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"