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+++

“Don’t be taken in when they pat you paternally on the shoulder and say that there’s no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason for fighting. Because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretense of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons rapidly developed by servile scientists will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you into pieces.”

― Peter Weiss, The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

+ This political season feels like being trapped in a never-ending production of Marat/Sade, where the IQs of and de Sade have been reduced to about 60 and their moronic banter is inexorably driving the chorus (us) insane.

+ More than half of Trump’s supporters don’t believe he’ll actually do many of the things he claims he’ll do (mass deportations, siccing the military on domestic protesters and political rivals), while more than half of Harris’s supporters hope she’ll implement many of the policies (end the genocide/single-payer) she claims she won’t. And that pretty much sums up this election.

+ I remain baffled by the logic of the Harris campaign. Apparently, she convinced herself if she could capture the “Nikki Haley” vote, she’d have the election sewed up and she wouldn’t have to get herself dirty by appealing to college kids or Arab-Americans. This is a challenging feat to pull off when the real Nikki Haley is on the road campaigning for Trump and you’re stuck with Dick and Liz and we’re not talking about the Burtons.

+ It’s startling just how little the leaders of our country understand (or pretend not to) what is really going on out here and how much they are personally culpable for the toxicity, both metaphorical and literal (Flint still doesn’t have safe drinking water)… So let me help you out, Barack… More than two decades of non-stop war that has now morphed into genocide, an economic system that creates gaping inequalities and bails out the bankers who foreclosed on millions of homeowners, a political system fueled by unlimited infusions of corporate cash that is structurally tilted toward the moneyed minority, a health care system that leaves people buried in debt but doesn’t make them well, two guns in every home, and an energy system that ignited climate chaos…

+ Cook Political Report: “Harris is paying the price for positions taken and statements made when she and most of the other Democrats vying for the party’s nomination in 2019 were veering off into exotic territory on the Left.”

+ “Exotic territory on the Left” = single-payer health care, banning fracking, canceling student debt, $15 federal minimum wage, free child care for working families, ending qualified immunity for killer cops…all much more popular than Dick Cheney.

+ Bernie Sanders remains the most popular politician in America among young voters, and HRC is the most reviled. Guess who Harris is emulating?

Sanders: +27
Walz: +23
Harris: +19
AOC: +13
Buttigieg: +4
Biden: -11
Trump: -21
Vance: – 23
HRC: -27

+ Harris told NBCNews this week that she supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Astra Taylor: “A bold economic policy were today still in 2010.”

+ Jon Stewart: “The Cheney thing … do we really have to do that?”

+ Tim Walz: “I think Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney give permission to those folks who want to find a reason to do the right thing.”

+ Cap-R “Right thing,” that is…

+ Trump’s former chief of staff and Secretary of Homeland Security, Gen. John Kelly, told the New York Times that Trump spoke positively of Hitler multiple times, saying more than once, “You know, Hitler did some good things.” And the Atlantic quoted Kelly saying that Trump told him: “I need the kind of generals that Hitler had. People who were totally loyal to him, that follow orders.”

+ Fox News’ Brian Kilmeade defended Trump’s statement that he wants the “kind of generals that Hitler had.” Kilmeade: “I can absolutely see him go, it’d be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do, maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever.” Kilmeade and Trump may not be “cognizant” of the fact that several “German generals” (von Stauffenberg, Friedrich Olbricht, and Ludwig Beck) tried to blow Hitler to bits and Germany’s most famous General, Rommel, was forced to kill himself after being implicated in the plot.

+ After the Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler failed, two field marshals, 19 generals, 26 colonels, two ambassadors, seven diplomats, three secretaries of state, and the head of the Reich Police were arrested and executed–most of the generals were hanged from meathooks at Plötzensee prison…

+ Apparently, Trump wants the kind of “German generals” who, when he says, “invade Russia,” invade Russia, even though they know the campaign is doomed. Then, when millions of deaths later, it fails, they try to kill him.

