You might think I'm crazy

Dept. of Google Doing Evil:
Note: Barry C. Lynn mentioned herein is a different fellow from Barry W. Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Both are normally referred to only as "Barry Lynn".
* NYT: "Google Critic Ousted From Think Tank Funded by the Tech Giant: WASHINGTON - In the hours after European antitrust regulators levied a record $2.7 billion fine against Google in late June, an influential Washington think tank learned what can happen when a wealthy tech giant is criticized. The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family's foundation since the think tank's founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left and helped Google shape those debates. But not long after one of New America's scholars posted a statement on the think tank's website praising the European Union's penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had been chairman of New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group's president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar. [...] Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that 'the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,' according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team - nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows - would be exiled from New America."
* Matt Stoller at The Huffington Post, "Citizens Against Monopoly: As Google aims to consolidate complete power over discussion and free expression, it is time to heighten public urgency and pushback. [...] In late June, the European competition authority handed down a decision against Google for monopolizing the search market and suppressing rivals. It was a classic case of anti-competitive behavior, and the EU made the right decision. What's interesting, however, is not the decision, but what happened next across the ocean in Washington, D.C. My group, the Open Markets Program at New America, researches and studies monopoly power. Barry Lynn began this research 15 years ago, and has been building the necessary intellectual and historical grammar to understand the deep dysfunction in our corporate and political sectors. In response to the EU decision, Lynn sent a statement lauding the action. In response, Google had our group kicked out of our parent think tank, New America. Ken Vogel at the New York Times did the story on the specifics of how this happened. The combination, of the misbehavior in the search market and the attempt to suppress research into how Google operates, shows that the actual issue at hand is one of political power."
* Matthew Yglesias at Vox, "A leading Google critic's firing from a Google-funded think tank, explained: Forget it, Jake. It's Washington. [...] Google seems to have implicitly or explicitly used its financial clout to pressure New America to dissociate itself from Lynn, and now Lynn and his team are leaving New America and (apparently with some funding in hand) creating a new organization - Citizens Against Monopoly. In this particular case, Google's heavy-handed tactics seem more likely than not to backfire. But the case sheds light on the growing tendency of companies to use think tanks as essentially stealth lobbyists, and underscores the ways in which their priorities can shape the research agenda in Washington, even if it typically happens in more subtle ways." As long as Google was on the side of the consumer against telecoms companies, things were cozy. "What makes Google somewhat unusual for such a big company is that it's fairly closely aligned with the Democratic Party. Dozens of people moved from jobs at Google to jobs in the Obama administration, and vice versa, over its eight-year span. Schmidt was a major Hillary Clinton donor. More tellingly, Schmidt owns a company called Civis Analytics that does an enormous amount of behind-the-scenes data work for Democratic Party campaigns. This alignment grows out of both cultural affinity between Democrats and Google on social issues, and also years of regulatory struggle that often saw Google, Democrats, and consumer groups on one side pitted against telecommunications industry incumbents." But when it comes to anti-trust, Google is clearly on the other side, and they don't like it.
* Zephyr Teachout at The Interecept, "How I Got Fired From a D.C. Think Tank for Fighting Against the Power of Google"

Weirdly, Tucker Carlson gave sympathetic coverage to the story, including an interview with Matt Stoller.
* But Kashmir Hill says this isn't the first time. "Yes, Google Uses Its Power to Quash Ideas It Doesn't Like - I Know Because It Happened to Me."

And anti-monopoly arguments are penetrating. Even The Wall Street Journal takes "A Provocative Look at the Harm From Corporate Heft [...] That can be good: size and scale can enable companies to reduce costs, invest in better products and compete globally. But a provocative new study concludes the opposite. It found that in recent decades a lack of competition has driven up prices, hurting U.S. growth, wages and labor-force participation.

"How the Democratic Party Is Learning to Love Being Anti-Monopoly: Democrats just unveiled the opening salvo to their attempts to take back Congress. It sounds like the Warren and Sanders playbook - but the roots go deeper."

Marshall Steinbaum at The Roosevelt Institute, "A Real Monopoly Moment: The news that Barry Lynn's Open Markets group has been evicted from its DC think tank home, New America, for crossing the interests of its major funder, Google, is a legitimately shocking development. This development crystalizes the concerns about monopoly power that we at Roosevelt have been pointing out these past few years - along with our like-minded colleagues who have set up shop at the new Citizens Against Monopoly. Evidence is mounting that market power is causing economic problems: stagnant growth, rising inequality, slack labor markets, and vacant storefronts and factories. It should surprise no one that this excess power is now threatens intellectual freedom and inquiry. Concentrated power does not appreciate being called out."

