It's not like me to pretend

John Atkinson Grimshaw's famous The Old Hall Under Moonlight is just one of innumerable atmospheric oils by this master of moonlight, and I was just in that kind of mood.

I need to post this so I can post some more, I have so many tabs open I can't find anything anymore. There's just so much going on!

It's pretty clear that what Musk and DOGE are really about is that Musk wants to defund the police that police Musk's businesses, and do the same for the other grifters who are using the government for themselves at our expense. Trump's appointments are absolutely a case of putting the foxes to guard the hen houses. David Dayen, of course, has a pretty good run-down with "We Found the $2 Trillion: [...] 'Our budget wouldn't be justified if the DOD did pass this year's audit,' said Julia Gledhill, research associate for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center. 'Contractors continue to be rewarded for not doing their jobs terribly well.'" Or you can get the shorter version from Cory Doctorow, "It's pretty easy to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, actually: If Elon Musk wants to cut $2t from the US federal budget, there's a pretty straightforward way to get there – just eliminate all the beltway bandits who overcharge Uncle Sucker for everything from pharmaceuticals to roadworks to (of course) rockets, and then make the rich pay their taxes. There is a ton of federal bloat, but it's not coming from useless programs or overpaid federal employees. As David Dayen writes in a long, fact-filled feature in The American Prospect, the bloat comes from the private sector's greedy suckling at the government teat"

I meant to post this story earlier in January but I lost track of all the open tabs. "How Big Companies and the Courts Killed Net Neutrality: The powerful telecom industry did what they always do when the FCC does anything good or important on behalf of consumer: They sued to overturn the rules. [...] I'll spare you the rest. This court's warped decision scraps the common-sense rules the FCC restored in April. The result is that throughout most of the country, the most essential communications service of this century will be operating without any real government oversight, with no one to step in when companies rip you off or slow down your service."

It's usually Consortium News that sounds this alarm, but this is Rob Urie On Being Censored for the Last Four Years at Naked Capitalism, and tells an important story. While it's true that Republicans have generally supported government propaganda and censorship with far more intensity and cohesion than the Democrats, the Biden administration went absolutely overboard in actively suppressing what it termed "disnformation", even when it clearly was nothing of the kind. And it should never, ever be acceptable to argue that the government should be allowed to mandate what the truth is. But, of course, since Google started refusing to list articles that didn't serve the government, you might never have been able to find stories about what was being labeled as "disinfo" among those events where you knew it was the truth. And the right-wing is much better at screaming far and wide when their own material is being suppressed — so much so that a lot of them think they're the only ones it's happening to. "Yves here. This important post fills out the picture of how extensive censorship became under the Biden Administration. I hope you'll circulate his piece widely, since it demonstrates the campaign went well beyond social media and included disappearing disfavored content from Internet searches. What is remarkable is Urie's evidence of a dramatic shift in search results after the dissolution of the Biden State Department censorship program. This indirectly confirms that Google's change in its algos to prefer mainstream sites and the quick reversal was the result of government intervention, and not Google acting out of its own profit motives." But we need to dip further into the past to get to the start of this story, when Donald Trump's executive order created this whole government-in-your-social-media ball rolling.

Paul Krugman explains why he left The New York Times: "Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless. One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, 'You've already written about that,' as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject. If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, 'we are being lied into war.' I felt that my byline was being used to create a storyline that was no longer mine. So I left."

At Pro Publica, "The Militia and the Mole," a story from someone who spent two years of his life undercover with the right-wing militias to uncover what they were really up to, and sent it to the media, only to have the story ignored until he sent it to Joshua Kaplan, who took the time to check it out.

"It's Simple! Concentrated Wealth and Inequality Crushes Economic Growth: More billionaire dollars, slower growth. Full stop. Like it or not, if countries want to join the 'rich-country club,' they need to redistribute wealth. What has not been studied much — at least partially because the data is hard to come by — is the distribution of wealth within countries, and how that relates to economic growth. Is wealth concentration a symptom of what Peter Turchin has called 'elite overproduction'? My devoted readers will undoubtedly remember my 2008 research into rich countries' wealth inequality and economic growth. (In case you haven't heard, wealth inequality utterly dwarfs income inequality.)" The trouble is it's easier (though certainly not easy) to prevent this overabundance in fewer hands than it is to deal with it once it occurs. You could say that the 91% top marginal rate we enjoyed back in the 1950s was a Prevention of Excessive Wealth tax, and it worked marvelously, until it got lowered to 70% in the '60s, which started the avalanche because it made it easier to build dynastic wealth and start doing the things that lead to capturing government, which ultimately led to the 1980s when the TMR went as low as 28% under Reagan. And that led to a whole lot of other evils, of which Citizens United is only one. That Elon Musk can personally threaten every member of Congress with heavily funded primary challenges as well as heavily-funded election campaigns against them is a just plain disaster. Absolutely no one should have that kind of wealth. But go ahead and convince members of Congress to vote for a 91% top marginal rate, let alone a significant wealth tax that actually removes those millions and billions from them, when those billionaires could easily retaliate by making sure you can never work again, or, if you do what they want, conceivably reward you with your very own millions of dollars.

