One little miracle a day is all I need

I feel worse than I thought I would if this happened, even though I probably expected it more than a lot of lefties and Democrats did. The whole Cheney thing was the closest she could get to hugging Kissinger, saying she couldn't think of a single thing she'd do different from Biden was just stupid, refusing to let a single Palestinian endorse her was criminal political malpractice, and I just don't want to talk about it yet. I will point out that Rashida Tlaib massively out-performed Harris in Dearborn. And that Harris lost a bunch of crucial states she had been winning before her veer to the right.

"What Election Do These People Think We Just Had? Democrats are inventing wild fantasies about the power of Big Woke rather than confront the failures of their actual approach. The ugly truth for these people is that Kamala Harris ran as right-wing a campaign as any Democrat in living memory. She downplayed discussions of her race and gender. She bent over backward to welcome billionaires, corporate titans, and Republicans into the fold. She told Black men that one of her priorities for them was…crypto. She made her past as a prosecutor a cornerstone of her pitch. She bragged about owning a Glock and joked that she would shoot people who broke into her house. She stuffed the Democratic National Convention to the gills with cops and Border Patrol agents while crushing even the tiniest dissent over her support for the genocide in Gaza. She promised the most 'lethal' military in the world. She was seemingly joined at the hip with Liz Cheney for weeks. She even praised Dick Cheney! It's hard to think of what more she could have done to satisfy the people clamoring for her to pander to conservatives. But admitting that would mean that the CNN favorites and the anonymous politicos had to confront an even more uncomfortable reality: that, ideologically at least, Harris ran the campaign of their wildest dreams, and got crushed."

Branko Marcetic, "Democratic Party Elites Brought Us This Disaster: The story that is about to be pushed hard is that Kamala Harris lost because she was too far left. It will be pushed because this is the Democratic establishment's go-to explanation for all its failures. [...] For years now, voters have been telling pollsters that they were fed up with the economy, and poll after poll during this campaign registered them saying it was the issue that would most decide their vote, especially among those who were leaning toward Trump. This held across last night's exit polls. Across all seven battleground states and nationally, survey results were virtually the same: voters viewed the economy as the most important issue in the election; they felt their personal financial situation was worse and they thought so at significantly higher rates than they did in 2020; and huge majorities of those who voted for Trump viewed the economy negatively, considered it the election's most pressing issue, and voted for the person they thought was going to bring 'change.'"

"Exit Right: Trump has remade Americans, and to defeat Trumpism requires nothing less than the left doing the same. [...] In our century, American politics has been blown open by the reverberating crises of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization. They have rebounded on our society and politics in four major forms: imperial blowback and endless warfare; deindustrialization and the hollowing out of American society; the rise of an engorged, predatory, and increasingly insane billionaire class, obsessed with eugenics and immortality; and the climate crisis, now a source of regular natural disasters and swelling refugee flows. At each juncture, the Democrats have attempted restoration: to manage the crisis, carry out the bailout, stitch things back together, and try to get back to normal. It is the form of this orientation, as much as substantive questions of culture, race, and gender, that seems to me the fundamental reason the Democrats are often experienced as a force of inhibition rather than empowerment by so many voters. And it is against this politics of containment that Trump's obscenity comes to feel like a liberation for so many."

"One thing I'm sure of: Harris ignored voters' anger over Gaza, and it cost the Democrats dear: Disempower voters and they will seize back that power in the only way they can, showing you that they have a choice by rejecting the status quo. The voters who switched to Trump will get the headlines, but there will probably be many who went third party, or simply stayed at home. The Democrats broke their pact with many members of the electorate, and then were shocked that voters did not unilaterally uphold it. [...] The feeling of unperturbed exceptionalism is the same one that cannot allow them to understand the sense of vulnerability, precarity and fear that the past year has given rise to. Those astonished by Trump's win and who worry about the terrifying era that he is about to usher in will never grasp that to many, that world is already here, they've just not been living in it."

In These Times, "Democrats Chose to Back a Genocide and Turn Right Over Defeating Trump: By refusing to budge on Palestine, Harris and the Democrats surrendered their moral advantage, forcing them to track right and alienate their base. [...] But feigned concern and vibes can only go so far. As the honeymoon of 'brat summer' gave way to a codified campaign theme, it was clear not only was Gaza going to be ignored entirely as an issue — and the death machine would churn on without pause — but Team Harris would be leaning into a strategy of attempting to woo so-called 'disaffected Republicans.' She made the centerpiece of her campaign Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick Cheney, the former vice president of George W. Bush. To the Savvy Commentators this made sense — obviously, winning over fence-sitting Republicans was the right call. And few in our media questioned whether this strategy had any downsides."

OMG: "Axelrod pushes for Rahm Emanuel as DNC chair." Robert Reich is all right, I guess, but absolutely no one else from the Obama or Clinton administrations should ever again be in government, in the Democratic leadership, or communicating in public.

Just before the election, we heard from Stanley Greenberg, "The Campaign That Pushed Harris Into a Tie With Donald Trump [...] Three years ago, I titled my piece in the Prospect 'Democrats, Speak to Working-Class Discontent: It's the one way to mobilize Blacks, Hispanics and Asians, not just white workers.' Harris and Walz were doing precisely that. Major speakers at the Democratic convention took up corporate greed, the hardships from high costs, and the current battle for the middle class. They pointed out what Harris said in an economic speech on August 16: 'Donald Trump fights for billionaires and large corporations. I will fight to give money back to working- and middle-class Americans.' Base voters made the cost of living their very top concern, and she was finally telling them it was her top priority too. [...] And for reasons that I still can't understand, they dropped the middle-class message and voicing its discontent." And started campaigning with Liz Cheney instead. On October 9th Harris/Walz had all three "Blue Wall" states and Nevada, with Arizona tied and a lead of 276-251 in the Electoral College. As of October 27th, she's lost Wisconsin and Pennsylvania as well as Nevada and Arizona (with Virginia going from dark blue to light blue). There was a while back there when even Florida was only barely pink.

"A GOP operative accused a monastery of voter fraud. Nuns fought back.: Sister Stephanie Schmidt had a hunch about what her fellow nuns would discuss over dinner at their Erie, Pennsylvania, monastery on Wednesday night. The day before, a Republican operative in the battleground state falsely suggested to his nearly 58,000 followers on X that no one lived at the monastery and that mail ballots cast from there would be 'illegal votes.' Cliff Maloney, who hired 120 people to go door-to-door across Pennsylvania urging Republican voters to return their mail ballots, wrote on X that one of those workers had 'discovered' an Erie address where 53 people were registered to vote but 'NO ONE lives there.'"

Earlier in the week, Congress rejected a bill to give an administration the power to pretty much kill any non-profit organization that disagreed with it, although 52 Democrats also voted for it — every one of whom should be removed from Congress at our earliest opportunity. But now the newly-elected Congress has the votes — thanks to those same Democrats — to to pass it. The Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act, which would empower the secretary of the Treasury to designate any nonprofit as a 'terrorist supporting organization' and revoke its tax-exempt status, is set to go before the Committee on Rules on Monday for a hearing that could tee up the bill for a new floor vote. [...] The bill, also known as H.R. 9495, has come under withering criticism from a broad coalition of organizations that say its sponsors are pushing it as a means of cracking down on free speech — particularly speech in support of Palestine. In a joint statement earlier this week, a coalition of Arab American and Muslim organizations pledged to continue to fight the bill."

"No Thanks to These 52 Dems, House Defeats Bill Enabling Trump Assault on Nonprofits: 'Every single Democrat who voted for this is not taking the threat of Trump remotely seriously and should be disqualified from any leadership positions moving forward,' said Georgia State Rep. Ruwa Romman. Legislation that would have handed President-elect Donald Trump sweeping power to investigate and shutter news outlets, government watchdogs, humanitarian organizations, and other nonprofits was defeated in the House of Representatives on Tuesday after a coalition of progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers mobilized against it, warning of the bill's dire implications for the right to dissent. But 52 Democratic lawmakers—including Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), and Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.)—apparently did not share the grave concerns expressed by the ACLU and other leading rights groups, opting to vote alongside 204 Republicans in favor of the bill. One Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, joined 144 Democrats in voting no. The measure ultimately fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to approve legislation under the fast-track procedure used by the bill's supporters, but progressives wasted no time spotlighting the Democrats who supported the measure." The bill was fast-tracked last week and required a two-thirds majority to pass, but this time it will only take a plain majority and there will be no stopping it.

It's amazing how many people supported Trump thinking he is some kind of peacenik, despite his record when he was previously in office, not to mention his more recent public statements. "Trump to Nominate Marco Rubio as U.S. Secretary of State, Bridging GOP's Hawk-isolationist Divide: Florida senator has vocally defended Israel's right to respond to Iranian attack and backed Trump's promise to deport pro-Palestinian protesters in the U.S. on student visas" I wonder if they are going to be disappointed when they realize he's stacking his administration with neocons, the very people they've been objecting to. (And, also, even Republicans have been supporting a ceasefire, at least while Biden has been refusing to support one).

