I'm just a wandering on the face of this earth

Very seasonal photo of a tree near Glastonbury Tor by Mike Jeffries.

"Trump's Blueprint to Crush the Left Draws from Decades of Counterterrorism Policy: Trump's NSPM-7 is a pivotal policy endangering free expression in the United States. [...] It was in this atmosphere that the Trump White House issued two pivotal policies for the future of free expression in the United States. On the evening of September 22, Trump signed an executive order designating 'Antifa' as a 'domestic terrorist organization.' Antifa is short for 'anti-fascist.' It refers to an ideology. Although there may be groups that would classify their beliefs as 'anti-fascist,' there is no singular or central 'Antifa' organization. Nevertheless, on some parts of the right, the mythical Antifa has started to play the role of boogeyman formerly reserved for the Communist Party. Whereas Communists were argued to be the hidden driving force behind everything from Civil Rights to peace activism, the nonexistent Antifa is now fingered as the secret, sinister mover of domestic protest—and the legally dubious move of declaring Antifa a domestic terrorist organization has become a major rallying point on the right."

The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, and his restoration, was a great opportunity for Matt Stoller to talk about media monopolization and what to do about it, so he had a good natter with David Dayen on the Prospect Weekly Roundup, where they discussed his article at Big, "On Jimmy Kimmel: It's Time to Destroy the Censorship Machine and Repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996: In 1996, Bill Clinton set the stage for what Donald Trump is doing now by creating a censorship machine of consolidated media, broadband, and tech firms. It's time to break it apart. [...] The second problem is that the tools exist for Trump to engage in a coercive censorship regime because Bill Clinton and a Newt Gingrich-led Republican Congress helped consolidate the media with the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which supercharged a wave of media and telecom consolidation kicked off by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. As More Perfect Union noted, 'In 1983, 50 companies controlled 90% of the U.S. media market. That number is now down to 5.' If the ability to wield power over content exists, it will likely be purposed, and Trump isn't the first one to do it."

"Citizens Unlimited: The Inside Plan To Deliver Citizens United 2.0: The Trump Justice Department is reversing the federal government's Supreme Court defense of longstanding campaign finance laws and is now urging justices to strike down some of the last remaining limits on election spending."

Local Portland station KATU decided to illustrate how "war ravaged" Portland is to justify Trump's invasion, so they set up a 24-hour webcam outside ICE HQ

"Recognition of Palestine is a repeat of the West's Oslo 'peace' fraud: Britain's Keir Starmer is already pulling the rug from under his own grudging declaration. The only hope of change is of the unintended consequences variety." The "state" Starmer is talking about is the same one Israel has "offered" and Palestinians have rejected for decades — one with no sovereignty, no right to self-defense, no contiguous lands, and no control of their air apace, borders, or water. Bantustans within Israel's control.

Hamas has a question: "Senior Hamas Leader Mousa Abu Marzouk on Trump's Gaza Plan and the Future of Hamas [...] 'President Trump said 25,000 members of Qassam were killed,' he said, adding that this number is equivalent to public estimates of the total size of the Qassam Brigades, Hamas's armed wing. 'Israel also recently announced that most of Hamas's military capabilities were destroyed—they said 90% of Hamas's capabilities were wiped out. So if they destroyed 90% of Hamas's military capabilities and killed most of Qassam's fighters, as President Trump says, whose weapons are you going to disarm and where are the weapons you claim you'll remove when you already destroyed them?'"

Like Atrios says, "The idea that widespread voter fraud could exist, let alone does, understandably persists in the minds of people likely doing it." "MAGA's Top 'Voter Fraud' Watchdog Votes in a Swing State. He Doesn't Live There. A long paper trail shows that Jack Posobiec votes in one state and lives in another.

Drop Site News has a story on how the Mamdani campaign is handling media smears that try to paint him as some kind of anti-Jewish activist, "Inside Zohran Mamdani's Campaign [...] Andrew Epstein, Zohran's communications director during the primary, vividly recalls his reaction to Politico's Holocaust smear. 'I said, "Wtf?" and started firing off texts and emails,' explained Andrew, who is in his late thirties and lives near Zohran in Astoria. Along with Mamdani's then-political director Julian Gerson and the campaign's media strategist Morris Katz, Andrew is Jewish."

"What the general election campaigns against Larry Krasner and Zohran Mamdani say about the Democratic Party [...] 'The reason Larry Krasner won is because the people like his policies,' Gavio said, pointing to Krasner's embrace of criminal justice reform and his attacks on Trump. 'What moderates who are running in the general election are basically saying to the Democratic base is: We don't support these policies that you support.'

"Elon Musk's SpaceX Took Money Directly From Chinese Investors, Company Insider Testifies: The newly unsealed testimony marks the first time direct Chinese investment in the company has been disclosed, raising new questions about foreign ownership interests in one of America's most important military contractors." The very idea that any part of your country's defense should be in the hands of an internationally-owned company is insane. (And that goes for your water supply, too, dammit.)

David Loftus has been back on his beat of trying to disabuse people of the myth that Portland was burned to the ground during the BLM police riots, and he thought the issue was improving in search results, but then he had a terrible realization. "The Age of AI = No Right Answer."

Imagine my surprise at seeing the very first sentence in an MSN article: "British historian explains why he was 'shaken every day' during US visit: Feminist Avedon Carol, a Maryland native who has lived in London for many years, once commented that the United States has an even closer relationship with the UK than it has with its neighbor to the north, Canada. UK media, from the BBC to the Times of London, typically cover U.S. politics extensively — and British historian Timothy Garton Ash explains why he is so worried about the U.S. in a Guardian column published on September 16." (Via Ansible.)

RIP: "Jane Goodall, world-renowned primatologist, dies aged 91: [...] The Jane Goodall Institute announced that she had died of natural causes while in California as part of a US speaking tour. 'Dr Goodall's discoveries as an ethologist revolutionised science,' the statement read. 'She was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world.' Born in London in 1934, Goodall began researching free-living chimpanzees in Tanzania in 1960. In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, which works to protect the species and supports youth projects aimed at benefiting animals and the environment."

RIP: "Moody Blues singer and bassist John Lodge dies aged 82 [...] Lodge, who was born in Birmingham, played on some of the group's best-known songs including 'Nights in White Satin', 'Question' and 'Isn't Life Strange'. [...] 'John peacefully slipped away surrounded by his loved ones and the sounds of the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly. We will forever miss his love, smile, kindness and his absolute and never-ending support.'"

RIP: "Diane Keaton, Oscar-winning star of Annie Hall and The Godfather, dies aged 79." I remember when the whole gang went to see Annie Hall together and for months we were quoting it. And of course, that iconic Marshall McLuhan moment.

Radley Balko has started posting a series on how a brave informant exposed widespread police malfeasance in, "Collateral Damage: In 2006, a 92-year-old Atlanta woman was gunned down in her own home by police during a drug raid. The police initially claimed the woman was a marijuana dealer who fired a gun at them. The story might have ended there. But an informant bravely came forward to set the record straight. Subsequent investigations and reports revealed that the police had raided the wrong home, killed an innocent woman, then planted marijuana in her basement to cover up their mistake. In the ensuing months, we'd learn that the Atlanta Police Department's narcotics unit routinely conducted mistaken raids on terrified people. The problem was driven by perverse federal, state, and local financial incentives that pushed cops to take shortcuts in procuring warrants for drug raids in order to boost their arrest and seizure statistics. Most of those incentives are still in place today. The raids haven't stopped. And neither have the deaths."

"The Myth of the Campus Snowflake: The students I encounter as a university president aren't afraid of free speech—quite the contrary. [...] Critics of universities might counter that, even if true episodes of campus censorship are rare, what matters is that students are afraid to express themselves. In making that claim, however, they rely on poorly constructed polls, typically produced by advocacy groups, that paint a misleadingly dismal picture of student attitudes toward free speech. For example, a common question asks students whether they feel comfortable expressing their opinion about controversial topics. 'Comfort,' however, is the wrong metric for judging a free-speech climate. Speaking up is often hard, especially in a setting where professors and peers may challenge your viewpoint. Justice Louis Brandeis, one of the great figures in the history of American free speech, wrote in Whitney v. California that the Constitution's First Amendment presupposes a 'courageous, self-reliant' people. The point of college should be to build that courage, and to teach the skills that enable people to listen to and learn from one another. That should feel uncomfortable."

