'Cause I couldn't stand the pain

This photo of Beautiful Norway After The Sunset is from Tina Koskima (@LoveSongs4Peace).

It's been a little bit of a technical adventure. First I finally threw up my hands and gave in to the demands of the present when it became clear that NHS just assumed everyone had a smartphone, so I gave up my dumbphone of long-standing and made the switch. That required a lot of adapters and changed habits to begin with. But then my beloved ten-year-old Precision started being very cranky, so that had to go, too, and though the new machine is certainly very spiffy with many fine qualities, there's sure a lot to get used to, even leaving aside the fact that I'd never updated from Win7 and had to adapt to that upgrade, too. So, I can't find things, and things look strange, and I'm still not used to this keyboard, and I had a helluva time doing the last post because the font was so small and I couldn't figure out where to change it for a while. I'm still going back and finding typos. And then there are all those passwords I've forgotten.

Yes, price-gouging is an important factor in the current inflation. "Corporate profits have contributed disproportionately to inflation. How should policymakers respond? [...] Since the trough of the COVID-19 recession in the second quarter of 2020, overall prices in the NFC sector have risen at an annualized rate of 6.1%—a pronounced acceleration over the 1.8% price growth that characterized the pre-pandemic business cycle of 2007–2019. Strikingly, over half of this increase (53.9%) can be attributed to fatter profit margins, with labor costs contributing less than 8% of this increase. This is not normal. From 1979 to 2019, profits only contributed about 11% to price growth and labor costs over 60%, as shown in Figure A below. Nonlabor inputs—a decent indicator for supply-chain snarls —are also driving up prices more than usual in the current economic recovery. [...] The overheating view often emphasizes the atypically fast nominal wage growth of the past year as justification of their arguments. But this nominal wage growth—while fast compared to the very recent past—still lags far behind overall inflation and hence signals that labor costs are still dampening, not amplifying, inflationary pressures."

"Prosecutor drops all charges against Pamela Moses, jailed over voting error: Moses, convicted last year, was granted new trial in February after Guardian revealed files that had not been given to her defense A Memphis prosecutor has dropped all criminal charges against Pamela Moses, the Memphis woman who was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote. Moses was convicted last year and sentenced in January. She was granted a new trial in February after the Guardian published a document showing that had not been given to her defense ahead of the trial. [...] The central issue in her case was whether she had known she was ineligible to vote when a probation officer filled out and signed a form indicating she was done with probation for a 2015 felony conviction and eligible to cast a ballot. Even though the probation officer admitted he had made a mistake, and Moses said she had no idea she was ineligible to vote, prosecutors said she knew she was ineligible and had deceived him. Moses stood in the lobby of the probation office while the officer went to his office to research her case for about an hour, he said at trial."

"Steven Donziger vs. Big Oil:The environmental lawyer was finally released from house arrest this week. THIS WEEK, after nearly 1,000 days of arbitrary detention, the environmental and human rights lawyer Steven Donziger was released from house arrest. On this week's podcast, Donziger talks to Intercept investigative reporter Sharon Lerner and Ryan Grim about his decadelong legal battle with Chevron over land contamination in Ecuador." (Transcript promised.)

Back during the UK elections, Jeremy Corbyn was trying to make people aware of Boris' plans to privatize the NHS, but it barely got a headline when the New Labour establishment was busy fabricating fake "evidence" that Jeremy Corbyn was an anti-semite. The successful effort to ensure that Corbyn was unelectable was so blatant as to be baffling, but perhaps it's all a reminder that the New Labour leadership is actually in favor of privatization of the NHS. The present state of privatization is already driving doctors out, but now we learn that, "Labour's shadow health secretary says he would not "shirk" from using private providers to reduce NHS waiting lists. Wes Streeting told the BBC's Nick Robinson it proved "effective" the last time his party was in power. But he put the blame for needing the option at the Tories' door, saying the government had "run down the NHS". The Labour MP also told the Political Thinking podcast his own experience of cancer made him "even more passionate" about bringing down waiting lists. Mr Streeting's remarks appear to show a change in direction for the party. Labour's last two leaders, Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Miliband, focused their election campaigns on protecting the NHS in England from privatisation. But under the New Labour government of the late 1990s and 2000s, the role of the private sector increased in the health service." (What a phony. He didn't experience any delays in his cancer treatment, this is bollocks.)

When Governor DeSantis' purge of "woke" textbooks from the curriculum turned out to include math texts, people were surprised. But now we know: He had a particular publisher to send the grift to. "As DeSantis administration rejects textbooks, only one publisher allowed for K-5 math classes in Florida."

"Democrats Bail On Promise To Shed Light On Corporate Political Spending: A little-noticed provision in the mammoth omnibus spending bill means the country's corporate watchdog once again can't tackle dark money. Buried in the 2,741 pages of the $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill that President Joe Biden signed last month is a provision that bars the government's Wall Street watchdog agency from forcing corporations to disclose their political donations. The stipulation, part of a deal with Republicans to keep the government up and running, means that Democrats are poised to once again break their long-standing promise to shed light on the massive secret corporate spending that now dominates U.S. politics — just as a Biden appointee appeared ready to finally tackle the issue."

"Dems retreat on crime and police reform: If 2020 was the year the left reordered the traditional politics of crime and policing, 2022 looks like the year centrists regained their footing and nullified those gains. President Joe Biden is proclaiming that it's time to 'fund the police” and pouring more money into law enforcement in his budget plan. Democratic mayors in deep-blue cities are promising to hire hundreds more cops. Even in liberal bastions like Los Angeles, candidates are sprinting to claim the tough-on-crime mantle. [...] The signs of the Democratic Party's evolution on crime are everywhere — and go beyond defeats suffered by the 'defund the police” movement in Minneapolis and elsewhere last year. As the midterm elections pick up, Democrats are calling for more police funding and attempting to co-opt traditionally Republican talking points on crime." Not only did no one ever defund the police, but many cities gave them more funding than ever. If it is true that crime is up, that doesn't argue well for giving the cops more money. But crime isn't really up all that much (and in some areas has gone down), despite the copaganda.

On the other hand, few seem to view with alarm the really worrying trend. "We're in the Midst of a White-Collar Crime Wave: Financial malfeasance has never been more rampant, or more under-punished. Everywhere you look in America, crime is out of control. Whether it's Elon Musk—the world's richest man—cutting regulatory corners in public, professional son-in-law Jared Kushner getting a $2 billion payoff from the Saudis, hackers draining hundreds of millions of dollars out of a crypto game, or the meatpacking industry boosting profits through price gouging, the economy's winners color outside the lines with increasing chutzpah. There's a lot of evidence that the country is in the middle of an alarming white-collar crime wave, but, unlike street crime, the phenomenon doesn't show up much in our political discourse. It's time to change that. [...] People are getting taken at work, too: In a survey of service workers, 34 percent reported an increase in wage theft by their employers during the pandemic. A commentator could pull up these figures all day, and so could a prosecutor."

Another nightmare scenario in the annals of Corporate Hospital Ownership: "Out Of The ER, Into The Street [...] Not long ago, ER doctors prized their unique ability to ignore both politics and profits, and treat patients in order of the severity of their condition, regardless of their insurance status. But companies like USACS changed all that. Over the past decade, the percentage of ER doctors working for small independent practices has shrunk by more than half to just 20 percent, and the corporate consolidations have led physician wages to stagnate even as billing surged. Then came COVID-19, which caused an abrupt plunge in ER traffic that left many doctors temporarily downsized at the very moment their skills were needed most. Across the country, many ER doctors are privately arriving at the same conclusion that inspired the USACS uprising: It's no longer enough to help people by treating one ER patient at a time, when the real emergency appears to be unbridled corporate greed."

Pro Publica, "America's Highest Earners And Their Taxes Revealed: Secret IRS files reveal the top US income-earners and how their tax rates vary more than their incomes. Tech titans, hedge fund managers and heirs dominate the list, while the likes of Taylor Swift and LeBron James didn't even make the top 400. [...] In a progressive tax system, the more income you make, the higher your tax rate is. But in the U.S., that's only partly true. On average, the rate of income tax that people pay does climb as incomes ascend into the top 1%, but when you get to the range of $2 million to $5 million, that trend stops. The group earning in this range, composed mostly of business owners and workers with extremely high salaries, paid an average income tax rate of 29% from 2013 to 2018. After that, average tax rates actually drop the further up in income you go."

