I’m extremely pleased to announce that Gerard Van der Leun’s poetry book, Into the Smoke of the World and other poems, is ready for purchase. Poetry was very dear to Gerard’s heart, and this beautiful book features almost all of his poems that survived the Paradise fire, plus many full color photographs and cover artwork by wonderful pastel artist (and Van der Leun reader) Casey Klahn. Please go to the Vanderleunbooks.com website and order. Continue reading →
Philip Glass pulls out of Kennedy Center – and buys a loaf of bread
Composer Philip Glass, 89, is apparently not a Trump fan:
Composer Philip Glass announced Tuesday that he is withdrawing his symphony from the Kennedy Center, pointing to the arts center’s values and leadership.
“After thoughtful consideration, I have decided to withdraw my Symphony No. 15 ‘Lincoln’ from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,” Glass announced in a statement posted to X.
“Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony,” he continued. “Therefore, I feel an obligation to withdraw this Symphony premiere from the Kennedy Center under its current leadership.”
Really? I was unaware of Trump’s support for slavery, or his advocacy of the South’s defiance of the federal government (seems the opposite, actually).
And I wonder whether Glass is aware that Lincoln met with many accusations similar to those against Trump: that he was a tyrant who didn’t respect the law. For example:
“What shall we call him? Coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies? Or shall we consider them all as embodied in the word fiend, and call him Lincoln, the Fiend?”
So wrote Virginia’s Richmond Enquirer of the President of the U.S. in 1862. It was not unusual. Caught up in the passions of the era, the Northern Copperhead papers no less than the Southern press called Abraham Lincoln names that for venomous variety have been unsurpassed before or since in editorial tirades against a President—”The Ape,” “Simple Susan,” “Kentucky Mule,” “Illinois Beast,” “traitor,” “lowborn, despicable tyrant,” “cringing, crawling creature.” …
Thus the Illinois State Register (Springfield), taking Lincoln to task for his “assumed clownishness,” charged that his “buffoonery convinces the mind of no man, and is utterly lost on the majority of his audience.” The Chicago Times, one of his angriest foes, sneered that “he cannot speak five grammatical sentences in succession.” One of Lincoln’s greatest speeches, the second inaugural (“with malice toward none”) was dismissed by the Times as “slipshod” and “puerile.” …
Of his assassination, the Dallas Herald wrote: “God almighty ordered this event.” Houston’s Tri-Weekly Telegraph crowed: “From now until God’s judgment day, the minds of men will not cease to thrill at the killing of Abraham Lincoln.”
Then again, Philip Glass actually is a loaf of bread. If you’re unfamiliar with Glass’s work, the following parody may not make sense. It’s from a favorite play (or rather, series of short plays) of mine by David Ives, called All In the Timing:
News roundup
(1) Doesn’t it seem like shutdowms are threatened every couple of weeks? See this:
Leader, Chuck Schumer, eked out a deal for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding bill, later on Thursday, to be sequestered from the six-bill minibus, in a last-minute attempt to avoid the shutdown that begins midnight on Friday. Instead, DHS will be funded with a short-term continuing resolution for two weeks.
(2) I guess the White House ballroom isn’t big enough. Trump’s itching to build something even bigger:
When Trump first displayed models of the proposed arch last October, a reporter asked him who it was for. Trump replied “Me. It’s going to be beautiful.”
In a December update, the president said the new arch “will be like the one in Paris, but to be honest with you, it blows it away. It blows it away in every way.”
There was one exception, he noted: “The only thing they have is history […] I always say [it’s] the one thing you can’t compete with, but eventually we’ll have that history too.”
The president clearly believes his arch will be part of creating that history. “It’s the only city in the world that’s of great importance that doesn’t have a triumphal arch,” he said of Washington DC.
(3) I’m uninterested in the Epstein file dump. But if you’re interested, see this or this or this.
(4) The US and Israel deny any involvement in a Tehran blast that killed at least five people. Iran says the cause was a gas leak.
(5) Judge rules that ICE can stay in Minnesota:
U.S. District Judge Kate Menendez ruled this morning against a lawsuit filed by state Attorney General Keith Ellison seeking to have ICE ejected from Minnesota.
And from the comments at that Powerline post:
[The judge] apparently based part of her decision on the 8th circuit court’s panel repealing of her order last week restricting ICE. Saying “If that injunction went too far, then the one at issue here—halting the entire operation—certainly would.”
On therapists as social justice warriors
On yesterday’s thread about anti-MAGA rage in the health professions, there was some discussion about the leftism of therapists. I’m unaware of any threats by therapists to kill MAGA fans. But then again – unlike nurses and doctors – they’re not in the business of directly tending to their clients’ bodily needs, so they don’t have as much opportunity – or is it temptation?