+ Of course, Trump isn’t alone in lionizing the German generals of the Wehrmacht. Many at the Pentagon and West Point have done the same despite the disasters of Operation Barbarossa and Stalingrad. Patton and many other US generals and war strategists idolized Rommel. It’s a feature of imperial powers to extol the prowess of generals they’ve defeated while ignoring the innovations of those who kicked their ass, like General Giap, whose techniques of guerrilla warfare they still seem to have learned nothing from, to their extreme peril.

+ My prediction: The second Trump administration won’t get rid of the Department of Education but privatize it out to Prager U, which will develop new standard curricula not only rewriting US history to elide troublesome episodes, but also the military history of Nazi Germany…

+ Trump’s former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper on the former president’s vows to use the US military for political retaliation: “He’s spoken about this before. If you recall, a year ago or so, he spoke about a second Trump term being about retribution. So, yes, I think we should take those words seriously.”

+ I wonder what would’ve happened if Trump’s German Generals had implemented this mad order from the Donaldissimo: Disguise US F-22s as Chinese fighters and “bomb the shit out of Russia. Then we say [to Putin]: China did it. We didn’t do it. China did it. And they start fighting each other and we sit back and watch.” (See Woodward’s War)

+ Nearly half of all Americans support rounding up undocumented immigrants and tossing them into militarized camps. Evidently, the real Shithole Country is our own…

Overall: 47%

Republicans: 79%
Independents: 47%
Democrats: 22%

White Evangelicals: 75%
White Catholics: 61%
White mainline Protestants: 58%
Black Protestants: 42%
Hispanic Catholic: 33%
Unaffiliated: 32%

+ Amid all the immigrant trashing from self-proclaimed American patriots comes a study published in the September issue of Armed Forces and Society showing that immigrants were nearly 30% more likely to express a willingness to join the military than native-born Americans.

+ Maria Garza, the editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial page, has resigned after the owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong,  blocked the editorial board from moving forward with an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.  “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent. In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.” Soon-Shiong, like his billionaire pal Elon Musk, was born and raised in apartheid South Africa. He bought the LA Times in 2018 for “nearly $500 million in cash.” This will be the first time the paper hasn’t made a presidential endorsement since 2008.

+ A demographic analysis of the 2020 elections shows that Biden won because he did better than HRC with white men. In almost every other demographic group, Trump showed improvement.

+ Harris’s transition team is reportedly vetting crypto enthusiast Chris Brummer to replace Gary Gensler at the SEC.

+ Eugene Debs:  “I’d rather vote for something I want and don’t get it, than vote for something I don’t want and get it.”

+++

+ Donald Trump’s campaign promises would accelerate the insolvency of the Social Security trust fund and lead to a 33% across-the-board cut to all benefits, according to a new analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB).

Q: Do you think it’s possible to eliminate federal taxes?

TRUMP: There is a way. You know, in the old days, when we were a smart country, in the 1890s — this is when the country was relatively the richest it ever was. It had all tariffs. It didn’t have an income tax.”

+ The McKinley Tariff Act of 1890 put tariffs on tin plates and wool, …a far cry from steel and Electric Vehicles. Even then, the tariffs backfired so badly they were removed four years later…

+ Estimated costs of Trump’s tariff plan:

– Cost to typical family: $2,600/yr (Peterson Institute);

– Cost could be as high as $7.6K/yr (Yale budget lab)

– Gas price hike: 75 cents/gallon (GasBuddy);

– Poorest pay 6% more as a share of income (ITEP);

– US stock contraction: ~10% (UBS);

– ~20% decline in GM earnings (Evercore);

– 684K fewer full-time jobs (Tax Foundation)

+ Walz on Trump and Musk: “I’m gonna talk about his running mate – his running mate Elon Musk. Elon’s on that stage jumping around, skipping like a dipshit. He could spend millions to make more than $10 billion on the back end. Donald Trump, in front of the eyes of the public, is promising corruption.”