"Museum finds remains from a victim of a notorious 1980s Philadelphia police bombing: [...] The remains are believed to be those of 12-year-old Delisha Africa, one of five children and six adults killed when police bombed the MOVE organization's headquarters, causing a fire that spread to dozens of row homes. The violent confrontation, a rare bombing of American citizens by U.S. civilian authorities, led to lawsuits but no criminal charges against police or city officials."

RIP: "Phil Lesh, bassist for the Grateful Dead, dies at 84: The musician was a founding member of the influential band and died 'surrounded by his family and full of love'" (Rolling Stone's obit is here.) I saw them a few times, but a friend showed me this video that showcases what Phil Lesh brought.

RIP: "Candyman actor Tony Todd dies aged 69" I know he was best known for his horror roles (I saw Night of the Living Dead in a movie theater, although I don't really remember much about the movie, now, nevermind who was in it), and I know I saw him in numerous cop shows from Homicide to I don't kmow how many others, and he was even one of the members of the party in The Man From Earth, but the stand-out memory for me was his role as grown-up Jake Cisco in DS9's "The Visitor". Took my breath away. (Mind, he was pretty good as Worf's brother Kurn, too.)

I don't know anything about the author of this book or the reviewer, but I'm afraid "Finally, a fresh argument against 'wokeness'" tracks pretty well with what I've observed over the decades. Some academic types make a name for themselves, but the amelioration mostly doesn't happen out there in the trenches. Poor black people aren't suddenly doing better because of DEI - in fact, it seems to have done more harm than good. "One of the hallmarks of Awokenings, according to al-Gharbi, is that they do little or nothing for the marginalized people they are supposed to benefit. As the historical record shows, they mostly serve to create jobs, scholarships and other opportunities for symbolic capitalists. The growing ranks of diversity, equity and inclusion officers in corporations, on campuses and in other symbolic-capitalist hubs is just par for the course during an Awokening. At the same time, Awokenings create real problems for the marginalized people — on the left, on the right and in the center — who resist or even question them." I don't think the working class is really all that socially conservative, but I know they aren't neoliberals who think it's more important to say "Latinx" than to have a living wage.

Just for the record, this is Liz Cheney, pretending that Democrats want to kill babies because they didn't want to pass a law to make infantacide illegal because it already is. She has also always been a warmonger. Her father, by the way, helped steal the 2000 election, lied us into bombing the hell out of Afghanistan and invading Iraq and violated US law against torture. I can't imagine how Democrats convinced themselves that they could win an election by putting her front and center to campaign with.

"University of Michigan recruits state attorney general to crack down on Gaza protesters: Revealed: in a highly unusual move, regents allegedly bypassed local prosecutors, believing Dana Nessel would be tougher on student protesters". And then when Rashida Tlaib complained that this unusual move against protesters suggested some kind of bias was involved, Nessel accused Tlaib of saying it was because she was Jewish, a false claim that was repeated more than once by Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, with plenty of amplification from ADL. Slanders of Tlaib for supposedly saying antisemitic things proliferate widely in the smear-osphere, both on the net and off it. It's an adventure asking for a citation. (And I do wish people would remember that Palestinians, most of whom are too young to be familiar with English-speaking discourse on antisemitism, may be completely unaware of "antisemitic tropes" such as that Jews are miserly and money-grubbing. This image is an example of that kind of antisemitism which, strangelty, ADL and AIPAC never had a word to say about.)

"If Trump Wins, Blame the Billionaires: Without them, this presidential race wouldn't be close at all." Well, Elon makes that clear, and then this week both The LA Times and The Washington Post declined to endorse a candidate in the presidential race. But I still find it strange that Trump's and Vance's two immediate backers, Musk and Thiel, are exactly what their campaign is based on being against: immigrants.

From The Verge, "Intuit asked us to delete part of this Decoder episode: We declined. Today's episode of Decoder, well — it's a ride. I'm talking to Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi, who's built Intuit into a juggernaut business software company through a series of major acquisitions. Quicken and QuickBooks are incredibly well known as personal finance and small business accounting software, but nearly everything else — TurboTax, Mailchimp, Credit Karma, and loads more — were acquisitions of some kind along the way. That leads to a lot of challenging structure questions that Sasan and I really got into — integrating all those companies and their different approaches to software requires big decisions, and Intuit made a big decision handling it all by betting on interoperability that I found fascinating. So far, that sounds like normal Decoder stuff, right? Here's where it got weird. I couldn't have the CEO of Intuit on without asking about tax reform in the United States. Individual income taxes are more complicated in the US than in almost any other developed economy, and Intuit has been lobbying hard since the late 1990s to keep it that way to protect TurboTax, spending nearly $3.8 million in lobbying in 2023 alone. There's been extensive reporting about it." And then he got a demand from Intuit to delete that whole section of the interview.

"Big Supermarkets Kill Your Favorite Products [...] One of the arguments Amazon makes to justify selling its own private label products ahead of the products sold on its platform by third parties is that supermarkets often do this as well. What Bezos and co. leave out, of course, is that the ability to self-preference your own private label product, for supermarkets as well as Amazon, is probably a result of scale and some level of monopoly power." (Further reading: "The Grocery Cartels")

"'The Police Had Their Eye on Me': How Law-abiding Israelis Calling for the Hostages' Release End Up in Jail: Over 800 people have been detained at protests calling for the release of the hostages since the October 7 attack, with some spending hours or days in detention. Five of the arrestees detail their treatment at the hands of the police, and whether it has deterred them from attending further demonstrations."

"Shaming Israelis for Fleeing Their Country Ignores the Reasons Behind Their Departure: A large number of those leaving Israel are doing so out of a realization that the ethos they grew up on is giving way to one based on Jewish supremacy and ruinous policies"

Forbes, "Money Growth Does Not Cause Inflation! [...] The bottom line is that the 'money growth==>inflation' view makes perfect sense in some alternate universe where all those assumptions regarding the variables DO hold, but not here, not today, not in the United States of America in 2011. That's not how it works. It's a damn shame, I know, because it's so simple and intuitively appealing and it would make controlling inflation really simple. But, if we are to develop useful policies then we need a model better suited to the way the modern financial system works."

"Rapid Money Supply Growth Does Not Cause Inflation: Neither do rapid growth in government debt, declining interest rates, or rapid Increases in a central bank's balance sheet. Monetarist theory, which came to dominate economic thinking in the 1980s and the decades that followed, holds that rapid money supply growth is the cause of inflation. The theory, however, fails an actual test of the available evidence. In our review of 47 countries, generally from 1960 forward, we found that more often than not high inflation does not follow rapid money supply growth, and in contrast to this, high inflation has occurred frequently when it has not been preceded by rapid money supply growth."

"October 7: Forensic analysis shows Hamas abuses, many false Israeli claims: Investigation draws up a list of those killed in Hamas attack, but also finds certain claims repeated by Israeli politicians untrue." One-hour film from Al-Jazeera.

"A Cartography of Genocide: Israel's Conduct in Gaza Since October 2023"

"The thing about the Kobayashi Maru"

Pocketful of Miracles is one of my favorite movies of all time and it helped me feel a little better the other week watching it for free on YouTube. Glenn Ford, Bette Davis, and Hope Lange are great in it, but for me, Peter Falk and Edward Everett Horton are the real delights. Do yourself a favor and take a little time out to watch it, it sure can't hurt.

Scarlet billows start to spread

Thanks to the late Taral Wayne for once having used this APOD photo by David Lane of the Milky Way over Devil's Tower as his October profile pic. (Original APOD page here.)

Scott Hechinger in Teen Vogue, "Robert Roberson Will Be Executed Because It's Legal to Execute Innocent People in the US: For one week in September 2024, it seemed like everyone knew the name Marcellus Williams. Williams, a Black man who firmly maintained his innocence, was about to be executed by the state of Missouri for a murder that countless legal experts say there's no evidence he committed. [...] But then horror and shock spread as the United States Supreme Court and Parson declined to intervene and news of yet another state killing emerged. How could this happen? How could Missouri kill a man when all signs pointed to his innocence?"

Marcy Wheeler on "John Roberts' Sordid Legacy: 14 Pages of Mean Tweets: John Roberts not only rewrote the Constitution to protect Donald Trump. He forced prosecutors to spend 14 pages arguing that it is not among the job duties of the President of the United States to attack Republicans who've crossed him on Twitter. This is what the Chief Justice wants to protect. This is the all-powerful President John Roberts wants to have. Someone who can sit in his dining room siccing mobs on fellow Republicans. Who knows whether it will work? Who knows whether these right wing Justices will go that far — to argue that even the President's mean Tweets targeting members of his own party must be protected from any accountability?"