But I think it might be time to recycle a post I wrote in May of 2023 on the topic of the leftism of therapists, and the fact that many have been refusing to treat people on the right for many years prior to Trump. So the rest of this post is a repeat of that earlier post.
Here’s a long article on how therapists have become social justice warriors. I haven’t yet read the whole thing, although I intend to do so. But I’ll just point out that: (a) there have always been many bad therapists out there, although there are probably many more these days; and (b) the vast majority of therapists have been on the left for a long long time.
On a personal note connected with point (b), twenty or so years ago when I was newly divorced and newly conservative and wanted to discuss both issues with a therapist, I had an amazingly difficult time trying to find a therapist willing to deal with a client on the right. So this sort of ostracism is not a new phenomenon at all, although I’m virtually certain it is now far more common than it was back then, and it was already common back then. If anyone is interested, here’s a website which purports to list therapists willing to work with conservatives. I have no idea whether it’s reliable or not, however.
If anyone is looking for a therapist, I suggest being basically up-front about your politics when you first speak to each therapist on the phone. Explain that you are politically conservative and ask whether they’re comfortable working with a conservative, whether they come from an identity politics ideology, and that sort of thing. The therapist may be truthful in telling you yes or no. You can often get a good sense of this in even a brief conversation, and it doesn’t cost a cent.
But what a terrible mess.
Open thread 1/31/2026
Where did January go? Wasn’t it New Year’s Eve just a moment ago?
The nomination of Kevin Warsh
I don’t have too much to say about Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh for Federal Reserve Chairman. But many of you probably do, so here’s a thread for discussing it.
Gold and silver prices plummeted early Friday morning following news that President Trump planned to nominate Kevin Warsh as the next chair of the Federal Reserve.
Investors started selling off precious metals with gold falling by as much as 10%, dropping from $5,500 an ounce to around $5,136 per ounce. …
Precious metals have been a safe have for investors concerned that the next Fed chair would cede to Trump’s demands to cut interest rates sharply.
News of the Warsh pick appeared to mollify those concerns.
Don Lemon arrested for the church invasion
You may or may not agree with the FACE Act (1994), but it’s pretty clear that Lemon and the other activists in the Minnesota church invasion violated it. Leftists are perfectly fine with the Act’s application to anti-abortion activists, but apply it to those who harass churchgoers and the left’s not so happy.
Especially if the person is Don Lemon, who says he was just there as an observing reporter:
Presumably, the DoJ got an indictment from a grand jury, the only practical option open to them at that point. If so, it certainly didn’t take long to get, and underscores the point that they should have probably tried that first. …
Lemon has hired Hunter Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell to represent him, and Lowell is already all-in on the First Amendment defense …
However, this defense is a loser for several reasons, the first of which is that Lemon wasn’t the only party to this incident that had First Amendment rights at stake. The First Amendment protects the right to freedom of religious expression, the core of which is the right to worship in one’s own church in peace. Even people claiming to be journalists can’t interrupt worship services and demand impromptu “interviews” with the minister or celebrant, especially inside the church on private property. Lemon filmed himself preparing with the instigators outside before invading the church, and his “interview” consisted of demanding answers to the instigators’ claims and demands.
Next up, the criminal statutes involved do not have “journalist” exceptions. Neither the FACE Act nor the Ku Klux Klan act allow for disruption of church services for the purpose of “journalism.” …
As for Lemon’s thirty years in journalism, that’s irrelevant to the crime at hand. If a journalist is dumb enough to commit a crime on video, that doesn’t automatically transform itself into a news report. Lemon filmed himself actively conspiring to invade a church for a protest in violation of both the FACE and Klan Acts, and then participated in the act by buttonholing the pastor and harassing him while his co-conspirators terrorized the rest of the congregation.
Seems pretty straightforward to me. But the left is really into the elevation and expansion of the right of freedom of speech over everything else when it’s their “speech” that’s involved.
What’s up with all these leftists in healthcare professions who proudly advocate harming MAGA supporters?
You’ve seen the articles: healthcare workers (often nurses) who boast that they won’t treat MaGA supporters or even that they’ll harm or kill them. Another variant is the same claim about not treating, or outright harming, Israelis.
This shouldn’t surprise us, although it probably does. People who work in healthcare are people, after all, and there’s always been a certain number of natural sociopaths drawn to the profession. We’ve always heard of the random nurse or doctor who injects patients with something lethal, although their numbers have mercifully been very low. But they have always existed.
However, what’s going on now seem to be a new phenomenon, and although it continues to involve a small number it’s certainly more people than the group I described above. This time, also, they seem to have little awareness that they will face any negative consequences for publicly stating their willingness to harm or kill patients. They brag about their intent to commit such crimes, and seem to consider it a good way to virtue-signal. When they are suspended or fired, they’re probably very surprised.
