Crowding out old realities

"Basilica da Estrela (2019) by Ivo Antunes is from a collection on Trams of Lisbon.

"The OnlyFans Lawsuit Illuminates the Danger Social Media Companies Pose to Us All—Here's What You Need to Know: It feels like every time we turn around there is some new, terrifying information coming out about mega-corporations involving themselves in our personal lives. Whether it is Amazon trying to buy Roomba to make sure they know what we are doing at all times or Meta/Facebook handing over private Facebook messages for an abortion investigation, it all feels a little violating. Well, here comes another doozy. This time, it is a lawsuit filed against OnlyFans and Meta/Facebook. Usually, OnlyFans appears in the news because of an issue related to pornography use or sex workers' rights. But this lawsuit concerns social media power and capitalism—and their threat to humanity. There is technically more than one lawsuit going against OnlyFans and Meta right now, but they fall under the same umbrella. Adult Performing Artists Guild (which represents several adult entertainers who used OnlyFans, along with other adult content sites) and rival OnlyFans companies, JustForFans and FanCentro, have all filed lawsuits. All the cases center on one allegation—OnlyFans bribed Meta employees to put some adult entertainers on a terrorist watch list." Why? To punish (and shadow-ban) creators who weren't exclusive to OnlyFans.

The headlines said the FBI "raided" Mar-a-Lago, a term I resent on the grounds that they didn't show up in the middle of the night while everyone was asleep and break down the door, wreck the place, maybe kill a few innocent bystanders, and then find out they'd gone to the wrong address, the way it's normally done. They sure don't alert your lawyer and agree to meet them there at an agreed time in broad daylight and make an orderly retrieval of the items you removed from another residence illegally. Anyway, here's a little opinion piece from Johnny Ganz on "The Case for Going After Trump."

"Police Lied to Get the Warrant to Search Breonna Taylor's Home: The March 2020 killing of Breonna Taylor, which caused widespread protest around the country, was the result of police lies to obtain a warrant and racist police violence after officers forced their way into her apartment. On August 4, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the federal grand jury indictments of four Louisville Metro Police officers involved in the raid that resulted in Taylor's death. Three of the officers were accused of violating Taylor's Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure by lying to secure a no-knock warrant. The officers who sought the warrant 'knew that the affidavit used to obtain the warrant to search Taylor's home contained information that was false, misleading, and out-of-date; that the affidavit omitted material information; and that the officers lacked probable cause for the search,' the indictment reads."

If you give people carte blanche to rob you, they rob you. "FBI 'Lied' About Its Intentions, Planned to Seize Contents of Private Vaults, Lawyers Say: During its investigation of a business in California that offers secure deposit boxes to clients, the FBI planned to use civil forfeiture to sell every asset worth over $5,000 in every customer's box before a judge had even seen an application for a warrant to raid the business, according to a new analysis by the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm that is legally representing people who said the FBI seized their assets in an overly broad operation. The news provides an extra wrinkle to a case that has alarmed privacy and Fourth Amendment advocates. Although criminals allegedly made use of U.S. Private Vaults, so did ordinary people, who were swept up in the case and would have lost their property to the FBI for no fault of their own. 'The government has a duty to be honest with the court when it applies for a warrant under the Fourth Amendment,' senior attorney at the Institute for Justice Robert Frommer said in a statement. 'But the FBI lied about its intentions in claiming to only be interested in the property of the business, and not the box holders. Ultimately, the lure of civil forfeiture turned these federal cops into robbers.'"

"Former CIA Officer Joshua Schulte Faces as Many as 80 Years in Prison After Being Convicted For Providing Information to WikiLeaks: A federal jury in New York last month convicted former CIA officer Joshua Schulte on nine felony counts under the Espionage Act for providing information to WikiLeaks that became known as Vault 7. Schulte has consistently denied that he was the source of the information. Two years ago, he was convicted on two of the original 11 charges, while the jury hung on the remaining nine. The most recent trial, in which Schulte represented himself, was on those nine counts, and he now faces as many as 80 years in prison. Schulte is yet to be tried on state child pornography charges. Prosecutors had literally no evidence that Schulte had taken the data from the CIA and transferred it to WikiLeaks. But they contended that he was a computer genius who is so brilliant that he was able to cover his tracks."