+ Gallup: “More than half of Americans (52%) say they and their families are worse off today than they were four years ago, while 39% say they are better off, and 8% volunteer that they are about the same.” These numbers are very close to 1992, when Poppy Bush lost to Clinton. This is yet another reason for Harris to distance herself from Biden’s policies. Too late now.

+ Both sides want to lose Michigan: Trump tells the Chicago Economic Club that US auto plant workers at importers like Mercedes Benz just assemble parts “out of a box,” adding that a child could do their jobs.” They want children to work on the assembly line.

+ Here’s an autoworker’s response to Trump’s dissing of UAW workers this week when he said: They don’t build cars. They take them out of a box, and they assemble them. We could have our child do it.”

“My name is Bill P., a Louisville assembly plant, Local 862, UAW. My job title is retired. I would like to challenge you [Trump] to do my job as a retiree, after 28 years on the line. I have no knees. They are absolutely destroyed. I need a hip replacement. I can barely walk, let alone even think about playing golf.  Come and try it. You think you know it all. Go for it.”

+ Bloomberg fact-checking some of Trump’s bullshit on the auto industry…

+ On CNBC, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman rationalized his endorsement of Trump by saying Biden’s weakness encouraged Russia’s invasion of Georgia, which happened in August 2008 during the Bush administration.

+ National Catholic Reporter on Trump’s profane rant at the Al Smith Dinner: “The real outrage is that Trump, given the public nature and extent of his repulsive record, should be invited to a fundraiser for an organization, Catholic Charities, that has long worked in the trenches to save and transform lives on society’s farthest margins. It is tragic that the guest of honor this year will be someone whose personal example and policy wishes are in a collision course with the principles of Catholic social teaching.”

+ Tucker Carlson, campaigning for Trump as the angry, daughter-spanking Dad America needs: “There has to be a point at which dad comes home…Dad comes home, and he’s pissed…You know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now.’”

+ People magazine, not The Nation…

+ When asked about the possibility of political executions, Michael Flynn vowed that the Gates of Hell” will be opened if Trump is reelected.

+ An investigation by NPR found that Donald Trump has threatened to prosecute, investigate, arrest or otherwise punish perceived enemies more than 100 times since 2022.

+ How badly have Harris and the Democrats misplayed the Gaza genocide and bombing of Lebanon? Trump, the man who implemented the Muslim ban, is now leading with Arab-American voters…

+ Trump: “I worked a shift at McDonalds yesterday.” A McDonalds shift is eight hours, not 18 minutes…

+ Dukakis in a tank looked less ridiculous.

+ The entire Trump McDonalds event, if you can call it an “event,” was staged. The McDonalds was closed for the day.

+ Sounds familiar…

+ Asked about how to expand the availability of organic food in urban areas, Trump said that would be up to Bobby Kennedy, Jr, who is “big into the health food and women things.” Where will Big Macs rank on Bobby’s Food Pyramid?

+ Trump says he didn’t like playing football because he didn’t like “some guy… from a bad neighborhood” tackling him…

+++

+ Kamala Harris: “No one should go to jail for smoking weed.” She sure put a lot of them there as a prosecutor. Is she writing notes of apology? Supporting reparations?

+ Harris on CNN: “How much of that wall did he build? I think the last number I saw was about 2%. And then when it came time for him to do a photo op, you know, where he did it? In the part of the wall that President Obama built.” So Harris intends to build more miles of wall than Trump?

+ According to data analyzed by AdImpact, “since President Joe Biden left the race on July 21, Republicans have spent about $120 million on ads attacking their Democratic rivals over trans issues.” The number of people in the US age 13 and older who identify as “trans” is about 1.6 million, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA or about 0.6 percent of the US population that is 13 and older.

+ Trump last week in LaTrobe, PA: “Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women, and I love women, but this guy, this is a guy that was all man. This man was strong and tough. And I refuse to say it, but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out there, they said, “Oh my God, that’s unbelievable.” I had to say it. We have women that are highly sophisticated here, but they used to look at Arnold, this is bad, but he was really something special. Arnold was something special.”

+ Stormy Daniels on Trump: “He’s no Arnold Palmer.”

