The cat has thanked me for my years of service and wishes me luck on my future endeavors. Did I miss a meeting?

Texas Orders Unauthorized Dallas-Area Muslim ‘University’ to Cease Operations Immediately
May 9, 2026

□ [“Unions and Labour MPs Demand PM Starmer Resign Over Party’s Election Defeats"]

I don't pay close attention to British elections because I don't think you can legally do that and still be American but there were local elections a few days ago and the Reform UK party won over 1200 seats, city councils and such, while the Labour Party lost over a thousand seats.  It was nationwide, across England, Scotland and Wales, because f*ck the Irish.

As the losses started, Starmer immediately tweeted that it was his fault but he wasn't going to resign over this.  Then the losses continued to pile up so even if Starmer hasn't changed his mind, he's clearly not long for this office.  He hasn't even been there for two years and has damaged his party badly.  I don't know when the next elections are coming or what they'll cover - USA!  USA!  USA! - but it sounds like the elites need to go in reverse immediately to prevent the same thing from happening to the rest of them.

So I'm still a skeptic but this does sound very encouraging.  The Brits have finally taken a stand for their country, the birthplace of modern freedom.  There's still a lot to worry about, especially considering how much they've given up over the last sixty or seventy years, but there is reason to hope.  Even better, the next target would be right across the channel.  You've invaded France before, better get ready to do it again.

Former NFL Player Sentenced to Prison for $197M Medicare Fraud
May 9, 2026

The concept of a "multiverse" has been around for a long time.  My suspicion is that in the last century or so, it has been mostly used as a way to define corporate Intellectual Properties.  Most notably in comic books, each character and their supporting cast exists in their own universe.  If they are connected to a different character, that is an event where multiple universes combine.  It's probably relevant that the characters may not be exactly the same as they are in their home universe.

In comics, especially with one-dimensional superheroes, this was just easier.  There was no way to have, for instance, a team-up between the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges.  Their style of humor simply couldn't go together, the characters would have nothing in common and that's not counting their managers or the actors themselves.  The best anyone could do would be a picture of the two groups smiling at the camera, Moe is not going to poke Groucho in the eyes.

This basically applies to every other intellectual property getting together.  You might be able to have [famous character] meet Frankenstein or Sherlock Holmes in a movie or book but that's not going to be a treasured memory from their complete library.  At least the superhero genre in the comics medium had an audience that would actually take this seriously.

The most notable example was the Justice Society of America, featuring characters from the different companies that would eventually form DC Comics.  This was a way to sell books to each character's fans, promote the other characters to the same fans and find some other way to get stories out of 'men in tights solving problems by punching people.'  At least the kids liked it.

Years passed and the JSA stopped selling comics.  So DC moved on but soon decided to try again, this time by rebooting some of the characters.  They started with the Flash, then added Green Lantern, Hawkman and would include others.  Soon it was time to reboot the JSA but rename it.

But there was also a question about how to handle the earlier versions.  A company can lose its trademarks by not using them so lawyers would have instructed DC to have the old characters show up every so often.  The Flash was the first one to deal with this, officially establishing the "multiverse" in "The Flash of Two Worlds," issue #123.  Just after this, one of the smaller companies in DC's orbit also attempted to get into superheroes again, Marvel created the Fantastic Four.

This was only a little over 20 years after the Justice Society had formed and now there were two comic-book universes with each character or group as its own IP within that universe.  For DC, they would keep bringing back all the old characters and whatever other companies they had purchased.  But this caused more problems, few people were really able to keep track of everything each character had done in different universes.

The Black Canary of Earth-2 falls in love with the Green Arrow of Earth-1 so she moves universes to be with him.  Ok, that's believable to an extent but then there's all the stories set in the future?  They all say they're Earth-1 but contradict each other.  There were other contradictions, Wonder Woman was a separate character from Wonder Girl and Wonder Tot, she imagined them as 'fictional characters' she teamed up with.  Then some editor was unaware of that and added Wonder Girl to the new Teen Titans book.  Further problems were caused trying to fix this continuity error.  This was the sort of thing that led DC to trying to fix these problems with Crisis on Infinite Earths.