Israel came up with a novel reason for attacking a hospital in Lebanon when it claimed there is a bunker with a pot of gold underneath it, presumably hidden there by the Leprechaun peacekeeping squad from Ireland. "Israel has accused Hezbollah of keeping hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and gold in a bunker under a hospital in the southern suburbs of Beirut, though it said it would not strike the complex. The Sahel hospital in Dahiyeh was evacuated shortly afterwards, and Fadi Alame, its director, told Reuters that the allegations were untrue. Israel did not provide evidence for its claim that cash was being kept under the hospital. Instead, it published an animated graphic that purported to show a bunker under the hospital and said it had previously been used to hide the former secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Israel appealed to the Lebanese government to confiscate the money it said the Shia militant organisation had stolen from the Lebanese people. Shortly after, Israel issued a series of warnings to residents of Dahiyeh that it would begin striking buildings in the area and that they should move at least 500 metres away. Those who remained in the area began to flee." So, they showed a cartoon, so it must be true, and of course everyone knows it's necessary to Israel's self-defense to root out any theft of monies from "the Lebanese people" by Hezbolla. The hitch in this lie is that, unlike in Gaza, the press is allowed in to check things out, and the BBC didn't see any tunnels, bunker, or gold there.

One of the more frustrating contributions to the discourse is when Israel's defenders dismiss any counter as coming from "Hamas propaganda". Although we occassionally see quotes dropped into newspaper articles that purport to be from some kind of official Hamas statement, almost everything else is coming from Israelis — including statements of intent by Israeli leaders and Tik-Tok and Instagram posts by IDF soldiers. Drop Site has published a lengthy investigation of one battalion's mission of destruction, and their social media posts, "'Our Job Is to Flatten Gaza. No One Will Stop Us.' [...] The footage Drop Site News has documented in this investigation comes from just one battalion and yet the level of destruction remains absolutely staggering. It seems as if the battalion is in a desperate race against time, flattening as much as possible with disturbing intensity even as it becomes a daily routine. None of this is actual combat. It's pure devastation aimed at civilians, aided and abetted by the staggering level of impunity given to them by their western benefactors in the Biden White House. Nowhere in these videos is there any mention of Hamas. Instead, soldiers make mocking comments, calling it 'Urban Renewal,' while others joke about 'pre-registration for lands within walking distance of the sea.'"

Gee, it sounds like the whole State Department and Pentagon were trying to warn Blinken and McGurk not to do what they were doing: "The emails, which haven't been reported before, reveal alarm early on in the State Department and Pentagon that a rising death toll in Gaza could violate international law and jeopardize U.S. ties in the Arab world." And it's funny how often people talk like we have no ties in the Arab world, as if Israel is our only friend. (And the claim that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East is a bit strange, too, when Iran is a democracy, and Israel doesn't allow most of the people who live under its control to be called citizens and to vote for its government.) But it's clear now that whatever they may have said in public, Biden's people really wanted a wider war. And what are we to make of this? "Blinken Approved Policy to Bomb Aid Trucks, Israeli Cabinet Members Suggest." There was a time when I would have been very surprised to see this in TNR: "Joe Biden Chose This Catastrophic Path Every Step of the Way."

You can watch Al-Jazeera's "Inside Western media's reporting on Gaza | The Listening Post," about the blatant, enforced bias of the establishment media's coverage of the genocide, free on YouTube.

Doctorow, "Return to office and dying on the job: Denise Prudhomme's bosses at Wells Fargo insisted that the in-person camaraderie of their offices warranted a mandatory return-to-office policy, but when she died at her desk in her Tempe, AZ office, no one noticed for four days. That was in August. Now, Wells Fargo United has published a statement on her death, one that vibrates with anger at the callously selective surveillance that Wells Fargo inflicts on its workforce "— This one particularly angered me. We've known since at least 2008 that Wells Fargo's business model is one big crime spree and I want to know why these people still aren't in prison.

Kuttner in the Prospect, "An Epic Dystopia: How a near-monopoly gained control of most of the nation's electronic medical records, to the detriment of medical practice and doctor morale: I periodically see three wonderful doctors, my internist and two specialists. They all know that I'm a journalist who once wrote for The New England Journal of Medicine. Every time I see them, even before they examine me, each one spends several minutes railing about something called Epic. That sort of thing tends to pique a journalist's curiosity." They're supposed to be a just-plain medical database, but the priority is finding ways to jack up prices. Cory Doctorow has more on the evils of Epic's upcoding.

The American Prospect is devoting the current issue to "The Cold Civil War: States have always diverged on policies, but it's grown more intense. And for red states, that's not enough. [...] In 1967 in a speech at Stanford University, Martin Luther King described 'two Americas': One with all the 'material necessities for their bodies' and the other 'perishing on a lonely island of poverty.' Nearly 60 years later, King perfectly captures the two Americas that we're dealing with right now, bounded by a geographical reality: The laws that you live under are determined by the policymakers in the state where you live." And red state laws are much less generous than blue state laws, which means a lot more people are being hurt there - and having shorter life expectancy. "This wide gulf between healthy and ailing America is bad enough. But red states in particular want their policy preferences to be reflected across the nation, and have engaged in numerous aggressive tactics to make that a reality." Kalena Thomhave's article, "The Chasm Between Oklahoma and Connecticut," takes a look at how that happens: "The two states weren't always such polar opposites. For instance, in 1959, Oklahoma and Connecticut residents had roughly the same life expectancy. But fast-forward 60 years, and the numbers have significantly diverged. Connecticut now ranks among the top ten states in average lifespan, with an average life expectancy at birth of 80.8 years in 2019. That same year in Oklahoma, the average lifespan at birth was more than four years lower at 76.1 years, among the bottom ten states in life expectancy. The national average life expectancy in 2019 was roughly 79 years."

RIP: "Kris Kristofferson, US country singer and actor, dies aged 88 — He came from a military family and for a long time he did them proud, but when he quit to pursue songwriting, they disowned him. A Rhodes Scholar who started off supporting the Vietnam war, he ultimately repudiated that view as he heard more from the VVAW. Nice photogallery here.

RIP: Taral Wayne (1951-2024)— This happened in July and was an enormous shock, even though I knew he wasn't well. Taral was a huge part of my fandom for so many years and never stopped mattering. Just before I moved to England, Taral created a giant card with a fake Bergeron cover that everyone at the 1985 Disclave signed, and it's had pride of place on my sitting room mantel ever since. He was quirky and grumpy and a lot of other things, but he was always fair, and generous with his art, and I'm so sorry that he's gone.

RIP: "Controversial all-time MLB hits leader Pete Rose dies at 83: Pete Rose, baseball's career hits leader and fallen idol who undermined his historic achievements and Hall of Fame dreams by gambling on the game he loved and once embodied, has died. He was 83." One thing Trump said that was absolutely true is that Pete Rose belonged in the Hall of Fame. I swear I saw him take flight during what he called "The World Serious". He was amazing.

I completely missed the fact last year that The Washington Post had completed its purge of quality by firing Radley Balko, one of the only reasons to read the decreasingly relevant rag, and he started his own Substack as a result. He's got a good piece up right now detailing just what an impossible, frightening, terrible idea Trump's deportation plan really is.

Dave Johnson on The Era Of The Oligarchs: Let me tell you about the billionaires. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy whatever they want, and it does something to them. [...] Imagine the disappointment of becoming a billionaire (or even only achieving $8 or 900,000,000) and NOTHING HAPPENS. (We've seen how the tech bros think they should be immortal and then use their money to try to get there.) They really thought there'd be something more. Some award, some elevation. One thing is for sure, though. They are better than regular people and they know it. It's the entire point of society! They've reached the top. They're smarter. They deserve what they have. And more than anything they deserve more. Elevation. They deserve elevation."

I had assumed most people would have seen this about the Lancet report but since it seems a lot haven't: "Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential: By June 19, 2024, 37,396 people had been killed in the Gaza Strip since the attack by Hamas and the Israeli invasion in October, 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.1 The Ministry's figures have been contested by the Israeli authorities, although they have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services,2 the UN, and WHO. These data are supported by independent analyses, comparing changes in the number of deaths of UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) staff with those reported by the Ministry,3 which found claims of data fabrication implausible. Collecting data is becoming increasingly difficult for the Gaza Health Ministry due to the destruction of much of the infrastructure.5 The Ministry has had to augment its usual reporting, based on people dying in its hospitals or brought in dead, with information from reliable media sources and first responders. This change has inevitably degraded the detailed data recorded previously. Consequently, the Gaza Health Ministry now reports separately the number of unidentified bodies among the total death toll. As of May 10, 2024, 30% of the 35,091 deaths were unidentified. Some officials and news agencies have used this development, designed to improve data quality, to undermine the veracity of the data. However, the number of reported deaths is likely an underestimate. The non-governmental organisation Airwars undertakes detailed assessments of incidents in the Gaza Strip and often finds that not all names of identifiable victims are included in the Ministry's list.6 Furthermore, the UN estimates that, by Feb 29, 2024, 35% of buildings in the Gaza Strip had been destroyed,5 so the number of bodies still buried in the rubble is likely substantial, with estimates of more than 10,000. [...] In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2,375,259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28,000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58,260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85,750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024."