"Our Bewildering Economy: What are the contradictory trends and policy choices? And does the Inflation Reduction Act live up to its name? [...] The Inflation Reduction Act provides several examples. The political problem is that many of them do not take effect in time for the November midterms. For instance, the provision allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices does not become operative until 2026, and only for ten major drugs. Other things that the government might do to damp down price pressures would require even more far-reaching action. These all reflect structural factors in the economy that add to price pressures and cannot easily be categorized as 'supply' or 'demand,' such as monopoly pricing power and our need to produce more inputs domestically to protect against supply chain shocks."

Ryan Cooper says, "Joe Biden's Student Debt Forgiveness Is a Good Start: [...] Biden also announced new rules to punish institutions that load up graduates with lots of debt, and new reporting mechanisms to steer prospective students away from them. As welcome as this news is, it doesn't do enough to fix the broader system of higher-education financing. Much like the medical system, higher education is badly in need of price regulation. For decades now, the government has been shoveling subsidies into colleges and universities, and (with a few exceptions) they have responded by jacking their prices through the roof. Biden can't do this by himself, of course, but it's long since time for the government to start demanding a better deal for itself—and American students."

"'A Wrong Never Righted': Court Upholds Mississippi's 1890 Jim Crow Voting Law: The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals voted to uphold a Jim Crow law that Mississippi's white-supremacist leaders adopted in 1890 in an attempt to disenfranchise Black residents for life. White lawmakers designated certain crimes that they believed Black people were more likely to commit as lifelong disenfranchising crimes. The court's conservative majority admitted that the Jim Crow law was 'steeped in racism,' but said the State had made enough changes in the 132 years since to override its white supremacist taint. A 2018 analysis found that the law still disproportionately disenfranchises Black Mississippians compared to white residents."

"Ronald Reagan stuck it to millennials: A college debt history lesson no one tells: Dramatic, awful changes occurred on my generation's watch -- and it amounts to a fiendishly successful conspiracy. [...] By the time Reagan was elected to the nation's highest office a decade and a half later, these powers had devised perfect tools to make sure the spirit of 1960s protest would never again erupt on campus. During Reagan's two terms as president, dedicated funding for outright grants-in-aid decreased, federal guidelines pushed individual loans, and private bill collectors were brought in to ensure that the hardest kind of debt to escape was whatever you took on for your education. Even more important was the shift in tone and expectation. Public goods became private services, and by the end of the 1980s, the anti-tax, infra-structure-starving, neoliberal Weltanschauung meant that as states cut their budgets, support for higher education was thrown into a cage match with every other necessary public good. Had anyone at my reunion complained about the complacency of today's students or bragged about how they got through school without taking on staggering debt, I could have reminded them that the class of '84 was the last to have a higher percentage of grants than loans."

"Why Is Larry Summers Engaged in Science Denial About Inflation?: It could be his conflicts of interest. Larry Summers doesn't like to be criticized. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently penned an op-ed arguing that viewing monetary policy as the sole solution to inflation is both short-sighted and dangerous, and it cited Summers's belief that unemployment would have to jump significantly to get inflation under control. Warren's critique of 'monetary policy and my economic analysis are, I believe, misguided and if heeded could have devastating consequences for tens of millions of workers,' Summers tweeted in response. Yes, the guy who thinks workers need to be tossed out of their jobs is supremely concerned about workers. [...] The bigger issue with Summers's prediction is that his understanding of the source of inflation centered almost exclusively on federal fiscal stimulus starting a wage-price spiral. That's why in his Warren-bashing Twitter thread, he touted his opposition to 'massive stimulus policy and easy money.' The thing is, nowhere, in the thread or outside, has Summers actually been able to demonstrate the link between federal stimulus and prolonged inflation. Given the global nature of inflation, American domestic policy seems at best an extraordinarily weak explanation. Why would one set of $1,400 stimulus checks in the U.S. raise prices across the world? [...] In particular, the evidence for Summers's own argument, that inflation is being driven largely by runaway wage growth, is especially sparse. Real wages have been falling, and even before that, wage increases lagged overall inflation. At this point, Summers is now embodying the 'science denial' he accused others of months ago."