A video worth watching: "Why Oligarchy Falls (And How to Speed It Up)" — 18 minutes of what Aristotle observed about how oligarchic tyrannies crack, if the right people get their timing right.

Cory Doctorow, "The first days of Boss Politics Antitrust: 'Boss politics' are a feature of corrupt societies. When a society is dominated by self-dealing, corrupt institutions, strongman leaders can seize control by appealing to the public's fury and desperation. Then, the boss can selectively punish corrupt entities that oppose him, and since everyone is corrupt, these will be valid prosecutions. In other words, it's possible to corruptly enforce the law against the guilty. This is just a matter of enforcement priorities: in a legitimate state, enforcers prioritize the wrongdoers who are harming the public the most. Under boss politics, priority is given to the corrupt entities that challenge the boss's power, without regard to whether these lawbreakers are the worst offenders. Meanwhile, worse wrongdoers walk free, provided that they line up behind the boss. [...] Trump is a classic boss politician – that's what people mean when they call him 'transactional': he doesn't act out of principle, he acts out of self interest. The people who give him the most get the most back from him. This means that Biden's brightest legacy – militant antitrust enforcement of a type not seen in generations – is now going to become 'boss antitrust,' where genuine monopolists are attacked under antitrust law, but only if they oppose Trump" On the bright side, Rohit Chopra, head of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB), is still in place, at least for a while, because no one else seems to want the job.

I am in awe of Hamilton Nolan. "On Having a Maximum Wealth: The single most ridiculous aspect of human history is how much of it has been driven by the goal of allowing a tiny portion of a large population to live in luxury. This is a theme found, to varying degrees, in society after society across the world: A lot of people with a low standard of living working in service of the goal of raising the standard of living for some sort of ruler or supreme leader and his family and allies. I understand that this is not some sort of revelation. 'You've discovered class,' you are now saying in a mocking tone. Beyond the social and political and economic dynamics underlying this process, though—things that make up magisterial fields of inquiry—I think that every once in a while it is well worth taking a moment to gape at the basic ludicrousness of this fact. As societal goals go, an honest reading tells us that we are often not aiming for 'better technology' or 'philosophical progress.' No, the reality is that, thousands of years and around the globe, the primary purpose of all the work that everyone is doing is 'allowing a few jerks and their unbearable kids to live lavishly.' Countless millions through millennia have suffered, dragging stones to build pyramids and losing fingers in dirty factories and getting black lung so that Some Guy Somewhere can sit on a soft pillow and enjoy delicacies. What an absurd, idiotic goal to organize human society around. Wow!"

The Beatles, on the BBC, "I'll Get You"

There is no freedom in a land where fear and hate prevail

"St Michael's Tower on Glastonbury Tor peeping out of it's silky blanket of mist. Taken about 45 minutes before sunrise." Michelle Cowbourne lives around Glastonbury and takes lots of pictures there. I recommend the slideshow at her Visions of Somerset website.