+ When the Central Park 5 were falsely charged with raping a white woman, Trump took out ads in New York papers calling for their execution.  They were exonerated years ago, but Trump continues to slander them.  At the presidential debate, Trump said they pled guilty (they didn’t) and the victim died (she didn’t). Now they’re suing him.

+ Newspaper Guild president Jon Schleuss denounced JD Vance as“a scab, just like anyone else who crosses a picket line” after Vance published an oped in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where workers have been striking for two years. “There’s no excuse for it,” Schleuss said. “Our strikers have bravely held their picket lines against the Post-Gazette for over two years as management has relentlessly violated federal labor law. If you respect workers, you respect a picket line by striking workers.”

+ Journalist Mark Halperin: “I’ve been pitched a story about Donald Trump now for about a week, that if true, would end his campaign.” This is a grandiose journalistic fantasy. We should know by now that there’s no true or even false which would “end Donald Trump’s campaign.”

+ There’s been a lot of gossip in the last 24 hours about a story so ugly it will cause Trump to drop out. Here’s the first hint of what it involves. I don’t think there’s any story–true or false–which will take Trump down. It will just reiterate the belief among the Trump cult that he’s a King David-like figure whose debauchery has been given a divine dispensation. If true, the only impact this latest alleged act of sexual assault would have on the election is to add another zero to Melania’s annual allowance for staying married to him and probably give him another slight uptick in the polls.

+ Pastor Guillermo Maldonado, King Jesus International Ministry: “This is not a war between the left and the right. This is a war between good and evil…In the Old Testament, the prophets anointed the kings…Father, we anointed him to be the 47th president of the United States to restore the biblical values.”

+ Did they get the anointing oil in the same place P. Diddy got his?

+ Philip Roth on Trump’s 77-word vocabulary: “It’s better called Jerkish than English.”

+ Kamala Harris during her event with Liz Cheney in Michigan: “This concept of isolation? We were once there as a nation. And then Pearl Harbor happened … we have to remember history. Isolationism is not insulation.”

+ But what’s been the cost of the “concept of humanitarian interventionism?” 4.5 million dead in the forever wars, women worse off in Afghanistan now than before, 13 million refugees from Syria, many flooding Europe fueling rightwing regimes, chaos in Libya and the return of human slave trafficking and markets.

+ For a party that has spent the last six months warning about a fascist takeover of the US government, the Democrats didn’t spend much time thinking about how to keep this from happening, other than offering their own version of fascism lite featuring the Cheney Seal of Approval.

+++

+ Rents rose by an average of 8% from 2022 to 2023, the highest annual average growth seen since 2000…

+ The U.S. Department of Labor is investigating the possible employment of kids as young as 11 on the night shift at Tyson Food plants in Arkansas. Investigators have gone to the plants and noted that children might be working in hazardous conditions. After Trump’s mass deportation takes place, they’ll need to hire five-year-olds to work the killing line at the slaughterhouses…

+ A new study from UC Berkeley says after California’s $20 fast food minimum wage went into effect, workers made more money, employment rates remained stable, and a $4 burger cost only 15 cents more.

+ NLRB data shows that union election petitions are up 27 percent from a year ago and have increased more than double since 2021.

+ As many as 50% of Texas construction workers are undocumented: “In Texas, cutting off undocumented workers would be like banning gasoline overnight: even if a transition is possible, industry is so reliant that the economy would collapse. But, unlike gasoline, TX might not have any alternatives to undocumented workers.”

+ Mississippi police are using drug-sniffing dogs to intercept abortion pills in the mail.

+ A September report from the US Government Accountability Office found that China outspent the US by almost nine-to-one on foreign infrastructure finance between 2013 and 2021—$679 billion compared with $76 billion.”

+ Lula on the international financial system: “It’s the Marshall Plan in reverse, where the poorest countries finance the richest…African countries borrow at rights up to eight times higher than Germany and four times higher than the United States.”