If they are young (and by “young” I mean anything under forty) they’ve been steeped in leftist education, for the most part. So some of this is a generational phenomenon. Then there’s widespread TDS and the demonization of anyone supporting Trump, which has increased over the years rather than decreased. I see it myself, nearly constantly. It becomes standard in many circles, and that escalates matters as well, when one’s colleagues and friends and family seem to all agree that MAGA equals Nazi. That thought is reiterated and magnified through the MSM, Democrat and NeverTrump politicians and pundits, and social media.
Healthcare professionals often go into the profession through a desire to do good, and if killing Nazis is good then they’ll do that, too. Nor is their professional training politically neutral, either. You can find loads of articles describing the extent to which medical training has veered into leftist indoctrination, and the results: for example see this, which notes the leftist bent of health:
[A] follow-up paper, published in 2019, demonstrated that recent medical school graduates—especially women, but men as well (though to a slightly smaller degree) skew much more to the left than their older colleagues, a progressive shift the authors argue is likely to continue, and over time, shift the political balance of the profession as a whole.
Most of the articles I found on leftist training in health care involved medical school and doctors, but it stands to reason the same is true for nurses and the like.
There’s also this, for a description of some of the training:
The most sweeping of the “implicit bias” training mandates, and a possible harbinger of future state-wide edicts in other states? That would be in California, where according to the very letter of the law, “all continuing medical education courses”—which physicians need to complete to have their licenses renewed—must “contain curriculum that includes the understanding of implicit bias.”
But indoctrination programs that anger, demean, and insult people are unlikely to persuade them. Objective data demonstrating benefits in medical outcomes resulting from intrinsic bias training is inconsistent and sparse. Even those who believe racism is the source of disparate medical outcomes and support implicit bias training urge some caution using the current approach because of methodological problems.
While I recognize that social injustices exist, I remain unconvinced that racism is a major cause of outcome disparities—and I’m concerned that this indoctrination causes more harm than good. In fact, the evidence already suggests that this divisive ideology, rooted in racial discrimination, is being prioritized over the findings of scientific research to the detriment of patient health.
There’s this sort of thing:
First-year [medical students at UCLA] are reportedly assigned readings in the required course, Structural Racism and Health Equity “SRHE,” which pushes far-left views supporting protesting climate change and abolishing police and prisons. …
A current student in the medical program at UCLA claimed that this class isn’t alone and that far-left politics pervade every class in the program.
“This curriculum is laced through all four years of medical school,” the student told Fox News Digital.
National Review had this 2023 article on the topic, but it’s behind a paywall.
There’s an organization called “Do No Harm” that’s dedicated to eliminating some of this indoctrination:
“We are a diverse group of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers united by a moral mission: Protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology. We believe in making healthcare better for all – not undermining it in pursuit of a political agenda,” the organization’s website explains.
There’s a lot of information at the website, and I wish them much good luck with that. It’s late and getting later.
Alteration inflation
I have an old sweatshirt of which I’m very fond. It’s a pretty color, and it’s in good shape despite its antiquity.
Except for the zipper, which broke. I can do simple sewing, but I’ve never put in a zipper and I don’t have a sewing machine. So I called the local place that does alterations, the one that’s got the best prices in town, and asked them how much it would cost to put in a plain old zipper in a sweatshirt.
The answer? Fifty-six dollars.
I don’t think I’ll be doing that any time soon. Who would?
Open thread 1/30/2026
Pretti had an altercation with federal agents 11 days prior to his fatal encounter
And it’s on video:
You might notice some people in the comments saying of course it’s fake. If you don’t like the contents of a video, that’s a common thing to say these days. However, this one is apparently real; Pretti’s parents have said it’s him, and that they already knew about the incident before the video became public. It’s apparently also been authenticated by the BBC, for what that’s worth.
Commenters on the left also seem to think the video shows the brutality of law enforcement. Whereas the rest of us think it shows what an angry aggressive guy Pretti actually was, not the gentle ICU nurse of lore, at least not in these confrontations. He not only yells the F-word over and over with great animus, kicks out the taillight of the car (is it ICE’s or some other law enforcement group’s?), but right before that he appears to spit at the driver. He does all of this (as shown in a video I saw that analyzed the content in slow-motion) while carrying his gun in the waistband area.
He’s guilty of a number of probable misdemeanors and felonies involving damaging the car and spitting at the cop (the saliva doesn’t have to make contact). Supposedly Pretti’s rib was broken in the encounter. If only he’d been arrested, he’d probably be alive today. One thing he did not seem to learn from his experience was to not touch cops; in the fatal encounter he apparently pushed the agent who had pushed a woman who was blocking the way.
