WCS 79: Kakistocracy comes alive!
w/: Signal @ SF City Hall + my Nazi trip + The Hood Half-Marathon
Blame Bruno Ganz for my obsession with Nazis.
The late German actor stars in Wings of Desire, which is always in contention for the title of My Favorite Film. As a result, the inclination is to check out anything the great Ganz was in. His operatic turn in Downfall came to my attention in the spring of 2023, early in the Biden Administration’s last half. Trump threat levels were at their lowest since 2015. The screening took place in Fresno.
Even without the obvious contemporary threat, Downfall became the fascination that would spur a deep interest in the hows and whys of fascism, particularly around World War II. Enlightened cinematic pieces like Malèna and Judgement at Nuremburg would not have entered me without that slow consideration of nearly two springs ago.
Thanks once more, Bruno Ganz.
The film largely lives in the unique bunker mentality of The Third Reich’s close. Ganz acts as Adolph Hitler, a fulminating madman who has overplayed his hand. The Allied Forces are closing in at a rate that’s not exactly glacial? But real fuckin slow.
Encroachment, with inevitability.
And here is the transcendent component: As the tension builds, Hitler’s lieutenants begin offing themselves, underground. Periodically—almost literally punctuating the narrative—one of these fuckers puts a German pistol to their chin and just pops out the lights.
I love watching Nazis off themselves. Makes my dick hard.
It’s the most glorious thing. My eyes have brimmed with joyful tears, just thinking about and typing: Nazis blowing out their brains.
Oh, to be rid of them!
Why am I writing about Downfall in this precise moment, you ask? Because the US President ain’t no Hitler. That man’s evil was well earned.
Hitler had visceral familiarity with struggle. He begged on the street to stave off hunger, seriously tried to make it as a painter when he wasn’t too good at that. Distinctly unique mental health issues aside, Donald Trump is a soft punk who gleans power from the weakness of others.
The nigga eighty-five percent press release.
What’s more, the Whites House occupant has a few tells. When 4547 is feeling the heat, for example, he looks down and to the right, as though being admonished by his father. He showed that tell on Tuesday, in the early portion of a scandal that could prove significant.
Only the best people should start exploiting Trump’s tells.
This week I am feeling more confident than I have in a while that the current US President is bound to crash. Author Michael Wolff said recently that Trump’s gambit ends with the New York real estate jerk in tears. This is acceptable to me, though my deep desire is for so much more.
Hello to every eyeball owner who consumed yesterday’s Caen outtakes.
Bonus Herb Caen
The few famished subscribers who consume entire Friday newsletters can confirm that the more compelling three-dot journalism sometimes lies at the bottom, a reward for having hung in there.
These deletions say a lot about the quality of this week’s batch and almost certainly heighten Caen expectations. But first…
10 Pushing NPR rightward over decades
The broadcaster being under attack as a progressive propaganda outlet is one fine marker of the culture’s backward slide across this young-ish century.
How much territory has the GOP annexed in its war against independent journalism? In the early 2010s, the network was still airing personal essays from a wide range of American POVs and famous voices like Frank Deford. To quell the right’s complaints of liberal bias, the news organization quashed that storytelling and opinion. Now a Trumped-up right hopes to land the death blow.
Associated Press
On Wednesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green held a hearing in which she and fellow Republicans displayed their untreated obsession with queer issues and demonstrated very limited knowledge of public broadcast programming beyond MAGA talking points.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting receives about half a billion dollars in public funding. Though vital to NPR and PBS functions, the money takes up such a minute portion of the federal budget that its skimpiness discredits any cost-saving pretext.
That rural populations depend on public radio may be all that keeps these media outlets intact.
The fascists hate diversity and will not stop until all news reporting looks like one America.
Lil Hit
In citing turbulences in world markets, China’s Premier Li Qiang said that “[f]alling back to the law of the jungle will be a regression in history and a tragedy for humanity.
NPR
The Herb Caen Experience
It’s not gallows humor if they’ve always despised you. It’s fucking reportage…
Reminder: The idea is to make Tesla the new Hummer, a brand designed to appeal to the luxury class that becomes a kind of albatross for the wealthy…
Today’s finest bad acting can be found on Pornhub and at cabinet-level Trump press availabilities…
The pictures I saw of JuJu Watkins grimacing and grasping her right knee on Monday hurt my heart…
The manner in which Elizabeth May invited Washington, Oregon, and California to become part of Canada makes her my favorite pol of 2025, so far…
Pretty perfect that Evil Pete Hegseth classified the events of 2017 in Charlottesville as a hoax on Monday, and if anyone with a big mic has asked for a clarification? They haven’t done it very effectively…
It’s the sole responsibility of corporate media companies that mainstream America has been slipping toward oligarchy over at least three decades and is only now learning the word…
9 Julio Rodriguez, Seattle’s most famous & frustrating baseball star
The best young centerfielder in Major League Baseball was Rookie of the Year in 2022, fourth in MVP voting in 2023, and just “Meh” last year.
