the vet for some time to come…
After Penny, I went to Shell, and gave Skoosh something to drink. She wanted almost 18 liters, and seeing I had driven 434km with her since the last time I filled her up, my app told me she had done a lovely 24,31km/l (which my app tells me would be 57,18 mi/gal, not to bad for sure). I went to Edeka, got all the things (except one) that mum asked for, and I got some things for myself as well. Then, I headed back to Nijmegen. A quick stop at Appie, where I got the last thing mum needed, and I got a few things for myself. (of course I forgot some things, so I need to see about visiting the supermarket at some point).
I headed to my parent’s place, where I unloaded all for mum (and dad). Koa was just enjoying his snuffle mat, and when he was done, and when Bas got some snacks and cuddles as well, Koa and I headed home again. I cleaned up the few groceries, walked a short walk with Koa, and I had something to snack. After that, I tried to relax a bit, as I was rather tired. But, Koa was tired too, so that was a good thing, we could relax together.
We were in the garden for a while. I read my book, and Koa spent some time on his outdoor bed. I gave him a few snacks on it, and later on, he went on it by himself for a bit as well. So, I tried to take a little video. I had read for a while, and then my back started to annoy me, so I went back inside, to relax on the couch a bit.
I decided to give Koa one of the extra plush toys that I had ordered from IKEA. He got the (small) Blåhaj, which was still big enough when compared to Koa now. And yes, I took a video of this as well. 😉Koa played a bit with the new plush, and then he dozed off again. I watched some telly, and had a snack. Then, when the neighbor texted, we headed out for a bit.
Koa was a bit too enthusiastic, and the black fluff felt the need to correct him. It scared Koa a bit, and the fluff got separated in a rough way by the neighbor. I checked Koa, and he wasn’t damaged in any way, just very startled from the big black one lashing out. Yeah, Koa is a bouncy puppy, and both Bas and the black fluff aren’t too interested in all that…
I got an email from the doggy school. It seems I need to buy a few things for the classes, and a few things I already have. The first class is a theory one, and a long one. Pups can stay at home/with a sitter, so that the ones following the class can make notes and ask questions during the longer lesson. But… I can’t leave Koa that long with my dad and Bas, as I know that will lead to disaster. I asked my neighbor, but she wasn’t sure yet if she could make it. So, either she can, and I can take my mum to the first class. Or, Koa needs to stay with mum and dad, and I will have to relay all the info to mum. I hope that the neighbor is willing and able to doggy sit, but I know it’s for a few hours (the drive there is about 30 minutes, the class takes two hours, and the drive back is also 30 minutes… and the drive is a bit longer if I have to pick up mum…), and I know she has some plans earlier that day. So, it’s a wait and see… I will have to pay for the class in the next few days, so I am hoping that my money will come in this Friday, so I can pay her before the weekend comes. Otherwise, I can always show the transfer, as she will understand that the extra holiday on Monday will slow the payment down.
Koa and I relaxed some more, and then we got ready for bed. We were rather tired, so it didn’t take too long for the both of us to doze off. After an hour, I was startled by what I thought to be a loud bark. But, when I checked on Koa, he was out like a broken light-bulb, so I may have dreamed about the bark? I went to the loo, and went back to bed. Of course, Koa had to wee then. I tried to sleep again after that, and I just could not. My ADHD brain was on fire…
I checked my phone, saw an email from a good friend, and decided to answer him. I made a few more images, based on his new info, and I was hoping that they would be better. I watched some Downton, I scrolled a bit on Masto. My mind was just so active… After 3 hours, I went to the couch… Koa’s things went to the crate in the living room. I got a new little blanket that I bought a little while ago, and I got to watching telly on the couch. I did doze off a few times. And, when my body was cursing the couch, I decided to get up, and start our day. But yeah, I felt broken for sure…
Thanks to all for your kindness and support during my "journey through daily life" :bear_love: I really appreciate it 💜 as it helps me to keep going on bad/harder days! :bear_nuzzle:
:pixy_party: 💜 🍀 🐾
-
CW: A very long journal Toot! Nothing bad, except me being very tired...
#Journal of a tired Dutch AuDHD Pixy :pixy_party: (Thursday, 21/05/2026).
I had an OK enough night, but still, I felt tired, with a slight headache, when we got up. After Koa had his food, and I got dressed, and I’d taken my meds, I got to my laptop. I started with an email to a sweet friend of mine, with which I sent an edit of a picture that I had for him the previous day. He had mentioned some changes in his email to me, so like a real addict, I had to try them out, and see if I could create an image for him that was better suited. After I had done that, I wrote my journal toot, and I worked a bit on my blog.
I spent some time with some AI editing, and I spent some time writing bits for my blog. I enjoyed some breakfast, and I tried to relax a bit, as I was rather tired still. Koa and I went out for a short nighttime walkies, but I had forgotten to wear the head lamp, so I could not shine a light on the grassy area. I always try to clean Koa’s number two’s, but there are at least two dog owners, one big and one smaller dog, that don’t deem it necessary to clean up their dog’s shit. So yeah, have to be careful when you want to walk on the field… Unfortunately…
When we got back, I cuddled for a while with Koa, and then he went to the crate for some snoozing, as I didn’t want to be nibbled on by my little vampire… 😂 He went to the crate, got a snack, and was OK there, while I tried to relax a bit, as I was tired, and I had a long enough day ahead of me. Around 6, Koa and I went for another walk, and then I got everything in Skoosh, and we headed to Nijmegen.
Mum was a bit grumpy that I was so early, while she was the one that had requested I’d come early (guess her early was less that than mine, 🫣). I “handed” over Koa, and when mum was ready to watch him and Bas, I got to Skoosh, and we skedaddled to Germany. It felt a bit weird driving there again, after not having been there for 4 weeks.
I started with the Penny, where I took 3 full bags of recycling cans and bottles. I passed the €50, and it’s €0,25 per item, so I had brought in plenty, and my arms and hands were done when the bags were finally empty. But, the money would come in handy when Koa has his next vet appointment again next week. He needs another Titer test, and depending on the outcome, he may need his boosters that time. Seeing the bill went past the €200 for the first time… I hope that the second one will be less. I did get some money back from the insurance, but not as much as I paid. I put that money to Koa’s piggy bank as well, so I should have enough to cover his next vet bill. And then, hopefully, he won’t need the vet for some time to come…
After Penny, I went to Shell, and gave Skoosh something to drink. She wanted almost 18 liters, and seeing I had driven 434km with her since the last time I filled her up, my app told me she had done a lovely 24,31km/l (which my app tells me would be 57,18 mi/gal, not to bad for sure). I went to Edeka, got all the things (except one) that mum asked for, and I got some things for myself as well. Then, I headed back to Nijmegen. A quick stop at Appie, where I got the last thing mum needed, and I got a few things for myself. (of course I forgot some things, so I need to see about visiting the supermarket at some point).
I headed to my parent’s place, where I unloaded all for mum (and dad). Koa was just enjoying his snuffle mat, and when he was done, and when Bas got some snacks and cuddles as well, Koa and I headed home again. I cleaned up the few groceries, walked a short walk with Koa, and I had something to snack. After that, I tried to relax a bit, as I was rather tired. But, Koa was tired too, so that was a good thing, we could relax together.
We were in the garden for a while. I read my book, and Koa spent some time on his outdoor bed. I gave him a few snacks on it, and later on, he went on it by himself for a bit as well. So, I tried to take a little video. I had read for a while, and then my back started to annoy me, so I went back inside, to relax on the couch a bit.
I decided to give Koa one of the extra plush toys that I had ordered from IKEA. He got the (small) Blåhaj, which was still big enough when compared to Koa now. And yes, I took a video of this as well. 😉Koa played a bit with the new plush, and then he dozed off again. I watched some telly, and had a snack. Then, when the neighbor texted, we headed out for a bit.
Koa was a bit too enthusiastic, and the black fluff felt the need to correct him. It scared Koa a bit, and the fluff got separated in a rough way by the neighbor. I checked Koa, and he wasn’t damaged in any way, just very startled from the big black one lashing out. Yeah, Koa is a bouncy puppy, and both Bas and the black fluff aren’t too interested in all that…
I got an email from the doggy school. It seems I need to buy a few things for the classes, and a few things I already have. The first class is a theory one, and a long one. Pups can stay at home/with a sitter, so that the ones following the class can make notes and ask questions during the longer lesson. But… I can’t leave Koa that long with my dad and Bas, as I know that will lead to disaster. I asked my neighbor, but she wasn’t sure yet if she could make it. So, either she can, and I can take my mum to the first class. Or, Koa needs to stay with mum and dad, and I will have to relay all the info to mum. I hope that the neighbor is willing and able to doggy sit, but I know it’s for a few hours (the drive there is about 30 minutes, the class takes two hours, and the drive back is also 30 minutes… and the drive is a bit longer if I have to pick up mum…), and I know she has some plans earlier that day. So, it’s a wait and see… I will have to pay for the class in the next few days, so I am hoping that my money will come in this Friday, so I can pay her before the weekend comes. Otherwise, I can always show the transfer, as she will understand that the extra holiday on Monday will slow the payment down.
Koa and I relaxed some more, and then we got ready for bed. We were rather tired, so it didn’t take too long for the both of us to doze off. After an hour, I was startled by what I thought to be a loud bark. But, when I checked on Koa, he was out like a broken light-bulb, so I may have dreamed about the bark? I went to the loo, and went back to bed. Of course, Koa had to wee then. I tried to sleep again after that, and I just could not. My ADHD brain was on fire…
I checked my phone, saw an email from a good friend, and decided to answer him. I made a few more images, based on his new info, and I was hoping that they would be better. I watched some Downton, I scrolled a bit on Masto. My mind was just so active… After 3 hours, I went to the couch… Koa’s things went to the crate in the living room. I got a new little blanket that I bought a little while ago, and I got to watching telly on the couch. I did doze off a few times. And, when my body was cursing the couch, I decided to get up, and start our day. But yeah, I felt broken for sure…
Thanks to all for your kindness and support during my "journey through daily life" :bear_love: I really appreciate it 💜 as it helps me to keep going on bad/harder days! :bear_nuzzle:
:pixy_party: 💜 🍀 🐾
-
CW: A very long journal Toot! Nothing bad, except me being very tired...
#Journal of a tired Dutch AuDHD Pixy :pixy_party: (Thursday, 21/05/2026).
I had an OK enough night, but still, I felt tired, with a slight headache, when we got up. After Koa had his food, and I got dressed, and I’d taken my meds, I got to my laptop. I started with an email to a sweet friend of mine, with which I sent an edit of a picture that I had for him the previous day. He had mentioned some changes in his email to me, so like a real addict, I had to try them out, and see if I could create an image for him that was better suited. After I had done that, I wrote my journal toot, and I worked a bit on my blog.
I spent some time with some AI editing, and I spent some time writing bits for my blog. I enjoyed some breakfast, and I tried to relax a bit, as I was rather tired still. Koa and I went out for a short nighttime walkies, but I had forgotten to wear the head lamp, so I could not shine a light on the grassy area. I always try to clean Koa’s number two’s, but there are at least two dog owners, one big and one smaller dog, that don’t deem it necessary to clean up their dog’s shit. So yeah, have to be careful when you want to walk on the field… Unfortunately…
When we got back, I cuddled for a while with Koa, and then he went to the crate for some snoozing, as I didn’t want to be nibbled on by my little vampire… 😂 He went to the crate, got a snack, and was OK there, while I tried to relax a bit, as I was tired, and I had a long enough day ahead of me. Around 6, Koa and I went for another walk, and then I got everything in Skoosh, and we headed to Nijmegen.
Mum was a bit grumpy that I was so early, while she was the one that had requested I’d come early (guess her early was less that than mine, 🫣). I “handed” over Koa, and when mum was ready to watch him and Bas, I got to Skoosh, and we skedaddled to Germany. It felt a bit weird driving there again, after not having been there for 4 weeks.
I started with the Penny, where I took 3 full bags of recycling cans and bottles. I passed the €50, and it’s €0,25 per item, so I had brought in plenty, and my arms and hands were done when the bags were finally empty. But, the money would come in handy when Koa has his next vet appointment again next week. He needs another Titer test, and depending on the outcome, he may need his boosters that time. Seeing the bill went past the €200 for the first time… I hope that the second one will be less. I did get some money back from the insurance, but not as much as I paid. I put that money to Koa’s piggy bank as well, so I should have enough to cover his next vet bill. And then, hopefully, he won’t need the vet for some time to come…
After Penny, I went to Shell, and gave Skoosh something to drink. She wanted almost 18 liters, and seeing I had driven 434km with her since the last time I filled her up, my app told me she had done a lovely 24,31km/l (which my app tells me would be 57,18 mi/gal, not to bad for sure). I went to Edeka, got all the things (except one) that mum asked for, and I got some things for myself as well. Then, I headed back to Nijmegen. A quick stop at Appie, where I got the last thing mum needed, and I got a few things for myself. (of course I forgot some things, so I need to see about visiting the supermarket at some point).
I headed to my parent’s place, where I unloaded all for mum (and dad). Koa was just enjoying his snuffle mat, and when he was done, and when Bas got some snacks and cuddles as well, Koa and I headed home again. I cleaned up the few groceries, walked a short walk with Koa, and I had something to snack. After that, I tried to relax a bit, as I was rather tired. But, Koa was tired too, so that was a good thing, we could relax together.
We were in the garden for a while. I read my book, and Koa spent some time on his outdoor bed. I gave him a few snacks on it, and later on, he went on it by himself for a bit as well. So, I tried to take a little video. I had read for a while, and then my back started to annoy me, so I went back inside, to relax on the couch a bit.
I decided to give Koa one of the extra plush toys that I had ordered from IKEA. He got the (small) Blåhaj, which was still big enough when compared to Koa now. And yes, I took a video of this as well. 😉Koa played a bit with the new plush, and then he dozed off again. I watched some telly, and had a snack. Then, when the neighbor texted, we headed out for a bit.
Koa was a bit too enthusiastic, and the black fluff felt the need to correct him. It scared Koa a bit, and the fluff got separated in a rough way by the neighbor. I checked Koa, and he wasn’t damaged in any way, just very startled from the big black one lashing out. Yeah, Koa is a bouncy puppy, and both Bas and the black fluff aren’t too interested in all that…
I got an email from the doggy school. It seems I need to buy a few things for the classes, and a few things I already have. The first class is a theory one, and a long one. Pups can stay at home/with a sitter, so that the ones following the class can make notes and ask questions during the longer lesson. But… I can’t leave Koa that long with my dad and Bas, as I know that will lead to disaster. I asked my neighbor, but she wasn’t sure yet if she could make it. So, either she can, and I can take my mum to the first class. Or, Koa needs to stay with mum and dad, and I will have to relay all the info to mum. I hope that the neighbor is willing and able to doggy sit, but I know it’s for a few hours (the drive there is about 30 minutes, the class takes two hours, and the drive back is also 30 minutes… and the drive is a bit longer if I have to pick up mum…), and I know she has some plans earlier that day. So, it’s a wait and see… I will have to pay for the class in the next few days, so I am hoping that my money will come in this Friday, so I can pay her before the weekend comes. Otherwise, I can always show the transfer, as she will understand that the extra holiday on Monday will slow the payment down.
Koa and I relaxed some more, and then we got ready for bed. We were rather tired, so it didn’t take too long for the both of us to doze off. After an hour, I was startled by what I thought to be a loud bark. But, when I checked on Koa, he was out like a broken light-bulb, so I may have dreamed about the bark? I went to the loo, and went back to bed. Of course, Koa had to wee then. I tried to sleep again after that, and I just could not. My ADHD brain was on fire…
I checked my phone, saw an email from a good friend, and decided to answer him. I made a few more images, based on his new info, and I was hoping that they would be better. I watched some Downton, I scrolled a bit on Masto. My mind was just so active… After 3 hours, I went to the couch… Koa’s things went to the crate in the living room. I got a new little blanket that I bought a little while ago, and I got to watching telly on the couch. I did doze off a few times. And, when my body was cursing the couch, I decided to get up, and start our day. But yeah, I felt broken for sure…
Thanks to all for your kindness and support during my "journey through daily life" :bear_love: I really appreciate it 💜 as it helps me to keep going on bad/harder days! :bear_nuzzle:
:pixy_party: 💜 🍀 🐾
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CW: A very long journal Toot! Nothing bad, except me being very tired...
#Journal of a tired Dutch AuDHD Pixy :pixy_party: (Thursday, 21/05/2026).
I had an OK enough night, but still, I felt tired, with a slight headache, when we got up. After Koa had his food, and I got dressed, and I’d taken my meds, I got to my laptop. I started with an email to a sweet friend of mine, with which I sent an edit of a picture that I had for him the previous day. He had mentioned some changes in his email to me, so like a real addict, I had to try them out, and see if I could create an image for him that was better suited. After I had done that, I wrote my journal toot, and I worked a bit on my blog.
I spent some time with some AI editing, and I spent some time writing bits for my blog. I enjoyed some breakfast, and I tried to relax a bit, as I was rather tired still. Koa and I went out for a short nighttime walkies, but I had forgotten to wear the head lamp, so I could not shine a light on the grassy area. I always try to clean Koa’s number two’s, but there are at least two dog owners, one big and one smaller dog, that don’t deem it necessary to clean up their dog’s shit. So yeah, have to be careful when you want to walk on the field… Unfortunately…
When we got back, I cuddled for a while with Koa, and then he went to the crate for some snoozing, as I didn’t want to be nibbled on by my little vampire… 😂 He went to the crate, got a snack, and was OK there, while I tried to relax a bit, as I was tired, and I had a long enough day ahead of me. Around 6, Koa and I went for another walk, and then I got everything in Skoosh, and we headed to Nijmegen.
Mum was a bit grumpy that I was so early, while she was the one that had requested I’d come early (guess her early was less that than mine, 🫣). I “handed” over Koa, and when mum was ready to watch him and Bas, I got to Skoosh, and we skedaddled to Germany. It felt a bit weird driving there again, after not having been there for 4 weeks.
I started with the Penny, where I took 3 full bags of recycling cans and bottles. I passed the €50, and it’s €0,25 per item, so I had brought in plenty, and my arms and hands were done when the bags were finally empty. But, the money would come in handy when Koa has his next vet appointment again next week. He needs another Titer test, and depending on the outcome, he may need his boosters that time. Seeing the bill went past the €200 for the first time… I hope that the second one will be less. I did get some money back from the insurance, but not as much as I paid. I put that money to Koa’s piggy bank as well, so I should have enough to cover his next vet bill. And then, hopefully, he won’t need the vet for some time to come…
After Penny, I went to Shell, and gave Skoosh something to drink. She wanted almost 18 liters, and seeing I had driven 434km with her since the last time I filled her up, my app told me she had done a lovely 24,31km/l (which my app tells me would be 57,18 mi/gal, not to bad for sure). I went to Edeka, got all the things (except one) that mum asked for, and I got some things for myself as well. Then, I headed back to Nijmegen. A quick stop at Appie, where I got the last thing mum needed, and I got a few things for myself. (of course I forgot some things, so I need to see about visiting the supermarket at some point).
I headed to my parent’s place, where I unloaded all for mum (and dad). Koa was just enjoying his snuffle mat, and when he was done, and when Bas got some snacks and cuddles as well, Koa and I headed home again. I cleaned up the few groceries, walked a short walk with Koa, and I had something to snack. After that, I tried to relax a bit, as I was rather tired. But, Koa was tired too, so that was a good thing, we could relax together.
We were in the garden for a while. I read my book, and Koa spent some time on his outdoor bed. I gave him a few snacks on it, and later on, he went on it by himself for a bit as well. So, I tried to take a little video. I had read for a while, and then my back started to annoy me, so I went back inside, to relax on the couch a bit.
I decided to give Koa one of the extra plush toys that I had ordered from IKEA. He got the (small) Blåhaj, which was still big enough when compared to Koa now. And yes, I took a video of this as well. 😉Koa played a bit with the new plush, and then he dozed off again. I watched some telly, and had a snack. Then, when the neighbor texted, we headed out for a bit.
Koa was a bit too enthusiastic, and the black fluff felt the need to correct him. It scared Koa a bit, and the fluff got separated in a rough way by the neighbor. I checked Koa, and he wasn’t damaged in any way, just very startled from the big black one lashing out. Yeah, Koa is a bouncy puppy, and both Bas and the black fluff aren’t too interested in all that…
I got an email from the doggy school. It seems I need to buy a few things for the classes, and a few things I already have. The first class is a theory one, and a long one. Pups can stay at home/with a sitter, so that the ones following the class can make notes and ask questions during the longer lesson. But… I can’t leave Koa that long with my dad and Bas, as I know that will lead to disaster. I asked my neighbor, but she wasn’t sure yet if she could make it. So, either she can, and I can take my mum to the first class. Or, Koa needs to stay with mum and dad, and I will have to relay all the info to mum. I hope that the neighbor is willing and able to doggy sit, but I know it’s for a few hours (the drive there is about 30 minutes, the class takes two hours, and the drive back is also 30 minutes… and the drive is a bit longer if I have to pick up mum…), and I know she has some plans earlier that day. So, it’s a wait and see… I will have to pay for the class in the next few days, so I am hoping that my money will come in this Friday, so I can pay her before the weekend comes. Otherwise, I can always show the transfer, as she will understand that the extra holiday on Monday will slow the payment down.
Koa and I relaxed some more, and then we got ready for bed. We were rather tired, so it didn’t take too long for the both of us to doze off. After an hour, I was startled by what I thought to be a loud bark. But, when I checked on Koa, he was out like a broken light-bulb, so I may have dreamed about the bark? I went to the loo, and went back to bed. Of course, Koa had to wee then. I tried to sleep again after that, and I just could not. My ADHD brain was on fire…
I checked my phone, saw an email from a good friend, and decided to answer him. I made a few more images, based on his new info, and I was hoping that they would be better. I watched some Downton, I scrolled a bit on Masto. My mind was just so active… After 3 hours, I went to the couch… Koa’s things went to the crate in the living room. I got a new little blanket that I bought a little while ago, and I got to watching telly on the couch. I did doze off a few times. And, when my body was cursing the couch, I decided to get up, and start our day. But yeah, I felt broken for sure…
Thanks to all for your kindness and support during my "journey through daily life" :bear_love: I really appreciate it 💜 as it helps me to keep going on bad/harder days! :bear_nuzzle:
:pixy_party: 💜 🍀 🐾
-
Finally Friday Reads: Rolling Chaos
“Had enough? Obviously, the Mobsters Are Governing America bunch haven’t.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Things continue to look bleak for our country as Orange Caligula’s physical and mental conditions become more obvious. The Anti-Weaponization Fund looks more shady than ever. The continued coverage of its impact on our budget and rule of law gets more shocking with each elucidation. None of Trump’s songs and dances has gotten the voters’ attention as much as our difficult economy. It is evident with each grocery store and gas station visit and bill to pay that something is very wrong. The worst, massive insider-trading crimes appear to be going on within Trump’s circle.
Forbes has this headline this morning. “Trump’s Tax Immunity Could Save Him More Than $600 Million. The president secures a get-out-of-jail-free card for tax improprieties, just as he’s hauling in record amounts of cash.” Dan Alexander has the analysis and the story.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed a document Tuesday giving Donald Trump, his two eldest sons and his company broad immunity for potential tax disputes with the federal government. It’s the clearest way that the president is personally benefitting from his settlement with the Internal Revenue Service, which he sued days after taking office for failing to prevent the release of his personal tax returns.
The settlement lands at a convenient moment. Donald Trump earned an estimated $1.4 billion from crypto and licensing ventures in 2025, as he turned his first year back in the White House into the most lucrative year of his life. If the president received an extension for his 2025 return, his preparers may be sorting through exactly how to present this year’s welter of income right now. Trump has never hidden the animating principle. When Hillary Clinton accused him of paying no taxes in the 2016 debates, he replied: “That makes me smart.” Also much richer. If Trump is able to conjure up theories to avoid taxes for his 2025 income, he could save more than a half-billion dollars, according to Forbes estimates.
The conflict-of-interest underpinning all of this is so obvious that even Trump has acknowledged it. “I’m the one that makes the decision, right?” he mused in the Oval Office in October. “You know, that decision would have to go across my desk. And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.” Trump first suggested he would send whatever judgement he received to charity, before settling on a more creative approach. The government would not pay Trump. Instead, Trump would get a pass enabling him to pay less to the government. The move harkens the old cliché—a penny saved is a penny earned—with the same result: more money in Trump’s pocket.