The right wing can build its own youth movement because they're more willing to pay their youths. It's a little different on the other side. "The Right-Wing Millennial Machine: Conservatives are building an army of fired-up young people. How? By offering them salaries. After he graduated from college, it took Nathan two years, three unpaid internships and six bartending and retail jobs before he got his first paid gig in progressive politics. His employer was a small, millennial-focused outreach nonprofit, and his job was to supervise four interns — young kids, fresh out of school, working the same day job/night job, 80-hour-a-week cycle he had just exited. Nathan, who wouldn't give his real name out of fear of retaliation, asked his boss if he could start paying the interns. 'I didn't think I was going to get them federal minimum wage — that's impossible in Washington,' he said. 'But at least they could get a stipend.' His boss refused, without offering much of a case for why they couldn't afford to pay them." If only George Soros was half of what they say he is.

The American Prospect doesn't usually do this kind of thing, but they have a piece up called "Why Winning Is Bad for Democrats" by Anonymous Democratic Consultant: "Oh, you want life to get better now, do you? Do you even understand politics?"

The Moody Blues, "I'm Just A Singer (In A Rock And Roll Band)"

It may sound good to you, not to me

Suddenly Facebook seemed to be accusing me of being a robot, and it presented me with a button to prove I wasn't, but when I clicked it, nothing happened. Then it told me it had disabled my account and offered me a button to ask for a review, which did work and they said I didn't pass and they'd permanently disabled my account. They didn't respond to my efforts to contact them, so I started a new one using the same name which it let me do, but it's nearly impossible to reconstruct an account that's over a decade old, and of course I've lost all my data (they offered me a button to download my data, but that didn't work, either.) It breaks my heart that I can no longer read all those memories with discussions that included friends who are no longer with us. And I can't remember all those names. Took two weeks for my sister to notice my friend request, and she's the whole reason I ever joined Facebook in the first place, dammit.

Once again, events are leaving me speechless. Someone shot Charlie Kirk. To me, that fact alone meant it was probably a right-winger, since most people on the left didn't rate him as important enough to want dead, and anyway the right-wingers are the ones with the guns. But right-wingers instantly started inventing reasons why the entire "left" should be rounded up for killing Charlie Kirk (and so much for free speech), while some gamers all said he was a Groyper. It makes more sense to think this was right-on-right violence, but the alleged killer apparently shared a landlord with a transperson so this is obvious definitive proof that there are vast left-wing violence networks funneling money from George Soros to the Democratic Socialists of America through AOC and Mamdani. No, I am not the person who made that up. Next to that one, even the theory that Mossad took him out doesn't sound so absurd. But now, suddenly, we have a text between the alleged shooter and his alleged lover that supplies all the evidence needed to wrench the whole story back to the story everyone was trying to tell on day one that got derailed when the "He wrote 'trans' on the bullet" story turned out to be a misunderstanding of the letters TRN engraved on the casing in its manufacture. So we had this whole "It was a trans!" story floating around for more than a day, then it got debunked and he seemed to be part of gamer-Groyper culture, and then we got redirected right back around to, "Oh, what a relief, it was the queers and trannies after all!" I've got whiplash.

Meanwhile, late-night television is taking hits because, bottom line, conservatives never, ever, want to be criticized. Making sure that critics get fired is their version of "free speech". Stephen Colbert is fired, Jimmy Kimmel is swept off the air, and small publications are nuisance-suited out of existence while Trump himself launches utterly laughable suits against The New York Times, even though it's a pretty conservative paper. Trump has now called for the firing of Seth Myers and Jimmy Fallon.

I wanted Obama put on trial for killing Americans without charge or trail, and I want Trump put on trial for making up reasons to shoot up a Venezuelan boat on an even more dubious pretext.

"Bernie Sanders claims Israel is committing genocide in Gaza: Sanders, who is Jewish and had previously refrained from saying that Israel was committing a genocide against the Palestinians, called the Gaza War 'a genocide'. 'Many legal experts have now concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza,' US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said Wednesday. In an article published on his personal website, he cited several human-rights groups and international organizations that said the Israel-Hamas War qualified as a genocide. They include the International Association of Genocide Scholars and Israeli groups B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel." I'd wondered why he hadn't already, but I guess the UN making it official may have tipped the balance.

Joe Wrote, "A Winning Strategy? The DNC Tells Its Voters to F&#ck Off: 'Why don't people like us?' The Democrats do not have a 'young voter problem.' Nor do they have a 'Latino voter problem,' a 'working-class voter problem,' or a 'male voter problem.' The Democratic Party's poor performances with various demographics can be traced to an underlying cause: The Democrats have a Democrat problem. With exceptions, the party is composed of officials, staffers, pundits, donors, and politicians who do not believe in politics, at least not in the literal sense of the word. While most parties try to build support by turning their constituents' wishes into policy, the Democrats take the opposite approach. The political objective is determined by wealthy party and media insiders, who then try to convince their constituents that the elite-decreed platform is in their best interest. This was best illustrated in the concluding chapter of Abundance, which outlined a top-down political theory: the policies are decided by the donor class, and the job of Democrat-aligned media and politicians is to sell those policies to American voters."

"'What Other Country Gets Away With All of This?': Israel Bombs Hamas Ceasefire Negotiating Team in Doha: 'The whole point was to gather people together to discuss the peace offer to kill them,' said one journalist. The government of Qatar slammed Israel for a "cowardly" attack in violation of international law on Tuesday, an assassination attempt which targeted members of Hamas' negotiating team in the capital city of Doha who had gathered to discuss a new Gaza ceasefire proposal put forth by US President Donald Trump. As they attacked the negotiating team, the Israel Defense Forces also demanded the evacuation of 1.3 million Palestinians from Gaza City and areas north of it, as they intensify attacks there. The assassination attempt came hours after Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said Israel had accepted the US proposal, many of the details of which have not been disclosed. According to Al Jazeera, the proposal was similar to one previously proposed by the US which would require the release of half of the living Israeli captives who were kidnapped by Hamas on October 7, 2023, after which a 60-day ceasefire would begin with negotiations for a permanent end to the war. That deal was agreed to by both parties before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backed out."

A must-read at Infinite Jaz, "Israel might annex the West Bank—what would that actually mean? A brief explainer. For weeks now, stories about Israel's looming declaration of sovereignty over the West Bank have been breaking almost daily. I've argued—along with others—that annexation has in many ways already happened. Yet what's actually unfolding on the ground, and what would change with a formal declaration, remains shrouded in mystery to most observers, like so much of the occupation, long buried under euphemism. This explainer is meant to get you up to speed." They can't just declare the whole West Bank a part of Israel without coming up with some explanation for why the Palestinians who live there can't vote in their "democracy". But they can't let them vote, either. So watch for them trying to provoke a third intifada.

Cory Doctorow on "The worst possible antitrust outcome [...] But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge. That meant that the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is 'remedy') for Google. Yesterday, he handed down that remedy and it is as bad as it could be. In fact, it is likely the worst possible remedy for this case: Let's start with what's not in this remedy. Google will not be forced to sell off any of its divisions – not Chrome, not Android. Despite the fact that the judge found that Google's vertical integration with the world's dominant mobile operating system and browser were a key factor in its monopolization, Mehta decided to leave the Google octopus with all its limbs intact. Google won't be forced to offer users a "choice screen" when they set up their Android accounts, to give browsers other than Chrome a fair shake. Nor will Google be prevented from bribing competitors to stay out of the search market. One of the facts established in the verdict was that Google had been slipping Apple more than $20b/year in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine. This exposed every Safari and iOS user to Google surveillance, while insulating Google from the threat of an Apple competitor. And then there's Google's data. Google is the world's most prolific surveiller, and the company boasts to investors about the advantage that its 24/7 spying confers on it in the search market, because Google knows so much about us and can therefore tailor our results. Even if this is true – a big if – it's nevertheless a fucking nightmare. Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too. Any remedy worth the name would have required Google to delete ("disgorge," in law-speak) all that data." And then it gets worse.

