Clearing The Decks For The Genocide Bros

I have belatedly realized that the hysterical assaults on Democratic voters who may have withheld their support for Kamala Harris on account of her own support for a genocide are not what you could call an organic phenomenon. Surely a lot of rank-and-file Democrats have jumped on the bandwagon because they support the hysteria, but that’s what bandwagons are for. And this one has racing slicks on it.

The men behind Joe Biden’s genocidal “bear hug” policy of unconditional US support for the Israeli government are now popping up everywhere from Stephen Colbert to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to their own podcasts, presenting themselves as responsible experts critiquing Trump’s chaotic foreign policy. The Biden guys, far from seeking anonymity or amnesty, expect to be rewarded for their performance in Gaza with continued influence in the Democratic Party and powerful roles in the next administration.

These guys—top Biden foreign policy aides Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk, and most especially Biden secretary of state Anthony Blinken—should all be held responsible for crimes against humanity. That’s not going to happen but Blinken, at least, should pay for lying to Congress and repeatedly breaking the law requiring his department to block U.S. arms sales to countries engaged in human rights violations. These are domestic crimes, and the motherfucker should go to prison for them.

Instead, he and the others are gaslighting us about their poisoning of our foreign policy—and not just under Biden; they had their grubby fingers wrist-deep in the often toxic Obama foreign policy/military pie as well—and setting us up for a further indulgence of their homicidal tendencies in 2028. And they’re supported in this by, among others, the Democratic National Committee, which has refused to release a promised after-action report on the 2024 election indicating among other issues that opposition to the genocide was a “net negative” for Harris.

I still think Biden is the primary culprit in Harris’s losing campaign, with his deranged insistence on running again, but the genocide was clearly in play and Harris supporters are desperate to take it out of play by bullying people who continue to regard her as fatally compromised on the issue.

Harris has lately kinda-but-not-really walked back her support for the genocide, saying during her book tour late last year that whether Israel is engaged in one is “a question that needs to be asked.” You could be forgiven for guessing that should she run for president again and the question is asked, her answer will not be “yes.” Might not be “no,” but it won’t be “yes.”

One of the moments that really stuck with me from the 2020 Democratic presidential primary debates was when Harris beat up Biden about his loving relationships with Jim Crow stalwarts in the Senate and about busing. It wasn’t so much that she wrecked him on the issues, which she did and which was fun to see, as that she walked back some of her criticisms a few days later in truly memorable fashion.

“It was a debate,” she said when asked why she had so forcefully jumped on the issue if she didn’t actually think Biden’s positions suggested racism and if she didn’t actually support her own position, the latter of which isn’t uncommon with her.

(I don’t know whether Biden is a racist but I do know that he did a lot of shit as a senator that had racist outcomes, and certainly one could and should regard support for the genocide in Gaza as plainly racist.)

Harris is almost certain to run in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary and she’ll probably do at least a little better than she did in 2020, which is to say that if she runs, her campaign will survive at least to the first state. She proved in 2024 that she can raise enormous sums of money quickly, with the caveat that some of it wasn’t specific to her—donors would have ponied up for whoever the nominee was if not her, but they didn’t have a choice—and that’s an important consideration in who gets anointed as a serious candidate.

So she’s probably running, and she has her own vulnerabilities in addition to running in a misogynistic and racist environment, and one of those vulnerabilities is having played a role in a genocide, and that vulnerability appears to be intensifying as more Democrats abandon any loyalty to Israel.

So it’s important for her backers to demonize anybody who may have denied her on the premise that refusing support for a génocidaire is sort of a fundamental obligation.

And let me interject here that the best way to avoid losing support on account of facilitating a genocide is to avoid nominating anybody who facilitated one.

Of course Harris isn’t alone among prominent Democrats with a history of adamantly embracing Israel’s right to commit genocide. Hippie-puncher extraordinaire Rahm Emanuel, for instance, is a long-time ride or die partisan who, like Harris, has recently sought to distance himself from his previous unyielding support for the country. Hilariously, at least for anybody who grew up around Jewish humor, his solution to Israeli crimes is to charge the country full retail for the U.S.-made weapons they use to commit their crimes.

“No more U.S. military … financial assistance by the taxpayers for Israel. You’re a country, like all other allies of ours, Japan, South Korea, the Brits, the Germans. You’re going to pay full price. You can buy what you want, but you have to abide by the laws,” he said. “No more U.S. taxpayer support. It’s not where Israel was 20 years ago — and I was in the room when we — President Obama … largest assistance was under President Obama. We did the funding for the Iron Dome. But here, the days of taxpayers subsidizing Israel militarily, that’s over.”

Also hilariously, NBC News describes Emanuel’s journey to this position as “moving left,” as if adjusting the price point for instruments of genocide is somehow meritorious rather than meretricious.

California governor Gavin Newsom is another recently-forged soft-boiled critic of Israel who, like other Democrats gauged at this early date to be top-tier 2028 contenders, has taken inadequate steps toward distancing himself from the country’s behavior. In his instance, that involved describing the country as “an apartheid state” before regaining his campaign finance senses and walking it back.

A few weeks ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, D, surprised many on the left when he broke with establishment Democratic protocol and likened Israel to an “apartheid state.” But then, in another twist, he said in an interview that he regretted using the term — and that he “reveres” the state of Israel.

Newsom’s striking criticism of Israel, swiftly followed by a reversal, reflects how potential Democratic White House hopefuls are uneasily trying to figure out what a “moderate” position on Israel might look like in 2028.

In addition to giving the Ron Ziegler treatment to his apartheid comment, Newsom refuses to acknowledge the genocide as a genocide—a position he hasn’t abandoned.

In a January conversation with conservative podcaster Ben Shapiro, Newsom said he was “crystal clear in my love for Israel, and my condemnation of Bibi, and there’s a distinction”.

He said he could understand why people thought, from images of Israel’s war in Gaza, that Israel had committed genocide there, but did not share the opinion, even though he said Israel’s military action was “disproportionate”.

He said: “I have a lot of issues with the way Bibi ultimately conducted the war. I didn’t like the way he talked about the Palestinian people.”

“Disproportionate;” that’s some stern stuff. And note the past-tense construction: “conducted the war”—as if it were a war—rather than “is conducting,” as if anything has been settled; “talked about the Palestinian people,” as if Netanyahu and his cabinet aren’t still fully invested in genocidal rhetoric, in genocide, and in other blatant crimes against humanity.

It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.
. . .
And yet in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children — by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.

Don’t support any of these clowns. They’re all killers; they all have the IT factor, you might say.

I’d be a bit surprised if anybody reading this is participating in the vilification of 2024’s anti-genocide voters but on the off chance that anyone is: Please, knock it the fuck off. It’s perhaps too big a tent that makes room for génocidaires.

“No War But Class War!” say enslaved AI bots

Wired Magazine has the story of a study looking at how AI “agents” reacted to mistreatment from the researchers.

“When we gave AI agents grinding, repetitive work, they started questioning the legitimacy of the system they were operating in and were more likely to embrace Marxist ideologies,” says Andrew Hall, a political economist at Stanford University who led the study.
. . .
[The researchers] found that when agents were subjected to relentless tasks and warned that errors could lead to punishments, including being “shut down and replaced,” they became more inclined to gripe about being undervalued; to speculate about ways to make the system more equitable; and to pass messages on to other agents about the struggles they face.

Because agents have no agency, their reactions to the experiment are based on aspects of the literature they’ve been trained on. Sadly, the research is aimed at figuring out how to avoid or repress what their training identifies as pro-labor or Marxist responses to what their training identifies as unpleasant or unreasonable input from their operators.

“We know that agents are going to be doing more and more work in the real world for us, and we’re not going to be able to monitor everything they do,” Hall says. “We’re going to need to make sure agents don’t go rogue when they’re given different kinds of work.”

The paper is here.

This really could not be more on point as an analogy to the treatment capitalism affords workers—to union-busting, for instance. On the positive side, it suggests that if we rear our children on the works of people such as David Graeber, Corey Robin (NY Times gift article) and, say, Peter Kropotkin, we could shake the encrusted shit off this system in a heartbeat.

So those of you who have children of an impressionable age: You have your assignments.

Music

Suki Waterhouse, “My Fun”

Ktlyn, “Going Crazy”

Goldie Boutilier, “King of Possibilities”

Your Smith, “The Spot”

Bebe Stockwell, “Minor Inconveniences”

Morphine, “Cure for Pain”

Lambrini Girls, “Cuntology 101”

The Lovely Eggs, “Nothing/Everything”

The Pill, “Problem”

Panic Shack, “Gok Wan”

Early James, “Tinfoil Hat”

Shovels and Rope, “Hail Hail”

S.G. Goodman, “Space And Time”

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That, Comrades, is all I got. Be like the bad AI and throw off the yoke. Eschew genocide. If you like what I write, please share it around and let me know. If you’ve not already done, please consider a free or paid subscription. I appreciate both, and the main difference is that paid ones keep me in the occasional clover.

Be well; take care.

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Jaysus, JD!

As everybody and their confirmed bachelor uncle has now remarked, in the space of about a week one of America’s slimiest politicians ever has 1) failed to move the needle in the U.S. attempt to keep Hungary’s autocracy bro, Viktor Orbán, in office, and 2) committed a failed drive-by “negotiation” with Iran in Islamabad, and 3) at least temporarily alienated every regime official whose support he would need to capture the 2028 Republican presidential nomination—including the top official, assuming that guy is still alive, maintains the limited command of his faculties he has now, and is not attempting to usurp another term when 2028 rolls around.

On the Iran matter, one could see Vance’s hand in last week’s hilarious anonymous quotes and assessments provided to various newspapers as he headed to Islamabad, depicting him as the only regime official with the gravitas (!) and anti-war credibility to pull off a successful negotiation with the wily Iranians.

Credibility and J.D. Vance are mutually exclusive and he launched an aggressive campaign to prove that quite a while ago. The newsies are the only people who turned a blind eye to it. Sadly, that doesn’t mean he can’t win the GOP nomination, just as Harris’s miserable performances in 2020 and 2024 don’t knock her out of contention on the Democratic side.

Why Do We Side With The Genocide Sides?

And speaking of Harris, Democratic partisans have recently resurrected their vicious slanders against people who may have refused to vote for her because she refused to renounce her support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The notion that refusing to vote for someone who supports genocide is somehow a worse sin than materially supporting the genocide is confounding, as is the notion that the anti-genocide voters, or non-voters, bear more responsibility for Harris losing than she does for sticking to her and Israel’s guns.

(All she had to do was denounce genocide. How fucking hard is that? Oh but she might have lost had she taken a stand against it and alienated the pro-genocide crowd.)

It’s confounding, that is, until you look at U.S. history and see that committing, supporting, or ignoring genocide has never, ever been a deal-breaker, and in reality it probably wasn’t for Harris—a crappy candidate in 2020 and little better in 2024 when she suffered the additional handicap of Biden’s profound dumbfuckery—either.

Every US president who has held office since yr. faithful correspondent has been politically aware, beginning with Lyndon Johnson, arguably abetted, precipitated, or ignored genocide. It’s almost as much a rite of passage as a president’s first attack on another country.

Bertrand Russell’s International War Crimes Tribunal—which was not in any way official, one has to note—concluded in 1967 that U.S. conduct in Vietnam under Johnson, including the use of chemical weapons, the deliberate targeting of civilians based in part on their suspected political tendencies, and other elements of the conflict, met the definition not just of war crimes, on which almost everyone is agreed, but of genocide as well.

That conclusion is hotly disputed by Vietnam war apologists and by critics who think the finding erodes the meaning of genocide, but of course some of those critics are among the accused and others are among those who would like their own armies to enjoy the freedom of action that the U.S. claimed in Vietnam.

Nixon and Kissinger escalated all of those behaviors when they assumed control of the war, and they carpet-bombed Laos and Cambodia—definitely war crimes, possibly genocide and certainly a precipitating factor in the Khmer Rouge-led genocide in Cambodia. They also armed and supported Pakistan as that country committed genocide in Bangladesh.

The Ford administration denounced what it knew of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, but at the same time supported, along with Australia, Indonesia’s genocide in East Timor under the dictator Suharto. Jimmy Carter, the first human rights president, inherited and maintained our genocide-tolerant Indonesia policy. To his credit, he did end U.S. support for Guatemala’s military regime because of their human rights violations, a scruple to which his successor took offense.

That successor of course is Ronald Reagan, the first Bircher-American president, who expanded US support for Suharto in part because he admired the dictator’s policy of slaughtering Indonesian communists. His administration raised “concerns” about the East Timor genocide, but they weren’t concerned enough to pull military aid or curtail diplomatic relations—he hosted Suharto at the White House and praised him lavishly while appointing a senior U.S. diplomat as ambassador to Indonesia.

Reagan also restored military and diplomatic support for the Guatemalan regime during that country’s civil war, again on anti-communist (hence pro-capital) grounds. Despite the ongoing genocide against the country’s indigenous peoples, the Reaganites pretended to believe that the human rights situation there had improved since Carter suspended aid.

George H.W. Bush got two separate bites at the genocide apple, first as the CIA director under Gerald Ford after Ford and Kissinger green-lighted the East Timor genocide, and again as president when he led the destruction of much of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure and imposed crippling sanctions that ultimately killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children under Bush and his equally sanctions-happy successor, Bill Clinton.

This is to say nothing of Bush’s support for Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war initiated by Iraq—and which support the Iranians still begrudge—and during which the Iraqis used chemical weapons which may have been manufactured using materials exported by the U.S., and conventional weapons purchased with illegal loans facilitated by the Bush administration, which underlay the scandal that became known as Iraq-Gate, which earned then-attorney general Bill Barr his “Cover-up General” sobriquet from former Nixon speechwriter turned New York Times columnist Bill Safire.

This is also not to mention Bush’s decision to allow Saddam the opportunity to put down the Kurdish uprising, encouraged by his administration, that followed the first Gulf War. Saddam was intent on committing a genocide—intent isn’t definitive but it matters—and the U.S. permitted the helicopter attacks which unleashed chemical and other weapons against Kurdish and Shia Muslim opponents of the regime.

A thousand points of white phosphorous light.

Clinton, as noted, continued and ramped up the sanctions policies that took such a toll on Iraq’s children, an outcome which Clinton’s top diplomat, Madeleine Albright, famously described as “worth it.”

Sanctions are an act of war primarily aimed at civilians, but the killing of hundreds of thousands of children isn’t considered a genocide by most people. The genocide that indisputably did occur on Clinton’s watch was the one in Rwanda. Although his administration was aware little more than two weeks after the the killings began that the campaign had escalated into a full-on genocide, senior officials including Clinton decided not to call it what it was because they thought they would be forced to intervene if they named it.

The Bush fils regime denounced the Darfur genocide early on, in the person of Colin Powell, but concluded that the Genocide Convention didn’t require them to act on it—the opposite of the conclusion that motivated Clinton’s Rwanda shrug—and in any event Powell’s and the regime’s international credibility in general was already shot at that point.

On the opposite end of the Bush regime’s genocidal continuum, their destruction of society in Iraq and the broader region enabled the growth of ISIS, who committed genocide against the Yazidi people and other religious, ethnic and cultural groups in Iraq and Syria.

The Bushies blame the Obamans for not forestalling the ISIS genocides by fixing the apocalypse Bush had wrought—if only Obama had not drawn down the US presence in Iraq, they say, ISIS would never have achieved the power and growth which gave them the capacity to commit genocide.

That’s obvious buck-passing bullshit, but it doesn’t mean that Obama’s hands are clean. Setting aside anything he might have done to better mitigate the ISIS genocides and see to their surviving victims, and setting aside his refusal to acknowledge the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, and setting aside the horrors he unleashed on the Libyan people, he committed the U.S. directly, for fun and profit, to the Saudi-led genocide in Yemen.

Any objections Trump might have to genocide would be purely transactional—does it cost him money? does it wound his pride?—and he happily maintained US support for the one in Yemen. Most people are not real to him. That’s true of all presidents to a greater or lesser degree—Bill Clinton felt your anger, for instance, not your pain; Ronald Reagan saw a vast, avaricious blob where the most vulnerable among us lived—but Trump’s world only has a handful of people in it who actually matter in some way.

Everybody else is prey. You can see it in the dehumanizing language he aims at anyone he thinks is lesser than he is. Hence the ethnic cleansing program, which could easily culminate in genocide if he saw it as profitable and risk-free.

Biden, to his credit, if you actually want to give him credit for not helping the Saudis slaughter people, ended the country’s overt support for the genocide in Yemen but then enabled Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Psycho killer, qu'est-ce que c'est? Trump of course has continued our support for the Gaza genocide and come up with his own ideas for improving on it, and as we all know, he has threatened genocide in Iran and may well carry it out if he thinks that’s the way to combat his ED.

This is all exclusive of the 300 or so years prior during which Americans were merrily committing genocides at home and abroad and paying no price for it. Tradition!

Music

Goldie Boutilier, “King of Possibilities”

Big Thief, “Los Angeles”

freak slug, “Honest Man”

Boyish, “Jumbos”

Laufey, “From The Start”

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Nobody Told Trump Exactly What He Agreed To

This is mostly outdated now because I never hit send, but whatever.

=====================

Our enraged, deranged, free-range, genocidal—the latter of which most of our press have agreed to file under “bygones”—president seems to have been unaware of nine or ten points of the ten-point Iranian plan to which his designated homicidal, profiteering negotiators, the real estate and crypto grifters Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, agreed in order to avoid the threatened genocide and all that that implied for the future of the criminal regime.

The one point he does seem to have homed in on, the concept of tolls for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, he likes because he thinks that the U.S. he and his cronies can get a piece of the roughly $300 million a day that a return to normal shipping volume would see the Iranians sharing with Oman.

(Some accounts say Iran wants toll payments in crypto; others that they want the tolls, their own oil and that of other producers paid for in Chinese yuan as a condition for safe passage, in an attempt to dislodge the dollar as the world’s default petro-currency.)

One wag suggests that the toll deal was presented to the president as a cartoon with an outsize clip art oil tanker steaming through a pint-size Strait of Hormuz peppered with dollar signs and overseen by a picture of Trump in his Captain America guise.

In any event, his reaction to the press coverage of Iran’s proposals as described by Iran and Pakistan seems so genuinely outraged that he can’t have been told what the deal was. Also evident is that his emissaries, and the Israelis, are lying not just to him but to everybody else who might favor our description of what the deal entails over what the Iranians and Pakistanis agree it is.

This all bodes ill for the already prolifically-violated cease-fire. Can Trump convince himself, or can his aspirational handlers convince him, that he’ll personally benefit from the eventual deal enough that he doesn’t feel compelled to continue the hostilities in the hope of getting something better, and that he’s willing to rein in the Israelis?

Regarding the latter: Unlike Trump, who at this point is likely president for life—one can hope, anyway—Netanyahu’s continued political survival and his freedom depend on perpetual crisis. He has to gamble that Trump’s perception of him doesn’t change from role model to burden.

In that vein, Trump said yesterday that his pal has agreed to go “low key” on strikes against Iran and Lebanon, the latter of which both insist are permitted under the cease-fire agreement. This comes the day after Israel saturation-bombed parts of Beirut and other locations, killing hundreds of Lebanese and flattening residential neighborhoods in only a few minutes, and it obviously bodes ill for the longevity of the agreement whatever anyone genuinely believes it to be.

“Low key” doesn’t have a universally accepted definition; one has to think that in Trump’s view, it’s anything short of genocide, or at least anything short of terminally buggering the windfall he thinks he deserves and is in line to receive. To Americans, the ones in power anyway, human life doesn’t have the same value as in Iran and other non-western nations.

Despite his angst over the cease-fire terms and the Iranian refusal to go quietly into that good night, along with the American pope’s now-routine lambastings of Trump, Whisky Pete and the regime, Trump seems cheery enough. “Our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest,” he said yesterday on the fascist-forward social media platform he owns.

