1) I enjoyed watching Emma Thompson's arrival on Colbert's show, and also her rant about how AI keeps trying to change her writing. "“And so I end up just going, ‘I don’t need you to f**king rewrite what I’ve just written! Will you f*** off? Just f*** off" "Colbert then jokingly suggested that Thompson show her computer the Academy Award she won for her screenwriting on the 1995 film Sense and Sensibility, which made her the only person to ever win an Oscar for both acting and writing."

2) Watched a Donna Summers' documentary, which was pretty uninformative. I knew little about her career so some of the info was new, but hardly anything was explored. ( Read more... )

3) Also saw the new 2025 documentary about LiveAid. I already knew a fair amount about it but given there were new interviews there were still some new bits. ( Read more... )

4) Had an afternoon with everything higgledy piggeldy. Got a call mid-afternoon from the leasing office that the utility company needed to make repairs to a transformer by our building. It would mean a 2-hour electricity cut off. So I got off the computer and decided to run the TV and finish exercises while I was waiting. But despite being told the power would be off in about 15 minutes, we still had power an hour later. My partner wasn't sure whether to stay late at work or come home. And if he did, we'd have to either eat snacks or wait for power to come back since we wouldn't want to open the fridge or freezer. ( Read more... )

5) A bit of hope that major money can be gotten out of politics, via a legal case. "Corporations exist with the express permission of the state in which they are incorporated. They are legal inventions, statutorily-created entities. They only have as much power as the states grant them.

That means the answer to Citizens United may be staring everyone straight in the face. After all, the states—and this Supreme Court majority is for “states’ rights” after all—by definition have the final say over what corporations may do in their states. As noted by the Center for American Progress, which backs campaign finance law reforms, “Corporations are pure creatures of state law. And for more than two centuries, the Supreme Court has affirmed that states have virtually unlimited authority to modify and withdraw the powers they grant to their corporations.”

Why couldn’t that authority include never granting corporations the power to spend money on political contributions in the first place?"