+++

Oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf on the coming collapse of the Atlantic Ocean circulation currents:  “So my risk assessment has really changed. I am now very concerned that we may push Amoc over this tipping point in the next decades. If you ask me my gut feeling, I would say the risk that we cross the tipping point this century is about 50/50.”

A new study in Nature reveals that climate change was a key driver behind the extreme #drought in Europe in 2022. The paper reports that human-induced global warming contributed to 31% of the intensity, with 14–41% of such contribution due to warming-driven soil drying that occurred before 2022.

+ Gavin Schmidt, NASA’s top climate scientist, said, “We are going to get to 1.5 degrees a little faster than we anticipated even four years ago. I think this year it’s about 50-50 whether we will reach 1.5 degrees in the [NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies] temperature record.”

+ On the historic rain event in Roswell, New Mexico, on Sunday: A total of 5.78″ of rain, making it Roswell’s wettest day ever. This is 1/2 their average yearly rain (11.63″).  2.70″ was recorded in one hour between 8 and 9 PM, more than the average for October, November, and December (2.34”).

+ Electric Vehicle Growth Rates for 2024

China: +32%
USA: +9%
Europe: +2% (dragged down by Germany)
Germany: -16% (following the end of an incentive program)
Japan: -12%

+ China buys more EVs than all other markets combined.

+  Development Reimagined estimates that China could install “more than 224GW of clean energy in Africa by 2030, meaning its participation in Africa’s energy transition will be crucial for the continent to meet its target of 300GW by 2030.”

+ An analysis in Nature: Communications Earth & Environment finds that global sea-level rise has doubled in the last 30 years: “Global mean sea level rise amounted to 4.5 mm per year as a result of #warming oceans and melting land ice, more than twice the rate of 2.1 mm/year observed at the start of satellite data in 1993.”

+ Since 2001, forest fires have shifted north and grown more intense. According to a new study in Science, global CO2 emissions from forest fires have increased by 60% in the last two decades.

+ The world’s natural carbon sinks are beginning to fail: “In 2023, the hottest year ever recorded, preliminary findings by an international team show the amount of carbon absorbed by land has temporarily collapsed. The final result was that forest, plants and soil–as a net category–absorbed almost no carbon.”

+ The institution of flat-rate train tickets reduced Germany’s transportation emissions by five percent in their first year of use.

+ An analysis by First Street reveals that financial losses from hurricanes are rising mainly because Americans continue to build in high-risk zones and floodplains, especially in Florida: “Nationally, 290,000 new properties were built in high-risk flood areas from 2019 through 2023, almost one in five of the 1.6 million built in total during that period.”

+ It now requires about 1/8th as much silicon to make a single solar panel as 20 years ago.

+ Over the last 50 years, global wildlife populations have fallen by nearly three-quarters. The sharpest declines have occurred in the Caribbean and Latin America, where wildlife populations have collapsed by as much as 95 percent since 1974.

+ About 77% of the world’s coral reef area has experienced “bleaching-level heat stress” between Jan. 1, 2023, and Oct. 10 of this year.

+ According to the Financial Times, “Over the past five years, renewable energy generation has grown at a compound annual rate of 23 percent in the global south, versus 11 percent in the world’s richest economies.”

+ A study in Science concludes that human-driven extinctions of hundreds of bird species over the past 130,000 years have “significantly reduced avian functional diversity and led to the loss of around 3 billion years of unique evolutionary history.”

+++

+ People are seeing piles of dead cattle in the pastures and feed lots of California’s Central and San Joaquin valleys, victims of the quietly spreading H5N1 virus. According to the CDFA, 124 herds tested positive for H5N1; 315 tested negative. 13 dairy workers also tested positive. It is unclear how many cows have died, but their corpses are seen in piles along the roads of the Central Valley.  Due to the large volume of dead animals …pick-ups have shifted from daily to every-other-day schedules.”

= Meanwhile, Washington state has reported 4 cases of H5N1 bird flu in farm workers and the United Farmworkers issued a warning on the risks to farmworkers from avian flu and the lack of sick leave: “These workers are on the front lines of infectious outbreak…if they test positive, they’ll be looking at something that’s financially a disaster.”