I wish I had written this: "The Land of Greater Fools: Watching Trump launch a crypto coin days before his own inauguration that instantly made him billions of dollars richer is kind of impressive, in the way that you might be impressed by watching the planes strike the twin towers on 9/11. People said this was bad, yes. But do you understand the level of corruption that is on full display here? This is—I don't want to be hyperbolic here—a level of public corruption that is, let's conservatively say, one thousand times worse than the Watergate scandal. That was just an instance of a paranoid president trying to steal secrets from his political opponents and then covering it up. This, on the other hand, is the president-elect of the United States of America putting out a big bucket that says 'BRIBE ME' right before he takes office. Anyone can now buy an imaginary 'coin' and the money will go directly into the pockets of the Trump family, as they run the United States government. That is what happened here. Donald Trump's net worth went up by tens of billions of dollars in one day. In one day! The day before his inauguration! [...] The problem with this impulse is that inherent in the hope of working with this guy is the accompanying understanding that you must not try as hard as you can to smash the guy at the same time. You can't say 'Donald Trump is a loathsome fascist' and then say in the next breath 'We look forward to crafting a worker-friendly trade policy with you, sir.' Yet, hey, guess who the people are who, collectively, are nurturing all of these disparate hopes of winning on their pet issues? They are the opposition. We are entering an age of gangster style fascism. We are going to need all of the opposition that we can get. If most of the opposition is busy flattering itself that they can soften Trump on this or that, they are not doing their most important work: Trying to destroy his entire political project. That political project is, I remind you, one of destroying the rest of us. An opposition that can't dedicate itself to being the opposition is a weak opposition, indeed. And Trump has always enjoyed a weak opposition." There's a lot more, go read the rest.

The American Prospect has been doing a daily round-up of what the new Trump administration is up to. On Day One they introduced it this way: "Donald Trump is president, and he wants you to know that on his first day, he got things done. A lot of things. Almost 100 things, or maybe 200 things; whatever number it takes to give the appearance of forward motion. This was a key insight that Joe Biden, now a private citizen, never bothered to learn: In a 24/7, post-by-post information environment, presidents making it clear that they are 'doing things' matters a lot more than the substance, at least in short-term public perception. Let's speak the truth, a rare commodity over the next four years: The federal government takes action 200 times on a slow day. Like, that's a day-after-Christmas level of workload. And many of these 'actions' are just plans to make plans, or plans to write reports, many of which in Trump's first term were not completed (I know, I tracked them all). Others are really important, though sometimes not in the way you think. Others are asking for legal challenge so deeply that there's already litigation in place. What this moment calls for is clarity: to contextualize and explain, clearly and succinctly, what Trump is doing and who really benefits. So that's what we're going to do today. Below, you will find a rolling tally of the most important executive orders and their meaning, compiled by our staff. Keep checking back for updates." Obviously, they can't hit everything, but you'll still learn a lot more from them than you'll get from any other news source.

"Biden commutes life sentence of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, 80: [...] Peltier has maintained his innocence since he was arrested in connection with the deaths and had for decades been supported by advocates for his release by Coretta Scott King, Nelson Mandela and Pope Francis. James H Reynolds, the US attorney who handled the prosecution and appeal of Peltier's case, publicly apologized, calling the prosecution and incarceration of Peltier 'unjust' and has called for his immediate release." This should have happened a long time ago, but Biden left it for the last minute, and then Trump became president and pardoned the J6 gang.

Dday in The American Prospect, "The Essential Incoherence of the End of the Biden Presidency: One reason the president goes out with low approval ratings is that his agenda was internally contradictory. [...] The Biden White House has been active, too, in these final days. And some of their announcements help unlock the key to why, despite a generally populist economic agenda, voters were so frustrated with the president, sending him out the door with the lowest approval ratings of his entire term. Too often the White House would operate at cross-purposes to its more populist agencies, sometimes contradicting the very arguments the president himself was making in public. This dichotomy between values and actions grates on people, alienates potential allies, and gives voters little sense of a coherent agenda."

"Baltimore homicides and shootings fall to lowest levels since 2015: Baltimore finished 2024 with a second consecutive year of historic decreases in gun violence unlike the city has seen since the 1970s. The decrease in gun violence from last year has brought needed optimism to a city that has long struggled to bring down its homicide rate, which still remains well above the national average. Police say 201 people were killed, with more than 400 people shot and wounded. Experts in gun violence prevention, city officials and anti-violence workers attributed the decline to a variety of factors: statewide and national efforts to fight 'ghost guns,' political stability in City Hall, and the maturation of the mayor's approach to pairing policing with services and support." Homicides were 342 in 2015, 263 in 2023, and 201 in 2024.