Here's a good 2013 article by Lynn, on an earlier era of anti-trust action, "Estates of Mind: The answer to America's techno-malaise is to force big corporations to compete more. And to open their patent vaults. [...] Or consider the business software giant Oracle. Its CEO, Larry Ellison, once said that acquiring another company was 'a confession that there's a failure to innovate.' Then in 2004 Ellison began to gobble up precisely those competitors most likely to force Oracle to innovate. This included PeopleSoft, Siebel, Sun Microsystems, and more than eighty other firms. The story is not much different at Google, which has vacuumed up more than 120 former competitors, along with their products, patents, and, often, their scientists and engineers. If you think of Google as an innovative company, remember that it was the smaller companies it swallowed that actually developed most of its key components. These include YouTube, DoubleClick, and the ITA airline reservation system, as well as ten search companies that no longer compete with Google because Google now owns them. Much the same is true of Intel, Corning, Pfizer, and Microsoft. These giants don't merely set standards for certain formats of semiconductors, glass, pharmaceuticals, and software. Their mastery over patents and markets empowers them to block or buy most any newcomer that might threaten their sovereignty. What technologies are developed, and how and where they are developed, is increasingly up to these small clubs of executives alone. [...] Nevertheless, problems soon emerged. By the mid-nineteenth century, American financiers had figured out how to use patent monopolies not merely to hobble rival innovators but also to erect corporate empires; by the turn of the twentieth century, they had largely perfected the art. One of the more notable instances saw J. P. Morgan grab control of the electrical patents of Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla, and then use the resulting 'pool' to control the entire electrical industry. One lawyer of that era even penned a primer for businessmen. 'Patents are the best and most effective means of controlling competition,' he wrote. Sometimes, he added, patents 'give absolute command of the market, enabling the owner to name the price without regard to cost of production.' The first coherent reactions against such abuse of patents also date to this time. In 1900, political scientist Jeremiah Jenks proposed using antitrust law to compel giant companies to license their patents."

David Dayen at The New Republic, "Democrats Face an Important Anti-Monopoly Test: How the party treats Trump's pick for antitrust enforcement will speak volumes about its commitment to fighting corporate consolidation. [...] The authority to change those guidelines rests with the head of the DOJ's antitrust division. So the Delrahim nomination suddenly puts the Democrats' credibility on the line. It's highly unlikely Delrahim would upend the consumer welfare standard. He praised it in this 2003 speech from when he served in the Justice Department under George W. Bush, arguing that 'increased use of economic thinking has transformed federal merger analysis.' Analysts at Hughes Hubbard put Delrahim 'within the mainstream of the last several decades' antitrust orthodoxy.' That's just what Democrats, in A Better Deal, claim to want to break from."

Best Protest Ever: "Dinosaur suit-wearing protesters march on Washington to protest Pres. Trump's plan to slash the budget for national service programs."

An Unhinged Rant about Harvey.

An Evening with Bernie Sanders: Riverside Church, NYC 8/28/17

David Dayen on how we are, "Canada's China: Buried amid NAFTA negotiations this week was a fun little nugget: we are Canada's China. Our corporate titan-backed rollout of "right to work" principles in state after state has denied a level playing field for Canadian manufacturers, which is all the U.S. ever says we want in trade negotiations. So Canada decided to call us on it."

Dday at The Intercept, "The Politics Of The Dream Act Seem Pretty Easy, But Some Democrats Are Still Screwing It Up: IF SENATE DEMOCRATS were united in 2010, undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children would already be on the path to citizenship. A vote on the DREAM Act held after the disastrous midterm elections got three Republican votes, enough to break a filibuster at the time if Democrats held firm. But six Democratic defections ' five no votes and one abstention ' sunk the bill, leading then-President Barack Obama to eventually establish the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, to protect the 'Dreamers.' [...] In other words, Congress is falling into two camps: not for and against a DREAM Act, but for and against voting on a DREAM Act by itself. And calling for a comprehensive immigration solution - which Congress has failed to agree on for decades, even when the parties were far less polarized - is pretty close to being against anything getting done. It's a cheap way to earn support and respect from a public that overwhelmingly supports DACA - 76 percent in favor of allowing beneficiaries to stay, including 69 percent of Republicans - without having to vote to keep them in the country."

