I have wasted hours of my life trying to write tonight. I give up. Internet and computers work less and less every fucking week.

Federal Appeals Court Pauses Lower Court Ruling Against Trump’s Backup Tariff Plan
May 12, 2026

□ [“5th Circuit Unanimously Vacates Mississippi's Race-Based Redistricting Order"]

The conflict continues, courts arguing back and forth on which laws are supposed to be followed for real, the states arguing that "racism" is being defeated by splitting people up based on their skin color.  The left is losing their minds and, on a day-to-day basis, I think that does more to motivate the rest of us.  'Don't be like that,' then we see another example.

The Trump administration has set an interesting trap for the left with this.  They actually have a goal to focus on - race-based voting districts - and their attempts to achieve it will explode in their face.  We see that with Virginia, which spent $70 million trying to push redistricting.  Then when the court blew that up, they want to get rid of the court and that's unconstitutional.  They're being stopped everywhere they turn but are still surrounded by their supporters who remain outraged.  These Democrat leaders can't go forward but they can't turn around.

Meanwhile the Trump administration is doing what it can to push MAGA through the midterms.  Not sure it'll work but there's definitely a lot of planning and muscle going in to make a supermajority for his last two years.  And the left is just helping push this along by being so insane.

FDA Commissioner Marty Makary Resigns
May 12, 2026

□ [“State Assembly Candidate May Be Off Primary Ballot; 90% of Her 5,258 Signatures Were Invalidated"]

A New York Democrat, she certainly looks and dresses like a Muslim immigrant, she was just getting fake signatures.  Dead people, people who don't live in New York, who aren't eligible to vote, they all supported her.  Real people, not so much.  She got ten times as many signatures as was required but since they're all fake, now she's struggling to get enough real ones.

We see this problem with all the third-worlders being brought in.  The leftist propaganda is that they're eager to be loyal Americans but in truth, they're just bringing their own tribal policies.  It's easy to steal elections where they come from so that's what they expect to get here.  And what do you know, Democrats are totally willing to take advantage of that.  They expect to come out the winners on this.

□ [“California Mayor Resigns After Pleading Guilty to Charges of Being Chinese Agent"]

Then there's the enemy nations who know how to make use of this.  I'm not sure who other than China is really capable of planning this.  Most invaders would just have children, take government funding and vote Democrat.  And how long has this been going on?  It wouldn't be surprising if they've been planning this for fifty years or more, since Nixon started talking to them.  They've been able to push this through the UN and every NGO they can find.  Perhaps the chaos is the main plan, the rest of the world isn't China so it doesn't really matter.

Greenland PM Admits US Military Presence on Island Is Part of Negotiations ‌With Washington
May 12, 2026

All my recent essays about superhero comics didn't have some grand overarching theme.  I had been trying to tie together thoughts I'd had over the years and suddenly found a few connections I hadn't noticed before.  The more I thought about it and looked into the history, the more interesting it became.

Back in 2002 (I think) I had noticed that the cover dates were very close for "The Flash of Two Worlds" and the first appearance of the Fantastic Four.  This was quite surprising.  DC had rebooted The Flash and, after a few years, had the new version meet the old version.  This would establish the multiverse, "Earth One," "Earth Two," etc.  It seems like a very obvious connection, I couldn't have been the first person to ever notice, but the Marvel Universe started immediately afterwards?  That can't be a coincidence.

DC controlled Marvel as the distributor, they were eager to sue anyone who got in their way.  Yet Marvel was totally allowed to start off with a rip-off of Challengers of the Unknown, from the same artist that created that series?  This just got stranger the more I thought about it.  I know nothing about numerology but even I noticed Flash #123 Fantastic Four.

So this had been on my mind for years.  Those of you who follow my writing may have seen my essays on this over the years.  Also during that time, Marvel and DC were putting out movies.  I watched some, even liked a few but I had lost interest in superheroes in general and especially out of the comics medium.  But the characters were part of my life and I was curious how the franchises would operate.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe started out cleverly, growing bigger over the years.  The DC movies, even those that were successful, didn't seem to be going anywhere.  Then in 2014, they announced a reboot.  They'd start with a Superman movie, then Batman/Superman.  Then the Justice League, followed by solo movies for those characters.