"'They Roll Right Over': Poll Finds Many Democrats Call Party Weak And Ineffective: Nine months after Trump won a second term, Democrats appear to harbor more resentment toward their party than do Republicans, an AP-NORC poll says [...] Respondents were asked to share the first word or phrase that came to mind when they thought of the Republican and Democratic parties. Answers were then sorted into broad categories, including negative and positive attributes. Overall, U.S. adults held a dim view of both parties, with about 4 in 10 using negative attributes, including words such as 'dishonest' or 'stupid.' But nearly nine months after Republican Donald Trump won a second presidential term, Democrats appear to be harboring more resentment about the state of their party than do Republicans. Democrats were likelier to describe their own party negatively than Republicans. Republicans were about twice as likely to describe their own party positively. 'They're spineless,' Cathia Krehbiel, a 48-year-old Democrat from Indianola, Iowa, said of her party."

Radley Balko, "A warning from a friend [...] At one point during the conference I chatted with a friend and former colleague I've known for 25 years. (I'm not using his name because it was a casual conversation.) He might be the most well-read person I know. He's a scholar who has studied authoritarianism for decades, but he's also an activist who has provided aid and support for dissident movements fighting authoritarian governments dating back to the Cold War — at times at some risk to himself. Because of that work, he's seen the abuses of authoritarian states firsthand. So he's been scornful over the years when Americans have hyperbolically likened their political opponents to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pinochet, or some other totalitarian figure. I suspect that once you've seen real authoritarianism on the ground, that sort of posturing probably seems insulting. In other words, I've always found him to be a sober realist about these things. So at the conference I asked him straight up, on a scale of one to ten, how worried he is about what's happening in the U.S. right now. I was hoping he'd give me a historical reality check — that he'd tell me my own fears are exaggerated. He answered, 'I think I'm at eleven.' I spoke with another old friend and colleague who works in AI and data systems. I asked her if DOGE's access to health records, financial records, and other sensitive data is as bad as it seems. 'However bad you think it is, it's worse,' she answered. 'They have everything.'"

RIP: "Mark Volman, Co-Founder of the Turtles and Vocalist on Flower Power Classic 'Happy Together,' Dead at 78: With longtime friend Howard Kaylan, Volman formed the duo Flo and Eddie, who worked with Frank Zappa, T. Rex, Alice Cooper, and more" I've been gratified to see a lot of tributes to him in the last few days, I hadn't realized he was as fondly remembered by so many others as he is by me.

RIP: " Bobby Hart, co-writer of Monkees hits like Last Train to Clarksville, dies aged 86." Of course, they wrote for other people and Boyce & Hart's "Hurt So Bad" was a hit for Little Anthony & The Imperials, and "Come A Little Bit Closer was an enormous hit for Jay & The Americans, but everyone remembers those Monkees hits like "Last Train To Clarksville and their title music, "Hey Hey We´re The Monkees". (I hadn't realized, though, that they also wrote "I Wonder What She's Doing Tonight".)

RIP: "Robert Redford, Legendary Leading Man and Oscar-Winning Director, Dies at 89: The founder of the Sundance Institute died early Tuesday morning at home in Utah surrounded by those he loved." I know I've mentioned before that Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid is still my favorite porn movie, but I don't think I've said anything about how much I loved Sneakers. But when I saw that he had died, I wasn't really thinking of those movies, but him. How could they not realize that this is what we had to compare them to, and no matter how high they rise or how much money they make, they could never measure up?

Doctorow on the connection between Wilhoit's Law and everything that's going on, "By all means, tread on those people: The thing that makes Wilhoit's Law so apt to this moment – and to our understanding of the recent history that produced this moment – is how it connects the petty with the terrifying, the trivial with the radical, the micro with the macro. It's a way to join the dots between fascists' business dealings, their interpersonal relationships, and their political views. It describes a continuum that ranges from minor commercial grifts to martial law, and shows how tolerance for the former creates the conditions for the latter."

Adolph Reed, Jr. in 2014, "Nothing Left: The long, slow surrender of American liberals For nearly all the twentieth century there was a dynamic left in the United States grounded in the belief that unrestrained capitalism generated unacceptable social costs. That left crested in influence between 1935 and 1945, when it anchored a coalition centered in the labor movement, most significantly within the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). It was a prominent voice in the Democratic Party of the era, and at the federal level its high point may have come in 1944, when FDR propounded what he called 'a second Bill of Rights.' Among these rights, Roosevelt proclaimed, were the right to a 'useful and remunerative job,' 'adequate medical care,' and 'adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.'" And then something terrible happened.

Weldon Berger seems to be getting back into blogging. He has the latest on how George Santos Finds Prison Distasteful, Plus a number of other things old blog-readers might remember.

"Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood, study finds" — Please wait until I'm dead.

"Apparently this video was shown to the public in London"

The Turtles, "Let Me Be" (Shindig - Nov 13, 1965)

I got wounds to bind

"The Calm Summer Evening by Serghio Ghetiu

The day after I posted it, I woke up and found an email from Blogger saying they'd deleted my previous post from its Blogspot site due to content violations. The only way you can respond to that is to push a button at the site asking for a review. So I did. I figured some troll from a certain country that has a highly-funded program to censor criticism all over the world had reported the post but that if a human looked at it they'd realize the post didn't violate any rules, and a few hours later I got email saying it had been reinstated. Hm.

Dday, "UnitedHealth Merger Approval Again Shows Lobbyist Power: Today on TAP: Another merger settlement allows consolidation in health care; UnitedHealth's lobbyist was MAGA's biggest firm. As I've been reporting, what was a promising start to antitrust enforcement in the second Trump administration has now become a pay-to-play operation where influential MAGA lobbyists paid millions by large corporations use their clout with the president and Attorney General Pam Bondi to overrule the enforcers and push through mergers. As a result, cases prosecuted but unresolved in the Biden years are under threat. Yesterday, another leftover Biden case was settled, which will allow the colossal UnitedHealth Group monopoly to swallow Amedisys, the second-largest provider of home health care in the nation, after already purchasing the third-largest provider in 2023. At a time when even investors are begging off UnitedHealth's consolidated business model, the Justice Department's Antitrust Division saw no problem with the insurance giant eating a top player in one of the fastest-growing sectors in health care." As usual, they have an excuse for why it's okay, but, also as usual, it doesn't add up.

"Israel Is Turning Gaza Famine Into a Hasbara War. It Won't Make It Less Real" — It's almost like deja vu reading first the intense campaign of famine denial from Israel itself and then seeing Media Matters' lengthy list of incidents of right-wing explainers producing identical "reason" to disbelieve your lyin' eyes in "As experts warn of a famine unfolding in Gaza, here's how right-wing media are reacting."

Hamas' response to the hasbara after "Israel Blames Hamas for Malnourishment of Israeli Captives as It Deliberately Starves Gaza: In a letter to the UN Security Council, Hamas blasted Israel for gaslighting the world on its forced starvation policy. [...] Ahead of the meeting, Hamas is vigorously rejecting Israel's allegations that Palestinian forces in Gaza are abusing Israeli captives by depriving them of food. 'For the Israeli prisoners held by the resistance in Gaza, they are experiencing the same conditions as the people of Gaza,' Hamas officials wrote in an August 4 letter to the council obtained by Drop Site. 'The famine—caused by the occupation regime—affects all areas of the Strip, and inevitably its effects are reflected upon the 'Israeli' captives, just as they are reflected upon their captors, their families, and the overwhelming majority of Gaza's population.'"99

Israel never intended for there to be a two-state solution, and world leaders knew it. "Israel's plan for 'full control' of Gaza heralds a new Nakba - so the West is panicking: Netanyahu's mass ethnic cleansing strategy pulls the rug out from under their cherished pretext for supporting Israeli criminality: the fabled two-state solutionIf you thought western capitals were finally losing patience with Israel's engineering of a famine in Gaza nearly two years into the genocide, you may be disappointed. As ever, events have moved on - even if the extreme hunger and malnourishment of the two million people of Gaza have not abated. Western leaders are now expressing 'outrage', as the media call it, at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to 'take full control' of Gaza and 'occupy' it. At some point in the future, Israel is apparently ready to hand the enclave over to outside forces unconnected to the Palestinian people."