"Obama Wants Censorship: Barack Obama and his ruling class bosses are losing legitimacy with more and more people. They have decided that censoring information will resolve their problems. On April 21, 2022 former president Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford University on the subject of social media. In typical Obamaesque fashion, he didn't state his point plainly. He used a lot of time, more than an hour, to advocate for social media censorship. He only used that word once, in order to deny that it was in fact what he meant, but the weasel words and obfuscation couldn't hide what Obama was talking about. In 2016 when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, the candidate she thought easiest to beat, Obama first presented his lament about “disinformation” and 'fake news.' His real concern was that Trump's victory proved that millions of people paid no attention to or even scorned, corporate media. No major newspaper endorsed Donald Trump, the television networks enjoyed the ratings increases he created, but ultimately believed that a second Clinton presidency was in the offing. None of them knew that some 60 million people would go to polling places and give their votes to Trump. Hence the disquiet in November 2016, when Obama realized that having buy-in from establishment corporate media meant little if their narratives were rejected by people across the country."

"The DEA's Elite Police Unit in Mexico Was Actually Dirty as Hell: The U.S.-vetted and trained unit was disbanded by Mexico, after years of corruption and controversy. After more than a year of quietly choking off resources behind the scenes, Mexico's president said last week that he has effectively shut down an elite police unit trained and funded by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to investigate drug cartels, claiming it was corrupt. 'That group, which was supposedly a high-level strategic group, was infiltrated by criminals,' President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at a press conference last week, confirming reports that the DEA's 'Sensitive Investigative Unit,' or SIU, had been disbanded after more than 25 years of joint operations in Mexico. So far, the scrapping of the SIU has been portrayed as yet another blow to bilateral security cooperation on anti-narcotics investigations under López Obrador. But current and former U.S. law enforcement officials who spoke with VICE News say the SIU has indeed been a corruption-plagued disaster for years. One agent with extensive experience operating in Mexico called the SIU “corrupt and dangerous” and was not sorry to see its demise. “I am glad,” the agent said. 'They were dirty, no-good criminals. It's the best thing that ever happened to the U.S. government in Mexico.'"

RIP: "R.I.P. Cynthia Albritton, a.k.a. Cynthia Plaster Caster: The rock 'n' roll legend, known for her famous lifetime art project, was 74. Cynthia Albritton, better known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, has died following an illness, per Variety. She was 74. She was a bonafide rock legend, famous for her artistic practice of immortalizing rock stars' penises by making plaster-casted sculptures of them."

ROT IN PERDITION: Orrin Hatch, anti-union, anti-abortion crackpot, dead at 88. "Though in his death he is being remembered for his bipartisan efforts, he did oppose his fair share of Democratic agendas. He voted against the Equal Rights Amendment, used the filibuster to block fair housing bills and pushed bills to ban abortions." Another reminder that bi-partisanship is bad.

Michael Hobbs on the NYT pearl-clutching about "cancel culture" (by which they really mean saying critical things to bigshots like journalists at The New York Times): "Panic! On the Editorial Page [...] If I quoted this without screengrabbing it you'd think I was making it up. Conservative complaints about progressive speech — going back to Elvis shaking his hips and beyond — are one of the most consistent features of the 20th century. But today, the Times tells us, they wouldn't be happening if libs hadn't been so insistent about trigger warnings. And that's it, the cancel culture panic in a nutshell: Left-wing threats to free speech may not be backed up by any evidence and totally unconnected to any Democratic policy agenda. But! If we're not careful, someday, the Democratic Party could be as dangerous as Republicans are now. Can't wait to read 50 more articles about it."

Taibbi and Orf, "The "Gentlemen's Agreement": When TV News Won't Identify Defense Lobbyists: As war rages, viewers watch commercials for weapons dealers, often without knowing it. [...] In 2008, David Barstow of the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting about this phenomenon of military 'journalists,' with 'Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand' being one of the winning submissions. Barstow wrote about how defense officials on air retained ties to the Pentagon and gave official talking points on air in a coordinated way, quoting a former Green Beret and Fox analyst who said of military officials, 'It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you.'' Networks and even papers like the Times have since become so dependent upon military and intelligence vets, both as bylined content-producers and as sources, that efforts to track lobbying ties have been abandoned. Both the Washington Post and New York Times won Pulitzers in 2018 for Russia-themed stories that relied on unnamed 'current and former officials' from the military and intelligence worlds. In just over ten years, in other words, the Pulitzer committee went from rewarding papers for exposing defense ties to rewarding their concealment, while pushing intelligence-friendly news narratives — exactly what the Times was concerned about in 2008. Now, only outlets like Jacobin go near the lobbying topic." Matt has a follow-up, "A Brief Note on the "Gentlemen's Agreement", Which is Not Just for Defense Lobbyists: TV analysts from all sorts of industries are identified by long-ago official titles, not current lobbying gigs."

More evidence that government can do things. "From ‘biologically dead' to chart-toppingly clean: how the Thames made an extraordinary recovery over 60 years: It might surprise you to know that the River Thames is considered one of the world's cleanest rivers running through a city. What's even more surprising is that it reached that status just 60 years after being declared “biologically dead” by scientists at London's Natural History Museum. Yet despite this remarkable recovery, there's no room for complacency – the Thames still faces new and increasing threats from pollution, plastic and a rising population."

Robert Kuttner is doing a "Summers Watch: Larry Summers is not only a self-promoter who is often wrong on his economics. He is disdainful of who suffers if his recommendations are taken seriously. Larry Summers, spurned for a Biden administration post, is famously vindictive. Lately, he has been taking victory laps, reminding everyone of how right he was and how mistaken everyone else was. It's hard to imagine any other prominent policy adult with this level of narcissism. His arm must be sore from patting himself on the back. He epitomizes the old line 'often wrong, never in doubt.” Let's first give Larry partial credit on the big picture. Inflation did accelerate faster than most other economists forecast, and the Fed will raise interest rates more than Fed Chair Jay Powell predicted last fall. But Summers drastically overstates the degree to which the inflation is the result of excessive macroeconomic stimulus, as well as exaggerating his own prescience. For starters, when President Biden sponsored the American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021, the economy was still in a deep COVID recession, and people were suffering. Most of the outlay was not intended as random macro-stimulus; it was targeted relief. Contrary to Summers, recent price hikes have been substantially the result of two factors that Summers largely omits from his analysis—supply chain shocks and monopolistic corporations with market power taking advantage of an inflationary climate to impose opportunistic price hikes. It's understandable that Summers doesn't focus on these—they are consequences of the policies of deregulation and hyper-globalism that Summers (and Bob Rubin) persuaded Bill Clinton to impose on the country. Summers—relentlessly—is a macroeconomist; and when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. He doesn't deign to look at structural particulars, except at a level that is breathtaking in its shallowness. Search 'Summers” and 'monopoly pricing” and you get superficial tweets denying the problem, based on no data. Moreover, Summers tends to backdate his predictions to make himself look prescient. What he actually forecast was often not what in fact occurred. As John Cassidy recently observed in The New Yorker, Summers in March 2021 forecast three possible scenarios—a one-third chance of stagflation; a one-third chance that 'the Fed hits the brakes hard” and we get recession; and a one-third chance of growth that 'will moderate in a non-inflationary way.” (Note the spurious mathematical precision—one-third, based on what?) Cassidy quotes financial analyst and longtime Fed watcher Tim Duy that Summers 'also put out plenty of other scenarios—enough that he almost couldn't be wrong.” Exactly so. Except that the one scenario Summers didn't forecast was the one that actually occurred: continued robust growth and moderately high supply-driven inflation." And there's more. And sometimes I wonder if Summers actually knows he's spewing lies.

Department of Manufacturing Consent: "Government poll tried to skew public opinion against defunding the police: Documents reveal Public Safety Canada, in consultation with RCMP, manufactured lower support for Defund the Police movement. [...] The government poll was not immediately released publicly, but was reported on as 'confidential” by Ottawa-based Blacklock's Reporter, which claimed it 'found [the] largest number of Canadians want MORE police funding, not less.” Their reporting was picked up by major newspapers across the country last summer, with headlines like 'Most Canadians against defunding police” and 'Study: Public says ‘don't defund our police.'” But there was another wrinkle. Despite having introduced pro-police bias into the questions, the full poll results, which Public Safety Canada quietly posted online a month after the initial coverage, show public support for defunding the police was in fact high and was misrepresented in the media coverage."