I'd also assumed everyone saw this. There seem to be a number of people who only ever see the hasbara but don't see any contradictory facts: "Israel: Palestinian Healthcare Workers Tortured: ICC Prosecutor Should Investigate Attacks on Health Care, Detainee Abuses. (Jerusalem) – Israeli forces have arbitrarily detained Palestinian healthcare workers in Gaza since hostilities began in October 2023, deported them to detention facilities in Israel, and allegedly tortured and ill-treated them, Human Rights Watch said today. The detention of healthcare workers in the context of the Israeli military's repeated attacks on hospitals in Gaza has contributed to the catastrophic degradation of the besieged territory's healthcare system. Released doctors, nurses and paramedics described to Human Rights Watch their mistreatment in Israeli custody, including humiliation, beatings, forced stress positions, prolonged cuffing and blindfolding, and denial of medical care. They also reported torture, including rape and sexual abuse by Israeli forces, denial of medical care, and poor detention conditions for the general detainee population."

"Fact check: Debunking Trump's October lying spree about immigration" has some good verbal karate on the issue, but is most notable for seeing someone in the establishment media who is actually good at doing it.

"Harris and the Enthusiasm Gap: Can she restore anything like the excitement of the campaign's early days when Harris replaced Biden as the Democratic candidate? Can she win without it?" Kuttner says Harris has made unforced errors that are hurting her campaign. He's right, and she's now down on the electoral vote map. I don't think the parade of Cheneys and Mark Cuban have helped her, and I still think she needed to show some kind of break with Biden's foreign policy. Snubbing a Palestinian speaker at the convention was more than a little troubling, and continuing to double down on unconditional support for Israel can't be good. But those ties to Wall Street trouble a lot of people, and I also frankly wish that Clinton and Obama would just keep quiet, they are doing more harm than good.

Does anyone remember this? From July 2020: "Federal Officers Use Unmarked Vehicles To Grab People In Portland, DHS Confirms"

"Why typewriters are having a renaissance in the digital age" (video and transcript)

"30 Times Architects And Engineers Created Weird Building Designs"

"Bill Hicks Final Unaired Letterman Performance 1993"

A much younger Jon Stewart interviews George Carlin.

I'd always wondered what she was doing in the (Bobby Darren version of) this song, but I didn't know until now that Louis Armstrong had put it into the original when he sang it with her and Darren kept it. Louis Armstrong & Lotte Lenya - "Mack the Knife"

May seem peculiar

"Londons Dream von Leonid Afremov" from Arnaud Caron is in the London Eclectic capital collection.

The summer seems to have slipped away from me. I'm not sure exactly what happened but I think it started with a fall. Nothing broke but it hurt to type for a bit, and then I got that lovely whooping cough that's been going around. After a couple weeks of no sleep it finally occurred to me to consult the chemist, who sent a bottle of Robitussin so I could finally get some rest. Except I was still sleepy all the time, even when the cough was long gone, very much like my most notable symptom the first time I had Covid. I didn't have the presence of mind to get a test, but Mr. Sideshow didn't seem to think he was sick once his own case of whooping cough subsided. (I wish I had looked it up a long time ago, but, for the record: That DPT shot they gave me when I was a kid inoculated me from whooping cough but ran out after a decade or two, and I was pretty sure that cough I had in, I think, the '90s, was maybe whooping cough, and I didn't know that it's also self-inoculating for a while. If I'd realized I should get another shot, I definitely would have. It was torture. Get the shot if you can afford it.) There were some technical difficulties as well, but....

But what a wild ride I missed! So much happened that I'm not sure I could have kept up with it anyway. Biden was tanking in the polls and Pelosi stepped in to get him to drop out of the race. That had to be hard since he didn't think Harris could win. Of course, he'd mainly picked her as assassination/impeachment insurance and he knew she wasn't popular, but somehow she seems to have galvanized the party into new levels of energy, despite showing no signs of changing Biden's bad policies or even continuing his good ones. But in choosing her own running mate, she resisted the urge to hippie-punch and chose a popular candidate instead of a hippie-punching school voucher advocate, to most people's relief. For a while she seemed to be getting the blue wall states back, but her continued refusal to signal any variance with Biden's Middle-East policy seems to have made them precarious. Jill Stein now polls higher with Muslim-Americans than Harris does. She still appears to be beating Trump in the EC, but the Dems seem set to lose the Senate in the meantime. And that Electoral Vote map changes a little too often for my tastes.

But the horroshow in Gaza made watching the news feel like a pointless task. Israel has proven it can do anything it wants, and it's all-in on genocide. And on starting wider regional wars, especially with it's latest terrorist attacks on Lebanon. The US is being led straight into the maw of Armageddon.

"The fast-food industry claims the California minimum wage law is costing jobs. Its numbers are fake [...] Here's something you might want to know about this claim. It's baloney, sliced thick. In fact, from September through January, the period covered by the ad, fast-food employment in California has gone up, as tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Federal Reserve. The claim that it has fallen represents a flagrant misrepresentation of government employment figures. Something else the ad doesn't tell you is that after January, fast-food employment continued to rise. As of April, employment in the limited-service restaurant sector that includes fast-food establishments was higher by nearly 7,000 jobs than it was in April 2023, months before Newsom signed the minimum wage bill. Despite that, the job-loss figure and finger-pointing at the minimum wage law have rocketed around the business press and conservative media, from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Post to the website of the conservative Hoover Institution."

"Elon Musk's Lawyers Quietly Subpoena Public Interest Groups: The billionaire's legal war over lost X advertisers takes a 'really cynical' turn. Lawyers representing Elon Musk and X, previously known as Twitter, have quietly begun sending subpoenas to a host of public interest groups, Mother Jones has learned. Most of the targeted organizations have signed open letters to X's advertisers expressing concerns about the platform's direction under Musk's leadership. The groups include the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the digital rights organization Access Now, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). The subpoenas represent a new chapter in the legal war Musk launched after advertisers fled X, and are part of a lawsuit Musk and X first filed about a year ago against Media Matters over a report it published documenting that ads appeared alongside extremist content. The subpoenas demand any correspondence the organizations have had with that progressive media watchdog group. Several targets told Mother Jones they've had no or limited interaction with Media Matters, and that the subpoenas feel, in the words of more than one person, like 'a fishing expedition.'"

Recent hasbara has included the claim that more frequent reporting of Palestinian deaths than Israeli deaths is evidence of bias rather than the simple result of there being more Palestinian deaths than Israeli deaths. But even the more "liberal" news media is still biasing their news toward Israel, even in Britain. "We Ran the Numbers – Here's How Britain's Progressive Newspapers Have Covered Gaza: Palestinians are 'killed', Israelis 'massacred'. [...] Our analysis reveals that in a war that has seen Israel kill over 39,000 Palestinians, all three publications favoured Israeli lives, narratives and voices, albeit to varying degrees. Across the four tests, the Mirror and Independent were consistently biased against Palestinians. The Guardian's headlines were much more nuanced and balanced but still gave disproportionate coverage to Israelis."

"US Working Class 'Overwhelmingly to the Left' of the Rich on Economic Policy: Survey: The new research, said one union leader, provides Democrats with a "clear roadmap to winning back" working-class voters. Polling results released Monday show that working-class voters in the United States are broadly more supportive of major progressive agenda items than those in the middle and upper classes, offering Democratic political candidates what one union leader called a 'clear roadmap to winning back voters we've lost to a GOP that's growing more extreme by the day.' The survey of over 5,000 registered U.S. voters was conducted last August by HIT Strategies and Working Families Power (WFP), a sibling organization of the Working Families Party. The poll found that a majority of working-class voters either somewhat or totally support a national jobs guarantee (69%), a 'public healthcare program like Medicare for All' (64%), a crackdown on rent-gouging landlords (74%), and tuition-free public colleges and universities (63%), landing them 'overwhelmingly to the left' of higher-income segments of the population." The poll did not support the idea that the working-class was more socially conservative.

This is Jeet Heer's praise for The Lever's "Master Plan" series, and you can listen to existing episodes of "Master Plan" here. There's a bonus episode of Ralph Nader talking about how their fight for cleaner water and air incensed Lewis F. Powell, here. Yes, there really was a genuine conspiracy to corrupt the United States, and it didn't come from Russia.