"'Self-termination is most likely': the history and future of societal collapse: 'We can't put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,' says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. 'I'm pessimistic about the future,' he says. 'But I'm optimistic about people.' Kemp's new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens."

"The Illusion of Choice: Republicans say that VA patients can get equivalent private-sector care anywhere in the U.S. Here's a 50-state reality check. At his confirmation hearing in January of 2025, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, a former congressman from Georgia, assured the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee of his commitment to provide specialized, high-quality medical care for the roughly nine million veterans enrolled in the nation's largest and only truly integrated public health care system, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). But Collins, a chaplain in the Air Force Reserve, also explained that his mandate from President Trump is to make it 'easier for veterans to get their health care when and where it's most convenient for them,' by giving them greater choice between in-house and outsourced care. To do this, he planned to lean on the network of 1.7 million private-sector providers who are part of the Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP), created by the VA MISSION Act of 2018. Annual reimbursement of these non-VHA doctors, therapists, hospitals, and clinics now costs the federal government more than $30 billion per year, nearly one-third of the VA's entire direct care budget." Spoiler: There are not enough physicians available outside of the VA to do the job for the rest of us, let alone absorb thousands of VA patients.

"The The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine: How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns. The digital deluge is a familiar annoyance for anyone on a Democratic fundraising list. It's a relentless cacophony of bizarre texts and emails, each one more urgent than the last, promising that your immediate $15 donation is the only thing standing between democracy and the abyss. The main rationale offered for this fundraising frenzy is that it's a necessary evil—that the tactics, while unpleasant, are brutally effective at raising the money needed to win. But an analysis of the official FEC filings tells a very different story. The fundraising model is not a brutally effective tool for the party; it is a financial vortex that consumes the vast majority of every dollar it raises." Interestingly, the author told Sam Seder that, while he's heard from numerous people who were aghast, he had not heard from the DNC, the DSCC, or the DCCC.

"Palestine Action protest arrests rise to more than 500: The Metropolitan Police said the majority of arrests - 521 - were for displaying placards in support of Palestine Action at Westminster's Parliament Square, and one at a Palestine Coalition march." But the part I thought was most interesting was that "The average age of those arrested was 54, and the most arrests - 147 of them - were of people aged between 60 and 69."

"Didn't Take Long To Reveal The UK's Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About [...] Yes, you read that right. A law supposedly designed to protect children now requires victims of sexual assault to submit government IDs to access support communities. People struggling with addiction must undergo facial recognition scans to find help quitting drinking or smoking. The UK government has somehow concluded that access to basic health information and peer support networks poses such a grave threat to minors that it justifies creating a comprehensive surveillance infrastructure around it."

"Judge Rules Ohio's Voucher System Unconstitutional: The ruling could end the siphoning of funds to private and parochial schools. In June, Ohio's sweeping EdChoice Scholarship Program suffered a near-fatal blow after a Franklin County Common Pleas Court judge ruled the program unconstitutional. That ruling found that using public funds to subsidize tuition at private religious schools violates the Ohio Constitution's ban on directing 'school funds' to religious or sectarian institutions. The judge also found that the expansion of EdChoice undermines the state's duty to maintain a 'thorough and efficient' school system, especially as public schools remain underfunded. An appeal by the state attorney general is in the works. Project 2025 posited that a second Trump administration would usher in the dismantling of K-12 public education from the inside out by doubling down on 'parental choice' and continuing to encourage states to redirect tax dollars toward private and, especially, conservative religious schools. What happens next may reveal if Ohio can continue to expand school choice programs without significant changes that address growing concerns about funding and accountability."

It can't be forgotten that Gavin Newsome is not a great guy, but I can't help but be entertained by the way he is trolling Trump and the reaction it's getting. But then, I remember how much fun it was when Fetterman was trolling during his campaign for his Senate seat, and look how that turned out.

RIP: "Loni Anderson, WKRP in Cincinnati Star, Dies at 79: She received two Emmy noms for being 'the smartest person in the room' on the CBS sitcom and tons of tabloid attention for her 1988-94 marriage to Burt Reynolds. [...] Anderson liked the concept of the sitcom but had a problem with her role, 'so I refused,' she explained in a 2020 interview. 'I went in and sat on my little soapbox and said, 'I don't want to play this part because she's just here to deliver messages and is window dressing.' Then Hugh said, 'Well, how would you do it?' … He said, "Let's make her look like Lana Turner and be the smartest person in the room."'" And Jennifer was perfect. I just loved her come-backs when Herb was trying to impress her, she really got the best lines.

"The Faux Intellectuals of Silicon Valley: There exists in Silicon Valley a particular species of intellectual fraud so brazen, so systematic, and so dangerous that it demands the kind of moral clarity that cuts through pretense like a blade through silk. We are witnessing the corruption of human thought itself—not by crude propagandists or obvious charlatans, but by a sophisticated ecosystem of oligarchs and their courtiers who have weaponized the very concept of expertise against the democratic discourse they claim to serve. At the apex stands Peter Thiel, whose genuine brilliance serves a moral emptiness so complete it takes your breath away. When asked by Ross Douthat whether the human race should survive, this man—this creature of extraordinary wealth and influence—paused to compute the variables. Not because he lacks intelligence, but because he possesses it without the slightest trace of love for the species that created the conditions making his intelligence possible."

"The Symbolism Survey: In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?"

We Five, "You Were On My Mind"

Someone waits for me

"Moonlight Surf" by Charles Vickery, American painter (1913-1998)

Don't let anyone con you into thinking Colbert was fired for having bad ratings. As with Phil Donahue before him, he was top-rated and it was all about politics. And the Writers Guild has called for a bribery probe.

"This Is the Worst Supreme Court Decision of Trump's Second Term: On Monday, the Supreme Court lifted an injunction that had protected immigrants from removal to dangerous countries where they could face torture and death. The Trump administration argues that it can expel immigrants to 'third countries'—places where they have never stepped foot—without any semblance of due process so long as they've been deemed 'deportable' by an immigration judge. The government specifically seeks to banish them to unstable countries in the throes of violence, including South Sudan and Libya. U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee, prohibited the government from carrying out this scheme without providing immigrants with basic due process rights: Murphy ordered officials to tell immigrants where they would be deported, and to let them object on the grounds that they would face torture there. SCOTUS has now stripped away those protections, allowing the government to expel immigrants without notice or a hearing. The court took this dramatic step not in a written opinion, but through an unsigned order on its emergency docket. In so doing, the court effectively nullified the Convention Against Torture, which the Senate ratified in 1994, as well as multiple federal laws implementing the treaty's guarantees. The justices' intervention in the case, DHS v. D.V.D., also sent a profoundly disturbing signal to the Trump administration that it will face no penalty for brazenly flouting lower courts' commands."

"Terror in New York as Muslim who cares about the poor wins mayoral primary: Did I mention he's brown? In a terrifying turn of events, a brown Muslim jihadist has defeated everyone's favourite corporate sex pest Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary to be New York mayor. The intifada has truly reached American shores... Zohran Mamdani holds disturbing views such as genocide is wrong and poor people should be able to afford food. Chillingly, he plans to create city-owned grocery stores that would drive food prices down. Personally, I think the poor should rummage through restaurant bins for leftovers like they do in civilised countries."

All you need is the headline and subhead. "'It's a Killing Field': IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid: IDF officers and soldiers told Haaretz they were ordered to fire at unarmed crowds near food distribution sites in Gaza, even when no threat was present. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed, prompting the military prosecution to call for a review into possible war crimes. Netanyahu, Katz reject claims, call them 'blood libels'"

"Samuel Alito saw a picture book he didn't like: Among a torrent of Supreme Court decisions today came one involving a picture book. Well, that's a little reductive, but also not really. The case, Mahmoud v. Taylor, centered on if a school had to give parents an opportunity to protect their children from such dangerous things as picture books involving LGBT+ themes on the off chance it inhibited the parents' rights to practice their religion. Without getting too far into the weeds with regards to the facts of the case, the case involved several families in Montgomery County, Maryland, who argued that the local schools adding books with LBGT+ content to the language-arts curriculum impinged upon their religious rights, specifically as parents. You see, the school district did not offer parents a way to opt their children out of lessons involving the books, even if they cited religious reasons."