Brent Budowsky in The Hill, "How Sanders could save the Democratic Party in 2018: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the conscience of the Democratic Party at a moment in history when it is crucial that Democrats stand for profiles in courage as a historically crucial midterm election effectively begins this week with the return of Congress from recess. [...] Democrats stand on the brink of being on the winning side of an anti-Trump wave election in the 2018 midterm elections. But it is possible for Democrats to win a wave election in the popular vote in 2018 without winning enough seats to gain control of the House of Representatives or the Senate, which would perpetuate one-party control in Washington after the midterm votes are counted. [...] What Sanders and his supporters have, and many Democratic insiders and large donors lack, is the passion and commitment of knowing that they speak for hugely important issues at a dangerous moment for American politics."

"Democrats Put Eric Holder, Best Friend of Wall Street Banks, in Charge of Winning Back Main Street America: Holder was a "double agent" for high finance while serving as America's top cop. [...] Eric Holder, the former U.S. Attorney General, is the chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, which promises to unfurl - a targeted, state-by-state strategy that ensures Democrats can fight back - when the political maps are drawn for U.S. House and state legislative races for the decade of the 2020s."

Late to the party, The New York Times appears to take vote-rigging seriously - but only if the Russians are in it. "Susan Greenhalgh, a troubleshooter at a nonpartisan election monitoring group, was alarmed. Most of the complaints came from Durham, a blue-leaning county in a swing state. The problems involved electronic poll books - tablets and laptops, loaded with check-in software, that have increasingly replaced the thick binders of paper used to verify voters' identities and registration status. She knew that the company that provided Durham's software, VR Systems, had been penetrated by Russian hackers months before." Let's see, where was the NYT 17 years ago....?

Ryan Cooper in The Week, "Did Kamala Harris just become a Bernie Bro? [...] Now Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), a centrist darling, has taken up the major proposal of the left, by becoming a co-sponsor of Bernie Sanders' Medicare-for-all bill. She may have become ... one of the Dread Bernie Bros. This is interesting, and not a little amusing, on multiple levels. But it's also a good opportunity to drive home the fact that the largest beneficiaries of an agenda of economic populism would be oppressed minorities, especially black and Latino Americans." (I was amused to see Cooper says the "centrists" who attacked him for an earlier article subjected him to a social media pile-on that was worse than he'd had from the Gamergate crowd. I tell ya, those HillBros are the worst. Meanwhile, Joy Reid is the poster child for deranged Clintonophilia.) "Jokes aside, what matters about this move is how it clarifies both recent history and the policy stakes. The problem with the argument about political success from Reid and Dean is that it's completely at odds with recent electoral results. Democrats just ran a compromising, centrist, big-donor candidate with a 3-2 money advantage and lost to the biggest buffoon in the history of presidential politics. Overall, the party is in its worst shape since 1928. If anybody is calling for a "purity test," it's people continuing to cling to such a world-historical failure."

"Best Looting of West Baltimore: The Hogan Administration Making Off with the Red Line Funds: It has been a shitty year for West Baltimore. But of all the crimes committed in 2015, nothing trumps Gov. Larry Hogan's decision to cancel the Red Line. The proposed subway-to-surface light-rail line - which had been planned for more than a decade and was supposed to break ground this year - would have linked impoverished West Baltimore to thousands of jobs and the rest of the city's transit system. To add insult to injury, the transportation funds that the O'Malley administration had been saving for the rail project were redistributed to wealthier, low-density counties for sprawl-inducing highway projects. Baltimore City literally received $0 from the 'savings.' So instead of providing life-changing access to employment, education, and health care to an area with the lowest car ownership in the state, that money is now going to projects such as widening roads in the middle of nowhere. And the $900 million the federal government was giving the MTA to cover its half of construction costs? That's now going somewhere other than Maryland, not to mention the millions of dollars already spent on planning and right-of-way acquisition. Even in a city known for crime, this is a heist for the history books."

"In Arizona, People Power Triumphs Over Dark Money in School Voucher Fight: In Arizona, people power just won a major victory over national dark money groups. In 90 days, more than 2,500 regular Arizona voters fanned out across the state, collecting more than 110,000 signatures to block a radical and highly controversial expansion of school vouchers pushed through by our GOP legislature and governor this spring. In a state that already ranks dead last in teacher pay and hovers just above last place for per-student spending, parents would now be able to take money out of local public schools to use toward private, home-school and religious education. With their signatures, 110,000 Arizona residents said 'enough.' Another cut to public school funding would be devastating. [...] Political insiders were quick to dismiss us. They said that the controversial law was more of the same, nothing to get hot and bothered about, and that Save Our Schools would turn out to a political blip in a state where residents are ready to walk away from their public schools. They were wrong.

