A book full of humanity, humor, and tenderness

I finished the book My Friends by Fredrik Backman. On the title page translator Neil Smith is listed, so I had to do some checking. Backman is Swedish, so a translator is necessary. The story is triggered by a painting. Most people looking at it see it as a painting of the sea. But Louisa sees there is also a pier and three boys in their early teens portrayed as laughing. Louisa spent most of your childhood in the foster care system and at one point was given a postcard of the painting. That painting is up for auction and she just has to see the real thing before it is sold for millions. She does see it before being thrown out of the auction. Then she encounters the artist who, with his friend Ted, sold all they had to buy it back. The artist recognizes Louisa as a fellow artist. That night the artist dies, telling Ted to give the painting to her. She doesn’t want something that expensive. But Louisa, just turned 18 and out of the foster care system, convinces Ted to take her with him as he boards the train to return to his home. On the way he tells her about the origins of the painting. The story then switches back and forth between the summer when Ted and his friends are fourteen, about to turn fifteen, when the painting was created and Ted traveling with Louisa twenty-five years later. Beside Ted and the artist (never explicitly named until the end of the book) the friends are Joar and Ali, the one girl in the group. Yep, one of the boys in the painting is a girl. They spend as much time together as possible and most of that time is on the pier or in the sea around it. They’re together so much because their home life is bad. Joar’s father is abusive. Ted’s is dying. Ali’s father tends to not pay bills so she’s in town only a couple years before dad needs to move on to avoid creditors. And the artist’s parents think he’s strange, drawing all the time, and just want him to be normal. Joar recognizes the artist’s talent. He also recognizes the artist can’t stay in this city and develop his craft. The artist isn’t doing much after being thrown out of the class of a nasty art teacher. So Joar announces that a contest is coming up and the artist absolutely must enter it, then makes sure he does, creating this painting. In the later time Ted took care of the artist as he was dying. There is strong implication that they were a gay couple. That is reinforced on the train ride when Louisa notices Ted admiring he conductor. Though this explains some of the artist’s strangeness, that they are probably gay is barely mentioned. Though the kids are dealing with bad home lives they are great friends to each other with days that are idyllic. Being fourteen they also get into mischief, usually with funny consequences. There are moments of blessing with mothers, older brothers, and various adults. It’s a beautiful story, full of humanity, humor, and tenderness. There isn’t much plot, though a great deal of simply living. Backman is an excellent writer and Smith did a masterful job in translating – I thought of the translation process a lot while reading. I very much enjoyed this book and highly recommend it. I may have to find some of his other books. Nick Romeo, in an article for Capital & Main posted on Daily Kos wrote that the most dangerous innovation of Silicon Valley is tech fascism. He discussed this with author and journalist Gil Durán, who wrote the book The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy. Romeo described tech fascism...

This anti-democratic ideology is destroying laws and norms while promising a glorious future delivered by technology, and it’s now moving from the fringe belief of a few eccentric billionaires to the cultural mainstream, according to Durán.

Some of the major points Durán talked about: There is a rising cult of Silicon Valley billionaires “who believe that technology is going to make democracy obsolete in the 21st century.” It is fascism because it aligns with the MAGA cult and is funding the nasty guy through gifts and crypto.

Fascism is generally a cult of grievance and self-victimization that promises a return to greatness through the purging and persecution of enemy groups. What tech fascism adds is that instead of only promising a return to some greater period in the past, it also promises this great, glorious future that will be achieved if only we eliminate the obstacles in our way, including regulation, law, democracy and anybody who opposes this acceleration of technology.

AI is being marketed as a terrifying invention that will fundamentally disrupt our lives quickly while not giving us a choice. Yeah, a lot of it is hype, but AI isn’t harmless and is already having an effect. The AI industry is calling it an existential threat to humanity and the biggest job killer ever. Of course, there is a backlash. Another claim is AI will create super abundance. We already have that, but too much of it is sucked up by the tech billionaires. The tech bros are claiming that AI is promising the greatest economic depression (except for billionaires becoming trillionaires). That’s while AI seems less useful than its marketers say.