"What We Learned From The New York Times' Anti-Zohran Crusade: The most powerful newspaper in America doesn't care about American democracy. [...] The incident is revealing not only of the profound institutional rot at the Times—not to mention its deep racist streak—but also of the general crisis of American democracy. At a time when the Trump administration is setting up a police state and network of concentration camps, the most important newspaper in the country is working hand in glove with a gutter racist, along with numerous wealthy interests and billionaire Trump donors, to smear a democratic socialist mayoral candidate. One must conclude that they view one threat as greater than the other."

"Crypto Week Revealed the Dittohead Congress: There are no 'hard-liners' in the Republican conference. And nobody interested in standing up for the institution of Congress either. On January 20, it was reasonable to suggest that the legislative output of Donald Trump's second term would be as thin as the first, primarily due to the unwieldiness of the Republican coalition. The recent history of the House of Representatives suggested total dysfunction; they couldn't even keep a Speaker for an entire term. House Democrats provided deciding votes for essentially all the major bills in 2023-2024, amid splits between mainstream Republicans and the House Freedom Caucus. For a while, it seemed like Trump was operating on the principle that Congress was not worth dealing with. He could rule through edicts and executive orders and never trifle with the need to pass laws. The Supreme Court was all too willing to give whatever he scribbled on paper the force of law, anyway, so why bother with Capitol Hill. But Trump eventually realized that Republicans in Congress were as willing to shrink in subservience to him as the Roberts Court. That includes the Freedom Caucus, whose vaunted principles no longer exist, if they were anything beyond cheap talk. Already they have passed a presidency's worth of lawmaking in one deeply unpopular bill, with little pushback. This week, Republican lawmakers decided to hand over the power of the purse to the president, while rubber-stamping action on crypto that Trump is openly and brazenly using for self-enrichment."

"UN Statements Undercut New Israeli Report on 10/7 Sexual Violence: The Dinah Project had to come up with an entirely new standard for evidence to continue to claim sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, 2023. This month, the Dinah Project—an Israeli organization—published a new report widely described in Western media as a thorough look into sexual violence by Palestinian militant groups on October 7, 2023. The document, however, contains scant new evidence and largely aggregates existing reports, many of which have been discredited or called into question. Instead of marshaling new evidence, it argues that less should be needed: The report spends the bulk of its 80 pages presenting a legal argument for a lower evidentiary standard to prosecute Hamas for war crimes over the alleged systematic use of sexual violence as a weapon of war."

"EXCLUSIVE: Internal Documents Detail Hamas Proposals That Preceded Trump’s Belligerent Rant: Trump and Netanyahu threatened to launch even more violent 'alternatives' to ceasefire negotiations as Hamas political leader blasts U.S.-Israeli 'blackmail." Hamas’s top political leader Khalil Al-Hayya delivered a blistering speech Sunday night, accusing the U.S. and Israel of plotting to sabotage yet another potential ceasefire agreement to end the Gaza war. 'We state clearly: There is no point in continuing negotiations under the siege, genocide, and starvation of our children, women, and people in the Gaza Strip,' Al-Hayya said. 'We will not accept that our people, their suffering, and the blood of its children be sacrificed for the occupation's negotiating tricks and the achievement of its political goals.'"

I hadn't really wondered where the unsourced claim that Hamas has stolen all the food from Gaza was coming from (we already knew), but even The New York Times finally got around to this one, "No Proof Hamas Routinely Stole U.N. Aid, Israeli Military Officials Say: For nearly two years, Israel has accused Hamas of stealing aid provided by the United Nations and other international organizations. The government has used that claim as its main rationale for restricting food from entering Gaza. But the Israeli military never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter. In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population." Which is why Israel was doing everything it could to prevent them from bringing in aid and finally got the US to defund UNWRA, the only organization that was competent to do it — and replace it with something they slapped together to lure innocent aid-seekers to be shot at by the IDF instead. The emergency in Gaza has finally become so un-ignorable (I'm not sure why - these people managed to ignore 2000 pound bombs) that even people like Amy Klobuchar, who only a couple of weeks ago was posing with Netanyahu himself, and Hillary Clinton, who not long ago was doing the rounds with the fake story about how Arafat turned down the perfect deal, have suddenly decided the Palestinians need to be sent aid. Naturally, Israel has suddenly demanded to know why the UN isn't bringing aid into Gaza, after they were forced out and had their facilities blown up and their workers murdered (by, of course, Israel). The response of the internet has been, basically, "Do you really expect us to fall for this?"

"Bringing Back Nonvoters: Today on TAP: A new poll finds that most people who voted for Biden in 2020 but stayed home in 2024 are economic progressives who were looking for leadership but didn't find it. One of the great mysteries of recent politics is why some 19 million Americans who voted in 2020 sat out 2024. This was the opposite of what happened in 2018, when revulsion against Trump and a huge upsurge in organizing increased Democratic turnout and flipped 41 House seats. About 67 percent of voters ages 18 to 29 voted Democrat for the House. The surge lasted just long enough to elect Joe Biden and narrowly flip the Senate. So why the collapse in 2024? Contrary to a lot of conventional wisdom, the explanation was not voter apathy." Indeed, these appear to have been high-information voters who'd been put off by the Democrats' feckless performances.

RIP: "Bill Moyers, former White House aide and PBS journalist, dies at 91: Bill Moyers, a soft-spoken former White House aide turned journalist who became a standard bearer of quality in TV news, died Thursday in New York. He was 91. Moyers' son William told the Associated Press his father died at Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital after a long illness. Moyers began his TV career in 1971 during the early years of PBS after serving as a leading advisor and press secretary to President Johnson. He spent 10 years in two stints at CBS News in the 1970s and '80s. He was editor and chief correspondent for 'CBS Reports,' the network's prestigious documentary series, and an analyst for the 'CBS Evening News.' He also did a turn as a commentator on 'NBC Nightly News' and was a host of the MSNBC program 'Insight' in 1996. But Moyers was often frustrated with the restraints of corporate-owned media and returned to non-commercial PBS each time. [...] According to a 1965 profile in Time magazine, Moyers was a key figure in assembling Johnson's ambitious domestic policy initiatives known as the Great Society. He shaped legislation and edited and polished the work of Johnson's speechwriters. [...] Moyers left the Johnson White House in 1967 as he was disenchanted with the escalation of the Vietnam War. He went on to become publisher of the Long Island, N.Y., daily newspaper Newsday, raising its stature in the journalism industry, before his first tenure at PBS." There's a nice tribute from Brian Stelter here. I have been dreading this moment, although I knew he was mostly retired, but I knew so many of our most valuable voices were running out of time, and I don't know how they can be replaced.

RIP: "Connie Francis: Pretty Little Baby singer dies at 87 [...] The musician, whose hits included "Stupid Cupid" and "Who's Sorry Now", had recently enjoyed a resurgence after her 1962 song "Pretty Little Baby" went viral on TikTok. [...] In 1960, she became the first woman to top the Billboard Top 100, with the bluesy ballad "Everybody's Somebody's Fool"." To me, her most memorable song was the one Katie Halper used to such good effect after Gloria Steinem made that embarrassing remark about how so many girls were supporting Bernie Sanders because that's where the boys are.

RIP: "American musical satirist Tom Lehrer dies at 97: Lehrer, a Harvard-trained mathematician, wrote darkly humorous songs, often with political connotations, that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s." I think the first one I learned as a child was "We Will All Go Together When We Go", but of course we all added "The Masochism Tango" and the ever-popular "Poisoning Pigeons In The Park" and so many others.