Asked about all this, the White House referred questions to the Trump Organization. The president’s business did not dispute the estimates but opted to issue a lengthy statement attacking the IRS that said, in part, “This settlement seeks to provide meaningful accountability for the IRS’s prolonged and systemic failure to safeguard sensitive taxpayer data.”
Like the settlement itself, Trump’s massive earnings are a product of the presidency. Heading into the 2024 election, Trump announced a new crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which sold tokens to anyone interested in buying. The tokens offered no financial interest in World Liberty, which helps explain why so few people noticed initially. But after Trump won the election, sales exploded. The economics of the deal were tailored to funnel vast sums of cash to the Trump family. After the first $15 million of sales, 75% of the proceeds went to the Trump family—with 70% of that flowing to the president-elect. More than $50 million went into this machine by the end of 2024, before ramping up in the new year.
Tokens were not the only thing Trump was selling. As Forbes first reported, he also struck a secret deal to offload a chunk of equity in World Liberty Financial in January 2025. The Wall Street Journallater identified the purchaser of that stake, an entity backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, which promised $500 million in the deal. The agreement reportedly excluded the proceeds from token sales, which appeared to be World Liberty’s principal business at the time. World Liberty went on to launch a stablecoin that another entity connected to Sheikh Tahnoon propped up with a multibillion-dollar investment. Trump walked away from the sale with an estimated $375 million in pre-tax earnings. That windfall would theoretically trigger a roughly $140 million federal tax bill.
Every sucker that voted for this man needs a good thwap upside their head. This Reuters Exclusive is shocking. “Trump official tried to ban voting machines used by half of US states.” The lede is shared by Erin Banco, Jonathan Landay, and Alexandra Alper.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s election-security czar last year sought to ban voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states by asking whether the Commerce Department could declare their components national-security risks, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
White House adviser Kurt Olsen, a lawyer Trump has tasked with proving widely debunked election-rigging conspiracy theories, pushed the plan to target Dominion Voting Systems machines. The idea emerged, the sources said, as Olsen and other officials brainstormed about how the federal government could take control over elections from U.S. states, an idea publicly aired by Trump.
Olsen wanted a national system of hand-counted paper ballots, the sources said, a frequent Trump demand some election-security experts say would be less accurate and potentially riskier than the current system of machines with auditable paper trails that almost all cities and states use.
The plan to exclude the machines, reported here first, got far enough that in September, Commerce Department officials began exploring what grounds could be invoked to execute it, three additional sources said. It eventually collapsed, however, because Olsen and other administration staffers working with him failed to provide evidence to justify such a move, two of the sources said.
This headline is from the New York Times. “Audit Immunity for Trump Family Puts I.R.S. in a Bind
Federal law prohibits the Internal Revenue Service from halting an audit at the direction of the president or his aides.” Andrew Duehren reports the story.President Trump’s return to office has been an unforgiving crucible for the hidebound Internal Revenue Service. He and his aides have decimated its ranks, fired and replaced its leaders and made repeated attempts to enlist the agency in his quest for political retribution.
Now, as part of an arrangement drawn up this week by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, the I.R.S. faces its most profound legal and ethical test yet: a demand to drop any audits of Mr. Trump, his family members or their “affiliates.”
Tax lawyers and former I.R.S. officials said such expansive protection would cut to the core of the agency’s mission to collect taxes in a disinterested, nonpartisan way — and could potentially run afoul of the laws governing how it does so.
“It’s just completely contrary to the notion that you’re supposed to comply with the law and the I.R.S. is there to make sure you do that,” said George Yin, a tax law professor and former chief of staff at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “The idea that you can get a free pass from the I.R.S. or anyone can get a free pass from the I.R.S. is just completely ridiculous.”
Immunity from I.R.S. scrutiny for Mr. Trump and his family was part of a broad agreement made by the Justice Department to resolve a lawsuit he filed against the I.R.S. over the leak of his tax returns. Beyond the audit provision, the Justice Department committed to creating a $1.8 billion fund to pay victims of “weaponization,” a proposal that has been rebuked by both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.
While the Justice Department has said Mr. Trump himself will not be paid out of that fund, an end to any and all audits based on tax returns previously filed could be quite lucrative for the Trumps. The New York Times reported in 2024 that an adverse ruling in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million, though it is unclear if that examination is still underway.
The nine-page outline creating the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund was agreed to and signed on Monday by Frank Bisignano, who leads the I.R.S. as its chief executive officer. The one-page addendum calling for the I.R.S. to drop any audits of Mr. Trump and his family members was released the next day and signed by only Mr. Blanche.
That has raised the question of how, and if, the leader of the Justice Department can control decisions made at the I.R.S., which falls under the Treasury Department.
“There’s a genuine question as to whether the attorney general can do this,” said Daniel Hemel, a tax law professor at New York University. “I can’t think of precedent where the attorney general signs a piece of paper that ends audits for a large number of people.”
This guest essay in the New York Times by Representative Jamie Raskin is a must-read. Raskin provides us with a blueprint to stop this particular grift. “There’s a Way to Stop Trump’s I.R.S. Slush Fund.”
These days it takes a spectacular burst of corruption to get the attention of our scandal-weary nation, but President Trump and his administration have managed, once again, to transfix Americans by establishing a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund in the Department of Justice that will undoubtedly be used to line the pockets of Mr. Trump’s partisans and foot soldiers — with your tax dollars.
The creation of this fund is a stupefying feat of self-dealing — part of a “settlement agreement” between the Department of the Treasury, which Mr. Trump controls, and the plaintiffs — Mr. Trump, two of his sons and their family business — who sued the I.R.S. for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns. It will very likely result in an undeserved windfall to a legion of Jan. 6 rioters who have already unjustly received pardons from Mr. Trump.
Every part of this farce is an affront to the Constitution. It usurps both the exclusive power of Congress to legislate programs and spend money and the power of the courts to decide specific cases and controversies.
It is, quite simply, a scam.
Only Congress has the power to appropriate federal dollars. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution states that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” But Mr. Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche seem to think they can conjure this giant slush fund into being without congressional approval.
Further, Article III, Section 1 states that the “judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Yet the settlement took Mr. Trump’s case out of the hands of the courts. And it calls for oversight by a five-member board, appointed by Mr. Blanche and whose members Mr. Trump can dismiss on a whim. Even if this fund were legitimate, that kind of setup wouldn’t be for Mr. Blanche to decide. Congress has never established a court, tribunal or board to hear pleas from people who believe they are victims of government “weaponization,” much less a fund almost certainly meant to reward supporters and allies of the president who feel they were wronged simply because their actions on Jan. 6, 2021, were prosecuted.
No matter what you think about the events of Jan. 6, hundreds of rioters indisputably broke the law that day when they stormed the Capitol trying to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election and the peaceful transfer of power.
As regrettable as it is that most of the rioters were pardoned, there’s no denying that as president, Mr. Trump has that power. But the same Constitution giving him that power also says that “neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” Jan. 6 was indeed an insurrection, and pardon or no pardon, no one can legally be compensated for taking part in it.
As James Madison noted in Federalist No. 10, a cardinal precept of our legal system is that “no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” Here, Mr. Trump’s administration “settled” a case that he brought, effectively making him the judge in his own case. He not only concocted the fund, but his Justice Department threw in a sweetener: shielding him and his sons from audits of any tax returns they have already filed.
The $1.776 billion figure is obviously meant to invoke the year of our founding. But go back and read the Declaration of Independence, which includes a long list of accusations directed at George III. Among them is the charge that the British king “has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”
Read more. I’ve gifted the link. #FARTUS thinks he’s above the law and also thinks the U.S. Treasury and Laws are his to toy with. NBC News reports that there are many takers for the Fund, even though it’s not open for business yet. “Trump’s $1.8B fund isn’t officially open yet. That hasn’t stopped applications. No commissioners have been chosen, a requirement before claims can be processed, an administration official told NBC News. The Justice Department says millions are eligible.”
Applications are already rolling into the Justice Department from hopefuls aiming for some of the nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, even though the process can’t officially begin until commissioners are chosen to decide how the money is doled out.
The fund was announced this week, part of an unprecedented settlement between President Donald Trump, two of his sons and the Trump Organization and the government he oversees over the leak of his tax returns. He agreed to drop legal claims in exchange for creating the fund.
It’s not clear yet how people are expected to formally apply. The pool of possible applicants is substantial, according to a Justice Department overview that was sent to GOP Senate offices Thursday.
“Literally tens of millions of Americans were subjected to improper and unlawful government targeting, including extensive government censorship and aggressive lawfare,” according to the overview.
Justice Department officials said the five commissioners will be chosen in the coming weeks — the appointments must be made within 30 days from when the settlement was signed Monday. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will make the decisions, though Congress members will get input on one of them. The president can fire the commissioners at will.
The department is working under a deadline, in part because the money pool — if it isn’t blocked by Congress or courts — would have to be distributed by the end of Trump’s term in 2028. Legal challenges have already begun, and disbursements could be tied up in the courts until well after the deadline, or it could be declared unlawful.
Both Democrats and Republicans have criticized the fund. Opponents have labeled it a massive “slush fund” for Trump’s allies. Its existence has alarmed some legal experts, in part because there will be very little public oversight over how it is managed.
Among the crooks waiting for compensation are Michael Cohen, Enrique Tarrio, Brandon Fellows, Michael Caputo, and Mike Lindell. The Lindell link goes to an MSNBC article with this headline. “Who’s applying for the $1.8 billion slush fund? In today’s edition of The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe: Trump’s revenge tour, Stephen Colbert’s last show, and more.” George Santos is in that list too.
“I’ve been pushing for this. I think I was weaponized against. I think I’m a good example of that.”
— Proud Boys founder Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to 22 years for Jan. 6 before being pardoned by Trump less than two years later, now seeking $2 million to $3 million from the Justice Department’s new $1.7 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund
Looks like quite the Motely Crew.
People are still shocked by the Supreme Court Decision that basically guts Voting Rights. This is from Talking Points Memo and is reported by Josh Kovensky and Khaya Himmelman. “Their Loved Ones Died for the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court’s Ruling Is a New Injustice.”
Dennis Dahmer was 12 years old in January 1966 when Klansmen stormed his family home and set it on fire, murdering his father, Vernon. He still remembers the shootout; he remembers watching his father die from smoke inhalation. The trauma lingers to this day, 60 years later.
Vernon Dahmer had been a fixture in the African American community near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He ran a successful local grocery, and, after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, obtained the right to register voters and collect poll taxes, which were still in effect, at his store. Members of the local White Citizens’ Council started to appear at the family farm, warning his father to stop, Dahmer told TPM, but that didn’t deter him. He recorded a radio announcement in January 1966 offering to cover the cost of poll taxes for African Americans who couldn’t afford to pay. The KKK attacked the next day.
“He would always say to us, ‘do something, dammit,’” Dahmer recalled. “‘Don’t just stand there.’”
With all that in mind, Dennis Dahmer decided late last year to listen in to oral arguments in Callais v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court case that would ultimately gut the remnants of the Voting Rights Act. The law had provided a framework for protecting minority votes in the South for decades.
“It was apparent to me that they had already made up their mind — talking about the MAGA ones for sure,” he said. “They were just laying the groundwork to justify what they were going to do.”
The Callais decision last month threatens to bring the state of Black congressional representation in the South back to the 1960s. State legislatures across the Old Confederacy are gerrymandering away political maps that allowed Black communities a voice in local, state and federal politics, and provided a means for them to elect politicians of their choosing. The rapid democratic backsliding has prompted demonstrations at Selma, the site of key actions during the Civil Rights Movement, and disbelief among Democrats at the consequences.
But for Dahmer and other survivors of people who were maimed or murdered during the Civil Rights movement, it’s deeply personal. For these families, the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais represents a return to the 1960s that isn’t abstract, but very real. They remember learning that their relatives died, they remember death threats against them and other loved ones in the aftermath, they remember how the fear and bloodshed prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to decide that the time had come to send a Voting Rights Act to Congress. In many of these cases, justice was limited, late, or non-existent: the perpetrators were acquitted, died before they were convicted, or were only held accountable after spending decades free.
Now comes a new form of injustice: the one lasting change to American democracy that their relatives’ deaths brought about has been undone.
You definitely should read this one and all the stories it tells. There are definitely more untold stories, too. This New York Times story by Nikole Hannah-Jones is spot-on. “The Civil Rights Era Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes.”
For students of history, what Tennessee did on May 7 felt like a premonition. One hundred and fifty years ago, when this nation’s first experiment with interracial democracy began to collapse, Tennessee — a former slave state and the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan — was the first domino to drop. In 1870, the Tennessee legislature rewrote the State Constitution to disenfranchise Black men. As the historian Manisha Sinha writes in “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic,” Tennessee “provided a template to other Southern states” for how to “overthrow Reconstruction.”Within three decades, Black representation, in Congress and in local and state offices across the former Confederacy, would be wiped out.
It was not just Tennessee that echoed history, but the Supreme Court as well. The case that felled the Voting Rights Act was Louisiana v. Callais. Louisiana is the state where in 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, another superlatively conservative Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to license segregation, setting off a race across the South to strip Black people of the franchise and codify their second-class citizenship.
The day after the Callais ruling, Gov. Jeff Landry took the unprecedented action of suspending the state’s U.S. House primary — in which tens of thousands of voters had already cast ballots — so legislators could redraw the election maps. Though one in three Louisiana residents is Black, Republicans intend to jettison at least one of two Black-majority districts. “Well, the failed narrative is actually that people in Louisiana are racist,” Landry insisted, “that basically we won’t elect Black people. I mean, I disagree with that.” In fact, since the Plessy era, Louisiana has sent only four Black people to Congress, and a Black candidate has never won in a white district there.
Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida quickly moved ahead with their own redistricting plans. And the governor of Mississippi — which has just a single Black U.S. representative despite having the nation’s highest percentage of Black residents, at 38 percent — announced his intent to do the same.
Voting and civil rights experts warn that America now sits at a familiar precipice. The Voting Rights Act helped transform the South: In 1965, the region had not a single Black representative in the U.S. Congress; today, it has 31. Now, Black representation may once again disappear in the South, where more than half of Black Americans live. This could lead to the largest decimation of Black political power since the fall of Reconstruction. And just like then, what is at stake is no less than American democracy itself.
This is another must-read article. I feel like we’re living through the darkest days in American history that haven’t quite rivaled the Civil War in terms of loss of life, but certainly rival the Civil War in changing how we live as free people in a democracy.
So, I’ve managed to write a very long post today, but every day with Orange Caligula and his crew of racists, sexist, backward-looking assholes just brings more shit into view and reality. Please hang in there.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#BogusWeaponization #CivilRightsCollapsing #IRS #SlushFund #TrumpAttackOnVotingAndVotingRights #TrumpFamilyCrimeSyndicateAndGriftRodeo #TrumpTaxImmunity -
Finally Friday Reads: Rolling Chaos
“Had enough? Obviously, the Mobsters Are Governing America bunch haven’t.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Things continue to look bleak for our country as Orange Caligula’s physical and mental conditions become more obvious. The Anti-Weaponization Fund looks more shady than ever. The continued coverage of its impact on our budget and rule of law gets more shocking with each elucidation. None of Trump’s songs and dances has gotten the voters’ attention as much as our difficult economy. It is evident with each grocery store and gas station visit and bill to pay that something is very wrong. The worst, massive insider-trading crimes appear to be going on within Trump’s circle.
Forbes has this headline this morning. “Trump’s Tax Immunity Could Save Him More Than $600 Million. The president secures a get-out-of-jail-free card for tax improprieties, just as he’s hauling in record amounts of cash.” Dan Alexander has the analysis and the story.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed a document Tuesday giving Donald Trump, his two eldest sons and his company broad immunity for potential tax disputes with the federal government. It’s the clearest way that the president is personally benefitting from his settlement with the Internal Revenue Service, which he sued days after taking office for failing to prevent the release of his personal tax returns.
The settlement lands at a convenient moment. Donald Trump earned an estimated $1.4 billion from crypto and licensing ventures in 2025, as he turned his first year back in the White House into the most lucrative year of his life. If the president received an extension for his 2025 return, his preparers may be sorting through exactly how to present this year’s welter of income right now. Trump has never hidden the animating principle. When Hillary Clinton accused him of paying no taxes in the 2016 debates, he replied: “That makes me smart.” Also much richer. If Trump is able to conjure up theories to avoid taxes for his 2025 income, he could save more than a half-billion dollars, according to Forbes estimates.
The conflict-of-interest underpinning all of this is so obvious that even Trump has acknowledged it. “I’m the one that makes the decision, right?” he mused in the Oval Office in October. “You know, that decision would have to go across my desk. And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.” Trump first suggested he would send whatever judgement he received to charity, before settling on a more creative approach. The government would not pay Trump. Instead, Trump would get a pass enabling him to pay less to the government. The move harkens the old cliché—a penny saved is a penny earned—with the same result: more money in Trump’s pocket.
Asked about all this, the White House referred questions to the Trump Organization. The president’s business did not dispute the estimates but opted to issue a lengthy statement attacking the IRS that said, in part, “This settlement seeks to provide meaningful accountability for the IRS’s prolonged and systemic failure to safeguard sensitive taxpayer data.”
Like the settlement itself, Trump’s massive earnings are a product of the presidency. Heading into the 2024 election, Trump announced a new crypto venture, World Liberty Financial, which sold tokens to anyone interested in buying. The tokens offered no financial interest in World Liberty, which helps explain why so few people noticed initially. But after Trump won the election, sales exploded. The economics of the deal were tailored to funnel vast sums of cash to the Trump family. After the first $15 million of sales, 75% of the proceeds went to the Trump family—with 70% of that flowing to the president-elect. More than $50 million went into this machine by the end of 2024, before ramping up in the new year.
Tokens were not the only thing Trump was selling. As Forbes first reported, he also struck a secret deal to offload a chunk of equity in World Liberty Financial in January 2025. The Wall Street Journallater identified the purchaser of that stake, an entity backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, which promised $500 million in the deal. The agreement reportedly excluded the proceeds from token sales, which appeared to be World Liberty’s principal business at the time. World Liberty went on to launch a stablecoin that another entity connected to Sheikh Tahnoon propped up with a multibillion-dollar investment. Trump walked away from the sale with an estimated $375 million in pre-tax earnings. That windfall would theoretically trigger a roughly $140 million federal tax bill.
Every sucker that voted for this man needs a good thwap upside their head. This Reuters Exclusive is shocking. “Trump official tried to ban voting machines used by half of US states.” The lede is shared by Erin Banco, Jonathan Landay, and Alexandra Alper.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s election-security czar last year sought to ban voting machines used in more than half of U.S. states by asking whether the Commerce Department could declare their components national-security risks, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.
White House adviser Kurt Olsen, a lawyer Trump has tasked with proving widely debunked election-rigging conspiracy theories, pushed the plan to target Dominion Voting Systems machines. The idea emerged, the sources said, as Olsen and other officials brainstormed about how the federal government could take control over elections from U.S. states, an idea publicly aired by Trump.
Olsen wanted a national system of hand-counted paper ballots, the sources said, a frequent Trump demand some election-security experts say would be less accurate and potentially riskier than the current system of machines with auditable paper trails that almost all cities and states use.
The plan to exclude the machines, reported here first, got far enough that in September, Commerce Department officials began exploring what grounds could be invoked to execute it, three additional sources said. It eventually collapsed, however, because Olsen and other administration staffers working with him failed to provide evidence to justify such a move, two of the sources said.
This headline is from the New York Times. “Audit Immunity for Trump Family Puts I.R.S. in a Bind
Federal law prohibits the Internal Revenue Service from halting an audit at the direction of the president or his aides.” Andrew Duehren reports the story.President Trump’s return to office has been an unforgiving crucible for the hidebound Internal Revenue Service. He and his aides have decimated its ranks, fired and replaced its leaders and made repeated attempts to enlist the agency in his quest for political retribution.
Now, as part of an arrangement drawn up this week by Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, the I.R.S. faces its most profound legal and ethical test yet: a demand to drop any audits of Mr. Trump, his family members or their “affiliates.”
Tax lawyers and former I.R.S. officials said such expansive protection would cut to the core of the agency’s mission to collect taxes in a disinterested, nonpartisan way — and could potentially run afoul of the laws governing how it does so.
“It’s just completely contrary to the notion that you’re supposed to comply with the law and the I.R.S. is there to make sure you do that,” said George Yin, a tax law professor and former chief of staff at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation. “The idea that you can get a free pass from the I.R.S. or anyone can get a free pass from the I.R.S. is just completely ridiculous.”
Immunity from I.R.S. scrutiny for Mr. Trump and his family was part of a broad agreement made by the Justice Department to resolve a lawsuit he filed against the I.R.S. over the leak of his tax returns. Beyond the audit provision, the Justice Department committed to creating a $1.8 billion fund to pay victims of “weaponization,” a proposal that has been rebuked by both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill.
While the Justice Department has said Mr. Trump himself will not be paid out of that fund, an end to any and all audits based on tax returns previously filed could be quite lucrative for the Trumps. The New York Times reported in 2024 that an adverse ruling in an I.R.S. audit could cost Mr. Trump more than $100 million, though it is unclear if that examination is still underway.
The nine-page outline creating the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund was agreed to and signed on Monday by Frank Bisignano, who leads the I.R.S. as its chief executive officer. The one-page addendum calling for the I.R.S. to drop any audits of Mr. Trump and his family members was released the next day and signed by only Mr. Blanche.
That has raised the question of how, and if, the leader of the Justice Department can control decisions made at the I.R.S., which falls under the Treasury Department.
“There’s a genuine question as to whether the attorney general can do this,” said Daniel Hemel, a tax law professor at New York University. “I can’t think of precedent where the attorney general signs a piece of paper that ends audits for a large number of people.”
This guest essay in the New York Times by Representative Jamie Raskin is a must-read. Raskin provides us with a blueprint to stop this particular grift. “There’s a Way to Stop Trump’s I.R.S. Slush Fund.”
These days it takes a spectacular burst of corruption to get the attention of our scandal-weary nation, but President Trump and his administration have managed, once again, to transfix Americans by establishing a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund in the Department of Justice that will undoubtedly be used to line the pockets of Mr. Trump’s partisans and foot soldiers — with your tax dollars.
The creation of this fund is a stupefying feat of self-dealing — part of a “settlement agreement” between the Department of the Treasury, which Mr. Trump controls, and the plaintiffs — Mr. Trump, two of his sons and their family business — who sued the I.R.S. for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns. It will very likely result in an undeserved windfall to a legion of Jan. 6 rioters who have already unjustly received pardons from Mr. Trump.
Every part of this farce is an affront to the Constitution. It usurps both the exclusive power of Congress to legislate programs and spend money and the power of the courts to decide specific cases and controversies.
It is, quite simply, a scam.
Only Congress has the power to appropriate federal dollars. Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution states that “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law.” But Mr. Trump and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche seem to think they can conjure this giant slush fund into being without congressional approval.
Further, Article III, Section 1 states that the “judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” Yet the settlement took Mr. Trump’s case out of the hands of the courts. And it calls for oversight by a five-member board, appointed by Mr. Blanche and whose members Mr. Trump can dismiss on a whim. Even if this fund were legitimate, that kind of setup wouldn’t be for Mr. Blanche to decide. Congress has never established a court, tribunal or board to hear pleas from people who believe they are victims of government “weaponization,” much less a fund almost certainly meant to reward supporters and allies of the president who feel they were wronged simply because their actions on Jan. 6, 2021, were prosecuted.
No matter what you think about the events of Jan. 6, hundreds of rioters indisputably broke the law that day when they stormed the Capitol trying to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election and the peaceful transfer of power.
As regrettable as it is that most of the rioters were pardoned, there’s no denying that as president, Mr. Trump has that power. But the same Constitution giving him that power also says that “neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” Jan. 6 was indeed an insurrection, and pardon or no pardon, no one can legally be compensated for taking part in it.
As James Madison noted in Federalist No. 10, a cardinal precept of our legal system is that “no man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” Here, Mr. Trump’s administration “settled” a case that he brought, effectively making him the judge in his own case. He not only concocted the fund, but his Justice Department threw in a sweetener: shielding him and his sons from audits of any tax returns they have already filed.