+ A new study in the Journal of Pediatrics shows that the pandemic remains as bad as it ever was for babies – in the year to Aug 2023, 6,300 babies under one were admitted to hospital wholly or partly BECAUSE of Covid.

They are the only age group where admissions have not gone down over time.

From  Aug 2020-Aug 2023. Covid admissions in infants accounted for 43% of ALL admissions in children under 18 (19.7K/45.9K)

Infants (babies under 1) are generally at higher risk from respiratory infections, plus they are the age group that, if infected, are overwhelmingly meeting the virus for the first time.

They are not vaccinated and have not had it before.

As children gained some immunity from infection or were vaccinated (primarily teens), their risk of needing hospital fell.

But this doesn’t help infants in their first encounter with the virus. In the 12 months Aug 2022-23, infants were *64% of all covid child admissions*.

Most infants were in the hospital for only a short time – about 2 days, but e.g. in the last 12 months, about 5% needed intensive care, and eight babies died.

Children of ethnic minority backgrounds or in deprived areas were more at risk of COVID-19 admission to the hospital.

US analysis has shown that COVID hospitalizations in babies under 6 months old are HIGHER than ANY other age group apart from over 75! Similar to adults aged 65-74!

Almost 1 in 5 babies needed intensive care!

+ Infants in the US have died at higher rates after abortion bans went into effect, according to a study published in JAMA Pediatrics. This is evidence of a national ripple effect, regardless of state-level status,” said Dr. Parvati Singh, an assistant professor of epidemiology with The Ohio State University College of Public Health and lead author of the new study The health of infants and children has never been an issue for most of the anti-abortion movement.

+ After Kim Paseka learned that she was carrying a non-viable pregnancy, she said she “felt like a walking coffin.” Paseka lives in Nebraska, which has implemented a 12-week ban on abortions and because Paseka wasn’t raped and the pregnancy didn’t pose an immediate threat to her life, her doctors told her there was nothing they could do. “I had to go back to the hospital for three more scans, Paseka said, “where I had to see the heartbeat weaken further week by week, and during this whole time, I’m so nauseous, I’m tired I’m experiencing all the regular pregnancy symptoms, but I was carrying a non-viable pregnancy.” It took nearly four weeks for Paseka to miscarry at home.

+ In a ruling striking down Ohio’s abortion restrictions, Judge Christian Jenkins cited the fact that Ohio’s Republican AG Dave Yost asked him to ignore the state’s new constitutional amendment and uphold anti-abortion laws anyway. Jenkins refused.

+ The Florida official who sent letters threatening TV stations for airing pro-choice ads has filed a declaration in federal court stating that (1) DeSantis’ office directed him to send them, and (2) he resigned rather than send more.

+ Locate X is a US government-bought tool that tracks phones worldwide without a warrant. It’s now being used to track phones at abortion clinics. Joe Cox at 404 Media obtained leaked records of the tracking device in action and watched a phone go from Alabama to an abortion clinic and back again…

+ A lawsuit filed in Norfolk, Virginia, by the Institute for Justice argues that the warrantless use of Flock surveillance cameras, which are now in 5,000 different US cities, is unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment: “It is functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move. This civil rights lawsuit seeks to end this dragnet surveillance program.”

+ An investigation by the Associated Press found that nearly 100 people in the US were killed or injured since 2017 in plots that included US military or veterans, most of them in service of a far-right agenda. According to the AP: “the No. 1 predictor of being classified as a mass casualty offender was having a U.S. military background – that outranked mental health problems, that outranked being a loner, that outranked having a previous criminal history or substance abuse issues.”

+ While testifying against legalizing medical marijuana, Kansas Peace Officers Association Vice President Braden Moore says he doesn’t want the pungent odor in his state. “It’s not conducive to the state of Kansas, I don’t believe.” The Official State Smell of Kansas: Industrial Hog Farms.