"Federal Judge Bars Enforcement Of Texas' Voter ID Laws: The permanent injunction against the law follows years of litigation, but will be appealed. The Justice Department, which once backed the challengers to the state's voter ID law, reversed course once Trump took office - urging that recent amendments to the law eliminated its discriminatory effects."

"Emmanuel Macron's Waning Support Shakes Bid to Overhaul French Economy: PARIS - As Emmanuel Macron sets out to shake up France's rigid labor market, the young president is losing the public support he may need to weather protests by the country's powerful unions. [...] Unpopular budget cuts, accusations of an authoritarian approach and weeks of critical news coverage have sent Mr. Macron's approval ratings in a downward spiral. The latest poll, published in mid-August by public opinion firm Harris Interactive, found that 37% of voters approve of him, down from 51% in July and 59% in June. Given that drop, Mr. Macron will have to tread carefully in rolling out his labor reforms in September. For months, the 39-year-old president has been in talks with powerful labor unions in a bid to contain planned street protests. Now the prospect is growing that the ranks of those demonstrations could swell with students, retirees and other segments of French society unhappy with Mr. Macron's early steps." He wants to bust unions. He's going to be the Bill Clinton of France, wrecking the economy and calling it "reform".

This may be a bit late, but worth taking note of, from Jon Schwarz, "Happy Labor Day! There Has Never Been a Middle Class Without Strong Unions" points out a number of benefits of unions, including this one: "Dean Baker, co-director of a Washington, D.C. think tank called the Center for Economic and Policy Research, or CEPR, is arguably the only economist in the U.S. who both recognized the danger of the gigantic U.S. housing bubble in the mid-2000s and warned about it loudly. But Baker didn't appear out of nowhere. His first job in Washington was at the Economic Policy Institute, which was founded in 1986 with a five-year funding pledge from eight unions. His foothold there made it possible for him to eventually co-found CEPR and make his case on the housing bubble. (I know this about Baker because I briefly worked for CEPR long ago.)"

You can tell we've got a better pope. "U.S. Bishops' Labor Day message: 'Unions must retain and recover their prophetic voice': WASHINGTON (CNS) -- 'Excessive inequality' threatens cooperation among all people in society 'and the social pact it supports,' said Bishop Frank J. Dewane of Venice, Florida, in the U.S. bishops' annual Labor Day statement. In the message, Bishop Dewane cited the words of Pope Francis, who told factory workers in Genoa, Italy, 'The entire social pact is built around work. This is the core of the problem. Because when you do not work, or you work badly, you work little or you work too much, it is democracy that enters into crisis, and the entire social pact.' [...] Workers' legal rights to 'a just wage in exchange for work, to protection against wage theft, to workplace safety and just compensation for workplace injuries, to health care and other benefits, and to organize and engage in negotiations, should be promoted,' he added. 'Workers must be aided to come to know and exercise their legal rights. As an example, CCHD has supported the Don Bosco Workers in Westchester, New York, which has launched a successful campaign to combat wage theft. Persons returning from prison also need support to understand their legal rights as they seek new employment. CCHD has helped the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in Cincinnati and elsewhere as they work with returning citizens to find stable and meaningful jobs.' Labor unions play an important role in this effort, according to Bishop Dewane, as he quoted from Pope Francis' remarks in June in an audience with delegates from the Confederation of Trade Unions: 'There is no good society without a good union, and there is no good union that is not reborn every day in the peripheries, that does not transform the discarded stones of the economy into its cornerstones.'"

"What Can Trump Learn From Local Governments? How Not To Handle Infrastructure: Public-private partnerships are frequently portrayed, especially by President Donald Trump, as an easy infrastructure fix for cities and states with tight budgets. But horror stories of so-called 'P3s' gone wrong have been making headlines for the past decade, often as a result of contractual clauses that prove costly for governments or keep information from the public eye. They don't have to be that way." This article is actually too kind on several fronts, since it singles out a handful of egregious examples but fails to point out that it's not just a few examples but rather the norm. There was a time when government and the commercial sector could work together for a common goal, but that was before the sole goal was to ensure massive profits to commercial industry even if it meant high costs go government at the expense of public services. If, for example, the goal were to get everyone to work, you might get the commercial sector to pitch in with government to build the New York subway system. Today, the goal of getting everyone to work would be pretty much on the back-burner, with transport merely a gimmick for skimmers to make more money.