Courts have ruled consistently that the cash bail practices of L.A., San Francisco, and Sacramento are unconstitutional. But California judges are ignoring those rulings: "The court cases all said something simple: it's unconstitutional to jail people away from their families after arrest solely because their families cannot access a cash payment for money bail. (Only U.S. and Philippines have for-profit bail industry.) So, what happened? The judges in the other 55 of California's 58 counties have simply refused to comply with these rulings. I've never seen anything like it in my career. In those 55 counties, the court have recently decided to simply keep doing what has been held unconstitutional. They have kept their cash bail schedules--essentially menus that assign certain amounts of cash based on what a person is charged with any nothing else."

RIP: "Phil Donahue, Pioneering Talk Show Host, Dies at 88 [...] Never a stranger to controversy or hotly debated sociopolitical issues, the silver-haired Donahue brought a strong journalistic spine to his popular show and was a potent contrast to the regular celebrity chatter and soap opera menu of daytime television." He got fired for opposing the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq even though he had the most popular show on the network. Jeff Cohen's short appreciation of him is actually a better fit. (Also: Jon Schwarz on how "NYT Can't Forgive Donahue for Being Right on Iraq.")

RIP: "Organize, Teach, Fight: Jane McAlevey, 1964-2024 [...] Jane—organizer, writer, and teacher—will live on in the tens of thousands of organizers around the world committed to deep organizing methods. But like so many other people in what Jane affectionately called her 'tribe,' I'm gutted that she's gone. She had so much more to give the movement. And she would have loved to see the day when workers won on the scale she knew they were capable of." She died after multiple fights with cancer, but more importantly, decades of teaching people how to fight. She says a lot of important things in this Katie Halper segment.

RIP: "Blues Legend John Mayall Dead at 90." We all listened to this guy and the various editions of The Bluesbreakers.

RIP: "Writer Lewis H. Lapham, longtime editor of Harper's Magazine and the founder of Lapham's Quarterly, died in Rome. He was 89." He got a deal to write for them, and ended up running the show.

RIP: "James Darren, Teen Idol Actor in Gidget, Singer and Director, Dies at 88" — I'm just old enough to remember him as Moondoggie, and I liked him in Time Tunnel, but Vic Fontaine has to be one of my favorite characters of all time.

RIP: "James Earl Jones Dies: Revered Field Of Dreams Star, Darth Vader Voice, Broadway Regular, Was 93" — I loved him in a lot of things, but especially his iconic moment as a union man. He was pretty cool waiting for his airplane to ram that other plane, too.

"Dalek Spy: FBI Once Investigated Dallas Man for Selling Secrets to a Fictional Alien Race"

There is no way for me to make butter pecan ice cream but I want some. I wonder if I can find an able-bodied volunteer....

John Mayall, "Room to Move"

Sleeping on the job

Semini Kwsta's "Il Nostro Inconto" is from the South American Painters collection.

I don't know how much more of this I can face. The only solution I can see is launching all the billionaires into the sun.

Assange out of prison, but not without extracting a plea deal for the phony charges. This story isn't over and we'll have to wait to see where it goes, but for the moment Julian Assange is out of Britain and headed home to Australia and his family.

Tom Tomorrow presents the Trump Felony Conviction Talking Points from the GOP.

"Revealed: Israeli spy chief 'threatened' ICC prosecutor over war crimes inquiry: Mossad director Yossi Cohen personally involved in secret plot to pressure Fatou Bensouda to drop Palestine investigation, sources say [...] Cohen, who was one of Netanyahu's closest allies at the time and is emerging as a political force in his own right in Israel, personally led the Mossad's involvement in an almost decade-long campaign by the country to undermine the court. [...] According to accounts shared with ICC officials, he is alleged to have told her: 'You should help us and let us take care of you. You don't want to be getting into things that could compromise your security or that of your family.'"

"3 weeks before Oct. 7, IDF Gaza Division warned of Hamas plan to attack, take 250 hostages: Report reveals Sept. 19 document that specified terror group was training for mass assault on south; 'I feel like crying, yelling, swearing,' says soldier involved with memo"

Harold Meyerson, "Who Created the Israel-Palestine Conflict? It wasn't really Jews or Palestinians. It was the U.S. Congress, which closed American borders 100 years ago this month. Without either side even noticing it, we're coming up on the centenary of the most decisive event in the fraught history of the Israel-Palestine relationship. It was not the 1896 publication of Theodor Herzl's Zionist manifesto, nor the 1917 Balfour Declaration in which the United Kingdom pledged its support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. It was not the 1948 founding of the Israeli state and subsequent Nakba—the expulsion of many thousands of Palestinians from Israel. Nor was it Israel's occupation, following the 1967 war, of what had been Palestinian territories, or either of the two intifadas. Rather, it was the enactment on May 26, 1924, of the Johnson-Reed Act by the Congress of the United States. Fueled chiefly by white Protestant xenophobic fear and rage at Jews and Catholics flowing into the United States since the 1880s, the act effectively outlawed immigration from Russia, Poland, Italy, and all of Eastern and Southern Europe. Had that pre-Trumpian wall not gone up on America's borders, there's no reason to think there ever would have been more than a trickle of Jews moving to Palestine.

"The Music Mafia's Invincible 'Poison Dwarf,' in the Crosshairs at Last? The DOJ says Live Nation has been colluding with its former chairman Irving Azoff to fix artist fees and 'pimp' Ticketmaster."

RIP: "Donald Sutherland Dies: Revered Actor In Klute, Ordinary People, MASH, Hunger Games & Scores Of Others Was 88." I can't remember when I first saw him, but I know I loved him when he got involved with FTA. There's a nice gallery of pictures here.

RIP: "Willie Mays, the Giants' electrifying 'Say Hey Kid,' dies at 93 [...] The center fielder, who began his professional career in the Negro Leagues in 1948, had been baseball's oldest living Hall of Famer. He was voted into the Hall in 1979, his first year of eligibility, and in 1999 followed only Babe Ruth on The Sporting News' list of the game's top stars. The Giants retired his uniform number, 24, and set their AT&T Park in San Francisco on Willie Mays Plaza."

RIP: "Kinky Friedman, Proudly Eccentric Texas Singer-Songwriter, Dead at 79: Known for songs like "Sold American," the cigar-chomping character and buddy of Willie Nelson won acclaim as a journalist and novelist and once ran for Texas governor"

RIP: "Martin Mull, Arrested Development and Roseanne actor, dies aged 80: Martin Mull, whose droll, esoteric comedy and acting made him a hip sensation in the 1970s and later a beloved guest star on sitcoms including Roseanne and Arrested Development, has died, his daughter said on Friday. He was 80 years old." I saw his furniture at The Cellar Door, and learned this song from him.

"King Alito's Arrogance Has Reached Frightening New Levels [...] But there is a substantive problem that we're starting to pick up on, and that is Justice Alito, in recent weeks, making very real and serious errors in his opinions. They're actually prompting corrections from sources that he cites, who say, 'No, my work reflects the opposite of what you're claiming.' [...] As all three liberals said in their dissents, that is not what the Supreme Court is supposed to do. Yet it's very similar to what happened in the racial gerrymandering case, where Alito looked at what the district court had found after a lengthy trial and hearing and rejected it point-by-point, saying I know better than you. This is King Alito declaring that he alone may speak the truth. What's really alarming is that the other conservatives are going along with it. They just accept that King Alito can decree these new realities and facts and histories."

I can't read the article discussed here, but maybe you can. I can't read it because I'm in England, where it's blocked. "The British justice system and British censorship: Rachel Aviv has published a brilliant investigation of the conviction of the nurse Lucy Letby on seven charges of murder. It ranks with David Grann's article about the execution of Cameron Todd WIllingham as a withering indictment of a government's criminal procedure. Both articles will lead you dismayed about how little real evidence may be needed to take someone's liberty or life." I gather there are serious questions about this conviction. The British press was free to vilify the accused, but now we can't read about those who may have put her in the frame. As Scott says, "There may be certain limited circumstances in which restrictions on reporting during an ongoing trial might be justifiable, even if they generally wouldn't be under the American system. But I can't see a good defense for an order that sweeping, which insulates the state from criticism during an appeals process. The criminal justice system is a locus of state power that needs the scrutiny of the press like any other. And it also has the effect of removing desperately needed scrutiny from the press itself"

Jacobin interviews Lily Geismer about her new book: "The Democrats Didn't Just Fail to Defend Social Programs. They Actively Undermined Them. In the '80s and '90s, the Democrats took a jackhammer to education, housing, and social welfare. This isn't the story of a weak party unable to defend its earlier gains, but a transformed party demolishing them in service of a new neoliberal ideology."

Matt Taibbi called my attention to the fact that the bank heist was so egregious that even Saturday Night Live noticed it and had a cold open of "Timothy Geithner" explaining.

"Scientists Find Crows Are Capable of Recursion — A Cognitive Ability Thought to Be Unique to Humans and Other Primates."

