The clerk has woken up from sleep, his eyes are droopy

This cottage in Knaresborough was photographed by Cliff Ounsley.

Covid finally got us, as careful as we've been. He only goes out — masked and gloved — to shop, and I don't go out at all. Now, I mostly sleep. But I'm in no condition to write up how the Supreme Court is overturning The United States of America, so I'll just post what I had before I caught the plague and go back to sleep.

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This is from mail so no link, but Robert Cruickshank on the French election:

From what I can see here in the upper left of North America, I think on the one hand it's very good that the left was able to get its act together and run as a coalition that denied Macron a majority. That's a very positive sign.

On the other hand, Le Pen also had a big breakthrough, going from like 8 seats to 90. That's in part due to Macron spending so much time fear-mongering about the left that his own base didn't show up to stop them. This stat shows that where a second round legislative campaign was between the Left Coalition and RN (Le Pen's party), 72% of Macron's party's voters didn't even bother to show up: https://twitter.com/Taniel/status/1538608328179326979.

Had Macron been willing to compromise with the left in order to keep out the far right — as every postwar French president did before him — then the Left Coalition might well have won even more seats and Le Pen many fewer.

De Gaulle understood the need to work with the left to keep out the right. Adenauer understood this. Churchill understood this. But today's neoliberals are repeating the same mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s, believing that the left is a bigger threat than the right. And the result will be ruinous.

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"Biden Taps Anti-Social Security Ideologue To Oversee Program: Biden nominated Andrew Biggs, a think tank denizen with a history of slamming Social Security, to oversee government retirement benefits for 66 million Americans. Last month, President Joe Biden nominated a longtime advocate of Social Security privatization and benefit cuts to a key board overseeing the Social Security system. The move comes as Republicans get ready to push cuts to Social Security and Medicare, if they end up winning control of Congress during the November's midterms, as expected. The development suggests that there could soon be a coordinated push in Washington to cut the Social Security program, which provides retirement, disability, and survivor benefits to 66 million Americans."

And vice versa: "Facebook Says Apple is Too Powerful. They're Right. In December, 2020, Apple did something insanely great. They changed how iOS, their mobile operating system, handled users' privacy preferences, so that owners of iPhones and other iOS devices could indicate that they don't want to be tracked by any of the apps on their devices. If they did, Apple would block those apps from harvesting users' data. This made Facebook really, really mad. It's not hard to see why! Nearly all iOS users opted out of tracking. Without that tracking, Facebook could no longer build the nonconsensual behavioral dossiers that are its stock-in-trade. According to Facebook, empowering Apple's users to opt out of tracking cost the company $10,000,000,000 in the first year, with more losses to come after that. Facebook really pulled out the stops in its bid to get those billions back. The company bombarded its users with messages begging them to turn tracking back on. It threatened an antitrust suit against Apple. It got small businesses to defend user-tracking, claiming that when a giant corporation spies on billions of people, that's a form of small business development." So Facebook, furious that Apple has weakened its business model by offering its users protection and security, has pointed out, quite rightly, that Apple also has enormous power and it doesn't use it for good. In fact, it uses it for evil. "In Facebook's comments to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's 'Developing a Report on Competition in the Mobile App Ecosystem' docket, Facebook laments Apple's ability to override its customers' choices about which apps they want to run. iOS devices like the iPhone use technological countermeasures to block 'sideloading' (installing an app directly, without downloading it from Apple's App Store) and to prevent third parties from offering alternative app stores. [...] Facebook is very well situated to comment on how high switching costs can lock users into a service they don't like very much, because, as much as they dislike that platform, the costs of using it are outstripped by the costs the company imposes on users who leave. That's how Facebook operates."

My father, partially deafened in the army, didn't have much of a record collection, but he really dug Eartha Kitt, and this was one of the rare 45s that was in our house as long as I can remember. Kitt spoke four languages and sang in more and sure could make it sound sexy. "Uska Dara (A Turkish Tale)", 1953.

Stay out of the way of the blood-stained bandit

"Purple Fog" is by Chuka Ibe.

All over the country, progressive DAs and AGs won big in primaries and elections, but that's not how the media reported it. Let's take, for example, The New York Times, which seems to have formed the basis of the response by everyone from The Nation to Joe Biden. "How To Spin An Election: Sometimes the bias of the New York Times is so outrageous that it surprises even me. Because what the NYT did yesterday in its election coverage is so dangerous, I try my best to analyze it carefully below. On June 8, the day after the June 7 elections, the New York Times published a story telling its readers about what it called “the shifting winds on criminal justice” [...] There is a lot of remarkable stuff about this story. But one thing stands out above all the rest: there were huge progressive criminal justice victories in California on election night, and the NYT just ignores them. I honestly could not believe what I was reading." The forces of evil spent quite a lot on the recall of Chesa Boudin, an effort that was strongly aided by the press, which got its talking points direct from the police, and in a low turnout with it only taking a few extra right-wingers to come out to vote, Boudin was recalled. Dean Preston did a good thread on this, in which he notes, "In 2.5 years, Boudin reduced the jail population by 38% and stopped charging kids as adults. The sky did not fall. Violent crime rates did." And his policies are overwhelmingly popular. But people just didn't get out to vote. However, as Chloe Cockburn pointed out, there was some very good news for progressives in California and around the country.

