Erin Hanson says, "I painted this in tribute to two master artists, David Hockney and Paul Cezanne. It features pines that I saw during my visit to Cezanne's hometown. Hockney, Cezanne, and I have always loved trees throughout our careers. I hope it is a fitting tribute.
Cezanne's Pines, 2026"— I like the painting even though they don't look like pines to me.
I don't know how I left out June's most important story (apparently) last month, but I feel a responsibility to note that Trump's exciting plan to clean up the Reflecting Pool has not worked out too well. That's not surprising for a man who thinks he knows about pools since there's always been one in every place he's ever lived even though he's never been in one, is it? In any case, those were swimming pools, and the Reflecting Pool is not, so it seems he made a little mistake when he got his pool guy to remove the filtration system, paint it a color that's too dark, and — did I forget the part where he and his entourage drove a bunch of heavily-armored cars over it before it was refilled? It certainly has captured the public's imagination. "It's not easy being green: Trump's botched reflecting pool becomes 2,028ft metaphor," and Trump has been so embarrassed that he has claimed Antifa saboteurs were responsible for the resulting stink and damage and there are now robot voices informing people that no loitering is permitted. In a national park. Incredible. Last I heard, an administration spokescreature was saying it was Hamas.
"'New Red Scare': ICE Protester Gets 30 Years for Leftist Zines Under Trump Antifa Decree: 'The Prairieland model is in motion: inflate anti-ICE protest into a terrorism narrative, then use the courts to punish people for being part of a movement,' said one observer.'The Prairieland model is in motion: inflate anti-ICE protest into a terrorism narrative, then use the courts to punish people for being part of a movement,' said one observer. Civil liberties defenders sounded the alarm Tuesday over the draconian prison sentences imposed on a group of activists falsely accused by the Trump administration of being members of a non-existent 'North Texas Antifa Cell'—including a 30-year term for a man convicted of moving a box containing leftist literature. In what the US Department of Justice (DOJ) called 'the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following President Donald J. Trump's executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025,' the defendants were sentenced in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas in Fort Worth to between 30-100 years imprisonment for actions in connection with a July 4, 2025 protest at the PrRairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, an ICE lockup run by prison profiteer LaSalle Corrections."
How Secret Pro-Israel Money Flooded the Labour Party and Ended with a Ban of Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur: After Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur were banned from entering the UK earlier this week, reportedly because of their criticism of Israel, Piker commented that he 'would never have imagined that a [Labour] government would ban me from entering the UK.' Indeed, millions of UK voters would likely agree. But Prime Minister Keir Starmer's government is not really a Labour government; it came to power on the back of a secret project to wrest control of the Labour Party back from an ascendant left wing. This secret project was resourced by illegally undeclared money from wealthy donors, funneled through a seemingly anodyne think tank called Labour Together. It involved covertly seeding promiscuous claims of antisemitism against political opponents, attempting to silence independent media that threatened to expose its project, and—ultimately—developing the dishonest leadership pitch that allowed Keir Starmer to trick a left-wing membership to elect him leader."
"Balancing Act at the NYT: Nicholas Kristof's Wrote About Israel's Sexual Torture of Prisoners, the Next Day Isabel Kershner Penned More Unverified Rape Allegations Against Hamas: The paper's 2026 version of the Hamas rape story was penned by one of the Times' most reliably pro-Israeli reporters, Isabel Kershner, and this new 'investigation' once again takes seriously, discredited Israeli sources that Kershner claims to be independent and reliable. At the center of the piece is Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a key Israeli source after October 7. Elkayam-Levy and her organization were central to Western media coverage after October 7, when she repeatedly presented the rape allegations against Hamas. However, as Mint Press News reported, Israeli media later reported that 'Elkayam-Levy and her commission had misled donors, exaggerated evidence collection efforts, and spread misinformation related to October 7 claims. The controversy surfaced shortly after she received the prestigious Israel Prize.' In Kersner's new piece, extravagant claims are made about the thorough nature of the investigation, describing all the visual evidence now assembled. But Kershner isn't allowed to publish the evidence. She writes; 'The commission's archive is closed to the public because of the graphic nature of much of the material, it said, and to protect the privacy of victims and their families.' The Times is asking its readers to trust the Israelis, Isabel Kershner, and the paper itself with its abysmal track record on this topic. Kershner does not mention the fact that early last year, Israel blocked a UN probe into possible Hamas sexual crimes of October 7, because according to Haaretz, they wanted to avoid an inquiry into the abuse of Palestinians in Israeli prisons."