Larry Summers isn't the only one who the networks trot out when they need someone to explain why we can't have nice things. "Marc Goldwein and the Limits of Deficit Scolding: On student debt cancellation, America's foremost spending scold believes whatever he needs to believe to stop progress. [...] Goldwein is emblematic of the kinds of self-described wonks who have 'well, actually'-ed student debtors to the political margins for years. He talks fast, spouts misleading statistics offhandedly in interviews, and is bemusedly dismissive of anyone with a different view. He acts like what much of the news media assumes a smart economics guy acts like. So is he right that student debt forgiveness is a mistake? Perhaps the better question is: What does Marc Goldwein actually believe about student debt? [...] So according to Goldwein, we couldn't cancel student loans in 2020 because the boost to the economy would be a paltry $115–$360 billion. But we also can't cancel student loans in 2022 because the boost to the economy would be a whopping, inflationary (gasp!) $70–$95 billion!"

"Inflation Is No Excuse for Squeezing Workers: The Fed's decision to raise interest rates for the fourth time this year threatens to loosen the tightest U.S. labor market in decades. What would it look like if policymakers consolidated workers' recent gains instead?"

"Book banned at a school named after its author: The book Life is So Good, co-written by George Dawson, is banned at George Dawson Middle School in Southlake, Texas. The same George Dawson who wrote this book is the George Dawson the school is named after."

"How Biden did it: The Clean Air Act of 1970 authorized the government to regulate air pollution. The Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden just signed into law, allocates more than $300 billion to energy and climate reform, including $30 billion in subsidies for manufacturers of solar panels and components, wind turbines, inverters, and batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid. Notice the difference? The Inflation Reduction Act is a large and important step toward slowing or reversing climate change. It also illustrates the nation's shift away from regulating businesses to subsidizing businesses."

Hm, let's see who Atrios is calling "America's Worst Transportation Secretaries" — Oh, you guessed. "Pete Buttigieg's Feeble Policy on Flight Cancellations: The transportation secretary could be doing far more with his existing authority. The new DOT rule could make matters worse for consumers. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been widely criticized for allowing airlines to cancel flights with no consequences. The big carriers sell tickets for flights that they know they lack the crews to serve, a practice that then leads to mass cancellations. The airlines have successfully duped passengers into taking credits for future flights, rather than offering cash refunds as required by law, giving the airlines billions of dollars in cash flow that belongs to their customers. On August 3, Buttigieg finally issued a draft rule for public comment, compelling airlines to give cash refunds to passengers whose flights are canceled and providing clearer definitions. It sounds great, but in practice the rule could actually give the airlines two more years to continue their anti-consumer behavior." Just enforce the existing law, McKinsey Pete.

This interview was done before Frost won his primary, but I was just delighted at the very idea of having an unusually young Congresscritter with that name. "Maxwell Frost Interview: Florida Politics, Abortion Access, More: If you've heard one thing about 25-year-old Maxwell Frost, it's probably that he could be one of the first Gen Z members of Congress. Despite his age, he has no shortage of political experience under his belt; Frost previously worked for March for Our Lives and the ACLU while spending his free time protesting in the streets of Orlando during the 2020 uprising for Black lives. It makes sense that he spent plenty of time throughout considering how to get his generation involved."

"New Apostolic Reformation Faces Profound Rift Due To Trump Prophecies And 'Spiritual Manipulation Of The Prophetic Gift': Four weeks after the January 6th insurrection, two leaders of the revivalist New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) were concerned about the future of their movement. They felt that influential apostles and prophets had gone too far in forecasting the reelection of Donald Trump; denying the reality of the loss by a man considered to be God's anointed; speaking for God in detailing how Trump was being thwarted by demonic forces; and claiming that God will restore him, possibly by any means necessary." These are scary people.