We are taught to revere wealthy people. If you’re wealthy, it means you’re morally better. It means you’re a superior intellect, and you’re important, and people should be in awe of you. I think that people get this idea in our country that somehow people become billionaires because they’re smart and disciplined and visionary, which is actually not the case at all. And unfortunately billionaires also buy into this myth of their own greatness.

The tech bros demand all the power to destroy everything and no one has the right to stop them. What if farmers said that? Or garbage men? His book is about, “the radicalization of Silicon Valley billionaires into the most dangerous anti-democratic force the country has ever faced.” We have to deal with the billionaire threat. But many of the big champions of the Democratic Party blast at the nasty guy, but not at billionaires. The nasty guy will be around for only a couple more years. Tech bros will be around a lot longer. There are some Democrats speaking out, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. People don’t trust billionaires. We need politicians that won’t take billionaire money and will increase the distrust. Start with the 5% wealth tax on California’s ballot. It’s great, but not nearly enough. In Wednesday’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted Jill Lawrence of The Bulwark listing the three new demands that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made that prompted Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, to pull out of trade talks. The quotes are quite likely from Carney:

Limits on Canada’s ability to negotiate and sign trade deals. Canada has negotiated twenty economic and security partnerships in the last year, and forthcoming deals in the next six months could double its market access. “We’re the partner of choice in many respects for countries around the world and the Americans wanted to restrict that. ... It’s a power play and becomes a question of sovereignty.” Continual efforts “until the very last minute” to restrict French language protections (like bilingual labels), Canadian culture, “and in effect our sovereignty,” even though “these issues were never on the table” and never will be. Late U.S. demands that would have been unfair to Canadian auto parts and extended favorable tariff treatment to some cars and trucks but not others. The exclusions were “a big change” with no rationale given, Carney said, and would have made Canadian vehicle production “more uneconomic over time.”

Each of the three sounds like a good reason to pull out of the talks. In the comments exlrrp posted a meme of a Dolly Parton quote from the Larry King Now show in 2016:

If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you’re straight, you’re straight. And you should be allowed to be how you are and who you are.

Thanks, Dolly. Another meme posted by exlrrp:

Remember when Trump collected $12 billion dollars, started WWIII, & then we never heard from the Board of Peace again? One of Trump’s biggest scams and nobody ever talks about it.

In the comments of today’s roundup exlrrp posted a meme about the broken trade talks with Canada that prompted the nasty guy to order Lake Ontario be renamed Lake America. The meme has the text:

Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, announced today that the United States of America will be renamed South Canada, the 14th Province.

Another meme posted by exlrrp show a house labeled Quality of Life and rooms labeled Affordable Housing, Healthcare, Good Jobs, Lower Prices, Safe Communities, and Education all going up in flames. In front of the house the nasty guy is telling a man in a MAGA hat, “Oh look, a trans person!” Anil Dash has a couple tweets on Meta’s settlement over the harm its products might do to children and teens:

So Meta will always choose to pay, rather than to fight, because then it doesn't have to change. The initial investigation by the FTC into Facebook's abuse of its users was *SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO*, and that one also ended in a settlement. After which, they... went back to abuse their users. Meta is a creep who will _never_ take no for an answer, and never stop trying to ignore their lack of consent. Every media & regulatory organization in the world seems determined to ignore this reality; I genuinely don't understand why. Today's settlement is so that Meta can keep violating consent.

David Michigan added that the $17 billion in payments will be spread out over ten years. This becomes barely more than a rounding error to the company. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos has something to say about Meta’s settlement:

No admission of algorithmic skullduggery. No apologies. No nothing. Just some chump change distributed to a bunch of states that will probably toss it into their general fund to shore up their coffers a bit. But, hey, Zucky Boy promises—cross his heart and all!—that he’ll “make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm [to kids] from its platforms—and will do it within months.” And here’s my promise: I’ll let you know when media outlets start publishing stories “within months” about how Facebook and Instagram’s “transformations” are riddled with holes, if they’ve been done at all.

Bill also remembered an event from, 2002, which was 24 years ago. Bush II invited Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan to his Crawford ranch. In on the meeting was Adel Al-Jubeir, a foreign policy adviser to the Saudi kingdom.