"'Crushing Blow to the Labor Agenda' as Manchin, Sinema Block Biden NLRB Nominee: In a move likely fraught with major implications for worker rights during the impending second administration of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, Democratic-turned-Independent U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on Wednesday blocked Democrat Lauren McFerran's bid for a second term on the National Labor Relations Board. With every Republican senator except Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas voting against President Joe Biden's nomination of McFerran for a new five-year term, the fate of the woman who has led the agency since 2021 was up to Manchin and Sinema—who, as More Perfect Union founder and executive director Faiz Shakir put it on social media, "consistently spoiled the story of 'what could have been'" by years of fighting to thwart their own former party's agenda. Sinema struck first, her "no" vote on McFerran grinding the confirmation tally to a 49-49 tie. Manchin, who showed up later, cast the decisive vote, negating speculation that Vice President Kamala Harris, the Senate president who lost the presidential contest to Trump last month, would break the stalemate." The even more infuriating thing is that if Kamala Harris had been on time, she could have cast the deciding vote before Manchin got there to gum up the works. Just absolutely useless.

"Israeli prosecutor says state has no rape cases against Palestinians from 7/10 raid: Regime representative admits what UN and others already said – but still wants to murder Palestinians. Israeli media outlet Ynet has published an interview with Moran Gaz, until recently, the head of the security cases division at the Southern District Prosecutor's Office in Israel and a member of 'Team 7.10,' which responsible for cases involving captured Palestinians in connection with the October 7th attacks. Gaz has admitted that, despite having over fourteen months to investigate the Israeli regime's claims of 'mass' and 'systematic' rape on 7 October 2023, her department has no evidence of any rapes or sexual assaults and is filing no cases for prosecution." That doesn't mean she isn't every bit as venomous against Palestinians, though.

"Judge threatens to break the UK's wall of secrecy around Assange's persecution: For years, the UK and Sweden stymied Freedom of Information requests to hide why prosecutors under Keir Starmer pursued the Wikileaks founder. Finally the game may be up. After nine years of legal battles, a British judge has finally challenged the wall of secrecy erected by British and Swedish authorities around the legal abuse of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Judge Foss, sitting at the London First-Tier Tribunal, has ruled that the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) must explain how it came to destroy key files that would have shed light on why it pursued Assange for 14 years. The CPS appears to have done so in breach of its own procedures. [...] A few CPS emails from that time were not destroyed and have been released under Freedom of Information rules. They show that it was the UK authorities pushing reluctant Swedish prosecutors to pursue the case against Assange. Eventually, Swedish prosecutors dropped the case after running it into the ground. In other words, the few documents that have come to light show that it was the CPS – led at that time by Keir Starmer, later knighted and now Britain's prime minister – that waged what appears to have been a campaign of political persecution against Assange, rather than one based on proper legal considerations."

"'Don't Be Fooled': Laken Riley Act Not About Crime by Migrants—It's a Right-Wing Power Grab: With the U.S. Senate poised to vote on the Laken Riley Act on Friday, immigrant rights advocates are warning that—despite claims from proponents that the bill is aimed at protecting American communities from violent crime—supporters of the legislation are actually advancing a dangerous "Trojan horse" and securing a power grab for xenophobic right-wing authorities. [...] Immigration attorney Ben Winograd of the Immigrant & Refugee Appellate Center offered a hypothetical scenario under the bill: 'Imagine a man who is a U.S. citizen marries a woman who entered the country illegally. He abuses her constantly, and after learning that she intends to leave him, he calls the police and (falsely) claims that she stole some of his property.' 'If the police arrest the woman, she would be subject to mandatory detention while in removal proceedings—even if the police determined that the accusation was bogus,' said Winograd. 'The Laken Riley Act would allow any person with a grudge against an undocumented immigrant to make them subject to indefinite mandatory detention simply by leveling a false accusation of theft.'"

Jack Smith spills the beans: "In the newly released report, Smith detailed how Trump and his allies tried to 'induce state officials to ignore true vote counts,' manufactured 'fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost,' directed 'an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election,' and leveraged 'rioters' violence to further delay it.' 'In service of these efforts, Mr. Trump worked with other people to achieve a common plan: to overturn the election results and perpetuate himself in office,' the report added."

RIP: "Peter Yarrow of folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary dies aged 86: a vocalist with the US folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, has died aged 86. The cause was bladder cancer, which Yarrow had been diagnosed with four years ago. Yarrow took lead vocals on Puff, the Magic Dragon, The Great Mandella and Day Is Done, songs he either wrote or co-wrote with Noel Paul Stookey. Stookey is the last surviving member of the group, as Mary Travers died in 2009." You probably had to be there, but they were an incredible influence.