Radley Balko at The Watch, "The police militarization debate is over: Quaint disputes about the proper role of police and military have been superseded by a more urgent threat: Donald Trump is creating his own, personal paramilitary force. For about 40 years now, civil libertarians have been warning about the threat posed by police militarization. For the past 20 years, I've been one of them. My position has long been that a soldier is trained to annihilate a foreign enemy. A police officer's job is to promote public safety while protecting our constitutional rights (or at least it's supposed to be). These skills are not interchangeable. They are, in fact, often in direct contradiction to one another. And it's dangerous to conflate the two. There has long been an important and consequential discussion about the proper, constitutional role of police, the proper, constitutional role of the military, and the ramifications of blurring the lines between the two. In many ways, it's a debate that dates back to the founding era, when British soldiers stationed in the streets of colonial American cities — Boston in particular — led to animosity, anger, and eventually violence. It was a precipitating factor in the Revolutionary War, it's a big reason why we have the Second, Third, and Fourth Amendments, and it's why the Founders were deeply distrustful of standing armies. In six months, the Trump administration made that debate irrelevant. It has taken two-and-a-half centuries of tradition, caution, and fear of standing armies and simply discarded it.

"A Practical Fanatic" is Sam Adler-Bell's review of a book on William F. Buckley. "Bill was never a stickler for facts — as a debater, he judged information by its usefulness not its truth value — and from Kendall, an O.S.S. officer during WWII, Buckley learned a more sophisticated justification for his innate carelessness: psychological warfare. It didn't matter that McCarthy was a heedless font of calumny; 'slanders and smears were best understood as strategically useful,' writes Tanenhaus, 'perhaps even necessary disinformation.' That McCarthy damaged and demoralized the enemy was reason enough to back him. Asked in 2019 why Buckley and company never seemed to care about McCarthy's lies, George Will told Tanenhaus, 'I think it's grounded in the oppositional mentality. The feeling that we are a church militant in an unconverted world and we have to watch our back.'"

Very short videos: "30 Days of US Healthcare: Learn more about this topic and much more in Dr. Glaucomflecken's Incredibly Uplifting and Really Fun Guide to American Healthcare" — keep these handy to send to people who still just don't get it.

Just see what you've done

"Amaryllis" by Olga Sarukhanova is from the Georgia O'Keeffe-inspired What Flowers Say collection.

I want to quote a bit of this review by Sam Rosenfeld of Michael Lewis' Who Is Government? The Untold Story of Public Service:

The right's hatred for the civil service contains multitudes. There's a sociological angle—the conviction that the administrative state is under the collective control of a particular class of people zealously committed to a dangerous ideology and bent on resistance by hook or by crook to conservative governance. Trump's iteration of this, like his iteration of all ideas, is deeply personalized, grounded in his understanding of the federal civil service as the people investigating and seeking to punish him for his crimes. The ascendant Silicon Valley strain of anti-bureaucracy, meanwhile, espouses a more avowedly demolitionist ethos in keeping with the hothouse managerial culture of tech. At base, however, the case for government administration is the case for government itself, and that is precisely what the right can't abide.

Democracy is a double delegation game. Voters delegate the task of actually making laws to the politicians they elect to represent them. The politicians then delegate the task of executing those laws to bureaucrats. At their most effective, the grounded portraits of individual bureaucrats in Who Is Government? take us, in their hyperspecificity, all the way back to the first step of that game—the question prior to 'who is government?' of 'why have government?' Across the book's accounts, we see bureaucrats engaging with problems for which free markets and private action would not be able to generate solutions on their own. 'No one coal mining company was likely to fund the [safety] research that would benefit all coal companies,' Lewis notes, and in fact the market even incentivized those companies to neglect implementation of safety features for years after bureaucrats like Chris Mark had developed them—until new laws passed by Congress finally added enforcement teeth to the regulations. The FDA's Stone created a reliable mechanism for making important information about discoveries in the treatment of rare diseases accessible to doctors when no such mechanism had earlier existed—the rareness of the diseases means 'it doesn't really pay anyone to do it,' as one biochemist remarked to Lewis. Eggers describes the work of space nerds at Caltech: 'This is government-funded research to determine how the universe was created and whether we are alone in it. If NASA and JPL were not doing it, it would not be done.'

Ordinary people aren't expected to devise on their own the collective answers to every failure in health care or mine management or space exploration—that's what Congress is there to do. But members of Congress aren't expected themselves to build the clearinghouse for rare disease treatment, or devise the software that determines the right roof reinforcement for a specific coal mine, or build panoramic space telescopes that suppress starlight so far-flung planets can be detected—that's what civil servants are there to do. The tasks that lawmakers ask to be performed in their legislative language are legion, complicated, specialized, and ongoing. That's why there are a lot of bureaucrats, and that's why they enjoy, to a greater or lesser extent, some degree of autonomy to do their jobs. 'What the government job gave me was the freedom to do these things,' Mark the mine engineer tells Lewis. 'No one told me to do it. No one could have told me to do it.'

The idea that "unelected bureaucrats" like these are a bunch of lazy grifters who just suck up government paychecks while not doing anything useful is big on the right. (I'm still baffled by people who insist that commercial entities are more efficient and better to deal with than the DMV. I've never had a problem with the Department of Motor Vehicles in my life and I don't have enough imagination to theorize on what issues they've had with them that make anyone think they are inferior to spending weeks or months on the phone being denied health care by your insurance company.) Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) exists, purportedly, to remedy the gross inefficiency of having lots of these "bureaucrats" bloating the government. (The truth, of course, is that while most people want good government, which is what the bureaucrats are for, rich people just don't want to be governed.) So when one of the DOGE kids gave an interview about what he really found in government, he naturally got fired.

A former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency says that he found that the federal waste, fraud and abuse that his agency was supposed to uncover were "relatively nonexistent" during his short time embedded within the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"I personally was pretty surprised, actually, at how efficient the government was," Sahil Lavingia told NPR's Juana Summers.

Lavingia said the overall message at DOGE was transparency and a vibe of "ask for forgiveness, not permission." So, when a blogger asked for an interview about Gumroad, he agreed. And when asked, he talked about his work at DOGE, including how little inefficiency he saw compared to what he was expecting.

"Elon [Musk] was pretty clear about how he wanted DOGE to be maximally transparent," Lavingia said. "That's something he said a lot in private. And publicly. And so I thought, OK, cool, I'll take him at his word. I will be transparent."

Shortly after the interview was published online, Lavingia got an email. Just 55 days into his work at DOGE, his access had been revoked.

[...]

"I did not find the federal government to be rife with waste, fraud and abuse. I was expecting some more easy wins. I was hoping for opportunity to cut waste, fraud and abuse. And I do believe that there is a lot of waste. There's minimal amounts of fraud. And abuse, to me, feels relatively nonexistent. And the reason is — I think we have a bias as people coming from the tech industry where we worked at companies, you know, such as Google, Facebook, these companies that have plenty of money, are funded by investors and have lots of people kind of sitting around doing nothing."

Note that they assumed they'd find waste, fraud, and abuse because that's what they were used to seeing in the tech sector. The real waste, fraud, and abuse we are facing right now comes not from ordinary government "bureaucrats" nor from recipients of Social Security, SNAP, Medicare, and Medicaid, but from the commercial end of the "public-private partnership" — the contractors and blood-suckers to whom government services have been diverted so they can make money providing nothing of earthly value to the public. One of those people is Elon Musk, whose real mission with DOGE was to eliminate the bureaucrats and agencies that oversee fraud and waste from people like him. That's why the first thing he did was fire the Inspectors General.

* * * * *

I can't talk about the attack on Iran, I said all those things a couple of decades ago and I'm afraid I'll just get apoplectic. So right now, it's all about watching the NYC mayoral primary race, where the establishment has stepped right up to support the egregious and disgusting disgraced ex-governor Cuomo (the same guy whose resignation they once demanded) against a young, popular guy who, according to Larry Summers, would destroy the country by introducing a few free bus routes.

That's entertainment! "Trump goes after Leonard Leo in attack on tariff ruling: President Trump denounced a court ruling blocking his tariffs in a lengthy Truth Social post Thursday night that targeted Leonard Leo, who played a central role in shaping Trump's judicial picks during his first term. 'Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY. Backroom 'hustlers' must not be allowed to destroy our Nation!' Trump wrote. It marked the president's first comments after a whirlwind 24 hours that saw the U.S. Court of International Trade block the bulk of Trump's tariffs before an appeals court lifted the order. The tariffs were also blocked by a separate court, but that ruling doesn't go into effect for two weeks. Alongside his condemnation of the ruling, Trump went after Leo, who spent decades forming a conservative judicial pipeline as a longtime leader of the Federalist Society and advised Trump on judge selections during his first stint in the White House." Leo, we will recall, is the guy who arranged for certain Supreme Court justices to have wealthy right-wing sponsors to bribe them into staying on the court and moving even further to the right. And yet, the Trump vs. Leonard Leo show was totally upstaged by the the Elon vs. Trump show.