The $1.776 billion figure is obviously meant to invoke the year of our founding. But go back and read the Declaration of Independence, which includes a long list of accusations directed at George III. Among them is the charge that the British king “has dissolved representative houses repeatedly for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.”
Read more. I’ve gifted the link. #FARTUS thinks he’s above the law and also thinks the U.S. Treasury and Laws are his to toy with. NBC News reports that there are many takers for the Fund, even though it’s not open for business yet. “Trump’s $1.8B fund isn’t officially open yet. That hasn’t stopped applications. No commissioners have been chosen, a requirement before claims can be processed, an administration official told NBC News. The Justice Department says millions are eligible.”
Applications are already rolling into the Justice Department from hopefuls aiming for some of the nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, even though the process can’t officially begin until commissioners are chosen to decide how the money is doled out.
The fund was announced this week, part of an unprecedented settlement between President Donald Trump, two of his sons and the Trump Organization and the government he oversees over the leak of his tax returns. He agreed to drop legal claims in exchange for creating the fund.
It’s not clear yet how people are expected to formally apply. The pool of possible applicants is substantial, according to a Justice Department overview that was sent to GOP Senate offices Thursday.
“Literally tens of millions of Americans were subjected to improper and unlawful government targeting, including extensive government censorship and aggressive lawfare,” according to the overview.
Justice Department officials said the five commissioners will be chosen in the coming weeks — the appointments must be made within 30 days from when the settlement was signed Monday. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche will make the decisions, though Congress members will get input on one of them. The president can fire the commissioners at will.
The department is working under a deadline, in part because the money pool — if it isn’t blocked by Congress or courts — would have to be distributed by the end of Trump’s term in 2028. Legal challenges have already begun, and disbursements could be tied up in the courts until well after the deadline, or it could be declared unlawful.
Both Democrats and Republicans have criticized the fund. Opponents have labeled it a massive “slush fund” for Trump’s allies. Its existence has alarmed some legal experts, in part because there will be very little public oversight over how it is managed.
Among the crooks waiting for compensation are Michael Cohen, Enrique Tarrio, Brandon Fellows, Michael Caputo, and Mike Lindell. The Lindell link goes to an MSNBC article with this headline. “Who’s applying for the $1.8 billion slush fund? In today’s edition of The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe: Trump’s revenge tour, Stephen Colbert’s last show, and more.” George Santos is in that list too.
“I’ve been pushing for this. I think I was weaponized against. I think I’m a good example of that.”
— Proud Boys founder Enrique Tarrio, sentenced to 22 years for Jan. 6 before being pardoned by Trump less than two years later, now seeking $2 million to $3 million from the Justice Department’s new $1.7 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund
Looks like quite the Motely Crew.
People are still shocked by the Supreme Court Decision that basically guts Voting Rights. This is from Talking Points Memo and is reported by Josh Kovensky and Khaya Himmelman. “Their Loved Ones Died for the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court’s Ruling Is a New Injustice.”
Dennis Dahmer was 12 years old in January 1966 when Klansmen stormed his family home and set it on fire, murdering his father, Vernon. He still remembers the shootout; he remembers watching his father die from smoke inhalation. The trauma lingers to this day, 60 years later.
Vernon Dahmer had been a fixture in the African American community near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He ran a successful local grocery, and, after the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, obtained the right to register voters and collect poll taxes, which were still in effect, at his store. Members of the local White Citizens’ Council started to appear at the family farm, warning his father to stop, Dahmer told TPM, but that didn’t deter him. He recorded a radio announcement in January 1966 offering to cover the cost of poll taxes for African Americans who couldn’t afford to pay. The KKK attacked the next day.
“He would always say to us, ‘do something, dammit,’” Dahmer recalled. “‘Don’t just stand there.’”
With all that in mind, Dennis Dahmer decided late last year to listen in to oral arguments in Callais v. Louisiana, the Supreme Court case that would ultimately gut the remnants of the Voting Rights Act. The law had provided a framework for protecting minority votes in the South for decades.
“It was apparent to me that they had already made up their mind — talking about the MAGA ones for sure,” he said. “They were just laying the groundwork to justify what they were going to do.”
The Callais decision last month threatens to bring the state of Black congressional representation in the South back to the 1960s. State legislatures across the Old Confederacy are gerrymandering away political maps that allowed Black communities a voice in local, state and federal politics, and provided a means for them to elect politicians of their choosing. The rapid democratic backsliding has prompted demonstrations at Selma, the site of key actions during the Civil Rights Movement, and disbelief among Democrats at the consequences.
But for Dahmer and other survivors of people who were maimed or murdered during the Civil Rights movement, it’s deeply personal. For these families, the Supreme Court’s decision in Callais represents a return to the 1960s that isn’t abstract, but very real. They remember learning that their relatives died, they remember death threats against them and other loved ones in the aftermath, they remember how the fear and bloodshed prompted President Lyndon B. Johnson to decide that the time had come to send a Voting Rights Act to Congress. In many of these cases, justice was limited, late, or non-existent: the perpetrators were acquitted, died before they were convicted, or were only held accountable after spending decades free.
Now comes a new form of injustice: the one lasting change to American democracy that their relatives’ deaths brought about has been undone.
You definitely should read this one and all the stories it tells. There are definitely more untold stories, too. This New York Times story by Nikole Hannah-Jones is spot-on. “The Civil Rights Era Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes.”
For students of history, what Tennessee did on May 7 felt like a premonition. One hundred and fifty years ago, when this nation’s first experiment with interracial democracy began to collapse, Tennessee — a former slave state and the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan — was the first domino to drop. In 1870, the Tennessee legislature rewrote the State Constitution to disenfranchise Black men. As the historian Manisha Sinha writes in “The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic,” Tennessee “provided a template to other Southern states” for how to “overthrow Reconstruction.”Within three decades, Black representation, in Congress and in local and state offices across the former Confederacy, would be wiped out.
It was not just Tennessee that echoed history, but the Supreme Court as well. The case that felled the Voting Rights Act was Louisiana v. Callais. Louisiana is the state where in 1896, in Plessy v. Ferguson, another superlatively conservative Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to license segregation, setting off a race across the South to strip Black people of the franchise and codify their second-class citizenship.
The day after the Callais ruling, Gov. Jeff Landry took the unprecedented action of suspending the state’s U.S. House primary — in which tens of thousands of voters had already cast ballots — so legislators could redraw the election maps. Though one in three Louisiana residents is Black, Republicans intend to jettison at least one of two Black-majority districts. “Well, the failed narrative is actually that people in Louisiana are racist,” Landry insisted, “that basically we won’t elect Black people. I mean, I disagree with that.” In fact, since the Plessy era, Louisiana has sent only four Black people to Congress, and a Black candidate has never won in a white district there.
Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida quickly moved ahead with their own redistricting plans. And the governor of Mississippi — which has just a single Black U.S. representative despite having the nation’s highest percentage of Black residents, at 38 percent — announced his intent to do the same.
Voting and civil rights experts warn that America now sits at a familiar precipice. The Voting Rights Act helped transform the South: In 1965, the region had not a single Black representative in the U.S. Congress; today, it has 31. Now, Black representation may once again disappear in the South, where more than half of Black Americans live. This could lead to the largest decimation of Black political power since the fall of Reconstruction. And just like then, what is at stake is no less than American democracy itself.
This is another must-read article. I feel like we’re living through the darkest days in American history that haven’t quite rivaled the Civil War in terms of loss of life, but certainly rival the Civil War in changing how we live as free people in a democracy.
So, I’ve managed to write a very long post today, but every day with Orange Caligula and his crew of racists, sexist, backward-looking assholes just brings more shit into view and reality. Please hang in there.
What’s on your Reading, Action, and Blogging list today?
#BogusWeaponization #CivilRightsCollapsing #IRS #SlushFund #TrumpAttackOnVotingAndVotingRights #TrumpFamilyCrimeSyndicateAndGriftRodeo #TrumpTaxImmunity -
DATE: May 23, 2026 at 12:00PM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: Brain development patterns predict if childhood ADHD symptoms will fade or persist
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-signatures-identify-which-teens-will-outgrow-adhd-symptoms/
Children experiencing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder face symptoms that can persist, emerge, or fade away completely as they grow older. A recent study published in Nature Mental Health revealed that these different symptom paths are physically reflected in how the brain develops during adolescence, specifically in the growth and thinning of certain brain regions. The research highlights the potential for using brain scans to predict future symptom changes and emphasizes the need for long-term monitoring even after medical treatment begins.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, commonly known as ADHD, affects around five percent of children and adolescents worldwide. This developmental condition often results in varying clinical outcomes as children grow into teenagers and young adults. Some individuals continue to experience symptoms into adulthood, while others go through a remitting phase where their symptoms largely fade. Still, others follow an emergent path where behavioral issues actually worsen over time.
Predicting which adolescents will follow which path remains extremely difficult. A central reason for this difficulty is a lack of long-term brain imaging data showing exactly how adolescent brains mature. The physical development of the brain during these transitional years involves intense structural changes, including a major biological process called synaptic pruning.
During synaptic pruning, the brain naturally eliminates unused neural connections to increase mental efficiency. This normal trimming process causes the outer layer of the brain, known as the cerebral cortex, to thin over time. Variations in how quickly or slowly this thinning occurs can fundamentally impact how a person processes information, pays attention, and regulates their emotions later in life.
Qiang Luo, a researcher at Fudan University in China, led an international team of scientists to explore how typical brain maturation maps onto attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The team wanted to know if specific physical brain changes corresponded to different developmental symptom paths. They also evaluated whether standard medications prescribed for the condition altered those physical brain development paths.
The research team examined longitudinal data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study. This massive ongoing project tracks thousands of youth in the United States over many years, measuring environmental, physical, and mental health factors. The team focused on a diverse overarching group of 7,436 adolescents who received initial brain scans at roughly ten years of age.
The researchers categorized the adolescents into four distinct groups based on behavioral assessments provided over a subsequent two-year period. A massive control group experienced no elevated psychiatric symptoms. A much smaller persistent group showed high symptom levels at the beginning and the end of the two years. A remitting group started with high symptoms that eventually faded below the diagnostic threshold. Finally, an emergent group started with low symptoms that eventually worsened to clinical levels.
Assessments of the brain scans over time revealed distinct physical signatures for each group. The persistent group exhibited a faster rate of cortical thinning in certain frontal areas of the brain compared to the healthy control group. These specific frontal regions are typically associated with executive functions like complex decision making and cognitive control. An accelerated thinning is linked to deficits in these daily cognitive abilities.
In the emergent group, the brain also showed altered developmental rates. Individuals whose symptoms worsened over time demonstrated a slower rate of cortical thinning in the right posterior cingulate cortex. This region is a key component of the brain’s default mode network, which helps regulate mind-wandering and internal thoughts. By retaining connections that would typically be pruned away, the developing brain might struggle to shift focus outward when required in a classroom or social setting.
The remitting group, on the other hand, displayed a completely different biological signature. Adolescents whose symptoms faded experienced a faster physical volume expansion of the left hippocampus. The hippocampus is a deeper, primitive brain structure heavily involved in memory formation and emotion regulation. As this region grew faster, the adolescents showed corresponding behavioral improvements in school engagement, prosocial behaviors, and sleep quality.
To understand why these structural brain changes were happening, the researchers compared their localized brain maps to spatial gene expression databases. They analyzed which genes are naturally highly active in these specific changing brain regions. They found a strong overlap with genes responsible for organizing cellular synapses and managing chemical messengers like dopamine and serotonin.
This genetic overlap provides a deep biological foundation for the outward behavioral changes observed. It suggests that the physical volume shifts seen on the brain scans are tied to the fundamental cellular processes governing how local neurons communicate with one another. Tracking these physical parameters essentially allows scientists to view genetic activity playing out on a large scale.
The researchers then investigated the role of ongoing medication use in these developmental outcomes. They matched adolescents with similar symptom severity at the start of the study who either received or did not receive medical treatments. The analysis showed that taking prescribed medication initially was not statistically significant in predicting an individual’s eventual entry into the remitting trajectory.
This lack of association between medication and sustained remission is an unexpected finding. Medical treatments for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are widely recognized as highly effective at managing immediate behavioral symptoms. However, they might not fundamentally alter the underlying physical development of the brain over the long term. The researchers noted that individuals experiencing symptom remission still exhibited some persisting sleep problems and emotional regulation issues.
Following their initial physical analysis, the team tested whether these newly discovered brain signatures could forecast future behaviors. They fed the baseline brain scan data and behavioral scores into a machine learning computer model. The model accurately predicted symptom severity in the participants three years later at age thirteen. The physical brain measurements improved the accuracy of the predictions beyond using simple behavioral checklists alone.
The team subsequently validated their predictive model using completely separate groups of research participants. One validation group consisted of young adults aged twenty-three in a European neuroscience study. The researchers successfully replicated the specific link between hippocampal expansion and fading symptoms across both the young adult group and two other independent clinical samples. Observing this exact same brain expansion pattern in differing age groups bolsters the reliability of the initial finding.
The current study possesses some limitations to keep in mind. Because the research is observational, it cannot prove that the physical changes in the cortex and hippocampus directly cause symptom improvements or deteriorations. The findings only demonstrate a strong correlation between particular physical brain development rates and changing symptom paths over time.
Additionally, the different datasets used varying questionnaires to measure participant behavioral symptoms, which makes exact comparisons across the separate groups slightly complicated. The available information regarding the participants’ complete medication dosing histories was also somewhat limited. The researchers caution against drawing definitive conclusions about long-term drug impacts based purely on parental reports of recent medication usage.
Moving forward, scientists will need to conduct more frequent brain scans over longer periods to capture the true fluid dynamics of brain development. Focusing on lifestyle interventions that naturally influence continuous hippocampus growth, such as consistent aerobic exercise, might aid in creating new non-pharmacological therapies. By identifying the physical brain markers for these symptom paths, researchers have established a biological roadmap for developing targeted interventions aimed at bringing about long-lasting symptom remission.
The study, “Cortical thinning and hippocampal expansion as brain signatures of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder symptom trajectories,” was published in Nature Mental Health and was authored by Wenjie Hou, Daqian Zhu, Barbara J. Sahakian, Samuele Cortese, Christelle Langley, Lizhu Luo, Qingyang Li, Zixin Gu, Luolong Cao, Gareth J. Barker, Arun L. W. Bokde, Rüdiger Brühl, Sylvane Desrivières, Herta Flor, Hugh Garavan, Penny Gowland, Antoine Grigis, Andreas Heinz, Jean-Luc Martinot, Marie-Laure Paillère Martinot, Eric Artiges, Frauke Nees, Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos, Luise Poustka, Michael N. Smolka, Sarah Hohmann, Nathalie Holz, Nilakshi Vaidya, Henrik Walter, Robert Whelan, Gunter Schumann, Li Yang, Tobias Banaschewski, Qiang Luo, and the IMAGEN Consortium.
URL: https://www.psypost.org/brain-signatures-identify-which-teens-will-outgrow-adhd-symptoms/
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#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #ADHDdevelopment #Brain maturation #Corticalthinning #Hippocampalexpansion #Synapticpruning #Executivefunction #Neuroimaging #NatureMentalHealth #ADHDpredictivemodel #Longtermoutcomes
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Walter Mosley - Diabeł w błękitnej sukience
Oswojony z klimatem noir za sprawą książek Chandlera postanowiłem dać szansę innym autorom tego nurtu. Pierwszym strzałem była kupiona za grosze powieść “Diabeł w błękitnej sukience” Waltera Mosleya.
Link do wpisu 🔗
https://xiegozbior.pl/zajawki/2025/04/24/walter-mosley-diabel-w-blekitnej-sukience.html#fediksiazki #bookstodon #książki #WalterMosley #emg #noir #kryminały
@ksiazkiPełny wpis w wątku poniżej! ⬇️
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The Face on the Building: America’s Palazzo Braschi Moment
In 1934, the Fascist Party Federation draped the facade of Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with an enormous sculpted face of Benito Mussolini, surrounded by the word “SI” repeated in cascading rows. The building sat between Piazza Navona and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, in the heart of a city that had been shaping political identity through architecture for two thousand years. That face functioned as an instruction. Citizens who walked beneath it understood, whether they could articulate it or not, that the state had claimed the visual field, and that to exist in public space was to exist under observation and under obligation, holding the urban semiotic.
Ninety-two years later, giant banners bearing the face of a sitting American president hang from the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Each banner is photographed from slightly below, a classic technique in authoritarian portraiture that elongates the jaw and narrows the eyes, producing an expression of surveillance rather than service. Meanwhile, his name has been affixed to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and to the United States Institute of Peace. His signature will appear on American currency. A presidential portrait replaces nature photography on the America the Beautiful national parks pass. And his birthday has been twinned with Flag Day by the Department of the Interior, granting free admission to national parks on April 14 as a celebration of the man rather than the land.
These are facts, and they require no editorial seasoning to alarm anyone who has spent time with the visual history of the twentieth century.
Before sharpening the comparison, though, honesty demands an accounting of the American tradition it descends from. The United States has never been modest about presidential memorialization. Gutzon Borglum carved four presidential faces into a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota that the Lakota Sioux called Six Grandfathers, a monument to democratic leadership built on stolen land with the enthusiastic participation of a sculptor who attended Ku Klux Klan rallies. Lyndon Johnson named the Kennedy Center for Kennedy partly as a political maneuver to move arts funding legislation through Congress. Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA projects stamped federal iconography onto every post office and courthouse in the country, building a visual vocabulary of state presence that Americans still inhabit without noticing. The impulse to brand public space with presidential identity has a long and bipartisan genealogy.
What Trump is doing, then, sits on a spectrum rather than outside it. The question is whether it occupies an extreme position on a familiar American continuum or whether it has crossed into categorically different territory. Borglum’s mountain honored dead presidents. LBJ’s naming honored an assassinated predecessor. Roosevelt’s WPA murals depicted collective labor, not the president’s own face. In each case, the memorialization was filtered through institutional processes, legislative authorization, or the basic decorum of waiting until the honoree was no longer in office. What distinguishes the current campaign is the erasure of those filters. A sitting president chairing the board that renames a performing arts center after him, then claiming surprise at the vote he orchestrated, is operating by a different set of rules than the ones that governed even the most vainglorious of his predecessors.
Consider the Kennedy Center board that voted unanimously to add Trump’s name: it was composed entirely of his own appointees. At the Institute of Peace, the board was similarly reconstituted before the renaming. Federal agencies under executive authority commissioned the banners on government buildings, and when the USDA initially described one as temporary, the pattern expanded rather than retreated. Add the currency signature, the national parks pass, the birthday celebration, the proposed renaming of Penn Station, Dulles Airport, and the Washington Commanders stadium, the Trump-class battleships, the Trump Accounts, TrumpRx, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity connecting Armenia and Azerbaijan: each item, in isolation, might be dismissed as a peculiar excess. Assembled together, they constitute a program. And the speed of the assembly matters, because personality cults do not arrive fully formed. They accrete.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the NYU historian and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, has described the current pattern as the construction of a personality cult. Trump himself, when asked about the namings, has repeatedly denied agency. He claimed surprise at the Kennedy Center vote, said during the State of the Union that nobody believed him but he did not name the Trump Accounts, and repeated the denial for TrumpRx. Senator Adam Schiff published a formal report in September 2025 identifying the banners as violations of federal law and drawing explicit parallels to Mussolini’s facade and to the Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il portraits that adorn government buildings across North Korea. Dr. Emma Briant, a visiting associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who researches propaganda and information warfare, has identified the banners as consistent with the visual grammar of dictatorship. Max Stier, who leads the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, has stated that while political protest is an old tradition in Washington, the use of government resources to promote a single individual has no precedent in American life. Stier’s formulation cuts to the structural question: political leaders, in a democracy, are hired help.
Here, however, a distinction requires careful handling. Mussolini did not deny the face was his. He staged it. Stalin did not feign surprise at the naming of Stalingrad. The open dictatorial claim and the coy denial are different postures, and conflating them sacrifices diagnostic precision. Trump’s repeated insistence that others, acting independently, have chosen to honor him could be read as evidence that the democratic norm of appearing modest still exerts gravitational pull on him, that he still needs to perform the fiction of humility because the audience still expects it. A dictator who no longer needs to perform that fiction is operating from a different position of power. The denial, in other words, may mark a transitional phase rather than an accomplished fact: the leader who still pretends to be embarrassed by the adulation is further along the path than the leader who has never sought it, but he has not yet arrived at the place where the pretense becomes unnecessary. The direction of travel matters more than the current coordinates.
Against this visual program, something unexpected has been happening on the National Mall. An anonymous collective called the Secret Handshake has been installing guerrilla sculptures and banners within sight of the government portraits. In February, they erected a gold-painted statue depicting Trump and Jeffrey Epstein posed as Jack and Rose on the prow of the Titanic, titled “King of the World.” The National Park Service issued a four-day permit for the installation. Crowds gathered. People laughed. They took photographs. Some were offended. On March 31, the collective installed a gold-painted faux-marble toilet near the Lincoln Memorial, titled “A Throne Fit For a King,” mocking the renovation of the White House bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom during a government shutdown.
A separate organization, the Save America Movement, has plastered Washington with posters targeting cabinet members. One shows a photograph of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller with the caption “Fascism Ain’t Pretty.” Another shows Attorney General Pam Bondi with the words “Epstein Queen.”
Mary Corcoran, who runs the Save America Movement, has framed the asymmetry plainly: the administration funds its propaganda with taxpayer dollars, while the opposition funds its counter-imagery with donations.
Now: a reasonable person could look at this guerrilla campaign and argue that its existence disproves the alarm. Mussolini’s Rome never saw an anonymous collective erect a satirical statue of Il Duce outside the Palazzo Braschi and receive a government permit for the trouble. In Stalin’s Moscow, the Save America Movement equivalent would have been shot. Pyongyang renders the entire exercise unimaginable. The four-day permit is, in one reading, proof that American democracy is functioning exactly as designed: the state displays its iconography, citizens mock it, courts adjudicate the disputes, and the carnival continues. Beatty v. Trump is proceeding through federal court. Philip Glass withdrew from Kennedy Center programming and suffered no state reprisal. Every counter-example that can be celebrated as resistance is simultaneously evidence that the system under indictment has not yet collapsed.
This is a fair objection, and the article cannot survive without absorbing it. So let it be absorbed.
Whether the American system has already become a dictatorship has always been the wrong question. What matters is whether the distance between the current trajectory and that destination is shrinking, and how citizens would know the difference between a contested public sphere that reflects democratic health and a contested public sphere that reflects a transitional phase between open society and closed one. Every authoritarian state passed through a period in which satirical statues could still be erected, in which permits were still granted, in which courts still heard challenges to executive overreach. The Weimar Republic had the most ferocious satirical press in Europe. It had George Grosz and John Heartfield and Kurt Tucholsky and a judiciary that, for a time, still functioned. Permits were issued. Magazines were published. And then they were not.
The permit is not the answer to the diagnostic question. The permit is the diagnostic question. Is the four-day window for a satirical statue evidence that the system is working, or evidence that the system is still in the phase where opposition is tolerated because it has not yet become threatening enough to suppress? We will not know the answer in real time. We will know it only in retrospect, and by then the knowing will be useless.
And here is where theatrical instinct becomes relevant to political analysis. What is happening on the National Mall is a stage contest. One side has seized the proscenium. It controls the permanent architecture, the lighting, the scale, the vantage points. Guerrilla artists are working from the wings, placing temporary objects designed to be photographed and circulated rather than to endure. State portraiture and monumental sculpture anchor the government’s visual strategy. Carnival, political caricature, and the traditions of Daumier, Gillray, and the Italian commedia dell’arte anchor the opposition’s.
Whether ridicule can defeat monumentalism is the open question. Historical evidence offers mixed answers. Daumier was imprisoned for his caricatures of King Louis-Philippe. Weimar Germany’s satirical press produced some of the most brilliant political art of the twentieth century and failed to prevent the rise of the Third Reich. Vaclav Havel, however, argued that humor and absurdity were essential tools of resistance under totalitarianism, that refusing to take the regime’s self-image seriously was itself a political act eroding the regime’s authority. Czech dissidents, from Havel’s essays to the work of the Plastic People of the Universe, demonstrated that a state’s control of the visual field could be undermined by the persistence of an alternative aesthetic. But Havel also spent years in prison before his persistence paid off, and Czechoslovakia’s liberation owed as much to the structural collapse of the Soviet Union as to the courage of its artists.