My first reaction was 'that's a stupid idea.'  At least Marvel built small and grew from there.  In 2014, Avengers was the only MCU movie I'd seen but I did enjoy it very much.  DC was just expecting the same success without actually winning an audience.  Which led to my second reaction, 'they're aiming for an Avengers/Justice League crossover.'

To this day, I think I was right on both counts, although I've never heard anybody confirm the second one.  Marvel continued to grow and it was impressive, I've never heard of a movie franchise get that big across that many different characters.  They reached their peak and then started going downhill.  DC never even got that far, their movies were rarely massive successes and usually a lot less.  They had to announce another reboot was coming but still had to put out the movies they'd made.

So I continued to think about this over the years.  Last year, Marvel was getting desperate and DC's new movies weren't any improvement on the previous ones.  They're even getting close to yet-another reboot.  Meanwhile both franchises were clearly pushing the multiverse and the main goal seemed to be pushing as many characters as possible onscreen.  At least in comics, that's cheap and easy.  Why would anybody in their right minds try to do this in movies?

I continued to think about Justice League/Avengers as the ultimate target for these companies.  And to this day, I still have affection for the Kurt Busiek/George Perez miniseries that brought it out in comics form.  I was thinking about it one day and it occurred to me that the series must have come out over 20 years ago, I'm so old.

When I think of how much time has passed since something has happened, I often find it entertaining to ask what was going on the same amount of time before that event.  As an example, soon 9/11 will be closer to the day I was born than to 'today,' over half my life will have happened since that day.  That's a bit extreme but you see the point, if JLA/Avengers came out roughly 20 years ago, what was happening 20 years before that?

That answer was easy, the early 1980s, Marvel and DC were doing crossovers that had been intended to build up to these teams being together.  Interesting.  And twenty years before that?  The Marvel Age was growing, "Flash of Two Worlds" had just come out.  Twenty years before that?  The Golden Age.  Suddenly history looks like a handful of easy-to-connect events.

As the predecessor to the Justice League, the Justice Society was one of the first things I thought of regarding the Golden Age.  That was back when DC was two companies.  The crossovers had already started.  I was mistaken in how these companies operated, I did know they were closely related but hadn't really thought about it.  Jack Liebowitz was co-founder of both, on the board of directors, it wasn't a case of two separate companies getting along in the same space.

But this is what led me to consider that the 'multiverse' concept was more about defining how different Intellectual Properties were used and interacted.  The more I thought about it, the more it looked like an ideal test project, for comics and every other medium, every other company.  Because I come from the comic book side of things, the more I thought about that, the more examples there were.  Jack Kirby fought over royalties for his newspaper strip, his opponent was the editor for Challengers, Superman and Batman.  This loss was how Kirby got stuck at Marvel in the first place.  Another example I never even bothered with was the use of real people as corporate IPs.  The biggest example is Stan Lee but there are others.  Bob Kane spend a few decades being the only name attached to Batman although he barely even looked at the finished product.

Because I was more of a Marvel fan at heart, I looked at how they were affected by these decisions from DC.  I'm not sure I've ever given so much thought to Ant-Man but how they used him was so bizarre until you realize that he was always there to be rebooted and hang out with the big team which was eventually formed.  Officially the goal was to do a 'rip-off of JLA' but that doesn't explain the Fantastic Four.  It does explain the Avengers, especially when Captain America was brought back.

Although I pondered some later characters and stories, I did notice my attention went down after Spider-Man.  There was Kirby's initial contribution, there was the way he seemed intended from the start to be the central character of the franchise.  And of course I always enjoyed thinking about Ditko's work so that was the next step in what I focused on.  I tried to work out DC's overall plan across the decades but I was just moving from one subject to another with much less direct connections.

As I was thinking about all this, it was quite amusing to hear the 2025 announcement that Marvel and DC would be doing comic-book crossovers again, first time since JLA/Avengers had come out in 2003.  I still think they're trying to do that as a movie although it's also entertaining to see how it's failing these days.  But I still think the plan is in roughly 20-year segments.  If it fails now, they'll still try again.  They have a whole multiverse to work through.

Leftists in Providence, Rhode Island Succeed in Removing Mural of Murdered Iryna Zarutska
May 12, 2026