"The IRS Tax Filing Software TurboTax Is Trying to Kill Just Got Open Sourced: The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit's lobbyists and Donald Trump's megabill. Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the 'future of tax filing' in the private sector. Direct File is a piece of software created by developers at the US Digital Service and 18F, the former of which became DOGE and is now unrecognizable, and the latter of which was killed by DOGE. Direct File has been called a 'free, easy, and trustworthy' piece of software that made tax filing 'more efficient.' About 300,000 people used it last year as part of a limited pilot program, and those who did gave it incredibly positive reviews, according to reporting by Federal News Network. But because it is free and because it is an example of government working, Direct File and the IRS's Free File program more broadly have been the subject of years of lobbying efforts by financial technology giants like Intuit, which makes TurboTax. DOGE sought to kill Direct File, and currently, there is language in Trump's massive budget reconciliation bill that would kill Direct File. Experts say that 'ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money.'"

Why does Maryland keep electing these corrupt governors? "A Democratic Governor Lends A Hand To Loan Sharks: Maryland Governor Wes Moore just approved a new carveout exempting predatory payday lenders from state regulations. [...] Thanks to Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, a bill that exempts certain payday lenders from state laws protecting borrowers from exploitation and discrimination just became law in Maryland. Earned wage access lenders target mostly low-wage workers by fronting them their paycheck earlier with sky-high interest rates and excessive fees. Those predatory tactics have been somewhat reined in by Maryland regulations — but they now won't apply to the growing payday loan market."

Hm, I wonder why The Hill claimed no Democrat had come forward to run for the New Hampshire seat that Jordon Wood is running for. Could it be that he's too progressive?

The June issue of The American Prospect focuses on The Golden Age of Scams, and it's everywhere you look. "There's an economic principle named after a 16th-century British financier—Sir Thomas Gresham—who urged Queen Elizabeth I to clean up the sorry state of the national currency. Gresham's Law states that “bad money drives out good,” and while Sir Thomas meant “bad money” in terms of coinage that didn't carry the intrinsic value of gold or silver, the principle applies just as well to the business world. Simply put, honest companies have a hard time competing with dishonest ones. This is intuitive if you think about it. An auto dealership that only sells lemons and lies about it will earn well above fair value for their vehicles. Snake oil doesn't cost as much to make as a useful medication. Robbing your customers is more lucrative than making sure they're satisfied. If you accept this premise, then you should recognize that we're about to see a lot of honest businesses either turn to the dark side or close up shop."

At The Lever, an audio interview with Stephanie Kelton, "Everything You Think About The Deficit Is Wrong: Every major agency has downgraded America's credit rating. Economist Stephanie Kelton explains why it matters — but not for the reasons you think."

RIP: "Brian Wilson, visionary creative spirit for the Beach Boys, dies aged 82: Musician, who suffered from mental health problems, wrote and produced the 1966 album Pet Sounds – seen by many as the greatest album of all time." They were fun when they did "Help Me, Rhonda"; the studio version wasn't much but when they did "Darlin'" live, it rocked; "Kokimo" seemed dull at first until suddenly Carl soared; but "God Only Knows" is one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. The Wilson boys were all much greater talents than anyone recognized at the time, but Brian gave them the chance to really show it. Yeah, I cried.

RIP: "Sly Stone Dead At 82." I think I only saw them once, back in 1968 when no one had heard of them. A building had been painted blue on St. Mark's Place and we weren't even sure what it was yet, but my friend and I were walkimg by and the guys at the door saw two young women and pretty much begged us to come in. It was free so we decided to have a look, and found a big room with not enough people milling on the floor but a perfectly competent band on stage. So I leaned up against the stage and watched and listened for a while. But I couldn't read their name on the drumhead and eventually I caught the bass player's eye and waved him over to ask what they were called. "Sly and the Family Stone," he said. Little did we know....

"Democrats set out to study young men. Here are their findings.: A widely mocked project to get under the hood about why Democrats are losing young men has sobering results. [...] The focus groups found that young men feel they are in crisis: stressed, ashamed and confused over what it means to be a man in 2025. They vented about conflicting cultural messages of masculinity that put them in a 'no-win situation around the meaning of 'a man,'' according to the SAM project memo. They described how the Covid pandemic left them isolated and socially disconnected. They also said they now feel overwhelmed by economic anxiety, making 'traditional milestones,' like buying a home or saving for kids' college, 'feel impossible,' an analysis of the research said. 'The degree to which those economic concerns are also impacting how they think about themselves and quote-unquote success of being a man, and living up to their own expectations or the expectations of their family or society,' Della Volpe said. 'There's another layer of economic anxiety that I don't think I fully saw until now.'"

The first time I saw a photo of a room in the Sleeper-McCann House, I thought it was a painting, and proceeded to get confused looking for a gallery of Henry Davis Sleeper's work. There are lots of individual scattered photos of the various rooms in the house, but I didn't see much collected together. There are a few in a slideshow on this page.

Bill Medley on Cheers
Bobby Hatfield on Cheers

Guardian quickie interview with Lee Child, author of Reacher.

The Beach Boys, "Heroes and Villains"

Arise, ye prisoners of want!

"The Old Church by the River" is by Frits Thaulow (1847-1906). You can find more of his work here.

"Senate Democrats Have Been Handed a Tool to Stop the Big Beautiful Bill Thanks to a Republican vote to stop California from setting its own auto emissions, Democrats can challenge virtually any Trump administration action, and eat up time on the Senate floor. [...] The bottom line is this: If you found something like 1,000 current or former agency actions—a reasonable number considering all the work executive branch agencies do—you would probably have enough to keep the Senate debating and voting on CRA resolutions through the duration of this Congress. That means the Senate would never have the ability to take up executive branch or judicial nominations, or legislation like the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that recently passed the House. Senate Democrats could put the chamber into permanent gridlock, and thereby save 14 million people from losing their Medicaid coverage, save millions more from loss of SNAP benefits, while also forcing the 2017 Trump tax cuts to expire. That's the level of hardball that can be played here." But will they?

The Supreme Court surprised a lot of people by deciding that Trump can't just deport people without due process, in a 7-2 decision. The 2 dissenters were, of course, Alito and Thomas, and Scott Lemieux makes an interesting point: "The question of whether Trump is primarily symptom or cause is settled by the fact that Trump's most uncritical lickspittles and enablers on the Court are the two he didn't appoint."

And this is an over-optimistic headline, but "Supreme Court tie vote dooms taxpayer funded Catholic charter school: WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday effectively ended a publicly funded Catholic charter school in Oklahoma, dividing 4-4. The outcome keeps in place an Oklahoma court decision that invalidated a vote by a state charter school board to approve the St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, which would have been the nation's first religious charter school. But it leaves the issue unresolved nationally. The one-sentence notice from the court provides an unsatisfying end to one of the term's most closely watched cases."

The mayor of Newark, New Jersey was trying to do his job to inspect an ICE facility that was operating without proper permissions or standards, and three Congress members from the state were given a tour of the place, and as they all left, they were suddenly swarmed by officials and shoved around and the mayor was arrested. About ten days later, Homeland Security posted a short video in which they claimed one of them, Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, body-slammed officials and was being charged. I've watched videos of the event from various angles and what I see is police attacking elective officials who were performing their duties.

"'Indiscriminate, Unrestrained, Brutal': Former Israeli PM Calls Gaza Assault 'War Crimes': Israel's former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says he now believes his country's relentless assault on the Palestinian people amounts to 'war crimes' and must be stopped. Addressing the people of Israel in an article written in Hebrew and published by Haaretz on Thursday, Olmert, who served from 2006 to 2009, condemned current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government for 'waging a pointless war, without a clear goal or plan, and with no chance of success,' according to Google's translation of the piece."