What makes Washington different is that the contest is happening in real time, in the same physical space, and it is mediated by the technology that makes the personality cult possible in the first place. A two-story banner goes up. A satirical statue appears within the banner’s sightline. Visitors photograph the juxtaposition and post it to social media, where the image circulates to millions of people who will never visit the Mall. Statues vanish after four days; photographs persist on millions of screens without expiration dates. Official banners carry the weight of authority, while the crowd’s editorial framing, captured in a single snapshot posted from a phone, carries the weight of witness. In the economy of attention, the guerrilla image may travel farther and lodge more durably in memory than the state image, precisely because it is funnier, stranger, and more human.
None of this means the guerrilla artists are winning. Banners still hang. The name still sits on the Kennedy Center, despite active litigation (Beatty v. Trump, as of March 2026, remains ongoing) and despite a federal statute designating the Center as the sole national memorial to John F. Kennedy in the capital and prohibiting renaming without an act of Congress. Performers who withdrew from Kennedy Center programming after the renaming, including the composer Philip Glass, understood that the building itself had been conscripted into a narrative they could not endorse through participation.
Architecture has always carried political meaning, and the National Mall was designed to embody democratic ideals through spatial openness, axial symmetry, and the subordination of individual identity to collective memory. Monuments there honor presidents who are dead. Memorials mark wars that are concluded. Museums house the patrimony of a nation, curated by institutions that are, at least in theory, independent of the sitting executive. Hanging a living president’s face from government buildings along the Mall ruptures the design logic of the space, superimposing the living ruler onto a landscape conceived for the contemplation of shared sacrifice and historical distance.
When the White House responded to criticism by stating that the president is focused on saving the country rather than garnering recognition, the statement performed its own negation. A president focused on the country rather than recognition does not hang his face on the Department of Justice, does not chair the board that renames a national performing arts center after him, and does not then express surprise at the outcome.
We have been here before, and we have not been here before. The Palazzo Braschi face came down. Mussolini’s SI ballots were counted and discarded. Il Duce ended hanging by his ankles at a gas station in Milan. History does not replay mechanically, though certain patterns of self-display are diagnostic. When a leader begins claiming public architecture for private glorification, the leader is telling you what he believes about the relationship between the state and himself. That face on the building is a declaration. And in a functioning democracy, citizens who see it are obligated to name what it means, clearly and without apology, while the permit to erect the satirical statue in its shadow still exists, because the day the permit is denied will be the day the argument is settled, and by then, the argument will no longer matter.
#americanTradition #architecture #economy #governmentAdvertising #guerrillaArtists #gutzonBorglum #mussolini #nation #nationalMall #palazzoBraschi #PhilipGlass #politics #promotion #wpa -
The Face on the Building: America’s Palazzo Braschi Moment
In 1934, the Fascist Party Federation draped the facade of Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with an enormous sculpted face of Benito Mussolini, surrounded by the word “SI” repeated in cascading rows. The building sat between Piazza Navona and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, in the heart of a city that had been shaping political identity through architecture for two thousand years. That face functioned as an instruction. Citizens who walked beneath it understood, whether they could articulate it or not, that the state had claimed the visual field, and that to exist in public space was to exist under observation and under obligation, holding the urban semiotic.
Ninety-two years later, giant banners bearing the face of a sitting American president hang from the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Each banner is photographed from slightly below, a classic technique in authoritarian portraiture that elongates the jaw and narrows the eyes, producing an expression of surveillance rather than service. Meanwhile, his name has been affixed to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and to the United States Institute of Peace. His signature will appear on American currency. A presidential portrait replaces nature photography on the America the Beautiful national parks pass. And his birthday has been twinned with Flag Day by the Department of the Interior, granting free admission to national parks on April 14 as a celebration of the man rather than the land.
These are facts, and they require no editorial seasoning to alarm anyone who has spent time with the visual history of the twentieth century.
Before sharpening the comparison, though, honesty demands an accounting of the American tradition it descends from. The United States has never been modest about presidential memorialization. Gutzon Borglum carved four presidential faces into a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota that the Lakota Sioux called Six Grandfathers, a monument to democratic leadership built on stolen land with the enthusiastic participation of a sculptor who attended Ku Klux Klan rallies. Lyndon Johnson named the Kennedy Center for Kennedy partly as a political maneuver to move arts funding legislation through Congress. Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA projects stamped federal iconography onto every post office and courthouse in the country, building a visual vocabulary of state presence that Americans still inhabit without noticing. The impulse to brand public space with presidential identity has a long and bipartisan genealogy.
What Trump is doing, then, sits on a spectrum rather than outside it. The question is whether it occupies an extreme position on a familiar American continuum or whether it has crossed into categorically different territory. Borglum’s mountain honored dead presidents. LBJ’s naming honored an assassinated predecessor. Roosevelt’s WPA murals depicted collective labor, not the president’s own face. In each case, the memorialization was filtered through institutional processes, legislative authorization, or the basic decorum of waiting until the honoree was no longer in office. What distinguishes the current campaign is the erasure of those filters. A sitting president chairing the board that renames a performing arts center after him, then claiming surprise at the vote he orchestrated, is operating by a different set of rules than the ones that governed even the most vainglorious of his predecessors.
Consider the Kennedy Center board that voted unanimously to add Trump’s name: it was composed entirely of his own appointees. At the Institute of Peace, the board was similarly reconstituted before the renaming. Federal agencies under executive authority commissioned the banners on government buildings, and when the USDA initially described one as temporary, the pattern expanded rather than retreated. Add the currency signature, the national parks pass, the birthday celebration, the proposed renaming of Penn Station, Dulles Airport, and the Washington Commanders stadium, the Trump-class battleships, the Trump Accounts, TrumpRx, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity connecting Armenia and Azerbaijan: each item, in isolation, might be dismissed as a peculiar excess. Assembled together, they constitute a program. And the speed of the assembly matters, because personality cults do not arrive fully formed. They accrete.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the NYU historian and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, has described the current pattern as the construction of a personality cult. Trump himself, when asked about the namings, has repeatedly denied agency. He claimed surprise at the Kennedy Center vote, said during the State of the Union that nobody believed him but he did not name the Trump Accounts, and repeated the denial for TrumpRx. Senator Adam Schiff published a formal report in September 2025 identifying the banners as violations of federal law and drawing explicit parallels to Mussolini’s facade and to the Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il portraits that adorn government buildings across North Korea. Dr. Emma Briant, a visiting associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who researches propaganda and information warfare, has identified the banners as consistent with the visual grammar of dictatorship. Max Stier, who leads the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, has stated that while political protest is an old tradition in Washington, the use of government resources to promote a single individual has no precedent in American life. Stier’s formulation cuts to the structural question: political leaders, in a democracy, are hired help.
Here, however, a distinction requires careful handling. Mussolini did not deny the face was his. He staged it. Stalin did not feign surprise at the naming of Stalingrad. The open dictatorial claim and the coy denial are different postures, and conflating them sacrifices diagnostic precision. Trump’s repeated insistence that others, acting independently, have chosen to honor him could be read as evidence that the democratic norm of appearing modest still exerts gravitational pull on him, that he still needs to perform the fiction of humility because the audience still expects it. A dictator who no longer needs to perform that fiction is operating from a different position of power. The denial, in other words, may mark a transitional phase rather than an accomplished fact: the leader who still pretends to be embarrassed by the adulation is further along the path than the leader who has never sought it, but he has not yet arrived at the place where the pretense becomes unnecessary. The direction of travel matters more than the current coordinates.
Against this visual program, something unexpected has been happening on the National Mall. An anonymous collective called the Secret Handshake has been installing guerrilla sculptures and banners within sight of the government portraits. In February, they erected a gold-painted statue depicting Trump and Jeffrey Epstein posed as Jack and Rose on the prow of the Titanic, titled “King of the World.” The National Park Service issued a four-day permit for the installation. Crowds gathered. People laughed. They took photographs. Some were offended. On March 31, the collective installed a gold-painted faux-marble toilet near the Lincoln Memorial, titled “A Throne Fit For a King,” mocking the renovation of the White House bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom during a government shutdown.
A separate organization, the Save America Movement, has plastered Washington with posters targeting cabinet members. One shows a photograph of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller with the caption “Fascism Ain’t Pretty.” Another shows Attorney General Pam Bondi with the words “Epstein Queen.”
Mary Corcoran, who runs the Save America Movement, has framed the asymmetry plainly: the administration funds its propaganda with taxpayer dollars, while the opposition funds its counter-imagery with donations.
Now: a reasonable person could look at this guerrilla campaign and argue that its existence disproves the alarm. Mussolini’s Rome never saw an anonymous collective erect a satirical statue of Il Duce outside the Palazzo Braschi and receive a government permit for the trouble. In Stalin’s Moscow, the Save America Movement equivalent would have been shot. Pyongyang renders the entire exercise unimaginable. The four-day permit is, in one reading, proof that American democracy is functioning exactly as designed: the state displays its iconography, citizens mock it, courts adjudicate the disputes, and the carnival continues. Beatty v. Trump is proceeding through federal court. Philip Glass withdrew from Kennedy Center programming and suffered no state reprisal. Every counter-example that can be celebrated as resistance is simultaneously evidence that the system under indictment has not yet collapsed.
This is a fair objection, and the article cannot survive without absorbing it. So let it be absorbed.
Whether the American system has already become a dictatorship has always been the wrong question. What matters is whether the distance between the current trajectory and that destination is shrinking, and how citizens would know the difference between a contested public sphere that reflects democratic health and a contested public sphere that reflects a transitional phase between open society and closed one. Every authoritarian state passed through a period in which satirical statues could still be erected, in which permits were still granted, in which courts still heard challenges to executive overreach. The Weimar Republic had the most ferocious satirical press in Europe. It had George Grosz and John Heartfield and Kurt Tucholsky and a judiciary that, for a time, still functioned. Permits were issued. Magazines were published. And then they were not.
The permit is not the answer to the diagnostic question. The permit is the diagnostic question. Is the four-day window for a satirical statue evidence that the system is working, or evidence that the system is still in the phase where opposition is tolerated because it has not yet become threatening enough to suppress? We will not know the answer in real time. We will know it only in retrospect, and by then the knowing will be useless.
And here is where theatrical instinct becomes relevant to political analysis. What is happening on the National Mall is a stage contest. One side has seized the proscenium. It controls the permanent architecture, the lighting, the scale, the vantage points. Guerrilla artists are working from the wings, placing temporary objects designed to be photographed and circulated rather than to endure. State portraiture and monumental sculpture anchor the government’s visual strategy. Carnival, political caricature, and the traditions of Daumier, Gillray, and the Italian commedia dell’arte anchor the opposition’s.
Whether ridicule can defeat monumentalism is the open question. Historical evidence offers mixed answers. Daumier was imprisoned for his caricatures of King Louis-Philippe. Weimar Germany’s satirical press produced some of the most brilliant political art of the twentieth century and failed to prevent the rise of the Third Reich. Vaclav Havel, however, argued that humor and absurdity were essential tools of resistance under totalitarianism, that refusing to take the regime’s self-image seriously was itself a political act eroding the regime’s authority. Czech dissidents, from Havel’s essays to the work of the Plastic People of the Universe, demonstrated that a state’s control of the visual field could be undermined by the persistence of an alternative aesthetic. But Havel also spent years in prison before his persistence paid off, and Czechoslovakia’s liberation owed as much to the structural collapse of the Soviet Union as to the courage of its artists.
What makes Washington different is that the contest is happening in real time, in the same physical space, and it is mediated by the technology that makes the personality cult possible in the first place. A two-story banner goes up. A satirical statue appears within the banner’s sightline. Visitors photograph the juxtaposition and post it to social media, where the image circulates to millions of people who will never visit the Mall. Statues vanish after four days; photographs persist on millions of screens without expiration dates. Official banners carry the weight of authority, while the crowd’s editorial framing, captured in a single snapshot posted from a phone, carries the weight of witness. In the economy of attention, the guerrilla image may travel farther and lodge more durably in memory than the state image, precisely because it is funnier, stranger, and more human.
None of this means the guerrilla artists are winning. Banners still hang. The name still sits on the Kennedy Center, despite active litigation (Beatty v. Trump, as of March 2026, remains ongoing) and despite a federal statute designating the Center as the sole national memorial to John F. Kennedy in the capital and prohibiting renaming without an act of Congress. Performers who withdrew from Kennedy Center programming after the renaming, including the composer Philip Glass, understood that the building itself had been conscripted into a narrative they could not endorse through participation.
Architecture has always carried political meaning, and the National Mall was designed to embody democratic ideals through spatial openness, axial symmetry, and the subordination of individual identity to collective memory. Monuments there honor presidents who are dead. Memorials mark wars that are concluded. Museums house the patrimony of a nation, curated by institutions that are, at least in theory, independent of the sitting executive. Hanging a living president’s face from government buildings along the Mall ruptures the design logic of the space, superimposing the living ruler onto a landscape conceived for the contemplation of shared sacrifice and historical distance.
When the White House responded to criticism by stating that the president is focused on saving the country rather than garnering recognition, the statement performed its own negation. A president focused on the country rather than recognition does not hang his face on the Department of Justice, does not chair the board that renames a national performing arts center after him, and does not then express surprise at the outcome.
We have been here before, and we have not been here before. The Palazzo Braschi face came down. Mussolini’s SI ballots were counted and discarded. Il Duce ended hanging by his ankles at a gas station in Milan. History does not replay mechanically, though certain patterns of self-display are diagnostic. When a leader begins claiming public architecture for private glorification, the leader is telling you what he believes about the relationship between the state and himself. That face on the building is a declaration. And in a functioning democracy, citizens who see it are obligated to name what it means, clearly and without apology, while the permit to erect the satirical statue in its shadow still exists, because the day the permit is denied will be the day the argument is settled, and by then, the argument will no longer matter.
#americanTradition #architecture #economy #governmentAdvertising #guerrillaArtists #gutzonBorglum #mussolini #nation #nationalMall #palazzoBraschi #PhilipGlass #politics #promotion #wpa -
The Face on the Building: America’s Palazzo Braschi Moment
In 1934, the Fascist Party Federation draped the facade of Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with an enormous sculpted face of Benito Mussolini, surrounded by the word “SI” repeated in cascading rows. The building sat between Piazza Navona and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, in the heart of a city that had been shaping political identity through architecture for two thousand years. That face functioned as an instruction. Citizens who walked beneath it understood, whether they could articulate it or not, that the state had claimed the visual field, and that to exist in public space was to exist under observation and under obligation, holding the urban semiotic.
Ninety-two years later, giant banners bearing the face of a sitting American president hang from the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Each banner is photographed from slightly below, a classic technique in authoritarian portraiture that elongates the jaw and narrows the eyes, producing an expression of surveillance rather than service. Meanwhile, his name has been affixed to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and to the United States Institute of Peace. His signature will appear on American currency. A presidential portrait replaces nature photography on the America the Beautiful national parks pass. And his birthday has been twinned with Flag Day by the Department of the Interior, granting free admission to national parks on April 14 as a celebration of the man rather than the land.
These are facts, and they require no editorial seasoning to alarm anyone who has spent time with the visual history of the twentieth century.
Before sharpening the comparison, though, honesty demands an accounting of the American tradition it descends from. The United States has never been modest about presidential memorialization. Gutzon Borglum carved four presidential faces into a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota that the Lakota Sioux called Six Grandfathers, a monument to democratic leadership built on stolen land with the enthusiastic participation of a sculptor who attended Ku Klux Klan rallies. Lyndon Johnson named the Kennedy Center for Kennedy partly as a political maneuver to move arts funding legislation through Congress. Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA projects stamped federal iconography onto every post office and courthouse in the country, building a visual vocabulary of state presence that Americans still inhabit without noticing. The impulse to brand public space with presidential identity has a long and bipartisan genealogy.
What Trump is doing, then, sits on a spectrum rather than outside it. The question is whether it occupies an extreme position on a familiar American continuum or whether it has crossed into categorically different territory. Borglum’s mountain honored dead presidents. LBJ’s naming honored an assassinated predecessor. Roosevelt’s WPA murals depicted collective labor, not the president’s own face. In each case, the memorialization was filtered through institutional processes, legislative authorization, or the basic decorum of waiting until the honoree was no longer in office. What distinguishes the current campaign is the erasure of those filters. A sitting president chairing the board that renames a performing arts center after him, then claiming surprise at the vote he orchestrated, is operating by a different set of rules than the ones that governed even the most vainglorious of his predecessors.
Consider the Kennedy Center board that voted unanimously to add Trump’s name: it was composed entirely of his own appointees. At the Institute of Peace, the board was similarly reconstituted before the renaming. Federal agencies under executive authority commissioned the banners on government buildings, and when the USDA initially described one as temporary, the pattern expanded rather than retreated. Add the currency signature, the national parks pass, the birthday celebration, the proposed renaming of Penn Station, Dulles Airport, and the Washington Commanders stadium, the Trump-class battleships, the Trump Accounts, TrumpRx, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity connecting Armenia and Azerbaijan: each item, in isolation, might be dismissed as a peculiar excess. Assembled together, they constitute a program. And the speed of the assembly matters, because personality cults do not arrive fully formed. They accrete.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the NYU historian and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, has described the current pattern as the construction of a personality cult. Trump himself, when asked about the namings, has repeatedly denied agency. He claimed surprise at the Kennedy Center vote, said during the State of the Union that nobody believed him but he did not name the Trump Accounts, and repeated the denial for TrumpRx. Senator Adam Schiff published a formal report in September 2025 identifying the banners as violations of federal law and drawing explicit parallels to Mussolini’s facade and to the Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il portraits that adorn government buildings across North Korea. Dr. Emma Briant, a visiting associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who researches propaganda and information warfare, has identified the banners as consistent with the visual grammar of dictatorship. Max Stier, who leads the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, has stated that while political protest is an old tradition in Washington, the use of government resources to promote a single individual has no precedent in American life. Stier’s formulation cuts to the structural question: political leaders, in a democracy, are hired help.
Here, however, a distinction requires careful handling. Mussolini did not deny the face was his. He staged it. Stalin did not feign surprise at the naming of Stalingrad. The open dictatorial claim and the coy denial are different postures, and conflating them sacrifices diagnostic precision. Trump’s repeated insistence that others, acting independently, have chosen to honor him could be read as evidence that the democratic norm of appearing modest still exerts gravitational pull on him, that he still needs to perform the fiction of humility because the audience still expects it. A dictator who no longer needs to perform that fiction is operating from a different position of power. The denial, in other words, may mark a transitional phase rather than an accomplished fact: the leader who still pretends to be embarrassed by the adulation is further along the path than the leader who has never sought it, but he has not yet arrived at the place where the pretense becomes unnecessary. The direction of travel matters more than the current coordinates.
Against this visual program, something unexpected has been happening on the National Mall. An anonymous collective called the Secret Handshake has been installing guerrilla sculptures and banners within sight of the government portraits. In February, they erected a gold-painted statue depicting Trump and Jeffrey Epstein posed as Jack and Rose on the prow of the Titanic, titled “King of the World.” The National Park Service issued a four-day permit for the installation. Crowds gathered. People laughed. They took photographs. Some were offended. On March 31, the collective installed a gold-painted faux-marble toilet near the Lincoln Memorial, titled “A Throne Fit For a King,” mocking the renovation of the White House bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom during a government shutdown.
A separate organization, the Save America Movement, has plastered Washington with posters targeting cabinet members. One shows a photograph of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller with the caption “Fascism Ain’t Pretty.” Another shows Attorney General Pam Bondi with the words “Epstein Queen.”
Mary Corcoran, who runs the Save America Movement, has framed the asymmetry plainly: the administration funds its propaganda with taxpayer dollars, while the opposition funds its counter-imagery with donations.
Now: a reasonable person could look at this guerrilla campaign and argue that its existence disproves the alarm. Mussolini’s Rome never saw an anonymous collective erect a satirical statue of Il Duce outside the Palazzo Braschi and receive a government permit for the trouble. In Stalin’s Moscow, the Save America Movement equivalent would have been shot. Pyongyang renders the entire exercise unimaginable. The four-day permit is, in one reading, proof that American democracy is functioning exactly as designed: the state displays its iconography, citizens mock it, courts adjudicate the disputes, and the carnival continues. Beatty v. Trump is proceeding through federal court. Philip Glass withdrew from Kennedy Center programming and suffered no state reprisal. Every counter-example that can be celebrated as resistance is simultaneously evidence that the system under indictment has not yet collapsed.
This is a fair objection, and the article cannot survive without absorbing it. So let it be absorbed.
Whether the American system has already become a dictatorship has always been the wrong question. What matters is whether the distance between the current trajectory and that destination is shrinking, and how citizens would know the difference between a contested public sphere that reflects democratic health and a contested public sphere that reflects a transitional phase between open society and closed one. Every authoritarian state passed through a period in which satirical statues could still be erected, in which permits were still granted, in which courts still heard challenges to executive overreach. The Weimar Republic had the most ferocious satirical press in Europe. It had George Grosz and John Heartfield and Kurt Tucholsky and a judiciary that, for a time, still functioned. Permits were issued. Magazines were published. And then they were not.
The permit is not the answer to the diagnostic question. The permit is the diagnostic question. Is the four-day window for a satirical statue evidence that the system is working, or evidence that the system is still in the phase where opposition is tolerated because it has not yet become threatening enough to suppress? We will not know the answer in real time. We will know it only in retrospect, and by then the knowing will be useless.
And here is where theatrical instinct becomes relevant to political analysis. What is happening on the National Mall is a stage contest. One side has seized the proscenium. It controls the permanent architecture, the lighting, the scale, the vantage points. Guerrilla artists are working from the wings, placing temporary objects designed to be photographed and circulated rather than to endure. State portraiture and monumental sculpture anchor the government’s visual strategy. Carnival, political caricature, and the traditions of Daumier, Gillray, and the Italian commedia dell’arte anchor the opposition’s.
Whether ridicule can defeat monumentalism is the open question. Historical evidence offers mixed answers. Daumier was imprisoned for his caricatures of King Louis-Philippe. Weimar Germany’s satirical press produced some of the most brilliant political art of the twentieth century and failed to prevent the rise of the Third Reich. Vaclav Havel, however, argued that humor and absurdity were essential tools of resistance under totalitarianism, that refusing to take the regime’s self-image seriously was itself a political act eroding the regime’s authority. Czech dissidents, from Havel’s essays to the work of the Plastic People of the Universe, demonstrated that a state’s control of the visual field could be undermined by the persistence of an alternative aesthetic. But Havel also spent years in prison before his persistence paid off, and Czechoslovakia’s liberation owed as much to the structural collapse of the Soviet Union as to the courage of its artists.
What makes Washington different is that the contest is happening in real time, in the same physical space, and it is mediated by the technology that makes the personality cult possible in the first place. A two-story banner goes up. A satirical statue appears within the banner’s sightline. Visitors photograph the juxtaposition and post it to social media, where the image circulates to millions of people who will never visit the Mall. Statues vanish after four days; photographs persist on millions of screens without expiration dates. Official banners carry the weight of authority, while the crowd’s editorial framing, captured in a single snapshot posted from a phone, carries the weight of witness. In the economy of attention, the guerrilla image may travel farther and lodge more durably in memory than the state image, precisely because it is funnier, stranger, and more human.
None of this means the guerrilla artists are winning. Banners still hang. The name still sits on the Kennedy Center, despite active litigation (Beatty v. Trump, as of March 2026, remains ongoing) and despite a federal statute designating the Center as the sole national memorial to John F. Kennedy in the capital and prohibiting renaming without an act of Congress. Performers who withdrew from Kennedy Center programming after the renaming, including the composer Philip Glass, understood that the building itself had been conscripted into a narrative they could not endorse through participation.
Architecture has always carried political meaning, and the National Mall was designed to embody democratic ideals through spatial openness, axial symmetry, and the subordination of individual identity to collective memory. Monuments there honor presidents who are dead. Memorials mark wars that are concluded. Museums house the patrimony of a nation, curated by institutions that are, at least in theory, independent of the sitting executive. Hanging a living president’s face from government buildings along the Mall ruptures the design logic of the space, superimposing the living ruler onto a landscape conceived for the contemplation of shared sacrifice and historical distance.
When the White House responded to criticism by stating that the president is focused on saving the country rather than garnering recognition, the statement performed its own negation. A president focused on the country rather than recognition does not hang his face on the Department of Justice, does not chair the board that renames a national performing arts center after him, and does not then express surprise at the outcome.