But several years before Crisis, DC had started interacting with its known rival of the last couple decades, beginning crossovers with Marvel.  Marvel had long since found a new distributor and exploded with the number of books they put out, it ruled the industry.  They had also made a few attempts, rarely worth remembering, to move into tv, movies and other media.

The first crossover was the most out-of-character book you can imagine, The Wizard of Oz.  That's right, nothing to do with superheroes.  Marvel was planning to adapt L. Frank Baum's books, starting with this one, DC was just going to adapt this movie.  They didn't want to hurt each other's sales so they decided to team up.  Essentially the Marvel creative team did the work and DC handled the publishing.  This brought up suggestions that they could put more IPs together.

And just to note, L. Frank Baum had effectively been an early version of Disney.  He immediately started churning out adaptations of his hit books, changing them as needed.  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a hit 1902 Broadway musical and adapted into a movie in 1910.  He even formed his own movie studio and planned a theme park.  This was an early attempt at the same use of IPs that Disney and Marvel were following, roughly 20 years before Superman showed up.

As to why Marvel and DC suddenly decided to do this movie, it's not clear.  It was successful, yes, a box-office smash, re-released to theaters multiple times and CBS reran it every year for a few decades.  If you're going to do a comic book version of a movie, I suppose that's a valid choice but it might be something else.  The Wizard of Oz was also a central point in the gay movement, "friends of Dorothy" being a common way to find out who swung a certain way.  I think it's quite likely that higher-ups at both companies decided this was the best way to push their interests on children.

Given how long Dorothy's friends had been in Hollywood, I suspect this was a deep conspiracy being run through the entertainment industry and beyond.  This would fit with the definition of "alternate universe," that these people are aware they don't live on the same planet as the rest of us and this is a way of communicating that belief.  And now that Marvel and DC had been interacting as peers for the last 20 or so years, they could take the next step.

Superman and Spider-Man handled the first two crossovers, the first in 1976 (the year I was born) and the second in 1981 (one of the first comics I ever read.)  These crossovers would continue for a few years until they ran into a problem.  In 1979, it was agreed the Justice League and Avengers would meet, work on the book started in 1981 but by 1983, it was shot down.  Marvel editor-in-chief Jim Shooter gets all the blame but remember that comment I made about 20 years or so going by.  Well this was 20 years after Marvel had gotten started.  Is that really a coincidence?

Anyway, from what is known, Jim Shooter does deserve the blame.  It's not clear how artist George Perez had started the artwork but Shooter hadn't even approved the story yet.  He and DC editor Dick Giordano even took their argument public in respective editorials, Shooter insisting that DC wasn't living up to Marvel's standards and Giordano giving specific details to show that Shooter wasn't even trying to work with them.  He went months without responding to the plot summary - DC was the publisher so this is why Perez had been able to start the artwork - and when he finally did, it was just lots of complaints about details.  Hawkeye isn't currently an Avenger so he can't be there.  Giordano's response was Batman isn't currently in the Justice League but fans would want to see him involved.

This comes off as 'people who do not occupy the same world' which might be believable for Marvel and DC.  It's also an argument about how to maintain one's IPs when interacting with others.  No agreement could be come to so future crossovers were abandoned.  At the time, it probably seemed permanent although it didn't last all that long.

A decade later with the comics industry at its peak sales - the 'speculator' period - Marvel did start pushing crossovers with other companies.  The weirdest one was Archie Meets the Punisher but they also crossed over with Image Comics, Star Trek and from the start there was already some interaction with DC.  Batman would also meet the Punisher and Captain America.  By the late-90s, they were doing a number of crossovers again.  I didn't read any of them but I did hear about them, they even merged a bunch of characters for a short run which probably wasn't any good but does at least sound funny.