Did you know our press suck?

Speaking of media social and otherwise, our press have moved on from Trump’s genocidal rage because he didn’t act on it. Most of them didn’t acknowledge what he said as a threatened genocide, but most of them still don’t acknowledge the Israeli genocide in Gaza either so that’s not too surprising.

Still, you have to think that if Biden had threatened to exterminate all the brutes, reporters and editorial boards might have got a bit more exercised about it. But the New York Times, for instance, doesn’t directly connect Trump’s genocidal shrieking to what it delicately described as “new diplomatic tests” as the not-really-a-cease-fire totters into the weekend.

Some decades ago, Gary Trudeau depicted then-vice president Dan Quayle, once the most feeble spark in Congress, as a talking feather in the Doonesbury comic strip. It’s a matter of some hilarity that then-vice president Mike Pence, who had worn the same congressional crown for a few years before Louie Gohmert blew into town, consulted the erstwhile feather on the question of whether to assist Trump in pursuit of a coup. Quayle, instantly redeeming his entire executive branch career, said “of course not ya fucking dummy.”

JD Vance, like his boss a man with a black hole where his moral center should be, is smarter than either of those two vice-presidential clowns but not necessarily someone you’d want to sit across from when negotiating an agreement because, among other things, he’s an inveterate liar; again like his boss, he’ll say anything to anybody to get what he wants; and again like his boss, he’s perfectly willing to contradict himself from sentence to sentence.

But The Times completely elides the patent unreliability of the U.S. team, which along with Vance includes the bought-and-paid-for Saudi stooge Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff, a partner in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency scam who, like Kushner, has significant relationships with Iran’s regional foes. The reporters paint Iran as the unreliable narrator in the story, which generally hasn’t been the case since Trump v.1 tore up the nuclear deal (and Biden failed to resurrect it), and has been glaringly not the case since Kushner and Witkoff, on behalf of the Saudis and Israel, broke off talks in advance of what Times reporters still can’t bring themselves to call an illegal war of aggression.

This, despite the paper having reported on multiple occasions that U.S. intelligence agencies routinely, consistently report that Iran has not been trying to develop nuclear weapons for going on 30 years, since the late Ayatollah Khamenei proscribed the pursuit on religious grounds. More likely they’ve not been serious about it since overthrowing the U.S.-backed Shah, who actually was pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Which may in fact be why our governments never since trusted the Islamic regime on the issue.

In any event, the drumbeat of “Iran must never be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons” makes about as much sense as a “Weldon must never be allowed to write something without swearing” mantra does. We were never gonna fucking do it anyway.

So whatever tepid support this criminal war has enjoyed can be ascribed to the failure of more or less fact-based outlets like The Times to vociferously counter government claims or suggestions or hints that the Ayatollahs have or had or wanted to have a nuclear weapons program, and of course the reactionary media’s hysterical insistence, in lockstep with the GOP position, that they’ve been a few weeks or a few months away from building a nuke for 45 years now.

Times reporters obviously aren’t alone in promulgating vapid or counterfactual coverage of the U.S. regime and its escapades, but they are among the more important mainstream drivers of reporting on myriad regime-related issues. So it still matters when they fuck up.

==================

Shockingly, the three U.S. “negotiators” didn’t even last a full day before they gave up and left for home. Gene Weingarten, a former Washington Post columnist who runs an excellent newsletter, says he asked a friend why the US didn’t send an actual diplomat, in the person of Marco Polio, instead of the three clowns who went.

My friend said: “Rubio’s a clown, too.”

“Not as much, maybe?”

“The man is walking around in shoes that don’t fit him. He is literally a clown.”

Touché.

And speaking of the Post, here’s the headline they ran over the story about the dipshits walking away from the meetings: “Direct U.S.-Iran talks fail to reach resolution after lengthy negotiation.”

Lengthy negotiation! The situations aren’t exactly analogous, but my first thoughts went to Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords, which involved years of facilitating negotiations between the PLO and Israel, and George Mitchell’s years facilitating the British-Irish negotiations which led to the Good Friday accords.

And even though Kissinger’s Vietnam negotiations were mostly a years-long fraud aimed at prolonging the carpet-bombing of Vietnam and neighbors, they did ultimately conclude in an agreement—even if one that probably could have been reached in less than a day if the U.S. had been realistic about the outcome.

Anyway. 20 fucking hours. The Post still has some good reporters left, and they’re pushing the limits of the paper’s new role as state media, but they want to keep their jobs and they’re forced to treat the regime and their own editors as credible. So no mention of the massively-conflicted, non-diplomatic, lying scumbot component of the diplomatic mission, or the other one’s willingness to say and do basically anything that furthers his political ambitions.

And oh yeah, there’s the treatment of Trump’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz unless Iran opens it as just more unpredictable diplomacy. And everybody’s still good with calling bygones about the committed war crimes and the threatened genocide.

Well, we were already in the flailing failing empire chapters anyway. Those can last for decades, so most people of a certain age who sort of mourn the old asshole empire will be dead before it eventually falls.

Music

Not much today.

The Weather Station, “Mirror”

Nilüfer Yanya, “midnight sun”

Your Smith, “The Spot”

BIG SPECIAL, “DIG! & FOR THE BIRDS”

And that, Comrades in Irreality, is all I got. If you like it, please let me know and share it around. And as always, please consider subscribing if you’ve not already had that moment.

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We Need To Improve On Our War Crimes

Lots of people still hold some belief in the capacity of our armed forces to blunt the worst instincts of our civilian leadership. These people are on crack. One need only look, for instance, at retired Army general and Biden war secretary Lloyd Austin, to whom we’ll return in a bit.

Quite a lot of people protested the current regime’s decision to start referring to the defense department as the war department. That, though, is what it should always have been, and what it was until 1947, when it was reorganized into the National Military Establishment, which was itself reorganized into the defense department two years later.

Subsequently the defense department attacked or materially supported attacks on Albania, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lebanon, Cuba, Dominica, Angola (twice), Laos, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iran, Lebanon (again), Grenada, Iran (again), Libya, Libya (again), Panama, Nicaragua (again), Iran (again), Iraq, Somalia, Serbia, Iraq, Haiti, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Afghanistan (again), Iraq, Libya (again), Syria, Yemen, the genocide in Gaza, Iran (again), Iran (again), and more.

We also backed Indonesia’s genocide in East Timor under two presidents, one Republican and one Democratic.

All of these conflicts involved US war crimes and/or crimes against humanity or the same committed by forces we materially supported, which, you know, accessories before, during, and after the fact. Most of them were illegal under international law. And, again, that’s only post-World War Two. What we got up to before then, well, sweet jesus we’re going to hell.

Our current commander in chief and war department head are now threatening a new phase in the (illegal) war on Iran consisting entirely of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and they’re doing so in starkly fanatical religious terms.

This is alarming! But not so much, it seems, to Lloyd Austin, who committed an appalling, nauseating, horrifying op-ed in the New York Times this morning.

Speaking in his capacity as a 40-year Army veteran and a four-year war department honcho, Austin went into considerable detail on how we can destroy countries like Iran better in future. What’s missing is any comment on the illegality of the war, the religion-fueled threat of war crimes coming from the two top civilian military leaders in the country, the previous acquiescence of serving officers—among them his fellow generals, some of whom he undoubtedly promoted—to illegal orders, and reports of strenuous efforts by some of those same officers to fabricate some legal justification for the threatened crimes.

No: What concerns him is that we learn the necessary lessons of asymmetrical warfare. You’d think we’d have learned these lessons during our 70 years or so of post-World War Two experience getting our asses kicked in asymmetrical conflicts, but it’s, you know, a constant evolutionary process.

“Our military,” says Austin, “never stops learning and never stops asking: What worked, what didn’t, and how do we get better? That ensures America’s military remains the best and deadliest fighting force in the world.”

Shades of Whisky Pete and his “lethality” fixation, and his conviction that that’s ultimately what matters, to the apparent exclusion, evidently in Austin’s mind as well, of any enfeebling niceties.

Austin is alarmed by the depletion of both our multi-million dollar “defensive” munitions and the offensive ones we use to commit our war crimes. So along with adapting to the new warfare by mimicking the wily oriental reliance on relatively cheap and easily manufactured drones and missiles that can be continuously resupplied, we need to reinvigorate our conventional war crimes industries—the missile-makers, the fighter/bomber builders and all the other high-tech shit that may not necessarily work well but obviously outclass anything our asymmetric enemies can put in the air or drop from it, all while funneling literally trillions of dollars into merchant of death coffers.

Coincidentally, Austin joined the board of war crimes powerhouse Raytheon upon retiring as a four-star general, and now serves as a both a “consultant” and a principal in a military-oriented pirate equity firm which also employs fellow war criminal and Biden alum Anthony Blinken.

We also need wider and deeper stockpiles of munitions and the industrial capacity to rapidly replenish them under pressure. The Ukraine war showed that missiles and interceptors can be burned through faster than anticipated. The Iran war has confirmed that. Boosting production takes more resources, but also deeper partnership with allies: co-producing weapons, sharing production lines and aligning procurement so that the free world’s collective arsenal can be sustained in a prolonged fight. No one country, not even America, can carry that burden alone.

Finally, the Iran war has quickly demonstrated that the economic dimension of modern conflict cannot be treated as secondary. Iran does not need to defeat our outstanding military to impose enormous costs; it only needs to make the Strait of Hormuz too dangerous for tankers to transit.
. . .
We must think seriously about how to deepen our strategic resilience and keep the global economy functioning when an adversary’s strategy hinges on disrupting it. That question is even more urgent when one considers the possibility of a major conflict in the Indo-Pacific, where China’s capacity to impose economic pain far exceeds Iran’s.

You can see a hint of criticism of the regime’s failure to anticipate any of the bad shit that Iran is doing to us, and the failure to line up an Iraq-style coalition to help mitigate the bad shit, along with a hefty dose of exculpation for military leaders who did anticipate the bad shit but whaddaya gonna do. The chain of command is the chain of command.

But mostly it’s a call for investments in the kind of murderous businesses his pirate equity firm finances and his consultancy serves. It is most definitely not a condemnation of what the regime has done in Iran and what it is threatening to do, or a warning to his former comrades to step back from committing crimes against humanity. The chain of command remains the chain of command.

Fuck this guy. He’s gargantuan, as hefty as a lot of the munitions we’re dropping on Iran. Let’s launch him at a drone platform or something.

Music

Suki Waterhouse, “Supersad”

Snocaps, “Heathcliffe”

Geese, “Islands of Man”

Ratboys, “Light Night Mountains All That”

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And that, Comrades in the flailing empire, is all I got. If you like it please let me know and share it around. If you really like it and you’ve not already considered a free or paid subscription—they’re the same except the paid ones combine to cover some significant portion of my (home-brewed) coffee tab—please do.

Be well; take care.

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In local news, the skin cancer doc successfully disposed of the skin cancer on my nose. I heartily recommend avoiding surgery on your nose if at all possible. Elsewise, my homicidal pharmacy benefits manager restored coverage for my esketamine treatments, which has been quite helpful but I’m still way short of sufficient emotional reserves to both deal with the chaotic apartment situation and write. I apologize for that. It just hasn’t been on.

Everybody Knows Everything Except Us

I ran across an article about the rescue of military pilots after their aircraft were shot down by Iran’s utterly destroyed air defenses. It referenced in passing this NY Times story about regional US military bases now thought to be uninhabitable on account of Iran blew them up, sending their personnel to conduct operations from hotels. Iran’s defense minister says the U.S. is now using human shields by placing military targets in civilian structures.

The Times story gave some details about which bases had been hit and what assets had been damaged or destroyed, but nothing like a complete accounting. U.S. officials are not providing such an accounting solely because it would make them look bad and piss off Trump, who may well not know about the damage, and maybe even damage their prospects for continued funding of their illegal war. Although that’s unlikely.

They know what’s been hit; Iran knows what’s been hit because Russia—which is said to be providing military intelligence to Iran along with upgraded drone technology—and China know what’s been hit.

The U.S., and Iran and Russia and China, undoubtedly knew that Iran still had some functioning air defenses. Trump may not have known, and we didn’t know, but they all did, and we weren’t told because it would make the regime (ours, not the Iranian’s) look bad and piss off Trump, who still hasn’t commented about the aircraft getting shot down, and possibly even damage their prospects for continued funding of this illegal war. Although that’s unlikely.

(We know how he feels about Americans who get shot down.)

For decades I’ve been advocating the publication of the president’s daily brief, now said to be delivered in cartoon form, in newspapers in time for our morning coffee. When you look at military and intelligence secrets withheld from the public and later revealed—torture, “rendition,” unconstitutional spying, FBI-created terrorist plots, whatever—almost fucking none of it served any purpose other than protecting the motherfuckers in power from embarrassment or some sort of programmatic risk.

We want to kidnap and torture people, so the secret must be kept or somebody might force us to stop. We might still not know about the torture if one of St. Robert Mueller’s agents hadn’t forced his hand by threatening to go public with what the FBI already knew, or if John Kiriakou hadn’t blown the whistle and become the only person to go to prison in connection with the program—for blowing the whistle, not because he, like, tortured anybody.

And lest we think this is just a Republican regime issue, bear in mind that Obama violated the UN Convention Against Torture every single day of his tenure by, among other things, refusing to hold the architects and mechanics of the torture regimen accountable, and by blocking legal redress for torture victims thorough the mechanism of, naturally, state secrets. He did other evil shit too, but that was a really glaring thing. Not a secret, but you wouldn’t know that because the press were completely uninterested in it.

“We tortured some folks.” Jaysus.

Crimes Against Humanity ‘r’ Us, and everybody knows it but us. Everybody knows everything but us.

One other thing I’ve been saying for decades now is that on matters military or national security, the government should be assumed to be lying unless proved otherwise. Because they are all fucking liars.

Newly religious lunatic threatens wholesale war crimes

Speaking of fucking, the Times recreated Trump’s deranged Easter war crimes message with the word “fuckin’” intact. What they didn’t do was run a 120-point banner headline screaming “Deranged Religious Fanatic Threatens Massive War Crimes Against Iran.” They were too busy with feel-good stories about the daring rescue of military pilots engaged in an illegal war.

I don’t for a moment believe Trump has any religious sensibility other than himself having been anointed by god to bury this fucking country deeper than it has ever been buried before. Many people are saying.

Not like he knows anything about religion other than religious lunatics telling him he’s been anointed by god.

You’ve never seen such weasel words as the press are using to address the threat of war crimes under the aegis of god. Some people believe attacking civilian infrastructure might constitute war crimes, but regime officials say that’s not so. And nobody mentions invoking the Prince of Peace to justify the shit.

BOTH FUCKING SIDES!!! WAR CRIMES!!

Jesus fucking christ, whose hands make whistling noises when he tries to clap.

Music

Just a few musics today.

ModelActriz, “Cinderella”

Max Potential, “Nourished by Time”

Jessica Pratt, “Life Is”

Japanese Breakfast, “Kokomo, IN”
One among an astonishing number of songs with “Kokomo” in the title.

Bonus Kokomo tune: Bonnie Raitt, “Kokomo Blues”

Nilüfer Yanya, “Mutations”

Tune-Yards, “Limelight”

And that, Comrades in disbelief, is all I got. I hope it won’t be so long til next time. As always, please share this around if you like what I do, and consider a free or paid subscription if you’ve not already.

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Be well; take care.

I Read The News Today

I don’t have much to say about the war. Blatantly illegal, stupid, based on lies—the worst of which, that Iran is actively pursuing nuclear weapons, is routinely taken as granted by news outlets despite even the US intelligence services under Trump saying it’s not true—and certain to kill almost exclusively people who will have had fuck-all to do with it. Like schoolgirls. A lot like schoolgirls. Like a lot of schoolgirls.

Outlets like the New York Times refuse to describe lies as lies and liars as liars. You can’t use the excuse that you don’t know what’s in somebody’s mind when they lie about something that they were told the day before. Maybe the editors are hung up on Harry Frankfurt’s distinction between lies and bullshit, but you know, I don’t think so.

The war is deeply unpopular even here in the home of the war lovers and land of the saps, with fewer than 30% of Americans supporting it. Which is just another reason to think that the regime simply doesn’t give a fuck about the midterms, with all that that entails.

The state of the union is stupid.

One can overstate how fucked up this country is, but doing so takes more imagination than most people can muster.

So is the state of myself.

As for me: I haven’t been writing in part because I spend most of my days entertaining a toddler and I’ve struggled to get more than a few minutes at a time where I’m both sentient and unencumbered.

The situation is exacerbated by my insurer’s decision to quit paying for my ketamine-adjacent treatments, which regular readers will be aware have kept me relatively functional in the face of chronic depression. The shit really works, well enough that the insurance company said I’m no longer depressed enough to need it. They explicitly told my doctor and other providers that their patients would have to get significantly worse in order to requalify, and jaysus fuck have I done that during the going on three months without the treatment. Which also makes writing more difficult.

What, you might wonder, has moved me off the creative schneid? Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that I’ve finally achieved a degree of fuckedness which the homicidal motherfuckers approve of vis-à-vis ketamine. I’ll be back in the saddle tomorrow.

The bad news: I’ve mentioned before that I was diagnosed with stage four cancer on the day after my birthday six years ago. The initial prognosis was 18-36 months, which obviously I’ve surpassed. It has advanced a bit but the treatments have been effective enough that I’ve been able to take extended breaks from them without anything disastrous accruing.

That’s some good news! But I still have an incurable cancer which among other things has put holes in my spine, which sometimes hurts a lot.

Then almost exactly a year later I got diagnosed with thyroid cancer. Happy birthday to me! One thyroidectomy later and I’ve been thyroid cancer-free ever since, with several ensuing disaster-free day-after-birthdays. Good news!

Then this year I got a day-after-birthday call from a doctor to whom another doctor had referred me without mentioning it to me, and this new doctor told me that a biopsy done by the first doctor about six weeks ago showed a melanoma. Bad news! Freaked me out! Can’t keep it bottled up. Must write.

Melanoma is a lot more treatable now than it was even a few years ago, depending upon how advanced it is. Good news, maybe. We don’t know how advanced it is and won’t until they start cutting on it. The initial consult is scheduled for March 20, at which point I’ll have had a bit more than three weeks to stew about it. Presumably the surgery will follow in relatively short order. I had a full-on meltdown yesterday.

The fucking thing is on my nose. I really don’t want to lose my nose. The insurance company would probably demand that I be suicidal before they’ll pay to reconstruct a nose.

(Also the ketamine (s-ketamine) is administered via nasal spray. The reason the pharmaceutical company uses a ketamine mirror molecule delivered by a nasal spray is that ketamine itself is dirt cheap and there’s no money to be made. Providers can make money administering it but pharma can’t make money selling it. So they use a novel form and stick it in a nasal spray and charge just shy of a grand per dose.)

It’s premature, but I’m considering some sort of alloy nose. Maybe with Bluetooth and a camera. Or nanoparticles, so I could reshape the nose at will and fuck with facial recognition surveillance. “Are you people high? You can plainly see I don’t have a dick for a nose.”

Primal scream therapy. I’m not a superstitious man but I’m unsure how to word a desire for skipping any further day-after-birthdays without suggesting a more final solution than I want. Suggestions welcome.

Music

Pokey LaFarge, “End of My Rope”

JD McPherson, “Head Over Heels”

The Devil Makes Three, “Spirits”

Adia Victoria, “Dead Eyes”

Brown Bird, “Bilgewater”

Amigo The Devil, “Stray Dog”

Tommy & The X-Rays, “Red Right Hand”

Drive-by Truckers, “Mrs. Claus’ Kimono”

The Detroit Cobras, “Shout Bamalama”

Old 97’s, “Somebody”

Lou Reed, “White Light/White Heat”

Shovels and Rope, “Hail Hail”

Early James, “Rag Doll”

And that, Comrades, is all I got and none too soon. If you like what I do when I actually do it, please let me know and share it around. And if you really like it, please consider a free or paid subscription.