"Biden's Presidency Is Sinking Because of Conservative Democrats—Not the Left: Don't blame progressives for Biden's failures. It's the party's right flank that abandoned the working class. [...] What all of these critiques miss is a simple fact: Ever since Biden took office, progressives have been working to make his agenda a reality and bring relief for the very working people now facing economic havoc, while Democrats on the right flank of the party have obstructed this program every step of the way. But rather than deal with the uncomfortable truth that so-called 'moderates' are the ones imperiling both Biden's presidency and Democrats' electoral fortunes, establishment-friendly commentators are yet again lazily training their sights on their favorite scapegoat — the Left."

"Wokeness isn't why Democrats are unpopular: Whenever we get a new clip of some Democratic official, journalist, social media poster, cartoon character, guy from another country, Republican, etcetera saying something woke, an avalanche of pundits make the same point: this is why Democrats can't win. So when Kamala Harris gave us her pronouns and described what she's wearing at a meeting on disabilities, it was only a matter of time until guys like Kinzinger above made the same point. And whenever I see this, I always think the same thing. Does anyone really believe that if Democrats were providing Medicare for All, universal childcare, UBI, free college, and so on — that voters would throw all that out the window because Kamala Harris talked about her blue suit? If you could have real economic security, would you actually trade that away because a politician said 'birth giver' instead of 'mother'?"

"The Modern-Day Company Towns of Arkansas: Fortune 100 giants Tyson Foods and Walmart have heavy influence over two cities within 20 miles of one another, tucked into the northwest corner of the state. On a sweltering June Sunday earlier this summer, under the shade of a pavilion in Springdale, Arkansas's Luther George Park, Alice Gachuzo-Colin launched her campaign for city council. The first Black woman ever to run for office in Springdale, Gachuzo-Colin wants to move from what she calls 'old Springdale'—long dominated by white bankers, farmers, and businessmen—to 'new Springdale,' a place more representative of the town's current demographics and culture."

A legendary fighter for abortion rights released a book recently, and Nicole Sandler did an interview for her show: "Bill Baird is recognized widely as the 'Father of the birth control and abortion-rights movement. He was jailed eight times in five states in the 1960s for lecturing on abortion and birth control, and is believed to be the first and only non-lawyer in American history with three Supreme Court victories. He just celebrated his 90th birthday, but is still fighting for our rights. Today, he joins me to give us all a bit of a history lesson and explain why we must fight on!"

"Climate activists fill golf holes with cement after water ban exemption: Climate activists in southern France have filled golf course holes with cement to protest against the exemption of golf greens from water bans amid the country's severe drought. The group targeted sites near the city of Toulouse, calling golf the "leisure industry of the most privileged". The exemption of golf greens has sparked controversy as 100 French villages are short of drinking water."

"Facebook Created An Advanced AI And It Won't Stop Criticizing Facebook [...] 'Our country is divided, and he didn't help with that at all,' it told the BBC of Zuckerberg. 'His company exploits people for money and he doesn't care. It needs to stop!' The bot also told CNET reporter Queenie Wong it was 'considering deleting my fb account,' because there were 'too many trolls.' Can't argue there!"

RIP: "Alexei Panshin (1940-2022): Pioneering sf critic and Nebula-winning novelist Alexei Panshin died August 21 at the age of 82. His son Tobiah Panshin made the announcement on Facebook. 'Alexei suffered a sudden cardiac arrest on Wednesday. He passed away today, peacefully. He had many sayings he liked to quote to me, most of which he made up himself. A common one was, "How can we sink, when we can fly?" If any part of him persists in the infinite reaches of this universe, I suspect that he is flying now.'" I enjoyed his work when I first encountered it, but he wasn't a prolific fiction writer. In recent years, though, I've enjoyed his Facebook posts, and I will certainly miss him there.