“If the objective is to dismantle the weapons of mass destruction program, we could probably do that without going to war,” Al-Jubeir said. “Why not use that option? Why do people want to risk the lives of tens of thousands of American men and women in uniform for an objective that can be achieved through negotiations?”

Bill added:

Oh, let’s see: to get our hands on cheap oil, to feed the military-industrial complex, to scare Americans into re-electing the macho Republicans, to bully the world, to get revenge on Saddam for “tryin’ to kill muh daddy,” and to act out G.I. Joe fantasies aboard an aircraft carrier under a “Mission Accomplished” banner. Other than that, I got nothin’.

Some debt is good other debt is not. The reason matters.

An Associated Press article posted on Daily Kos reports that Meta, Mark Zuckerberg’s company, has settled a case over teen social media addiction, agreeing to pay $17 billion. The suit had been filed by 29 states. I think another 18 states had files separate suits. This trial had been in the news for about a week. The accusation is that Meta, parent to Facebook and Instagram, designed its products to be addictive, especially to youth. In addition to monetary damages the suit wants to force Meta to change how its products work. That Meta let a week go by before settling implies to me that the evidence presented so far is quite damaging to the company or that worse was about to be revealed. Another aspect of settling is they don’t have to admit to causing harm (though if that were the only reason they could have settled before the trial began). They can claim they are making these changes because of how benevolent they are. I think that Meta’s payout of $17 billion is too small compared to its 2025 revenue of $201 billion. In addition to paying the cash, Meta agreed to a few things for teen accounts. There would be a hard limit to daily use – I think I heard two hours. They would limit push notifications during school hours and overnight. They would add “age-appropriate” content controls and strengthen parental controls. Lisa Needham of Kos reported the nasty guy’s ballroom has lost a primary reason for being built. He has said the ballroom is part of a military bunker for the White House. But, according to a Washington Post report, the White House has a military bunker. This one was actually rather secret – Obama built it after 9/11 and didn’t blab about it. It also looks to be a great deal more secure and survivable even during a nuclear blast, than what the nasty guy has been proclaiming for his bunker and ballroom. How can the ballroom be all that secure when it has so many and such large glass windows?

All of this makes it clear that the ballroom was always just a ballroom and that the military complex beneath it was invented out of whole cloth to justify the ballroom. And once Trump came up with that genius idea, everyone surrounding him just ran with it. ... Can’t wait for the next Democratic administration to tear the whole thing down, especially now that we know that the big, secret, totally necessary bunker was there all along. Nobody needs this gilded palace of sin.

