'I'm very disappointed in myself'

When it rains, it pours

A video shared on X claims French President Emmanuel Macron was booed at the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympics. Macron has publicly shit himself. He was booed at the closing of the gay Olympics. And it is clear that he can’t take a punch. A worthless person. pic.twitter.com/qIv0K9arjQ — ROGOZIN (@Rogozin) August 12, […]

Vance was initially cautious to accept Walz’s proposed date for the debate

News Grotesquerie Grotesquerie Trailer: The Devil is All Around Us, Even if You’re a Nun Riding a Bicycle From the creator of American Horror Story… By Vanessa Armstrong | Published on August 15, 2024 Credit: Prashant Gupta/FX Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Prashant Gupta/FX American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy has a new original series coming to FX that seems equally terrifying. It’s called Grotesquerie, which he co-created it with Jon Robin Baitz and Joe Baken, and we got a teaser trailer today that makes clear that things are getting pretty demonic in the small town at the center of the show’s events. By demonic, of course, I mean the trailer contains images of crosses portrayed over disturbing imagery, quick cuts to things like a scorpion walking on the ground, a shot of a jigsaw puzzle of The Beast, and a swimming pool boiling over. Here’s the official synopsis, which lays things out in more detail: In FX’s Grotesquerie, a series of heinous crimes have unsettled a small community. Detective Lois Tryon feels these crimes are eerily personal, as if someone—or something—is taunting her. At home, Lois grapples with a strained relationship with her daughter, a husband in long-term hospital care and her own inner demons. With no leads and unsure of where to turn, she accepts the help of Sister Megan, a nun and journalist with the Catholic Guardian. Sister Megan, with her own difficult past, has seen the worst of humanity, yet she still believes in its capacity for good. Lois, on the other hand, fears the world is succumbing to evil. As Lois and Sister Megan string together clues, they find themselves ensnared in a sinister web that only seems to raise more questions than answers. Grotesquerie stars Niecy Nash-Betts as Detective Lois Tryon, Courtney B. Vance as Marshall Tryon, Lesley Manville as Nurse Redd, Micaela Diamond as Sister Megan, Nicholas Alexander Chavez as Father Charlie, Raven Goodwin as Merritt Tryon, and Travis Kelce. The show premieres on Wednesday, September 25, 2024, at 10 p.m. ET/PT on FX and streams the next day on Hulu. Check out the teaser trailer below. [end-mark] The post <i>Grotesquerie</i> Trailer: The Devil is All Around Us, Even if You’re a Nun Riding a Bicycle appeared first on Reactor.