Melbourne Ska Orchestra - Get Smart theme

Light passing by on the screen

This is in The Atlantic, which is establishment enough that we're allowed to admit it's real now. "New 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity: Two decades of U.S. policy appear to be rooted in a mistaken understanding of what happened that day. For more than two decades, through two wars and domestic upheaval, the idea that al-Qaeda acted alone on 9/11 has been the basis of U.S. policy. A blue-ribbon commission concluded that Osama bin Laden had pioneered a new kind of terrorist group—combining superior technological know-how, extensive resources, and a worldwide network so well coordinated that it could carry out operations of unprecedented magnitude. This vanguard of jihad, it seemed, was the first nonstate actor that rivaled nation-states in the damage it could wreak. That assessment now appears wrong. And if our understanding of what transpired on 9/11 turns out to have been flawed, then the costly policies that the United States has pursued for the past quarter century have been rooted in a false premise." And right now, the Trump-Biden policy is to consolidate a relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel that results in the Saudis getting nukes and the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia being an axis of power together.

"Romney Admits Push to Ban TikTok Is Aimed at Censoring News Out of Gaza: A discussion between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sen. Mitt Romney over the weekend included what one critic called an 'incredible mask-off moment,' with the two officials speaking openly about the U.S. government's long-term attempts to provide public relations work for Israel in defense of its policies in the occupied Palestinian territories—and its push to ban TikTok in order to shut down Americans' access to unfiltered news about the Israeli assault on Gaza. At the Sedona Forum in Sedona, Arizona on Friday, the Utah Republican asked Blinken at the McCain Institute event's keynote conversation why Israel's 'PR been so awful' as it's bombarded Gaza since October in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack, killing at least 34,735 Palestinians—the majority women and children—and pushing parts of the enclave into a famine that is expected to spread due to Israel's blockade. 'The world is screaming about Israel, why aren't they screaming about Hamas?' asked Romney. ''Accept a cease-fire, bring home the hostages.' Instead it's the other way around, I mean, typically the Israelis are good at PR. What's happened here? How have they, and we, been so ineffective at communicating the realities there?' Blinken replied that Americans, two-thirds of whom want the Biden administration to push for a permanent cease-fire and 57% of whom disapprove of President Joe Biden's approach to the war, are 'on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond.'"

Not a surprise: "Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists To Avoid Words 'Genocide,' 'Ethnic Cleansing,' And 'Occupied Territory': THE NEW YORK TIMES instructed journalists covering Israel's war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms 'genocide' and 'ethnic cleansing' and to 'avoid' using the phrase 'occupied territory' when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept. The memo also instructs reporters not to use the word Palestine 'except in very rare cases' and to steer clear of the term 'refugee camps' to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous Israeli–Arab wars. The areas are recognized by the United Nations as refugee camps and house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees. The memo — written by Times standards editor Susan Wessling, international editor Philip Pan, and their deputies — 'offers guidance about some terms and other issues we have grappled with since the start of the conflict in October.' While the document is presented as an outline for maintaining objective journalistic principles in reporting on the Gaza war, several Times staffers told The Intercept that some of its contents show evidence of the paper's deference to Israeli narratives."

"Pro-Israel Groups Pushed for Warrantless Spying on Protesters: When the renewal of a key section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was being debated in this Congress, one of the pieces of evidence from reformers for the abuses in the system was that the law had routinely been employed to spy on protesters in the U.S. Despite the fact that FISA's Section 702 is intended to be about collection of intelligence on foreign subjects, U.S. persons would often get vacuumed up in the dragnet. And the FBI was caught querying FISA databases to get information on protesters, most recently during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Despite these concerns and after a bitter debate, Congress passed and President Biden signed a reauthorization of FISA Section 702 with new and expanded powers for surveillance. Just days before that bill became law, Columbia University president Nemat Shafik testified before a congressional hearing on antisemitism. This set off the encampment protests at Columbia, the ensuing crackdown by the NYPD, and now the spread of demonstrations to college campuses across the country."

"Business titans privately urged NYC mayor to use police on Columbia protesters, chats show: A WhatsApp chat started by some wealthy Americans after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack reveals their focus on Mayor Eric Adams and their work to shape U.S. opinion of the Gaza war." Malefactors of Great Wealth.

Not sure what caused it, but the Supremes surprised a lot of people by not killing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. David Dayen says, "The CFPB Ruling Strikes a Blow for Governing: Instead of giving in to cynicism, Congress created an agency to protect consumers. The Supreme Court declined to overrule it."

True to form, however, "Supreme Court Says It's Fine For Cops To Dick Around For Months Or Years After Seizing People's Cars: The Supreme Court has recognized there's something definitely wrong with asset forfeiture. But, so far, it has yet to attempt to put a full stop to it. A recent case dealt with criminal asset forfeiture. In that case, the nation's top court ruled it was unconstitutional for the government to seize assets worth far more than the maximum fine it could levy for the criminal charges accompanying the seizure. In that case, cops took a $42,000 Range Rover in exchange for a sale of $260 worth of heroin to an undercover officer. Given that this crime had a max fine of $10,000, the Supreme Court said taking the Range Rover was an 'excessive fine' — something that violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. But the justices said this also applied to civil asset forfeiture. And in civil cases, criminal charges usually aren't filed, which means any forfeiture would be an 'excessive fine' because the applicable fine in cases with no criminal charges is always going to be… $0. Unfortunately, the 2019 ruling changed little about forfeiture programs. Most still operate the way they always have and will likely continue to do so until another legal challenge reaches the upper levels of the court system."

Here's something else the Supremes could fix, but won't: "Federal Judge Says It's Time To End The 'Mistake' Of Qualified Immunity While Handling A Bogus Murder Charge: Qualified immunity is a mess. It's a mess the Supreme Court created and, to date, seems largely unwilling to fix (despite the occasional remand). The theory of QI is this: law enforcement officers (and other government employees) should be granted forgiveness for blowing constitutional calls during rapidly evolving situations potentially involving life and death. And it would be great if that's how qualified immunity was applied. But instead it's summoned as a 'get out of litigation free' card every time a cop (or other government employee) gets sued. While it may have limited usefulness in cases where officers are under fire or facing other life-threatening situations, it should not be applied at all when time isn't a factor. The problem is that the Supreme Court has made the rules of QI very clear: assume QI at all times and only deny it when there's no possible way to avoid doing so. Years of cops hollering QI at the drop of a lawsuit has pushed some courts and judges to the limits of their patience. Most notably, new appointee to the Fifth Circuit, Don Willett, called bullshit on qualified immunity shortly after taking his seat at this appellate court" — which would have been great if he wasn't dissenting from the deranged crackpots who make up the rest of the Fifth Circuit. "The same sort of thing has happened here. In this case, handled by a Mississippi federal court, there were no split-second decisions to be made. Instead, during the course of murder investigation (something that can take weeks, months, or years), a law enforcement officer decided the best course of action would be to frame an innocent person."

"Louisiana lawmakers vote to remove lunch breaks for child workers, cut unemployment benefits: A Louisiana House committee voted Thursday to repeal a law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks and to cut unemployment benefits — part of a push by Republicans to remove constraints on employers and reduce aid for injured and unemployed workers."

"No prison time for developer who bribed city officials for 18 years: A federal judge has given no prison time to a San Francisco developer who admitted to bribing city officials in a prolonged scheme to accelerate building permits and pass inspections. Sia Tahbazof, 73, was sentenced to three years of probation and a $75,000 fine for his crimes. The corrupt developer appeared in court Friday with scores of supporters who filled the gallery. 'This was a serious offense,' U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston said before handing down the sentence. 'It took place over 18 years. That's a long time to be paying bribes. That's a long time to foster corruption in the housing department.'"

"A GOP Texas school board member campaigned against schools indoctrinating kids. Then she read the curriculum: Gore, the co-host of a far-right online talk show, had promised that she would be a strong Republican voice on the nonpartisan school board. Citing 'small town, conservative Christian values,' she pledged to inspect educational materials for inappropriate messages about sexuality and race and remove them from every campus in the 7,700-student Granbury Independent School District, an hour southwest of Fort Worth. 'Over the years our American Education System has been hijacked by Leftists looking to indoctrinate our kids into the 'progressive' way of thinking, and yes, they've tried to do this in Granbury ISD,' she wrote in a September 2021 Facebook post, two months before the election. 'I cannot sit by and watch their twisted worldview infiltrate Granbury ISD.' But after taking office and examining hundreds of pages of curriculum, Gore was shocked by what she found — and didn't find. [...] Gore rushed to share the news with the hard-liners who had encouraged her to run for the seat. She expected them to be as relieved and excited as she had been. But she said they were indifferent, even dismissive, because 'it didn't fit the narrative that they were trying to push.'"

"New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won't do it [...] But critics like me aren't asking the Times to abandon its independence. We're asking the Times to recognize that it isn't living up to its own standards of truth-telling and independence when it obfuscates the stakes of the 2024 election, covers up for Trump's derangement, and goes out of its way to make Biden look weak."