Marcy Wheeler, "The Arpaio Pardon: You're Not the Audience: Meanwhile, Brennan Center's Mike German has started to track a disturbing trend. I believe he, like me, thinks the FBI is generally adequate at infiltrating white supremacist groups to disrupt the most outrageous attacks. But what law enforcement is not doing is policing right wing violence at protests the same way it polices left protests." It's about cops.

Bernie Sanders in Fortune: "Why Medicare-for-All Is Good for Business" - for one thing, it cuts out 33% of costs from administration alone, not to mention the extortion to fatten insurance company exec's wallets.

Robert Kuttner talked to Amy Goodman on Democracy NOW! about his surprising interview with Steve Bannon.

Another day, another reframing of the CCES study of who voted how and why. As Lambert notes, the original framing was about Obama voters who jumped ship to vote for Trump, but this week's frame is Sanders supporters who did so - and caused the election of Trump, because they were a bunch of racists. The data don't actually say that, though, and there are plenty of reasons to think other factors were involved, even for these people who clearly had no intention to vote for a status quo candidate of either party. (It shouldn't be forgotten that of actual Democrats, more Clinton-supporting Democrats defected to McCain in 2008 than Sanders-supporting Democrats defected to Trump. That's a particularly interesting jump since, policy-wise, there was virtually no difference between the two Democratic candidates in 2008 beside sex and race. This was not the case in the 2016 race, where differences in the records and approaches of the two contenders for the Democratic nomination were significant.) The study seemed to use views on "trade" as an indicator of whether views on the economy or simple racism were the strongest motivators for these Trump voters, but, "Let me remark here that other factors that correlate with voting for Trump include poor credit scores, battlefield casualties, employment situation, and deaths of despair. These do not seem to have been considered by CCES, or if considered were not brought forward by Schaffner, and it is not clear to me that views on trade or race are adequate proxies for them."

Meanwhile, "Bernie Sanders, Nation's Highest Profile Socialist, Once Again Voted Most Popular [...] According to the poll - conducted online from Aug. 17-22 with 2,263 Democrats, Republicans, and registered Independents - Sanders is currently the only politician in the whole country who "a majority of Americans actually like." Among the respondents, 54 percent view Sanders favorably with just 36 percent taking the opposite view. Compared to others included in the survey - including Republicans like McConnell, President Donald Trump, and Vice President Mike Pence as well as top Democratic leaders like Hillary Clinton, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California - it wasn't even close. 'When it comes to the most popular demographics," Bustle reports, "the poll showed Sanders scored highest among millennials - people aged 18-34, who expressed a 62 percent approval rating. Furthermore, 58 percent of women registered to vote view Sanders favorably, as do 55 percent of men.'"

Sections leaked from Clinton's book attack Sanders. Bernie brushes off her contradictory and delusional claims as looking backward when there are more important things to be concerned with. "I'm working overtime now to see we overturn Trump's decision on DACA, pass a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and next week I'll be offering a Medicare-for-all single-payer system." Her claims are pretty strange, though - says he stole her ideas even though he'd actually introduced a bill ten months before she mentioned the subject, and a direct government employment infrastructure program is not merely "bigger" or less realistic than her infrastructure bank idea, it's different, better, more likely to result in actual restoration and expansion of infrastructure, and cheaper than a lot of over-financialization. The media is full of talk about Clinton's book, but as Sophia A. McClennen in Salon notes, Bernie has a book out, too, and it isn't being talked about much. Maybe that's because it's not about the 2016 election, about making things better.

Amber A'Lee Frost in Current Affairs, "How To Write About Nazis: When covering the far right, the media has a duty to deliver both facts and context, fearlessly and stoically..." The mainstream press, however, seems to be writing just the kind of pieces they want - either adoring profiles or alarmist nonsense that makes them seem far more mainstream and popular than they are. "Above all, keeps things in perspective. It's true that the far right are coordinating, but they are not on the precipice of seizing power - the traditional right (that old Republican base) already have that squared away. The brownshirts are not at the gates just yet, but if they ever get there, we're not going to beat them back if we lose our heads."