Swear to god, it's like "success" makes you stupid. "Why rich people tend to think they deserve their money [...] One experiment by psychologists at the University of California, Irvine, invited pairs of strangers to play a rigged Monopoly game where a coin flip designated one player rich and one poor. The rich players received twice as much money as their opponent to begin with; as they played the game, they got to roll two dice instead of one and move around the board twice as fast as their opponent; when they passed 'Go,' they collected $200 to their opponent's $100. [...] In various ways — through body language and boasting about their wealth, by smacking their pieces loudly against the playing board and making light of their opponents' misfortune — the rich players began to act as though they deserved the good fortune that was largely a result of their lucky roll of the dice. At the end of the game, when researchers asked the rich players why they had won the game, not one person attributed it to luck. 'They don't talk about the flip of the coin. They talk about the things that they did. They talk about their acumen, they talk about their competencies, they talk about this decision or that decision,' that contributed to their win, Piff said in an interview with host David Brancaccio."

I liked this 2017 article so much I am posting it again: "Mintz: A modest tax proposal: End payroll taxes, hire IRS goons and bring back the guillotine [...] We eliminate the estate tax, like one side wants, but instead replace it with a guillotine. Anyone passing along more than $5.5 million will have their heirs beheaded. Not only will the prevent the rise of an concentrated aristocracy - guillotines being their historic weakness - but it will also encourage rich families to pour their money into charities and the economy. Everybody wins." (Actually, I don't want rich people choosing charities, they just ruin things, like Bill Gates does. Maybe we could designate something useful they could give to, like non-sectarian soup kitchens and public libraries.)

"Late Star Trek Actor Nichelle Nichols to Have Ashes Sent Into Space: Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols' ashes are set to launch on board United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur, in a send-off fitting for Lieutenant Uhura. [...] According to TMZ, the actor's ashes will be added to the United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket which is set to launch for the moon in December 2022. The rocket will also carry the remains of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, as well as James Doohan, who played Scotty in The Original Series, and Majel Barrett Roddenberry, who played Nurse Chapel."

I can only agree with Jon Stewart's ancient Pizza Rant.

Video of baby elephant's first steps!

Max Frost and the Troopers, "The Shape of Things To Come"

Not gonna lie

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic, "Is Democracy Constitutional? In Moore v. Harper the Supreme Court will decide if anyone besides itself should be able to adjudicate American election law. Every American child in public school learns that the U.S. political system is one of checks and balances, in which the judicial, executive, and legislative branches constrain one another to ensure that no one branch of government exercises too much power. One pending case before the Supreme Court asks: What if they didn't? In Moore v. Harper, North Carolina Republicans are arguing that no other state body, including the state supreme court, has the power to restrict the legislature's ability to set voting rules—specifically ones allowing legislators to gerrymander the state, in defiance of a ruling by the state supreme court finding that their plan violated the state constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. This belief is based on a crank legal premise called the 'independent-state-legislature theory.' You'd think that the theory's recent vintage would make it anathema to self-identified originalists, but among most of the justices this philosophy is implemented with scarcely more rigor than one might put into scanning Wikipedia to win an argument with a stranger online. More disturbing, the popularity of the theory among conservative legal elites is further indication of their commitment to an idea of 'democracy' in which the Republican Party is simply not allowed to lose, and of their desire to alter the system to ensure that it cannot."

"Warren, Padilla Demand Buttigieg Crack Down on Airline Industry's 'Rampant Unfair Practices': It is well within the secretary of transportation's power to rein in airlines, the senators said. Calling on the Biden administration to use its authority to protect U.S. travelers from "rampant unfair practices" by commercial airliners, Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Alex Padilla wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Tuesday to condemn the exorbitant costs, frequent flight cancellations and delays, and lack of transparency in the industry."