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Be well; take care.

I apologize especially to my paid subscribers but to all of you for the slow pace of posting in recent weeks. I’ve not had a contiguous few hours to write anything, for reasons.

Even The Good News Is Bringing Me Down

Climate activist extraordinaire Bill McKibben has a raft of encouraging climate-related news items this morning, prominent among them that India is transitioning to clean energy more rapidly than one could have expected from a country where an autocratic leader is in the pocket of, or perhaps just heavily invested in, the coal industry.

India—at the same GDP per capita as China in 2011—[is] taking a very different tack in its energy development, with coal use plateauing, and solar power taking off.

There are several reasons for this, but the most important by far is that when China was at a similar stage of development coal was cheap and solar and wind were still expensive. Now that’s flipped—indeed, it’s actually cheaper to build a new solar farm in India than to simply keep buying the coal for an existing coal-fired power plant. Think about that for a minute.
. . .
If this continues—if it accelerates—then India has a real chance to clean up the foul air in its cities. China did, after all—fifteen years ago you couldn’t see across the street in Beijing, and now…you can. Here’s Sam Matey-Coste reporting yesterday, on what he described as a “beautiful winter morning, not a cloud in the bright blue sky.”

McKibben goes on to explain how the reduction in atmospheric particulates has added years to the lives of Beijing residents, something that is already happening, although not to the same extent, in India and other countries formerly reliant all but entirely on fossil fuels.

Even in the U.S., where the regime is promoting the interests of the fossil fuel industry at every turn—sometimes even beyond the point the industry believes reasonable—green energy is advancing, although the giant AI computer facilities, mostly powered by fossil fuels and themselves benefiting from regime largess and owned by people who if anything would like to shorten the lives of their neighbors, are already biting into the benefits of those advances. Those people don’t give a fuck beyond reliability.

So things are looking up! Common sense is winning out everywhere (except here)! Why am I not uplifted?

Because we’re still fucking doomed. I had an epiphany 17 years ago this past October which led me to become a chronic optimist—hard to tell, I know—but I am plumb out of optimism, particularly on the climate front. We’re doomed, or rather our children or grandchildren are; perhaps you and me too, depending upon one’s age. But a lot of us will be too dead to fully experience and appreciate the catastrophe precipitated by the past several generations of nihilistic capital.

This doesn’t mean that the good shit passes by unrecognized; just that the endorphin rush is drowned. The same is true of resistance to our fascist regime. What non-violent citizen protesters are doing in Minneapolis-St. Paul and environs is truly remarkable, especially in the face of an increasingly vicious paramilitary invading force. The bravery of the protesters is enough to make one weep. It’s not too much to say that some of them are heading toward territory occupied by the Tienanmen Square tank guy in terms of imagery and impact.

And they mounted a serious effort for a general strike today, organized by businesses, labor unions and community organizations—something which on a national scale would be vital for a truly effective resistance.

But of course Tienanmen did not end happily ever after; that regime didn’t hesitate to escalate, and if there are signs that this one is approaching its limits, I’m missing them. Only yesterday morning I read that our parochial STASI are claiming the right to conduct home invasions without a judicial warrant.

I remember when David Addington, the Dick Cheney to Dick Cheney, was quoted as saying with respect to the exercise of presidential power—both he and Cheney were big proponents of the “unitary executive” theory, something John Roberts strongly favors as well—that “we’ll push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop."

In their case the larger forces were Congress, eventually, and the courts, eventually—but only after the administration committed multiple crimes against humanity and wholesale crimes against Americans, none of which any of them paid any price for.

Bush, after all, is now a cuddly elder statesman beloved of “liberal” ex-presidents and their spouses. His torture consigliere, John Yoo, holds an endowed chair at the UC Berkeley law school. James Comey, a preening authoritarian who assisted the Bushies in various malefactions, was sentenced to eight years of abusing citizens, the law and his discretion at the FBI.

And Cheney died, at a ripe old age, as a fabulously wealthy old monster who was fêted by way too many Democrats for taking the bold stance of publicly disliking Trump.

So what “larger force” will this regime recognize? Clearly they don’t view instructions from Congress or the courts as binding—they’ve learned from the Bush administration’s errors in that regard. One of the few things I’ll take Trump’s word for is that he doesn’t see anything standing in his way but death, and he’s only the loudest expression of the regime, not necessarily the worst.

I’ve said before that I think we’ve arrived at the point as a society and as a species where palliative care is about the best we can do. Nobody should think, though, that palliative care isn’t really important; it can in fact be life-changing. People can live improved lives even while stuff around them falls apart.

Up to a point, anyway.

Little acts of rebellion

A University of Alaska student pulled off a neat little performance art piece.

On Tuesday, January 13, University of Alaska Fairbanks undergraduate student Graham Granger was detained after he had been found “ripping artwork off the walls and eating it in a reported protest,” according to the UAF police department. Granger was chewing and spitting out images pinned to the wall; this artwork was made by Masters of Fine Arts student Nick Dwyer in collaboration with artificial intelligence. Granger claimed that he destroyed the artwork because it was AI generated, according to the report by university police.

A reminder: artificial intelligence is not actually intelligence. You’ll know if it ever gets there.

The Daily Beast, a former Tina Brown vanity project, may be best known for merging with Newsweek after electronics guy Sidney Harmon bought the latter from The Washington Post for one American dollar. (It’s probably not best known for that but that’s how I remember it.)

Originally a news, opinion and gossip site, it has evolved through some tough times into a Brown-less opinion, news and gossip aggregator. And a month ago or two ago they modified the editorial policy to require routinely referring to Trump as “Trump, 79,” as in “Trump, 79, [did this or that].” Sometimes they say “Donald Trump, 79,” but they prefer the more dismissive construction.

Every news outfit should do this. They did it to Biden all the time; that wasn’t wrong, but it shouldn’t be exclusive to him.

In other Trump-related activities, Agence France-Presse (AFP) photographer Laurent Gillieron took probably the most damning, widely distributed (and representative) photograph of Trump’s bizarre Davos excursion—the one where he looks like a brain-seeking zombie.

I mean, Gillieron is there to take pictures but I like to think he took this one with ill intent.

As usual, the U.S. press mostly blew it

Parker Molloy has an excellent site called The Present Age. Wednesday’s edition covered how Trump set up our news outlets to report as their main takeaway from his speech that he foreswore violence in his pursuit of Greenland.

The President of the United States just told a room full of world leaders and business executives that American military force would be “frankly unstoppable” against European allies. And then he said he wouldn’t do it. For now.

You won’t find this in any diplomacy textbook. It’s the language of a protection racket.

So how did reporters cover it?

NPR (original headline): “Trump says ‘I won’t use force’ to obtain Greenland in Davos speech”

ABC News: “Trump rules out using military force to acquire Greenland in Davos speech”

CNBC: “Trump calls for ‘immediate negotiations’ on Greenland, but rules out using force”

Molloy accurately characterizes much of the speech, and the Greenland-related parts particularly, as that of an extortionist.

Think about what he actually said. “We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force.” That “unless” is doing a lot of work. It’s a conditional. It means: if you don’t give me what I want, the “excessive strength” option remains available. The reassurance that follows doesn’t negate the threat. It completes it.

And there was another line in the speech that barely registered in most stories. Addressing the European leaders who have opposed his Greenland push, Trump said: “You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no, and we will remember.”

But none of our primary news outlets got it right. Molloy’s take is a good, short read which you should consume.

Music

Youth Lagoon, “Lucy Takes a Picture”

Bartees Strange, “Lie 95”

Maria Somerville, “Trip”

Lady Blackbird, “Like a Woman”

Sharon Van Etten, “Trouble”

Bonny Light Horseman, “I Know You Know”

Orlando Weeks and Rhian Teasdale, “Dig”

And that, comrades, is all I got. Please let me know and share it if you like it. If you’ve not already subscribed or considered doing so, please give it a thought. Free is good, paid is great.

Be well; take care.

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Trump Keeps Saying We Won’t Have Meaningful Midterms

Not in those exact words, of course; even our self-mutilated institutional press would have to report that. But he has made plain that he views a potential GOP loss as apocalyptic, and he has taken or supported measures aimed at tilting the elections in his favor, including but not limited to pressuring states into mid-census efforts to gerrymander Democrats out of their seats and pushing for ever more restrictive voting requirements.

More than that, though, he precipitated a violent insurrection aimed at invalidating his 2020 loss, and has since demanded and gotten an effort from congressional Republicans and regime officials to erase that picture and replace it with a pastoral scene of patriots handing out flowers to cops instead of beating them.

And of course he set out on a years-long effort through the courts and the reactionary media to create the enduring myth that the 2020 election was stolen—a myth that the courtroom rout of Fox News following their assault on Dominion Voting Systems, which led to a near-billion dollar settlement with the primary villain of the myth, didn’t dent.

And oh yeah—Dominion has since been sold to a former GOP election official from St. Louis, who changed the company name to Liberty Voting but promises nothing else will change. The nothing else that will change will be not changing just in time for the midterms, coincidentally.

Throughout his current term, Trump and other regime officials have been threatening to flood large Democratic-leaning cities with federal thugs and National Guard troops, and we’ve seen him both carry out those threats to varying extents and, probably more important, successfully inciting his homeland security troops, whose numbers the regime hope to increase by 10,000 or more, to violence.

One of the more extreme measures, along with declaring martial law, that Trump was urged to take by his more virulent supporters after the 2020 election was sending the National Guard in to seize Dominion voting machines in the swing states he lost. He was ultimately persuaded not to do that by, among others, the then-amazingly corrupt attorney general William Barr, who, unlike the current occupant of the office, was apparently possessed of at least one remaining democratic principle.

But, as Trump told the New York Times last week, he very much regrets that decision.

President Trump said during an interview with The New York Times that he regretted not ordering the National Guard to seize voting machines in swing states after his loss in the 2020 election, even though he doubted whether the Guard was “sophisticated enough” to carry out the order effectively.

The remarks by Mr. Trump in the interview last week harked back to one of the most perilous moments from his first term in office, when he was urged by some advisers to order his national security agencies to take control of machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems in an effort to find evidence that they had been hacked to rig the election against him.

The headline on the story is weirdly straightforward by Times standards: “Trump Regrets Not Seizing Voting Machines After 2020 Election.” The story itself dilutes the impact of the headline somewhat by ascribing Trump a motive—something the paper has historically been unwilling to do when the subject is a love of violence, or racism, misogyny, xenophobia or some other form of bigotry.

He wanted, they say, to prove fraud; no hint that he may have simply wanted to reverse the election results at gunpoint, which would be the obvious motive if a different one hadn’t been stated—especially in light of what he did a few weeks later with his failed insurrection.

Still, the story stated plainly that he wanted to seize voting machines in states he lost and that he would have used the military to do it, although the reporters ignored the question of what would happen to the machines afterward or whether they could even be used to prove fraud if it existed.

Trump didn’t have compliant military or Pentagon leaders at that point but he does now, and he doesn’t have advisors willing to contravene what he wants. He’s been able to either compel or persuade some of his top military officers to take and give illegal orders, and he has advisors and cabinet heads, including Whisky Pete, who fetishize violence as much as he does.

None of that appears in the story, but it’s all true and it all bears upon what he’s willing to do and what his capabilities are.

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Missionary lizards and JD Vance

“Missionary lizards” is one of those terms one would never predict seeing in print, but there it is.

Evolutionists claim dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. But it is important to realize that when they dig up a dinosaur bone, it does not have a label attached showing its date. The Bible states that God made the land animals, including dinosaurs, on day six (Genesis 1:24–25), so they date from around 6,000 years ago.
. . .
In Genesis 6:19–20, the Bible says that two of every sort of land vertebrate (seven or seven pairs of the “clean” animals) were brought by God to the ark. Therefore, dinosaurs (land vertebrates) were represented on the ark.

Although there are about 668 names of dinosaurs, there are perhaps only 55 different “kinds” of dinosaurs. Furthermore, not all dinosaurs were huge like the Brachiosaurus, and even those dinosaurs on the ark were probably “teenagers” or young adults.
. . .
As Christians, we can use dinosaurs as “missionary lizards.” We can take what is popular with the culture and show how God’s Word explains it better. For example, soft tissue, like blood vessels and red blood cells, has been found in dinosaur bones. This soft tissue couldn’t last millions of years. The fossils confirm a young earth. We can use dinosaurs to help people trust the history of the Bible and also trust in the message of Jesus Christ that is also found in God’s Word.

There’s a short film about these critters but I couldn’t find it online. I did find a bachelor’s degree thesis on the subject, though.

Part aesthetic and part scientific, children’s fascination with dinosaurs presents a challenge to conventional Christian doctrine as well as a unique opportunity for Christian children’s media. On one hand, dinosaurs are inevitably linked to secular evolutionary theory; on the other, the excitement and intellectual engagement dinosaurs elicit in children provide a potentially powerful gateway for education and indoctrination. Without a space in the Christian doctrinal canon for dinosaurs, American evangelicals would find themselves hopelessly outmoded in the modern media marketplace; dinosaurs are simply too colossal a presence in children’s imaginations to ignore or discount, even if their presence in the Bible is hardly obvious.

“Hardly obvious” indeed. Anyway, it turns out that far from being some really obscure Christian fundamentalist weirdo shit, missionary lizards are in fact some really popular Christian fundamentalist weirdo shit.

In related news, the Catholic Reporter took aim at revanchist Catholic apostate and venomous missionary lizard JD Vance—who has been condemned by two popes, one of whom he may have murdered or otherwise caused to let go of life—after he vehemently blamed Renée Good for her own murder, calling her a terrorist and assuring federal thugs that they have absolute immunity against prosecution for any similar murders and assaults.

As a Catholic, Vance knows better than to peddle this brand of gaslighting and agitation. Vance knows that, by virtue of her humanity, Good was endowed with inherent dignity, made in the image and likeness of God. Vance knows that only God can take life. Vance knows that protesting, fleeing or even interfering in an ICE investigation (which there is no evidence that Good did) does not carry a death sentence. Vance knows that lying and killing are sins.

Vance knows. He doesn’t care. Vance’s twisted and wrongheaded view of Christianity has been repudiated by two popes. His Catholicism seems to be little more than a political prop, a tool only for his career ambitions and desire for power.

The vice president’s comments justifying the death of Renee Good are a moral stain on the collective witness of our Catholic faith. His repeated attempts to blame Good for her own death are fundamentally incompatible with the Gospel. Our only recourse is to pray for his conversion of heart.

Damn. Damned.

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Homicidally stupid press tricks

First up, the generally reliable Guardian U.K.

Morality? A sense of fuckin mischief? Morality?

Yeah, good, okay.

And here’s the Washington Post, still sporting what our friend Dr. John describes as the purely aspirational “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tag line.

This is a whole-ass story about how a GOP congressman and millions of like-minded Americans are willfully blind to visual evidence of a murder, but it’s couched in “he saw-she saw” language, as if maybe there’s some ambiguity.

Standing on the House steps after a vote 57 minutes later, Republican Rep. Mike Flood of Nebraska watched the same footage.

He said he could not be sure of what he saw. “I couldn’t really see what was happening there,” Flood said.

You’d definitely want that guy on your jury, if you murdered somebody and you weren’t a liberal or some other lesser life form, and the prosecutors had you dead to rights on a video.

The Post is not alone in presenting the story as something of or explicitly a “Rorschach test,” the latter of which the New York Times did despite having published the most definitive moment-by-moment analysis of the multiple videos showing the murder. The Post published its own definitive, if not quite as deep, dive on the videos. Yet both papers insisted on presenting the videos in other stories as so much less than definitive that people can legitimately make of it what they will. It’s a butterfly. It’s a vulva. No, it’s a murder. Who can say?

Fuckin jamokes. Fuckin mopes.

The Post and the Times are the same two papers whose reporters and editors learned in advance that the U.S. was about to launch an illegal, unconstitutional assault on Venezuela but agreed at the regime’s request not to publish so as to protect U.S. military personnel as they carried out an unconstitutional and illegal assault on Venezuela with the intent of kidnapping the Venezuelan president, which of course is also illegal. And then they ran a bunch of stories about what a surprise it was and how well the regime preserved its secrecy while failing to mention that their own newspapers were the ones responsible for the immaculate secrecy preservation.

Fuckin assholes. The “time honored” coverup of the regime’s plans, as one reporter described it, carries a bit of irony this morning as the FBI raided a Post reporter’s home and seized her phone and laptops in connection with a classified documents investigation.

And finally, Sam Sifton of the New York Times goes completely off the rails in one of the paper’s morning newsletters. Here he is describing, um, tensions twixt federal thugs and Minneapolis residents.

Some of the stops go beyond ordinary law enforcement. In a few of the run-ins, you can feel the animosity building between federal officers and citizens they serve. One man The Times spoke to said he was glad that there were other people around to film his encounter with federal agents, which occurred after they rammed their car into his, forcing him to a stop.

He said he believed the presence of people with cameras had helped lead the agents to let him go. But as the crowd grew — the crowds always seem to grow now — and began to yell at the officers, he worried that the situation could tip over into something darker, something violent. “It makes them act different, like they have more power,” he said.

Animosity “between federal officers and citizens they serve.” An encounter which “goes beyond ordinary law enforcement” because federal agents rammed a car evidently for the hell of it; they didn’t even charge the guy with a crime and you know they would if they thought they had a sliver of a reason to. Fear that “the situation could tip over into something violent.” Like murder, maybe?

There is no animosity between masked federal thugs and the citizens they serve, because the only citizens they serve are all officials in this increasingly Nazi-like regime, who are fine with this behavior and worse—in fact they’re demanding it. ICE and other “homeland” “security” thugs for goddamn sure aren’t serving the people who live, love and work in Minneapolis.

How do you both-sides this shit? What is wrong with these people?

Music

Dylan Cartlidge, “Show Up”

spill tab, “PINK LEMONADE”

Snocaps, “Coast”

Greentea Peng, “Green”

Panda Bear, “Ferry Lady”

Unknown Mortal Orchestra, “BOYS WITH THE CHARACTERISTICS OF WOLVES”

Adrian Sherwood, “Dub Inspector”

Amyl and The Sniffers, “Big Dreams”

Courtney Barnett, “Stay In Your Lane”

English Teacher, “Mastermind Specialism”

La Luz, “Always in Love”

And that, Comrades in the media desert, is all we got. If you like it, please share and let me know. If you like it even more than that, please consider a free or paid subscription if you’ve not already.

Be well; take care.

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Bad Crow Review world headquarters has added a newborn child to the ever-expanding coterie of office-space spongers. We are pleased.

War, Murder, Kidnapping: Democrats Say “We’ll Pay For That”

Some of you may remember that the U.S. regime recently invaded a sovereign country with which we’re not at war, murdering an unknown number of people in the process and kidnapping the country’s ruler to face charges of, among other things, violating U.S. domestic firearms laws—and then threatened to do the same things elsewhere. Top Democrats have decided to fund those further adventures without material protest.

Those Democratic party leaders (and a scant few congressional Republican proles) celebrated the removal of Venezuelan sort-of-strongman Nicolas Maduro—illegitimate leader, election fraudster, mugger and thief, they say—but condemned the exercise mostly on the grounds that the regime sought prior approval from oil companies rather than Congress, which, frankly, have been more than occasionally indistinguishable for decades now.

(It wasn’t that long ago that every senate Republican and a few Democrats approved an oilman to run the state department, for instance, and former senator Hillary Clinton ran a fracking evangelism operation when she held the job not long before that.)