"The New York Times Protests Too Much [...] A striking thing about this dust-up is that the partisans are delivering clear, principled statements about what journalism should be, and the journalists are responding like campaign hacks — inventing straw men to debate and offering an endless stream of vague platitudes. That's not particularly new, though: You can spend a lot of time scrutinizing the public comments of the leadership of The New York Times2 and never find a clear, unambiguous explanation of how the paper thinks it should cover fundamentally unequal or dissimilar things like, say, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. But if you read between the lines a little bit, paying particular attention to what the paper says it shouldn't do,3 and combine that with what we can infer from the Times' coverage, a pretty clear picture emerges: The Times thinks — or wants people to think it thinks — that independent, 'balanced' journalism means generating a roughly equal volume of positive and negative coverage of the two candidates."

"The Fed Admits That 'Bailouts Were Not A Free Lunch': For years, politicians, lobbyists, and media outlets manufactured an elaborate fairy tale about bank bailouts costing the government nothing, and in fact even generating a profit for public coffers. It was a comforting story — but the entire lie was just debunked in a study published by the Federal Reserve, an institution that almost never admits truths that are inconvenient to Wall Street. The new analysis, authored by MIT's Deborah Lucas and published by the Atlanta Fed, shows the post-financial-crisis rescue of Wall Street cost half a trillion dollars — a sum 'large enough to conclude that the bailouts were not a free lunch and even less so a profit maker as some politicians and commentators have claimed.' The study also notes that the sum is 'large enough to ask whether there are better ways to protect taxpayers.' Ya think? THE LASTING LEGACY OF THE FINANCIAL CRISIS: So maybe you're now thinking, 'Hey, who cares about the financial crisis — it was so long ago, it doesn't matter anymore.' But wait, there's more: Another new Federal Reserve report illustrates how the financial crisis — and then the Obama administration's refusal to help homeowners protect themselves from financial predators — ripped away the American dream from an entire generation." Plus some handy new charts (that I maintain are not properly labeled). Thanks, Obama!

RIP: "Moody Blues Co-Founder Mike Pinder Dead at 82: 'Very sad news, the last of the original lineup of the Moody Blues has passed away,' Denny Laine's widow Elizabeth wrote on Instagram. 'He is now reunited with Denny, Ray, Graeme and Clint; what a joyous reunion that must be.' Keyboardist and vocalist Pinder was the last surviving original member of the band, contributing 27 songs to their catalog between 1964 and his departure in 1978, including respected compositions 'My Song' and 'Lost in a Lost World.' 'Michael's family would like to share with his trusted friends and caring fans that he passed peacefully,'"

Stiglitz, "Freedom for the Wolves: Neoliberal orthodoxy holds that economic freedom is the basis of every other kind. That orthodoxy, a Nobel economist says, is not only false; it is devouring itself. [...] It was because of democratic demands that democratic governments, such as that of the U.S., responded to the Great Depression through collective action. The failure of governments to respond adequately to soaring unemployment in Germany led to the rise of Hitler. Today, it is neoliberalism that has brought massive inequalities and provided fertile ground for dangerous populists. Neoliberalism's grim record includes freeing financial markets to precipitate the largest financial crisis in three-quarters of a century, freeing international trade to accelerate deindustrialization, and freeing corporations to exploit consumers, workers, and the environment alike. Contrary to what Friedman suggested in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, this form of capitalism does not enhance freedom in our society. Instead, it has led to the freedom of a few at the expense of the many. As Isaiah Berlin would have it: Freedom for the wolves; death for the sheep. [...] We've now had four decades of the neoliberal 'experiment,' beginning with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The results are clear. Neoliberalism expanded the freedom of corporations and billionaires to do as they will and amass huge fortunes, but it also exacted a steep price: the well-being and freedom of the rest of society."

Doctorow, "AI is a WMD: Fun fact: 'The Tragedy Of the Commons' is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, 'rescuing' it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to 'rational self-interest': [Link] Get that? If control over a key resource is diffused among the people who rely on it, then (Garrett claims) those people will all behave like selfish assholes, overusing and undermaintaining the commons. It's only when we let someone own that commons and charge rent for its use that (Hardin says) we will get sound management. By that logic, Google should be the internet's most competent and reliable manager." Oddly, it hasn't worked out that way.

"Why Doesn't Diversity Training Work?" Well, it doesn't, but most corporations seem to keep using it anyway. It's an easy way to pretend to be doing something about diversity and inclusion, and it can also provide corporations with new ways to mess with their workforce. But history has shown that this kind of social engineering can not only be useless, but might even be counterproductive. As we see in "How to get 7th graders to smoke." But social scientists have come up with lots of projects over the years that are intended to reduce prejudice between people, and the best of them had no effect at all while others actually made things worse. Interestingly, one thing did seem to have a positive effect: this Heineken commercial. (Thanks to Will Shetterly for the links.)

"Extremist Militias Are Coordinating in More Than 100 Facebook Groups: 'JOIN YOUR LOCAL Militia or III% Patriot Group,' a post urged the more than 650 members of a Facebook group called the Free American Army. Accompanied by the logo for the Three Percenters militia network and an image of a man in tactical gear holding a long rifle, the post continues: 'Now more than ever. Support the American militia page.' Other content and messaging in the group is similar. And despite the fact that Facebook bans paramilitary organizing and deemed the Three Percenters an 'armed militia group" on its 2021 Dangerous Individuals and Organizations List, the post and group remained up until WIRED contacted Meta for comment about its existence."

It's no surprise if you know anything about Bari Weiss' history. Or the entire right-wing "free speech" movement that is adamantly against everyone else's free speech. "The real cancel culture [...] The incoherence of the argument underscores the reality of the political moment. There is a relentless right-wing operation seeking to inflict pain on their ideological adversaries. Some, like Rufo, are the political equivalent of street brawlers, willing to say or do anything to achieve their objective. Others, like Weiss and The Free Press, give the movement a more journalistic and professional sheen. But no one involved is a supporter of free expression or an opponent of cancel culture. Rather, they are the cultural force aggressively pursuing cancellation." This is not even a little bit new, of course — it's always been the right-wing that is trying to "cancel" real dissent.

"The tax sharks are back and they're coming for your home [...] The progressive reforms from the New Deal until the Reagan revolution were a series of efforts to broaden participation in every part of society by successively broader groups of people. A movement that started with inclusive housing and education for white men and votes for white women grew to encompass universal suffrage, racial struggles for equality, workplace protections for a widening group of people, rights for people with disabilities, truth and reconciliation with indigenous people and so on. The conservative project of the past 40 years has been to reverse this: to return the great majority of us to the status of desperate, forelock-tugging plebs who know our places. Hence the return of child labor, the tradwife movement, and of course the attacks on labor unions and voting rights [...] It's all going according to plan. We weren't meant to have houses, or job security, or retirement funds. We weren't meant to go to university, or even high school, and our kids were always supposed to be in harness at a local meat-packer or fast food kitchen, not wasting time with their high school chess club or sports team. They don't need high school: that's for the people who were born to rule. They – we – were meant to be ruled over."

"Is the Internet bad for you? Huge study reveals surprise effect on well-being: A survey of more than 2.4 million people finds that being online can have a positive effect on welfare."

"'My songs spread like herpes': why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?"

"For a dose of pure wholesomeness, watch Welcome to Wrexham" — I haven't seen the show, myself, but go watch the birthday video, which is brilliant.

"How Sci-Fi Inspired Conspiracy Theory [...] Linebarger, who died of a heart attack in 1966 at age 53, could not have predicted that tropes from his sci-fi stories about mind control and techno-authoritarianism would shape 21st-century American political rhetoric. But the persistence of his ideas is far from accidental, because Linebarger wasn't just a writer and soldier. He was an anti-communist intelligence operative who helped define U.S. psychological operations, or psyops, during World War II and the Cold War. His essential insight was that the most effective psychological warfare is storytelling. Linebarger saw psyops as an emotionally intense, persuasive form of fiction—and, to him, no genre engaged people's imagination better than science fiction." So, does this mean Cordwainer Smith started it all?

Mike Pinder, "The Best Way to Travel"

Well I knew there was gonna' be trouble, when I heard that callin'

I've just discovered the art of Laurent Parcelier and I love to look at it.

"The Supreme Court effectively abolishes the right to mass protest in three US states: It is no longer safe to organize a protest in Louisiana, Mississippi, or Texas. The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will not hear Mckesson v. Doe. The decision not to hear Mckesson leaves in place a lower court decision that effectively eliminated the right to organize a mass protest in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Under that lower court decision, a protest organizer faces potentially ruinous financial consequences if a single attendee at a mass protest commits an illegal act. It is possible that this outcome will be temporary. The Court did not embrace the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit's decision attacking the First Amendment right to protest, but it did not reverse it either. That means that, at least for now, the Fifth Circuit's decision is the law in much of the American South."