You will notice the crowd of people, part of what ICE has to deal with constantly in Minneapolis, as well as the honking of horns and the blowing of the loud whistles. It’s designed to annoy and impede the authorities, and it does. I’ve also read that the whistles could be criminal – impeding – but I’m not sure that’s correct. At any rate, during the fatal encounter I’m convinced the purposeful noise pollution contributed to the confusion among the agents about the removal of Pretti’s gun.
One thing this video doesn’t affect is whether the agents who shot him in the later incident were acting justifiably. Depending on one’s interpretation of that later video, it’s very possible they were acting justifiably because they thought he was armed and had gotten off a shot (instead of the gun misfiring in the agent’s hands). The previous video shows Pretti’s possible state of mind, but that’s actually not especially relevant in the evaluation of the reasonableness of the shooting. It’s the perceptions of the shooters that matter, based on what they saw and heard.
Quite a day
Nothing serious, but …
My car is still not working. Long boring story.
The blog went down just as I had finished writing a post and was in the act of publishing it.
I couldn’t log into the host – that was a first.
I was put on a longish hold when I called the host. But then voila, the customer service person actually fixed the problem. Success!
And then I noticed that comments suddenly weren’t working. Another call to the host, and fortunately another fix. So far.
I think I’m going to take a walk now. It’s actually a beautiful day, although cold.
Tom Homan comes to Minneapolis
And this is what he had to say:
In my meetings with folks so far—and most importantly the governor and the AG to Mayor Fry—we didn’t agree on everything. I didn’t expect to agree on anything. I’ve heard many people want to know why we’re talking to people who they don’t consider friends of the administration. Bottom line is you can’t fix problems if you don’t have discussions. I didn’t come to Minnesota for photo ops or headlines. I came here to seek solutions, and that’s what we’re going to do. …
One thing we all agreed on was [that] U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a legitimate law enforcement agency that has a duty to enforce the laws enacted by Congress and keep this community safe.
That right there is already surprising. Sanctuary cities and states ordinarily refuse to cooperate with that endeavor, which indicates that they don’t agree that ICE is legitimate and don’t agree those laws should be enforced. No one is asking local and state governments to deport people, but if ICE is legitimate it follows that a state or city would do its part to neither impede ICE nor to encourage its citizens to do so. That, unfortunately, has not been the case in Minneapolis.
More:
I didn’t ask [Minnesota state and local officials] to be immigration officers. I’m asking them to be cops working with the cops to help us take criminal aliens off the street.
What we did agree upon is not to release public safety threats back into the community and [that] they could be lawfully transferred to ICE.
I’m surprised by that agreement, too. Will it actually occur? Apparently it’s already begun – at least, that’s how I interpret the following:
I will highlight that the Minnesota State Prison System under the Department of Corrections has been honoring ICE detainers, and we appreciate the important collaboration. We’re going to expand upon that. That decision has made Minnesota safer—not only for residents of Minnesota, but for the men and women of law enforcement, not just ICE, all law enforcement. Rather than arresting the same significant public safety threat over and over again, they agreed to work with us to identify those people and remove them.
And this will happen, supposedly:
I’m also pleased to announce I had a very good meeting with Attorney General Ellison, and he has clarified for me that county jails may notify ICE of the release dates of criminal public safety risks so ICE can take custody of them upon release from the jail.
And this makes lots of sense. Again, it should have happened in Minnesota a long time ago, the way it does in cooperating red states:
One agent can arrest one bad guy in the safety and security of a jail where he’s behind the wire. We know he doesn’t have weapons. But when you normally release that public safety threat—illegal alien—back into the community, we have a job to do. We’re going to arrest him. So we’re going to find him. And what happens is now we’ve got to arrest somebody on his turf. He has access to who knows what weapons. Now we’ve got to send the whole team out—cover the back door, cover the front door—for officer safety reasons. Then, because of the hateful rhetoric and the attacks on ICE officers, now we’ve got to send a security team behind the arrest team. So what could have been done with one person in the safety and security of a jail, now we’ve got 15, 16 people out there doing it.
I know that causes stress in the community. So if we get these agreements in place, that means less agents on the street. More agents in the jail means less agents in the street. This is common sense cooperation that allows us to draw down on the number of people we have here.
More [emphasis mine]:
We will conduct targeted enforcement operations. Targeted—what we’ve done for decades. When we hit the streets, we know exactly who we’re looking for [and have a] good idea where we may find them. You have a criminal history. You have their immigration history. A lot of information about this person that we get from numerous databases out there. Targeted, strategic enforcement operations. That’s traditionally been the case, and that’s where we’re going. That’s what we’re going to continue to do and improve upon with the prioritization on public safety threats.
I wonder what really happened behind closed doors. Walz and Frey are currently being investigated and could be charged. Was there, for example, a promise not to charge them if they cooperate?
In other news, Walz has declared he won’t be running for public office again. Big deal; I don’t think he could win a race for dogcatcher right now.