Needham also reported on the comments of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner. He has a solution for the ballroom – blow it up and sell the chunks as souvenirs as a way to recoup the costs to the American taxpayers. That’s in the same way chunks of the old Berlin Wall were sold (and I have a piece). Krasner would like a chunk of the ballroom to use as a paperweight. Kos community member xaxnar commented on an article by Celeste Davis, written for her Substack. Back in the 1950s college students were 2:1 men. By the 1990s the ratio of men to women was about even. Now 60% of students are women. A big dropoff in college enrollment is men not going. What happened to the men? Why aren’t as many going to college? There are a lot of reasons that have been proposed, including: Men having other employment opportunities that don’t need college and pay just as well. Their behavior is rewarded for things that don’t encourage scholarship. Men lean more conservative and college seems too lefty. Davis thinks there is a simpler reason: Male flight. This is similar to white flight, which turned many cities black while their suburbs are mostly white. Male flight means men tend to leave professions where women reach about 60%. When women’s participation reaches that high, it is seen as a women’s profession and men don’t want it anymore. That has happened to Veterinary medicine. And it is now happening to attending college. The exception is gay men, becoming the most highly educated demographic. But when education is seen as the thing for women we have a species at war with itself, which doesn’t have a viable future. Douglas Schonenberg of the Kos community commented on America getting to $40 trillion in debt. Now that the debt is so large Republicans like to say Democrats added to the debt too! But that is a flawed argument. We as individual humans would reasonably go into debt to pay for critical medical care, renovations to the house, or even buy a house. Some debt is good other debt is not. The reason matters. Obama added to the national debt to pull the nation out of the Great Recession. The nasty guy and Biden added to the debt to rescue the economy from the pandemic. The nasty guy and Republicans added to the debt, not to rescue us from economic calamity, but to give more money to the already extremely wealthy. They did it both in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 and the Big Brutal Bill of 2025. So when Republicans say we have to do something about the debt and the place to do that is Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid, Schonenberg asks why there? “The government needs to spend less” is not the answer. The government needs to spend better. Schonenberg wants the government to spend money on scientific research, clean energy, updating infrastructure, making healthcare more affordable, education for all, and support for workers. Government should not have the purpose of giving money to the already rich and gutting programs for others. And it shouldn’t hand the bill to future generations. Borrowing money so the rich become richer doesn’t make sense. To lower the debt let’s have an honest conversation. Does defense need those new weapons systems? Are those military contracts necessary? Let’s look at tax loopholes, corporate subsidies, low capital gains taxes, and tax rates for the rich. Borrowing money to improve the lives of all Americans makes a great deal of sense. Taxing responsibly should mean not needing to borrow money to improve the lives of all Americans. Dolly Parton died at the age of 80. I trust you heard the news by now. If you haven’t Jewly Hight of NPR has an obituary, as does Lisa Needham of Kos. I saw a meme saying the wrong 80 year old died. Michel Martin of NPR talked to country music journalist Tom Roland, who co-authored Parton's photographic memoir, “Star of the Show: My Life on Stage” about Parton’s importance to country music. I’m not a fan of Parton’s style of music. It’s just not my thing. If you like it, go for it! I am a fan of Parton’s character. She was always charming, and uplifting. I could add another dozen warm descriptors, including support for the LGBTQ community. She amassed wealth and used it for uplifting others. Just one example of that is her Imagination Library. Maureen Pao of NPR reported that has provided more than 300 million books to children around the world. The gift of reading was a way to honor her father, who never learned to read. An interview with Parton that’s gotten a few airings over the last few days talks about how she grew up as one of a dozen children. They didn’t have much money, but they did have what counted: love and kindness. I’m sure her remaining wealth and royalties from her catalog of 3,000 songs will continue to uplift others.