It's Time for Public Pharma [...] CRUCIALLY, THE GROUNDWORK HAS ALREADY BEEN LAID in the nation's biggest state. In 2020, in a bill that came as a surprise to many, California passed SB 852, the California Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act, which empowered the state legally to create a public label for buying and selling drugs at cost, called CalRx. A second provision, which passed the state Senate in May and awaits passage in the Assembly, would direct millions more from the annual budget toward the production of a generic manufacturing plant in the state. Meanwhile, Gov. Newsom has pushed state lawmakers to put $100 million into developing CalRx and getting the state's manufacturing operation off the ground. Not surprisingly, the program is beginning with insulin, as roughly four million state residents suffer from diabetes, a quarter of whom cannot afford the insulin they rely on. Not for nothing, the California program is also backed by the highly organized diabetes rights groups in the state."

David Dayen, "Cut Off Private Equity's Money Spigot: A variety of legislative and regulatory actions would make it hard for private equity to stay in business. That should be the goal. It is genuinely hard to find a more destructive economic force in America today than the private equity industry. It encompasses all of the negative trends that have undermined living standards for the broad mass of citizens since the Reagan era: the escalating share of national income going to finance, the rise of market concentration, the contempt for workers, the yawning gap between rich and poor. The biggest private equity firms buy up companies with borrowed money and load them with debt. While fund managers extract cash through fees and financial engineering, the companies struggle to pay off these new obligations on their balance sheet. The subsequent cost-cutting of jobs, wages, and pension plans can be seen as a direct transfer from labor to capital, with the financiers growing impossibly rich while everyone else suffers. The leveraged-buyout era has immiserated labor, dampened productive investment, and degraded the experience of workers, customers, and the larger economy. We should ameliorate this suffering by ending private equity as we know it."

"New Biden BA.5 'Plan' Openly Abandons Metrics for Preventing Infection, Butchers Mask and Ventilation Policy: [...] In this post, I'll skip over the vaccination and booster controversies, and focus on the Biden Administration's strategic goals, and also on masks and ventilation. I'm doing this for two reasons. First, I'm committed to policy of layered protection ('Swiss Cheese Model'), which I think would both subsume Biden's vax-first policy and be more effective in preventing airborne transmission, especially given that the operational definition of Biden's 'Preparedness Plan' has turned out to be 'Let 'Er Rip,' turning the United States into a global reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Second, I believe that the Biden Administration's guidance on both masking and ventilation is lethal, or to put matters more politely, won't save as many lives as it could. (The 'Fact Sheet' relies heavily on CDC content, so I'll have to stumble into that gruesome morass as well, for which I apologize in advance.)"

"The FBI Confirms Its Brett Kavanaugh Investigation Was A Total Sham: Oh, well, it's not like he received a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court or anything. [...] Given these allegations—in addition to Kavanaugh's temperament, which, to put it in terms he can understand, could be best described as 'a hothead who just did a 10 Jägerbombs'—it struck many as outrageous for him to be given a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. That sense of outrage only deepened last year, when we learned that the FBI had received 4,500—4,500!—tips about Kavanaugh, which were referred to the White House, i.e. the organization trying to get the guy confirmed to the Court. And now, the FBI has confirmed that, yeah, it didn't really feel the need to look into any of those tips, and when it did follow up on some, the White House was making sure it didn't dig too far."

"Lobbying Blitz Pushed Fertilizer Prices Higher, Fueling Food Inflation: Emails show fertilizer producer Mosaic lobbied heavily for tariffs under Trump, then used them to dominate the market. [...] The yearslong lobbying campaign resulted in the Trump administration recommending tariffs in 2020 that went into effect last year on phosphate fertilizer from Russia and Morocco, the first- and fourth-largest fertilizer exporters in the world, respectively. As foreign imports plummeted, Mosaic gained control of 90 percent of the U.S. phosphate fertilizer market."

"Why Are Democrats Bragging About Plunging the Private Sector into Deficit?: Democrats want to keep shrinking the deficit to fight inflation but also keep the economy out of recession. Good luck with that. [...] Looking at the economy through the lens of a stock-flow consistent model frequently allowed Godley to anticipate problems that others were missing. For example, when democrats and republicans were celebrating the emerging fiscal surpluses in the late 1990s and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was predicting surpluses as far as they eye could see, Godley was pointing to the concomitant deterioration in the private sector's financial position and challenging the coherence of the CBO forecast."