Then in 2003 - twenty years after the last batch of crossovers, forty years after Marvel got started, sixty years after the Justice Society was running strong - the Avengers/Justice League crossover finally came out, by George Perez and Kurt Busiek.  I read it, I love it, all that stuff, but then Marvel and DC's relationships died again.  JLA/Avengers was collected, then out of print.  It was briefly brought back in 2022 - another twenty years - when George Perez was dying, an honor to his legacy and probably the last chance people would have to get his autograph.

The 'every twenty years' theory doesn't really line up perfectly but it's surprisingly close.  And every time it happens, the companies seem to have continued to modify and update their definition of Intellectual Property.  And they always seem to require a "multiverse" to make it happen.  Marvel and DC superhero movies have been building this for a few years now.  These movies are increasingly failing at the box-office but I've thought for a long time that the point was to bring that crossover to the screen.

Even if it fails, we still see them doing that with their respective franchises.  Actors and movie studios are also IPs, and the Marvel and DC cinematic universes are more-and-more dependent on just showing the high-paid actors doing cameos.  The story is irrelevant, the audience is expected to pay for thirty seconds of 'man in tights' onscreen dealing with someone else.  And as always, they're trying to save their universe.

Female High School Athletes Slam Gavin Newsom Over California Trans Athlete Controversy
May 9, 2026

□ [“Furious Tennessee Democrats Demand Secession of Memphis from the State"]

Um, you got @630,000 people in Memphis.  That still leaves almost seven million people in the rest of the state.  You're not going to get much representation in the House and you'll lose all your state benefits.  Plus you don't have many farms there so where will your food come from?  This is a great idea and I hope you do it immediately.

I really didn't expect this to be what they're willing to die for.  As I keep saying, I had assumed that every state had gerrymandered as much as possible already so I didn't think it was really possible to do any more.  But now I'm getting the impression that this was always a tactic Republicans - or at least Trump - had in their back-pockets to use when it became necessary.

This isn't going to work but it'll be fun to watch.  A lot of people in Memphis don't want any part of this and I'm guessing some even vote Democrat.  Then there's the state and the federal government, then there's the question of why, exactly, you need race-based voting districts.  There's already laws about this and if the minority just expects to get whatever they want, that doesn't say very much about their belief in democracy.

This could be interesting.  These Memphis politicians really have no ground to stand on and no way to win this fight so it becomes an issue of what they, or other leftist cities, intend to do next.  This also looks like a turning point where a lot of Democrats will have to admit they really aren't devoted to this idiotic conflict.  'Shut up and do the job you were elected for.'  I can't see anything to point to but that's really the impression I get from a stunt like this.

Georgia Town Council Fires Back After Mayor Fires Police Force for Allegedly ‘Insulting’ His Wife
May 9, 2026

□ [“Star Wars Box Office Woes Grow"]

This movie is coming out later this month and it's getting no attention.  Early tickets are now on sale and they aren't doing well.  It's a Star Wars movie, the first one in seven years, and there's no audience.  A big percentage of the sales so far are probably just youtube commenters who will be making videos.  This is a dead franchise, nobody could have expected this to happen so fast.

People do talk about Star Wars and look up stuff on the internet but none of it has anything to do with this movie that's ready for release.  The discussions are about what Disney can do with the franchise as well as what people are doing with A.I. for short fan-videos.  That's where the remaining fanbase is, this movie is now expected to do worse than the 2018 Solo movie.

That movie was Kathleen Kennedy's first credit as Executive Producer and the first total failure in the franchise's movie history.  This one will be second and Kennedy oversaw it for almost all the production, only leaving a few months ago.  I think there needs to be some accounting, preferably in public if Disney wants any chance of winning the fans back.  She needs to explain why she wasted so much time and money on failure.

Leftist Danish PM Fails to Form New Government - the King Tasks Defense Minister to Form Rightwing Coalition
May 9, 2026