"The New York Times Really Asked Ms. Rachel If She's Paid By Hamas: The house style of the New York Times is severely outdated. Depending on the topic, the newspaper's purportedly impartial tone instead reads as smug, self-amused, and deeply lazy. The results are disastrous when applied to a recent article which sincerely considers the idea that Rachel Griffin-Accurso, the popular children's entertainer known as Ms. Rachel, might be financially compensated by Hamas. Griffin-Accurso's grave sin is that she wants Israel to stop starving and killing Palestinian children in Gaza. For this, she has become the target of a pro-Israel contingent so committed to suppressing any support for Palestine that they have abandoned basic human dignity. Griffin-Accurso has spoken out on the crisis for a while on her Instagram page, and in the past week, she posted a number of statements that promote organizations which aid children suffering from violence and hunger, including malnutrition in Gaza and famine in Sudan."

RIP: "Susan Brownmiller, author, dies at 90 "— I didn't always agree with her, but she certainly changed the way we talk about rape.

RIP: "George Wendt: Actor who played Norm Peterson in the hugely popular American sitcom Cheers" — It always amused me that his role was so universally acknowleged that Quark's bar in Deep Space Nine had a regular alien patron named Morn.

RIP: "Loretta Swit, who played 'Hot Lips' Houlihan on M*A*S*H, dies aged 87 [...] The growing awareness of feminism in the 70s spurred Houlihan's transformation from caricature to real person, but a lot of the change was due to Swit's influence on the scriptwriters. 'Around the second or third year I decided to try to play her as a real person, in an intelligent fashion, even if it meant hurting the jokes,' Swit told Suzy Kalter, the author of The Complete Book of M*A*S*H. 'To oversimplify it, I took each traumatic change that happened in her life and kept it. I didn't go into the next episode as if it were a different character in a different play. She was a character in constant flux; she never stopped developing.'"

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have been roaming around on a book tour for their re-branded version of neoliberalism called Abundance. Most people seem to have figured out what it is, but it's nice to see a comprehensive review of their points in Sandeep Vaheesan's "The Real Path to Abundance" at Boston Review. This is a longer read but definitely worth the time to see a thorough response. A little taste: This is the blind spot running through all of Abundance's anecdotes: the limits of the private sector. The primary conceit is that in many areas, the private sector is ready to invest—and to invest big—if politicians would only lift public barriers standing in their way. There is little evidence that is true. In reality, corporate executives and managers make investment decisions based on expected profits. Even when zoning restrictions are favorable, developers evaluate a range of investment options before committing to construction. They are looking not only for positive returns but for higher returns than alternative options. Homebuilders, in particular, will not build unless they have reason to think they can achieve sufficiently high profits—those that outperform land banking, speculation, or other forms of investment. The much-touted housing boom in Austin is a case in point: after a few years of above-average building activity led to modest rent reductions, residential developers reduced construction substantially. The burst of construction made only a small dent in the dramatic increase in rents since 2010."

Matt Stoller makes some good points about "Monopolies and Fascism [...] Neumann's book, therefore, was received warmly. For Neumann, a key driver of the rise of the Nazi movement was monopolization, because he saw it as a system of economic control that was totally compatible with, and indeed encouraged, the rise of an authoritarian government. He noted that the Weimar Republic oversaw a massive merger wave; chemical giant IG Farben was a result of the combination of six firms in 1925. The Social Democrats, he argued, failed because they 'did not see that the central problem was the imperialism of German monopoly capital, becoming ever more urgent with the continued growth of the process of monopolization. The more monopoly grew, the more incompatible it became with the political democracy.' In the U.S., however, our antitrust laws saved our democracy. 'In Germany,' Neuman wrote, 'there was never anything like the popular antimonopoly movement of the United States under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.' The Sherman Act, in other words, wasn't perfect, but it did stop the rise of fascism. This kind of influence is obvious in decisions at the time, which had deep moral rhetoric. In 1945, Judge Learned Hand ruled that Alcoa was a monopoly, noting that 'among the purposes of Congress in 1890 was a desire to put an end to great aggregations of capital because of the helplessness of the individual before them.'"

Video: It's been interesting watching right-winger Piers Morgan repeatedly have Mehdi Hasan on his show to argue about whether Israel is committing a genocide. It was even more interesting to see Morgan finally give up and admit that Mehdi is right.

Video: Cory Doctorow's keynote speech about how people like Bill Clinton and Kier Starmer have helped destroy our privacy and control of our lives and possessions.

"The New War On State Regulators: After kneecapping and culling federal agencies, corporate interests have a coordinated plan to defang government protections, state by state. As Elon Musk and his DOGE cronies take a sledgehammer to federal agencies, corporate interests are mounting a coordinated effort to dismantle state rules and regulations — backing legislative efforts to kneecap state watchdogs' ability to enforce everything from environmental protections to worker safeguards. This means that as guardrails for consumers and workers are dismantled on a federal level, states are in danger of losing their ability to pick up the slack. In 15 states this year, according to a review by The Lever, lawmakers have introduced so-called 'judicial deference' laws, which would stack the deck against state regulators and allow corporate America to swiftly challenge and strip away state protections ranging from restrictions on pollution to consumer safeguards."

Hamilton Nolan, "Infinite Contempt For Working People Is Not an Acceptable Default Position [...] Why do I cast the average corporation—employers! Bestowers of life-giving healthcare coverage!—in such harsh terms? Because, as someone who writes about labor issues, I have become aware of the fact that we accept from these companies a sort of hostile, mean behavior towards their own employees that we would never tolerate if companies were, in fact, people, as the legal fiction claims. Major corporations spend huge sums of money on advertising and public relations to give themselves the warm halo of entities that have human personalities, and yet they act towards their own workers—their valued team members, who are their highest priority, etcetera!—in a bestial way that is a rejection of the most basic form of shared humanity. The ability to convince the general public that the standards of common decency that we all expect from one another do not apply to the entire field of business is one of the greatest tricks capitalism ever pulled."

"Andrew Cuomo Is Worse Than You Even Know: The former governor is a corrupt sexual harasser with a pro-corporate agenda and a proven track record of deadly negligence. He will do nothing to improve New Yorkers' lives. Why on Earth is he a contender for mayor? [...] While Cuomo was hailed for his leadership during the pandemic, and was even touted as a sex symbol in parts of the media, he in fact made catastrophic missteps in responding during the pandemic's early days that seriously worsened the death toll in New York. Cuomo initially said the 'seasonal flu was a graver worry' and his spokesperson 'refused to say if the governor had ever read the state's pandemic plan.' As the pandemic raged, the state was dealing with $400 million in Medicaid cuts that Cuomo had supported, and had lost 20,000 of its 73,000 hospital beds due to 'budget cuts and insurance overhauls.' [...] When Cuomo was first elected he 'pursued a decidedly un-progressive agenda[…] passing austerity budgets, targeting public-employee unions, cutting taxes on the wealthy, going to bat for charter schools,' according to City Limits. No surprise, then, that Cuomo 'rake[d] in money from corporate, hedge fund, and real estate interests.' As Politico reported, Cuomo dismissed the idea of raising taxes on the wealthy and introducing a state-level single payer program. The Alliance For Quality Education was scathing about Cuomo's record, writing in 2021 that he 'has been on a mission to underfund high need public schools ever since his first year as Governor, when he cut over $1 billion from schools, while giving a tax break to millionaires.' [...] For years, Cuomo even helped ensure that his own party was kept out of power in the state Senate, and 'encouraged [an arrangement] that allowed the Republicans to remain in leadership even after the election of a Democratic majority.' He wanted to guarantee 'that Republicans had control over the agenda in the Senate, so that he wouldn't be handing over power to New York City Democrats.' Cuomo also tried to hobble progressive political power in other ways. After the Working Families Party worked out a deal with Cuomo, getting progressive concessions in exchange for not running a challenger to him on its ballot line, he 'reneged on those commitments and set out to destroy the party.' Journalist Ross Barkan says that 'an organized progressive wing of the party was terrifying to him.'"

It's always seemed obvious that Betty Boop was based on a black performer so it's nice to see that she's being played by a black woman on Broadway.

Tony Babino, "L'Internationale" (swing jazz version)