"St. Louis gave minimum-wage workers a raise. On Monday, it was taken away [...] St. Louis is not the first city to see its minimum-wage ordinances undercut by state legislatures. The issue is a divisive topic across America, and there are 25 states that have minimum-wage preemption laws - when state governments approve laws that prevent local governments from passing such measures - including Kentucky and Iowa, according to Paul Sonn, general counsel with the National Employment Law Group."

"Louisiana floods destroy home of Christian leader who says God sends natural disasters to punish gay people: A flood has destroyed the home of a Christian lobbyist who preached that God sends natural disasters to punish gays. President of the controversial Christian group Family Research Council, Tony Perkins, described a deluge of 'near biblical proportions' hitting his Louisiana home." (This story is actually a year old, but it just seemed timely.)

Peter reminds us that, though most Britons know that homosexual sex ceased to be a specific crime in 1967, 25 years later we were still campaigning to make more sense of the law and stop the campaign of harassment by the police. "The Myth of Homosexual Decriminalisation: On the 50th Anniversary of the ground breaking 1967 Sexual Offences Act, the campaigner Peter Tatchell takes a sceptical look at its impact on Britain's gay communities."

"How SB Nation Profits Off An Army Of Exploited Workers [...] Twelve years ago, SB Nation began as a do-it-yourself venture, by and for fans, more a community of communities than a journalistic endeavor. It has since evolved and rebranded itself and emerged as Vox Media, which was valued at $1 billion in 2015 after a $200 million round of funding from NBCUniversal. The SB Nation network itself, consisting of 319 team websites, has remained in place, a vast operation read by millions of people every month and powered by unpaid and underpaid labor."

Beat the Press, "Opposition to Trade Deals: Brad DeLong's "Socialism of Fools" Might Look Like Common Sense to Those Outside the Fraternity: The usually sensible Brad DeLong is very unhappy with those who oppose the agenda that has passed for globalization over the last three decades. He argues that people are foolish for believing that globalization has had a major impact on employment and the distribution of income in recent years. I'll take the side of Brad's "fools" in this matter."

Briahna Joy Gray in Current Affairs, "How Identity Became A Weapon Against The Left: Reaction to criticism of Kamala Harris shows how the voices of progressive people of color are erased...
* Michael Brooks discussed the article with Ms. Gray on The Michael Brooks Show.

Ian Welsh says "The World Is Going To Hell Because: You get the behaviour you reward."

RIP: "Science fiction author Brian Aldiss dies aged 92: The prolific writer behind more than 80 books and editor of 40 anthologies died at his Oxford home after celebrating his birthday." Well, that's the way to do it - become a revered grandmaster of your craft, and then have a nice bash to celebrate your 92nd birthday, go to bed and die in your sleep.

RIP: "Walter Becker, Steely Dan Guitarist, Dies at 67." Donald Fagen put out a statement. A fuller obit from the Guardian says Becker died of "an undisclosed illness." He was still touring as of last year. "Walter Carl Becker, singer, songwriter and instrumentalist, born 20 February 1950; died 3 September 2017" Rolling Stone obit, and New York Times obit.

"Bob Dylan Documentarian Murray Lerner Dead at 90: Oscar nominated filmmaker captured legendary performances at Newport Folk Fest, Isle of Wight." There's a nice little clip there of Mike Bloomfield talking about Sun House and Paul Butterfield.

RIP: "Richard Anderson, Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman Actor, Dies at 91." Other genre credits include Forbidden Planet. He was on most of the regular evening shows in the late '50s and early '60s, including Zorro, The Untouchables, and Perry Mason, as well as having a role in The Fugitive.

My new favorite TV show is Braindead. Unfortunately, it was cancelled after one short season, but it was lots of fun, and when it says, "Previously on Braindead..." Jonathan Coulton sings the recap wonderfully. It can't have had much promotion, we stumbled on it by accident while rummaging through Amazon Prime, having never heard of it before.

APOD: Milky Way over Chilean Volcanoes
* Diamond Ring in the Clouds
* The Crown of the Sun

"Photographer Kristina Makeeva Captures the Otherworldly, Frozen Beauty of the Earth's Oldest & Deepest Lake

Russian Photographer Kristina Makeeva Captures Girls In Dresses Against Backgrounds Of The Most Beautiful Places

119: Skiffle, The Beatles, and Billy Bragg - An interview that explains why George Harrison once said that if there was no Leadbelly there's no Lonnie Donnegan, and if there's no Lonnie Donnegan, there's no Beatles.

The Cars