Class dismissed

 Merriam-Webster has announced that its word of the year for 2023 is authentic.  In the event authentic is unable to fulfill its duties, pusillanimous will take over.

"Then Nestor cut the gears/With his new-drawn authentic sword."  (Iliad, tr. Chapman, 1598)

The OED says this was the first use of "authentic" in written form, the translation celebrated by Keats.  Well, that's enough literature for today.  On to history!

I'm not sure which is more humiliating, that Kevin McCarthy went to the Oxford Union to debate the question "This House believes US interventionism has done more harm than good" or that the House then voted 175 to 160 against the proposition.  That's right, he won.  Well, sharpen my head and call me Eberhard Faber.

He won by asserting that "In every single war that America has fought, we have never asked for land afterward -- except for enough to bury the Americans who gave the ultimate sacrifice for freedom."  Now I understand why Oxford granted a degree to John Neely Kennedy.

This is Kevin McCarthy, who represents a portion of California, which used to be Mexico.  As did Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.  Perhaps like Margie Greene he is unaware that Guam is part of the United States, acquired from Spain at the same time as Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines.  Hawaii?  American Samoa?  And since we're in the UK, anybody remember the price America asked for fifty broken-down destroyers in 1940?  Just 99-year leases on bases in British colonies, including Canada.   How much land do we need for cemeteries?  

Look, all countries were stolen out from under their original inhabitants at some point -- Britain by the Beaker people around 3000 BCE, Palestine in 1948, the rest somewhere in between.  That's the way history rolls.  All we can ask is that the newer, stronger occupiers be honest about what they were doing and not invoke generous gods or Manifest Destiny or whatever Hitler meant by Lebensraum.  "We want your land and we're having it" will do.  America's image of itself as a republic has always prevented us from calling our overseas real estate an empire, but what else is it?  We have around a thousand military installations around the world, which is why our defense budget is in the trillions (a lot more than we spend on those "entitlements" that enrage rich people like Mitt Romney -- Social Security, for instance).  We also operate eleven of those floating cities called aircraft carriers.  Russia has one, usually in drydock for repairs or visible for miles because of the cheap oil it burns.

   Yes, we gave the Canal Zone to Panama after stealing the whole isthmus from Colombia in the first place.  We're generous that way.  Of course, it gave us the right to kidnap their president and put him on trial in Florida.  Maybe we should send the Marines for Trump.

Last year Britain's Daily Star trained a webcam on a head of lettuce to see which would last longer, the veg or the PM.  The lettuce wilted but was still recognizable when Liz Truss resigned after 45 days as prime minister.  But going from punch line to pundit is now a career path, and Truss has endorsed Trump.  She was in Washington with a delegation of MPs from Conservative Friends of Ukraine, which suggests she doesn't know much about Trump.

Do you enjoy the articles in Sports Illustrated?  Do you know that at least some of them are generated by robots?  Can you tell the difference?

The Grand Ole Opry has voted narrowly to stop displaying the Confederate flag.  The Grand Ole Opry in Glasgow.  Scotland.  Honestly, I learn things every day.

Peter Antonacci was appointed by Ron DeSantis to lead an investigation of "election fraud."  After a "contentious" meeting with the governor Antonacci, 74, collapsed outside his office and lay on the floor for twenty-four minutes before anyone noticed he was dead.  We know this because the Florida Bulldog news site submitted a public records request for the security camera footage suppressed since September 2022.  Another DeSantis collaborator, state surgeon general Joseph Ladapo, was granted instant tenure at the University of Florida despite being an anti-vaxer and proponent of the hydroxychloroquine "cure" for covid.  (Florida isn't called "God's waiting room" just because many residents are old.)  Ladapo's academic qualifications are as skimpy as Kevin McCarthy's knowledge of history.  So much for Harvard Medical School.

Remember when Hillary Clinton called half the MAGAs a "basket of deplorables"?  I would have gone with "bucket of chum" but that's why I don't run for office.  According to Media Matters our liberal media devoted sixteen times more attention to that shocking remark than to Trump's description of most Americans as "vermin."  Can we at least re-brand them the corporate media?  Or the cowardly media?

Alex Jones owes $1.5 billion to the Sandy Hook families he repeatedly slandered, but they're willing to settle for $85 million over ten years as long as they don't have to think about him or listen to his yelps of poverty.  But Fani Willis is not making plea deals with the big fish in the Fulton County RICO case, Trump, Giuliani and Meadows.  That's how racketeering prosecutions work. 

How desperate is Benjamin Netanyahu for supporters?  He welcomed world-class antisemite Elon Musk to Israel and gave him a tour of a kibbutz.  But not before issuing him this vest:

If that doesn't coax the advertisers back to Xitter, he'll just have to sue the Elders of Zion.