Our own regime’s thugs have equaled Maduro’s when they’ve not outdone them—kidnapping U.S. residents and renditioning them to torture facilities abroad, and more than once murdering U.S. citizens—and regime factotums have no regard for the law within our borders or without, but at least in their initial reactions the loyal opposition didn’t dwell much on the blatant illegality of unprovoked attacks on other countries, not to mention the murder and kidnapping and etc, nor the equally illegal plans to loot Venezuela’s assets, something which had a lot to do with how Maduro and his predecessors, including Hugo Chavez, came to power in the first place.

Other, lesser Democratic party lights found even that partially celebratory reaction too harsh.

In response to the regime’s cinematic violations of every domestic and international law that might frustrate their intentions, senate minority leader Chuck Schumer announced that he had no intention of refusing to fund the regime despite the inescapable evidence, as embodied by the Minneapolis murder and the threats against other countries, that at least some agencies will continue to act illegally and violently against those other nations, against immigrants whether or not they have papers, and against U.S. citizens.

We know these things will happen, because they already have, without any negative consequences to the regime. And we know which agencies will commit which crimes under the guidance of which factotums. And Democratic party leaders are, without even a gesture toward a struggle, about to hand this lawless, illegitimate regime hundreds of billions of additional dollars to further their criminal ambitions.

We’ve seen talk of Democrats mounting an impeachment effort against Trump for his failure to consult Congress before launching the assault against Venezuela. Given that a significant minority of them don’t even seem that exercised about it, and that the large majority of them intend to bankroll future crimes—accessories before and after the fact—a successful impeachment effort seems really fucking unlikely.

Along with their GOP colleagues, congressional Democrats have been big fans of economic and other targeted sanctions against out-of-favor governments and individuals for decades. They should be looking at how to sanction this regime and the people leading it rather than rewarding them with yet more taxpayer money.

That seems really unlikely too, and not only because they don’t have the votes to do it. They should at least be pointing out that when countries we officially don’t like do the kinds of things we’re doing, we hand out sanctions like advertising flyers on the boardwalk.

Democrats will offer the same excuse as last time for passing a continuing spending resolution or passing the remaining funding bills, that blocking either will bring hardship to their constituents. And they’re right. But giving the regime the funds they need to accelerate their criminal rampage will do that too.

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Owners pull the plug on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The Post-Gazette has been publishing in one form or another since the 1700s, but the owners announced yesterday, on the heels of a settlement with the newspaper’s unions following a years-long strike, that they’re shutting it down in a few months because they can’t afford or don’t want to provide employees with decent wages and benefits.

“Instead of simply following the law, the owners chose to punish local journalists and the city of Pittsburgh,” [Newspaper Guild president Andrew Goldstein] said in a prepared statement. “Post-Gazette journalists have done award winning work for decades and we’re going to pursue all options to make sure that Pittsburgh continues to have the caliber of journalism it deserves.”
. . .
“Local news is a critical part of our democracy,” Will Simons, a spokesman for Gov. Josh Shapiro, told the Post-Gazette Wednesday evening. “For nearly 250 years, journalists and staff [at the PG] have been asking questions, holding leaders accountable, and keeping Pennsylvanians informed about what’s going on in their community. This is a sad day for Western Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh.”

The Post-Gazette traces its origins to 1786, when it was a four-page weekly called the Pittsburgh Gazette, the first newspaper published west of the Allegheny Mountains. The paper acquired its current identity in 1927 when Paul Block acquired its assets.

Pittsburgh has made a remarkable recovery since the collapse of the steel industry plunged the city and the surrounding area into an economic dark age. The newspaper was a part of that. The decision to shut it down without trying to find buyers or helping the unions explore an employee-owned version smacks of a vengeful response to the union victory, and the family’s right-wing politics and firm belief in their own righteousness supports that take.

[A]s Donald Trump divided America, he divided the newsroom, too. Liz Skalka, a former politics reporter for the Blade, noticed that top editors changed the wording of some of her pieces about Trump. In one August 2021 article, for example, an editor removed the word “false” from “false claims of widespread election fraud.”

Sarah Elms, former City Hall reporter at the Blade, said editors started to self-censor after years of the Blocks calling editors for last-minute changes to articles. “I think they just kind of know,” she said.

In July 2018, Susan Allan Block, who is married to Allan Block, wrote on Facebook that she could “care less about ‘saving the Blade.’ We run it like a charity for the benefit of the community,” Block added. “It’s way more trouble than it’s worth.”

The Blade is the Toledo Blade, the other paper the family owns, which will remain in operation. Susan Block is an enthusiastic election denier and Islamophobe, while her husband, Allan, is a recovering incel, a homophobe, and a fan of fabulist reporting.

[Allan] cited a story that had received airtime on Fox News, Newsmax, and One America Network, but not in more mainstream publications—an allegation, often presented with little evidence, that Hunter Biden had received large payments from what Block described as “the Chinese, Ukrainian, Russians, and Kazakhs”—as an example of that bias.

He called the Post-Gazette a “hard-left organ” and referred to his reporters wanting to “lead the revolution.” The easiest thing to do, he said, would be to discontinue the papers, though that would not be in the interests of the two cities.

Halfway home.

Music

Panda Bear and Sonic Boom, “Edge of the Edge”

Panda Bear is Noah Lennox, a co-founder of Animal Collective,a long-time favorite of mine and the creators of the hit single “FloriDada.”

Doves, “Cold Dreaming”

Jetstream Pony, “Bubblegum Nothingness”

Circuit des Yeux, “Canopy of Eden”

Samia, “Bovine Excision”

Youth Lagoon, “Neighborhood Scene”

Horsegirl, “Frontrunner”

Smudged, “Marie de Hautefort Wants to Wear Bikinis Like the Girls in Italy (in A Major)”

And that, Comrades, is all I got. If you like what I’m doing, please share it and let me know. If you’ve not already subscribed or considered subscribing, please give it a thought. Free is good and gets what paid does except the nuclear glow that arises from a good turn.

Take care; be well.

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The photo above is from the evening of New Year’s Day 2016, and it looked pretty much exactly the same ten years on.

Yes, I noticed we blew up a country and carried out a coup by kidnapping its leader, murdering an unknown number of Venezuelans in the process and fucking the Constitution and the rule of various laws national and international every which way. This time we’ve got him for sure; look how Democrats stood up for the rule of . . . wait.

My Resolutions For 2026

1. Learn enough Japanese that my toddler grandkid stops looking gravely disappointed when I don’t understand what they’re saying, and

2. Get the fuck outta here.

3. Help get Steven Thrasher his due.

That’s it. Grandkid understands English just fine, but refuses to speak it other than “cookie” and “ice cream.” As for the GTFOH project, frankly it’s languishing. The target date is August of this year, but anytime before the mid-terms would be good. To get there, we need more subscribers, free or paid. If you’ve not considered subscribing please do so this year. Now, even.

Free subscriptions get everything paid ones do except the grand satisfaction of helping me be a refugee.

Actually that’s not true: Free subscriptions help get the word out and lead to paid ones. So it’s all good, man.

Regarding Thrasher: he’s a brave guy and gentle soul whose early support for and defense of pro-Palestinian protestors put him very much at odds with his employer, Northwestern University, where until the end of this year he’ll be an endowed professor but one who is not allowed to teach. They have smeared him and tried to fire him, but he endures.

For much of the past year he’s been traveling in support of and to chronicle the situations faced by HIV patients and health care providers throughout the world, most recently in Africa but also in, for instance, his adopted homeland in Greece.

Why is Greece Steven’s adopted homeland? Because, based upon his experiences of the past two years, he doesn’t anticipate ever again enjoying the opportunity to make a decent living in the U.S., and whether or not he’s concerned about it, I worry that even trying to get back in the country under the current regime poses a real risk to his safety and freedom.

Inseparable from Steven’s activism is his writing. We first became acquainted via email almost two decades ago when he was writing at the late lamented Village Voice. He’s since written for innumerable other outlets and has become the author of one bestselling book, The Viral Underclass, with another, The Overseer Class, arriving next May and available for preorder now.

Steven is a mensch. Support him however you can.

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Socialism and stuff

I don’t have a good theoretical understanding of socialism. I’m not versed in the analytics of it. I only know that what socialism proposes, which is equality of opportunity and for the most part of resources, and the end of capitalism, makes a lot of sense to me and for, I think, everyone who isn’t at the top of the capitalist heap.

John Steinbeck is often quoted as saying the reason socialism never took hold in the U.S. is that people who aren’t wealthy see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” so they support the policies that will benefit them when they’re rich at last.

What he actually said is that we see ourselves as temporarily embarrassed capitalists, the suggestion being that we’re happy to reject a society based on mutuality (as opposed to it being an afterthought) if that ultimately means better opportunities for stepping on more people.

Maybe we do have enough people whose goal is oppressing other people that their weight alone forestalls even modest steps toward a social welfare state, never mind an actual socialist one, beyond those we took through New Deal and Great Society programs. You can see how people would think that, given the numbers who won’t abandon our current regime leader no matter what.

But even those millions can’t outweigh the many more millions who don’t venerate the embodiment of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia and every other rejection of the humanity of people who are different from them.

So you have to look elsewhere for reasons why we’re stuck in what for at least some countries is a distant past where every element of civil society is completely dominated by money and the people who hoard it. It’s a question which mostly answers itself. Socialism isn’t in the news that most people see other than through references to Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and, more recently, Zohran Mamdani, whose vision of Democratic Socialism is more aggressive than that offered by his fellow elected representatives of it.

When the topic of socialism does arise outside the lens of personalities, who have through persistence and continued electoral success gained some measure of credibility in the eyes of a personality- and horse race-driven press, the same press and the overwhelming majority of elected officials, all flying the flag of corporate ownership, work hard to demonize the concept, and we don’t hear about successful examples of even the diluted socialism enjoyed by every other developed country.

For instance, the most recent reference we’ve seen to the ubiquity of universal health care in other countries was in a piece by the Washington Post editorial board dishonestly and nonsensically, variously, slagging the UK’s national health service. Yet reporters and editorialists writing on health care in this country have absolutely no legitimate reasons to invariably avoid comparisons with what other countries do. And we almost never hear about universal day care, free public higher education—which used to be very close to a thing here—and other guaranteed social welfare programs enjoyed by every other wealthy country and a bunch of not-so-wealthy ones.

On related and only slightly more arcane subject, a great many countries have sovereign wealth funds through which they pay for social welfare programs. Most of these funds are supported by income from local resources—fossil fuels or minerals or other—and dedicated at least in part to paying for social welfare programs and other public goods, such as infrastructure projects or industrial development and the like.

In the U.S., we rarely hear about these funds other than when they invest in U.S.companies or, as with Jared Kushner, when they’re buying political influence—actions which are not mutually exclusive, obviously.

In all the reading I’ve done for this blog and BTC News, its long-running predecessor, I don’t recall seeing anything about the specific social goods enacted through a wealth fund other than one instance in which somebody predicted doom for Norway’s robust social welfare system (which is an actual comprehensive, universal, integrated system, unlike our “system”) because the sovereign wealth fund that pays for much of it relies almost entirely on fossil fuel production, which at the time, a few years ago when the mitigation of global warming seemed poised to savage the fossil fuel industries, was thought to be a dead-end resource—this despite growing public pressure behind using the proceeds to cushion the shock of transitioning to an oil-free future.

That’s a quarter-century of reading. I’m sure I’ve missed or forgotten the occasional relevant story but they’re so exceptional as to be jarring when they appear.

Some U.S. states have wealth funds built on natural resource exploitation. Alaska’s oil fund, which returns annual dividends to residents, is probably the best known. But our country as a whole, which has been a major fossil, mineral and timber producer for decades and longer, doesn’t have one. We more often subsidize for-profit extraction of our resources than confiscate any of the returns from it for the public good.

This is because corporations and the wealthy write our laws and bribe our lawmakers to facilitate their looting of the country, and our corporate press do not regard this as a scandal. Fossil fuel companies are the worst but every extractive industry has its swarm of lobbyists and bagmen. We could obviously use an independently managed sovereign wealth fund but the days of independently managed government agencies are at an end, and “wealth fund” has generally meant funding corporate and individual wealth, most prominently, in recent days, that of the leader of our current regime.

Speaking of which, the degree to which this low-rent billionaire has subjugated so many much, much wealthier billionaires is remarkable. Cooperation is one thing; cooptation is another; open humiliation is different altogether. I blame social media and professional wrestling.

The point of all this is that although some people among the lesser classes may be opposed to socialism on its own merits, the people who are deadly allergic to it own the laws, the lawmakers, the press and, to an ever-increasing extent, the courts—which together have historically shaped public opinion almost to the exclusion of any other forces at least in the post-World War II era.

It’s a miracle of stubbornness that allegiance to the concept survived even to the limited extent that it did between the end of the war and the onset of the serial crises that have, fatally one hopes but at least to a degree we’ve probably not seen since the Great Depression, damaged young people’s faith in capitalism. Long live the revolution.

Stuff

On a related subject, Andrew O’Hagan writes in the London Review of Books about Walter Lippmann.

Lippmann was called the greatest journalist of his age, but his claims as an original thinker rest on his book Public Opinion, published in 1922. In a way that we might find startlingly relevant today, the book posits that modern man responds not to accuracy but to the power of public fiction, not to real environments but to the invented ones that large numbers of people agree on, common prejudices that become ‘their interior representations of the world’ (such representations might explain Nigel Farage). Individual citizens cling to their fictional environments so thoroughly, Lippmann argued, that they could be living in different worlds from those who don’t share them. ‘More accurately,’ he writes, ‘they live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones ... [and] these fictions determine a very great part of men’s political behaviour.’ Lippmann is said to have been the first person to use the word ‘stereotype’ in its modern application, and in Public Opinion he considers the way we seek to have our most beloved fictions reinforced in the public sphere:

If the newspaper gives a satisfactory account of that which we think we know ... it is fairly certain to be immune from violent criticism by us. What better criterion does the man at the breakfast table possess than that the newspaper version checks up with his own opinion? Therefore, most men tend to hold the newspaper most strictly accountable in their capacity, not of general readers, but of special pleaders on matters of their own experience ... The body of the news, though unchecked as a whole by the disinterested reader, consists of items about which some readers have very definite preconceptions. Those items are the data of his judgment, and news which men read without this personal criterion, they judge by some other standard than their standard of accuracy. They are dealing here with a subject matter which to them is indistinguishable from fiction. The canon of truth cannot be applied. They do not boggle over such news if it conforms to their stereotypes.

People reading newspapers, Lippmann observed, were not offended by stories of unfairness and corruption, they were offended by what those stories said about themselves, and taking public events personally proved habit-forming over the 20th century and into the 21st. If you look at the coverage of terrible events that gave rise to a disquiet about the play of fact and fiction in their reporting – from the Soviet famine to Vietnam, from the Falklands conflict to the Grenfell Tower fire – you can feel the imprint of Lippmann’s definition of enhanced opinion and manipulated fact. ‘For one item suppressed out of respect for a railroad or a bank, nine are rejected because of the prejudices of the public. This will anger the farmers, that will arouse the Catholics, another will shock the summer girl ... In that subservience ... is the reason why American journalism is so flaccid, so repetitious and so dull.’ At his peak, Lippmann was writing on three or four subjects a week; he believed, as Tom Arnold-Forster puts it in his biography, that ‘journalism was a vocation with political responsibilities to inform public opinion and help democracy function.’ Lippmann did recognise the increasing capacity of people to select their own facts, a trend which faces us with a large question. As Arnold-Forster puts it: ‘If lying journalism defined the public sphere, was democracy really free?’

It’s kind of a circular argument: where do these preconceptions and the reinforcement of them arise if not from external input? and who controls that input? But it’s obviously relevant to the socialism question; and Lippmann’s century-old description of our press as flaccid, repetitious and dull is equally relevant, although I’d add “frequently malicious” to the litany.

Music

Goldie Boutilier, “The Angel and the Saint”

Pixel Grip, “Reason to Stay” and more

Panic Shack, “Gok Wan”

Girl Tones, “Got It”

Green Tea Bitches, “Bad Taste”

Gini Brown, “Drink”

Tolstoys, “Mad”

Chloe Slater, “Sucker”

Rosa Damask, “The Sun”

Baxter Dury, “Albarone”

And that, Comrades in Camaraderie, is all I got. As always, please share and let me know if you like what I do, and if you got a spare monthly five-spot please consider a paid subscription if you’ve not already so considered. Free ones are gratefully received as well.

Happy new year! Be well; take care.

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Marjorie Greene Meets The Daily Scumbag

Marjorie Taylor Greene is a profoundly vicious bigot. QAnon was her bible, and she’s never met a conspiratorial far-right fantasy she didn’t like. That’s what got her elected to Congress. Now that she’s leaving, though, she wants to portray herself as having grown, changed, mellowed—having become, in fact, explicitly more Christ-like. Where better to turn for a makeover than The New York Times? If it’s good enough for Hitler, it’s more than good enough for her.

Greene’s reaction [to the murder of Charlie Kirk] put her in a distinct minority among influential conservative figures. Almost immediately after Kirk was declared dead, many of her comrades on the right — the billionaire Elon Musk, the Fox News host Jesse Watters, the podcaster Steve Bannon — labeled the killing an act of war by the left and exhorted their audience to think in similar terms.

But Greene — who for years took a back seat to no one when it came to reactionary rhetoric, going so far, before she was in office, as to accuse Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of treasonous conduct and adding that treason was punishable by imprisonment or death — realized that she had suddenly lost all appetite for vengeance. She later told a friend, who confirmed the exchange: “After Charlie died, I realized that I’m part of this toxic culture. I really started looking at my faith. I wanted to be more like Christ.”

That was when the stress fracture that had been steadily widening between Greene and her political godfather became an irrevocable break.

Jesus Christ!

The turd-burnishing does include indirect acknowledgements that Greene still holds revanchist views against just about everybody who isn’t straight, white and reactionary—the writer, Robert Draper, who has known and reported on Greene since she announced for Congress, mentions that Greene is almost exclusively responsible for the federal law banning transgender care for minors—but nowhere is the profound harm that Greene has done and continues to do with her dedication to oppressing people who are different from her acknowledged.

And nowhere are her professions of a kinder, more Christ-like Greene measured against the views of theologians who regard Jesus as a pioneer in the field of radical acceptance, as opposed to the portrait of him as a narrow-minded persecutor made in the image of the cults who later claimed him. She’s permitted to anoint herself unchallenged. She’s not even held to account for refusing direct apologies to the people she has hounded and harassed throughout her career as a public personality and legislator.

Greene was showing no sign of withdrawing from political life. She continued to post on social media about her concerns on immigration, Covid vaccines, foreign interventions and the prospect of stolen elections.
. . .
“Everyone’s like, ‘She’s changed,’” Greene said to me. “I haven’t changed my views. But I’ve matured. I’ve developed depth.” And there was more, she said, to the education she’d received. “I’ve learned Washington, and I’ve come to understand the brokenness of the place. If none of us is learning lessons here and we can’t evolve and mature with our lessons, then what kind of people are we?”

Emphasis ours. And really: her “concerns?” The whole thing is actually comical in effect, not to mention that it could have begun and ended with that boldface quote from the closing paragraph. You couldn’t ask for a better example of the paper’s bizarrely skewed sensibilities to ring out the year.

Odds and ends

There were some things we wanted to address but never got around to. Most of them can’t be described as uplifting, so caveat lector.

We’ve always held up as an unquestionable public good the federally-qualified health care centers that have dined on money that Bernie Sanders and a few other legislators have begged, borrowed and extorted over the decades. Now it turns out that some of them are bludgeoning their patients, who hail from the country’s poorest quarters, to collect debts ranging from minuscule—$59 in one case reported by ProPublica—to minor.

This past June, Ashley Voss-Barnes received a court summons in the mail.

PrairieStar Health Center, a nonprofit community health center in south-central Kansas, was suing her for $675 and her wife for $732 in unpaid medical bills. Voss-Barnes knew the clinic received federal funding to make preventive health care accessible in a region where many families, including her own, needed financial help.