Books book review Beautifully Understated, Effortlessly Atmospheric: Pink Slime by Fernanda Trías A review of Fernanda Trías’s horror novel. By Alexis Ong | Published on August 15, 2024 Comment 0 Share New Share Pink Slime unfolds in my hands with a customary string of lively blurbs, one invoking the well-worn name of J.G. Ballard, which can sometimes be a crapshoot in this current age of Total Marketing where quick associations and categorization can feel like a set of jingling keys. So it’s extra satisfying that Pink Slime’s flavor of Ballardianism turns out to be devastatingly true. Fernanda Trías’s neat, visceral prose (translated from the Spanish by Heather Cleary) bears a distinctly cinematic quality that consumes the page and my mind’s eye and whole little reading bubble; her protagonist moves through damp fog and distant neon with a visual fluency that makes my first taste of Pink Slime effortlessly atmospheric.  Dystopian themes of isolation and psychopathology aside, perhaps Pink Slime aligns so easily with the Ballardian label because it shares Ballard’s fondness of wielding the short story to dissect single subjects. Set in an alternate version of Uruguay, Pink Slime broadly observes similar constraints with a much more melancholy sense of intimacy and pathos. Its unnamed protagonist lives in the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe—the red wind—that has poisoned the air with toxins and a strange plague. To get by, she babysits a disabled boy, Mauro, whose indifferent, wealthy parents drop him off with cash and food; Mauro has a rare genetic condition that makes him constantly, endlessly hungry, and has trouble communicating and functioning normally. Max, the protagonist’s ex-husband, is afflicted by the disease, but confined to the safety of a government facility called Clinics. And then there’s her mother, reduced to a small life in the decaying suburbs, difficult in the way that all mothers are, who chafes against her daughter’s plan to leave for Brazil. Trías uses these bound spaces to create a highly effective sense of claustrophobia informed by pandemic protocols and the encroaching nightmare of climate change; the inhabitants of Pink Slime’s city track the weather so they know when to seal themselves indoors with fake-meat rations and stale air. Their new normal is a filthy, soupy fog that leaches color from the world, but also offers temporary safety from the red wind. There is clearly a lot about this that speaks to our current place in time, but Pink Slime is primarily concerned with the interiority of its protagonist and her slow, quiet struggle away from stasis; she reflects on the way we rationalize and justify our own actions when perhaps all we need to do is accept that our lives are simply driven by chance or inertia. In this protagonist and her pseudo-fatalist connection to Max, Trías paints a somber picture of two people tethered together with the weight of circumstance and past baggage, where one is perhaps clinging to the other a little too tightly. We get glimpses of this relationship in flashbacks and Clinics visits, and Trías here does a powerful job of capturing the faintly sweet stagnation of sentimentality and nostalgia that affects—and limits—us all.  Buy the Book Pink Slime Fernanda Trías Buy Book Pink Slime Fernanda Trías Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Perhaps the most interesting thing about the book is Trías’s presentation of Mauro, who mostly exists on the page without the usual allegory and metaphor that one might usually apply to an almost non-verbal character defined by their syndrome. The protagonist is consumed by the intensity of Mauro’s care when she has him, but Trías, by the end of the book, lets the reader sit with their own biases and thoughts on this abnormally large, difficult child completely driven by one overriding impulse and his relationship with the protagonist, or perhaps his analog function as a force of nature—if that suits the reader better. If the protagonist is a willing victim of life-as-inertia, then Mauro is the force that pushes her out of that familiar cycle of promise and procrastination. Trías’s approach and style is too elegant to have Mauro exist as a base metaphor for the sort of hypercapitalist, hyperconsumptive culture that pushed Pink Slime into existence—a mouth with no direction—but this sort of ambiguity in fiction is best left to sit privately inside the reader’s head, to be combed through like a knot and left alone to ferment in the subconscious.   If anything, Pink Slime forces me to examine my own relationship with inertia, like a hand gripping the crown of my head and swiveling it toward something I’d rather let sit just out of view. Trías writes an all-too-relatable protagonist with an incisiveness that makes me sit with my own sad little idiosyncrasies and the things I let myself believe stand in the way of moving forward. I think of the protagonist stumbling upon a small trove of treasure—old cans of tuna—and the glorious sensation of taking in the scent and taste of an extinct animal. I think of the snippy exchanges she has with her mother, clinging on to the last vestiges of middle-class life in a decaying neighborhood where residents would rather pay people like her to live in their houses than allow homeless people to move in. Trías has preserved a crisp snapshot in time of this woman’s life with a beautifully understated sense of cinematic style and nuance that one sees more often in short stories (more so international, non-western short stories), and this, above all the obvious Ballardian hallmarks of bourgeois degeneration and societal compartmentalization, is the heart of what brings Pink Slime into this particular fold.[end-mark] Pink Slime is published by Scribner. The post Beautifully Understated, Effortlessly Atmospheric: <i>Pink Slime</i> by Fernanda Trías appeared first on Reactor.