RIP: "Sam Moore of Sam & Dave, at 89. "That tells you a great deal about the esteem Sam & Dave were held in by their fellow musicians, but, in truth, it is only scratching the surface: their songs were covered by everyone from the Temptations and Tom Jones to Eurythmics and Elvis Costello. At the height of their 60s success, they were called 'the greatest live act of all time' by Otis Redding's manager, whose own charge was hardly a slouch on stage. Nevertheless, after co-headlining with them on the 1967 Stax/Volt tour, Redding declined to share a bill with the duo nicknamed Double Dynamite again: he felt he had been thoroughly upstaged." (There's a great video of Sam & Dave doing "Hold On, I'm Comin'" on that page.) Their most famous track, of course, was "Soul Man."

RIP: "Garth Hudson, founder member of the Band and Bob Dylan collaborator, dies aged 87: Hudson was the last remaining member of the folk-rock group, releasing 10 studio albums with them and touring with Dylan in his newfound electric period. The multi-instrumentalist, who played keyboards and saxophone for the bestselling 1960s folk-rockers as well as Bob Dylan, died peacefully in his sleep at the Woodstock nursing home he lived in, the executor of his estate confirmed to the Toronto Star. Hudson's variously spirited and melancholy organ lines were a key part of the Band's sound – including his psychedelically vamping intro to "Chest Fever" – and he was also an accordionist, including on the Dylan-penned When I Paint My Masterpiece. Hudson was also responsible for recording and archiving the sessions that became The Basement Tapes, with the Band and Dylan playing ad-hoc songs in a house in upstate New York."

RIP: "Jules Feiffer, award-winning political cartoonist and writer, dies at 95: Feiffer was known for his weekly comic strip in the Village Voice called Feiffer. It was a fixture throughout the late 1950s until 1997 and syndication meant it appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, Esquire and the Observer." Gosh, it really feels like it's the end of some eras.

Marc Andreessen has been running around telling a bunch of stories meant to make CEOs look like innocent bystanders being attacked by the likes of the CPFB, and he also seems to think Hillary Clinton was president: "Marc Andreessen, the billionaire tech investor who co-founded Netscape, has recently been making the rounds on various podcasts to talk about how the Democrats were so very mean to him and forced him to become a supporter of Donald Trump. Andreessen's obnoxious whining wouldn't otherwise be notable, given how many guys in the tech industry have blamed backlash against 'wokeness' to explain their support of the MAGA movement. But a new interview released by the New York Times on Friday is interesting, if only because the Times cleaned up its own transcript to make Andreessen sound like less of an idiot."

I still think it's almost impossible to find a verdict for who has been the worst president of my lifetime, which is longer than Mehdi Hasan's, but I can't help nodding at a lot of this: "Joe Biden had one job. And he failed. [...] Joe Biden had one job. Not getting bills passed or executive orders signed. Not fighting foreign wars or securing the border. No. It was defeating Donald Trump. Denying him the presidency. Ending the threat he posed to our democracy. That was Biden's one job. He said so himself. From the moment he announced his (third) campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2019, he made clear that he wanted to lead us to victory 'in the battle for the soul of this nation'. When he formally accepted his party's nomination at the Democratic national convention in the summer of 2020, he said he was running to 'save our democracy' and to ensure the United States became 'a light to the world once again'. This was a battle, he declaimed, 'that we, together, will win'." Well, that didn't happen, and if he'd really wanted to do that, he should have done the things Mehdi mentions in this column once he was in office. But he never should have been in office. The best thing he could have done was drop out of the race and endorse the front-runner.

"Sony Video Chief Admits Strategic Mistakes," or how DRM killed the Walkman.

"Kamala Harris Paid the Price for Not Breaking With Biden on Gaza, New Poll Shows: Twenty-nine percent of non-voters who supported Biden in 2020 said U.S. support for the genocide was the top reason they sat the 2024 election, according to a survey by YouGov. [...] Of course, diverging from Biden on Gaza risked losing voters who supported his policy. But a close look at the survey suggests that risk was low compared to the potential reward. Voters who were with Biden in 2020 and stuck with Harris in 2024 were asked if breaking with him on Gaza would make them more or less enthusiastic about voting for Harris. By a 35 to 5 margin, they said doing so would have made them more enthusiastic to vote for her, with the remainder saying it would have made no difference. Meanwhile, Democrats' unshakable commitment to the war also blended with concerns that the party was not focused on issues that mattered to Americans, as I argued previously. The survey showed that the issue of Gaza was most salient among white voters, 34 percent of whom said it was the top reason they didn't vote for Harris, and Hispanic voters (27 percent), while less so with black voters (just 9 percent)."