We have been here before, and we have not been here before. The Palazzo Braschi face came down. Mussolini’s SI ballots were counted and discarded. Il Duce ended hanging by his ankles at a gas station in Milan. History does not replay mechanically, though certain patterns of self-display are diagnostic. When a leader begins claiming public architecture for private glorification, the leader is telling you what he believes about the relationship between the state and himself. That face on the building is a declaration. And in a functioning democracy, citizens who see it are obligated to name what it means, clearly and without apology, while the permit to erect the satirical statue in its shadow still exists, because the day the permit is denied will be the day the argument is settled, and by then, the argument will no longer matter.
#americanTradition #architecture #economy #governmentAdvertising #guerrillaArtists #gutzonBorglum #mussolini #nation #nationalMall #palazzoBraschi #PhilipGlass #politics #promotion #wpa -
The Face on the Building: America’s Palazzo Braschi Moment
In 1934, the Fascist Party Federation draped the facade of Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with an enormous sculpted face of Benito Mussolini, surrounded by the word “SI” repeated in cascading rows. The building sat between Piazza Navona and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, in the heart of a city that had been shaping political identity through architecture for two thousand years. That face functioned as an instruction. Citizens who walked beneath it understood, whether they could articulate it or not, that the state had claimed the visual field, and that to exist in public space was to exist under observation and under obligation, holding the urban semiotic.
Ninety-two years later, giant banners bearing the face of a sitting American president hang from the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Each banner is photographed from slightly below, a classic technique in authoritarian portraiture that elongates the jaw and narrows the eyes, producing an expression of surveillance rather than service. Meanwhile, his name has been affixed to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and to the United States Institute of Peace. His signature will appear on American currency. A presidential portrait replaces nature photography on the America the Beautiful national parks pass. And his birthday has been twinned with Flag Day by the Department of the Interior, granting free admission to national parks on April 14 as a celebration of the man rather than the land.
These are facts, and they require no editorial seasoning to alarm anyone who has spent time with the visual history of the twentieth century.
Before sharpening the comparison, though, honesty demands an accounting of the American tradition it descends from. The United States has never been modest about presidential memorialization. Gutzon Borglum carved four presidential faces into a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota that the Lakota Sioux called Six Grandfathers, a monument to democratic leadership built on stolen land with the enthusiastic participation of a sculptor who attended Ku Klux Klan rallies. Lyndon Johnson named the Kennedy Center for Kennedy partly as a political maneuver to move arts funding legislation through Congress. Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA projects stamped federal iconography onto every post office and courthouse in the country, building a visual vocabulary of state presence that Americans still inhabit without noticing. The impulse to brand public space with presidential identity has a long and bipartisan genealogy.
What Trump is doing, then, sits on a spectrum rather than outside it. The question is whether it occupies an extreme position on a familiar American continuum or whether it has crossed into categorically different territory. Borglum’s mountain honored dead presidents. LBJ’s naming honored an assassinated predecessor. Roosevelt’s WPA murals depicted collective labor, not the president’s own face. In each case, the memorialization was filtered through institutional processes, legislative authorization, or the basic decorum of waiting until the honoree was no longer in office. What distinguishes the current campaign is the erasure of those filters. A sitting president chairing the board that renames a performing arts center after him, then claiming surprise at the vote he orchestrated, is operating by a different set of rules than the ones that governed even the most vainglorious of his predecessors.
Consider the Kennedy Center board that voted unanimously to add Trump’s name: it was composed entirely of his own appointees. At the Institute of Peace, the board was similarly reconstituted before the renaming. Federal agencies under executive authority commissioned the banners on government buildings, and when the USDA initially described one as temporary, the pattern expanded rather than retreated. Add the currency signature, the national parks pass, the birthday celebration, the proposed renaming of Penn Station, Dulles Airport, and the Washington Commanders stadium, the Trump-class battleships, the Trump Accounts, TrumpRx, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity connecting Armenia and Azerbaijan: each item, in isolation, might be dismissed as a peculiar excess. Assembled together, they constitute a program. And the speed of the assembly matters, because personality cults do not arrive fully formed. They accrete.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the NYU historian and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, has described the current pattern as the construction of a personality cult. Trump himself, when asked about the namings, has repeatedly denied agency. He claimed surprise at the Kennedy Center vote, said during the State of the Union that nobody believed him but he did not name the Trump Accounts, and repeated the denial for TrumpRx. Senator Adam Schiff published a formal report in September 2025 identifying the banners as violations of federal law and drawing explicit parallels to Mussolini’s facade and to the Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il portraits that adorn government buildings across North Korea. Dr. Emma Briant, a visiting associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who researches propaganda and information warfare, has identified the banners as consistent with the visual grammar of dictatorship. Max Stier, who leads the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, has stated that while political protest is an old tradition in Washington, the use of government resources to promote a single individual has no precedent in American life. Stier’s formulation cuts to the structural question: political leaders, in a democracy, are hired help.
Here, however, a distinction requires careful handling. Mussolini did not deny the face was his. He staged it. Stalin did not feign surprise at the naming of Stalingrad. The open dictatorial claim and the coy denial are different postures, and conflating them sacrifices diagnostic precision. Trump’s repeated insistence that others, acting independently, have chosen to honor him could be read as evidence that the democratic norm of appearing modest still exerts gravitational pull on him, that he still needs to perform the fiction of humility because the audience still expects it. A dictator who no longer needs to perform that fiction is operating from a different position of power. The denial, in other words, may mark a transitional phase rather than an accomplished fact: the leader who still pretends to be embarrassed by the adulation is further along the path than the leader who has never sought it, but he has not yet arrived at the place where the pretense becomes unnecessary. The direction of travel matters more than the current coordinates.
Against this visual program, something unexpected has been happening on the National Mall. An anonymous collective called the Secret Handshake has been installing guerrilla sculptures and banners within sight of the government portraits. In February, they erected a gold-painted statue depicting Trump and Jeffrey Epstein posed as Jack and Rose on the prow of the Titanic, titled “King of the World.” The National Park Service issued a four-day permit for the installation. Crowds gathered. People laughed. They took photographs. Some were offended. On March 31, the collective installed a gold-painted faux-marble toilet near the Lincoln Memorial, titled “A Throne Fit For a King,” mocking the renovation of the White House bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom during a government shutdown.
A separate organization, the Save America Movement, has plastered Washington with posters targeting cabinet members. One shows a photograph of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller with the caption “Fascism Ain’t Pretty.” Another shows Attorney General Pam Bondi with the words “Epstein Queen.”
Mary Corcoran, who runs the Save America Movement, has framed the asymmetry plainly: the administration funds its propaganda with taxpayer dollars, while the opposition funds its counter-imagery with donations.
Now: a reasonable person could look at this guerrilla campaign and argue that its existence disproves the alarm. Mussolini’s Rome never saw an anonymous collective erect a satirical statue of Il Duce outside the Palazzo Braschi and receive a government permit for the trouble. In Stalin’s Moscow, the Save America Movement equivalent would have been shot. Pyongyang renders the entire exercise unimaginable. The four-day permit is, in one reading, proof that American democracy is functioning exactly as designed: the state displays its iconography, citizens mock it, courts adjudicate the disputes, and the carnival continues. Beatty v. Trump is proceeding through federal court. Philip Glass withdrew from Kennedy Center programming and suffered no state reprisal. Every counter-example that can be celebrated as resistance is simultaneously evidence that the system under indictment has not yet collapsed.
This is a fair objection, and the article cannot survive without absorbing it. So let it be absorbed.
Whether the American system has already become a dictatorship has always been the wrong question. What matters is whether the distance between the current trajectory and that destination is shrinking, and how citizens would know the difference between a contested public sphere that reflects democratic health and a contested public sphere that reflects a transitional phase between open society and closed one. Every authoritarian state passed through a period in which satirical statues could still be erected, in which permits were still granted, in which courts still heard challenges to executive overreach. The Weimar Republic had the most ferocious satirical press in Europe. It had George Grosz and John Heartfield and Kurt Tucholsky and a judiciary that, for a time, still functioned. Permits were issued. Magazines were published. And then they were not.
The permit is not the answer to the diagnostic question. The permit is the diagnostic question. Is the four-day window for a satirical statue evidence that the system is working, or evidence that the system is still in the phase where opposition is tolerated because it has not yet become threatening enough to suppress? We will not know the answer in real time. We will know it only in retrospect, and by then the knowing will be useless.
And here is where theatrical instinct becomes relevant to political analysis. What is happening on the National Mall is a stage contest. One side has seized the proscenium. It controls the permanent architecture, the lighting, the scale, the vantage points. Guerrilla artists are working from the wings, placing temporary objects designed to be photographed and circulated rather than to endure. State portraiture and monumental sculpture anchor the government’s visual strategy. Carnival, political caricature, and the traditions of Daumier, Gillray, and the Italian commedia dell’arte anchor the opposition’s.
Whether ridicule can defeat monumentalism is the open question. Historical evidence offers mixed answers. Daumier was imprisoned for his caricatures of King Louis-Philippe. Weimar Germany’s satirical press produced some of the most brilliant political art of the twentieth century and failed to prevent the rise of the Third Reich. Vaclav Havel, however, argued that humor and absurdity were essential tools of resistance under totalitarianism, that refusing to take the regime’s self-image seriously was itself a political act eroding the regime’s authority. Czech dissidents, from Havel’s essays to the work of the Plastic People of the Universe, demonstrated that a state’s control of the visual field could be undermined by the persistence of an alternative aesthetic. But Havel also spent years in prison before his persistence paid off, and Czechoslovakia’s liberation owed as much to the structural collapse of the Soviet Union as to the courage of its artists.
What makes Washington different is that the contest is happening in real time, in the same physical space, and it is mediated by the technology that makes the personality cult possible in the first place. A two-story banner goes up. A satirical statue appears within the banner’s sightline. Visitors photograph the juxtaposition and post it to social media, where the image circulates to millions of people who will never visit the Mall. Statues vanish after four days; photographs persist on millions of screens without expiration dates. Official banners carry the weight of authority, while the crowd’s editorial framing, captured in a single snapshot posted from a phone, carries the weight of witness. In the economy of attention, the guerrilla image may travel farther and lodge more durably in memory than the state image, precisely because it is funnier, stranger, and more human.
None of this means the guerrilla artists are winning. Banners still hang. The name still sits on the Kennedy Center, despite active litigation (Beatty v. Trump, as of March 2026, remains ongoing) and despite a federal statute designating the Center as the sole national memorial to John F. Kennedy in the capital and prohibiting renaming without an act of Congress. Performers who withdrew from Kennedy Center programming after the renaming, including the composer Philip Glass, understood that the building itself had been conscripted into a narrative they could not endorse through participation.
Architecture has always carried political meaning, and the National Mall was designed to embody democratic ideals through spatial openness, axial symmetry, and the subordination of individual identity to collective memory. Monuments there honor presidents who are dead. Memorials mark wars that are concluded. Museums house the patrimony of a nation, curated by institutions that are, at least in theory, independent of the sitting executive. Hanging a living president’s face from government buildings along the Mall ruptures the design logic of the space, superimposing the living ruler onto a landscape conceived for the contemplation of shared sacrifice and historical distance.
When the White House responded to criticism by stating that the president is focused on saving the country rather than garnering recognition, the statement performed its own negation. A president focused on the country rather than recognition does not hang his face on the Department of Justice, does not chair the board that renames a national performing arts center after him, and does not then express surprise at the outcome.
We have been here before, and we have not been here before. The Palazzo Braschi face came down. Mussolini’s SI ballots were counted and discarded. Il Duce ended hanging by his ankles at a gas station in Milan. History does not replay mechanically, though certain patterns of self-display are diagnostic. When a leader begins claiming public architecture for private glorification, the leader is telling you what he believes about the relationship between the state and himself. That face on the building is a declaration. And in a functioning democracy, citizens who see it are obligated to name what it means, clearly and without apology, while the permit to erect the satirical statue in its shadow still exists, because the day the permit is denied will be the day the argument is settled, and by then, the argument will no longer matter.
#americanTradition #architecture #economy #governmentAdvertising #guerrillaArtists #gutzonBorglum #mussolini #nation #nationalMall #palazzoBraschi #PhilipGlass #politics #promotion #wpa -
The Face on the Building: America’s Palazzo Braschi Moment
In 1934, the Fascist Party Federation draped the facade of Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with an enormous sculpted face of Benito Mussolini, surrounded by the word “SI” repeated in cascading rows. The building sat between Piazza Navona and the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, in the heart of a city that had been shaping political identity through architecture for two thousand years. That face functioned as an instruction. Citizens who walked beneath it understood, whether they could articulate it or not, that the state had claimed the visual field, and that to exist in public space was to exist under observation and under obligation, holding the urban semiotic.
Ninety-two years later, giant banners bearing the face of a sitting American president hang from the Department of Justice, the Department of Labor, and the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C. Each banner is photographed from slightly below, a classic technique in authoritarian portraiture that elongates the jaw and narrows the eyes, producing an expression of surveillance rather than service. Meanwhile, his name has been affixed to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and to the United States Institute of Peace. His signature will appear on American currency. A presidential portrait replaces nature photography on the America the Beautiful national parks pass. And his birthday has been twinned with Flag Day by the Department of the Interior, granting free admission to national parks on April 14 as a celebration of the man rather than the land.
These are facts, and they require no editorial seasoning to alarm anyone who has spent time with the visual history of the twentieth century.
Before sharpening the comparison, though, honesty demands an accounting of the American tradition it descends from. The United States has never been modest about presidential memorialization. Gutzon Borglum carved four presidential faces into a mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota that the Lakota Sioux called Six Grandfathers, a monument to democratic leadership built on stolen land with the enthusiastic participation of a sculptor who attended Ku Klux Klan rallies. Lyndon Johnson named the Kennedy Center for Kennedy partly as a political maneuver to move arts funding legislation through Congress. Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA projects stamped federal iconography onto every post office and courthouse in the country, building a visual vocabulary of state presence that Americans still inhabit without noticing. The impulse to brand public space with presidential identity has a long and bipartisan genealogy.
What Trump is doing, then, sits on a spectrum rather than outside it. The question is whether it occupies an extreme position on a familiar American continuum or whether it has crossed into categorically different territory. Borglum’s mountain honored dead presidents. LBJ’s naming honored an assassinated predecessor. Roosevelt’s WPA murals depicted collective labor, not the president’s own face. In each case, the memorialization was filtered through institutional processes, legislative authorization, or the basic decorum of waiting until the honoree was no longer in office. What distinguishes the current campaign is the erasure of those filters. A sitting president chairing the board that renames a performing arts center after him, then claiming surprise at the vote he orchestrated, is operating by a different set of rules than the ones that governed even the most vainglorious of his predecessors.
Consider the Kennedy Center board that voted unanimously to add Trump’s name: it was composed entirely of his own appointees. At the Institute of Peace, the board was similarly reconstituted before the renaming. Federal agencies under executive authority commissioned the banners on government buildings, and when the USDA initially described one as temporary, the pattern expanded rather than retreated. Add the currency signature, the national parks pass, the birthday celebration, the proposed renaming of Penn Station, Dulles Airport, and the Washington Commanders stadium, the Trump-class battleships, the Trump Accounts, TrumpRx, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity connecting Armenia and Azerbaijan: each item, in isolation, might be dismissed as a peculiar excess. Assembled together, they constitute a program. And the speed of the assembly matters, because personality cults do not arrive fully formed. They accrete.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the NYU historian and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, has described the current pattern as the construction of a personality cult. Trump himself, when asked about the namings, has repeatedly denied agency. He claimed surprise at the Kennedy Center vote, said during the State of the Union that nobody believed him but he did not name the Trump Accounts, and repeated the denial for TrumpRx. Senator Adam Schiff published a formal report in September 2025 identifying the banners as violations of federal law and drawing explicit parallels to Mussolini’s facade and to the Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il portraits that adorn government buildings across North Korea. Dr. Emma Briant, a visiting associate professor at the University of Notre Dame who researches propaganda and information warfare, has identified the banners as consistent with the visual grammar of dictatorship. Max Stier, who leads the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, has stated that while political protest is an old tradition in Washington, the use of government resources to promote a single individual has no precedent in American life. Stier’s formulation cuts to the structural question: political leaders, in a democracy, are hired help.
Here, however, a distinction requires careful handling. Mussolini did not deny the face was his. He staged it. Stalin did not feign surprise at the naming of Stalingrad. The open dictatorial claim and the coy denial are different postures, and conflating them sacrifices diagnostic precision. Trump’s repeated insistence that others, acting independently, have chosen to honor him could be read as evidence that the democratic norm of appearing modest still exerts gravitational pull on him, that he still needs to perform the fiction of humility because the audience still expects it. A dictator who no longer needs to perform that fiction is operating from a different position of power. The denial, in other words, may mark a transitional phase rather than an accomplished fact: the leader who still pretends to be embarrassed by the adulation is further along the path than the leader who has never sought it, but he has not yet arrived at the place where the pretense becomes unnecessary. The direction of travel matters more than the current coordinates.
Against this visual program, something unexpected has been happening on the National Mall. An anonymous collective called the Secret Handshake has been installing guerrilla sculptures and banners within sight of the government portraits. In February, they erected a gold-painted statue depicting Trump and Jeffrey Epstein posed as Jack and Rose on the prow of the Titanic, titled “King of the World.” The National Park Service issued a four-day permit for the installation. Crowds gathered. People laughed. They took photographs. Some were offended. On March 31, the collective installed a gold-painted faux-marble toilet near the Lincoln Memorial, titled “A Throne Fit For a King,” mocking the renovation of the White House bathroom attached to the Lincoln Bedroom during a government shutdown.
A separate organization, the Save America Movement, has plastered Washington with posters targeting cabinet members. One shows a photograph of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller with the caption “Fascism Ain’t Pretty.” Another shows Attorney General Pam Bondi with the words “Epstein Queen.”
Mary Corcoran, who runs the Save America Movement, has framed the asymmetry plainly: the administration funds its propaganda with taxpayer dollars, while the opposition funds its counter-imagery with donations.
Now: a reasonable person could look at this guerrilla campaign and argue that its existence disproves the alarm. Mussolini’s Rome never saw an anonymous collective erect a satirical statue of Il Duce outside the Palazzo Braschi and receive a government permit for the trouble. In Stalin’s Moscow, the Save America Movement equivalent would have been shot. Pyongyang renders the entire exercise unimaginable. The four-day permit is, in one reading, proof that American democracy is functioning exactly as designed: the state displays its iconography, citizens mock it, courts adjudicate the disputes, and the carnival continues. Beatty v. Trump is proceeding through federal court. Philip Glass withdrew from Kennedy Center programming and suffered no state reprisal. Every counter-example that can be celebrated as resistance is simultaneously evidence that the system under indictment has not yet collapsed.
This is a fair objection, and the article cannot survive without absorbing it. So let it be absorbed.
Whether the American system has already become a dictatorship has always been the wrong question. What matters is whether the distance between the current trajectory and that destination is shrinking, and how citizens would know the difference between a contested public sphere that reflects democratic health and a contested public sphere that reflects a transitional phase between open society and closed one. Every authoritarian state passed through a period in which satirical statues could still be erected, in which permits were still granted, in which courts still heard challenges to executive overreach. The Weimar Republic had the most ferocious satirical press in Europe. It had George Grosz and John Heartfield and Kurt Tucholsky and a judiciary that, for a time, still functioned. Permits were issued. Magazines were published. And then they were not.
The permit is not the answer to the diagnostic question. The permit is the diagnostic question. Is the four-day window for a satirical statue evidence that the system is working, or evidence that the system is still in the phase where opposition is tolerated because it has not yet become threatening enough to suppress? We will not know the answer in real time. We will know it only in retrospect, and by then the knowing will be useless.
And here is where theatrical instinct becomes relevant to political analysis. What is happening on the National Mall is a stage contest. One side has seized the proscenium. It controls the permanent architecture, the lighting, the scale, the vantage points. Guerrilla artists are working from the wings, placing temporary objects designed to be photographed and circulated rather than to endure. State portraiture and monumental sculpture anchor the government’s visual strategy. Carnival, political caricature, and the traditions of Daumier, Gillray, and the Italian commedia dell’arte anchor the opposition’s.
Whether ridicule can defeat monumentalism is the open question. Historical evidence offers mixed answers. Daumier was imprisoned for his caricatures of King Louis-Philippe. Weimar Germany’s satirical press produced some of the most brilliant political art of the twentieth century and failed to prevent the rise of the Third Reich. Vaclav Havel, however, argued that humor and absurdity were essential tools of resistance under totalitarianism, that refusing to take the regime’s self-image seriously was itself a political act eroding the regime’s authority. Czech dissidents, from Havel’s essays to the work of the Plastic People of the Universe, demonstrated that a state’s control of the visual field could be undermined by the persistence of an alternative aesthetic. But Havel also spent years in prison before his persistence paid off, and Czechoslovakia’s liberation owed as much to the structural collapse of the Soviet Union as to the courage of its artists.
What makes Washington different is that the contest is happening in real time, in the same physical space, and it is mediated by the technology that makes the personality cult possible in the first place. A two-story banner goes up. A satirical statue appears within the banner’s sightline. Visitors photograph the juxtaposition and post it to social media, where the image circulates to millions of people who will never visit the Mall. Statues vanish after four days; photographs persist on millions of screens without expiration dates. Official banners carry the weight of authority, while the crowd’s editorial framing, captured in a single snapshot posted from a phone, carries the weight of witness. In the economy of attention, the guerrilla image may travel farther and lodge more durably in memory than the state image, precisely because it is funnier, stranger, and more human.
None of this means the guerrilla artists are winning. Banners still hang. The name still sits on the Kennedy Center, despite active litigation (Beatty v. Trump, as of March 2026, remains ongoing) and despite a federal statute designating the Center as the sole national memorial to John F. Kennedy in the capital and prohibiting renaming without an act of Congress. Performers who withdrew from Kennedy Center programming after the renaming, including the composer Philip Glass, understood that the building itself had been conscripted into a narrative they could not endorse through participation.
Architecture has always carried political meaning, and the National Mall was designed to embody democratic ideals through spatial openness, axial symmetry, and the subordination of individual identity to collective memory. Monuments there honor presidents who are dead. Memorials mark wars that are concluded. Museums house the patrimony of a nation, curated by institutions that are, at least in theory, independent of the sitting executive. Hanging a living president’s face from government buildings along the Mall ruptures the design logic of the space, superimposing the living ruler onto a landscape conceived for the contemplation of shared sacrifice and historical distance.
When the White House responded to criticism by stating that the president is focused on saving the country rather than garnering recognition, the statement performed its own negation. A president focused on the country rather than recognition does not hang his face on the Department of Justice, does not chair the board that renames a national performing arts center after him, and does not then express surprise at the outcome.
We have been here before, and we have not been here before. The Palazzo Braschi face came down. Mussolini’s SI ballots were counted and discarded. Il Duce ended hanging by his ankles at a gas station in Milan. History does not replay mechanically, though certain patterns of self-display are diagnostic. When a leader begins claiming public architecture for private glorification, the leader is telling you what he believes about the relationship between the state and himself. That face on the building is a declaration. And in a functioning democracy, citizens who see it are obligated to name what it means, clearly and without apology, while the permit to erect the satirical statue in its shadow still exists, because the day the permit is denied will be the day the argument is settled, and by then, the argument will no longer matter.
#americanTradition #architecture #economy #governmentAdvertising #guerrillaArtists #gutzonBorglum #mussolini #nation #nationalMall #palazzoBraschi #PhilipGlass #politics #promotion #wpa -
Top 20 – I Miei Film del 2025
Come ogni anno, dopo la grande corsa ai recuperi di fine dicembre, siamo giunti ad una più o meno soddisfacente decisione su quali sono o penso che siano i 20 film che più mi sono piaciuti di questo 2025. Come ribadito nel titolo, si tratta dei miei film preferiti e non dei migliori film, perché è bene ricordare che la lista in questione non si erge a verità assoluta sulle opere più belle uscite quest’anno, ma elenca semplicemente i 20 titoli più amati dal sottoscritto. Quindi non gridate allo scandalo se non trovate il vostro film preferito, può essere che, pur riconoscendone l’ottima fattura, mi sia piaciuto meno rispetto a un film magari meno perfetto ma più emozionante (oppure un altro motivo per cui manca potrebbe essere che non l’ho proprio visto, come ad esempio Father Mother Sister Brother di Jarmusch, che ho perso causa influenza: in tal caso vi invito a scrivere nei commenti ogni suggerimento atto a colmare le mie tante lacune).