One of the things I can't forgive Trump for is making it sound like criticisms of voting machines are just sour grapes and crackpottery. "A candidate in Georgia who appeared to get few Election Day votes was actually in first place: The discrepancy in a race for a county-level board of commissioners seat was blamed on a series of technical errors. A candidate for a county office near Atlanta was vaulted into first place after a series of technical errors made it appear that she had not mustered a single Election Day vote in a vast majority of precincts in last month's Democratic primary, election officials determined. The candidate, Michelle Long Spears, was shortchanged by 3,792 votes in the District 2 primary for the Board of Commissioners in DeKalb County, Ga., that was held on May 24, according to newly-certified results released on Friday. In all but four of the district's nearly 40 precincts, no Election Day votes were recorded for Ms. Spears, who had received more than 2,000 early votes. She said that she immediately alerted state and county election authorities. 'When I visited several precincts (including my own) after Election Day and saw ZERO votes reported for myself, I was shocked and knew that wasn't accurate,' Ms. Spears said in a text message. After conducting a hand count over the Memorial Day weekend and auditing those returns, election officials determined that they had drastically underreported the vote totals for Ms. Spears"

In the exhausting world of Democratic Fail:
"New York Dems' Giant Gift To Private Equity: New York Democrats just voted to invest a lot more pension money in private equity deals that rarely pay off. New York's Democratic-controlled legislature this week passed a bill to funnel as much as $54 billion more in retiree savings into high-risk Wall Street investments, amid a flood of campaign cash from the financial industry."

"The Real Estate Industry Protects Its Right To Evict: Awash in real estate industry cash, New York's Democratic-controlled legislature avoided any real action this session to address the housing crisis."

"Biden Hikes Medicare Prices And Funnels Profits to Private Insurers: The largest-ever Medicare premium increase will pad the pockets of insurance executives who donated millions to the president's election campaign. Last week, the Biden administration quietly reaffirmed its decision to enact the highest Medicare premium hikes in history right before this year's midterm elections. At the same time, President Joe Biden is endorsing a plan to funnel significantly more Medicare money to insurance companies and further privatize the government insurance program for older Americans and those with disabilities."

"Michigan Couple Says Town Seized Their Building and Offered To Return It if They Bought Two Cars for Police: 'Extortion, there's no other way to explain it,' the couple's attorney says. A Michigan couple says their town seized a building they owned and then demanded that they buy two cars for the police department to get their own property back. The case, first reported by WXYZ Detroit, began in December of 2020 when the mayor of Highland Park and the police chief dropped by a 13,000-square-foot building owned by Justyna and Matt Kozbial for an impromptu fire code inspection. The city officials found a marijuana grow operation inside. The Kozbials, immigrants from Poland, say they had a state license to grow medical marijuana, but the city seized the building anyway and held on to it for 17 months without charging them with a crime. Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can legally seize property—cash, cars, and even houses—suspected of being connected to criminal activity like drug trafficking, whether or not the owner has been charged with a crime. But not only were the Kozbials never charged with a crime, police never alleged there was any major criminal activity. In a response to an interrogatory filed in the Kozbials' subsequent lawsuit against Highland Park, a city police officer answered 'none' when asked to identify any predicate felony offenses justifying the seizure. Things then took a highly unusual turn when the Kozbials say they received a settlement offer from the town: Stop growing marijuana and buy two vehicles for the local police department."

It seems like every couple of years someone tries to "warn" us against reliable news media like Naked Capitalism or Consortium News. "US State-Affiliated NewsGuard Targets Consortium News: The Pentagon and State Dept.-linked outfit, with an ex-N.S.A. and C.I.A. director on its board, is accusing Consortium News of publishing 'false content' on Ukraine, reports Joe Lauria. Consortium News is being 'reviewed' by NewsGuard, a U.S. government-linked organization that is trying to enforce a narrative on Ukraine while seeking to discredit dissenting views. The organization has accused Consortium News, begun in 1995 by former Associated Press investigative reporter Robert Parry, of publishing 'false content' on Ukraine. It calls 'false' essential facts about Ukraine that have been suppressed in mainstream media: 1) that there was a U.S.-backed coup in 2014 and 2) that neo-Nazism is a significant force in Ukraine. Reporting crucial information left out of corporate media is Consortium News' essential mission. But NewsGuard considers these facts to be 'myths' and is demanding Consortium News 'correct' these 'errors.'"