Abortion initiatives in Missouri and Arizona will effectively ask voters to allow no restrictions on ending the lives of unborn children. Missouri and Arizona on Tuesday joined the list of states with abortion initiatives on the Nov. 5 ballot. Now, voters will decide pro-abortion measures in a total of eight states, the most on record in a single year: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, New York, Nevada, and South Dakota. The ballot measures in both Arizona and Missouri ask voters whether they wish to amend their state constitution to allow abortions. Both include a wide-ranging “health of the mother” clause—or in these cases, “health of the pregnant person” or “pregnant individual”—that would make it legally and practically impossible to pass laws restricting abortion. Missouri’s ballot measure, titled “The Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative,” would enshrine the right to abortion in state law if voters approve it. The measure would allow the state Legislature to pass laws regulating abortion after fetal viability, but also would prohibit lawmakers from restricting abortions “needed to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant person.” Arizona’s abortion amendment would establish a “fundamental right to abortion” and prohibit laws that deny, restrict, or interfere with abortions after fetal viability when the procedures are “necessary to protect the life or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual.” Missouri and Arizona appear to refer to women by using the terms “pregnant person” and “pregnant individual,” respectively. Both ballot measures, if approved, would leave the decision of what is necessary to protect a woman’s “health” to “health care professionals,” rather than medical doctors. In the Supreme Court’s Doe v. Bolton decision, issued the same day in 1973 as Roe v. Wade, the justices defined “health” of the mother as referring to “all factors” affecting the pregnant woman. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court held that states could regulate first-trimester abortions and to some extent second-trimester abortions, but only for the purpose of protecting the “health” of the mother. When the unborn child is viable during the third trimester, the Roe decision—which the high court overturned in June 2022—allowed states to make abortion illegal contingent on the existence of exceptions to protect the mother’s life and “health.” Doe v. Bolton defined the “health” of the mother as “all factors” that affect the woman, including “physical, emotional, psychological, [and] familial” factors and “the woman’s age,” drastically expanding the allowable abortions under Roe.  Because the texts of the Arizona and Missouri constitutional amendments contain no limitations on what “health” means or definitions of “health care professional,” the measures if passed likely would legalize abortion at any stage of the pregnancy. That is, if anyone who claims medical expertise asserts that the mother would benefit physically, emotionally, or otherwise by killing the unborn child.  Arizona law defines a health care provider as “a person or organization that provides health care to prevent, diagnose, or treat illness or injury.” This includes those who work at a licensed health care institution or provide health care in a fieldwork setting, such as social workers. According to Missouri law, a health care professional is a person who is licensed, accredited, or certified by the state to perform specific health services. This definition includes physicians, surgeons, dentists, podiatrists, pharmacists, psychologists, and nurses. Although both statutes allow abortion restrictions after fetal viability, usually around 23 or 24 weeks’ gestation, the limitations would be rendered void by the proposed “health of the mother” clauses. The ballot measures in both Arizona and Missouri would allow any health care provider, including a social worker or dentist, to determine that a woman’s mental health requires that she end the life of her unborn child. As a result, if voters approve the amendments, legal experts say pregnant women in Arizona and Missouri would be able to get abortions for any reason up to the time of birth. The post 2 New Ballot Initiatives Would Expand ‘Health’ Definitions to Legalize Abortion on Demand appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said Monday that former President Donald Trump would find it “difficult to prevail” in his potential $100 million suit against the Justice Department over a raid for classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Trump’s attorneys filed an administrative claim with the Justice Department over the Aug. 8, 2022, raid on Mar-a-Lago and the subsequent indictment secured by special counsel Jack Smith on Monday, a preliminary step before actually suing, that accuses the FBI and DOJ of “malicious political prosecution aimed at affecting an electoral outcome to prevent former President Donald Trump from being reelected,” the New York Post reported. Turley noted that, like Trump as president, the DOJ has “[its] own form of immunity,” which could come into play should Trump’s lawyers actually file a lawsuit. “Well, I think he is going to find greater political traction than legal traction on this type of case. The odds are against him,” Turley said. “This is a very difficult type of case to prevail on against the Justice Department. They’re given their own form of immunity, ironically, for discretionary functions.” “Now, to get around that, what the Trump team is saying is that the Supreme Court has established that this was unconstitutional, that there are privileges or protections here, that you shouldn’t have gone forward with this,” Turley continued. “That remains an issue on appeal as to what extent the president has those protections, the Supreme Court itself said, at least with regards to the presidential immunity aspects that they have not ruled on this previously. So, this is the type of area the courts tend to not like to be pulled into. So, the odds are against the Trump team on this. What they do get potentially is discovery, but that’s a two-way street. The Department of Justice then gets discovery, as well, against the Trump team.” U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon of the Southern District of Florida dismissed the charges against Trump in the classified documents case in July, ruling that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel. Cannon previously ordered the appointment of a special master to review documents seized during the Mar-a-Lago raid, but the ruling was later overturned on appeal by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. “The Supreme Court said that you are not protected for acts that are personal in nature, but you’re also not protected for official acts that are done for personal reasons. That’s a sort of gray area,” Turley said. “They established these three sets of cases, and the courts have to determine where this falls. Now the court in Florida did dismiss this case, and the Trump team has arguments here that are not frivolous.” The law professor said that even with Trump’s cooperation with some FBI requests prior to the raid, he may not have a good case. “The bets on this one have got to go in favor of the Justice Department,” Turley said. Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation. The post ‘Odds Are Against’ Trump in Lawsuit Vs. DOJ Over Mar-a-Lago Raid, Law Professor Turley Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.

SF Criminal Cases to Be Dismissed After Courts Fail to Meet Deadlines

Harris to Propose Price Controls