Ricordo come sempre che in classifica compaiono solo film distribuiti in Italia (al cinema o in esclusiva streaming) nel 2025, anche se sono stati presentati in qualche festival negli anni precedenti. La discriminante è sempre stata questa, dal 2008 a oggi, e non è cambiata. A presentare questa sedicesima edizione della Top 20 quest’anno troviamo Jack Nicholson, straordinario protagonista di Qualcuno Volò sul Nido del Cuculo (Milos Forman, 1975).
Fatte le doverose premesse del caso (a- Miei film preferiti, non migliori film in assoluto e b- solo film distribuiti in Italia nel 2025), prima di lasciarvi ai titoli della Top 20 ci tengo a sottolineare che ovviamente non è stato possibile vedere tutto ciò che è uscito durante l’anno solare ma soltanto una settantina di titoli e che quindi, come sempre, è una classifica molto parziale che si fa più per gioco che per reale utilità. Apriamo le danze dunque e, mi raccomando, fatemi sapere anche le vostre scelte!
20- Alpha (Julia Ducournau)
Da che mondo è mondo, in una classifica di preferenze la posizione numero 20 è molto più difficile della numero 1. Alla fine però, l’ultima fatica di Julia Ducournau non poteva restare fuori: un lungo massaggio cardiaco alle emozioni dello spettatore, continuamente messo alla prova dagli sbalzi ermetici di un film molto bello, innegabilmente in grado di scavare nel profondo grazie anche a tre interpretazioni pazzesche. Un film sulle difficoltà di essere adolescenti, su quanto sia difficile essere madre di una ragazza in crisi e sorella di un uomo disperato, sopraffatto dalla tossicodipendenza, ma soprattutto, come dicevo, è un lungo massaggio cardiaco: c’è un costante bisogno di aggrapparsi alla vita, di curare, di salvare, di salvarsi.19- Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
Onestamente non ero certo di voler vedere questo film. Ne avevo sentito parlare come una versione afroamericana di Dal Tramonto all’Alba, o qualcosa del genere e temevo si trattasse dell’ennesima boiata spacciata per horror. Invece il film di Ryan Coogler (già regista del meraviglioso Fruitvale Station, ma anche di quella cazzata allucinante di Black Panther) fa davvero centro. Al di là della bellissima estetica del film e dell’ottima ambientazione (per non parlare della colonna sonora), mi è piaciuto come la prima parte sia tutta dedicata alla preparazione del climax finale e come lo scontro notturno sia molto più psicologico rispetto al carrozzone splatter che uno potrebbe aspettarsi. Sorprendente, nonostante i mille finali.18- A House of Dynamite (Kathryn Bigelow)
Kathryn Bigelow realizza l’incontro ideale tra il Dr Stranamore e WarGames, senza però la spassosa ironia del primo né l’avventura adolescenziale del secondo. Il film si svolge in 19 fatali minuti, dilatati però in due ore per mezzo del cosiddetto effetto Rashomon. Lo scenario, non così distopico come si può pensare, è spaventoso, e la storia regge, nonostante qualche calo di tono nella parte centrale. Appena si entra nella storia infatti, è impossibile staccare gli occhi dallo schermo, dagli sguardi confusi e spaventati dei protagonisti, da quei numeri che scorrono sui monitor. Lo trovate su Netflix e, al di là di tutto, Kathryn Bigelow sa come si gira un film: è grande cinema.17- L’Ultimo Turno (Heldin, Petra Volpe)
Non sorprendetevi se, nella prossima cinquina di candidati per l’Oscar al Miglior Film Straniero, dovesse esserci anche questo bellissimo film svizzero, realizzato da Petra Volpe. Un’escalation di situazioni, allarmi, capricci, ansie, dove la mano di Leonie Benesch, ma soprattutto il cuore, può essere piuma e può essere ferro (cit). Un film ansiogeno, dove allo spettatore non viene concesso un momento di pausa, stesso destino riservato alla sua protagonista. Il messaggio che compare nel finale, prima del fade to black, chiarisce molto meglio il punto di tutto il film, ovvero la grave carenza di infermieri negli ospedali svizzeri. Bellissimo, ma che ansia.16- Sotto le Foglie (Quand Vient l’Automne, François Ozon)
François Ozon, uno dei registi più attivi degli ultimi decenni, riesce sempre a sfornare bei film, ma quasi mai film davvero bellissimi (almeno secondo me). Ecco, questa potrebbe essere la volta buona in cui il regista francese tira fuori la perla, un dramma che si svela piano piano, strato dopo strato, mettendo in tavola una bella teglia di dubbi, ipotesi, che lo spettatore può abbracciare o rifiutare. Una serie di eventi in cui la risposta non è mai una sola, dove si scoprono realtà scomode, passati ingombranti, verità inconfutabili. E quando entri in questo labirinto di sospetti, non ne esci più. Grande film.15- Nosferatu (Robert Eggers)
Parafrasando Nietzsche, si può dire che se tu guarderai a lungo nell’oscurità, anche l’oscurità vorrà guardare dentro di te. Ed è proprio in un buio accecante che Eggers immerge lo spettatore (e Lily-Rose Depp) sin dalla primissima inquadratura, come a volerlo rendere parte di quella stessa notte buia, la stessa oscurità nella quale il regista fa muovere le sue ombre. La grandezza di questa nuova versione è, al di là dell’indubbia potenza visiva, la capacità di reinventarsi in ogni scena, di essere coinvolgente anche di fronte a una storia che abbiamo visto in tutte le salse, che il regista statunitense però riesce a modernizzare con la metafora, neanche troppo sottile, di una donna indipendente in lotta contro una società di maschi dominanti. L’oscurità non è mai stata così “buia”: spegnete le luci.14- Grand Theft Hamlet (Sam Crane, Pinny Grylls)
Durante la pandemia, due attori di teatro, rimasti improvvisamente a spasso, decidono di mettere in scena l’Amleto all’interno dell’open world del videogioco GTA, facendo casting, prove e l’intero spettacolo dentro il gioco, cercando di evitare di essere uccisi da altri gamer (per i meno pratici, GTA è uno dei videogame più violenti di sempre, dove chi gioca può rubare, uccidere e compiere qualunque attività criminale per ottenere bonus di vario genere). L’idea di Sam Crane e Pinny Grylls non è soltanto originalissima, ma è anche divertente, oltre che incredibilmente coinvolgente: dopo i primi cinque minuti sarà impossibile smettere di guardare questo assurdo documentario, se così si può definire. Anche in un periodo di grande crisi, uno splendido esempio di umanità e di come il bisogno di esprimersi artisticamente riesca ad abbattere ostacoli apparentemente insormontabili. Che bello!13- Aragoste a Manhattan (La Cocina, Alonso Ruizpalacios)
Dopo il successo di The Bear, tutto ciò che si svolge dentro una cucina deve caricarsi sulle spalle vari esami del dna per definire il grado di parentela con la serie. Ciò che vediamo nel film di Ruizpalacios ha però delle vibrazioni tutte sue, che raccontano molto del mondo che viviamo oggi: individui di culture diverse si districano tra i muri dell’incomprensione, mentre il macigno del capitalismo tenta di sacrificare ogni individualità, ogni sogno, ogni speranza sull’altare del profitto e del consumo. A condire tutte queste vicende c’è tanto umorismo caustico e una regia piena di belle intuizioni, tra cui un piano sequenza da urlo: quanta fame (di vita!) in un film così piccolo.12- September 5 (Tim Fehlbaum)
Quasi interamente girato all’interno della cabina di regia della ABC durante il sequestro degli atleti israeliani durante le Olimpiadi del 1972, il film lascia da parte qualunque approfondimento politico per concentrarsi esclusivamente sul lavoro giornalistico, con le sue urgenze, i suoi errori, le improvvise rivelazioni, la corsa alla notizia. Breve, dal ritmo serrato, senza dubbio coinvolgente, con alcuni volti interessanti come Peter Saarsgard, Ben Chaplin, John Magaro (il marito di Past Lives) e Leonie Benesch (protagonista de La Sala Professori e de L’Ultimo Turno, che avete già incontrato in questa classifica). La conferma che, ancora una volta, quello del giornalista è il lavoro più bello da vedere in un film.11- Io Sono Ancora Qui (Ainda Estou Aqui, Walter Salles)
L’ultimo lavoro del grande Walter Salles entra di diritto nella rosa dei più importanti film brasiliani della storia. Splendido nel modo in cui divide perfettamente la leggerezza del primo atto con la brutale sofferenza del secondo, Salles racconta una storia che meritava di tornare sotto l’attenzione del grande pubblico, per farci ricordare ancora una volta, se mai ce ne fosse bisogno, una cosa che dovremmo tenere sempre bene a mente: i fascisti sono una merda. Gran film.10- Presence (Steven Soderbergh)
Steven Soderbergh piazza lo spettatore a osservare una “normale” famiglia statunitense dal punto di vista grandangolare di un fantasma che vive nella loro casa, raccontando la crisi di una generazione, le aspettative, la competitività, il bisogno di vivere di apparenza pur di restare a galla, inzuppando tutta questa vita ordinaria con alcune tracce di sovrannaturale (oggetti che levitano, una medium che avverte la presenza, ecc). Il regista ci apparecchia la tavola per la prima ora, senza mai stancare, fino a spiazzarci nell’ultimo quarto d’ora, in un paio di scene che regalano brividi. Chi lo va a vedere aspettandosi un horror resterà molto deluso, è un filmone che parla di tutt’altro. Stupendo.9- Springsteen – Liberami dal Nulla (Deliver Me From Nowhere, Scott Cooper)
Chi si aspetta di vedere su grande schermo il mito di Bruce Springsteen, troverà invece un’opera che gli toglie la maschera, soffoca la leggenda per alimentare però la sua umanità, il suo cuore, il suo bisogno di essere ancora una persona normale in un mondo di luci accecanti. In questo bellissimo film di Scott Cooper scoprirete finalmente il lato oscuro del mito, l’animo intimo di un artista che non è mai sceso a compromessi con il suo successo, che ha cercato di restare se stesso sempre, mentre il mondo intorno a lui continuava a girare vorticosamente. Anche perché, come ci suggerisce il film, il passato non esiste più e il futuro non si può rincorrere: possiamo vivere soltanto dentro noi stessi, ora.8- No Other Land (Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal)
Un collettivo di registi israeliani e palestinesi racconta la violenza e la distruzione da parte dei coloni israeliani di una piccola comunità rurale della Cisgiordania, Masafer Yatta. Il rapporto tra un giornalista di Isreaele e un giovane attivista palestinese è uno dei tantissimi spunti di un film che, inevitabilmente, atterrisce lo spettatore con le tante crudeltà che mostra e che, al tempo stesso, commuove per l’enorme forza e la necessità di sopravvivere che mette in scena minuto dopo minuto. È complicato racchiudere in poche righe tutta l’impotenza che si prova durante la visione, ma anche la voglia di abbracciare i bambini che vengono fatti sfollare dalla scuola, prima che venga distrutta da una ruspa. Premio Oscar per il miglior documentario, una storia che fa male, ma che riesce anche a illuminare con la sua umanità.7- A Complete Unknown (James Mangold)
Mangold riesce a costruire un film che contiene al suo interno mille storie diverse, che gravitano tutte intorno al grande protagonista Bob Dylan: dalla leggenda Woody Guthrie allo sfortunato Dave Van Ronk, dal sogno di Pete Seeger di cambiare il mondo attraverso la musica, all’attivista Joan Baez, regina del folk, che pochi anni dopo sarebbe diventata “l’usignolo di Woodstock”. Oppure Sylvie, personaggio fittizio chiaramente ispirato a Suze Rotolo, musa e compagna del cantautore, prima di quella metamorfosi artistica che avrebbe cambiato la sua vita e (soprattutto?) la storia della musica. Per chi la vuole cercare, c’è davvero tanta carne al fuoco: un film completo, totalmente credibile, coinvolgente, straordinario nelle interpretazioni, che racconta l’uomo dietro il genio, l’essere umano dietro il rivoluzionario, il futuro premio Nobel per la letteratura dietro i capelli spettinati di un “completo sconosciuto”. Ma soprattutto c’è tanta, tantissima, musica stupenda. I tempi cambiano, per noi comuni mortali, così come per i geni: basta viverli, una canzone per volta.6- Bird (Andrea Arnold)
Tra echi di urgenza sociale che richiamano il miglior Ken Loach e una deriva favolistica alla Alice Rohrwacher, Andrea Arnold procede in equilibrio tra realismo magico e fiaba malinconica: la protagonista Nykiya Adams (che brava!) si arrangia come può in un contesto ostile, mostrando la capacità degli adolescenti di trovare luce ovunque, anche nelle condizioni peggiori. Ed è proprio lì, tra la vita aspra che mostra e l’incanto che ti regala, che questo film ti tiene stretto, facendoti pensare che è una delle cose più belle che hai visto quest’anno. Inoltre, la colonna sonora è pazzesca e va da Too Real e A Hero’s Death dei Fontaines DC a Lucky Man dei Verve, da The Universal dei Blur a Yellow dei Coldplay. Come dicono proprio i Blur, “When the days they seem to fall through you, well, just let them go”.5- The Brutalist (Brady Corbet)
La cosa più difficile da fare con quest’opera immensa di Brady Corbet è scegliere di cominciare a vederla. Poi tutto va in discesa perché l’attenzione che gli dedichi, il film te la restituisce sottoforma di splendido cinema: è davvero tanta roba. Potete facilmente immaginare che, in oltre 3 ore di film, di cose ne succedono parecchie e ci sarebbe tantissimo da dire: è una di quelle storie che ti porti appresso fuori dalla sala, che ti si arrampica dentro durante la notte, a cui inevitabilmente ripensi al mattino. Adrien Brody è magnifico e quello di Guy Pearce è un piacevolissimo ritorno sulle scene di un film importante. Girato con un budget ridotto, è uno dei più ambiziosi ed enormi film indipendenti mai realizzati. Clamoroso.4- La Voce di Hind Rajab (Ṣawt al-Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania)
Sono andato al cinema senza sapere neanche di cosa parlasse. Sapevo solo che dovevo vederlo. Il film di Kaouther Ben Hania mescola realtà e finzione, ricostruendo il tentativo da parte della Mezzaluna Rossa (il corrispettivo mediorientale della nostra Croce Rossa) di ottenere i permessi necessari per salvare una bambina palestinese chiusa dentro un’automobile, appena assaltata dai soldati israeliani che hanno sterminato la famiglia della piccola Hind Rajab. Solo questo basterebbe a renderlo un film potentissimo, ma il punto di forza (nonché elemento straziante) è che la voce al telefono che sentiamo per tutto il film è la voce reale della bambina, ovvero la registrazione delle conversazioni telefoniche avvenute tra lei e i soccorritori (che invece sono interpretati da attori e attrici). Un’opera di rara potenza ed emozione, commovente, agghiacciante, spaventosa. Se il Cinema con la C maiuscola ha il dovere di raccontare il tempo che vive, questo film è destinato a essere ricordato in eterno.3- Emilia Perez (Jacques Audiard)
Vincitore del premio della Giuria a Cannes, è una sorta di musical incentrato su un boss del cartello messicano che decide di cambiare sesso (!). Da un’idea assurda, quasi grottesca a pensarci, nasce un’opera meravigliosa su genere, identità, violenza, redenzione, senza mai perdere un grammo di credibilità. Un film che ha dentro di sé mille film diversi: musical, gangster, dramma sociale, sentimento. Girato con un gusto estetico superiore (parliamo sempre di Jacques Audiard, uno dei più grandi registi europei della sua generazione), una fotografia meravigliosa e un trio di attrici fuori dall’ordinario: Zoe Saldana, in particolare, è incredibile e il film è stu-pen-do.2- Una Battaglia Dopo l’Altra (One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson)
Quasi un decennio dopo il fortunato Vizio di Forma, il regista di Los Angeles torna a pescare idee dalla narrativa di Thomas Pynchon, il cui romanzo Vineland ha fornito il materiale di base sul quale modellare poi la storia, molto diversa, di questo nuovo film. Ci sono momenti che sembrano uscire fuori dal cinema dei fratelli Coen, ma soprattutto c’è l’enorme talento di PTA nel raccontare storie, nel prendere per mano lo spettatore e coinvolgerlo in un caleidoscopio di ironia, azione, calore umano e battute fulminanti, fino a una bellissima scena di inseguimento nel deserto, tra dossi, salite e discese, in una sorta di “labirinto rettilineo” che tiene con il fiato sospeso. Il mondo forse si può davvero cambiare, una battaglia dopo l’altra. Nel frattempo, godiamoci film stupendi come questo: “ocean waves“, amici e amiche, “ocean waves“.1- Un Semplice Incidente (Yak Taṣādof-e Sāde, Jafar Panahi)
Anche stavolta il regista iraniano gira il film in totale segreto, senza permessi, e anche stavolta realizza qualcosa di stupendo, una riflessione profonda sul ruolo di vittima e carnefice, sull’umanità, sulle conseguenze che ha ogni azione. Il film si apre sull’interno di un’automobile di notte: al volante c’è il padre di una famiglia composta da moglie incinta e una bambina vispa e solare. Improvvisamente l’uomo investe un cane e questo piccolo incidente procurerà un piccolo danno all’auto, che dovrà fermarsi per una riparazione improvvisa. Da qui comincia una serie di eventi che porterà l’uomo ad essere rapito e a circondarsi di aguzzini pronti ad eliminarlo: ma perché? Chi è quest’uomo? Cosa è successo anni prima? Il suono di quella protesi alla gamba e, soprattutto, quel finale incredibile, me li porterò appresso ancora per molto tempo. Un capolavoro.[Se l’articolo ti è piaciuto, offrimi un caffè o magari una colazione,
una piccola mancia per aiutarmi a sostenere il sito!]#2025 #bestOf2025 #Cinema #classifica #daVedere #film #filmDel2025 #filmDellAnno #filmPiùBelli #fineAnno #lista #listaFilm #miglioriFilm #top10 #top20
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Turning Saffron into Slop – Treylya Safran yn Skomblans
Kernewek is under attack. The attacker? Machine-made rubbish. Fresh from companies dictionary-bashing to make terrible ‘translations’ for their black-and-gold-washing brandification of Kernow, the shoddiness has spiralled.
Error-riddled AI ‘Kernewek textbooks’ have appeared on Amazon, by ‘authors’ who are at best well-meaning but harmful and at worst out to exploit us. Worse, a prominent crackpot is ‘translating’ conspiracy theories into ‘Cornish’ en masse. It’s not just nonsensical; it ties our language to fascism faster than we, making content by hand, can work to untie it.
There are those who believe that the best defence is to put down our shield and join the opposing forces: to ‘buy in’ to AI in the hope of coming out the other side with a useful tool for the language and a stronger community. Such hopes must be abandoned. What follows is a look why this approach is wrong-headed, as evidenced by universities, activists and indigenous groups.
Kernewek yw yn-dann omsettyans. An omsettyer? Atal gwrys dre jynn. Nowydh devedhys a gompanis ow pylla gerlyvrow rag gul ‘treylyansow’ euthyk rag aga merkegyans yethwolghi a Gernow, an pilyekter re wrug pesya.
‘Dysklyvrow’ ‘Kernewek’ gwallblagys re apperyas war Amazon, gans ‘awtours’ neb yw teg aga thowl dhe’n gwella ha drogusus aga hwans dhe’n gwettha. Lakka, yma koyntwas a vri ow ‘treylya’ tybiethow kesplottyans dhe ‘Gernewek’ yn routh. Nyns yw gocki hepken; y kelm agan yeth orth faskorieth uskissa es dell yllyn, dre wul dalgh dre leuv, oberi dh’y digelmi.
Yma nebes a grys bos agan gwella difres gorra an skoos dhyworthyn ha junya an ostys er agan pynn: dhe ‘unverhe’ gans SK gans govenek dos yn-mes gans toul dhe les rag an yeth ha kemeneth kreffa. Res yw hepkor govenegow a’n par na. An pyth hag a sew a vir orth prag yth yw an devedhyans ma penn-gam, dell yw dustunys gans pennskolyow, gweythresoryon ha bagasow teythyek.
Note: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has come to be synonymous with Generative AI (GenAI) and with Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, in common parlance. Unless explicitly stated, I use the terms interchangeably.
Kernewek is under attack. The attacker? Machine-made rubbish. Fresh from companies dictionary-bashing to make terrible ‘translations’ for their black-and-gold-washing brandification of Kernow*, the shoddiness has spiralled.
Error-riddled AI ‘Kernewek textbooks’ have appeared on Amazon, by ‘authors’ who are at best well-meaning but harmful and at worst out to exploit us. Worse, a prominent crackpot is ‘translating’ conspiracy theories into ‘Cornish’ en masse. It’s not just nonsensical; it ties our language to fascism faster than we, making content by hand, can work to untie it.
There are those who believe that the best defence is to put down our shield and join the opposing forces: to ‘buy in’ to AI in the hope of coming out the other side with a useful tool for the language and a stronger community. Such hopes must be abandoned. What follows is a look why this approach is wrong-headed, as evidenced by universities, activists and indigenous groups.
LOW-RESOURCES AND LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY
Simply adding a language to an AI model leads to a spike in poor-quality articles, drowning out quality writing by humans. AI has “industrialized the acts of destruction—which affect vulnerable languages most, since AI translations are typically far less reliable for them.”1 Wikipedia editors from varied languages evidence that machine translation tools have made it easier than ever before to create shoddy articles in minoritised languages, causing massive damage in minutes. AI leads to non-speakers producing much longer, truthier rubbish, Sámi computational linguistics expert Trond Trosterud notes: “the problem [is] that they are armed with Google Translate. Earlier they were armed only with dictionaries.”1
Kernewek, like all but 60 of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages, is designated “low-resource”, meaning it lacks sufficient data to train a machine.2 It is tempting, therefore, to assume that the solution is to provide more data. However, training an LLM requires petabytes of text, audio and video—manually categorised and in a machine-readable format—a vast trove that Kernewek simply does not have.3 Professor Will Lamb, Chair of Gaelic Ethnology and Linguistics at Edinburgh University, speaks of “millions of work hours devoted to just one aspect” of a working AI.4
Even if ChatGPT is trained on another language than English, the time and labour required may make it largely unviable. Current assessments of the performance of ChatGPT for different languages have shown that it performs worse in all tasks.5
Prof. Lina Dencik, Data Justice Lab
Furthermore, the amount of data and work is not the only barrier; at issue is the nature of the language itself. Microsoft has found that languages such as Breton—and thus Kernewek—cause a high rate of errors distinct from the size of their dataset, due to grammatical features, such as mutation, not present in well-sourced languages. As such, they remain poor without significant additional work.6 Essentially, simply adding more Kernewek may not help. Thus, engaging with AI is, for Kernewek, to tie ourselves to slop.
Noten: Skians Kreftus (SK) re dheuth ha bos kesstyr gans SK Dinythus (SKDin) ha gans Patronyow Yeth Bras (PYB), kepar ha ChatGPT, yn lavar kemmyn. Marnas bos menegys yn kler, my a us an termys yn keschanjyadow.
Kernewek yw yn-dann omsettyans. An omsettyer? Atal gwrys dre jynn. Nowydh devedhys a gompanis ow pylla gerlyvrow rag gul ‘treylyansow’ euthyk rag aga merkegyans yethwolghi a Gernow*, an pilyekter re wrug pesya.
‘Dysklyvrow’ ‘Kernewek’ gwallblagys re apperyas war Amazon, gans ‘awtours’ neb yw teg aga thowl dhe’n gwella ha drogusus aga hwans dhe’n gwettha. Lakka, yma koyntwas a vri ow ‘treylya’ tybiethow kesplottyans dhe ‘Gernewek’ yn routh. Nyns yw gocki hepken; y kelm agan yeth orth faskorieth uskissa es dell yllyn, dre wul dalgh dre leuv, oberi dh’y digelmi.
Yma nebes a grys bos agan gwella difres gorra an skoos dhyworthyn ha junya an ostys er agan pynn: dhe ‘unverhe’ gans SK gans govenek dos yn-mes gans toul dhe les rag an yeth ha kemeneth kreffa. Res yw hepkor govenegow a’n par na. An pyth hag a sew a vir orth prag yth yw an devedhyans ma penn-gam, dell yw dustunys gans pennskolyow, gweythresoryon ha bagasow teythyek.