"Sleazy "Democratic" PACs Working To Defeat Progressives: Hakeem Jeffries, a Wall Street Democrat and worthless careerist-- the Dem version of Kevin McCarthy-- who represents Bedford-Stuyvesant, Clinton Hill, East New York, Canarsie, Flatlands and Coney Island in Brooklyn plus Ozone Park and Howard Beach in Queens, started an anti-progressive PAC-- Team Blue PAC-- with rabid Blue Dog (and total Wall Street whore) Josh Gottheimer last year. As of March 31 they had collected just over a quarter million dollars this cycle-- primarily sewer money from lobbyists and corporate PACs-- to use against progressive candidates challenging incumbents. The progressive Democrats that Jeffries and Gottheimer are working hardest to keep out of office are Nina Turner (OH), Imani Oakley (NJ), Kina Collins (IL), Rana Abdelhamid (NY) and Amy Vilela (NV), all women of color. [...] There are even worse anti-progressive PACs that are part of the Democratic establishment, although none of the others have the presumptive next Democratic Party House leader (Jeffries). One of the ones doing the most damage right now is Mark Mellman's so-called "Democratic Majority for Israel," which claims to be a pro-Israel PAC but is just as much an anti-Medicare for All PAC and just generally anti-progressive PAC. Last cycle, for example, its biggest expenditures-- by far-- were $1,400,032 against Bernie and $899,148 to help Eliot Engel and $664,890 against Engel's opponent, Jamaal Bowman. Engel lost his seat to Bowman. This cycle they have been helping many anti-progressive candidates-- like Jon Kaiman on Long Island-- raise money but so far their biggest expenditures have gone to keep Nina Turner out of Congress. So far, they've spent $1,420,603 helping to prop up waste-of-a-seat Shontel Brown and another 1,240,738 smearing Turner, this cycle's most feared-- by the corrupt establishment-- candidate running for anything, anywhere."

This article contains an interesting little tidbit from Philip Linden himself. "The creator of Second Life has a lot to say about all these new 'metaverses': Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale and executive chairman Brad Oberwager aren't too impressed with what they've seen so far. [...] 'Blockchain economies are extremely dangerous,' says Rosedale. 'They do some things that are good, but as a side effect in the way they're designed, they're an almost certainly fatal thing to humankind in the long term.' I assumed that Rosedale was referring to the computational wastefulness of blockchain accounting and the resultant environmental costs, a common criticism. That's part of it, he says, but he was actually talking about something much more abstract. The problem, he believes, is that total decentralization inevitably increases wealth inequality. He pointed me to a simulation he designed last year in which bouncing balls demonstrate the theory that 'the rich actually always get richer, no matter what.' It's something he devised after reading a Scientific American article on the topic. 'What I do in the simulation is I give 1,000 people each 1,000 poker chips, so everybody starts off with exactly the same number of poker chips, but then that means there's a million poker chips total,' says Rosedale. 'And that's it. That's all you get. Now, let these people randomly engage in free market transactions.' Those transactions are money transfers decided by coin flips. If I collide with Phillip in the simulation, there's a 50% chance he'll give me some money, and a 50% chance I'll give him some money. 'Most people would think that if you waited for a month, everybody would still have around 1,000 tokens, because we just flipped coins,' says Rosedale. 'Tyler's not smarter than Phillip; If 50% of the time you get my money and 50% of the time I get yours, what happens to individual wealth? What happens is surprising, and of course, horrifying. What happens is that there's one winner. There's one extremely rich person and everyone else has nothing.'"

Every now and then I like to remind people of how the Newspapers of Record and the CIA conspired to kill a story and a reporter. Here's the 2014 story from The Intercept upon the release of a film about the events that began in 1996, "How The CIA Watched Over The Destruction Of Gary Webb: Freshly-released CIA documents show how the largest U.S. newspapers helped the agency contain a groundbreaking exposé. Eighteen years after it was published, 'Dark Alliance,' the San Jose Mercury News's bombshell investigation into links between the cocaine trade, Nicaragua's Contra rebels, and African American neighborhoods in California, remains one of the most explosive and controversial exposés in American journalism."

I've always wanted to do this and it occurred to me that maybe someone had done it on YouTube—and indeed, lots of people have, but I think I liked this one the best: Steph signs with the Temptations' "My Girl".

The Beatles, live in Indianapolis 1964, "If I Fell"

Play it right and bide my time

Steampunk Tendencies posted this to their Facebook page with no explanation so I have no idea what it is or where, but I'd sure like to see it.

"Under Pressure, the Biden Administration Rebrands Its Medicare Privatization Initiative: After quietly pushing an insurance-industry-backed Medicare privatization scheme, the Biden administration has come under fire from pro-Medicare activists. In response, the administration has rebranded the scheme — but left its privatizing substance intact. [...] Joe Biden seemed to be dangling a blade over the “direct contracting” program after a groundswell of opposition among both grassroots activists and progressives in Congress forced his hand. Officials began hinting that they would overhaul the program or even cancel it entirely, with those businesses set to profit from it working feverishly to prevent the latter outcome. For the past week, both the health care industry and advocates for public health care have been waiting anxiously to find out what the administration decided. Yesterday, they got their answer. In response to “feedback from stakeholders and participants,” the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced the direct contracting program would be turned into something called ACO REACH (Accountable Care Organization Realizing Equity, Access, and Community Health). The question is, is this change enough to fix what worried public-health campaigners about direct contracting in the first place? The answer, they say, is no. 'We don't see anything other than a name change,' says Diane Archer, president of Just Care USA."

"Democrats Creating Their Own October Surprise: Imminent congressional inaction on Affordable Care Act subsidies will doom 14 million people, the party's midterm chances, and health care reform for a decade. Watching congressional Democrats these days feels like a painful, slow-motion car wreck. They are sleepwalking into a health care disaster that's entirely of their own making. With little debate or media focus, Democrats are on the verge of dooming millions of Americans to huge new health care bills, which will in turn serve to ruin any hope Democrats have of winning the midterms. And that will effectively destroy any chance of real health care reform for at least another decade."

Collected at Threadreader, a series of tweets from Matt Stoller: "1. Here's Apple CEO Tim Cook today arguing that antitrust laws against big tech are bad for privacy and bad for national security. In honor of his speech, I thought I'd do a little thread on just how bad these tech firms are for American security." And there are quite a few examples!

"These six corporations are financing an assault on reproductive rights in six states" — While publicly condemning the new anti-abortion laws, and boasting of their commitments to women's health, gender equality (or "equity"), and the empowerment of women, CVS, AT&T, Merck, Comcast, United Health, and Anheuser-Busch have all shoveled plenty of contributions to the legislators who pass the anti-choice legislation.

"Wall Street May Reap Billions From New York Dem's Reversal: City Comptroller Brad Lander pledged to disentangle retirement funds from risky private equity and fossil fuel investments — but now he's pushing to do the opposite. As the Biden Administration warns that workers' retirement funds may be getting fleeced by hedge funds and private equity firms, a top Democrat is reversing his own criticism of such investments and requesting authority to funnel billions of dollars of retiree savings to the private equity moguls. If that happens, it could mean a half-billion dollars of additional annual fees for a private equity industry that has produced some of the wealthiest people on the planet. [...] 'Private equity is inconsistent with the transparency obligations of public pensions,' said Siedle. 'There isn't a single public pension in this country that's knowledgeable about how to oversee or monitor private equity investments. They don't know what they're investing in, they don't know the fees they are paying, they don't know the risk they're taking on. When you see a push to increase private equity, what you're really seeing is a politicization of the investment process. The only reason to increase investments in private equity is to please donors."

"We Have New Evidence of Saudi Involvement in 9/11, and Barely Anyone Cares: The FBI has quietly revealed further evidence of Saudi government complicity in the September 11 attacks — and nothing's happened. here's a lot going on in the world right now, so it's not surprising some news slips through the cracks. Still, it's amazing that explosive new information about an allied government's complicity in one of the worst attacks on US soil in history has simply come and gone with barely any notice. Last week, the FBI quietly declassified a 510-page report it produced in 2017 about the 9/11 terrorist attack twenty years ago. The disclosure is in accordance with President Joe Biden's September 2021 executive order declassifying long-hidden government files about the attack, which many hoped would reveal what exactly US investigators knew about the Saudi Arabian government's possible involvement." So, a member of the Saudi government's spy organization was being paid by the Saudi royal family to hang out in the United States helping the 9/11 hijackers set themselves up and then the FBI and the Bush administration covered-up for him and now nobody cares about any of this. The same pressbots and pundits who went insane and screamed for blood in the wake of the attacks on 9/11 are just completely uninterested in who actually did it. And...why is that?

Video: Luke Savage and Emma Vigeland on "How 'The West Wing' Misled A Generation Of Liberals" — And why do Democrats talk like It's An Existential Threat and then behave like nothing unusual is going on and we don't have to do anything?