Peter, Paul & Mary, "Wasn't That A Time" live, 1967.

And folks dressed up like Eskimos

I don't seem to have the sense of timing I used to have, so let's do this before the last night of Christmas on the 6th. Here we are with the traditional Christmas links:
• Mark Evanier's wonderful Mel Tormé story, and here's the man himself in duet with Judy Garland.
• Joshua Held's Christmas card, with a little help from Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters.
• Brian Brink's tour-de-force performance of "The Carol of the Bells"
• "Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime."
• Ron Tiner's one-page cartoon version of A Christmas Carol

Ann Telneas quit The Washington Post after they killed one of her cartoons. "Why I'm quitting the Washington Post: I've worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I've never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now."

The problem I was complaining about 20 years ago has not gone away, and I still have no way to know whether the 2016 election, the 2020 election, or the 2024 election were actually hacked. The machines still aren't being audited and without real hand-counts, we don't actually know how the voters actually voted. I still have no reason in the world to think E&S, in particular, is not hacking elections—I mean, they practically bragged about it once upon a time. And I don't know anything about Rachel Donald and whether the story is pure conjecture, but she says, "Cyber-Security Experts Warn Election Was Hacked," and for all I know it could be true.

"Pentagon Repatriates Guantánamo Detainee Held Without Charge for Over Two Decades: The move came as the Biden administration faced pressure to clear the notorious military prison of all uncharged detainees before Donald Trump takes office. The man, 59-year-old Ridah bin Saleh al-Yazidi, had been held at Guantánamo since the day former U.S. President George W. Bush opened the prison camp in 2002. The Pentagon said in a statement Monday that al-Yazidi has been repatriated to the government of Tunisia. With al-Yazidi's transfer, there are now 26 detainees remaining at Guantánamo, the majority of whom have never been charged with a crime and have been approved for release from the prison, which United Nations experts have said is "defined by the systematic use of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment." More detainees have died at Guantánamo than have been convicted of a crime, according to the human rights group Reprieve."

"How 'more reason for alarm' is hitting Dems after Harris loss: report [...] Per the report, Three "focus groups — held immediately after the 2024 election and conducted by GBAO, a Democratic polling firm — featured three kinds of voters: young men in battleground states who voted for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024; voters in battleground states who voted for Biden in 2020 but didn't vote at all in 2024; and voters in blue states who had previously voted for Democrats, a third party candidate or didn't vote in 2020 but voted for Trump in 2024." Navigator Research's director of polling and analytics, Rachael Russell, told Politico that "the focus groups offer 'a pretty scathing rebuke' of the Democratic Party." Some ex-Democratic voters call the party "weak" and say its "overly focused on diversity and elites," according to the news outlet. Furthermore, "When asked to compare the Democratic Party to an animal, one participant compared the party to an ostrich because 'they've got their heads in the sand and are absolutely committed to their own ideas, even when they're failing,'" Politico notes, while "Another likened them to koalas, who 'are complacent and lazy about getting policy wins that we really need.'" Russell emphasized, "This weakness they see, [Democrats] not getting things done, not being able to actually fight for people — is something that needs to be figured out." She added, "It might not be the message, it might be the policy. It might be something a little bit deeper that has to be addressed by the party.""

From Normal Island News, "Media deeply confused after discovering Germany terror suspect is a Zionist: In an event that was as confusing as it was horrific, a Zionist has committed an act of terrorism in Germany. Mainstream journalists quickly condemned this brutality because we assumed the suspect was an Islamist, but now we know the truth, we don't want to talk about it anymore. This is because we have no idea if we are supposed to support or condemn this guy. He is kind of like our Luigi Mangione..."

Also from Normal Island News, "Israel destroys Syrian navy due to concerns of underwater tunnels: Israel says it has destroyed every vessel in the Syrian navy, due to worrying reports of tunnels under the water. It has also bombed targets in Damascus, Homs, Tartus, Latakia and Palmyr, but it's unclear if it has blown up the schools and hospitals. Excitingly, the Israeli military raised its flag over the town of al-Khadr in a move that looked nothing like settler-colonialism. Israel decided to invade Syria the moment the Assad regime fell because it never misses an opportunity to attack a neighbour. It's kind of like seeing someone you don't like passed out in the street and kicking them in the head, several hundred times, in self-defence. Israel explained it has destroyed 80% of Syria's military capacity to stop it becoming a 'future military threat', a label it could apply to any country on earth. Obviously, most countries aren't as defenceless as Syria, but Israel has nukes so consider this a warning... Pre-emptively attacking a country has no basis in international law, but the British government has reassured the public: 'We will always support Israel's right to defend itself and make itself secure'. You would support Israel too, if Mossad had embarrassing tapes of you..."

