Knocking At The Gate

Brady Corbet's The Brutalist (2024) is one hell of a ride: Sweeping but clunky, overflowing with injustice but inspiring, stupendously long but always attention-seizing. The cinematography, acting, music, production design, and direction are all triumphs but there's more going on here there it might seem. First, let’s be clear about the word “brutalist.” That adjective is almost exclusively used to describe an architect or a building that is associated with a mid-20 th century art movement known as Brutalism. That word does not refer to “brute” or “brutal” or as commonly used in English, but instead refers to a French term for “raw concrete.”   Concrete is cheap, plentiful, quick to use, and long-lasting and that’s why it is one of the most important building materials of all time. It is commonplace to try to hide that buildings are made of concrete by cladding them in something that’s pretty such as glass or stucco or stone or by detailing them with flourishes made of wood...

For state regulators (a) to commission a study which showed that Florida insurers were shoveling billions of dollars in excess payments to their parent companies then claiming to be unable to cover claims without hiking rates or closing up shop, (b) to then keep that study from state lawmakers seeking to calm Florida's hurricane-drenched insurance market, and (c) to then take two years to release the study in a public records request might be one of the most Florida things ever. In this article, Tampa Bay Times staff writer Lawrence Mower explains how this happened and provides a link to the "draft" report.

 Sarah Hagale on Instagram.

Writing in the News-Press , Dr. Robert Hilliard —the noted educator, author, playwright, and veteran who won a Purple Heart fighting Adolf Damn Hitler — explains how to recognize and respond to fascism .

In keeping with the current craze of abusing workers and vilifying the work of public employees, Utah has decided that they shouldn't be able to bargain collectively with their employers . That's a low blow, and a hateful one, and a grotesquely anti-American one. Every single worker everywhere should be able to organize their workplace, period. Anything else hurts us all.

The U.S. Department of Education has long used a series of “Dear Colleague” letters sent to state and local education officials to outline the Department’s broad policy goals and to explain the Department’s interpretation of federal law and court decisions. Along with the law itself, with non-regulatory guidance issued by the Secretary, with the Code of Federal Regulations, and with findings of the Inspector General, these Dear Colleague letters are a fundamental component of federal, state, and local education governance in the United States. Unfortunately, this most recent letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of CivilRights is horrifyingly anti-American. Along with the purges of public employees, this letter is a function of ongoing hostile takeover of federal agencies with the intent of destroying them from within and preventing them from implementing the laws enacted by the Congress. Here are my notes based on my first reading. LETTER (p. 1): “Discriminatio...