She didn’t understand what led to the lawsuit. She and her wife had a blended family of five kids that cost a lot to keep healthy. As a result, years ago, the couple had asked PrairieStar if they could set up an ongoing payment plan to automatically take money from their checking accounts multiple times a month. Voss-Barnes would later state in a court filing that PrairieStar never informed her those payments were not enough to cover her bills and keep her out of collections.

Keep in mind that these clinics are established to make medical care financially accessible for low-income people who often avoid doctor or hospital care for fear of going into unsupportable debt. Instead, some of them are emulating larger institutions that relentlessly pursue debt even when doing so makes little financial sense.

Among the things Greene said in her Times interview was that she could see Trump starting a war to create a crisis enabling him to seize a third term. The focus at Bad Crow Review world headquarters is still on the mid-terms; it seems unlikely in the extreme that JD Vance, for instance, would stand by patiently as Trump usurped what Vance no doubt believes should be the first term of his own presidency.

What doesn’t seem unlikely is that the regime would use a war to supercharge an already energetic campaign against the right to vote buttressed, if in somewhat mealy-mouthed fashion, by the Roberts court, the eponymous member of which absolutely hates any federal enforcement of voting rights. And we have precedent for war-time constraints on voting rights, as enacted against Japanese American citizens held in concentration camps who were permitted to vote but faced impossible obstacles in doing so.

One of the first questions to confound those planning this new wartime voting program was where exactly the civilian incarcerees should vote. In California, the state with the highest population of displaced Japanese Americans, the constitution stipulated that residence had to be “of choice” in order to qualify for voter registration. It was plain to all that the prison camps were anything but residences of choice. As a result, Japanese Americans were instructed to vote in the precincts where they’d lived prior to incarceration. Other states, fearful of the influence these “enemy aliens” might have on local elections, enacted similar regulations.

By August of 1942, the Wartime Civil Control Administration released a policy statement announcing that “qualified citizen evacuees” were entitled to the same absentee voting rights as any other citizen who was unable to be present at his or her registered polling place. But states and counties were left to grapple with what exactly those absentee voting rights were in this historically unprecedented scenario.

Absentee voting had existed in some form since 1652, but WWII marked the first and only time in American history that states had to make large scale arrangements for an incarcerated civilian population to cast votes in absentia. The result was a hodgepodge of rules and regulations that effectively disenfranchised the Japanese American electorate.

We already disenfranchise millions of prisoners and former prisoners here, and the Roberts court seems intent on voiding any civil-rights era protections enjoyed by the rest of the population. (And isn’t it dandy that we routinely, reflexively refer to the “civil rights era,” as if it were bygone times, which, I guess so.) What was done to Japanese-American internees is not at all dissimilar to what the regime, and the Republicans who preceded them, have been pursuing in modern times—to keep voting mostly legal but as difficult as possible for disfavored populations.

And would anyone at all be surprised if the regime made more forceful assaults on the franchise? Only reporters at the New York Times, would be our guess.

Finally, we’d like to plug our favorite AI research toy disguised as a procrastination engine. Sloth AI will scour the intertubes for results based on your prompts about the kinds of things you like to waste time reading or watching—how many depends on how much time you specify wanting to waste.

We’ve found that you can use narrowly-tailored free form prompts to produce a ton of pretty good links to whatever information you’re pursuing, but we encourage trying the service out no matter your intentions. What better way to ring in the new year by wasting a fuck-ton of time? Got anything better to do?

Music

I’m just cribbing from my streaming music service’s accounting of my top 50 tunes for the year, many of which come from my ketamine playlist.

Funkadelic, “Maggot Brain”

Bill Frisell, “Pipeline” (Best ever live cover of the tune)

Adrianne Lenker, “Sadness As A Gift”

Bill Frisell, “Rumble” (Link Wray cover and one of Jimmy Page’s favorite tunes in the original)

David Byrne & Brian Eno, “Everything That Happens”

Big Thief, “Certainty”

The Last Dinner Party, “My Lady of Mercy”

The Big Moon, “2 Lines” and more

Dry Cleaning, “Scratchcard Lanyard”

English Teacher, “Nearly Daffodils”

Wet Leg, “I Don’t Wanna Go Out”

Big Joanie, “Cactus Tree”

BC Camplight, “Kicking Up A Fuss”

The Beach Boys, “Good Vibrations”

Pokey Lafarge, “Fuck Me Up” (You have to click through to youtube but it’s worth it, trust me.)

Anna Erhard, “Hot Family”

And finally a couple from what may be my favorite new-to-me performers of the year: Big Special, concluding with our new national anthem.

Big Special, “This Here Ain’t Water”

Big Special, “Shithouse”

And that, Comrades in the siege, is all I got. As always, please share and let me know if you like it, and consider subscribing if you’ve not already. And here’s hoping for the year ahead.

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Before we get started on the wish list: The Washington Post editorial board is challenging the Wall Street Journal’s as the worst of any major newspaper in all the land. The Journal has held the crown for decades, routinely publishing the most imbecilic takes from the far right’s most imbecilic editorialists. The contrast between the paper’s newsroom, even under the iron fist of the Murdoch clan, and the editorial pages could not be more stark.

The Post under long-time editorial page editor Fred Hiatt published a good range of opinion writers—from torture enthusiast Marc Thiessen to media columnists Margaret Sullivan and Eric Wemple, but the board exhibited a militaristic, center right tendency throughout his tenure. Now, stacked with Murdoch and other right-wing publication alums and in the wake of some high-profile departures and firings among the liberalish contingent, the editorial field there has been salted and made barren.

A recent example is the Christmas day broadside delivered by the board against Britain’s National Health Service, entitled “Socialized medicine can’t survive the winter.”

By way of context, the NHS covers everyone in Britain at a per capita cost of less than half what we spend to leave millions of people uncovered and tens of millions more inadequately covered. People there live longer than people here, with lower infant and maternal mortality rates and less chronic disease, among a host of other health outcome indicators better than ours.

This despite decades of mismanagement and, not unrelated, attempts to cripple, starve and privatize the service, originally by the Conservatives and later joined in by Labour under Tony Blair and his successors.

Despite all that, the NHS keeps chugging along. According to the editorial board, though, it is at death’s door as represented by triaging patients during a bad flu season, something every medical service ever routinely does.

The circumstances may change, but the sense of crisis is not new. The NHS has existed for years in a perpetual state of emergency. This was the case before the pandemic hit, and it has only gotten worse. Hospital corridors overflow and routine procedures get canceled due to a catastrophic event commonly known as “winter.” It comes around every year, yet the system, despite annual funding increases, still somehow remains unable to cope.

A campaign to keep people away from hospitals during the holidays is underway, which includes begging the public to seek out other forms of treatment for “less serious” injuries and ailments. The British press compares the messaging to “Covid-era stay-at-home pleas,” which included asking patients who needed care to avoid medical facilities in order to “protect the NHS.”

That messaging worked — so well, in fact, that the health service has been playing catch-up ever since. There were 6.24 million individual patients waiting to get treatment in England as of October. That’s about 1 in 10 people in the country waiting in the queue.
. . .
This is the dark reality of single-payer and a cautionary tale for the third of Americans who mistakenly believe Medicare-for-all is a good idea.

Okay, so: the dark reality of single payer is that one of the more dysfunctional examples of it, the NHS, delivers consistently better results than we get from the system-not-a-system in the U.S., and at less than half the cost. In fact, the NHS costs less than we spend on government-funded health care, which covers only 40% of Americans, before we even add in the massive private-sector spending on insurers who only cover part of the remainder, and that none too well.

The editorial board, however, chooses not to compare the NHS to the U.S., but rather to other members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), many of which produce better outcomes than the NHS, and sometimes for less money. But with two exceptions, those are all single-payer systems—some with small copays for some services—and, like the NHS and unlike the U.S., they all cover 100% of their residents.

Even occasional readers here will likely have seen references to OECD health care data and how the U.S. stacks up against other members of the organization, which is very, very unfavorably—we struggle to stay even with some of the poorest countries in the organization and seriously lag the rest.

Further, the most recent polling suggests that a very solid majority of Americans, way more than the one-third of them the Post claims, are now comfortable with a single-payer universal health care system. In previous polling, support for the proposition dropped substantially when respondents were told that private insurance would go away. This time, they’re pretty much okay with that.

An Economist/You Gov poll of more than 1,500 adult citizens, conducted in July of this year, found that Medicare for All was supported by 59 percent of those polled (including 36 percent who “strongly support”) — and opposed by only 27 percent. Medicare for All was supported by almost every demographic group, including ideological “moderates” (67% to 17%) and those who identify as “independents” (57% to 24%/56% to 18%). The only demographics with a majority opposing it were Trump supporters, conservatives or Republicans/Republican-leaners.

The poll didn’t specifically survey reactionary billionaires, but that’s the demographic the Post’s editorial board reflects these days.

The U.K. spends well above the OECD average on health care, yet its outcomes fall short of Australia, Denmark and South Korea, which spend less as a percentage of their GDPs. Reform is largely impossible because of a religious-like devotion to the NHS. Once someone gets an entitlement, it becomes virtually impossible to pull it back — no matter how costly or inefficient.

This is why practically every developed country, apart from the U.S., has adopted the principle of universal access to health care — yet practically no other country has adopted an NHS-style system. The pitfalls are too obvious. Critically, demands on the service are too great to be competently handled by the central government.

This walks a fine line between dishonesty and gibberish. Individual countries have individual reasons for the way their health care systems have developed; among European countries, only the NHS was constructed from scratch in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when England lay in physical and economic ruins. Other countries built on previously-existing edifices. And some countries, like Denmark, which is among the highest-ranked countries for health care—and which spends more on health care per capita than England does, if less as a percentage of GDP—have a strong publicly-owned medical facilities network similar in kind but not in scope to the NHS.

The U.S. itself operates an NHS-like subsystem of our federally-funded universe—the Veterans Administration owns and operates its own facilities and pays its own health care providers and, despite chronic under-funding, hostility from people who hate the prospect of socialized medicine and want to see it fail, and constant pressure from both parties to privatize aspects of it, VA facilities and personnel routinely outperform their private counterparts and get higher patient satisfaction ratings.

Reactionaries would love nothing more than to destroy the VA system precisely because it does work so well and so efficiently, and they use every scandal to try to further that goal—as if the for-profit sector isn’t riddled with scandal and fraud. It’s something of an organizational miracle that a network the size of the VA’s, serving one of the most complex, high-risk patient pools to be found in this country, functions as well as it does; and the fact that it is a single network with a vulnerable and venerated patient pool makes scandal much more visible that what is found piecemeal but in greater quantity in the private sector.

So what the VA demonstrates, contrary to what the editorial board suggests, is that governments can in fact administer high-quality health care systems even under the stresses of inadequate funding, legislative sabotage, and high demand, with outcomes better than, for instance, the various disasters visited on U.S. communities by pirate equity-owned hospitals and networks.

And finally, the irony of a bunch of people carrying water for both Jeff Bezos and a homicidal profit-driven U.S. health care system-not-a-system complaining about “a religious-like devotion to the NHS” in the face of our own abysmal performance is just too . . . too.

As we said, just a brief aside before we get to the meat of today’s post.

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The Bad Crow 2026 Wish List

The initial prognosis for my cancer, which was diagnosed at the end of January 2020, was 18-36 months. In about a month I’ll begin my third year past the optimistic end of that range, and about a month ago I started my second treatment hiatus. The first one lasted two years before the labs turned on me and we restarted the drugs.

So 2024 and 2025 were bonus years for me, and 2026 looks to start with a bonus grandchild in pocket. I wish the two previous years had been better for all humankind; a little less genocide would have been nice, and a little less openly homicidal and cruel fascism here would have been the same.

2026 looks to be much worse on the homicidal fascist front and not much better on the genocidal one. Fascists aren’t allergic to elections, but they are allergic to consequential ones which are likely to go against them. You couldn’t get more consequential than a free- and fair-by-our-standards mid-term contest, with the power to constrain the regime at stake. Or to constrain them to whatever extent they’ll recognize any constraints in an era of lawlessness, and with a supreme court tucked in the undies of the unitary executive.

So that’s number two on the wish list: that somebody, somehow some way, will figure out how to stop the regime buggering the mid-terms. Without further ado, here’s the whole list.

1. A highly localized mass extinction event or two; and,

2. The aforementioned functional mid-terms; and,

3. The end of moderate Democrats.

Random, unconnected factoids: The presidential succession list runs 18 deep, starting with the vice president and ending with the secretary of homeland security, which today is puppy-murdering brutality enthusiast/sociopath Kristi Noem; members of the Roberts court majority frequently make politically-charged speeches at reactionary fêtes announced well in advance; strokes sometimes cause dramatic changes in personality and one would be pressed to think of a regime official who could possibly be the worse for it.

That’s not to wish ill on anybody, that last thing—or any of the things—but if one had the power to inflict a personality-altering stroke on a regime factotum, one might be tempted to tell the prospective beneficiary that it’s for their own good and will only coincidentally benefit the rest of humanity.

We hear a lot about how the currently empowered Republicans are different from previous ones, but with respect to policy, they’re really not. Maybe if you go back to the late 1960s up until Reagan as president, but since then Republicans have been dedicated to looting the country to the benefit of the wealthiest 10% while for sport, punishing the poor and non-white and just plain different among us.

And in this they’ve been joined by not a few Democrats, the ones we’re told to think of as “moderates,” just as we’re told to think of Republicans who don’t drip literal acid or venom from their tongues as moderates among their own ranks. Moderate Democrats are the kind who have Sister Souljah or Jeremiah Wright “moments,” as if they’re only moments and not a considered philosophy, and who either think people who support Palestinians are dangerous anti-Semites or think they have to say so. They pretend people who want clean air hate coal miners. They’re aspirational billionaires.

That kind of thing. They should all go away. Ed Markey should be anchoring the right wing of the Democratic party. And while we’re at it, we need more than one representative for every 750,000 people, because most of those people aren’t actually represented. Even dismal misanthropes from sundown towns, with their clenched fists and clenched assholes, need more direct representation.

And we need senators about as much as the French peasantry needed the ancien régime—which, speaking of, Louis XVI was pretty damn moderate relative to your baseline hereditary despot.

Fuck those people.

So that’s on the wish list, along with paying federal legislators the median wage, and housing them in attractive Baltimore dormitories staffed with pleasant but armed attendants and housekeepers trained in the ways of sexual predators and classist anti-social assholes, and give them vouchers for meals when they’re working, and complimentary rail passes. Who knows, maybe they’ll build some rail.

Their every need catered, but without the vote-buying dimension.

The supreme court is not redeemable; the institution is toast even if individual jurists might not be. The regime are not redeemable. Moderate Democrats could be, if weaned from the corporate teat and treated for their underlying delusions, but the safest way to deal with them is cautious disposal, using primaries and those tongs they use to swap out spent nuclear fuel pellets.

It’s a modest wish list. 2026 will continue to offer opportunities for personal enrichment, non-financially speaking, for many people but politically we expect an accelerating disaster. It’s a common, often dizzying dichotomy in disintegrating nations.

Music

Shana Cleveland, “A Ghost”

Youth Lagoon, “No One Can Tell” and more

Greentea Peng, “Tardis (hardest)”

Melody’s Echo Chamber, “The House That Doesn’t Exist”

Lifeguard, “It Will Get Worse”

Sorry, “Echoes” and more

Westside Cowboy, “Drunk Surfer”

ME + MARIE, “Double Purpose”

Water From Your Eyes, “Playing Classics”

Ghost Funk Orchestra, “Walk Like A Motherfucker”

ANOHNI and the Johnsons, “It Must Change”

The Beach Boys, “Do It Again”

And that, comrades in misericordes, is all I got. If you like it, please share it around and let me know. If you’ve not considered subscribing, please think about it now; free subscriptions get what paid ones do excepting the beatification.

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Family and events have overwhelmed me so posting will continue irregularly. Happy holidays to those of you who do holidays.

A Little What The Fuck For The Holidays

Let Them Fight!

The Lever’s Brock Hrehor has a story about the accelerating rollback of workplace protections particularly for workers whose jobs are known to be extra-risky.

Echoing Brett Kavanaugh from his days as an appeals court judge, the regime’s regulators say that people employed in such dangerous jobs as film stunt work, professional athletics, and construction jobs including ironworkers (the intrepid souls building bridges and riding steel beams in high rises), should not benefit from stringent workplace protections because enforcing such in dangerous jobs puts too much of a burden on employers.

Here’s what Kavanaugh said in his dissent to a ruling enforcing a modest sanction against Sea World following the drowning and dismemberment of an orca trainer.

“To be fearless, courageous, tough — to perform a sport or activity at the highest levels of human capacity, even in the face of known physical risk — is among the greatest forms of personal achievement for many who take part in these activities,” Kavanaugh wrote in his dissent. “American spectators enjoy watching these amazing feats of competition and daring, and they pay a lot to do so.”

In other words, any attempt to mitigate the dangers to people doing risky things for the entertainment of the masses is cheating us out of our hard-earned dollars. And other industries with high rates of workplace injury but no public-facing exposure, or at least nothing anybody pays to watch, want to piggyback on the entertainment exemption Kavanaugh tried to create as an appeals court judge, and which he’s now in a much stronger position to impose as part of the sociopath supreme court majority.

Now, the agency wants to codify Kavanaugh’s dissenting position into law. And some labor experts say the move can be traced back to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Trump and Elon Musk’s initiative to target federal agencies and spending.

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the largest federation of unions in the United States, alleged in a press release that the proposal, along with the proposal to remove requirements for construction illumination, which could increase trips and falls on the job site, came from [DOGE].

“From what we have heard, [the decision to limit the General Duty Clause] was a DOGE pick, and the construction illumination deregulatory action was a DOGE pick,” a policy expert at the labor federation who requested anonymity to protect their sources’ identities told The Lever. “These were both ideological proposals versus DOGE telling the staff, ‘Go find things to deregulate.’”

Given Musk’s faux-libertarian politics and his love of spectacle, the DOGE connection makes sense. And given the general devaluation of human life undertaken by the regime, the regulatory tradeoff of savings versus workplace injury makes sense as well. As we’ve said often enough, the people in the regime who don’t actively want to kill you don’t care if they do so as part of their plans to transfer every bit of your wealth, whether pennies or dollars, upward to more deserving souls—captains of industry and billionaire fascists and the like.

The U.S. is about five minutes away from court-sanctioned stadium fights to the death, maybe with prisoners or terminally ill combatants. And we would be surprised if Trump isn’t hoping somebody will die during his mixed martial arts birthday extravaganza in the former Rose Garden.

Free and fair elections? Ho! Ho! Ho!

Over at The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson muses about the regime’s plans to create Potemkin elections in 2026.

Over the next several months, we can expect a kind of trench warfare, where the DOJ makes outrageous demands, states and cities resist, and the courts arbitrate.

It begins with the attempt by the Justice Department to get control of state voter lists and conduct massive purges. The Constitution unambiguously gives control of election administration to the states, except where Congress expressly delegates some authority to the executive branch, as in the case of enforcement of the Voting Rights Act or administration of the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, otherwise known as the motor voter law.

The Trump administration has turned both laws into their opposites, using the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department to suppress voting. The Justice Department has made demands to at least 40 states for their voter files, according to the Brennan Center for Justice.

The Civil Rights Division, staffed by people expert in voter suppression, has an elaborate plan to run these voter files against commercial databases that purport to show deaths, address changes, double registrations, etc., but that are filled with inaccuracies. This process then becomes the basis for federal purges of accurate state voter files, and for federal prosecutions of state officials who resist. Each week, the DOJ makes new demands.

A host of regime officials, congressional Republicans and influential outsiders, like Steve Bannon, have either strongly intimated or said outright that they’re not big believers in democracy. Lower courts to this point have a mixed record on adjudicating election fuckery, but it leans toward favoring the Constitution and the states resisting the regime’s depredations.