Always a sluggish offensive starter, Julio Rodriguez is guaranteed to make the Mariners’ stellar pitching staff better. But Seattle won’t touch its goals without peak offensive production from the gifted, $200 million star.
Spokane Spokesman Review
Fangraphs projects Rodriguez to tally a career-best 6.2 WAR, after putting up a disappointing 4.3 in 2024. If you don’t understand that sentence, you are part of why baseball is no longer too popular in the US.
Lil Hit
The Hood Half Marathon proves that running through historically-Black South Central LA can be good for one’s mental health.
Capital & Main
8 Cali’s abuzz over Haney tax relief bill
San Francisco Assemblyman Matt Haney, the Instagram follower that I will eventually get onto the West Coast Sojourn podcast, has followed up his ground-breaking cannabis cafe legislation with a bill that would spare state legal weed operations a 25 percent tax increase on July 1.
KGVT-San Diego
Assembly Bill 564 would repeal a required tax rate increase that was passed in 2022 as part of a bill that got rid of a wrong-headed cultivation tax.
Meanwhile, the Cancer Action Network has been speaking out against lounges and held a Sacramento protest against prospect of them.
Lil Hit
Enjoy stories about West Coasters who are so disgustingly wealthy that a $100,000 smoking room isn’t even the most remarkable aspect of their home? Well, this Bel Air weed mogul’s yarn will float your boat. Dude hasn’t even lived in the joint yet!
Realtor
One more plug for a Sacramento homie…
The latest by my young Sactown compadre Marshall Garvey dropped this week. The 1985 World Series might not resonate for you, but a lot of dudes over 50 would love to go back there, via Garvey’s vividly-detailed interviews. Order the hardcover edition or consume the iconic story digitally.
7 Behold: The Caitlin Clark Effect
Let me be the first to say it: She’s coming, the biggest cultural flashpoint sport has brought to the table since Dennis Rodman’s heyday. What’s more, this baller’s the biggest box office monster this side of Taylor Swift. She is pretty good at the game, too.
And Caitlin Clark is still only getting started.
Bowling Green State University
“The Caitlin Clark Effect” goes back to the unprecedented arena and televisions audiences Clark drew while in her final two Iowa Hawkeye seasons.
A Ball State study estimated that the sharp-shooting, second-year guard brought 26,000 new fans and S2.4 million to Central Indiana. Both figures sound mad low to me.
Training camp opens on April 27. The season starts May 17. Let’s prep so that this time we can really engage and talk constructively about what’s making Clark such an overwhelming star.
Lil Hit
Did Unilever fire Ben & Jerry’s CEO David Stever because of his activist politics?
AfroTech
Are we looking at mind-boggling incompetence on the part of what Dan Drezner, using the technical language of international relations theory, calls “the dumbest motherfuckers alive”? Or are we looking at a sinister plot to destroy America as we know it? The answer is “yes.” These people are both incompetent and evil.
The Fuller Caen
I dislike Bill Maher more than almost any Fox host and will tell you the reason once I’ve rationalized the gut feeling…
Know how you can tell Black people came up with the concept of wokeness? From the listless defense of it by those who dined out on the imagery and ideals for years…
Speaking of the people formerly known as Negroes, Beauford Delaney turns out to be an underappreciated figure, as “the first walking, living proof, for me, that a black man could be an artist”… to James Baldwin. Wow…
Among the last things I would like to be is branded a terrorist. But, some would say that self-immolation is a time-honored way to, er, get the party started…
Trump scandals are usually at least a little bit fun because they’re rarely complex. The objectionable behavior is always more Bowery Boys than Michael Clayton…
6 ‘When I give the Signal, you grift’
Signal has become an investigative journalism mainstay, though I use the app sparingly—mostly to link with European reporter peers and certain weed and shrooms connects. To my mind, the Signal is more secure than WhatsApp, but not government-grade private. A SCIF is not delivered to you, a la DoorDash, upon downloading Signal.
But as an end-run around the Sunshine Ordinance—the law that gives public access to records made by government officials—San Francisco’s politicians have long treasured the app’s timed-deletion feature.
SF Standard
From The Standard’s Power Play columnists: “The truth is, a journalist doesn’t need Signal to stumble into a group chat with high-powered government officials. Power Play’s very own Han Li was accidentally included on a group text message with [Mayor Daniel] Lurie about access to political events in January — the sender of the text apparently mistook our Han for Han Zou, the mayor’s director of public affairs.”
Lil Hit
Seeing 20 Hours in Mariupol, 2024’s winner of the Best Documentary Academy Award, heightened my empathy for Ukrainians. The prospect of this year’s doc victor No Other Land doing the same for Palestine is so powerful that the film can’t attract a US distributor and on Monday its director was attacked and arrested by police in Israel.
Bonus support of this work is enormously appreciated. Buy Me a Coffee or whatever.
My government does loathe me, and that demands extra energy. Keep me in Wheaties!
A blue state with Nazis in the crannies
What percentage of the US population do you think are Nazi sympathizers or wannabes?
5 Do you know a one-trick Negro?
The game changed, and too many of our poor Black fam haven’t picked up on this
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