Trump announced a plan even more communist than Mamdani's city-owned grocery stores: low-priced gas stations. Hmm, how does that work? Naturally, we go to The American Prospect to find out. "The Kleptocrat Nesting Dolls Behind Trump's Potemkin Gas Stations: How can Freedom Fuel afford to sell gas for $3.47 a gallon? That's the wrong question to ask. Five years ago, a manager for a Virginia gasoline distributor opened an invoice for more than 200,000 phantom gallons of gas they had no record of selling. Truckers on contract with a chain of gas stations that had recently terminated its contract had been filling up their tanks using an emergency PIN that the distributor, Petroleum Marketing Group, Inc. (PMG), had designated for one-time out-of-contract gas purchases, effectively stealing $667,517 worth in just over a week. Upon subpoenaing the gas station chain CEO's bank records, PMG ultimately discovered he had no fewer than 28 other credit agreements he hadn't disclosed on behalf of three or four alter-ego companies whose businesses he'd never listed on his application. The CEO and his brother/partner—two central New Jersey men in their thirties named Syed and Shamikh Kazmi, respectively—had outstanding default judgments against them in Wisconsin and Michigan, a business in Florida they had never disclosed, and legal disputes with landlords and franchisors from Circle K to Phillips 66 to 7-Eleven, the latter of which accused the brothers in a lawsuit of allowing a store they were operating to fall into such an alarming state of squalor it was forced to “disown” it, then exploiting a provision in the franchise agreement to order hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of cigarettes in its last weeks of operation that they allegedly neither returned to corporate nor paid for. Another landlord was suing them for tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent. The lawsuits would drag on and multiply while the Kazmi brothers bid on new assets under slightly altered names, then failed over and over again to wire over the required deposits."
Graham Platner lost the moment a credible claim of sexual assault came from one of the aforementioned girlfriends. It doesn't matter if it's true; it's believable enough, especially in context of his known background, to float. But the establishment Dems are rushing to use this to push aside his policies - the ones Maine Democrats overwhelmingly voted for, and that has to be fought. Troy Jackson, who had originally planned to run in the Senate race until Chuck Schumer big-footed his way into the campaign and drafted Janet Mills, pushing everyone else out to clear the field, got back in and won at the convention Maine threw to choose a new candidate. That's what the movement Platner built wanted, and right now it looks like that movement has a good shot at carrying Jackson to victory against Collins.
I can't even start about Schrodinger's war on Iran. It looks like Trump has now completely bottled out on doing the smart thing and just suing for peace and taking his lumps, but I'm not surprised that he doesn't have the guts to do it.
Naturally, The Sideshow supports Count Binface in his race against Nigel Farage in Clacton.
"BREAKING: Peter Thiel's 'Secret Doomsday Society' Running Your Government Just Got Hacked, And Holy Shit.: US Treasury Secretary and Senator, A Saudi Spy Chief, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk, And The Architect Of The Supreme Court. Doomsday Planning, Cult Building, Sex Hookup Workshops. Welcome to 'Dialog.'Twenty years ago, Peter Thiel — PayPal money, Palantir surveillance money, the man who personally bankrolled a Vice President into office — co-founded a private network called Dialog with a Valley operator named Auren Hoffman. The few reporters who've brushed against it call it the 'tech Bilderberg.' That undersells it. Dialog was so secret it never had a public website. Its members were never named. For two decades — no roster, no leak, no daylight. They quietly bought land outside Washington last year for a permanent campus, and even that barely registered. This is not a conference. A conference wants attention. Dialog was engineered for the opposite: a place where the most powerful people alive could say the quiet part out loud, to each other, with a guarantee it would never leave the room." But they were so arrogant that they got sloppy. And there's a list. You'll recognize some names.
REST IN PEACE: "Pat Oliphant, fearless Pulitzer-winning political cartoonist, dies at 90 [...] For over five decades, Oliphant's work ridiculed powerful figures — from President Lyndon B. Johnson to Donald Trump — with a blunt and meticulous stroke. He drew Jimmy Carter with large teeth and lips, alluding to his background as a farmer and the cultural stereotype of adaptation to rural work, and depicted Ronald Reagan, whom he thought was uninterested in the suffering of the American people, with a cork in his ear."