"Pentagon Drops Truth Bombs to Stave Off War With Russia: Leaked stories from the Pentagon have exposed how mainstream media reports Russia's conduct in the Ukraine war, in a bid to counter propaganda intended to get NATO into the conflict, writes Joe Lauria. The Pentagon has been engaged in a consequential battle with the U.S. State Department and the Congress to prevent a direct military confrontation with Russia, which could unleash the most unimaginable horror of war. President Joe Biden is caught in the middle of the fray. So far he is siding with the Defense Department, saying there cannot be any kind of NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine fighting Russian aircraft because “that's called World War III, okay? Let's get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine. “President Biden's been clear that U.S. troops won't fight Russia in Ukraine, and if you establish a no-fly zone, certainly in order to enforce that no-fly zone, you'll have to engage Russian aircraft. And again, that would put us at war with Russia,” said U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin earlier this month. (The administration plan is to bring down the Russian government through a ground insurgency and economic war, not a direct military one.)" But everyone, including Pelosi and Schumer and the entire mass media have been vocally itching for war. The two Democratic leaders tamped it down after even Blinken backed off that line, but TV loves wars, and the din is loud. "But on Tuesday, the Pentagon took the bold step of leaking two stories to reporters that contradict those tales. 'Russia's conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader's strategic balancing act,' reported Newsweek in an article entitled, 'Putin's Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He's Holding Back. Here's Why.' The piece quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying, 'The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets.' A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added: 'We need to understand Russia's actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict.'"

Pierce, "No Wonder Trump's Legal Beagles Fought So Hard to Keep These Emails Secret: John Eastman and the Camp Runamuck team were devising a plan of action in print. [...] First thing we do, let's indict all the lawyers. Eastman—and therefore, the legal representatives of Camp Runamuck—fought like wolverines chewing off their own legs to keep these communications away from the special committee appointed to investigate the events of January 6. Judge Carter's ruling did not merely declare Congress to be the winner in that particular struggle, it upped the stakes for the side that won. Carter did more than just decide the issue of the emails. He also explained why he was doing so, and he did that by treating the material as a road map for Congress—and the Department of Justice—to follow." Charlie is more optimistic than history can support, but someone really needs to spell out the difference between giving clients a good defense when they are accused of a crime and helping clients find quasi-legal ways to commit crime.

RIP: Eric Boehlert Dies: Media Critic For Media Matters & Salon, Founder Of Press Run Newsletter Killed In Bike Accident At 57: Eric Boehlert, a media critic devoted to calling out right-wing misinformation through his writing at Media Matters for America, Salon, Daily Kos and most recently as the founder of the Press Run website, died Monday in a bike accident. He was 57. His death was announced on Twitter today by journalist and friend Soledad O'Brien, who called Boehlert “a fierce and fearless defender of the truth.” Boehlert was struck by a train while biking in Montclair, New Jersey; Montclair police reported yesterday that a man riding a bicycle was struck and killed by a New Jersey Transit train in Montclair on Monday evening." His colleague, Atrios, wrote: "Very sad. I knew Eric some personally, working through Media Matters and otherwise, though we hadn't really had any personal contact in awhile. Nice guy, really got his journalism career boost exposing the various shenanigans at Clear Channel and then shifted into politics/political media coverage." I've spent many years watching Eric evolve and was pleased to see him breaking his assumptions in the last few years. Sorry he won't be putting those insights to use anymore.

RIP: Bobby Rydell, 'Wild One' Singer and 'Bye Bye Birdie' Star, Dead at 79: Bobby Rydell, one of the first music idols to spur teen fandom in the Fifties and Sixties, has died at age 79. His death was caused by complications from pneumonia, a rep for the artist confirmed in a statement. “He had the best pipes,” his good friend and radio legend Jerry Blavat told the Inquirer. “He could do Sinatra, he could do anything… He could do comedy. He played the drums. He was a great mimic… He could have been as big as Bobby Darin, but he didn't want to leave Philadelphia.”" Loved him as Hugo, but really loved to listen to him singing "Forget Him".

"Four-day week: What we do with our extra day off [...] Laura introduced a four-day week at the Stanton by Dale firm in January, making Friday a permanent day off for staff, who retained full pay. The firm had invested nearly £100,000 in new technology, which had helped drive production. Rather than making even more money, Laura decided to do something different."

"How the Minneapolis Foundation Bankrolls the Destruction of Public Schools: With hopes of creating an education “marketplace,” the business foundation floods the city with charter schools while vilifying teachers' unions. Over its 107-year existence, the Minneapolis Foundation has accumulated all the essential ingredients for a glossy resume. The foundation's website reverentially invokes its creation in 1915 by “a lawyer, two lumbermen and two bankers” who banded together to create “a wisely planned and enduring fabric” to benefit the community. It then lists an array of beloved Minnesota institutions and places the foundation has worked to found, preserve, or improve in some manner. From the first federal protection of the Boundary Waters in 1924 to the establishment of the Minnesota Orchestra in 1945 to the construction of the original Guthrie Theater (“A Theater for the People!”) in 1963, the foundation claims to have played a vital role. Today, the nonprofit grant-making machine, which boasts annual expenditures of $125 million, is helmed by former Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak. So when and why, exactly, did the Minneapolis Foundation start trying to kill the Minneapolis Public Schools?"

"Meet the Censored: Chris Hedges: Interview with the award-winning investigative reporter, now at Substack, who had six years of shows removed by YouTube This past weekend, celebrated journalist and author Chris Hedges woke up to find six years of episodes of his Russia Today show On Contact vanished from the show's account on YouTube. Though almost none of the shows referenced Russia or Vladimir Putin directly, and the few that did tended to be unflattering, his association with Russian state media was enough to erase hundreds of interviews about topics ranging from Julian Assange's imprisonment to censorship to police brutality to American war crimes in the Middle East."

Yes, they are still doing this stuff. "L.A. County Voting System Still Fails to Meet State Standards, County Clerk Smears Expert Critics: 'BradCast' 4/4/2022 [...] Back in 2020, Los Angeles County deployed a new, unverifiable touchscreen voting system called "Voting Solutions for All People" (or, VSAP) across the nation's most populous voting jurisdiction. Some ten years in development by the County's Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, the new touchscreen Ballot Marking Devices (BMDs) failed spectacularly in that year's Super Tuesday Presidential Primary, leading to long lines and questions about the results. The VSAP system had been conditionally certified by the Secretary of State just weeks before their first county-wide use, after state testing discovered about 30 different violations of California Voting System Standards." I seriously don't want to hear about "saving democracy" from Trump or the Russians when it's coming from people who ignore this kind of thing or, worse, shrug it off as conspiracy theory.

"Israel deliberately forgets its history: An Israeli historian suggests the diaspora was the consequence, not of the expulsion of the Hebrews from Palestine, but of proselytising across north Africa, southern Europe and the Middle East [...] But during the 1980s an earthquake shook these founding myths. The discoveries made by the “new archaeology” discredited a great exodus in the 13th century BC. Moses could not have led the Hebrews out of Egypt into the Promised Land, for the good reason that the latter was Egyptian territory at the time. And there is no trace of either a slave revolt against the pharaonic empire or of a sudden conquest of Canaan by outsiders. Nor is there any trace or memory of the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon. Recent discoveries point to the existence, at the time, of two small kingdoms: Israel, the more powerful, and Judah, the future Judea. The general population of Judah did not go into 6th century BC exile: only its political and intellectual elite were forced to settle in Babylon. This decisive encounter with Persian religion gave birth to Jewish monotheism. Then there is the question of the exile of 70 AD. There has been no real research into this turning point in Jewish history, the cause of the diaspora. And for a simple reason: the Romans never exiled any nation from anywhere on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. Apart from enslaved prisoners, the population of Judea continued to live on their lands, even after the destruction of the second temple. Some converted to Christianity in the 4th century, while the majority embraced Islam during the 7th century Arab conquest. Most Zionist thinkers were aware of this: Yitzhak Ben Zvi, later president of Israel, and David Ben Gurion, its first prime minister, accepted it as late as 1929, the year of the great Palestinian revolt. Both stated on several occasions that the peasants of Palestine were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Judea (2)."

The Real 'Big Lie' Has Nothing to Do With Donald Trump: American working people have slogged through three crushing recessions, a worsening inequality that resulted in lower standard of living, and a grotesque pandemic that has exposed glaring inadequacies of our economic model. [...] That particular fabrication asserts that the economy is recovering and as the pandemic recedes a return to normal prosperity will benefit all working people. [...] The real "Big Lie" to manipulate and con working people from the middle working class and working class is not convincing when the numbers of our economic model are examined. For starters, the economy had a net loss of around 10 million jobs in 2020. It gained 6.5 million jobs in 2021. That's a loss of 3.5 million jobs. Biden's “recovery” is merely a reflection of the economic malaise of the last few years with significant losses during the pandemic. It is part of the “recovery” of the business cycle which is a historical component of our economic model. These “recoveries” usually result in less income and fewer good jobs for working people because the structure of our economic model remains intact." And then there are the real unemployment numbers, which aren't the ones you will see in the mass media.