+ U.S. Special Operations Command is developing AI-generated social media users that “Appear to be a unique individual that is recognizable as human but does not exist in the real world” for intelligence-gathering purposes.

+ Senator Lidia Thorpe, a leading voice of Australia’s Indigenous people, was hauled away after shouting at King Charles in Parliament House, “You are not our King! This is not your land! We don’t want you here!”

+ To the claim that Charles shouldn’t be blamed for the abuses of his ancestors, let us quote the the Irish Republicans’ response to his great-grandfather King George V’s visit to Ireland in 1911: “We will not blame him for the crimes of his ancestors if he relinquishes the royal rights of his ancestors; but as long as he claims their rights, by virtue of descent, then by virtue of descent, he must shoulder the responsibility for their crimes.”

+++

+ According to Bob Woodward’s latest book, War, Biden donors were freaking out about his diminished mental capacity as early as the early summer of 2023, after Biden’s incoherent appearance at a fundraiser of top Silicon Valley donors hosted by Microsoft executive Kevin Scott. Woodward reports that guests found Biden to be “frightfully awful.” He was described as being “like your 87-year-old senile grandfather,” who told each woman in the room, “Your eyes are so beautiful.”Biden was described as looking exhausted, “he could not wait to sit down and only took two pre-arranged questions.” He read the answers from printed note cards and “even then seemed to wander off point.” At another event a few weeks later in New York City, Biden couldn’t recall the word for someone who had served in the military.

+ At a fundraiser in Chevy Chase that summer, Bill Reichblum told Woodward that Biden: “never completed a sentence….He told the same story three times in exactly the same way and it meandered so much…Frankly, my impression was there were times when it was as though we didn’t exist. He was just rambling and talking as to what came into his head.”

+ Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon called for the public execution of women who falsely claim to have been sexually assaulted: “MeToo would end real fast … All you have to do is publicly execute a few women who have lied.” The New New Testament…Jesus: Who among you will help me execute this serpent-tongued harridan by throwing the first stone?”

+ Montana Senate candidate Tim Sheehy, on why he wants to abolish the Dept. of Education: “We formed that department so little Black girls could go to school down South, and we could have integrated schooling. We don’t need that anymore.”

+ Eric Trump claimed on NewsMax this week that his dad saved Xmas: Eric Trump says his dad saved Christmas: “You had a cognizant effort to get rid of the word ‘Christmas.’ They were calling it a holiday tree during the Obama administration. It wasn’t until my father came in and said, ‘Listen, we’re gonna call it a Christmas tree.’”

+ Variety: Why should President Trump come to see your show [War Paint]?

Patti Lupone: Well, I hope he doesn’t because I won’t perform if he does.

Variety: Really?

Lupone: Really.

Variety: Tell me why.

Lupone: Because I hate the motherfucker, how’s that?

+++

+ The GAO reported that only 40% of the boats in the US Army’s fleet are seaworthy. Down from 75% in 2020.

+ A key Saudi suspect in the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi has had his Twitter account reinstated by Elon Musk, after it had been permanently suspended under the company’s previous owner, Jack Dorsey.

+ Primo Levi on the Holocaust and the generation gap: “For us to speak with the young becomes ever more difficult. We see it as a duty and, at the same time, as a risk, the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to. We must be listened to; above and beyond our personal experiences, we have collectively witnessed a fundament, unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It took place in the teeth of all forecasts; it happened in Europe; incredibly, it happened that an entire civilized people, just issued from the fervid cultural flowering of Weimar, followed a buffoon whose figure today inspires laughter, and yet Adolf Hitler was obeyed and his praises were sung right up to the catastrophe. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.”

+ Since Russia launched its invasion in February 2022, Ukraine’s population has dropped by 10 million, with 6.7 million refugees now living abroad, according to the United Nations. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that Ukraine now has the lowest birth rate in the world, according to Florence Bauer, the U.N. Population Fund’s Eastern European chief.

