"The Calm Summer Evening by Serghio Ghetiu
The day after I posted it, I woke up and found an email from Blogger saying they'd deleted my previous post from its Blogspot site due to content violations. The only way you can respond to that is to push a button at the site asking for a review. So I did. I figured some troll from a certain country that has a highly-funded program to censor criticism all over the world had reported the post but that if a human looked at it they'd realize the post didn't violate any rules, and a few hours later I got email saying it had been reinstated. Hm.
Dday, "UnitedHealth Merger Approval Again Shows Lobbyist Power: Today on TAP: Another merger settlement allows consolidation in health care; UnitedHealth's lobbyist was MAGA's biggest firm. As I've been reporting, what was a promising start to antitrust enforcement in the second Trump administration has now become a pay-to-play operation where influential MAGA lobbyists paid millions by large corporations use their clout with the president and Attorney General Pam Bondi to overrule the enforcers and push through mergers. As a result, cases prosecuted but unresolved in the Biden years are under threat. Yesterday, another leftover Biden case was settled, which will allow the colossal UnitedHealth Group monopoly to swallow Amedisys, the second-largest provider of home health care in the nation, after already purchasing the third-largest provider in 2023. At a time when even investors are begging off UnitedHealth's consolidated business model, the Justice Department's Antitrust Division saw no problem with the insurance giant eating a top player in one of the fastest-growing sectors in health care." As usual, they have an excuse for why it's okay, but, also as usual, it doesn't add up.
"Israel Is Turning Gaza Famine Into a Hasbara War. It Won't Make It Less Real" — It's almost like deja vu reading first the intense campaign of famine denial from Israel itself and then seeing Media Matters' lengthy list of incidents of right-wing explainers producing identical "reason" to disbelieve your lyin' eyes in "As experts warn of a famine unfolding in Gaza, here's how right-wing media are reacting."
Hamas' response to the hasbara after "Israel Blames Hamas for Malnourishment of Israeli Captives as It Deliberately Starves Gaza: In a letter to the UN Security Council, Hamas blasted Israel for gaslighting the world on its forced starvation policy. [...] Ahead of the meeting, Hamas is vigorously rejecting Israel's allegations that Palestinian forces in Gaza are abusing Israeli captives by depriving them of food. 'For the Israeli prisoners held by the resistance in Gaza, they are experiencing the same conditions as the people of Gaza,' Hamas officials wrote in an August 4 letter to the council obtained by Drop Site. 'The famine—caused by the occupation regime—affects all areas of the Strip, and inevitably its effects are reflected upon the 'Israeli' captives, just as they are reflected upon their captors, their families, and the overwhelming majority of Gaza's population.'"99
Israel never intended for there to be a two-state solution, and world leaders knew it. "Israel's plan for 'full control' of Gaza heralds a new Nakba - so the West is panicking: Netanyahu's mass ethnic cleansing strategy pulls the rug out from under their cherished pretext for supporting Israeli criminality: the fabled two-state solutionIf you thought western capitals were finally losing patience with Israel's engineering of a famine in Gaza nearly two years into the genocide, you may be disappointed. As ever, events have moved on - even if the extreme hunger and malnourishment of the two million people of Gaza have not abated. Western leaders are now expressing 'outrage', as the media call it, at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to 'take full control' of Gaza and 'occupy' it. At some point in the future, Israel is apparently ready to hand the enclave over to outside forces unconnected to the Palestinian people."
"'Self-termination is most likely': the history and future of societal collapse: 'We can't put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,' says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. 'I'm pessimistic about the future,' he says. 'But I'm optimistic about people.' Kemp's new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 5,000 years and took seven years to write. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens."
"The Illusion of Choice: Republicans say that VA patients can get equivalent private-sector care anywhere in the U.S. Here's a 50-state reality check. At his confirmation hearing in January of 2025, Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins, a former congressman from Georgia, assured the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee of his commitment to provide specialized, high-quality medical care for the roughly nine million veterans enrolled in the nation's largest and only truly integrated public health care system, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). But Collins, a chaplain in the Air Force Reserve, also explained that his mandate from President Trump is to make it 'easier for veterans to get their health care when and where it's most convenient for them,' by giving them greater choice between in-house and outsourced care. To do this, he planned to lean on the network of 1.7 million private-sector providers who are part of the Veterans Community Care Program (VCCP), created by the VA MISSION Act of 2018. Annual reimbursement of these non-VHA doctors, therapists, hospitals, and clinics now costs the federal government more than $30 billion per year, nearly one-third of the VA's entire direct care budget." Spoiler: There are not enough physicians available outside of the VA to do the job for the rest of us, let alone absorb thousands of VA patients.