Review, David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: 'The examples the authors cite persuasively debunk the now commonly accepted idea that there was only one overriding pattern in the evolution of government and social organization, and that it proceeded through a series of logical and ultimately inevitable phases to lead us into the modern world. They contest the deterministic view that certain events, such as the discovery of the benefits of agriculture or the creation of more efficient technology, left the societies that profited from them no other choice than to march forward towards an ever more sophisticated, technology-oriented civilization, transforming their institutions, cultures and relationships to accommodate and adapt to the supposed laws of the “brave, new world” thus unveiled."

Michael Dobson has posted a little tribute to Steve Stiles, who we still miss a lot.

"THE ART NOUVEAU ILLUSTRATIONS OF ALPHONSE MUCHA HD 1080p"

As a Steve Allen appreciator, I loved MST3K's The Steve-O-Meter.

Video: 1940s - Views of Los Angeles & San Francisco in color

Some photos of a neat building in Arkansas designed by a protegé of Frank Lloyd Wright, ThornCrown Chapel.

The Foundations, "Baby, Now That I've Found You"

Well, that long black train got my baby and gone

This stunning sunset was captured by Jude Nagurney Camwell.

"Manchin's Child Tax Credit Lies: A new study disproves Sen. Joe Manchin's rotten claims about the child tax credit. A new study finds that the expanded Child Tax Credit — implemented last year as a key part of President Biden's American Rescue Plan — did not negatively impact employment among adults with children. The findings completely disprove West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin's rationale for opposing the cash payments. Find out how and much more in today's Midday Poster below, exclusively for supporting subscribers."

I probably shouldn't bother with this one since she's leaving office to collect her reward from the corporate gods, but it's a perfect picture of what a "moderate" Democrat really is. "The Democratic Party's Biggest Problem Is Its Conservative Wing: Rep. Stephanie Murphy got everything she wanted, and it's a disaster, so she's retiring Several months ago, Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) announced that she won't be running for re-election. Recently, she explained why in a worshipful interview with Rachel Bade at Politico, excerpted in its Playbook newsletter (“Presented by PhRMA”): She's mad about Democrats criticizing her for not supporting President Biden's agenda. “I am surprised at how short the memory is. It's as short as being celebrated for having flipped a seat and then excoriated for taking votes that help you keep that seat,” she said. This is a crock. Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda is dead because a handful of the party's most conservative members, including Murphy, killed it. Now the party has nothing of legislative substance to run on, and members in swing districts are looking down the barrel of a possible midterm electoral bloodbath. The culprits are starting to head for the exits, scapegoating everyone but themselves for the consequences of their horrible decisions."

"The U.K. Wanted to Extradite Julian Assange to the U.S. From the Start: In a 2016 meeting, Britain's deputy minister of foreign affairs removed the diplomatic mask. THE U.K. HIGH COURT ruling that Julian Assange should be extradited to face trial in the United States — a decision that Amnesty International has called a “travesty of justice” — came as no surprise to me. It's what the U.K. government always wanted. I know because the British deputy minister of foreign affairs told me. Many pundits and politicians talk of the extradition proceedings against Assange as if they were an unforeseen legal outcome that came about as Assange's situation unfolded. This is not true. My experience as the foreign minister of Ecuador — the South American country that granted Assange asylum — left me in no doubt that the U.K. wanted Assange's extradition to the United States from the very beginning. One encounter I had with Alan Duncan, the former British minister of state for Europe and the Americas, in October 2016 really let the cat out of the bag. At our meeting in the Dominican Republic, Duncan went on extensively about how loathsome Assange was. While I didn't anticipate Duncan to profess his love for our asylee, I had expected a more professional diplomatic exchange. But the most important moment of the meeting was when I reiterated that Ecuador's primary fear was the transfer of Assange to the United States, at which point Duncan turned to his staff and exclaimed something very close to, 'Yes, well, good idea. How would we go about extraditing him to the Americans?”' His advisers squirmed in embarrassment. They had spent the last four years trying to reassure Ecuador that this was not what the U.K. was after. I responded that this was news indeed. I then wondered whether Duncan left the meeting feeling he had made a mess of it. I was particularly surprised by Duncan's candor because my June 2016 meeting with his predecessor, Hugo Swire, in Whitehall, had been quite different. It's not that Swire wasn't equally contemptuous of the irritating South American country that had granted Assange asylum; it is more that Swire actually knew the case well. Swire stuck to the U.K.'s position: Nobody wanted to extradite Assange to the United States. The Ecuadorian government was “deluded” and “paranoid.” This had nothing to do with the issue of freedom of expression or even WikiLeaks. The case was all about accusations in Sweden against Assange. Ecuador should stop protecting a potential sex offender."

"The Supreme Court's Astonishing, Inexplicable Blow to the Voting Rights Act in Wisconsin: On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued an astonishing decision throwing out Wisconsin's new legislative districts as a violation of the equal protection clause. The majority accused a Republican justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court of greenlighting a “racial gerrymander” by creating one more majority-Black district in the state Assembly. Wednesday's unsigned decision, issued through the shadow docket, hands Wisconsin Republicans an unexpected victory in their quest to reduce Black representation in the legislature. It also alters the law of redistricting in fundamental yet cryptic ways that might, to a cynic, seem designed to disadvantage Democrats in every single case."

"Column: Renting a car from Hertz? You could wind up in jail: Tederhi Usude, a Santa Clarita dentist, rented a car from Hertz in June 2020 to drive to a job at a nonprofit health clinic in rural Mendocino County. He extended the rental several times with Hertz's permission and paid a total of $7,000. Usude, 55, says that in his last conversation with a Hertz agent he explained that he was temporarily quarantined because of a COVID-19 outbreak at the clinic, and would return the car as soon as he was cleared to travel again. On Dec. 18, 2020, he was on his way to return the vehicle the week before Christmas — in fact, he had turned onto the very street where the Hertz office was located. That's when his nightmare began. A police car flashed its lights behind him. He pulled over and was ordered out of the car. By then six or eight squad cars were on the scene. He was told to lie on the ground, was handcuffed and was taken to jail, where he spent the night." This seems to be a habit with them.

Somebody musta put the word out. "RT America Shuts Down After DirecTV, Roku Drop Channel: RT America, the U.S. arm of the Russian-government-controlled TV channel, will shut down and lay off most of its staff after Russia's invasion of Ukraine led distributors to drop the network. Misha Solodovnikov, general manager of T&R Productions, the company that produces RT America, cited “unforeseen business interruption events” in a memo to employees obtained by Bloomberg News. CNN reported earlier on RT's move." This was terrible news. RT's talent showed up to the studio and were simply told it was all over, they were shut down. RT was the only platform for those people — none of whom were speaking on behalf of the Russian government. They were there because it was the only platform that wasn't either right-wing or establishment.

"Where Did You Go, Vice President Joe?: President Biden's first SOTU Address was a missed opportunity to say what he knows to be true: Stock buybacks manipulate the market and leave most Americans worse off."

Putin May Have Played Himself. Will We? Reports suggest Putin tried to outsmart even his own troops, and checkmated himself instead." Taibbi quotes "Bloomberg's Leonid Bershidsky, a former Moscow Times co-worker" as tweeting: "If Putin does attack, the presumption of his rationality, which has been part of my analysis of his actions for the last 23 years, not just the past few weeks, will need to be thrown out the window." It doesn't look like the Russian troops had any idea what they were getting into, but that aspect of war-making is not new. But Putin seems to have accomplished a serious own-goal: "Meanwhile, at home, a week of Putin's Ukraine invasion has crystalized years of lobbying for messaging unity in the West. Any innovation on that front that attracted minor protest before has been deployed in the last week without question. Even Alex Jones had defenders when he was banned years ago, but for obvious reasons no one is batting an eye at the EU banning RT, or Google or Meta or DirecTV or SkyTV doing the same, or Twitter blocking new accounts in Russia, or any of a hundred moderation decisions of varying levels of rationality. It barely made news when Twitter announced it was limiting the spread of accounts that 'undermine trust in the Ukrainian government' or spreads news that 'that Ukraine isn't doing well.' (Does that language sound familiar?). Facebook, in an echo of 1984's 'Eurasia is now an ally' switcheroo, removed the neo-Nazi Azov battalion from its Dangerous Individuals and Organizations list. A few weeks ago, it was at least a little controversial when Canada invoked its Emergencies Act to assert the power to cut off financial services for anyone 'directly or indirectly' participating in trucker protests, and GoFundMe faced criticism for freezing accounts. Now a fusillade of similar decisions is coming at us almost too quickly to track." Which is troubling, and when all those things happen at once, Americans, who supposedly believe in free speech, should be horrified. But all of America's worst war hawks have crawled out of the woodwork to flex again, as they've obviously been champing at the bit to do for some time. They must've prayed for Putin to do something stupid - and I guess he has. But that doesn't mean things can't be made stupider by everyone else.