ROT IN PERDITION: Alan Greenspan, destructive Rand cultist, dies at 100. With Rare Notable Exceptions, "Alan Greenspan was a horrible economist who made the nation and world worse through his obsession with Randian quackery." Like Rick Pearlstein says, "Speak Ill of the Dead—Early and Often, Please." Both Erik's and Rick's articles are worth reading for the true horror of how this deranged creature was treated like a god by The Important People and he wrecked the world.
ROT IN PERDITION: "Sen. Lindsey Graham dies at 71 after 'brief and sudden illness'." I can't contain my disgust at the number of Democrats singing his praises. Cory Booker's eulogy was sickening. He was a closeted gay man who ardently fought against gay rights and for endless wars. He won't be missed.
"Israel is an apartheid state – and its weird marriage laws show us how: Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its own nationality. Why? Because a common national identity would sabotage Israel's carefully veiled system of segregation [...] The same system that denies Israelis the possibility of a civil or secular marriage also refuses to recognise that they have any kind of civil or secular identity, simply as Israelis. By law, everyone in Israel must belong to a confessional group, identified as a Jew, Muslim, Christian or Druze. Which makes sense of another little-known fact about Israel: Israel is the only country in the world that does not recognise its own – in this case, Israeli – nationality. Why? For the simple reason that, were Israelis to share a common national identity, it would be much harder for the Israeli state to operate its apartheid system. Israeli nationality exists only as a fiction on Israeli passports to allow the population to travel internationally. Inside Israel, everyone is identified by their confessional group. In Israel, 'Jewish' is treated as a nationality. Remember the 2018 Nation State Law. What it declared is that the state of Israel belongs exclusively to the 'nation' of Jews – that is, to every Jew around the globe, not just those living in Israel. Muslims and Christians are lumped together into a similarly artificial 'Arab' nationality, while the Druze have their own, different nationality. The same Nation State Law makes clear that the state of Israel does not belong to these other, non-Jewish 'nations', despite their families having lived on the same lands for centuries. Palestinian citizens are nothing more than guests – and unwelcome ones at that. [...] In addition to Jew, Arab and Druze, there are more than 120 other categories to deal with all the anomalies. I was just one such anomaly after I married a Palestinian Christian and entered a lengthy and difficult naturalisation process. My nationality was classed as 'British'. Why all this complexity? Why all this unique weirdness? Because Israel needs to conceal its system of apartheid. The old South Africa simply said: one law for whites and another for blacks."
"New Documents Detail Nine-Figure, Silicon Valley–Funded Abundance Movement: The Prospect has obtained a fundraising pitch and historical manifesto from inside the movement. According to Zack Rosen, founder of California YIMBY and the Abundance Network, the problem with politics is Americans being too involved. Bemoaning the rise of small-dollar political donations in fundraising documents leaked to the Prospect, Rosen is blunt: 'Small dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber.' Rosen misses what he considers to be a bygone era of elite dominance. Lamenting the current state of democratized influence, Rosen says 'the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines.'"
Radley Balko has put up "A guide to racism in the criminal justice system: A repository of studies, surveys, and reports on the disparate ways white, Black, and Latino people are treated by police, prosecutors, courts, and prisons"
"I am a centrist Democrat and I am terrified of success: We appeal to 'the center,' which is an ambiguous blob-like thing that exists only in the minds of Democratic strategists whose brains stopped working in the 1990s."
They've been quiet for a while, but, "Gnomes looking for homes traumatise neighbourhood: Dozens of homeless gnomes have been surprising and terrorising residents of a housing estate in Somerset. [...] Since then, the cheery, red-cheeked gnomes have been spotted all over the neighbourhood - playing in the playground at the park, appearing in the dark on people's doorsteps or popping up behind the wheel of parked cars. [...] In an encounter reminiscent of Doctor Who's scariest foes the Weeping Angels, the neighbour describes their horror at opening the front door to let the cat in only to find two large gnomes looming out of the darkness on the doorstep."
The Beatles, "I Want You (She's So Heavy"
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