+ Edward Luce, associate editor of the Financial Times: “Hard to overstate what a sinister figure Elon Musk is. Never seen one oligarch in a Western democracy intervene on anything like this scale with unending Goebbels-grade lies.” Musk is the most obnoxious kid in middle school who is running the campaign of the school bully for student council without even being asked because even the school bully doesn’t want to be around him…

+ When the cops searched the home of a suspect accused of shooting at a DNC office in Tempe, Arizona, they found more than 120 guns, more than 250,000 rounds of ammo, body armor, and a grenade launcher.

+ Items Rudy Giuliani had to sign into bankruptcy receivership…

+ A signed photo of Yankee Stadium? Did someone sell him the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge, as well…

+++

+ Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, Peruvian theologian, Dominican priest and “father” of liberation theology, has died at 96. His work helped inspire the church in Latin America to adopt a “preferential option for the poor,” transformed global theology, and expanded the social teachings of the church, all of which prompted US-backed death squads across Latin America to take murderous methods to suppress it…

+ I rarely missed reading Gary Indiana’s acerbic columns in the Village Voice, where he served as art critic for several years in the ’80s and captured the grim strangeness of that scabrous decade. Indiana, who died this week at 74, penned this writing advice to himself: “Be bitchy.” And he was. In one column, Indiana described Warhol’s prints of Mao as the equivalent of “a gold American Express card being brandished.”

+ Ingmar Bergman: “I usually take a walk after breakfast, write for three hours, have lunch and read in the afternoon… for a person who is as chaotic as me, who struggles to be in control, it is an absolute necessity to follow these rules and routines.”

+ Martin Scorsese: “The things you do badly are as much a part of your style as the things you do well.”

+ The rebranding of Russell Brand is officially beyond parody…

+ From Richard Goldstein’s final interview with James Baldwin in The Voice…

Goldstein: “Is there a particularly American component of homophobia?

Baldwin: I think Americans are terrified of feeling anything. And homophobia is simply an extreme example of the American terror that’s concerned with growing up. I never met a people more infantile in my life.

Goldman: I suspect most gay people have fantasies about genocide.

Baldwin: Well, it’s not fantasy exactly since the society makes its will toward you very, very clear. Expecially the police, for example, or truck drivers. I know from my own experience that the macho me–truck drivers, cops, football players–these people are far more complex than they want to realize. That’s why I call them infantile. They have needs which, for them, are literally inexpressible. They don’t dare look in the mirror. And that is why they need faggots. They’ve created faggots in order to act out a sexual fantasy on they body of another man and not take any responsibility for it. Do you see what I mean? I think it’s very important for the male homosexual to recognize that he is a sexual target for other men, and that is why he is despised and why he is called a faggot. He is called a faggot because other males need him.”

Firebombs and Lethal Dispatches, the Black Sheep are Outta Control

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism
Patrick Cockburn
(Verso)

The Migrant’s Jail: an American History of Mass Incarceration
Brianna Nofil
(Princeton)

Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life
Ferris Jabr
(Random House)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week… 

All Species Parade
Jenny Scheinman
(Royal Potato Family)

In the Real World
Eric Bibb
(Stony Plain)

Heavy Lifting
MC5
(Ear Music)

Five O’Clock Somewhere

“It happens that validation can never be satisfied. With solidity comes decrepitude. The more we become what we intended to be, the less real the earlier versions of ourselves appear to us, and yet there we were, who we were, forever for all time a monad on its travels. Through the dark times, the insoluble passage. An era can be just what it looks like, finally, with everybody’s footnotes crammed into the bottom of the frame. Everything begins to feel like an epilogue, or a summing up, when in fact all you want is, right now, to live in this minute, this world, not ever to go back, never to take up residence in the house of memory, or at the very least to leave some doors and windows open to whatever new breeze might be felt, because there is still time, time left over from time, every minute that you didn’t die is time and a half, so to speak. You even have time to learn to bake bread or repair a motorcycle. After time runs out you will persist in someone’s memory somewhere, the way alcoholics say, “It’s five o’clock somewhere.’” – Gary Indiana, “Five O’Clock Somewhere”

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