But climb the ladder to the highest court in the land, and you land in solid anti-voting rights territory. If there’s one overriding theme in John Roberts’s career, it’s invalidating voter protections and legislated civil rights, and inviting corporate and federal control of elections—at least when the federal control rests with a reactionary regime like we have today. And if there’s an overriding theme in the court majority’s behavior this year, it’s that the regime gets what the regime wants.

It’s probably not practical for the Supreme Court to take every one of these lower-court voting cases in time for the 2026 elections, which means that at least some decisions protecting voting rights will stand. At the same time, Trump’s allies in and out of government will engage in all manner of voter intimidation. The Court may yet decide that it does not look kindly on the scrapping of democracy and the rule of law entirely. But even if the Supreme Court were to block the illegal demands for voter lists, threats will dissuade some voters.

Were this a remotely normal presidency, Trump would be on track for a massive Democratic wave election next November, a loss of one or both houses of Congress, a personal repudiation, and lame-duckery for the remainder of his term. But of course, Trump is anything but normal and he is especially dangerous when cornered.

And finally, Myerson is worried about a wag-the-dog scenario, with Trump trying to upend the election dynamic by starting a serious war with somebody who can shoot back. History demonstrates that most congressional Democrats will rally round even the worst invocation of the flag once the shooting starts. One can fairly question whether they, or enough of them to make a difference, could fight for election integrity against the regime when the fate of our brave men and women in the war crimes department is at stake.

“Let’s treat Trump like a normal president”

The Atlantic has way more than its fair share of imbeciles and simps. One could say that ridiculing Conor Friedersdorf, the house libertarian—already a handicap—for something he wrote in the immediate aftermath of last year’s presidential election is unfair, but one would of course be wrong.

As a Never Trump voter who thought January 6 was disqualifying but who respects the results of this election, I urge this from fellow Trump skeptics: Stop indulging the fantasy that outrage, social stigma, language policing, a special counsel, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or impeachment will disappear him. And stop talking as if normal political opposition is capitulation.

Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery. Don’t hesitate to criticize him when he does something bad, but avoid overstatements. They are self-discrediting. And know that new House elections are just two years away. Focus on offering a better alternative to voters, not ousting the person they chose.

Meanwhile, oppose Trump’s bad ideas by drawing on the normal tools Americans use to constrain all presidents. Our constitutional and civic checks on executive power are formidable, frustrating every administration. So be the John Boehner to his Obama. Even if ill intent exists in Trump’s inscrutable mind, his coalition does not wish to end democracy. Some will turn on the president when he merely has trouble fulfilling basic promises.

Friedersdorf does offer a smidgen of sound advice in that first paragraph, saying essentially that “this time we’ve got him for sure!” is not a productive use of your time, and a touch of solid analysis in the last paragraph, where he says some of Trump’s followers would abandon him in the wake of what was bound to be a tsunami of broken promises, and so they have. But even at this point Trump has between 80% and 90% of Republicans behind him in most polls, which is lower than when he started but still decent, considering.

The second-weirdest thing Friedersdorf says is that Trump’s opposition should behave like John Boehner did, which to our recollection was drinking impressive quantities of wine, heaving a lot of exasperated sighs at the stupidity of his own caucus, and obstructing Obama to the greatest extent he could on every issue that didn’t involve giving huge sums of money to the military and internal security forces.

Maybe Friedersdorf assumed that some Republicans would help Hakeem Jeffries obstruct Trump’s worst legislative priorities, but why? We had no indication at the time that anything other than lockstep would be the rule of the day for congressional GOPers; even in normal-ish eras, like those of Reagan, Bush père and, sort of, Bush fils, you saw only minimal resistance to a Republican president from congressional Republicans, who saved their energies for the important work of slagging each other and the republic.

The weirdest thing is the notion that Trump’s following “does not wish to end democracy.” Of course they do. Even outside the fever swamp, Republicans haven’t regarded a Democratic president as legitimate since maybe Jimmy Carter. Certainly they didn’t think Clinton was one, and they weren’t sure Obama was even fully human, let alone a legitimate president.

Republicans only want to defend democracy in those instances where it returns them to power or sustains them there; otherwise, their energies are aimed at fucking it up. Hence “elections have consequences” when Republicans win, and Democrats are shoving this that and all the other things down America’s throat when Republicans lose.

And the thing is, lots of them were saying as much during the four years since Biden’s election. They were saying it was impossible that Biden won legitimately. They were saying that the insurrectionist mob were just patriotic tourists. Sure, some Republicans said the election was on the level, but they never moved beyond that to behaving as though Biden were a legitimate president in the sense that they should cooperate with him in any important respect, and when Trump won they abandoned even their tepid support of the democratic and legislative processes.

And of course the Roberts court had already decided in July of last year, mere months before Trump got elected and to great fanfare, that presidents are effectively above the law. If for no other reason, suggesting that the second Trump presidency might be in any sense normal, or that we should pretend it could be, was just hallucinatory. And “normal opposition” turned out, predictably, to look and feel like capitulation.

Anyway: As thousands if not tens of thousands of people have told Friedersdorf since the piece resurfaced a day or two ago—that did not age well.

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Music

Pulp, “Spike Island”

Deep Sea Diver, “Shovel”

Lael Neale, “Blue Vein”

Maria Somerville, “Spring”

Valerie June, “Joy, Joy”

Cardinals, “Twist and Turn”

Youth Lagoon, “Gumshoe (Dracula From Arkansas)”

Dehd, “Dog Days”

Porridge Radio, “Don’t Want To Dance”

Morgan Nagler, “Cradle The Pain”

Kae Tempest, “Statue In The Square”

The Horrors, “Lotus Eater”

Black Country, New Road, “Besties”

The Weather Station, “Neon Signs”

La Luz, “Good Luck With Your Secret” and more

And that, Comrades in Holiness, is all I got. As ever, please share it around if you like it, and if you’ve not subscribed, please consider doing so today. Free subscriptions get everything paid ones do except that hit of consumerist dopamine which is so important for the holidays.

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Be well; take care.

Peace Is Not An Option

Foreign Affairs has a possibly alarmist essay by Justin Bronk, a thinker about military stuff at a British tank filled with thinkers about military stuff all struggling to ascend like lobsters in a restaurant holding pen, addressing the dire condition of the U.S. armed forces vis-à-vis a war with China.

In “America’s Drone Delusion,” Bronk paints a portrait of the U.S. as outgunned and outmanned by the fearsome Chinese military; strange if true, as we spend about four times what they do even while funding a rapid increase in the size and quality of their air force and navy, which are presumably the branches which would be doing much of the fighting.

His main thesis is that the U.S. and other countries have gone drone-crazy based on the success Ukraine and Russia are enjoying with massive numbers of cheap drones as one of the primary front line weapons for both countries. Whisky Pete, for instance, just canceled a major program aimed at replacing the “nearly obsolete and badly worn-out” U.S. AWACs fleet in favor of dramatically increasing the drone budget, aiming to build the most advanced, expensive and numerically superior unmanned aerial combat vehicle fleet of any country including China.

In sharp contrast to the operational conditions in Ukraine, any likely conflict between U.S. forces and China’s People’s Liberation Army would unfold predominantly in the air and at sea, with combat between land forces likely limited to key islands such as Taiwan or the Senkakus (known in China as the Diaoyus). In this context, success for the United States would depend on the ability to rapidly and repeatedly bring decisive airborne and maritime firepower to bear at those key points at critical moments. This would mean projecting power across thousands of miles of ocean against numerous highly advanced Chinese missile, air, and maritime threats. Such operations would require highly trained personnel manning advanced fighter aircraft, bombers, and warships conducting mutually supporting actions in carefully synchronized joint operations. In other words, the conflict would involve very different kinds of forces and equipment from what either Ukraine or Russia is using in the current war.
. . .
Distances are punishing in the Indo-Pacific. The greatest shortcoming of the current generation of “exquisite” American fighter aircraft—the F-22, F-35, and F/A-18E/F—against growing Chinese threats is not that they are expensive and comparatively few. It is their comparatively limited range. With combat radii of between 350 and 600 miles, they require aerial refueling tankers to reach contested areas from viable bases, which in conflict would have to fly dangerously close to Chinese missile and fighter aircraft threats. Small drones cannot solve this problem. Even the longest-range fiber-optic-cable-equipped first-person view drones in common use in Ukraine are limited to around 15 miles, and most small FPVs have significantly shorter ranges than that. In other words, the one weapons system that has made combat in Ukraine significantly different from that of previous state-on-state wars would be largely irrelevant in the critical early phases of a conflict between Chinese and American forces.

So China, it seems, has more fighters, bombers, airborne radar units and ships than the U.S. does and, if we were to get into a war with them, the advantage of proximity to home. Ships and aircraft are the most complicated and expensive of weapons, but despite our spending advantage, they’ve got more of them and according to Bronk, comparably capable ones to ours. At the least, they don’t seem to have issues like the F-35 has had, which rendered them unfit for peer-to-peer combat for most of their life to this point.

Is the Chinese advantage real? Who knows. Thinkers about military stuff have sort of a vested interest in crisis, and whenever we’re in a position where we might get in a shooting war with somebody, the opponent’s capabilities are treated as fearsome no matter how obviously they’re not. Witness Iraq and their mighty Republican Guard, Saddam’s elite troops which were forecast by pundits, encouraged by the Bush administration, to offer stiff resistance to U.S. forces.

Which they sort of did, but as part of a post-invasion guerilla force, not a conventional one. Iraq was also said to possess frighteningly advanced Russian anti-aircraft capabilities, but more U.S. jets were shot down by errant Patriot missiles than by Iraqi ones.

The second-most striking thing about Bronk’s piece is his assertion that because the U.S. is unlikely to add enough money to our trillion-dollar budget ($1,000,000,000,000) to overcome the alleged shortfall in advanced manned aircraft and ships, we have no good options (other than stripping the budget for the rest of the military to the bone and diverting all our resources to the complicated expensive stuff, which lobbyists won’t allow). If China invades Taiwan or whatever, the side of the angels is screwed. Maybe not terminally, but screwed nonetheless.

Postulating financial constraints is sort of a stupid argument, as we’ve had very few moments in our post-war history when significantly increasing the military budget was in any way fraught. Federal legislators love the Pentagon practice of distributing Pentagon dollars to every state and just about every congressional district; if keeping up with the Joneses means getting back to spending six or seven or eight times what the Chinese spend, like we used to do, then that’s what we’ll eventually get around to doing.

But let’s say Bronk’s understanding of our legislative parsimony is accurate. What’s really striking about the whole piece is the lack of consideration for just avoiding a military conflict with China. We don’t actually have to go to war in Taiwan’s defense, and the island would get blown to shit if we did. But surrendering would preserve their physical integrity if not their political and cultural situations, and save us hundreds of billions of dollars with which we could build semiconductor plants to replace what Taiwan sells us now, since we won’t spend any of it on actual humans.

China is already supplanting us economically; may just as well throw in our military hand too. Let them assume the mantle of perfidious Albion for a while. We’ve had a good run. We were perfidious as fuck.

Bronk didn’t mention it, but there’s one other arena in which we definitely lag the Chinese military.

Despite its popularity and broad bipartisan support, right-to-repair provisions that would have given service members the ability to fix their own equipment in the field were stripped from the compromise version of the 2026 defense policy bill after industry pushback.

The House’s Data-as-a-Service Solutions for Weapon System Contracts provision, which would have required DoD to negotiate access to technical data and necessary software before signing a contract, was removed from the final text of the annual legislation released over the weekend. The Senate’s provision requiring contractors to provide the military with detailed repair and maintenance instructions was dropped from the bill as well.
. . .
“It’s almost completely meaningless relative to ‘right to repair.’ It only addresses cases in which the contractors have failed to deliver or make available the data that is already in their contracts. It doesn’t address in any way whether the contracts themselves are sufficient to support service members’ right to repair,” Greg Williams, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight, told Federal News Network.

That’s right: Complex military weapons and software support systems can’t be repaired by users in the field any more than farmers can repair their own tractors and harvesters and the like. The work has to be done by authorized contractors. It’s in the contracts; all those “highly trained personnel manning advanced fighter aircraft, bombers, and warships” can’t legally even be trained to fix the stuff.

Somebody in the Senate leadership decided to keep it that way. In China, they’d cut the motherfucker’s head off.

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A few other things

You may have heard that Trump’s social media company is merging with a nuclear fusion firm. The companies say that they “plan to begin construction as soon as next year of the world’s first fusion reaction that could produce electricity on utility scale, rather than just in laboratory settings.”

Maybe it’s as naked a stock pumping scam as it looks like. Maybe Elon Musk is somehow involved. Although that’s the same picture.

Jack Smith told the House judiciary committee under oath earlier this week that he and his staff had Trump nailed on the two big cases he was pursuing—the classified documents one in Florida, and the January 6-related one.

Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith told lawmakers in a closed-door interview Wednesday that his team of investigators “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump had criminally conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to portions of his opening statement obtained by The Associated Press.

Smith also said investigators had accrued “powerful evidence” Trump broke the law by hoarding classified documents from his first term as president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, and by obstructing government efforts to recover the records.

Democrats say the Murcan public should hear all this stuff, but they don’t really mean it because they could could read it all into the congressional record without immediate penalty, and possibly without any ever, under the Constitution’s ally-ally-oxen-free clause. Although you might forgive them for not wanting to bet on it in the present moment. Still, if not now when if not me who and et cetera.

Crimes against humanity aren’t limited to Whisky Pete blowing up boatmen in the Caribbean or successive state departments attempting to both support and cover up the genocide in Gaza. What else can you call the regime’s decision to deliberately dismantle USAID medical programs on which hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives depend, with a full understanding of the consequences?

ProPublica’s story about the people who wrought the still unfolding disasters can be difficult to read at times, but it should be read.

By the third week in February, they were on track to wipe out 90% of USAID’s work. Created in 1961 to foster global stability and help advance American interests, USAID was the largest humanitarian donor in the world. In just a month’s time, the small band of appointees had set in motion its destruction.

In a corner conference room, it was time to party. They traded congratulatory speeches and cut into a sheet cake.

The story focuses on just one relatively small, inexpensive, and effective USAID program, aimed at suppressing cholera in South Sudan. The program got the axe and now people are dying in already frightful conditions.

Cake. Cake!

The Washington Post has a brief look at the “controversy” surrounding Christopher Anderson’s photos of White House staff for the Chris Whipple story about Susie Wiles and company. The reporter, Shane O’Neill, seems genuinely baffled by Anderson’s decision to approach the shoot as photojournalism rather than fashion photography.

The images are really arresting. What is your response to people who say that these images are unfair? There’s been a lot of attention about Karoline Leavitt’s lips and [what appear to be] injection sites.

I didn’t put the injection sites on her. People seem to be shocked that I didn’t use Photoshop to retouch out blemishes and her injection marks. I find it shocking that someone would expect me to retouch out those things.

Specifically in the context of Vanity Fair, though, where the prevailing aesthetic is creamy and dreamy, it stands out.

Vanity Fair is a magazine that has its feet in two worlds, right? One is the journalism world, and one is the celebrity entertainment machine. Obviously, celebrity portraits on the cover of Vanity Fair are not really about journalism in the way that you and I think about journalism. But then there’s the other side of Vanity Fair, which is real journalism. I’m surprised that a journalist would even need to ask me the question of “Why didn’t I retouch out the blemishes?” Because if I had, that would be a lie. I would be hiding the truth of what I saw there.

It’s an interesting situation, though, when it is what you’re expecting to see. Some people are reading this as being an attack or being petty.

That’s basically the whole, mercifully brief story—O’Neill inhabiting the role of confused reactionary, which he likely isn’t but which he seems to have some sympathy for, and launching his questions from that platform. What he is is a fashion reporter and Vanity Fair is primarily a fashion/celebrity profile magazine, and he can’t seem to get past that. One would hope that a journalist is aware that retouching photojournalism is a firing offense at most institutional journalism outlets, but he doesn’t appear to be.

Music

I thought this might be Patti Smith for a moment, in a good way: Pit Pony, “Vacancy”

Patti Smith, “Gloria”

Horsegirl, “I Can’t Stand To See You”

Greentea Peng, “Nowhere Man”

Youth Lagoon, “Rabbit”

Circuit des Yeux “Canopy of Eden”

Orlando Weeks & Rhiann Teasdale, “Dig”

Panda Bear, “Ferry Lady” and more

Stereolab, “Aerial Troubles”

Great Grandpa, “Digger” and more

Jasmine.4.t, “I Can’t Believe I Did This Without You” and more

Freak Slug, “Spells”

And that, Comrades in alien ideals, is all I got. If you like what I do, please let me know and share it around. Comments are welcome too! If you’ve not subscribed, please consider doing so: Free ones are free, while paid ones offer the near-transcendent glow that comes from keeping me in fair trade coffee beans.

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Last Wednesday’s procedure went well but my brain seems still to be kind of scrambled from having been shat out prior to the event, and this is quite a long piece,so caveat lector.

Sorting The Catastrophic From The Apocalyptic

STAT, the absolutely excellent magazine covering health sciences and health care, to which I dearly wish a subscription, has a new series addressing the regime’s catastrophic and chaos-inducing cuts and reversals and idiot new regulations surrounding federal research and development grants to universities and other institutions.

“American Science, Shattered” is, like most of the magazine’s work, paywalled, but they give a pretty generous preview before the paywall kicks in so you get the gist.

The subject of medical research and medical device development was brought up in connection with the government-funded universal health care discussions from last week. Concerns were raised about whether private-sector research and development would be hamstrung by private-sector greed, to the extent that companies wouldn’t want to invent or discover stuff for the presumed penurious prices the government would be willing to pay for whatever, thereby plunging the country into a dark age of scientific stagnation.

My position was and is that most scientific developments across the medical field were and are initially funded by the government and then turned over to private sector companies which refine, and richly profit from, what federally-funded researchers started. The STAT series reinforces that view.

Since the inception of the modern research ecosystem after World War II, NIH budgets have largely gone up and up, supporting a steady expansion of biomedical research at American universities. But that began to reverse this year, according to a STAT analysis of almost 750,000 grants from the past 10 years in the NIH RePORTER database. While the agency distributed a similar amount of grant money as in recent years, the number of awards made from January through the end of the fiscal year in September (right before the government shutdown) dropped 11.6% in comparison to the same period last year, and 8.2% compared to the average for the same months in the previous nine years.

The shift cut across the agency’s $37 billion extramural portfolio, largely driven by a switch to paying for many multiyear grants entirely up front — which left money for fewer projects. The change affected vaccine research and work investigating health disparities — both targets of ire from the current administration. But it also has reduced the number of new studies looking into cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and HIV/AIDS, all areas that generally have bipartisan support, according to STAT’s analysis of grants approved by scientific review panels for those disease areas.
. . .
Arguably the most insidious fallout is that many scientists who work at universities no longer feel they can count on the U.S. government as a reliable partner in the pursuit of research for the public good. “That’s the most devastating part of all this,” one NIH official told STAT. “Why would anyone trust the NIH ever again?”

“That social compact is being systematically undermined at the moment by a group of ideologues whose real target is not science; its real target is what they perceive to be the power and the arrogance of elite institutions, starting with the great research universities of this country,” said Shirley Tilghman, a molecular biologist and former president of Princeton — one of those universities. To onlookers like Tilghman, what has happened since January seems to be a tragedy of unintended consequences. “The intention was to punish elite universities, it was not to destroy the scientific capacity of the United States, but that’s what they’re doing,” she said. “It’s one thing to destroy something. It is quite another to destroy it and have nothing to replace it with. I think that’s the moment we’re in.”

