Not Up For Much Today But Have A Gander Anyway, Plus
TK TK, plus music
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I don’t know if it’s still there, but that rock wall could only be seen by people on the platforms waiting for a train. Japan isn’t perfect, but sometimes it’s pretty great. And I really like that picture. A good snap.
Not Up For Much Today
I hardly have anything to do today and I don’t feel like doing it, but I want to mention a couple of items, the first prompted by friend of the newsletter and frequent commenter Jack D, who was remarking this morning on the supreme court’s evisceration of probable cause (and, separately, on the superb quality of the vastly underused comment section here).
Here’s Jack, who is himself an attorney: “Supreme Court, again without opinion, allows Administration to stop people for questioning of immigration status based on their ethnicity and job status, and does not require probable cause in the formal legal sense. Worst court ever!”
And here’s Sonya Sotomayor, also an attorney, in dissent:
“The Government ... has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction,” Sotomayor wrote.
. . .
“Immigration agents are not conducting ‘brief stops for questioning,’ as the concurrence would like to believe. They are seizing people using firearms, physical violence, and warehouse detentions,” she wrote. “Nor are undocumented immigrants the only ones harmed by the Government’s conduct. United States citizens are also being seized, taken from their jobs, and prevented from working to support themselves and their families.”
That’s from The LA Times and may be paywalled but obviously it’ll be available elsewhere. What the court has done here is take a big step toward legitimating stopping anybody for any reason. For now it’s brown people, but it could just as well at some point be people with large-ish hooked-ish noses, like me.
Papers, please.
Leni Riefenstahl
Corey Robin, a political science professor at CUNY/Brooklyn College, who is great and you ought to subscribe to his blog (it’s free!), has a review unfavorably comparing the new Leni Riefenstahl documentary to the one from 30-ish years ago (available on YouTube and probably elsewhere). Riefenstahl, in the unlikely event you don’t know, was the brilliant German filmmaker and propagandist who so ably documented and aggrandized Hitler and the Nazis.
The first documentary devotes a good chunk of the film to explaining how pioneering were Riefensthal’s techniques, how innovative her approach to film and propaganda. It’s only by appreciating her filmic achievements that we can wrestle with what a monster she was. The original film quotes her saying something to the effect that people are charismatically drawn to other people who devote themselves, almost fanatically, to their work. It’s quite a brilliant bit of insight, and surprisingly wise to herself and her draw. The film enacts that principle by leading us in to her infernal workshop. The new documentary tends to keep a distance from the painstaking care and creativity of her films, leaving the audience to wonder why anyone should care about her at all.
In both films, Riefenstahl comes across as a grade-A narcissist, someone who conforms to Arendt’s portrait of Eichmann, incapable of seeing the world as others saw it (unless they were one’s superiors) but devoted to the work. Like Eichmann, Riefenstahl also had penchant for aesthetic fantasy that consistently carries her away from the reality in front of her.
But only in the first film do we see how that moral shabbiness is married to genius, and why it is that someone like Riefenstahl, who thought that physical beauty inevitably meant moral beauty, could wind up looking like the ugliest person of all. As my wife said, you can’t even watch or look at her throughout the film; she’s the grotesque she so sought to avoid in and through film.
I haven’t seen the original documentary in ages, when I watched it as an aspiring and ultimately failed filmmaker, so I’ll be checking it out again.
More horrible shit the regime is doing
A few things I had run across and not remarked on.
The first is the tale of a decorated veteran, Bajun Mavalwalla II—no, no, don’t even think about relating this to his name and national origins—who was arrested on the day he was moving into his new house for, essentially, conspiring to discommode the Stasi. He didn’t actually do anything other than attend a protest that broke out in some light property-damage violence at one point, in which he didn’t participate, but, as the court of supreme chuckleheads keeps affirming, you don’t have to do anything to get drawn into the machine these days: you just have to be.
In interviews, former prosecutors said the conspiracy statute was broad and afforded the Trump administration potentially sweeping powers.
“Federal conspiracy charges are a wondrous thing,” said Bruce Antkowiak, a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania. “It is a vast net which you can use to catch a bunch of people.”