"The 'Blob' Is Furious About Gaza. But That's Not Enough.: The foreign policy proletariat needs to stop filtering its dissent through official channels and start taking more radical action. Public resignations. Repeated leaks to the press. A torrent of desperate dissent cables. Government institutions in internal revolt against a president taking US policy off the rails. No, this is not about the forthcoming Trump administration. It's about Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and the US foreign policy apparatus they oversee. Over the past year, a series of sanctioned and unsanctioned revolts has erupted among foreign policy and intelligence agencies in protest of the Biden administration's complicity in the Gaza genocide."

RIP: "Jimmy Carter, longest-lived US president, dies aged 100" What can I say? He wasn't a good president, he started the deregulation and austerity, he only seemed to wake up after the hostage crisis in Tehran and it was too late, and the corporations —and therefore the media—instantly turned on him after his too-long speech talking about what we needed to do. But it seems like he spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it.

"84% Of Americans Want Tougher Online Privacy Laws, But Congress Is Too Corrupt To Follow Through: Americans are, apparently, tired of having every last shred of personal data over-collected, hyper monetized, then improperly secured by a rotating crop of ethics-optional corporations and lazy executives. [...] As is the norm for U.S. journalism, the outlet frames our failure to pass an internet privacy law over the last 30 years as something that just kind of happened without meaningful cause. The 'question' of whether to have even baseline public privacy protections has been left unanswered due to some sort of ambiguous externality. Just blame that pesky, ambiguous gridlock. In reality, Congress hasn't passed a privacy law because it's blisteringly, grotesquely corrupt. U.S. policymakers have decided, time and time and time again, that making gobs of money is more important than consumer welfare, public safety, market health, or even national security (see: our obsession with TikTok, while ignoring the national security risks of unregulated data brokers). The federal government is also disincentivized from passing a nationwide privacy law for the internet era because they've found that buying consumer data from data brokers is a wonderful way to avoid having to get a traditional warrant."

"On Chief Justice Roberts' 2024 Year-End Report: Challenging Critics & Invoking Heroic Civil Rights-Era Judges To Insulate An Imperial Court [...] Civil rights lawyers were perpetually foiled by judges who were openly prejudiced or who simply refused to compel southern jurisdictions to comply with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown. And when they filed cases before Judge Justice or Judge Waring, the claims were matters related directly to the forum where those judges sat. This is not what is happening with judge shopping cases in the northern district of Texas. That is why the history of Judges Justice and Waring cannot justify the decision by conservative lawyers to repeatedly file cases before one extremely conservative district court judge, even when their claims bear no relationship to the forum in Texas where that judge sits. The Chief closed his report with a point that demanded greater narrative attention. Indeed I regard it as the most important passage in the essay: '[t]he federal courts must do their part to preserve the public's confidence in our institutions.' Yes. There's the rub. What of the responsibility of courts to earn and maintain the public's confidence? The Chief might have acknowledged – however briefly - that some critiques of the Supreme Court's practices have actually led to positive changes. And he might have stated his intention in the New Year to encourage his fellow colleagues and judges across the federal system to redouble their efforts to ensure that their conduct promotes the public's confidence in the judicial system (timely and thorough financial disclosure reporting might be a start). Such a statement at the end of his essay would have done more to improve the federal courts' standing with the public, than the repeated and heated denials from judges whose conduct has garnered scrutiny."

Ian Welsh saying what I'm still afraid to say: "Thompson's assassination will cause more execs and CEOs to bodyguard up, but that doesn't matter much. Modern IEDs and drones are very very effective and getting cheaper all the time, though civilian drones are extremely restricted in the US, which has led to China being the world leader. I suspect they're restricted in part to make assassinations harder. Guns are nice, drones are better. Chinese leaders make the lives of most Chinese much better, not worse, so they aren't scared of assassination."

This one is for those of us who think Frank Miller ruined the DC universe.