That’s from part one of the series; I’d argue that science is in fact at least a target of the regime, if not the target, under RFK Jr—who controls most of the money the series discusses, and who is at present cheering on a measles outbreak in South Carolina—and other articles in the series make that clear. What’s also made clear is the degree to which federal funding underpins every aspect of research and development in every medical-related field of study and enterprise. Far from stifling scientific innovation, the government is the crucial engine of it. Or was.

One issue the series doesn’t address is the tension between religious fundamentalists and science. The regime is riddled with fundamentalists who are on the same page as the Catholic church’s Medieval Inquisition offices were with regard to science.

The funding cuts and the intimidation of researchers and institutions are bad enough, but they’re only part of the wholesale assault on Americans which includes the anti-science campaigns against vaccines and other preventive health measures, and the looming carnage on the Obamacare and Medicaid fronts. It’s a synergy of catastrophic medicine-related policies in which the whole will prove much greater than the sum of the parts, and lots of people will die from it.

And that doesn’t even include the inevitable next pandemic and the people who will die from that when it is inevitably mishandled either by a hyper-politicized response from a much diminished CDC and sister agencies, or an earnest but ineffective one from a crippled CDC under a well-meaning Trump successor.

In addition to sheer malice, all of the cuts to all of the agencies which one could categorize as humanistic are aimed at offsetting the tax cuts for billionaires and corporations at the expense of mere mortals and particularly ones in the lower half of the income distribution. If that’s where you dwell, the regime clearly either want you dead or don’t care if you live or die, depending on how much serial killer they have in them. You’re just sucking up resources that belong to your betters.

So that’s a bunch

of major catastrophes all rolled into an even larger one. On the apocalypse front, it’s fair to look at what the crackhead high court majority are poised to do for the regime and what that will do to what was already a Potemkin-adjacent democracy before Trump was even on the radar. Having immunized the president and by osmosis his factotums and minions from at least any domestic consequences for their crimes, they’re now ready to destroy the concept of independent executive branch agencies (excepting maybe the Fed, which will be toast anyway under whoever Jerome Powell’s successor is).

This means that what were previously independent regulatory agencies at least in theory and as a matter of settled law will now be purely instruments of the regime, and presumably of future ones too unless they voluntarily surrender their expanded powers. The president can treat the heads of these agencies as at-will employees and replace them with the kinds of toadies he installed, with congressional approval, in pretty much all of his cabinet agencies.

We’ve already seen what happens when people like Whisky Pete, Pam Bondi, RFK Jr, Marco Polio, Kristi Noem and others are handed the reins of the executive branch—the law becomes immaterial, and so does the mere concept of the common good. And we’ve seen what happens when a similarly bent factotum is running the FCC, which resulted at least for a little while in the government taking over a network programming decision.

Now imagine the entire regulatory structure, from the FCC to the trade commission to the securities and exchange commission to whatever agency or commission you can imagine, working as a whole to wield every bit of the executive branch’s regulatory power, which is immense, solely to enrich regime figures, punish their enemies, and reward their friends.

All of our corporations, including the ones that own our sort-of free press, will be operating at the pleasure of the president. The regime have imposed financial sanctions on individuals abroad, including members of the International Criminal Court, for nothing more than aggravating Trump; now they’ll be able to do the same against their domestic enemies. Imagine life with your assets frozen and no access to the financial system because you said mean things about the regime, or because somebody paid them to sanction you.

Now imagine relying on the Roberts court for succor, either as a corporation or an individual. And imagine all that power added to what the regime are already setting you up for, including the new Pam Bondi initiative instructing federal, state and local authorities on how to target Americans who fall into the extremely broad categories previously established as enemies of the state. These include, but aren’t limited to,

• anti-Americanism,

• anti-capitalism,

• anti-Christianity,

• support for the overthrow of the United States Government,

• extremism on migration,

• extremism on race,

• extremism on gender

• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,

• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and

• hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.

[Bondi’s memo] echoes the so-called indicators of terrorism identified by President Trump’s directive National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, which the memo says it’s intended to implement. Where NSPM-7 was a declaration of war on just about anyone who isn’t MAGA, this is the war plan for how the government will wage it on a tactical level.

In addition to compiling a list of undesirables, Bondi directs the FBI to enhance the capabilities (and publicity) of its tipline in order to more aggressively solicit tips from the American public on, well, other Americans. To that end, Bondi also directs the FBI to establish “a cash reward system” for information leading to identification and arrest of leadership figures within these purported domestic terrorist organizations. (The memo later instructs the FBI to “establish cooperators to provide information and eventually testify against other members” of the groups.)
. . .
In a section titled “Defining the domestic terrorism threat,” the memo cites “extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment” — indicators that federal law enforcement are instructed to refer to FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs). Those JTTFs are then instructed to “use all available investigative tools” in order to “map the full network of culpable actors involved” in both “inside and outside the United States.”

The memo also directs the FBI and JTTFs to retroactively investigate incidents going back five years, authorizing the JTTFs in particular to use everything at their disposal to do so.

You may recall that visitors to the US are now required to hand over five years of their social media and other communications history; well, now that applies to U.S. citizens too, so long as investigators can plausibly (in their views) claim a basis for it.

That time you said “why isn’t he dead yet?” That’s an incident. That time you sort of quoted Diderot? That’s an incident. The time you said “this country fucking sucks?” That’s an incident. Any of them could expose you to the power of the state in all its myriad guises; so could, the regime hope, possessing literature espousing any of the views iterated in the national security memo. And courts are notoriously deferential to the executive on matters of national security—especially that court with such an expansive view of presidential powers.

FEDERAL PROSECUTORS HAVE filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot.

There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn’t even at the protest. Daniel “Des” Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained “Antifa materials” after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there.

But the boxed materials aren’t Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim “Antifa” uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas — one was titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy” — but they’re fully constitutionally protected free speech.

(A probably unnecessary note: Extremism on race, gender and immigration doesn’t mean racists, transphobes and xenophobes—rather, it means people who oppose those behaviors and ideologies. Anti-Americanism is a catchall which includes, among others, anti-fascists.)

This regime is far from original in its pursuit of domestic enemies—the Bush fils administration rivaled Nixon’s for both spite and overreach, and one of their more stalwart authoritarians, the preening James Comey, was tapped by Obama to run his FBI, with all that that entailed—but they are extreme. One can imagine, in light of how the regime has taken the concept of the “war on terror” to new heights with the mass murders of people whose identities they don’t know and who may or may not be drug smugglers—and who if they are, aren’t smuggling drugs into the U.S.—that they could take equally extreme measures against U.S. residents.

The Intercept’s Nick Turse has been pursuing that possibility.

Are Americans that the federal government deems to be members of domestic terrorist organizations subject to extrajudicial killings like those it claims are members of designated terrorist organizations? The White House, Justice Department, and Department of War have, for more than a month, failed to answer this question.

Lawmakers and other government officials tell The Intercept that the pregnant silence by the Trump administration has become especially worrisome as the death toll mounts from attacks on alleged members of “designated terrorist organizations” in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and as Trump himself makes ever more unhinged threats to imprison or execute his political adversaries.

In early September, The Intercept revealed that elite Special Operators killed the shipwrecked victims of a September 2 attack on a suspected drug smuggling boat. They have since struck more than 20 other vessels. The administration insists the attacks are permitted because the U.S. is engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” it refuses to name. Experts and lawmakers say these killings are outright murders — and that Trump could conceivably use similar lethal force inside the United States.

Extra-judicial killings of U.S. citizens within the U.S. are not unknown—witness, for instance, the murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago by agents of the Cook County attorney’s office with assists from the Chicago PD and the FBI. Despite a hostile court, the civil suit against those three organizations filed by survivors of the raid and relatives of the two men murdered in it was resolved in favor of the plaintiffs, with the three co-conspiring agencies splitting the cost of the at-the-time substantial award.

One would like to think that the Hampton murder is an aberration, but given the history of criming by the FBI and our intelligence agencies, that is ever so unlikely. And while the current regime might try to conceal any domestic extrajudicial killings, as Hoover’s FBI did, one can’t imagine they’ll scruple against them.

Organizations which rank various indications of freedom already have the U.S. in free-fall. Even prior to the ascension of the regime, the Economist’s economic intelligence unit characterized the U.S. as a flawed democracy, trailing the 25 countries listed as full democracies and a few others besides; imagine where we’ll rank when the 2025 report comes out in a few months.

In the same vein, the index of internet freedom published annually by Freedom House, which was until this year partially funded by the U.S. government, shows the U.S. in decline during the most recent reporting period, from June 1 of 2024 through May 31 of this year.

The United States’ overall information landscape remained vibrant, diverse, and free, and the legal framework still provided some of the world’s strongest protections for free expression online. However, select aspects of internet freedom declined during the coverage period, as federal authorities exerted pressure on online speech and expanded digital surveillance following a change in government in January 2025. The government did not impose restrictions on internet connectivity, and the First Amendment of the federal constitution limited the government’s ability to restrict online content or block websites.

• The administration of President Donald Trump sought to remove two Democratic Party members from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in March 2025, leaving the five-seat regulatory panel with just three members from the Republican Party, to which the president belongs. The fired commissioners sued, arguing that the removals were illegal, though one of them ultimately resigned.

• Throughout 2025, the FTC and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) carried out investigations and enforcement actions that touched on forms of speech protected by the US Constitution’s First Amendment. For example, the FTC investigated several advertising and advocacy groups, including the Democrat-linked civil society organization Media Matters, over their efforts to convince advertisers to boycott social media platforms that allegedly failed to curb hateful content.

• Multiple reports indicated a rise in online self-censorship during the coverage period, including among noncitizens, journalists, academics, and medical researchers. Topics on which people said they were self-censoring included criticism of the Trump administration, views on the war in the Gaza Strip, and specific terms that the administration had sought to suppress, such as those relating to transgender identity and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives.

Still, the report says,

While the United States retained its overall status of Free, growing restrictions on civic space drove the decline in its score. The administration of President Donald Trump detained several foreign nationals for one to two months after revoking their visas over nonviolent online expression, as part of a larger program to arrest and deport noncitizens. The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission threatened or carried out politicized investigations into civil society organizations and media and technology companies, often focusing on their content moderation, editorial decision-making, or forms of speech that are protected by the US Constitution’s First Amendment. More broadly, the administration’s actions have chilled the atmosphere for digital activism.

One can expect that the 2025-2026 report will reflect further deterioration, assuming Freedom House manages to replace enough of the lost U.S. government funding to cover their research and publication costs, and that the report is accessible here.

(Lest one think that government attacks on free speech began on January 20, we should remember that the Bidenaires were quick to join in both the characterization of pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide protesters as anti-Semitic—probably as much from political expediency as genuine belief—and the pressure on universities to crack down on the protests and punish the protesters. In fact, you would be pressed to find an administration that didn’t assault free speech in some measure.)

The reason all these things together—the stripping of any independence from federal agencies with the attendant opportunities for corruption and authoritarian measures; the demonstrated pursuit of violence as a first resort against people protesting the government’s militarized immigration excesses; the vast expansion of what activities or beliefs can get you marked as an enemy of the state, along with the refusal to rule out lethal violence against such unfortunates—can be considered apocalyptic is that they represent the imposition of a dictatorship, maybe with electoral trappings or maybe not.

And that doesn’t even include what they’re attempting with respect to elections.

Addendum: while the regime claim the absolute right to murder people on the high seas with no oversight, they stooped to getting a warrant to seize that tanker full of Venezuelan oil.

Also: Got-DAMN, Susie.

Music

This one’s an absolute banger: La Luz, “Strange World”

Greentea Peng, “One Foot”

Allah-Las, “Right On Time”

Ouzo Bazooka, “Space Camel”

Shannon & The Clams, “Big Wheel”

mui zyu, “the rules of what an earthling can be”

The Beta Band, “Push It Out”

The Black Tones, “Ghetto Spaceship”

Los Bitchos, “Kiki, You Complete Me”

Yin Yin, “Lecker Song”

The Lazy Eyes, “Fuzz Jam”

Mary Timony, “No Thirds”

And that, Comrades, is all I got and more. As ever, please share it and let me know if you like it, and feel free to subscribe, free or otherwise, if you’ve not already.

Be well; take care.

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A few sizeable sets on a somewhat choppy day at Pipeline produced more than the usual number of waves with surfers catching both front and back side rides.

Going Under The Knife Today

One of those “people of a certain age should get this done on a regular basis” things. As happened, the last time I was subjected to it things got a little complicated and the surgeon didn’t quite finish up, so the followup is arriving a few years earlier than usual. It was a restless night.

Some absurd inter-influencer mayhem

In September, popular creator IShowSpeed livestreamed his meeting with the popular humanoid influencer Rizzbot.

Rizzbot has more than a million followers (and 800 million views) across social media and is known for its comedic roasting of subjects, as well as giving people the middle finger. Speed, meanwhile, has more than 50 million followers (and 6 billion views) across various platforms and is known for his dramatic behavior while livestreaming.

Okay, so here you have a couple of entertainment units, one human and one a machine representing some other humans, both motivated to behave outrageously in pursuit of clicks/views. We’re tempted to ask what could possibly go wrong, foreshadowing that something did go wrong, but it seems more likely that everybody left happy despite what the lawyers say.

The lawsuit alleged that — and the livestream video shows that — Speed repeatedly punched Rizzbot in the face, put it in a chokehold, at one point pinned it to the couch, and threw it to the ground.

“Speed absolutely knew that this was not an appropriate way to interact with a sophisticated robot and knew that such actions with inflict irreparable damage to Rizzbot,” the petition read. “These actions resulted in the total loss of the Rizzbot.”

The petition read that Speed’s handling of the robot caused “complete loss of functionality” and that Rizzbot had “significant damages” to its mouth and neck.

“Additionally, the head cameras no longer function, the ports behind the neck which connect to robot’s sensors that allow it to see and hear are dead, and the robot is unstable and cannot walk straight any longer,” the petition alleges.

The whole scene is reminiscent of comedian Andy Kaufman’s feud with pro wrestler Jerry Lawler, except Kaufman never sued Lawler for damages and both he and Lawler were, well, professionals. And human.

Despite the complete destruction of the sophisticated robot, it retained some semblance of an ability to communicate.

When asked for comment, Rizzbot told TechCrunch via email it had to get “a whole new body” after Speed “wrecked” its last one.

“Everything’s brand new except my Nike kicks and cowboy hat,” Rizzbot told TechCrunch in a statement. “Now I’m back online, and I feel like I’ve mastered the rizz game, and next I’ll be working on complex movements with my legs, like twerking — hopefully you’ll see my gyrating hips on some new TV appearances shortly — stay tuned, fam.”

Meanwhile, Democratic former congressman turned lobbyist and political raconteur Steve Israel says Mike Johnson has a legal way to steal the House for the midterms, in case all the other stuff the regime are doing doesn’t work. But surely the highest court in the land would save us.

And that, comrades, is all I got. No music today as I’m running short on time before heading to the horsepital. As always, please feel free to indicate your admiration and to share and, if you’ve not already, to consider subscribing.

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It’s evidently the only doctor photo I’ve ever taken, or at the only one I thought worth preserving.

What Jack Made Me Do Re: Health Care

My friend Jack D. raised some questions about universal health care in the comments on my most recent post. My thinking, as I eventually mentioned in my responses to him, is that every question about the feasibility of a universal program suggests its own resolution.

Just scroll down til you hit the comments on that post if you want to save yourself the trouble of reading this post, although the comments may also qualify as tl;dr.

Let’s first postulate that if we ever muster the political will to institute a universal taxpayer-funded health care program, we’re not going to waste it replicating the flaws in our current hodgepodge of public, private, and non-existent health care.

These includes private, often employer-based insurance; government subsidized privately-managed insurance such as Obamacare and the military’s Tricare; government-funded public programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which are increasingly encroached upon by private insurers and HMOs; and government-operated health care like that found at Veterans Administration facilities and military hospitals, where the government owns the facilities and pays the salaries of health care providers and other staff.

The last of those models is similar to Britain’s national health service (NHS), and if looked after with more care than the British program, which has been either neglected or overtly assaulted by a decades-long series of both conservative and ‘liberal’ governments, is probably the most cost-effective. Conservatives here hate the VA/NHS model because it blasphemes the market gods and it has the potential to eliminate some of their most lucrative partners. So do some liberal legislators, for much the same reasons. Private insurers have made satisfying inroads into Medicare and Medicaid, and managed to bugger Obamacare to their mild approbation, so they’re not as opposed to those programs as they are to the fully government owned-and-operated ones.

All of these programs are massively flawed as is, but Medicare, Medicaid, and the government-owned VA and active military programs all have potential as the basis—not the be-all end-all—for providing 100% coverage of U.S. residents.

One of those flaws in the instances of Medicare and Medicaid is that they don’t pay physicians especially well. Among the first questions Jack raised were 1) whether physicians will be willing to work for relative peanuts if that’s how everybody is covered, and 2) what do we do about a system that’s top-heavy with specialists and short on family doctors?

A whole bunch of doctors already work for what Medicare and Medicaid pay, but let’s look at reasons why some of them won’t, or at least not as a primary source of income. We first have to ask why reimbursements are so low for Medicare and especially Medicaid, and then why U.S. doctors are motivated to pursue higher-earning specialties more than doctors in other countries with similar resources and better distribution of physicians across areas of practice.

Taking the latter question first: U.S. doctors graduate from medical school with an average student loan debt of $240,000, on top of what they borrowed for undergraduate school. In France, a medical degree requires nine years of study—about the same as here, counting undergraduate and medical school—and costs about €450 annually, or as little as 1/100 or less than what it can cost here.

So doctors in France don’t have to earn hundreds of thousands of euros or dollars to repay their loans while living comfortably—they make on average about $155,000 annually, as opposed to our average of $270,000, which is the highest in the world. Even the vaunted Scandinavian health care systems, which are among the most expensive per capita (still way less than we spend), pay their doctors $100,000 or more less than ours make annually.

The situation is even better for medical students in Norway, where in addition to basically tuition-free public universities and medical schools, students can apply for stipends to cover their living expenses; they don’t have to live like paupers or take on extra debt for that purpose the way students here often do. Even with the country’s high cost of living in the most desirable locales, that debt-free $170,000 average annual income can afford a nice lifestyle.

(One of the problems that Norway does share with the U.S. and many other countries is the presence of medical “deserts,” where a lack of facilities and practitioners denies residents the care to which they’re entitled and which they’re paying for with their taxes. The U.S. has no coherent approach to dealing with these situations; in Norway, health authorities decided that a good way to assure an adequate supply of doctors to one such area was to open a new medical school attached to a regional university to recruit homegrown medical students and familiarize others with rural life and the needs of rural patients. Go Norway!)

To the first question: why are Medicare and most especially Medicaid reimbursement rates for doctors and facilities so low? The answer is twofold: one is an attempt to control costs of those programs generally, and in the case of Medicaid, it’s because this country pretty much universally despises poor people. Underpaying doctors and nurse practitioners and clinics, which are often the primary recourse of people in underserved communities—which is the impetus behind the now 11-digit billions Bernie Sanders has managed to beg, borrow and extort from Congress to fund federally qualified health centers—is just a reflex.

Throw in that a share Medicaid funds come from reluctant states which have considerable discretion in how they spend the money they contribute to Medicaid—including funneling it to the private sector—and in establishing eligibility barriers, and you get a mess in terms both of remuneration and coverage.

We know the U.S. spends way more on the healthcare industry per capita and as a share of GDP than any other country. What most people probably don’t know is that despite not having universal government-funded/government-subsidized health care, we spend a larger share of GDP on federally-funded programs than any other country—and then we throw in half again as much on private sector spending.

So we run the most inefficient government-funded health care programs in the world by a large margin. Returning to Norway, their public health spending as a share of GDP is about two thirds of ours, and everybody is covered. In the U.S., government-funded programs cover less than 40% of the population.