"The Forde report: my experience of Southside in 2017: After 27 months the much-delayed inquiry has arrived — having worked at the heart of the struggle between the Corbyn team and the permanent party staff, I know the grim picture it paints to be true, writes BEN SELLERSBACK in April 2020, a leaked Labour Party report told the story of hostility, abuse, bullying, racism and sexism among the party's paid staff, as part of a broader investigation into the handling of anti-semitism claims. Martin Forde QC was tasked by Labour leader Keir Starmer with leading an inquiry into the claims." It couldn't be clearer that the party staff and Parliamentary Labour Party were actively working for a loss to Boris Johnson in the election.

RIP: "Nichelle Nichols, Uhura in Star Trek, Dies at 89." This is not unexpected, of course, as we all knew she'd been having trouble for some time. But she was an inspiration to many, and the most beautiful woman on prime-time, and when I met her she was even more stunning and took my breath away. She was gracious, of course, as we've always known her. But I didn't know this: "Born Grace Nichols in Robbins, Ill. on Dec. 28, 1932, Nichols began her show business career at age 16 singing with Duke Ellington in a ballet she created for one of his compositions. Later, she sang with his band." And of course, she said my favorite line, when the mirror universe Sulu addressed her as "fair maid": "Sorry, neither." (Slideshow here, with many recent pics but unfortunately not the best Uhura photos.)

RIP: "Motown Songwriting Legend Lamont Dozier Dies at 81: Lamont Dozier, a Motown songwriting legend who helped define popular music in the '60s, has died at age 81. He helped craft early hits for the Supremes, the Isley Brothers and Four Tops before later returning to the top of the charts with Phil Collins. Dozier's death was confirmed by his son, Lamont Dozier Jr. No cause of death was immediately released. How many times did I see those three names, "Holland, Dozier, Holland" in parentheses under the song title? It's stamped into my memory forever. And, of course, an excuse to post links to what you already know are some of my favorite tracks: "Heatwave," "Can I Get A Witness?", "Baby I Need Your Loving" - and too many more by those artists, The Supremes, The Isley Brothers, and others. So much love.

RIP: "Tony Dow, Wally Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver, dies aged 77: Tony Dow, who as Wally Cleaver on the sitcom Leave It to Beaver helped create the popular and lasting image of the American teenager of the 1950s and 60s, died Wednesday. He was 77. Frank Bilotta, who represented Dow in his work as a sculptor, confirmed his death in an email to the Associated Press. No cause was given, but Dow had been in hospice care and announced in May that he had been diagnosed with prostate and gall bladder cancer." I don't think Beaver ever understood any more than I did why Wally had a creepy friend like Eddie Haskell. Dow had been sculpting in his later years, and there are a couple of nice photos in this group of photos of him.

RIP: "Veteran British actor David Warner, star of The Omen and Tron, dies aged 80: The stage and screen veteran's multifaceted career included roles in Titanic, Time Bandits and Straw Dogs, as well as a renowned Hamlet for the RSC. The veteran British actor David Warner has died aged 80. The BBC reported that Warner died from 'a cancer-related illness' and that his family confirmed the news 'with an overwhelmingly heavy heart'. Warner's varied career spanned cinema, stage, television and radio. He was regarded as the finest Hamlet of his generation on stage, then gravitated into cinema as a character actor, travelling from British 1960s cinema to the sci-fi universes of Tron, Doctor Who and Star Trek to James Cameron's Titanic, in which he played the malicious enforcer Spicer Lovejoy." He was in so many of my favorite movies and TV shows. I guess the earliest thing I must have seen him in was Tom Jones when it came out, though I don't remember it now. On the other hand, I've seen the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol enough times that it's Warner I see when I think of Cratchit. He died just five days short of his 81st birthday.

RIP: "Bernard Cribbins: a warm, kindly titan of children's entertainment" and Donna Noble's granddad in Doctor Who, at 91, after a lifetime's-long career.