"The The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine: How a single consulting firm extracted $282 million from a network of spam PACs while delivering just $11 million to actual campaigns. The digital deluge is a familiar annoyance for anyone on a Democratic fundraising list. It's a relentless cacophony of bizarre texts and emails, each one more urgent than the last, promising that your immediate $15 donation is the only thing standing between democracy and the abyss. The main rationale offered for this fundraising frenzy is that it's a necessary evil—that the tactics, while unpleasant, are brutally effective at raising the money needed to win. But an analysis of the official FEC filings tells a very different story. The fundraising model is not a brutally effective tool for the party; it is a financial vortex that consumes the vast majority of every dollar it raises." Interestingly, the author told Sam Seder that, while he's heard from numerous people who were aghast, he had not head from the DNC, the DSCC, or the DCCC.
"Palestine Action protest arrests rise to more than 500: The Metropolitan Police said the majority of arrests - 521 - were for displaying placards in support of Palestine Action at Westminster's Parliament Square, and one at a Palestine Coalition march." But the part I thought was most interesting was that "The average age of those arrested was 54, and the most arrests - 147 of them - were of people aged between 60 and 69."
"Didn't Take Long To Reveal The UK's Online Safety Act Is Exactly The Privacy-Crushing Failure Everyone Warned About [...] Yes, you read that right. A law supposedly designed to protect children now requires victims of sexual assault to submit government IDs to access support communities. People struggling with addiction must undergo facial recognition scans to find help quitting drinking or smoking. The UK government has somehow concluded that access to basic health information and peer support networks poses such a grave threat to minors that it justifies creating a comprehensive surveillance infrastructure around it."
"Judge Rules Ohio's Voucher System Unconstitutional: The ruling could end the siphoning of funds to private and parochial schools. In June, Ohio's sweeping EdChoice Scholarship Program suffered a near-fatal blow after a Franklin County Common Pleas Court judge ruled the program unconstitutional. That ruling found that using public funds to subsidize tuition at private religious schools violates the Ohio Constitution's ban on directing 'school funds' to religious or sectarian institutions. The judge also found that the expansion of EdChoice undermines the state's duty to maintain a 'thorough and efficient' school system, especially as public schools remain underfunded. An appeal by the state attorney general is in the works. Project 2025 posited that a second Trump administration would usher in the dismantling of K-12 public education from the inside out by doubling down on 'parental choice' and continuing to encourage states to redirect tax dollars toward private and, especially, conservative religious schools. What happens next may reveal if Ohio can continue to expand school choice programs without significant changes that address growing concerns about funding and accountability."
It can't be forgotten that Gavin Newsome is not a great guy, but I can't help but be entertained by the way he is trolling Trump and the reaction it's getting. But then, I remember how much fun it was when Fetterman was trolling during his campaign for his Senate seat, and look how that turned out.
RIP: "Loni Anderson, WKRP in Cincinnati Star, Dies at 79: She received two Emmy noms for being 'the smartest person in the room' on the CBS sitcom and tons of tabloid attention for her 1988-94 marriage to Burt Reynolds. [...] Anderson liked the concept of the sitcom but had a problem with her role, 'so I refused,' she explained in a 2020 interview. 'I went in and sat on my little soapbox and said, 'I don't want to play this part because she's just here to deliver messages and is window dressing.' Then Hugh said, 'Well, how would you do it?' … He said, "Let's make her look like Lana Turner and be the smartest person in the room."'" And Jennifer was perfect. I just loved her come-backs when Herb was trying to impress her, she really got the best lines.
"The Faux Intellectuals of Silicon Valley: There exists in Silicon Valley a particular species of intellectual fraud so brazen, so systematic, and so dangerous that it demands the kind of moral clarity that cuts through pretense like a blade through silk. We are witnessing the corruption of human thought itself—not by crude propagandists or obvious charlatans, but by a sophisticated ecosystem of oligarchs and their courtiers who have weaponized the very concept of expertise against the democratic discourse they claim to serve. At the apex stands Peter Thiel, whose genuine brilliance serves a moral emptiness so complete it takes your breath away. When asked by Ross Douthat whether the human race should survive, this man—this creature of extraordinary wealth and influence—paused to compute the variables. Not because he lacks intelligence, but because he possesses it without the slightest trace of love for the species that created the conditions making his intelligence possible."
"The Symbolism Survey: In 1963, a sixteen-year-old San Diego high school student named Bruce McAllister sent a four-question mimeographed survey to 150 well-known authors of literary, commercial, and science fiction. Did they consciously plant symbols in their work? he asked. Who noticed symbols appearing from their subconscious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbidden, created in the minds of their readers? When this happened, did the authors mind?"
We Five, "You Were On My Mind"
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