He's too big of a liability to get a job at your local mall

My Sunday viewing was Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom. Lunana is a village in northern Bhutan (small enough it doesn’t show on Google maps) and is likely to have the most remote school on earth. A young man named Uygen is teaching at a school in the capital Thimphu. He is called before the education director because he is seen as unmotivated. He would rather move to Australia to be a singer. But he has another year in his teaching contract. So he is sent to Lunana. He is driven to Gasa where two men from Lunana meet him to escort him to the village. They tell him it’s an easy six day hike. They lied. The elevation at Gasa is 2,800 meters (9180 feet) and at Lunana it is 4,800 meters (15,750 feet). The village people, all 68 of them, are delighted to meet their new teacher, a profession they hold in high respect. Yeah, it’s primitive, including only intermittent solar electricity. A fire in the stove is best started with yak dung (he is cautioned it’s best collected after it dries). The classroom has very little paper and no blackboard. Yet, the nine children are charming and eager to learn. A young woman, Saldon, becomes a sort of cultural guide. She sees him trekking a long way for yak dung, so she brings a yak to his classroom so he doesn’t have to walk so far. She says he must keep it in the classroom because it is too cold outside. Of course, also in the classroom is the dung. One begins to suspect a budding romance (with the woman, not the yak). At the harvest season he is told snow is coming. Head back to the city now or you’re stuck here until spring. Will you come back next year? An old story trope is the young man from the city who gets stuck in the hinterlands and finds the locals actually have some pretty good qualities. In these tales a question is whether the lad will stay with his new friends or return to the city. Back in 2019 I saw the documentary A Polar Year with that same outline. It was also about a teacher. A young man of Denmark went to a tiny village in Greenland (a Danish territory) to take the teaching job. In that one he stayed. Lunana was Bhutan’s entry for Best International Feature Film at the Oscars in 2022 and was a finalist. That’s when I became interested in it. It took a while for it to get to Netflix. It has also won and been nominated for awards at various film festivals around the world. The trivia page for this film on IMDb has these entries:

All the actors in Lunana are highlanders, many of whom had never seen the outside world. They had never seen a movie, and had never seen cameras before. ... The director and crew loaded 65 mules with cameras, solar panels, batteries, lights, and sound equipment for the eight-day trek up the mountains to isolated Lunana to undertake filming. ... The crew members of Lunana didn't take bath while they were up there filming for three months because of extreme weather and lack of facility.

Michel Martin of NPR spoke to political strategist Rina Shah about the House votes on foreign aid. They talked about how Speaker Johnson finally stood on principle rather than the nasty House politics, even though he might be removed for it. Shah added this tidbit:

Yeah, it says that he's taken the most principled stance, again, of his speakership. Those folks who are saying that this is the weekend in which he became speaker I believe are not wrong, because this is about governing.

Good to hear that he has, though I wish he had done so maybe five months ago. David Nir of Daily Kos Elections noted that with the resignation of Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher the Republican margin in the House is down to one vote. One Republican can vote against a bill and it will still pass, but not two. But since the Freedom Caucus is much larger than that slim margin Johnson has already been relying on Democrats to pass critical legislation. Which only enrages the Freedom Caucus.

Whatever happens next, the chaos in the ranks of House Republicans will only further serve to remind voters in November that only the Democrats are capable of governing the country. In fact, you could even say that they already are.

Wilson Dizard of the Kos community reported that New York Attorney General Letitia James has asked the court to reject the nasty guy’s bond that he posted so he can appeal his business fraud case. James listed several reasons why the bond is suspect. Knight Specialty Insurance Company, who put up the bond, is not a legitimate bond company. Knight doesn’t have enough cash on hand to cover the bond if it comes due. New York regulators have condemned Knight’s sketchy accounting methods. Federal regulators also complain about the nature of the bond. An Associated Press article posted on Kos that there has been a settlement on what Knight has to do to make the bond acceptable. Kerry Eleveld of Kos reported the group Republican Voters Against Trump have released an ad against the nasty guy and put up six figures to get it aired. The ad shows a job applicant walking a mall asking potential employers if they would hire him as he says he has the legal baggage the nasty guy has – facing 88 felonies, liable for sexual assault, and retention of classified documents. The tagline:

If Trump is too big of a liability to get a job at your local mall, he is too big of a liability to be president of the United States.

In a pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted David Frum of The Atlantic discussing the Ukraine aid bill passed by the House:

At the beginning of this year, Trump was able even to blow up the toughest immigration bill seen in decades—simply to deny President Joe Biden a bipartisan win. Individual Senate Republicans might grumble, but with Trump opposed, the border-security deal disintegrated. Three months later, Trump’s party in Congress has rebelled against him—and not on a personal payoff to some oddball Trump loyalist, but on one of Trump’s most cherished issues, his siding with Russia against Ukraine.