"Why Is Biden Pushing People Back to the Office?: How about converting our depopulated downtowns into affordable housing instead? One of the more awkward lines in President Biden's State of the Union address involved returning to a pre-COVID status quo, though he highlighted perhaps the least desirable aspect of that: the slog through a rush hour commute to a box with four walls and apprehensive co-workers. 'It's time for America to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again with people,' Biden said. 'People working from home can feel safe and begin to return to their offices.' It didn't draw the bipartisan applause speechwriters may have expected. This was not a throwaway line. Biden returned to the theme last Friday while discussing the jobs numbers, using substantially the same language. It's an echo of a message that has been offered by mayors and governors off and on over the past several months.

"The US supports illegal annexations by Israel and Morocco. Why the hypocrisy? America must be consistent. It cannot pick and choose when to follow international law Last December, as Russian forces encircled Ukraine, the Biden administration and its allies delivered a stark warning to Vladimir Putin: 'Any use of force to change borders is strictly prohibited under international law.' In January, as Russian troops massed even in even greater numbers, Secretary of State Antony Blinken added that 'the inviolability of frontiers' was among the 'guiding principles for international behavior.' Last month, after Russia's parliament recognized the independence of two self-declared republics Moscow had cleaved from eastern Ukraine, Blinken called this infringement upon 'Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity' a 'gross violation of international law.' All this is indisputably true. Remaking borders by force violates a core principle of international law. Which is why the Biden administration must do more than resist Russia's aggression in Ukraine. It must stop violating that principle itself."

RIP: "William Hurt, Star of Body Heat and Broadcast News Dead at 71: Oscar-winning Kiss of the Spider Woman actor died of natural causes, his family announced Sunday." He had lots of genre credits, of course, but I couldn't find an obit that mentioned Humans, where it delighted me when he turned up.

"We Need to Talk About Profits: Economists routinely ignore a fundamental set of data about the economy. [...] We live in a capitalist economy driven by the profit motive. Yet, ironically, the study of profits remains a shockingly neglected subset of the economic discipline. No Nobel Prize in Economics has ever been given to the study of profits. Economists classify their publications into countless categories (the Journal of Economic Literature's J3 code stands for 'wages, compensation and labor costs'), yet there is no category for profits. The American Economic Review last published an article with the word profits in the title in 2014. It was about the Japanese textile industry at the turn of the 20th century. As for metrics, while Carroll Wright's Bureau of Labor Statistics is still going strong, there is no Bureau of Capital Statistics."

UK prices aren't any worse than America's — in many cases they are much lower, especially for necessities. But this is happening everywhere. "Jack Monroe's thread on reality of UK's cost of living crisis is brutal: This is the real increase in the cost of living - one the vast majority of the media chooses to ignore, the food activist said. This time last year, the cheapest pasta in my local supermarket (one of the Big Four), was 29p for 500g. Today it's 70p. That's a 141% price increase as it hits the poorest and most vulnerable households."

"Motivated Reasoning: Emily Oster's COVID Narratives and the Attack on Public Education: Of the numerous political battles sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, some of the most bitterly contested have taken place over K-12 education. Schools have been a site of decisive struggles over the norms, values, and policies of the U.S. response to the public health crisis. While teachers collectively fought for stronger COVID mitigation measures, a small but vocal minority of parents confronted school boards in acrimonious meetings, demanding an end to remote instruction and mask mandates. These local skirmishes took place against the backdrop of successive COVID surges and a national media narrative that cast doubt on the usefulness of public health measures. It is impossible to understand the failed U.S. pandemic response, which has left over one million people dead, without understanding the role that schools have played as sites of political contestation. And it is impossible to understand the school reopening debate without understanding one of its main interlocutors: academic economist Emily Oster. But despite its prominence, Oster's work on COVID in schools has attracted little scrutiny—even though it has been funded since last summer by organizations that, without exception, have explicit commitments to opposing teacher's unions, supporting charter schools, and expanding corporate freedom. In addition to grants from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Walton Family Foundation, and Arnold Ventures, Oster has received funding from far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. The Thiel grant awarded to Oster was administered by the Mercatus Center, the think tank founded and financed by the Koch family.

"Healthcare for human rights, not profits: what the U.S. can learn from Cuba's Coronavirus response: Cuba's remarkable response to the Coronavirus pandemic highlights the need for a healthcare system that puts people before profits [...] Even in the face of an economic blockade obstructing the shipment of critical medical supplies such as syringes and other basic materials, Cuba has already vaccinated 93% of its population against Coronavirus. Since the initiation of the state's vaccination campaign in August of 2021, Cuba now has one of the highest Coronavirus vaccination rates in the world, with daily infections having drastically declined. In contrast, only 65% of the U.S. population is currently vaccinated against Coronavirus (despite the nation's surplus of vaccines), and daily infections in the U.S. just reached record highs this January."

"Bad News: Selling the story of disinformation [...] The media narrative of sinister digital mind control has obscured a body of research that is skeptical about the effects of political advertising and disinformation. A 2019 examination of thousands of Facebook users by political scientists at Princeton and NYU found that 'sharing articles from fake news domains was a rare activity'—more than 90 percent of users had never shared any. [...] The media scholar Jack Bratich has argued that the contemporary antidisinformation industry is part of a 'war of restoration' fought by an American political center humbled by the economic and political crises of the past twenty years. Depoliticized civil society becomes, per Bratich, 'the terrain for the restoration of authoritative truth-tellers' like, well, Harvard, the New York Times, and the Council on Foreign Relations. In this argument, the Establishment has turned its methods for discrediting the information of its geopolitical enemies against its own citizens. The Biden Administration's National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism—the first of its kind—promises to 'counter the polarization often fueled by disinformation, misinformation, and dangerous conspiracy theories online.' The full report warned not just of right-wing militias and incels, but anticapitalist, environmental, and animal-rights activists too. This comes as governments around the world have started using emergency 'fake news' and 'disinformation' laws to harass and arrest dissidents and reporters. [...] Ironically, to the extent that this work creates undue alarm about disinformation, it supports Facebook's sales pitch. What could be more appealing to an advertiser, after all, than a machine that can persuade anyone of anything? This understanding benefits Facebook, which spreads more bad information, which creates more alarm. Legacy outlets with usefully prestigious brands are taken on board as trusted partners, to determine when the levels of contamination in the information ecosystem (from which they have magically detached themselves) get too high. For the old media institutions, it's a bid for relevance, a form of self-preservation. For the tech platforms, it's a superficial strategy to avoid deeper questions. A trusted disinformation field is, in this sense, a very useful thing for Mark Zuckerberg. [...] The specific American situation was creating specific kinds of people long before the advent of tech platforms."

Glenn Greenwald has gotten a little partisan lately and it really does sound like he spends too much time hanging around with right-wingers, but he's not wrong about the shameful censorship the mass media and Big Tech practiced during the presidential campaign to suppress the story of how a coked-up failson of a wealthy candidate left his laptop lying around, and instead promoted a false, unverified story of how it was all just Russian propaganda. "The NYT Now Admits the Biden Laptop -- Falsely Called 'Russian Disinformation' -- is Authentic: The media outlets which spread this lie from ex-CIA officials never retracted their pre-election falsehoods, ones used by Big Tech to censor reporting on the front-runner." Frankly, I never understood why they thought it was so important to suppress this story. And though I understand why Greenwald was outraged when The Intercept refused to let him publish about it while allowing Risen to promote the story even the CIA wasn't quite willing to stand behind, I never agreed with his reasons for quitting over it. But hey, it was his choice. I mean, you either knew what a piece of crap Biden was or you were so adamantly anti-Trump that you didn't care. And the anti-Trump partisans had already shown that they were willing to engage in any kind of corruption to do what they perceived as ensuring Trump's defeat (as long as it didn't involve nominating Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren). Fox could rail about Biden and his son's nepotism and corruption as much as they liked, but most Democratic voters weren't going to pay much attention to it anyway after years of seeing such scandals as Gore and Obama wearing a different suit and numerous other faked up "exposés". But, left or right, people should be appalled by the willingness of the establishment media to play these blatantly censorious games and to rope "social media" into it as well.

