The ease and comfort in which he spouts his racism

My Sunday movie was Love & Vodka. I attended the premier of the movie as the closing film of the Cinetopia Film Festival in Ann Arbor. Yeah, I actually sat in a movie theater, something I’ve done little of in the last four year. The movie is so new that perhaps it isn’t quite done, or maybe it’s just that the post production team, who scrambled to get it done, haven’t been fully paid yet. This is the story of Bobby and Katya and is based on real life. The two meet when he nearly bumps into her. They like each other right off, but Katya is going home to Ukraine the next day. They message each other over the next year. Katya then challenges Bobby if you want to take this further come visit me. And he takes the gamble. A good chunk of the movie is Bobby in Ukraine visiting the family at their dacha and making one cultural gaffe after another, yet falling in love with Katya. The vodka comes in at a pivotal scene where various toasts prompt Bobby to drink too much of it. This story of a lover making a mess in a foreign culture has been told many times. I enjoyed the movie but I don’t think any of the actors will be getting Oscars. I heard about this movie only last Friday (I hadn’t heard Cinetopia was in progress) in an episode of Stateside on Michigan Public (the last twenty minutes or so here). Host April Bear talked to director Heidi Philipsen-Meissner, associate producer Amber Galkin, and Zach Bradley, the actor who played Bobby. After the movie was shown those same people and several more came on stage to talk of the experience and answer questions. The original Bobby Fox is known as RJ Fox and teaches film at a high school in Ann Arbor. His experience in Ukraine was in 2001. He published a book with the same name in 2015. Heidi Philipsen-Meissner’s son was in Fox’s class and the teacher knew the mother was a movie producer. He had written a screenplay based on the events of the book and asked her to look at it. She was intrigued. First, there were lots of rewrites. Then a pandemic. Then a war. Then an actor’s strike. So a lot had to change, including more rewrites to take the war into account. Bradley talked about joining the cast about four days before shooting started. The Ukraine part of the story could not be shot there. So the pine forests of northern Michigan were substituted for the forest around the family dacha. And the Midland – Bay City – Saginaw airport got Bobby from Michigan to Kyiv (the outside for the departing scene, the inside for the arrival). Associate producer Amber Galkin was got the job because she was a link to the Ukrainian community in Michigan. She was able to verify the cultural details, supply actors from her community who still spoke Ukrainian, and to go through the script and replace all the Russian words with Ukrainian – when Fox visited in 2001 the region he was in did speak Russian, but would not do so now. They even debated whether the word “vodka” was too Russian, but decided it now had international use. I knew before watching that the movie was shot in Michigan, not Ukraine. When Bobby and Katya are sitting in the forest and we hear the birds singing I thought of a bird specialist. He had said that a movie set in the Black Forest of Germany was ruined when he heard the birdcall of an American bird that is not seen in Europe. So as I heard the birds in this movie was I hearing Ukrainian birds added to the soundtrack or was I hearing Michigan birds? I doubt they went through the effort of recording Ukrainian birds. Adrian Florido of NPR talked to Jill Lepore, professor of US History at Harvard about the US Constitution. It was adopted on June 21, 1788 when New Hampshire was the ninth state to ratify it. So it is 236 years old. As the document that governs the government it had a lot of tremendously important innovations for the time. But even a document that important needs to be able to change, to be amended. The last meaningful amendment was 50 years ago. It hasn’t been amended since then because of polarization. It must get two-thirds approval in both houses of Congress. Then three-quarters of the states must ratify it. In a Congress known for doing nothing getting enough votes is not going to happen. When the amendment procedure was written that wasn’t considered a high bar. There are three ways to change fundamental law. First, we can amend the Constitution. Second, we can convince the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution differently. Third, revolution. Option 1 is impossible. Option 2 isn’t working because this particular Supreme Court is working to restore the original document, shed all the interpretations that have made life better. And option 3: “The danger of having an unamendable Constitution is that the risk of insurrection rises. ... Amendment was meant to be the remedy against insurrection.” A way to look at America’s Constitutional problems is to study all the proposed amendments that didn’t pass, even ideas that were proposed that didn’t get as far as actual amendment language. Constitutional scholars rarely look at all that. If the Constitution is going to be adapted only through the Supreme Court, “we really need a richer, fuller past.” Also on NPR Hawaii Public Radio's Savannah Harriman-Pote talked about the lawsuit a dozen young plaintiffs brought against the state over climate change. A while back I wrote about a similar case in Montana which, like other states fought against the suit as hard as it could. Last summer a Montana judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, saying the state must consider climate impacts when issuing permits for fossil fuel projects. The government appealed. In Hawaii the outcome is different – Governor Josh Green agreed with the plaintiffs. Harriman-Pote said:

Under the settlement, the state has agreed to develop a comprehensive plan to reduce carbon emissions from transportation, which is the largest source of climate pollution in Hawaii. It also agreed to create a special council of young people to advise on the process, including some of the plaintiffs.