ASNODHOW ISL HA TIPOLOGIETH YETHEL
Keworra yeth yn sempel orth patron SK a led orth spik yn erthyglow drog aga kwalita, ow peudhi skrif a gwalita gans tus. SK re wrug “diwysyansegi an aktys diswrians—hag a nas yethow goliadow an moyha, drefen bos treylyansow SK lieskweyth le lel yn tipek ragdha.”1 Golegydhyon Wikipedia a yethow divers a re dustuni re wrug medhelweyth-treylya y wul bos esya dell veu bythkweth kyns gwruthyl erthyglow pilyek yn yethow lyharivhes, ow kawsya damach kowrek yn mynysennow. SK a led orth digowsoryon owth askorra atal lieskweyth hirra ha gwirekka, konnyk yethonieth reknansek Sámi Trond Trosterud a not: “an kudyn [yw] aga bos ervys gans Google Translate. A-varra nyns ens ervys marnas gans gerlyvrow.”1
Kernewek, kepar hag oll marnas 60 a ogas lowr 7,000 yeth a’n bys, yw klassys avel “isel y asnodhow”, ow styrya nag eus dhodho kedhlow lowr dhe drenya jynn.2 Rakhenna, dynyek yw desevos bos an assoylyans profya moy a gedhlow. Byttegyns, res yw petavaytys a dekst, son ha gwydhyow—klassys dre leuv hag yn furvas redyadow gans jynn— dhe drenya PYB, tresorva efan nag eus dhe Gernewek yn sempel.3 Y kews Professor Will Lamb, Kaderyer Ethnologieth ha Yethonieth Wodhalek orth Pennskol Karedin, a “vilvilyow a ourys ober sakrys orth unn wedh hepken” a SK owth oberi.4
Hogen mars yw ChatGPT trenys war yeth a-der Sowsnek, an termyn hag ober yw res a styr y vos martesen anhewul dre vras. Arvreusyansow a-lemmyn a berformyans a ChatGPT rag yethow dyffrans re dhiskwedhas y perform gweth yn oberennow oll.5
Prof. Lina Dencik, Data Justice Lab
Pella, nyns yw an myns a gedhlow hag ober an unsel lett; a vern yw natur an yeth y honan. Microsoft re drovyas y kaws yethow kepar ha Bretonek—hag ytho Kernewek—kevradh ughel a wallow diblans a vraster aga sett kedhlow, drefen nasyow gramasek, kepar ha treylyansow, nag usi kevys yn yethow ughel aga asnodhow. Yndella, i a bes orth bos drog heb meur a ober keworransel.6 Yn essensek, possybyl yw ny wra keworra moy a Gernewek yn sempel gweres. Yndelma, oberi gans SK yw, rag Kernewek, omgelmi orth skomblans.
CORNISH UNDER CAPITALISM
But surely we can improve things over time? It will take a lot of help from AI companies, but it will be worth it. Sadly, Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, has found that once a tech company has established basic capabilities for a language, they pat themselves on the back and move on.7
Big tech companies are just that: companies. They exist to make a profit. Unfortunately, a market dominated by big languages gives them no incentive to invest in improvements for small ones.
All of the speech technology, smart homes and voice interaction systems used today are the products of commercial research. To put it bluntly, they exist to either make money from your data, to sell you more goods and services, or to influence your thinking. None of this AI exists for the public good. […] Unless there is a strong enough economic argument, don’t expect big companies to rush into producing Welsh, Gaelic or Cornish speech systems.8
Prof. Ian McLoughlin, University of Kent
Should they decide that a Kernewek AI is a viable profit-making enterprise, our situation may even be worse than abandonment. As Dr. Fintan Mallory remarks, the dominant means of profit for privately-funded AI enterprises is to convert their tools into surveillance devices.9 As Kernewek is currently one of the UK’s only languages which is not currently easily surveillable, this poses a huge risk to Kernewek activism and the fight for self-determination in a state that seeks to criminalise dissent.
While we’re on the subject of Kernewek and its position under capitalism, let’s consider the human cost. I lost my 13-year career in language to AI as soon as English output became viable enough to excuse not paying a human. In the unlikely instance that we achieve an AI that can produce quality Kernewek, why would anyone bother paying speakers? The idea of AI sucking all the life out of my heritage language when we are struggling to survive as-is is appalling.
Simply put, profit is antithetical to people. While AI is the new favourite toy of profit, it will be antithetical to people. And a language is its people.
KENEDHEL HEB YETH, KENEDHEL HEB KOLON
Combinations of characters on a screen mean nothing without agency and intention.10
Ross Perlin, Endangered Language Alliance
While language is not unique to humans, it is one of the chief parts of being human. It cannot be reduced to mere data, but is a highly social process.11 We all know how synthetic customer support via robot sounds or how AI fails to pick up nuance. As Dr. Mallory comments, “Language [is] something more like the soul of a community. You can’t store this in a machine. You can’t solve a human problem like linguicide with a view of language that removes the human component.”12
AI cannot comprehend Kernewek or any other language. It is a stochastic parrot: predicting what word is likely to follow the previous one.13 It cannot understand us. It cannot intend anything. If it tells you it feels delighted to help you, it is lying. I want our community to grow, but one hundred ‘Cornish-speaking’ computers do not add to it. One human does—bringing ideas and hopes and fears and foibles—and I do not think the Kernewek ‘speaking’ computers will add even one human to our community.
Worse, if it does, there is evidence from Microsoft to suggest that the use of GenAI on language tasks, even once a week, impairs cognitive ability to learn, leading to decreased engagement with the topic, overreliance on the technology and hobbled skills in independent problem-solving.14 By using AI tools to ‘teach’ a learner Kernewek, we may in fact be impairing their ability to learn the language at all without this crutch. We will make regurgitators in place of speakers.
Perlin also emphasises the human element, saying that when we hold community central to our languages, as we do, the stochastic parrot can feel like a violation.15 At the moment, I can tell when someone is using AI ‘Kernewek’ to me. The idea that one day I will not know when an outsider—someone I would welcome if they took up a book or a class—is puppeting my ancestors’ jaws and speaking through them is ghoulish. It has the instant sting of colonialism, of appropriation when one could appreciate, of parroting when one could join our chorus.
Hawai’ian scholar Ha‘alilio Solomon agrees: “It is painful, because it reminds us of all the times that our culture and language has been appropriated. We have been fighting tooth and nail in an uphill climb for language revitalization.[…] People are going to think that this is an accurate representation of the Hawaiian language.”16
TRUST AND COMMUNITY FEELING
The anti-machine backlash has long been simmering but is now seemingly breaking to the surface.17
NBC NEWS
The explosion of insults for AI itself (clanker, tinskin, toaster), its output (slop, dross, brainrot) and its users (slopper, groksucker, botlicker, second-hand thinker)—as well as others more clearly based on real-world slurs than I am comfortable to include—tells a tale of the general attitude of distrust and disgust towards the technology and its use on anglophone and other majority language internet.18 While the attitude among tech bros and corporates remains bombastic, for the general public AI is “becoming interchangeable with things that sort of suck.”19
Further, it’s not just majority languages with this negative view of AI as taint. A quick sampling of social media comments and likes regarding AI and Scottish Gaelic by Professor Lamb showed a split of 54% negative, 33% positive and 13% neutral. (Lamb, 2024) The sentiment of the top-rated negative comment was that AI is harmful and the second-highest that AI should be kept away from heritage languages.
What are we telling our descendants? That our language and culture isn’t worth the personal effort? That’s how I might read it, if I were them.20
Kernewek survey respondent
Kernewek paints an even starker picture, especially among younger and more technologically-savvy learners and speakers. A survey on Cornish Discord and Whatsapp found that 65% felt AI would be bad (11.5%) or very bad (53%) for the language. When asked what the community response should be to AI, 46% said we should prevent it and 27% avoid it, with only over-60s thinking that we should work with it.20
31% of respondents said using AI in Kernewek would cause them to feel estranged from the language, while 54% said that they would feel strongly estranged and 23% a little estranged from any organisation, resource or teacher using AI.
The response from those who gave their knowledge of AI as either “expert” or “good” was particularly damning. Everyone in this group responded that AI would be harmful for the language, that the use of AI would estrange them from a source strongly and that we should prevent the use of AI for Kernewek.
IDENTITY, AUTHENTICITY AND DIVERSITY
Aristotelis Ioannis Paschalidis, writing for UNESCO, was not speaking specifically about minoritised languages when he asked this, but the question resonates even more strongly for us: “How much loss of identity is one willing to sacrifice for efficiency?”21
Identity is of paramount importance to Kernewek speakers. Ute Wimmer’s study Reversing Language Shift: the Case of Cornish identified the language’s “function as a symbol of national identity” as the second highest motive (66%**) among speakers and learners, beaten only by Cornish culture (80%).22 This would seem cause for celebration, but when AI is added to the mix, it becomes a risk. Vincent Koc of Hyperlink states that AI can “inadvertently contribute to the dilution of language and cultural identity.”23
He also identifies that automating language learning or generation “may diminish the richness and authenticity that comes from human speakers who carry cultural histories in their speech.” Indeed, four studies by the University of Southern California have shown that using LLMs to assist writing “is linked to notable declines in linguistic diversity and may interfere with the societal and psychological insights language provides.”24
This is in English, one of the richest and largest languages in the world. Imagine the possible impact on a smaller language like Kernewek—with less documentation, less data, a tiny speakerbase and basically no money—and on its many language varieties and orthographies. Particular to the Kernewek context, Late speakers are already struggling to be seen as valid under the dominance of Middle. Do we think AI knows the difference? Thoughtlessly, it will either mix everything together, confusing everyone, or it will use Middle to overwhelm Late.
Generative AI-driven content creation, by favoring standardized languages, risks the disappearance of regional dialects.25
Barcelona supercomputing Center ….
Not only are varieties at risk; AI threatens to drown Kernewek as a whole. Perlin agrees that the linguistic flattening that occurred over centuries in English could manifest overnight in a minoritised language with AI at the helm—as it would be, being able to effortlessly outstrip human Kernewek. He raises concerns of LLMs freezing a language in place and even defining what it means to know the language, especially with low numbers of native speakers.26
Garbage translations multiply online like fake news. Native speakers of the languages in question are bypassed as being “too hard to find,” compared with automated methods of vetting that are completely disconnected from real-life communication. While larger and more powerful language communities may be able to hold the bots to account and even make strategic use of them, it is all too easy to imagine [a minority language] being overwhelmed.26
Ross Perlin, Endangered Language Alliance
Uncontrolled and in the hands of tech giants, synthetic Kernewek will outnumber and outmanoeuvre human Kernewek.
DATA SOVEREIGNTY AND COLONIALISM
Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of [an indigenous nation] to govern the collection, ownership, and application of its own data.27
Native Nations Institute
There are, however, indigenous cultures that are working on a more equitable relationship with AI. Tech without the giant requires resources, but it allows communities to retain data sovereignty over the cultural asset that is their language. Te Mana Raraunga, the Māori Data Sovereignty Network, has created a list of principles for the creation, use and sharing of Māori data, prioritising the need to enhance control for current and future Māori.
They raise a key point that should be considered carefully by stewards of linguistic and cultural knowledge: “Data from us, and about us and our resources, are valuable assets. Once control of it is lost, it is difficult to regain.”28 Decisions must not be taken lightly or hastily; we can always say “yes” if we have previously said “no” to a particular dataset’s use, but can never say “no” if we have already said “yes”.
The AI field, like any other space, is occupied by people who are set in their ways and unintentionally have a very colonial perspective.29
Michael Running Wolf, First Languages AI Reality
This is vital in the context of the potential control of Kernewek data by powerful external corporations. Capitalist extractivism has long been a bane on societies in the imperial periphery and our Cornish society is no different, having faced centuries of its wealth and natural resources being stripped and sold by and large for the profit of those outside Cornwall.
The book Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy notes that current data relations can be seen as “a continuation of the processes and underlying belief systems of extraction, exploitation, accumulation and dispossession that have been visited on Indigenous populations through historical colonialism.”30 This extractive understanding of information is, they note, not disrupted but rather replicated by paying people for their data.
Ultimately, our language must not lie in outside hands governed by proprietary principles that do not allow us sufficient sovereignty over one of our most valuable natural resources: our language. We must have open data principles, not bow to corporate control. We must steer and steward the use of our data, rather than expose it to use against our interests and for the pockets of big tech.
Rather than approaching language preservation as a technical problem, I think indigenous communities need to be politically empowered, whether that be funding from governments or legal protections to use their languages.31
Dr. Fintan Mallory, Durham University
We must prioritise language-as-community and seek open, equitable and ethical use of our language, heritage and other cultural assets. We must avoid thinking of AI as the magic that it promises and invest in basic research, driven by our own community. Corporations will not save us and, indeed, may do us great harm.
NO CORNISH ON A DEAD PLANET
Global capitalism and governments […] are addicted to ‘free’ market ideology over the wellbeing of communities, people and the planet.32
Cymdeithas yr Iaith Maniffesto 2022
Honestly, most takedowns of AI would have hit this point already. It’s one of the main arguments against Generative AI, but in case you’re not familiar with it, we will briefly look over the main points.
Water used in cooling AI data centers must be drinkable water. AI guzzles this water. The University of California has reported that “global water demand from AI could reach 4.2-6.6 billion cubic meters by 2027. That exceeds 50 percent of the UK’s annual water use in 2023.”33 All this while the Global Commission on the Economics of Water has declared “a rapidly accelerating water crisis” to which Kernewek should not be contributing.34
We have become utterly dependent on private technologies manufactured and controlled by a handful of opaque companies [who] appear mostly indifferent to the social consequences of their activities and only invest minimally if obliged by government regulations to enhance their public image.35
Iker Erdocia, Dublin City University
AI requires vast quantities of hardware at the cost of mining rare earth minerals. These are difficult to extract and purify and come with heavy environmental and social costs. They are often extracted from mines in countries with poorer environmental and labour protections. Reset states that “communities living near these mines, often indigenous or minority groups, regularly face land degradation, water contamination and human rights abuses. Much of this can be directly linked to the AI hardware.”36 When the hardware inevitably cooks and is useless, it is then thrown out as e-waste into poor communities. The potential advancement of Kernewek must not come at the expense of our sister indigenous and minority communities.
Training an also AI requires huge amounts of energy, soon perhaps as much as a small country37 and has an enormous carbon footprint.38 What is clear is that—through water usage, extractive industry, energy consumption and carbon footprint—AI is bad news for the struggling environment of the planet we live on and there is no Cornish on a dead planet.
MAKING AI AN EX-PARROT
Rather than making minority languages more accessible, AI is now creating an ever expanding minefield for students and speakers of those languages to navigate.39
mit technology review
We have heard of the vast improbability of getting AI to be able to mimic Kernewek in light of the costs in data, work, time and technology. We have considered the likely choice of cold negligence or surveillance product and the importance of data sovereignty. We have read about the effects on the livelihoods of Cornish speakers, as well as the the catastrophic costs to the environment and indigenous peoples.
We have learned that linguistic flattening by AI impoverishes its subjects and how AI may decide for us how our language must operate. We have seen the inescapability of language as human and the risks of creating ‘learners’ who cannot learn and ‘speakers’ who cannot speak. We have seen the dangers to reputation and trust for any organisation who would shovel what is seen as ‘slop’.
We have heard why giving in to the juggernaut of AI would be a mistake for Kernewek and how our community does not support our laying down of the shield. Instead, we must fight. We must make Kernewek a space as free of slop as possible, we must educate botlickers into ethical and effective language learning and use, we must avoid second-hand thinking.
We must make our language a no AI zone, a network of reliable humans and their human creations, built on authenticity, community, effort and trust: a Kernewek for the people, of the people and by the people.
KERNEWEK YN-DANN GEVALAV
Mes yn sur y hyllyn ni gwellhe taklow dres termyn? Y fydh res meur a weres a gompanis SK, mes y talvia dhyn. Yn trist, Gabriel Nicholas, kesvroder hwithrans orth an Center for Democracy and Technology, re drovyas pan wrug kompani tek fondya gallosow selyek rag unn yeth, i a omgeslowenha yn ughel hag ena movya yn-rag.7
Kompanis tek bras yw yndella poran: kompanis. Ymons i ena rag gwaynya budh. Y’n gwettha prys, ny wra marghas rewlys gans yethow bras ri kentryn dhe gevarghewi yn gwellhe rag an re byghan.
Oll a’n deknegieth kows, chiow konnyk ha systemow ynterweythres lev usys hedhyw yw an askorrasow a hwithrans kenwerthel. Dhe vos sogh, yth yns i po rag dendyl arghans a’th kedhlow, po gwertha gwara ha gonisyow, po delenwel dha dybyansow. Nyns yw tra vyth a’n SK ma rag an les kemmyn. […] Mar nag eus argyans erbysek krev lowr, na wra gwaytya kompanis bras dhe fyski dhe askorra systemow kows Kembrek, Godhalek po Kernewek.8
Prof. Ian McLoughlin, pennskol kint
Ha mars ervirons bos SK Kernewek aventur a yll gwaynya budh, possybyl yw bos agan studh gweth ages dell via gans forsakyans. Dell lever Dr. Fintan Mallor, an fordh vrassa a waynya budh rag kompanis SK arghesys yn privedh yw kedreylya aga thoulys yn devisyow aspians.9 Drefen bos Kernewek onan a’n yethow boghes y’n RU nag yw aspiadow yn es y’n eur ma, hemm yw peryl kowrek rag gweythresieth Kernewek ha’gan strif a-barth omdhetermyans yn stat a vynn galweythegi dissent.
Ha ni ow tochya Kernewek ha’y savla yn-dann gevalav, gwren ni mires orth an kost denel. My a gellis ow soodh 13 bloodh yn yethow dhe SK kettooth ha dell veu eskorrans Sowsnek hewul lowr dhe askusya sevel orth tyli den. Y’n kas diwirhaval may kevyn SK hag a yll askorra Kernewek da, prag y hwrussa nebonan omankombra ow pe kowser? An tybyans a SK ow tenna oll an bewnans a’m taves ertach ha ni ow kwynnel dhe dreusvewa dell on yw skruthus.
Yn sempel, budh yw gorthenebel orth tus. Hedre vo SK an degen nowydh flamm a vudh, y fydh gorthenebel orth tus. Ha yeth yw hy thus.
KENEDHEL HEB YETH, KENEDHEL HEB KOLON
Nyns eus styr dhe gesunyansow a lytherennow war skrin heb dewis ha heb mynnas.10
Ross Perlin, Endangered Language Alliance
Kyn nag yw yeth dibarow dhe dhensys, onan a’n rannow chif a vos denel yw. Ny yll bos lehes dhe gedhlow hepken, mes yth yw argerdh sosyel dres eghen.11 Ni oll a wor py mar synthesek y sen skoodhyans prener der SK po fatel yll SK fyllel orth konvedhes arliwyow. Dell gampol Dr. Mallory, “Yeth [yw] neppyth moy kepar hag enev a gemeneth. Ny yllir gwitha hemma yn jynn. Ny yllir assoylya kudyn denel kepar ha yethladhans gans gwel a yeth hag a remov an gerann denel.”12
Ny yll SK konvedhes Kernewek po taves vyth aral. Papynjay chonsus yw: y targan py ger yw gwirhaval wosa an huni kyns.13 Ny yll agan konvedhes. Ny yll mynnes tra vyth. Mar kwra derivas orthis y vos pes da dha weres, gow yw. My a vynn agan kemeneth dhe devi, mes ny wra kans jynn-amontya a yll ‘kewsel Kernewek’ keworra orti. Y hwra unn den—ow tri tybyansow ha govenegow hag ownow ha gwanderyow—ha ny dybav y hwra an jynnys-amontya kernwegorek keworra unn den hogen orth agan kemeneth.
Gwettha, mar kwra, yma dustuni a-dhyworth Microsoft hag a brof y hwra an devnydh a SKDin war oberennow yeth, unweyth an seythen hogen, aperya gallos godhvosel a dhyski, ow ledya orth omworrans lehes gans an desten, gorfydhyans y’n deknegieth ha sleyneth sprallys a assoylya kudynnow yn anserghek.14 Der usya toulys SK dhe ‘dhyski’ Kernewek, possybyl yw ni dhe shyndya gallos dyski an yeth vytholl heb an kroch ma. Ni a wra gul mimyoryon yn le Kernewegoryon.
Ynwedh Perlin a boslev an elven dhenel, ow leverel pan wren ni synsi kemeneth avel kres agan yethow, dell wren, an papynjay chonsus a yll bos klewys kepar ha defolyans.15 Y’n eur ma, my a aswon pan eus nebonan owth usya ‘Kernewek’ SK dhymm. An tybyans ny wrav vy unn jydh godhvos pan eus estren—nebonan a wrussen vy dynerghi mar pe lyver po klass ganses—ow popettya diwawen ow hengerens ha kewsel dresta yw bedhrosus. Yma dhe’n dra an wan dhistowgh a drevesigeth, a berghenegyans pan yllir gwerthveurhe, a bapynjaya pan yllir junya agan kesgan.
Unver yw skolheyk Hawai’i henwys Noah Ha‘alilio Solomon: “Ankensi yw, drefen ni dhe vos kofhes a’n prysyow oll re beu agan gonisogeth ha yeth perghenegys. Ni re beu owth omladh dre dhens hag ewines yn batel gales a-barth dasvewheans yeth.[…] Y hwra pobel krysi bos hemma representyans ewn a’n yeth a Hawai’i.”16
TREST HAG OMGLEWANS AN GEMENETH
Hir re beu an kil-lash gorthjynn ow kovryjyon mes lemmyn yma va ow terri an arenep dell hevel.17
NBC NEWS
Tardh an arvedhennow rag SK y honan (clanker, tinskin, toaster), y askorras (slop, dross, brainrot) ha’y usyoryon (slopper, groksucker, botlicker, second-hand thinker)—keffrys hag erel selys moy yn kler war geryow kas gwir dell ov attes gans aga heworra—a re hwedhel a stons ollgemmyn a wogrys ha divlases war-tu hag an deknegieth ha’y devnydh war an kesrosweyth Sowsnek ha yethow bras erel.18 Kynth yw an stons yn-mysk gwesyon dek ha korforeth hwath gwresek, rag an boblek gemmyn y hwra SK “dos ha bos keschanjyadow gans taklow tamm kawgh.”19
Pella, nyns yw marnas yethow moyhariv gans an gwel negedhek ma a SK avel podrek. Sampel uskis a gampollow media sosyel ha meusi ow tochya SK ha Godhalek Alban gans Professor Lamb a dhiskwedhas fals a 54% negedhek, 33% posedhek ha 13% heptu. (Lamb, 2024) Sentiment an kampol negedhek an moyha talvesys o bos SK dregynnus hag an nessa y talvia dhyn lettya SK rag kestav gans tavosow ertach.
Pyth eson ni ow leverel orth agan diyskynysi? Ny dal agan yeth ha gonisogeth an strivyans personel? Hemm yw martesen fatel wrussen vy y redya, a pen vy i.20
Gorthebydh sondyans Kernewek
Kernewek a baynt aven moy serth, yn arbennik gans dyskoryon ha kowsoryon yowynka ha moy skentel gans tek. Sondyans war Discord ha Whatsapp Kernewek a drovyas bos 65% a grysis y fia SK drog (11.5%) po pur dhrog (53%) rag an yeth. Pan veu govynnys pyth a dal bos gorthyp an gemeneth orth SK, 46% a leveris y kodh y hedhi ha 27% y woheles, gans an dus moy ha 60 bloodh hepken ow tybi y kodh oberi ganso.20
31% a worthebydhyon an sondyans a leveris y hwrussa an devnydh a SK yn Kernewek aga fellhe a’n yeth, hag ynwedh 54% a leveris y fiens i pellhes yn krev ha 23% pellhes tamm a by kowethas, asnodh po dyskador pynag ow tevnydhya SK.
An gorthyp a’n re a leveris bos aga godhvos a SK po “konnyk” po “da” o dampnus yn arbennik. Pubonan y’n bagas ma a worthebis y fia SK dregynnus rag Kernewek, y hwrussa an devnydh a SK gans pennfenten aga fellhe a’n bennfenten na yn krev hag y kodh dhyn hedhi an devnydh a SK rag Kernewek.