At the same time, The Newspaper of Record thinks free speech means the right to say stupid things and not have anyone criticize you for it - at least if you are The New York Times. Froomkin says "The New York Times editorial board should retract and resign: It's hard to imagine a more fundamental misreading of the freedom of speech — or an organization whose credibility depends more on understanding it correctly — than today's lead editorial from the New York Times editorial board. The First Amendment asserts a right to free speech. It does not assert a right to not be criticized for speech. In fact, it protects critical speech. And the protection is against government action, not against other people."

I'm not going to link to anything about the demise of Mad Albright. Instead, about who she was when she lived. She spoke at a Berkeley commencement ceremony in 2000. She was supposed to speak after the Medalist speaker, but the university got nervous and switched them around. "Commencement Speech by University Medalist Fadia Rafeedie"

Paul Butterfield Blues Band "Mystery Train"

Coverup: Four dead in Ohio

Last year, John Derf Backderf posted this on Facebook, but since everyone hates Facebook, and it is honestly a pain in the tail, I thought I'd put it here for a nice, easily-accessible link if anyone wants to link it elsewhere.

Since it's the time of year when the events of KENT STATE unfolded, I thought I'd share some items with you.

This event didn't end with the massacre. The days, weeks and months that followed were a depressing lesson in cover-ups, political sleaze and media manipulation. In its own way, it's as shocking a story as the story leading up to the massacre.

The cover-up by the National Guard began within minutes, even before the blood was cleaned off the Prentice Hall parking lot.

The 22 shooters reloaded their clips, to make it appear they hadn't fired their weapons. Guns were ditched, or switched. The armory checkout records for G Troop, the soldiers who did most of the slaughter, vanished. There was no way to ascertain who fired what weapon, or what soldier shot what student.

Almost all the shooters lied on their incident reports and insisted they had not fired. Later, most lied to the FBI, a felony for which they were not prosecuted. Within hours, all the shooters adopted the same defense.

"We thought we were about to be overrun. We felt our lives were in danger. We had no choice."

They weren't about to be overrun. Few of the 50 remaining protestors were anywhere near them when they fired. Most were the length of a football field away. The Guardsmen were in no danger at all. And they definitely had a choice.

The FBI also noted that it was obvious the shooters had quickly consulted attorneys and reached a group decision on what their defense was. Fifty-one years later, the surviving shooters still stick to that defense.

From Columbus, Gen. Del Corso, the reckless and reactionary leader of the National Guard, insisted a student sniper, firing from a rooftop, had caused the Guardsmen to fire in self defense. Del Corso and Gov. Rhodes were convinced the students were armed. They weren't. It would be 3 months before the FBI stated unequivocally, "There was no sniper."

Immediately after the massacre, Guard officers ordered 100 soldiers, some seen here, to fan out over the area and collect evidence, completely contaminating the shooting scene beyond hope. Shell casings were collected, some of which disappeared.

The soldiers were also ordered to round up all the projectiles that were thrown at them, mostly large driveway gravel from student parking lots. Instead, the soldiers went all over campus, especially to the construction area where the new library was being built, and out into surrounding city neighborhoods, and collected a fearsome array of "evidence" : bricks, concrete blocks, lumber, pieces of steel rebar, garden boulders that the school shotputter couldn't have heaved, etc. Gen. Canterbury insisted a fire hydrant had been thrown at him! An average hydrant weighs 300 lbs.! In the photo here, soldiers are marking as evidence a bit of pine branch. Some "weapon"!

This was all displayed on long tables in a campus building and shown to the skeptical press. The FBI later threw out most of this "evidence."

Capt. Snyder of the 145th Infantry, however, produced a pistol, which he says he found on the body of Jeff Miller. Along with a blackjack, just for good measure. He hadn't. The untraceable gun belonged to Snyder, a county deputy by day. So did the blackjack.

It would be FOUR YEARS before Snyder admitted he planted the gun on a dead boy.

In a comment below his original post, with an accompanying photo, he says:

The "shocking" display of weaponry pulled from dorm rooms by county deputies, under orders from Prosecutor Ron Kane.

Baseball bats, hunting knives, fish knives, a decorative samurai sword, a couple decorative flintlock pistols, a starter's gun, a few BB guns, art supplies mistaken for weapons, etc.

Reporters were less than impressed.

Plus the usual amount of drugs you'd expect to find, mostly pot. Some pills, which turned out to be legit prescriptions, and syringes, singled out by Kane as proof of heroin use, but which turned out to belong to diabetics.

Unfortunately for him, Kane had neglected to secure search warrants for this search. A judge quickly threw out charges.

Except one, because there was ONE crime. A deputy had stolen cash he found in the rooms. A humiliated Kane slunk away.

Their names were Allison Krause (19), Jeffrey Miller (20), Sandra Scheuer (20), and William Schroeder (19). Scheuer and Schroeder were not protesting at all, they were just observing from a few hundred feet away during a break between classes. Miller and Kraus and their friends were running away from the Guard when they were shot. Nine others were reported to be injured.

* * * * *

Biden gave his State of the Union address, which I didn't watch, but apparently the Republicans managed to put on a display that made me think, "You know, it's not just breaking government they're up to, it's being willing to make even themselves look like a bunch of trashy rowdies to make sure no one respects government at all." On the Dem side, though, Rashida Tlaib gave the progressive response and creepy spiv Josh Gottheimer gave the Quisling response, and Charlie Pierce says she was the only one who told the truth, when she said, "No one fought harder for President Biden's agenda than progressives. We rallied with our supporters, held town halls in our communities, engaged new people, and we even played hardball in Congress. But two forces stood in the way: A Republican Party that serves only the rich and powerful, and just enough corporate-backed Democratic obstructionists to help them succeed." Says Pierce, "It is incontrovertible that they supported the president's agenda and the Problem Solvers made only problems for it. And none of this had anything to do with Hunter Biden's laptop." Scott Lemieux deals with the reaction to Tlaib in "Josh Gottheimer trying to find the guy who did this: Axios is once again giving a platform to Democratic centrists to whine about colleagues who actually support Biden's agenda: 'Centrist House Democrats are unloading on Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) for her plan to give a response to President Biden's State of the Union address on Tuesday. 'It's like keying your own car and slashing your own tires,' Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) told Axios.' There is, in fact, a small group of Democrats who are repeatedly keying the car and slashing the tires of the Biden administration, and Gottheimer is their ringleader: [...] It's just amazing that the Problem Creation Caucus is still trying to blame others when they've gotten their way. Their top priority was passed. They refuse to pass the top progressive priority, including its most popular elements. They have no further ideas but tax cuts for the affluent and no positive message at all. To the extent that the midterms go worse than expected, it hangs on them, and trying to blame the Squad is just pathetic. "

"Biden's Big Chance to Lower Drug Prices: A decision on whether to open a costly cancer drug to generic competition will be made shortly. It doesn't require congressional approval. [...] Xtandi was invented due to grants from the U.S. Army and the NIH; all three of its patents disclose those funders. In the case of publicly developed drugs, under the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 the government has so-called 'march-in rights' to effectively extinguish such patents if the drug is not being distributed on 'reasonable terms.' After that, generic companies could market their versions and create competition on price. Activists, public-health experts, and patients have urged the government to use march-in rights on Xtandi, which is owned by a Japanese pharmaceutical conglomerate named Astellas. (Through an acquisition, Pfizer owns half of the U.S. market for the drug, where it and Astellas share costs and profits.) The advocates' argument is that charging U.S. patients significantly more than patients in other high-income countries for the same drug is in fact unreasonable. On January 10, the NIH said it would complete an initial review on how to proceed within a month. A decision is expected imminently." Will he do it? The politics here are all about money. Some of the very people who are in the decision loop are patent-holders getting big royalties. "However, Love believes that ultimately, HHS and the president will decide the fate of the petition. The hope of activists is that using march-in once will discourage other drug companies that used federal grants (which is the overwhelming majority of them) from pricing their products high."

"Judge orders new trial for US woman sentenced to six years for trying to register to vote: Pamela Moses released from prison after Guardian revealed new evidence in case that was not produced at trial. A Memphis judge has ordered a new trial for Pamela Moses, a woman who was sentenced to six years in prison for trying to register to vote. The case attracted national attention following a Guardian report, because of the severity of the sentence. Moses said she had no idea she was ineligible. Moses has been in prison since December, when her bond was revoked. On Thursday, the Guardian revealed new evidence in the case that was not produced at trial. Moses was released from custody on Friday, according to Claiborne Ferguson, her attorney."

I'm trying to avoid the whole Trump/January 6th story, but there's some stuff at TPM that makes me feel even more disgusted with Obama for nominating Garland.