A lot of people are talking about student loan cancellation because it is one of the things Biden can do without Congress to alleviate economic stresses in the economy, so the pro-poverty lobby makes up excuses not to. They started with a claim that student loan debtors are rich, but "No, Student Loan Cancellation will not Benefit the 'Wealthy'." Then there is the inflation claim but, "No, Student Loan Cancellation will not cause Inflation."

As the United States establishment gets closer to its dream of torturing Julian Assange to death, it's instructive to learn just how much you've been lied to about his case. It's kind of amazing how a false accusation of rape (by the police and newspapers, not the alleged victim herself) has turned into an excuse to pretend it's okay if Assange's life is destroyed as an example to the press of the consequences of trying to hold the powerful accountable. It would be useful if more people read what the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture said when he looked at all of the originating documents and became a witness to the twisting of law that was necessary to victimize Assange: "It quickly became clear to me that something was wrong. That there was a contradiction that made no sense to me with my extensive legal experience: Why would a person be subject to nine years of a preliminary investigation for rape without charges ever having been filed? [...] They intentionally left him in limbo. Just imagine being accused of rape for nine-and-a-half years by an entire state apparatus and by the media without ever being given the chance to defend yourself because no charges had ever been filed. [...] Assange reported to the Swedish authorities on several occasions because he wanted to respond to the accusations. But the authorities stonewalled. [...] Allow me to start at the beginning. I speak fluent Swedish and was thus able to read all of the original documents. I could hardly believe my eyes: According to the testimony of the woman in question, a rape had never even taken place at all. And not only that: The woman's testimony was later changed by the Stockholm police without her involvement in order to somehow make it sound like a possible rape. I have all the documents in my possession, the emails, the text messages." The woman, at the urging of an acquaintance, went to ask the police if someone she had had consensual unprotected sex with could be forced to take an HIV test. When she realized the police were going to use this to charge him with rape, she refused to cooperate and left. That night, the newspapers were full of headlines about how Assange was suspected of raping two women. Note that no second woman had been interviewed by the police at that time. And, "It also violated a clear ban in Swedish law against releasing the names of alleged victims or perpetrators in sexual offense cases. The case now came to the attention of the chief public prosecutor in the capital city and she suspended the rape investigation some days later with the assessment that while the statements from S. W. were credible, there was no evidence that a crime had been committed." Assange consistently tried to complete an interview with the police but they kept putting him off. Eventually his lawyer said he needed to be in Berlin soon and asked if Assange could leave the country; they said yes, so he went. And then we hear this story about how he is "hiding" from the police and refusing to talk to them and has absconded to another country. So pretty much everything you've heard is a lie — a lie that is supposed to make it okay to ignore the fact that the United States is illegally trying to persecute him for exposing war crimes.

Interesting interview by Matt Taibbi, "The Incredible Political and Media Journey of Jesse and Tyrel Ventura: Interview with Substack's newest contributors, who may be the ultimate symbols of America's censorship regime. Back on March 12th, not long after Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, the New York Times ran one of the first of what would become a series of gloating articles about the demise of Russia Today. The state-sponsored TV network had just been yanked off the air by government fiat in Europe, and removed in America by private carriers like Comcast, Xfinity, and DirecTV. About the channel, the Times wrote: A role at RT America was a rare job in an industry where if you had screwed up, were washed up or were completely new to the field, there weren't many other options… The Times then listed a series of those 'screwups' and 'washouts,' including the paper's own former star war reporter Chris Hedges (also thriving now on Substack) and the father-son tandem Jesse and Tyrel Ventura. The paper neglected to mention that none of these figures had failed at anything, but rather had been driven out of the mainstream press essentially over opposition to the Iraq war."

Some of you may remember Doug J. from Balloon Juice, but these days he's one of my favorite Twitter posters, New York Times Pitchbot. So it was nice to see him getting a profile at CJR, "The bot that saw the Times [...] In 2019, @DougJBalloon changed his name on Twitter to New York Times Pitchbot, committing to a new bit. He was encouraged by a conservative journalist friend and inspired by other 'pitchbot' accounts, particularly one, now retired, that satirized The Federalist, a conservative online publication. 'It's a tricky thing, because The Federalist is so insane. How do you parody it?' he says. 'What I think is more interesting is just how much of that same kind of stupidity is embedded in ostensibly left-center establishment journalism.'"

Froomkin wonders, "Can the New York Times save itself — and us? [...] But as I wrote for The Nation on May 13, the occasional, appropriately alarming news analysis doesn't make up for endless incremental, lobotomized daily campaign stories that exist in a context-free zone." Will the new editor address this problem? I'm predicting he won't. The NYT doesn't hire people to do that.

I watched The Man From Earth and it was riveting, which is a bit hard to believe considering what it is, but then I looked for the trailer and found the full movie instead and accidentally watched the whole thing again, only a few hours after seeing it for the first time. Beautifully done.

A long time ago I saw these guys from only a couple-few yards away, back in the days when we could all sit on floors. They look different in this 2016 video. Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady, "Good Shepherd". They sound different, too.