"Self-Destructive College Presidents: They are making a fraught situation worse by letting the far right define antisemitism and the necessary campus responses. Last December, the presidents of Penn and Harvard did not grovel sufficiently in trying to appease Republican inquisitors claiming that they were insufficiently sensitive to episodes of antisemitism. So with some crude prodding from large donors of the 'Israel right or wrong' camp, Liz Magill and Claudine Gay were pushed out of their jobs by panicked trustees. In the latest round of this self-abasement, other college presidents are hoping to out-grovel the earlier batch and outdo each other in sacrificing civil liberties. This never ends well. At last week's hearing before the same House Education subcommittee that destroyed Magill and Gay, Columbia's beleaguered president, Nemat 'Minouche' Shafik, who was born in Egypt, brought with her three senior Jewish colleagues for the grovel-fest. At one point, Rep. Rick Allen, a Republican from Georgia, asked Shafik whether she knew Genesis 12:3. She didn't. Allen explained: 'It was the covenant that God made with Abraham, and that covenant was real clear: 'If you bless Israel I will bless you, if you curse Israel I will curse you,'' he said. 'Do you want Columbia University to be cursed by God?' Allen demanded."

"U.S. Senate and Biden Administration Shamefully Renew and Expand FISA Section 702, Ushering in a Two Year Expansion of Unconstitutional Mass Surveillance: One week after it was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate has passed what Senator Ron Wyden has called, 'one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.' President Biden then rushed to sign it into law. The perhaps ironically named 'Reforming Intelligence and Security America Act (RISAA)' does everything BUT reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). RISAA not only reauthorizes this mass surveillance program, it greatly expands the government's authority by allowing it to compel a much larger group of people and providers into assisting with this surveillance. The bill's only significant 'compromise' is a limited, two-year extension of this mass surveillance. But overall, RISAA is a travesty for Americans who deserve basic constitutional rights and privacy whether they are communicating with people and services inside or outside of the US."

"Ron DeSantis Signs Florida Bill Limiting How Close Bystanders Can Get to Police: The law makes it a misdemeanor to approach within 25 feet of a first responder after receiving a verbal warning to stay away. [...] However, the right to observe and film police has been upheld by multiple federal appeals courts as a fundamental First Amendment activity, and civil liberties groups and press organizations argue that such laws are overly broad and chill the free speech rights of citizens and reporters."

"An Indiana court ruled that Jews have a religious liberty right to abortion. Here's why that matters. The idea of a Jewish right to abortion being enshrined in U.S. law could, at first, sound strange. But in the wake of Dobbs, as states have adopted new abortion restrictions, Jews and Jewish organizations have filed suit arguing that these restrictions put them in a bind. Jewish laws approach to abortion is generally understood — as much as anything within Jewish law is 'generally understood' — to place the well-being of the mother, including physical and emotional well-being, at the center of its analysis. As a result, where an abortion is necessary to protect the well-being of a mother, broadly construed, Jewish law sanctions — and often requires — the termination of the pregnancy. If a mother, motivated by these underlying Jewish values, were to seek an abortion in a state that imposed significant restrictions on such procedures, her religious commitments could run afoul of state law."

"The Trade War Within the U.S. Government Why does the National Security Council keep trying to wrest control of trade policy to help Big Tech? The tug-of-war within the Biden administration continues over whether to use trade policy to restrict the very kinds of regulations of tech that the administration is championing at home. These include protections of privacy from data mining and sale; regulation of AI; antitrust enforcement of excessive concentration and price-gouging; as well as keeping Americans' data secure from Chinese snooping. [...] If anything, you would expect the NSC to be even tougher, especially given the concerns over China using its own technology to spy on Americans and on the U.S. government. But the NSC wants to retain language that allows digital regulation to be treated as a trade barrier. This stance happens to chime perfectly with that of the tech lobby and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber declared in a recent statement, 'By dropping U.S. objections to trade violations, USTR risks giving a green light to foreign governments to raise barriers against U.S. exports or otherwise discriminate against U.S. companies.' This is the old discredited argument that because the tech behemoths most likely to be regulated happen to be U.S. companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon, regulating tech is discriminatory against U.S. exports."

"Republicans Are Objectively Pro–Junk Fee: A new congressional resolution aligns Republicans with the financial industry's fight to preserve sky-high credit card late fees. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's $8 cap on credit card late fees has had a wild ride on the road to implementation. After being finalized last month, the rule drew a lawsuit from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which sought an injunction in Fort Worth. No credit card companies are located in Fort Worth; the venue choice was made purely to ensure that the case would be heard by a right-wing federal judge. The first district court judge assigned to the case owned a bunch of credit card company stocks and recused himself; the second judge, a Trump appointee, showed remarkable candor in saying the case had no business being in Fort Worth and should be heard in Washington. Then the far-right Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed with the Trump judge and tried to pull the case back to Texas. Then one of the authors of that opinion, it turned out, also owned a bunch of credit card company stocks. He has asked for briefings on whether he should recuse himself, basically seeking outside opinions on his own personal corruption. That's not the only attack on the late fee rule. Now congressional Republicans are coming after it, in the process finally setting up a partisan fight over the popular issue of junk fees, which the Biden administration has been pushing for the past few years. Republicans, it turns out, are objectively in favor of junk fees. And by next week, they'll be on the record for them."

RIP: John Pease March 8, 1936-March 12, 2024. For the last several years I've made it a practice to check his Wikipedia page to see if he is still with us. This time, I found he'd left in March, just a few days after his 88th birthday. I didn't know when I sat down that first day for his Stratification class that he was already beloved and legendary among his students (though the guy who surprised him in an ape suit just as class was beginning should have tipped me off.) I didn't know that I'd spend the rest of my life recalling the things he'd do in that class that made him special. I didn't understand just how special he really was, which is why I stupidly didn't sign up for all his other courses and bring my camera and take notes of every remarkable thing he said and did. Of all the terrific profs I had at the University of Maryland, several of whom I still cherish, Professor Pease, who had looked so unassuming and dull on first glance, is the one I remember most of all. I'd rather be studying with you, Professor.

Can this be true? "The Myth of the Molly Maguires: The Myth of the Molly Maguires became international news on June 21, 1877, when the authorities hanged ten Irish miners in a single day in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Known as Black Thursday, or Day of the Rope, it was the second largest mass execution in U.S. history. (The largest was in 1862, when the U.S. government executed 38 Dakota warriors). The authorities accused the Irishmen of being terrorists from a secret organization called the Molly Maguires. They executed ten more over the next two years, and imprisoned another twenty suspected Molly Maguires. Most of the convicted men were union activists. Some even held public office, as sheriffs and school board members. However, there is no evidence that an organization called the Molly Maguires ever existed in the U.S. James McParland, an agent provocateur who worked for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and who provided the plans and weapons the men purportedly used in their crimes, provided the only serious evidence against the men. The entire legal process was a travesty: a private corporation (the Reading Railroad) set up the investigation through a private police force (the Pinkerton Detective Agency) and prosecuted them with their own company attorneys. No jurors were Irish, though several were recent German immigrants who had trouble understanding the proceedings."

"How the Fed Keeps Getting Inflation Wrong: Today on TAP: More than 400 economists work for the Federal Reserve Board. Far too many are intimidated by the echo chamber of bad economics created by Chair Jay Powell. President Biden made two catastrophically bad appointments. One was Attorney General Merrick Garland. The other was Fed Chair Powell. Either could literally cost Biden his presidency and the country its democracy—Garland by having slow-walked Trump's prosecution and Powell by needlessly slowing the economy. The latest inflation report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, released Wednesday, showed the Consumer Price Index ticking up by 0.4 percent in March, the same as in February, but slightly higher than expected. This in turn set off signals from the Fed that expected rate reductions would have to be postponed, and near-hysterical media commentary. The Dow duly dropped more than a thousand points. According to one press report after another, the economy was stuck with high inflation; high interest rates would persist; and Biden's election-year good-news economy would be stuck with a bad-news story. But if you bother to take a close look at the details of the actual price increases by sector, they have nothing to do with the kind of inflation that justifies high interest rates. Some of the Fed's own research confirms that. Nearly all of the price hikes came from a few sectors, none of which have anything to do with overheated demand.

"The Racial Wealth Gap Is About the Upper Classes [...] What this means is that the overall racial wealth disparity is being driven almost entirely by the disparity between the wealthiest 10 percent of white people and the wealthiest 10 percent of black people." So if you put the top 10% of black people and the top 10% of white people on Mars, there'd be hardly any racial wealth gap between those left in America.

"What Really Happened on October 7? And why, wonders a new Al Jazeera documentary, did the media go to such lengths to concoct gruesome X-rated versions of an attack that was harrowing enough to begin with?"

Tom Tomorrow on your liberal media.

The Bourbon Tabernacle Choir - "Death Is The Great Awakener"