Alas, there are only two or three other states that have environmental rights in their state constitution, making this sort of suit possible. A few days ago I wrote about the silly claim that America needed to abandon clean energy initiatives because the power needs of computers to run AI is so high. Mark Sumner, in this week’s 7 Stories for Daily Kos, wrote about why the claim is so silly – solar power and corresponding battery storage is getting so cheap and expanding so fast we can cover the power needs of AI. The amount of electricity generated by solar passed nuclear and oil about 2017. This year it passed the capacity of hydro. Within a year it will pass the capacity of gas and coal. Back at the beginning of June Jennifer Gerson, in an article for The 19th posted on Kos, wrote that a few mass shootings prompted state changes in law. The shootings were in East Lansing and Oxford, Michigan; Buffalo, New York; Lewiston, Maine; and Albuquerque, New Mexico. The common piece in those five shootings is that their governors are all women and they made gun safety a priority. They are Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Kathy Hochul of New York, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, and Janet Mills of Maine. Gun laws used to be the third-rail of politics. They aren’t so much anymore. Yeah, the laws they passed – secure storage, background checks, removing guns from dangerous people, banning guns from parks and playgrounds – are a big help, but not enough to end the menace. Much more needs to be done. In a pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Tyler Austin Harper of The Atlantic who wrote about vandals at Stonehenge who protested the lack of movement on environmental issues. The paint was easily removed, so there was no harm. The videos of the act got more than 30 million views and lots of outrage. A bit of what Harper said:

But the protest left me frustrated: yet another example of environmental activism that produces more rancor over its means than focus on its message.

Much better, wrote Harper, was sneaking onto Stanstead Airport outside London and spray-painting two private jets. The owners were rich people whose use of private jets mean they are much more responsible for climate change than the rest of us. Down in the comments are several interesting cartoons and memes. Jesse Duquette posted a cartoon with the caption “Louisiana.” It shows Jesus in a red cap saying to his disciples, “Forty-seventh in education? Just put my Dad’s weird rules up all over the place and pretend you’re helping.” Hil.i.am suggests the large, legible display of the commandments required for every classroom be shown in the original Hebrew. Make it Stop has a meme with the words:

Posting the Ten Commandments in Louisiana Public Schools should open the doors for also posting the Five Pillars of Islam, the Five Precepts of Buddhism, the 613 Jewish Mitzvot, the Rastafarian Commandments, the Dharma of Hinduism, the Five Principles of Shinto, and the Disasporic Religion of Haitian Vodou, to mention but a few of the over 6,000 estimated religions practiced on earth.

Rambler797 include a couple videos about Project 2025. The first was posted by TrumpFile, who wrote,

Here's Trump alluding to the fact that Project 2025 will end free and fair elections. “In four years you don't have to vote, ok. In four years don't vote, I don't care... We'll have it all straightened out so it'll be much different.”

The second one was posted by TrumpsTaxes:

Project 2025, straight from the horse’s mouth (President of the Heritage Foundation). Note the ease and comfort in which he spouts the racism, misogyny and conspiracy theories that will be central to policy in a 2nd Trump term. Wake up, folks.

Drew Sheneman posted a cartoon of a man looking at his basement’s damage because... “There’s three feet of climate change hoax in my basement!” And way down in the comments in among the artwork Onomastic I recently discovered is posting every day is this:

I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people, and then penalize them for not being able to stand up under the weight. – Malcolm X

In another pundit roundup are more good cartoons and memes. Bill Bramhall showed a classroom where the Ten Commandments are posted beside the ten points of an active shooter drill. exlrrp posted a couple memes. The first shows Jesus comforting the nasty guy: “Don’t worry, you’ll enjoy Hell. There’s people just like you there.” The second says, “Republicans want to impose the Ten Commandments on schoolchildren, but not on their candidate.” Way down in the comments is a post by Billy Goat Tavern on June 23:

On this date in 1944, the Republican Convention began at the Chicago Stadium. Billy “Goat” Sianis put up his famous “No Republican’s Allowed” sign, causing his bar to be filled with Republicans demanding to be served and leading to Billy’s most profitable day ever.