Constantly be tested on what it means to be a man

My Sunday movie was Drive Back Home. It is set in 1970 Canada. Weldon, in a small town in New Brunswick, gets a call from Toronto police saying his brother Perley was caught having sex with a man in a park. If family picked Perley up and took him home he could avoid jail time, as much as five years. Yes, this is a way to out a man to his family. Weldon, definitely a blue collar type, refuses to do it, but his mother demands that he go. So he does. He “borrows” his boss’s old truck and loads up with gas and sandwiches so that he doesn’t need to stop in Quebec – he doesn’t know French – and does the 800 mile trip to Toronto. He collects his brother. The purpose of a road trip is so the two people, through the adventures they experience, begin to understand each other. That takes a while because Weldon is quite annoyed he has to do this and with Perley’s insistence on bringing his taxidermied dog. There’s also some homophobic violence along the way. Thie IMDb page says the writer and director Michael Clowater based the story on true events involving his grandfather and grandpa’s partner. Though this is Clowater’s first film, he has enough friends in the movie business he was able to get Alan Cumming to play Perley. The actor who played Weldon isn’t someone I know. Overall, it’s a pretty good story about a time when being gay was dangerous. I was amused that whenever we see the truck crossing the rural landscape there is no other vehicle in the frame. But when we see into the truck to watch the characters interact, we can see out the back and there are always two vehicles following. Bob Berwyn, in an article for Inside Climate News posted on Daily Kos reported on the political consequences of the series of deadly heat waves that hit Europe this summer. One part is elected leaders facing constituent scrutiny because their response to the heat has been significantly insufficient. The other part is far right parties are “blaming governments they oppose for failing to protect people from the impacts of global warming, while denying that human activity is driving it.” In that first part a Green Party official said leaders know what to do. Meteorologists know how to forecast extreme heat. Public health experts know what things to do to reduce deaths. Yet, large numbers of people still died. That implies the known things to do weren’t done, but could also mean even if they were done well they couldn't handle the magnitude of the problem. Last week I wrote that perhaps four billion might die from the effects of global warming by 2050. Include in that tally 10,000 from the first heat wave this year, 63,000 in 2024, 51,000 in 2023 and so on back through the years. In Linz, Austria there is a department to make the city more resilient to climate shocks. They took “climate” out of the name of the department. Support of climate mitigation is tenuous. The far right parties complain that trees, which offer shade and lock away carbon, take up space that should go to roads and parking spaces, things that contribute to the heat. They also have a propaganda campaign to confuse the causes of the climate crisis and undermine the shift to renewables, such as wind. As for the general public, the heat has removed the political apathy. That comes as the media is covering climate change less. Kelcie Moseley-Morris, in an article for Stateline posted on Kos, reported a federal court ruling in Idaho could send abortion to the Supreme Court again, this time in a way that is beneficial to women. The ruling says there is a narrow right to an abortion if the pregnancy could be a risk to their health and, key phrase here, including their mental health. Maybe this could be the start of a slow erosion to Dobbs in the way anti-abortion advocates chipped away at Roe. The problems of an abortion ban that doesn’t have exceptions for a woman’s health – there are states with such bans – are becoming well documented. I’ve written about a few cases. They center on the issue of how sick does a woman have to be before an abortion is allowed to be done. I’m glad to see a court decision saying such abortions must be allowed. In this ruling anti-abortion advocates are concerned about what constitutes a pregnancy causing mental harm. What if a woman comes to an emergency room and threatens to harm herself if not given an abortion? Of course, I believe that if a woman wants an abortion she should get one. Dion Nissenbaum, in an article for Votebeat posted on Kos reported that the US Census Bureau released a report showing an analysis of the 2020 election that has “high confidence” that 24,000 noncitizens voted that year. The nasty guy said that proved he won the 2020 election. The Census Bureau said they examined 128 million voters to come up with their 24,000 figure. Election experts say there are some big flaws in this report, and that itself is concerning because the Census Bureau is usually meticulous in getting all the details right. Some of the problems: 24,000 is only 0.019% of 128 million, statistically minuscule. In no state election in 2020 would the number of noncitizen votes assigned to that state in this report have changed the outcome. This report does not list authors. It does not detail the reliability of the data nor the method of analysis. That makes them look like they’re hiding something. Of course, the nasty guy will use this report in his cry of voter fraud. NPR host Danielle Kurtzleben spoke to political reporter Elena Moore and producer Marc Rivers about how manhood is portrayed in movies. This is a part of their weekly series discussing various aspects of cinema. Yeah, there are whole genres of films that portray manhood – Westerns, gangster films, and movies like Top Gun. Rivers discussed two in particular.

In both of these films, we see that to be a man, living as a man means to constantly be tested on what it means to be a man. And so in "Carnal Knowledge," it's what kind of woman you can get. It's - and how many women can you get with? What kind of job can you get? In "Wake In Fright," it's - how strong are you? How many drinks can you guzzle? The screenwriter for "Carnal Knowledge" has talked about how he pitched his movie as a film about heterosexual men who don't like women. ... They think of women as objects that kind of project their own fantasies about how their life is supposed to be. So yeah, both of these films, I think, it presents masculinity as a constant performance and a fear of being humiliated by other men.

Moore said:

Some of the big themes that I've heard talking with young voters for years now, and especially young men out of the 2024 election - I'll go even more specific - is this feeling of feeling forgotten, this feeling of buying into a system that has not worked for them and this feeling of not meeting expectations that have been set for them. And I think for many people, in the political sense, that's translated to disaffection. That's translated to distrust in the system. And those are themes that have been reflected in movies forever. But, you know, not going too far back. I think a prime example is David Fincher's 1999 "Fight Club." ... The whole movie kind of explores this idea of, like, men realizing they are not alone in that anger and that frustration.

Then there are films like “Moonlight” of 2016 which is about a man who is gay and black. It shows how a man can break from the community expectation of what a man is.