Under this law, prosecutors won’t have to prove that Mavalwalla blocked the bus or attacked agents, Antkowiak said. “The major issue in a conspiracy case is intent,” he said. “You have to prove an agreement. You don’t have to prove that people sat down together and made a pledge. You don’t even have to write up an agreement they have verbally, but you have to prove that these people agreed to act in concert,” he said.
Because of the law’s sweeping power, prosecutors typically use discretion, experts said.
“It seems like what we have here is an issue of selective prosecution,” Robert Chang, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said that will lead to a “chilling effect on free speech under the first amendment”.
This could get him many years in prison if he’s tried and convicted, and it could probably be aimed at most of you, whether successfully or not.
Meanwhile, kiss the voting rights act goodbye.
The black-robed constitutional assassins are scheduled to take a shot next month at further eviscerating the law John Roberts seems to despise above all others, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even if Roberts hadn’t been openly skeptical of the law since his days clerking for his openly racist predecessor, the late chief justice William Rehnquist, and on into his time in the openly racist Reagan Administration, restricting the ability to meaningfully vote is one of the pillars of the regime’s effort to avoid any electoral consequences for being fascist shitheads. So one can expect him to shepherd the case with that in mind.
The question before the court is whether the 2024 map with the additional Black-majority district [in Louisiana] will be used in 2026 and subsequent elections. If the high court strikes down the 2024 map, it will create a presumption of illegal racial gerrymandering when map drawers craft majority-minority districts — districts in which people of color are the majority of voters — effectively destroying Section 2 of the VRA.
If the high court finds Section 2 unconstitutional, we may well see the elimination of the 11 Black-majority districts — all Democratic — in Republican-controlled Southern states.
In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion in Shelby County v. Holder, gutting Section 5 of the VRA, which had required federal preclearance before changes to election rules could go into effect in jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory voting practices.
It seems likely that Roberts would validate this new attack regardless, but the benefit the regime would derive from the court’s acquiescence makes it look like a sure thing. To me, anyway.
Here’s an editorial in the medical journal Stat from some of the former members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee.
Covid-19 vaccination was a major accomplishment of the first Trump administration and is estimated to have saved millions of lives. Extensive evidence demonstrates the vaccines’ safety and effectiveness. Yet on Aug. 27, the Food and Drug Administration restricted licensure of Covid-19 vaccines to people age 65 years and older and to younger people with high-risk conditions. This decision was made without input from vaccine experts or the CDC. Normally, recommendations about who should get a vaccine and at what age come from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices after extensive CDC input. That process was abandoned after the HHS secretary dismissed us ACIP members in early June.
The American public should be very worried.
The decision also ignored the data on the high burden of SARS-CoV-2 illness among infants and pregnant people. Infants have Covid-19 hospitalization rates comparable to adults aged 65–74 years, who remain eligible for vaccination. During pregnancy, Covid-19 infection significantly increases the risk of severe complications — including ICU admission, mechanical ventilation, preterm delivery, and neonatal death. Vaccination during pregnancy protects both mother and baby, reducing hospitalization in infants during their first six months of life, before they are eligible for their own vaccine. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists call for Covid-19 vaccination for children ages 6-23 months and pregnant women, respectively. We should listen to the nation’s doctors.
Listen to doctors, you say? Pshaw.
I’m an old guy. I can get whatever vaccines I need anytime, pretty much. But I have a toddler grandchild and another one on the way, the mother of which is planning to return to the U.S. to deliver the baby. I’m starting to question the wisdom of some aspects of that decision, but one hopes she can get the necessary vaccines before she arrives and for the incipient child as soon as they get home if not here.
TK TK
I dunno. I thought I’d have something else but I forgot. So long as you’re here, though, you may as well subscribe if you’ve not already. Free subscriptions get you pretty much everything paid ones—$5/month, $50/year, $more/year if you want—do except the profound moral uplift from putting money in my gaping pockets.
Music
Also not much. A thing from Big Special, the composers of our new national anthem, and a drib and a drab from others.
Big Special, National Average, “God Save The Pony”
Amyl and The Sniffers, Comfort to Me, “Security”
Folly Group, Awake and Hungry, “Sand Fight”
That’s all I got! Take care; be well.
Tip of the hat.