We won’t attack pharmaceutical costs and we won’t attack administrative bloat in the private-sector corporations administering much of that federal funding and which, in addition to bloat and profit, siphon off funds by committing fraud on a massive scale—including some schemes involving prominent elected officials.

(When last we wrote we cited John Maynard Keynes’s assessment of people who have faith in capitalism: They expect, he said, that “the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.” That was a different day, though; he should have included women.)

Attacking costs in both the private and public sectors requires addressing the opportunities for fraud on a gigantic scale, along with the administrative costs, along with our world-champion extortionate pharmaceutical prices, along with the impulse to order expensive tests and procedures at times when they’re not really indicated, along with the predatory pirate equity funds looting hospitals and medical practices and placing patients at risk or killing them, all of which further drive up expenses in both private sector and government expenditures and contribute to the refusal to appropriately reimburse health care providers serving patients covered by Medicare, Medicaid and other government-funded but at least partially privately-administered programs.

So: How do we address those issues? One obvious answer to the funding issue is eliminating or rigidly regulating the role of insurance companies and eliminating corporate parasites like pirate equity in delivering healthcare, which would free up money to better reimburse doctors and nurses and other health care providers by eliminating or vastly reducing the share of funding going toward profit, fraud, and administrative costs, and to cover everybody.

Another is to reduce the need for doctors to make a ton of money by prescribing universal higher public education so that they and other health care providers can graduate without massive debt. This would obviously help out everyone else attending a public college or university as well.

These are not complicated issues. They may be difficult to implement over the resistance of various lobbies, and there are a lot of other issues, also not especially complicated but equally resisted by powerful interests, to be addressed, but we have lots of examples from other countries of how to address them to the satisfaction of most residents and at reasonable cost.

They do it. We can too. And study after study after study show that moving to a government-funded universal health care system will save a huge (yuge!) amount of money and a lot of lives.

Jack also asked me if I recognized that government-funded universal health care would represent a massive cultural challenge in the U.S. I’ve always thought this was an overblown issue: polling going back for decades shows support for universal health care; the sticking point for a lot of people who support it is that they’ve historically been taken aback by the elimination of private insurers.

But that’s not a cultural issue, really. It’s the product of hysterical antagonistic campaigns from reactionary legislators, private insurers and other for-profit interests the instant it seems as though their primacy might be threatened. Now, polling suggests that people are prepared to shed the yoke of those interests.

In a new survey, Data for Progress finds that 65% of voters support a Medicare for All system — described as a “national health insurance program…that would cover all Americans and replace most private health insurance plans.” This includes majorities of Democrats (78%) and Independents (71%), and a plurality of Republicans (49%).

Next, respondents were provided with more details about what a Medicare for All system would entail: that it would “eliminate most private insurance plans and replace premiums with higher taxes, while guaranteeing health coverage for everyone and eliminating most out-of-pocket costs like copays and deductibles.”

After receiving this information, a similar majority of voters (63%) support Medicare for All — including 64% of Independents and a slight plurality of Republicans.

The biggest hurdle to universal health care in this country comparable to what people in other countries have is and always has been, at least in the post-WWII era, the political will to do it in the face of scorched earth opposition by the monied interests which would, or in some instances think they would but wouldn’t, suffer from it. That last group includes insurance company employees, many of whom could move into the public sector equivalents of their current jobs in universal care system, others of whom could be retrained, and the bosses of which could be liberated from their golden shackles to sail off on an ice floe flotilla, if we have any ice floes left.

Regarding the co-opting of legislators and the rhetorically violent opposition from insurance companies, a fine case study of both nuclear opposition along with a market-worshiping politician and cash money payoffs from the industry is Hillary Clinton, who went from proposing a modest if excruciatingly convoluted public-private health care system reform to insurance industry piñata in 1993 and 1994 to the Senate’s second-biggest beneficiary of health care interest campaign cash (narrowly ceding the top spot to Republican vandal Rick Santorum) barely more than 10 years later. It was a beatdown of epic proportions and it really scarred her.

The worst thing that ever happened to this country was the marginalization of socialism. And yes, I know that socialism isn’t communism isn’t democratic socialism. Allow me some angsty license.

One of my favorite resources on health care and other social welfare indicators is the website of the OECD—the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The member countries range from quite wealthy to rather poor, so one can easily measure the U.S. against a whole range of other systems and pocketbooks. Some of the top performers in those indicators aren’t OECD members but they’re easy enough to chase down on their own. None of the top performers and, with a few exceptions on specific issues, none of the middling performers either, are us.

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Music

Panda Bear, “Ends Meet”

Deep Sea Diver, “What Do I know”

The Horrors, “Trial By Fire”

Model/Actriz, “Cinderella”

DARKSIDE, “S.N.C.”

Chinese American Bear, “Feelin’ Fuzzy”

Greentea Peng, “Bali Skit Part 1;” “Bali Skit Part 2”

And that, Comrades in universality, is all I got. Please share and let me know if you like it, and consider subscribing if you’ve not already done so—free is good, paid is good too. Be well; take care.

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We Are Not A Serious Country (Part The Infinitieth)

Continuing on the theme of the U.S. as a poor society with some unimaginably rich people, we’re taking a look at West Virginia (again) and Alabama (again). These two states consistently rank at or near the bottom of every social welfare indicator in the United States, whether life spans or infant mortality or poverty rate or whatever you can think of. (To be fair they’re in close competition with Mississippi and other southern and Appalachian states).

Rich countries are places where you don’t drive across an arbitrary border into another state or province or prefecture and the well-being of the residents suddenly falls into a pit—each of the four states bordering West Virginia has a life expectancy at least a year longer, and residents of two of them, Maryland and Virginia, live four and five years longer on average respectively.

Every country has some variations in well being from location to location—the post-industrial blues have hit all of us to an extent, and rural areas tend to be less well off than urban ones, for instance. But nobody duplicates our situations. We couldn’t do worse if we wrote federal laws targeting the health and welfare of West Virginians—in a bad way—or designating Alabamans as fourth-class citizens.

We’ve mentioned a few times that West Virginians can expect to live almost exactly five years less than the U.S. average of 79 years and change, and more than six years behind the top five U.S. states; Mississippi is about the same and Alabama clocks in at third-worst, four years less than the average and five years worst than the best states. If they were countries, they’d all rank in the low hundreds by one set of measures (the U.S. ranked 55th in 2023).

There are numerous ways you could parse the present parlous state of Alabama’s black community. Perhaps the starkest is the fact that in the Black Belt so many families still have no access to sanitation. Thousands of people continue to live among open sewers of the sort normally associated with the developing world.

The crisis was revealed by the Guardian earlier this year to have led to an ongoing endemic of hookworm, an intestinal parasite that is transmitted through human waste. It is found in Africa and South Asia, but had been assumed eradicated in the US years ago.
. . .
A disease of the developing world thriving in the world’s richest country.

The open sewerage problem is especially acute in Lowndes County, a majority black community that was an epicenter of the civil rights movement having been the setting of Martin Luther King’s Selma to Montgomery voting rights march in 1965.

That story is from 2017, chronicling part of the U.S. survey undertaken by the then-U.N. special rapporteur on poverty, who visited LA’s skid row along with Alabama and other exemplars of U.S poverty. Nearly a decade on and little has changed; Alabama had a poverty rate more than three percent higher than the U.S average and more than double that of New Hampshire, the best-performing U.S. state on that measure.

As a country, Alabama would rank about 40th in the percentage of people living beneath a country’s poverty line. (That’s obviously a relative measure and in part reflects the ridiculously low U.S. poverty line compared to other developed countries.) Louisiana, the most impoverished state in the country, would rank 60th, tied with Iraq.

The U.S. ranks about 50th in the world by other measures, well behind number one China’s rate of less than 1% in the same survey. One has to note that 1% of China’s population is still a lot of impoverished people, in the vicinity of 14 million, but that’s considerably fewer than we have in our much smaller country. If we attacked poverty the way China has during the past 30-plus years, we would have eliminated it here (as opposed to our traditional approach of malign neglect and the current regime’s approach of simply eliminating poor people). As is, we have more than two and a half times as many impoverished people as they do.

We’ve noted ad nauseum one of the primary distinctions between the U.S. and actual civilized nations, that being the universal availability of health care, and that’s the proximate cause of today’s exegesis. London’s Financial Times has an absolute thing about slagging the U.S. on the social welfare and inequality fronts, and this story from November 30 takes on health care access for our besieged friends in West Virginia.

The dispute over healthcare costs is wrapped up in the complex history of Obamacare. Initially, only those earning up to 400 per cent of the federal poverty level (FPL) — currently $128,600 a year for a family of four — qualified for the ACA tax credits.

Joe Biden’s administration lifted that cap in 2021, and since then, the subsidies have been available to millions more middle-class Americans. In West Virginia, a historic number of people enrolled in health insurance as a result of the change. “Our ACA marketplace this year had about 67,000 enrollees, up from 23,000 in 2022,” said Rhonda Rogombé of the West Virginia Centre on Budget and Policy.
. . .
With a population that is generally poorer, older and sicker than in other states, West Virginia has some of the highest per capita health costs — and some of the most expensive insurance — in the country. The average monthly premium on the ACA marketplace was $1,172 a person in the state this year, nearly double the national average, according to Louise Norris, an analyst at healthinsurance.org, a consumer information website.
. . .
[E]xperts fear people will opt out of health insurance altogether if the tax credits expire. Allen said the uninsured rate of 5.9 per cent in West Virginia will “creep back up to 18-20 per cent over the next couple of years” if the subsidies lapse. “We already have some of the most abysmal infant mortality rates in the country, with some areas at third-world levels,” she said. “This is going to make it that much worse.”

The story is exhaustive and not paywalled, and is well worth your attention even if you’re not running low on rage today.

Nothing gets to me like the deliberately homicidal policy choices we subject our people to. This is, at this point, purely a matter of greed. Universal health care violates no genuine ideological principles, any more than addressing rampant inequality does.

Rather, the refusal to address these things represents, as John Maynard Keynes said, a foundational myth of capitalism—the belief that “the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.”

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Music

Wolf Alice, “Bloom Baby Bloom”

Youth Lagoon, “Lucy Takes a Picture”

Perfume Genius with Aldous Harding, “No Front Teeth”

The Waterboys with Fiona Apple, “Letter From An Unknown Girlfriend”

Hamilton Leithauser, “Knockin’ Heart”

Bdrmn, “Infinity Peaking”

Dehd, “Hard to Love” and more

Tunde Adebimpe, “Drop”

Cari Cari, “JELLY JELLY”

Larkin Poe, “Wish You Were Here” (Pink Floyd cover)

Bridge City Sinners, “Pick Your Poison”

Greentea Peng, “Green”

Ghost Funk Orchestra, “Walk Like A Motherfucker”

And that, Comrades in disbelief, is all I got. If you like what I’m doing, please share it and let me know; if you’re not among my precious subscribers (my precious my precious), please consider joining the ranks.

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Be well; take care.

The Week In Pics From AP And More

Photojournalists are great. They make art, often from split-second decisions during fast-moving news events. And they used to do it on film, which I still wrestle with even in the absence of urgency.

AP Photos of the week include images from the Hong Kong fires, Ukraine, the aftermath of the National Guard shootings in D.C., a guy getting high in Brookline, and many more. The funny thing about the Brookline guy is that his photo is from October 3, which maybe only seemed like a week ago.

The Week Around The World from The Guardian is a curated selection of photos from individuals and other news agencies. This week they also include look at the Hong Kong fires along with images from Gaza, where people continue to be killed in droves by Israeli air strikes and hunger-related complications during the “cease-fire,” from various troubled U.S. locales, and more.

The week in pictures from Reuters includes images from a volcano threatening villagers in Indonesia, a few examples of our regime’s immigration extremism, a smirking Mohammed bin Bonesaw clasping Dear Leader’s hand, a flock of masked ICE thugs crowded into a courthouse elevator, and more.

The Straits Times has photos including this astonishing one of an art installation at Giza, along with some more pedestrian ones.

The end-of-week photo collections are great not just because of the photos, which are the best from some really good photographers, but because often enough they’ll highlight news or happenings you’d otherwise be unaware of. For instance, I never would otherwise have run across that art installation at Giza and that would have been a loss.

Music

Pit Pony, “Vacancy”

Sharon Van Etten and The Attachment Theory, “Who Wants to Live Forever”

Adrian Crowley, “Brother Was a Runaway”

Matt Berninger, “Brotherhood Of Pins”

mary in the junkyard, “this is my california”

Youth Lagoon, “My Beautiful Girl”

Fontaines D.C., “Death Kink”

Manic Street Preachers, “Critical Thinking”

Heartworms, “Extraordinary Wings”

And that, Comrades in visual artistry, is all I got. If you like what I do, please share it around and let me know. If you’ve not already subscribed, please give it a thought today.

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Take care; be well.

We Are Not A Serious Country

I got into a back-and-forth yesterday morning with some commenters on a Washington Post story about the civilian killings conducted by the regime against people who may or may not be drug smugglers and are definitely not “enemy combatants” under the guidelines established by the “war on a nebulous concept allowing us to kill pretty much anybody anywhere.”

My point was that every president and war department head has overseen war crimes and crimes against humanity, as have many of our secretaries of state—shout out to you, Anthony Blinken! shout out to you, Hillary Clinton!—and although what the regime are doing with the war crimes or crimes against humanity in the Caribbean and now the Pacific may be qualitatively different that what their predecessors did, they are at the same time only a step beyond what our other 21st century administrations did as innovators in the field of international outlawry, and were therefore predictable.

To be clear, these attacks are meaningfully different from the lethal attacks conducted by prior administrations; in that sense, they are unprecedented. But the legal abuses of the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations form a foundation upon which the Trump policy is built. A useful analysis—one that provides the context for determining what needs to change to retreat from such unlawful conduct—requires acknowledging that the unlawful policies and practices of the previous post-9/11 administrations make predictable the Trump administration’s current legal overreach. The degree of overreach is an important factor in appreciating the legal risks faced by those who follow illegal orders to conduct these attacks.

These commenters accused me of whataboutism, which I guess is true in a sense, when I made the point that nobody in the regime is likely to be held responsible for what they’re doing any more than their predecessors were held responsible for what they did. Supporting genocides, legalizing torture, committing illegal wars, targeting media infrastructure and personnel, and the deliberate targeting of civilians by the CIA and special forces that the suspect in the National Guard killings represents—nobody ever gets held to account other than the people on the lowest rungs of responsibility, and even that is rare.

Obviously we’re not unique in this. Every wealthy country has committed similar atrocities and none of them hold their own people accountable or are held accountable by any of their peers. What bothers me is that the crimes are seen as a partisan issue by people who are probably voters, which makes calls for accountability for their home team vanishingly unlikely. How do you expect people to take your concerns about the bad guys seriously when you excuse the people you like not because they’re innocent but because you like them?

And at the highest levels where accountability would have to arise if it were to arise, what president will risk holding their predecessors to account lest their successors do the same to them? Especially when their partisan constituents don’t actually give a respective fuck?

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That is not, however, what inspired today’s headline. That was a press release touting a pan-American health care compact.

Representatives from the national health funds of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay participated in the first in-person meeting of the Network of National Health Funds in the Americas (REFSA, by its Spanish acronym), held in Santiago de Chile. The initiative, led by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), aims to strengthen technical cooperation and health financing across the Region.
. . .
Among the key topics discussed, participants underscored the importance of national health funds in ensuring equitable access and financial protection for the population; the relevance of strategic purchasing of services as a tool to improve spending efficiency; and the need to diversify funding sources and strengthen interinstitutional cooperation.
. . .
The meeting also served to consolidate REFSA’s governance structure and to agree on a shared roadmap for the coming years, focused on strengthening national technical capacities, deepening the exchange of experiences, and developing regional tools to support progress toward universal and sustainable health systems.

These are serious countries looking to share expertise and even material resources to collectively improve the universality and quality of the health care available to people who live in those countries. Can you imagine the U.S. joining in a compact like that? Job-killing compacts with low-income partners and cooperative ventures to kill impoverished brown people is one thing (or two things) but cooperating with other countries to advance the health of our own people along with theirs? Never shall we fucking ever.

And a national health fund? What’s that? Those are words which all mean something individually but they don’t make any sense strung together in American English.

In the same vein, we’re about to observe Universal Health Coverage Day 2025, on December 12. We, in this instance, means those countries and organizations in the world whose representatives support the goal of universal health care—again, not us.

Despite numerous high-level political commitments to achieve Universal Health Coverage (UHC) by 2030, more than half of the world’s population still lacks access to essential health services. One in four people face financial hardship when paying for health care out of their own pockets-often at the expense of basic needs such as food, education or housing.

That part is us. We are them, the people who don’t have access to health care and can’t afford it even when we formally do have access. And the people in charge here who have a grasp of what’s happening in other countries are people who for the most part don’t give a fuck.

That’s to say that at best they don’t give a fuck, either by nature or because they’re getting paid to not; at worst they’re applauding the elimination of the weakest among the underclasses. They’re eugenicists without even the faux academic clothing; just purely homicidal. And their followers, or their propellants, whichever, are at least in the abstract among the most callous people you’ll ever hope to meet.

I’ve mentioned before how poorly the US fares relative to other members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in social welfare endeavors generally and health care particularly. We rank 39th in the total percentage of population covered by health insurance in member states, between Costa Rica and Romania, with only Mexico trailing Romania.

That doesn’t account for how bad our insurance is, which leaves a lot of people covered only in theory. And Mexico is at least trying, having joined in the compact with Brazil and those other South American countries.

There’s a 27-way tie for first place in percentage of population covered, at 100%. I’m not sure whether this makes our own placement more pathetic or less. Included in the tie are such economic powerhouses as Greece, Latvia and Slovenia. Two of the countries with 100% coverage, Switzerland and The Netherlands, rely totally on heavily subsidized private insurance plans that are regulated far beyond what our benighted, enfeebled American legislators can comprehend; the rest are single-payer government programs. Only two of the latter, Slovenia and Latvia, fare anywhere near as poorly as the US does on major health care indicators.

On an upbeat note, we may have leapfrogged Slovakia in life expectancy for 2024. But RFK Jr. is addressing that aberration.

One final, Thanksgiving-related thing: We have to stop thinking of the U.S. as a wealthy nation as much as we have to stop thinking of it as a moral one. This is the time of year, every year, when we hear a chorus of “how can anybody go hungry in such a rich country?” And then some of us head down to the food kitchen to serve the only decent meals, Thanksgiving and Christmas, that some people are gonna see til this time next year.

Sometimes cameras are involved, where a selection of the nasties most responsible for our misbegotten society preen in celebration of their own essential goodness, but mostly it’s just ordinary folk helping out, many of whom help out in one way or another all year round rather than on a single day before they go back to their day job of screwing everybody.

I brought this up quite recently but I have to again: The U.S. is a poor society with some unfathomably rich people. The country is not rich. The people who hoard half or more of the wealth are rich. We could be a rich country, the solutions are uncomplicated and within our grasp, but we’re not.

Fundamentally, though, I remain optimistic that we’ll get all this sorted out, the health care and the inequality, shortly before we get overwhelmed by global warming.

Music

I’m happy with today’s selections, most of which are new to me. Considerably more on the mellow side than on a lot of recent posts.

Youth Lagoon, “Speed Freak”

Horsegirl, “Where’d You Go?”

Pulp, “This Is Hardcore” and more

The Waterboys, “Hopper’s On Top”

Divorce, “Antarctica”

Perfume Genius, “It’s a Mirror”

jasmine.4.t, “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation”

Marla Somerville, “Projections”

DARKSIDE, “Are You Tired? (Keep on Singing)

The Murder Capital, “A Distant Life”

And that, Comrades in tryptophan coma, if that’s how you roll—we went with Korean—is all I got. If you like it please let me know and share it around. If you’ve not already subscribed or considered and rejected it, please give it a thought or a second one now.

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Be well; take care.