"Documents Reveal Identities Of Three EPA Officials Who Downplayed Chemical Hazards: All three officials have played a significant role in pressuring scientists to dismiss the risks posed by products the EPA is assessing, according to whistleblowers. [...] The first complaint, filed in June, explained that all four whistleblowers experienced having chemical hazards they identified — including developmental toxicity, neurotoxicity, mutagenicity, and/or carcinogenicity — removed from assessments. According to a complaint they submitted to the EPA inspector general in early August, the whistleblowers met with opposition from all three named officials in their effort to accurately account for exposure to certain chemicals. On one occasion, according to the complaint, Stedeford revised a report, changing a finding of neurotoxicity after speaking to a representative of the company that made the chemical. Another of their complaints, submitted to the inspector general in late August, described Camacho as deleting hazards from an assessment without the permission of the scientist who worked on it to make the chemical seem less hazardous. And in a complaint filed with the inspector general in November, the whistleblowers documented the case of a chemical used in paint, caulk, ink, and other products that posed health risks, including the risk of cancer. In the latter case, a risk assessor noted the hazards in the assessment, but Henry changed the document to say that the 'EPA did not identify risk' for the chemical."

Andrew Bacevich at The Boston Globe, "US can't absolve itself of responsibility for Putin's Ukraine invasion: The conflict renders a judgment on post-Cold War US policy. That policy has now culminated in a massive diplomatic failure. [...] By casually meddling in Ukrainian politics in recent years, the United States has effectively incited Russia to undertake its reckless invasion. Putin richly deserves the opprobrium currently being heaped on him. But US policy has been both careless and irresponsible."

"Saudi-Russia Collusion Is Driving Up Gas Prices — and Worsening Ukraine Crisis: A spat between Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Biden is pushing gas prices ever higher. It started under Obama. As Russia ordered troops into Ukraine on Monday, gas prices soared to their highest levels in over seven years. While the media focuses on the conflict in Ukraine, a major cause of the gas price spike has gone overlooked: Moscow's partnership with Saudi Arabia has grown dramatically in recent years, granting the two largest oil producers in the world the unprecedented ability to collude in oil export decisions. The desert kingdom's relationship with the U.S. has chilled in the meantime, as demonstrated earlier this month, when President Joe Biden pleaded with the Saudis to increase oil production — a move that would not only have helped to alleviate rising inflation and gas prices, but also reduced Russia's extravagant profits amid its aggression against Ukraine. The Saudi king declined. The Saudi and Russian relationship has blossomed under Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, whose first formal meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin took place in the summer of 2015. MBS pursued the meeting after then-President Barack Obama declined to meet with him, The Intercept has learned from two sources with knowledge of the matter who were granted anonymity to describe sensitive discussions."

Taibbi, "Putin the Apostate [...] For anyone expecting me to be outraged about this — I am, after all, almost daily denounced as a Putin-lover and apologist, so surely I must want the Great Leader to stay in power forever — I have to disappoint. If Vladimir Putin were captured tomorrow and fired into space, I wouldn't bat an eye. I would like to point out that we already tried regime change in Russia. I remember, because I was there. And, thanks to a lot of lurid history that's being scrubbed now with furious intensity, it ended with Vladimir Putin in power. Not as an accident, or as the face of a populist revolt against Western influence — that came later — but precisely because we made a long series of intentional decisions to help put him there."

"'A Game-Changer': Defying Big Pharma, WHO Expands Vaccine Tech Sharing" 'The pharmaceutical system is being remade from the ground up by lower- and middle-income countries,' said one public health campaigner. The World Health Organization on Wednesday announced it is expanding its mRNA technology transfer efforts to five additional countries as it works to bolster coronavirus vaccine manufacturing in the Global South, an initiative that seeks to overcome persistent obstruction from the pharmaceutical industry and rich nations.

"The Factory Town Poll [...] If Democrats can't start to do better in these counties, the Blue Wall will soon be history, and old swing states like Iowa, Missouri, and Ohio, will become as deep a shade of red as West Virginia, another Factory-Town dominated state that used to be part of the Democratic coalition. [...] It is true (and no surprise) that Factory Town voters are not very happy with the Democratic Party. Democrats have a serious challenge in rebuilding a positive connection with these voters; they trail the Republicans in ratings on who handles many of the issues better; and it won't change overnight. But the basis of that negativity is less about woke language and identity politics than it is about a feeling that, in the midst of hard times for their communities, they have been abandoned and ignored by Democrats. Democrats' biggest problems with these voters are that they are seen as weak, ineffective, and lacking an economic plan that will make people's lives better. [...] Another big clue that it is economics that is central to winning these voters back is that the issues that voters mention as their top concern: the rising cost of living, jobs, and the economy, the rising cost of health care are their top concerns, all mentioned by more than 20% of voters. Considerably lower are the classic Republican culture war wedge issues: immigration, crime, and moral values, none mentioned by more than 13% of the voters."

A story for our times when the company that carries digital versions of some newspapers decides to announce it's making them free to people in Ukraine and five days later the sites are victims of a cyber attack.

"Washington Post/ABC poll asks a question from an alternate universe: Would you rather see the next Congress controlled by the (Republicans, to act as a check on Biden), or controlled by the (Democrats, to support Biden's agenda)?"

"Charity Can't Fix What Neoliberalism Has Broken: A British bus company recently reversed its plans to cut a bus route, but only after a wealthy local offered to fund it himself. A decent society can't rely on wealthy do-gooders to save public services."

Matt Stoller: "Forget the macho hawkish bleating, here's how the West directly helped Russia invading Ukraine. First, we refused to invest in renewable energy FOR DECADES. Second, we turned the USSR into an oligarchy. Third, we made a world safe for those oligarchs. Fourth, we expanded NATO. The end of the Cold War was like the end of World War II, only instead of savvy New Deal strategists who thought 'let's help the vanquished rebuild' we had Larry Summers and Andrei Shleifer who thought 'now's a good moment to rob and steal.'

RIP: "Autherine Lucy Foster dies at 92: Autherine Lucy Foster, the first Black student to attend the University of Alabama in 1956, has died at 92 years old. The news comes less than a week after the University dedicated the College of Education building in her honor. At the dedication ceremony on Feb. 25, the state of Alabama granted her the title of master teacher, which will never be awarded again."

"The Impoverishing Myth of White Privilege [...] When these poor whites arrived in the Americas, their masters continued these ruthless traditions. Whenever they got the chance, these white slaves, and their non-white counterparts, would runaway. The vast size of the Americas, combined with the extreme ethnic and linguistic diversity, made it impossible to tell who was a runaway slave, and who was not. Prosperous communities of former slaves of all ethnic and religious backgrounds emerged across the New World. This was a great thing for runaway slaves, not so great for the 'landowners' hoping to benefit from forced labor. After yet another rebellion where a coalition of ethnic groups fought to toss off the chains of colonial oppression, the ruling elite invented race to stabilize the system. Skin color of course existed before this, but there were no ideas of united races. An individual was Scottish, Irish, Dutch, Akan, Mohawk, Yoruba, etc. In this new system, those of African descent were placed at the very bottom of society to pacify white slaves who made up the majority of the forced laborers. White slaves continued living in horrid conditions, but now had someone to look down upon."

"A Field Guide To The 'Weapons' Of Hostile Architecture In NYC: Earlier this month, Ya-Ting Liu was walking through Fulton Street Station when she noticed something different. The domed transportation hub in Lower Manhattan, which opened in 2014, has been praised by architecture and public space enthusiasts for its airy and light-filled design surrounded by glass and an oculus skylight. Liu, who commutes to work in Manhattan, particularly liked the low ledges by the tall windows which look out onto the streetscape. She would often come there to sit when she was in between meetings or looking for a place to take a call. But on that day, she saw that a row of steel stanchions had been installed to rope off the area. A former student of urban planning, Liu knew exactly what was going on: it was an example of 'hostile' architecture or design that is meant to discourage lingering and other types of public behaviors." That would be infuriating all by itself, of course, but it's also ugly and gives the place a look of being under construction or something. (It's not just happening in NY, of course. Years ago I corresponded with my MP about this when the seating at a local station took an uncomfortable upward turn that made it as tiring to sit as to stand. The claim was that it was meant to discourage people sleeping on the public benches, but since you only had to cross the track to the Jubilee Line platform to find benches that were flat and spacious, this didn't seem to make much sense - especially since my train had a lot longer wait between.)

I'm all for recycling but I never expected roads to be surfaced by used diapers.

From 2013: "Study: Politicians think voters are way more conservative than they actually are: "A new working paper published this week by two political science graduate students may help explain why Americans' faith in Congress has dipped to historic lows: Politicians tend to vastly overestimate just how conservative their constituents really are."

"Why People Born 1955-1964 Aren't Baby Boomers: Ode to Generation Jones: punks, yuppies, but never hippies."

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Full Concert - 11/03/91 - Golden Gate Park