HONANIETH, LELDER HA DIVERSETH
Nyns esa Aristotelis Ioannis Paschalidis, ow skrifa a-barth UNESCO, ow kewsel yn komparek a-dro dhe yethow lyharivhes pan wrug ev y wovyn, mes an govyn a dhassen yn kreffa ragon: “Pygemmys koll a honanieth a vynnir sakrifia rag effeythuster?”21
Honanieth yw a’n moyha bri rag Kernewegoryon. Studhyans Ute Wimmer Reversing Language Shift: the Case of Cornish a henow “gweythres [an yeth] avel arwodh a honanieth kenedhlek” avel an nessa ughella skila (66%**) yn-mysk kowsoryon ha dyskoryon, fethys gans gonisogeth Kernow (80%) hepken.22 Yth havalsa hemma bos acheson solempnyans, mes pan vo SK keworrys, y teu ha bos peryl. Vincent Koc a Hyperlink a lever y hyll SK “kevri dre wall orth an gwannheans a yeth ha honanieth wonisogethel”.23
Ev a aswon ynwedh y hallsa awtomategi dyski po dinythi yeth “lehe an rychedh ha lelder hag a dheu a gowsoryon dhenel neb a dheg istoriow gonisogethel y’ga hows”. Yn hwir, peswar studhyans gwrys gans Pennskol Kaliforni Soth re dhiskwedhas bos devnydhya PYB dhe weres gans skrifa “kelmys orth dyfygyansow nosedhek yn diverseth yethel hag y hyll mellya gans an konvedhes brysoniethel ha kowethasel yw proviys gans yeth.”24
Ha hemm yw yn Sowsnek, onan a’n yethow an ryccha ha brassa y’n bys. Dismyk an effeyth war yeth byghanna kepar ha Kernewek—gans le a dhogvennans, le a gedhlow, sel kowsoryon munys hag ogas hag arghans mann—ha war y lies orgraf hag eghen yeth. Yn arbennik yn gettesten Kernewek, seulabrys yma kowsoryon Diwedhes ow strivya dhe vos gwelys avel vas gans gwartheyvans Kres. A dybyn y hwor SK an dyffrans? Heb preder, y hwra po kemyska puptra warbarth, ow sowdheni pubonan, po devnydhya Kres dhe fetha Diwedhes.
An gwruthyl a dhalgh herdhys gans SK Dinythus, dre favera yethow savonegys, a argyl an vansyans a rannyethow ranndiryel.25
Kresen woramontyorieth Barcelona
Nyns yw eghennow hepken yn peryl; SK a wodros beudhi Kernewek yn tien. Akordys yw Perlin y hallsa an platheans yethel a hwarva dres kansbledhynnyow yn Sowsnek hwarvos dres nos yn yeth lyharivhes gans SK orth an fronnow—dell via, ow pos gallosek a bassya Kernewek denel heb assay. Ev a venek prederow yn kever PYB ow rewi yeth yn hy le ha hogen ow settya pyth yw an styr a wodhvos an yeth, yn arbennik gans niverow munys a gowsoryon deythyek.26
Treylyansow leun a atal a liesha warlinen kepar ha nowodhow fug. Kowsoryon deythyek a’n yethow ma yw passyes avel bos “re gales dhe drovya”, komparys orth fordhow awtomategys a surheans kwalita hag yw disjunys yn tien a geskomunyans y’n bys gwir. Kynth yw possybyl rag kemenethow yeth brassa ha moy gallosek synsi an bottys ma dhe akont ha’ga devnydhya yn stratejek hogen, re es yw dismygi [yeth lyhariv] ow pos reverthys.26
Ross Perlin, Endangered Language Alliance
Heb kontrol hag yn diwla an gewri deknegieth, Kernewek synthesek a wra gornivera ha gorthrabellhe Kernewek denel.
SOVRANEDH KEDHLOW HA KOLONEGIETH
Sovranedh kedhlow teythyek yw an gwir gans [kenedhel teythyek] a woverna an kuntel, perghenogeth ha gweytha a’y hedhlow hy honan.27
Native Nations Institute
Byttegyns, yma gonisogethow teythyek hag usi owth oberi war geskowethyans moy ewnhynsek gans SK. Tek heb an kowr a res asnodhow, mes y as kemenethow gwitha sovranedh kedhlow war an gerthen wonisogethel hag yw aga yeth. Te Mana Raraunga, Rosweyth Sovranedh Kedhlow Māori, re wrug rol a bennrewlys rag an gwruthyl, devnydhya ha kevrenna a gedhlow Māori, ow ragwirhe an edhom a grefhe maystri rag Māori a-lemmyn hag a dheu.
I a venek poynt posek hag a dalvia bos konsidrys gans rach gans stywards a skians yethel ha gonisogethel: “Kedhlow ahanan, a-dro dhyn ha’gan asnodhow, yw kerthennow a bris. Pan vo maystri kellys, kales yw y dhaskemeres.”28 Ny dal gul erviransow yn skav po yn uskis; y hyllyn pupprys leverel “ea” mar kwrussyn leverel “na” kyns orth us sett kedhlow, mes ny yllyn nevra leverel “na” mar kwrussyn leverel “ea” seulabrys.
An desten SK, kepar ha pub le aral, yw leun a dus hag yw settys y’ga maneryow ha gans gwel pur drevesigel yn tidowl.29
Michael Running Wolf, First Languages AI Reality
Hemm yw pur bosek y’n gettesten a’n kontrol possybyl a gedhlow Kernewek gans korforethow gallosek a-ves. Estenegieth jatelydhek re beu molleth war gowethasow y’n amal emperourethek ha nyns yw kowethas Kernewek dyffrans, wosa enebi kansvledhynnyow a’y rychys hag asnodhow naturek ow pos destryppys ha gwerthys dre vras gans budh tus yn-mes a Gernow.
An lyver henwys Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy a verk lemmyn y hyllir gweles perthynyansow kedhlow avel “pesyans a’n argerdhow ha systemow-krysi isworwedhek a estennans, drogusyans, kuntellyans ha diberghenogeth re beu gwrys war boblansow Teythyek dres trevesigeth istorek.”30 An konvedhes estennek ma a gedhlow yw, dell verkons, hevelebys a-der goderrys gans tyli pobel rag aga hedhlow.
Wostiwedh, res yw ma na vo agan yeth gorrys yn diwla a-ves routys gans pennrewlys perghenogel na as dhyn sovranedh lowr a onan a’gan asnodhow naturel an moyha posek: agan yeth. Res yw dhyn kavos pennrewlys kedhlow ygor, a-der plegya orth kontrol korforethel. Res yw dhyn lewya ha gidya an devnydh a’gan kedhlow, a-der y usya erbynn agan lesow ha rag pocketys tek bras.
A-der drehedhes an arwithans a davosow avel kudyn teknegiethel, my a dyb bos res dhe gemenethow teythyek bos reythhes yn politek, po der arghasans a wovernansow po dre dhifresyansow laghel dhe dhevnydhya aga yethow.31
Dr. Fintan Mallory, Pennskol Durham
Res yw dhyn ragwirhe yeth-avel-kemeneth ha hwilas devnydh ygor, ewnhynsek hag ethegel a’gan kerthennow yeth, ertach ha gonisogethel. Res yw dhyn goheles tybi a SK avel an hus mayth ambos ha kevarghewi yn hwithrans selyek, lewys gans agan kemeneth. Ny wra korforethow agan selwel ha, hogen, i a yll agan shyndya.
NYNS EUS KERNEWEK WAR BLANET MAROW
Governansow ha kevalav ollvysel […] yw omres dhe ideologieth marghas ‘rydh’ moy es dell yns omres dhe sewena kemenethow, pobel ha’n planet.32
Cymdeithas yr Iaith Maniffesto 2022
An brassa rann a vreusyansow a SK a wrussa meneges hemma seulabrys. Onan a’n argyansow brassa yw erbynn SK Dinythus, mes rag own bos ankoth dhis, ni a wra mires orth an chif boyntys.
Res yw bos evadow an dowr goyeynhe pub kresen kedhlow SK. Y kollenk an dowr ma. Pennskol Kaliforni re dherivas “y hallsa demond dowr ollvysel SK hedhes 4.2-6.6 bilvil metrow kubek erbynn 2027. Henn yw moy es 50 kansran a us dowr bledhynnyek an RU yn 2023.”33 Y kettermyn, an Desedhek Ollvysel Erbysieth Dowr a dheklaryas “barras dowr ow tardha yn uskis” ma na dal Kernewek kevri dhodho.34
Ni re dheuth ha bos yn hwir omres dhe deknegiethow privedh gwrys ha kontrolys gans dornas a gompanis diskler [hag] a hevel bos mygyl dre vras orth an sewyansow sosyel a’ga gwriansow ha kevri yn ispoyntel marnas mars yns i konstrinys gans rewlys an wovernans dhe wellhe aga imach poblek.35
Iker Erdocia, Pennskol Sita Dulyn
Yma edhom dhe SK a vynsow kowrek a galesweyth orth kost palas monyow tanow. Kales yw estenna ha purhe an re ma hag yma kostow kerghynedhel ha sosyel poos. Estennys yns i yn fenowgh a hwelyow yn powyow gans difresyansow lakka rag lavur ha’n kerghynnedh. Reset a lever “yn fenowgh y hwra kemenethow yw trigys yn ogas dhe’n hwelyow, yn fenowgh bagasow lyhariv po teythyek, enebi gwethheans an tir, defolyans an dowr hag abusyans gwiryow denel. Meur a hemma a yll bos kelmys yn tidro orth an galesweyth SK.”36 Pan yw an galesweyth kegys yn sertan hag euver, ena tewlys yw avel e-wast yn kemenethow boghosek. Res yw nyns yw an avonsyans possybyl a Gernewek orth kost agan kemenethow hwor lyhariv ha teythyek.
Ynwedh res yw myns hujes a nerth rag trenya SK, yn skon martesen an keth myns ha pow byghan37 hag yma ol troos karbon kowrek.38 Kler yw—der usadow dowr, diwysyans estennek, konsumyans nerth hag ol troos karbon—bos SK yeyn nowodhow rag kerghynnedh ow strivya a’n planet mayth on ni trigys warnodho ha nyns eus Kernewek war blanet marow.
GUL DHE SK BOS EKS-PAPYNJAY
A-der gul dhe yethow lyhariv bos moy hedhadow, lemmyn yma SK ow kwruthyl tardhek pupprys owth omlesa rag studhyoryon ha kowsoryon a’n yethow ma dhe wolya.39
mit technology review
Ni re glewas a’n anwirhevelepter efan a wul dhe SK gallos mimya Kernewek yn golow an kostys yn kedhlow, ober, termyn ha teknegieth. Ni re gonsidras lycklod an dewisynter dispresyans yeyn po askorras-aspia ha’n posekter a sovranedh kedhlow. Ni re redyas a-dro dhe’n effeythyow war vewnansow Kernewegoryon, keffrys ha’n kostys katastrofek rag an kerghynnedh ha poblow teythyek.
Ni re dhyskas y hwra platheans yethel gans SK boghosekhe y destennow ha fatel yll SK martesen ervira a’gan parth fatel godh dh’agan yeth oberi. Ni re welas an anwoheladewder a yeth avel denel ha’n peryllyow a wul ‘dyskoryon’ na yll dyski ha ‘kowsoryon’ na yll kewsel. Ni re welas an peryllyow orth bri ha fydhyans rag kowethasow a wrussa palas an pyth hag yw gwelys avel ‘skomblans’.
Ni re glewas prag y fia omblegya orth an jagganat a SK error rag Kernewek ha dell na vynn agan kemeneth skoodhya gorra an skoos a-dhyworthyn. Yn y le, res yw dhyn batalyas. Res yw dhyn gul dhe Gernewek bos spas mar rydh a skomblans dell yll bos, res yw adhyski orth botlapyoryon yn dyski ha devnydh yeth yn ethegel hag yn effeythus, res yw goheles tybi wortaswerth.
Res yw dhyn gul dh’agan yeth bos parth heb SK, rosweyth a dus fydhyadow ha’ga gwriansow denel, drehevys war lelder, kemeneth, assay ha trest: Kernewek hag yw a-barth an bobel, a’n bobel ha gans an bobel.
Niwlen Ster
Notennow
* A prime example is the laughably-unaffordable restaurant RenMor, which The Headland Hotel thinks is a version of “Re’n Mor”, which they believe means “by the sea” as in “next to the sea” but actually means “by the sea!” like saying “by Zeus!”. This is both hilarious and enraging.
** A figure perhaps lower than it should be if you consider that many of the “emotional motives” which were not counted in this category, such as “I’m Cornish, what better reason do you need?”, do also refer to identity.
FENTENNOW
1. Judah, J. (2025) How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral, MIT Technology Review.
2. Ackermann, A. (2023) When AI doesn’t speak your language, Coda.
3. Crichton, D. (2024) AI and the Death of Human Languages, Lux.
4. Lamb, W. (2024). Could Artificial Intelligence save Scottish Gaelic?, The University of Edinburgh.
5. Dencik, L. (/2025) AI Inequalities: Minority Languages, TUC Cymru.
6. Joshi, P., Santy, S., Budhiraja, A., Bali, K., & Microsoft Research, India. (2020). The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World. Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
7. Ackermann, A. (op cit)
8. McLoughlin, I. (2018) How to teach AI to speak Welsh (and other minority languages), The Conversation.
9. Mallory, F. (2025) RISE UP Panel Discussion & Q&A: What AI Can and Cannot Do for Minoritised Languages, YouTube.
10. Perlin, R. (2024) AI Won’t Protect Endangered Languages, The Dial.
11. RISE UP (2025) #4 RISE UP Event Summary: What AI Can and Cannot Do For Minoritised Languages, RISE UP.
12. Mallory, F. (2024) European Day of Languages: Will lesser spoken languages soon only be kept alive by AI technology? Durham University.
13. Bender, E., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A., & Mitchell, M. (2021) On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
14. Lee, H.-P., Sarkar, A., Tankelevitch, L., Drosos, I., Rintel, S., Banks, R., & Wilson, N. (2025) The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers. Microsoft.
15. Perlin, R. (op cit)
16. Judah, J. (op cit)
17. Abbruzzese, J., & Wile, R. (2025) Is an AI backlash brewing? What ‘clanker’ says about growing frustrations with emerging tech, NBC News.
18. Webster, K. (2025) Why Using ChatGPT at Work Could Hurt Your Reputation, Inc. Magazine.
19. Herrman, J. (2024) Is That AI? Or Does It Just Suck?, Intelligencer.
20. Wilson, L. (2025) Skians Kreftus ha Kernewek/Artificial Intelligence and Cornish
21. Paschalidis, A. I. (2025) AI and the great linguistic flattening, UNESCO.
22. Wimmer, U. (2010). Reversing Language Shift: the Case of Cornish. Cornish Language Board, p. 113
23. Koc, V. (2025) Generative AI and Large Language Models in Language Preservation: Opportunities and Challenges, ResearchGate.
24. Sourati, Z., Karimi-Malekabadi, F., & Ozcan, M. (2025) The Shrinking Landscape of Linguistic Diversity in the Age of Large Language Models, ResearchGate.
25. Melero, M. (2024) The Future of Language (and Cultural) Diversity in the Age of AI, CLARIN.
26. Perlin, R. (op cit)
27. Russo Carroll, S., Rodriguez Lonebear, D., & Martinez, A. (2017). Data Governance for Native Nation Rebuilding, Native Nations Institute.
28. Te Mana Raraunga. (2018). Frequently Asked Questions, Te Mana Raraunga.
29. Ackermann, A. (op cit)
30. Walter, M., Kukutai, T., Carroll, S. R., & Rodriguez-Lonebear, D. (Eds.). (2020). Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Policy. Taylor & Francis, p. 24
31. Mallory, F. (op cit)
32. Cymdeithas yr Iaith (2022) Cymru Rydd, Cymru Werdd, Cymru Gymraeg., p. 27
33. O’Sullivan, L. (2025). How AI’s Failure on Linguistic Diversity is Deepening Global Inequality, RESET – Digital for Good.
34. Harvey, F. (2024). Global water crisis leaves half of world food production at risk in next 25 years, The Guardian.
35. Erdocia, I., Migge, B., & Schneider, B. (2024). Language is not a data set—Why overcoming ideologies of dataism is more important than ever in the age of AI. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 28(5), p. 23
36. O’Sullivan, L. (op cit)
37. Erdenesanaa, D. (2023) A.I. Could Soon Need as Much Electricity as an Entire Country, The New York Times
38. Heikkilä, M. (2022) We’re getting a better idea of AI’s true carbon footprint, MIT Technology Review.
39. Judah, J. (op cit)#4 #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Breus #Cornish #Cornwall #data #generativeAI #history #jynn #kedhlow #Kernewek #Kernow #Kernowek #LLM #machine #PYB #SK #SKDinythus #SkiansKreftus #Sordya
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Cinque Film 1: Il Viaggio
Amici cinefili e amiche cinefile, oggi diamo il benvenuto a una nuova rubrica, che spero diventerà un bel punto di riferimento per tutti voi lettori e lettrici. Contagiato da quel solito, immenso, pozzo di ispirazione che è Alta Fedeltà di Nick Hornby, mi dedicherò a liste di vario genere, quasi delle Top 5 in ordine sparso, ognuna con un tema diverso ad ogni puntata. Ovviamente il cinema sarà il perno di questo nuovo speciale, ma – udite udite – stavolta non sarà solo: l’idea infatti è di accompagnare le liste di Cinque Film con piccoli bonus che potrebbero cambiare, una volta composti da una canzone, un’altra da un libro, vedremo. Inoltre spesso sarete voi a consigliare il tema della rubrica: lo sceglierò infatti in base alle proposte che riceverò nelle stories instagram della pagina Film People, un modo per rendere sempre più vostro questo spazio.
Come primo tema di questa rubrica ho scelto il viaggio, anche perché la scorsa settimana è uscito il mio libro e quindi voglio raccontarvi Cinque Film che hanno ispirato la stesura del mio diario di viaggio. Non solo una strada da percorrere, ma anche film che parlano di incontri in terre straniere, connessioni, bisogno di ritrovarsi. Cominciamo!
Before Sunrise (1995): Ethan Hawke e Julie Delpy si conoscono in treno e passano una giornata intera per le strade di Vienna. Se c’è un piccolo sognatore dentro qualcuno di noi, quello scomodo individuo romantico che si muove sotto la nostra pelle amerà questo film, perché forse ci ricorderà vagamente quella notte che abbiamo vissuto anche noi in questo o quel viaggio, o forse ci commuove perché noi un’esperienza così non la vivremo mai. Primo capitolo della straordinaria trilogia di Richard Linklater. Quando il viaggio è un incontro, una scoperta, un nuovo amore.
I Diari della Motocicletta (2004): Gael Garcia Bernal si fa conoscere al grande pubblico grazie a questo cult movie di Walter Salles, incentrato sul viaggio di Ernesto Guevara de la Serna e Alberto Granado, che in sella a una vecchia motocicletta hanno attraversato la loro maiuscola America. La scoperta di una coscienza che trasformerà un “quasi” dottore in medicina in uno dei più grandi combattenti per la libertà. Quando il viaggio è un modo per scoprire chi siamo veramente.
Lost in Translation (2003): Quando si parla di film sui viaggi è impensabile non citare questo capolavoro di Sofia Coppola, con Bill Murray e una giovane Scarlett Johansson che si incontrano in un albergo di Tokyo, dove condivideranno parole, sussurri, canzoni e malinconie. La capitale del Giappone diventa un personaggio vero e proprio, in questo splendido film in cui il viaggio è l’incontro tra due solitudini.
Midnight in Paris (2011): Owen Wilson, in viaggio in Francia, viaggia nel tempo e si ritrova nella Parigi degli anni 20, dove conosce i più grandi artisti di quell’epoca. Quando uscì questo film, amici francesi e italiani mi scrissero in massa, indipendentemente gli uni dagli altri, per dirmi cose del tipo: “Woody Allen ha fatto un film su di te”, “Ma lo hai scritto tu questo film?” o anche “Ti ho pensato tanto”. Questo perché solo un anno prima ho vissuto per un breve periodo nella Ville Lumiere, dove camminavo per la città in cerca di ispirazioni, risposte, un po’ come fa Owen Wilson. Certo, io non ho incontrato nei bar né Hemingway né Scott Fitzgerald, ma non mi posso di certo lamentare (se volete saperne di più, nel mio libro trovate anche queste storie!). Quando il viaggio è cambiamento e una nuova consapevolezza.
I Sogni Segreti di Walter Mitty (2013): L’archivista Ben Stiller, che non ha mai messo il naso fuori New York, per salvare il proprio posto di lavoro deve ripercorrere le tracce del fotografo freelance Sean Penn in giro per il mondo. Per il protagonista sarà l’occasione di vivere esperienze straordinarie che non avrebbe mai neanche immaginato. Il fascino dello scatto fotografico, ma anche l’attrazione dei viaggi in solitaria. Probabilmente ciò che rende davvero speciale questo film è, nonostante le incongruenze e le assurdità, la sua capacità di lasciarci sui titoli di coda con la voglia di rendere magico ogni momento della nostra vita. Quando il viaggio è scoperta e ispirazione.
Quali film aggiungereste a questa lista? Quale volete che sia il prossimo tema della rubrica Cinque Film?
BONUS
Una bella canzone che parla di viaggi: La Strada, Modena City Ramblers.
Un bel libro che parla di viaggi: Strade Blu, William Least Heat-Moon#cinemaViaggi #cinqueFilm #daVedere #film #filmSuiViaggi #roadMovie #storieDiViaggio #top5 #viaggi
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Walter Mosley - Diabeł w błękitnej sukience
Oswojony z klimatem noir za sprawą książek Chandlera postanowiłem dać szansę innym autorom tego nurtu. Pierwszym strzałem była kupiona za grosze powieść “Diabeł w błękitnej sukience” Waltera Mosleya.
Link do wpisu 🔗
https://xiegozbior.pl/zajawki/2025/04/24/walter-mosley-diabel-w-blekitnej-sukience.html#fediksiazki #bookstodon #książki #WalterMosley #emg #noir #kryminały
@ksiazkiPełny wpis w wątku poniżej! ⬇️
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Walter Mosley - Diabeł w błękitnej sukience
Oswojony z klimatem noir za sprawą książek Chandlera postanowiłem dać szansę innym autorom tego nurtu. Pierwszym strzałem była kupiona za grosze powieść “Diabeł w błękitnej sukience” Waltera Mosleya.
Link do wpisu 🔗
https://xiegozbior.pl/zajawki/2025/04/24/walter-mosley-diabel-w-blekitnej-sukience.html#fediksiazki #bookstodon #książki #WalterMosley #emg #noir #kryminały
@ksiazkiPełny wpis w wątku poniżej! ⬇️
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Walter Mosley - Diabeł w błękitnej sukience
Oswojony z klimatem noir za sprawą książek Chandlera postanowiłem dać szansę innym autorom tego nurtu. Pierwszym strzałem była kupiona za grosze powieść “Diabeł w błękitnej sukience” Waltera Mosleya.
Link do wpisu 🔗
https://xiegozbior.pl/zajawki/2025/04/24/walter-mosley-diabel-w-blekitnej-sukience.html#fediksiazki #bookstodon #książki #WalterMosley #emg #noir #kryminały
@ksiazkiPełny wpis w wątku poniżej! ⬇️
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Walter Mosley - Diabeł w błękitnej sukience
Oswojony z klimatem noir za sprawą książek Chandlera postanowiłem dać szansę innym autorom tego nurtu. Pierwszym strzałem była kupiona za grosze powieść “Diabeł w błękitnej sukience” Waltera Mosleya.
Link do wpisu 🔗
https://xiegozbior.pl/zajawki/2025/04/24/walter-mosley-diabel-w-blekitnej-sukience.html#fediksiazki #bookstodon #książki #WalterMosley #emg #noir #kryminały
@ksiazkiPełny wpis w wątku poniżej! ⬇️
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Sean Penn Joins Dardenne Brothers, Walter Salles as Executive Producer on Brazil’s ‘Manas’
#MovieNews #Movies #International #JeanPierreandLucDardenne #SeanPenn #WalterSalles -
Walked through a JC Penney store for the first time in probably 20 years.
Pretty sure it’s just alternate-universe Kohls, right?
Same layout, same clutter, some different house brand names but otherwise Nothing distinctive.