yes

Tory Cross, on Twitter

>>Every single day that we throw sand in the gears, every single day that someone stands up and slows the process down, is another day that 80 million people have Medicaid.<<

Not everything is about BtS

If I have done the search correctly, I haven't posted about the political situation in South Korea for three months. I think about it most days, so that surprises me. This seems to have been the last time I mentioned former president Yoon, briefly, in a post that was mostly about the movie "Harbin."
https://lauradi7dw.dreamwidth.org/912403.html
This week (Friday morning 11 AM Seoul time, so tomorrow at 10 PM here), the court will finally issue a verdict about Yoon's impeachment. Everybody I personally follow (famous folks or not) online has been pro-impeachment since the brief declaration of martial law in December, but there are many far-right Evangelical Christians who are pro-Yoon (and pro-Trump, or at least were a few months ago). Huge clashes, probably violent, are likely to happen when the judgment is announced. Preparing for this, there is already an enormous police presence in the area of the courthouse, creating (in the words of Guardian writer Raphael Rashid, possibly directly translating) a "vacuum state" in the area. Streets blocked off, people told to leave. BTS member Kim Tae Hyung is serving in the military police in Chuncheon, which is a couple of hours from Seoul. Will such troops be called in? The only person in South Korea that I have physically met and know the name of is the friend of Arthur's we saw in June. I might recognize the desk clerks from the places we stayed but never knew their names. In my mind I worry about a lot of celebrities as though they were my friends or family members. I follow a number of BTS fans on Twitter. There don't seem to be many on Bluesky. I don't use Instagram*. I haven't tried to air my worries anywhere but here, and haven't seen it from anybody else.

* In Meta news, Facebook has taken down the most recent five columns posted by historian Heather Cox Richardson. I get her daily writing via email, since I try not to use Substack. Surely the censor at Facebook knows that her work is available elsewhere, so what is their goal?

sweet tributes

Friday the 4th - Senators Coons, Duckworth, and Durbin went out to participate in the dignified transfer. Possibly others, I'm not sure.

UPDATE - yes, confirmed, Trump will be at a golf tournament sponsored by Saudi Arabia instead of at Dover AF base when the "dignified transfer" happens.

Four members of the US Army died (drowned) when their vehicle sank in a peat bog in Lithuania. Whatever their family members expected when they were posted to a base in Georgia was presumably not that. The oldest (who had five children already) was 28. Nobody in the Trump administration seems to give a shit. I bet Donald and Melania will not be at Dover Air Force base when the flag-draped coffins arrive, as Joe & Jill or Bill & Hillary would have been. In the meantime, the people of Lithuania have been making memorials and piling up flowers and stuff, in a kind and sweet way.
https://www.stripes.com/branches/army/2025-04-02/mourners-gather-soldiers-death-lithuania-17341146.html

Jose Duenez, jr.
Edvin F Franco
Troy S. Knutson-Collins
Dante D Taitano

I know that lots of our military people die in vehicle incidents and other ways, and we inflict death on people around the world, but this seems unusually pointless and sad to me.