Down in the comments is a cartoon by Vilnissimo showing a person at a laptop talking to another: “Which do you want first? The bad news or the fake news?” In another pundit roundup Dworkin quoted Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post. The conventional wisdom was the nasty guy was going to dominate the courtroom during his trial.

How wrong they were. When the criminal trial actually began, reality hit home. Rather than dominate the proceedings or leverage his court appearance to appear in control and demonstrate no court could corral him, Trump day by day has become smaller, more decrepit and, frankly, somewhat pathetic.

Dworkin had his own comments on the trial:

This is a conspiracy and fraud trial. The prosecution alleges that Donald Trump conspired to keep information from the voting public and committed fraud to do it. It’s being called by media a hush money trial, but it isn't.

Even NPR has been calling it a hush money trial. Down in the comments is a cartoon posted by Fiona Webster. It shows a gunman silhouetted in a classroom door as the kids cower behind a desk. One kid says, “I was safer as a frozen embryo.” NPR is doing a series of stories on roadside historical markers. There are about 180,000 of them across America. Last Sunday host Andrew Limbong had a 16 minute conversation with Laura Sullivan about some markers. She and colleagues didn’t visit them all. They did an analysis using a database of the markers. Not all markers tell the truth. There are markers on alien sightings and on ghosts. Texas claims to be the home of the first airplane flight (the Wright brothers lived in Ohio and tested in North Carolina). They went to a marker in Eufaula, Alabama. The marker is about Edward Brown Young and wife Ann Fendall Beall and their entrepreneurial activities. It doesn’t say he was one of the most powerful men in the slave trade. Nearly 70% of markers for plantations do not mention slavery. Many do vilify the Union or promote the Lost Cause. There is a marker in Tuskegee, Alabama, home of Rosa Parks and the Tuskegee Airmen. The town is 90% black. And in the center of the square is a marker put up by the Daughters of the Confederacy, a highly racist group made up almost entirely of white women. The town would like to get rid of it. But many markers are owned by private groups, such as the Daughters. They don’t live or pay taxes in Tuskegee, yet they dominate the square. Getting this marker removed is in court. Many markers are 50 to 100 years old. It’s hard to discover who owns the marker and the land, who to contact to remove it. Three states – Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee – passed laws prohibiting the removal of markers, no matter how wrong or offensive they are. While other groups have been working to remove Confederate monuments the Daughters have been erecting more markers, “proof that the victors of war do not always get to write its history.” Bryan Stevenson eventually became executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. In his early days he noted the words slave, slavery, and enslavement didn’t appear in Montgomery. He asked the Alabama Historical Association to put up markers about slavery, but was told that’s “to controversial.” So he followed the idea of the Daughters: “If you want to own the narrative, write it yourself.” The National Memorial to Peace and Justice in Montgomery has more than 100 markers. One way to deal with offensive markers is to put up adjacent markers, perhaps bigger, that tell the rest of the story. Theo Moore, the African American heritage coordinator for the Alabama Historical Commission, noted another aspect of markers. Cities like Tuskegee and Tuscaloosa were named after Creek Native Americans. Where are their markers? Monday was Earth Day and this is National Park Week. So let’s honor one of the better ideas to come from America. Jacob Fischler of Michigan Advance reported:

The Bureau of Land Management will publish a final rule soon allowing the nation’s public lands to be leased for environmental protection, a Thursday news release from the Interior Department said. The rule, which both proponents and detractors say marks a shift in the agency’s focus toward conservation, directs land managers at the agency to identify landscapes in need of restoration and to create plans to fill those needs.

I like the idea. Alas, the article doesn’t say for these leases who is giving money to whom. Does a group pay for the privilege of raising and spending money to restore the land? That’s what I think of when BLM and leases are discussed. I’m sure there are groups that would do it. Or does the BLM pay the groups to improve the land for the BLM? Bill in Portland, Maine, in a Cheers and Jeers column for Kos, wrote:

I have never seen... A bison throw a cigarette butt out a window A flock of geese blow the top off a mountain A seal cause an oil spill A raccoon go out and leave all the house lights on A bobcat fight legislation to lower carbon emissions A songbird sing "Drill Baby, Drill" A pride of lions wage war over oil

...and many more. And something good for your eyes: The US Department of the Interior has a page with some beautiful photos from our national parks. Of the thirteen shown here I’ve been to ten of them – and to many more not shown here.