On the night of the first Tuesday in November of 2000, Tim Russert at first resisted his boss' demand that he prematurely call the election for Bush. He knew it was wrong, he tried not to, but Jack Welch was an evil man and he threatened Russert's job and the rest is history. I knew then that Welch was an evil, dangerous man, but I had no idea how evil until I heard Sam Seder's interview with David Gelles, who's written a book on "Jack Welch: The Man Who Broke Capitalism."

"Democrats' Betrayals Are Jeopardizing American Democracy: History is screaming at Democrats to both rescue the economy and save democracy from a meltdown. They're doing the opposite. American democracy is in the midst of a meltdown — the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and Republicans' intensifying crusade to limit voting rights and deny election results make that abundantly clear. Conflict-averse Democrats in Washington, D.C., are on the verge of letting this turn into a full-fledged nightmare. Torn between their corporate donors and the electorate, they are studiously avoiding the two key questions: What is really fueling this crisis? And how can it be stopped? The answer to the first question can be seen in headlines this week about billionaires growing their fortunes by $2 trillion during the pandemic, and now creating an overheated market for luxury yachts, all while one in five households just lost their entire life savings. Americans keep voting to change this crushing dystopia and yet they continue being force-fed more of the same — most recently with Democrats threatening to side with their financiers and abandon their whole economic agenda. Such betrayals from both parties have been telling more and more of the country that democracy is a farce. The way for Democrats to combat that disillusionment is to learn from their party's history during the Great Depression and the Great Recession. In the former debacle, the Democratic Party halted a potential meltdown of democratic institutions by delivering real help to millions of people. In the latter crisis, the Democratic Party's refusal to do the same resulted in the political meltdown that fueled the ascent of Donald Trump — and that continues to fuel the MAGA movement today."

Zach Carter "On Economics And Democracy: High unemployment is extremely dangerous. [...] FDR was not a cheap demagogue throwing red meat to the masses that he knew would be counterproductive. He was not an economist or a political theorist, but he was smart enough to recognize that the policy program that had spawned The Great Depression was probably not all it was cracked up to be. And he surrounded himself with a very famous Brain Trust – a coterie of intellectuals who had different, but in many ways related theories of why and how the Depression had happened. Early on, FDR impressed a particular British economist named John Maynard Keynes, who admired both FDR's spirit of experimentation and his insistence that defeating the Depression was about more than economic data. Keynes and Roosevelt believed that the Great Depression had put democracy itself on trial, and both were almost desperate to vindicate it. They did."

"Biden's Problems Go Back To 2009 [...] The public understood how bad the Bush years were and in the 2008 election the voters DEMANDED change. Barack Obama, campaigning on progressive promises to renegotiate NAFTA, codify Roe v Wade, support the pro-labor Employee Free Choice Act ('EFCA' or 'card check') won big. Barack Obama was elected with BIG Democratic House & Senate majorities. Democrats came into office in 2009 with All The Power. Voters gave them the House, Senate and Presidency and a mandate to change the country. After taking office Obama publicly reversed his position on renegotiating NAFTA and codifying Roe, along with so many other things. His administration introduced the 'Obamacare' health care plan that, while it did help millions of Americans, did so by propping up private insurance and pharma company profits. Bankruptcies continue, insurance companies profit, pharma still charges massively excessive rates, and America's health care system remains one of the worst in the world. And in response to the 2008 financial collapse caused by Wall Street fraud, his Justice Department refused to prosecute even a single Wall Street executive, bailing out Wall Street while refusing to help homeowners. (Later, after leaving 'public service,' top Justice Department and other administration officials, including Obama himself, received lucrative Wall Street positions, 'Speaking fees,' etc.)"

"The British Railway Station Where You Can Only Travel By Boat"

Gregory Benford, ecowarrier? "Addressing climate change: plants instead of plants? Rather than an industrial solution to excess atmospheric carbon dioxide, a retired UCI physicist looks to nature"

40 years after the fact, Kevin Smith unexpectedly releases his TAFF Report.

Christone "Kingfish" Ingram - 4 Song Set (Recorded Live for World Cafe)