The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

– TS Eliot, The Hollow Men

+ Back in 2003,  during peak post-9/11/Iraq War patriotic fever, when, as Dylan said of the McCarthy Era, “as long as you don’t say nothing, you can say anything at all,” Bill and Kathy Christison and I gave a talk in Taos, New Mexico, about the Iraq War, the neocons and the Israel Lobby. It was a bitterly cold night with brutal winds blowing down out of the Sangre de Cristos. As we left the venue, Bill noticed we were being tailed by a black truck, which followed us down State Road 68 towards Santa Fe, sometimes flashing its brights in the rearview mirror. Just outside Española, the truck pulled even with us and someone fired two shots at us from the passenger side window. Kathy and I flinched and ducked at the flashes. We heard a sharp metallic “ting.”

Bill and Kathy had both retired from the CIA in the late 70s and became two of the Agency’s fiercest critics. Bill, who had started as an analyst in the 1950s, had risen to near the top of the Agency. In the course of his career, he worked on the Soviet desk and nuclear proliferation. He became the principal adviser to the CIA director for Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa

And ended his career as director of the agency’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis. Few people knew more about how the world worked, who benefited and who paid the price.  Bill and Kathy met Cockburn shortly after 9/11 and quickly began writing erudite and incisive pieces for CounterPunch, excoriating US foreign policy. In an early essay, Bill laid out what he considered the root cause for many of the terrorist attacks on the US: “the support by the U.S. over recent years for the policies of Israel with respect to the Palestinians, and the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States is as much to blame as Israel itself for the continuing, almost 35-year-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Bill and Kathy had contributed a chapter to our book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. I’d spent the previous week driving across the Southwest, giving talks about the book and speaking at anti-war rallies, starting in San Antonio, then El Paso, Las Cruces, and Albuquerque, before meeting up with Bill and Kathy for events in Santa Fe, where they’d moved after leaving DC, and Taos.

The truck continued to shadow us for several miles and fired at least two more shots. But Bill engaged in some fancy evasive driving techniques, which he’d once put to use in wartime Saigon, and we made it safely back to Santa Fe. (Had I been driving, I’d’ve probably steered us right into the Rio Grande Canyon.) The Christisons’ car didn’t escape unscathed, however. At least one of the shots creased the roof of their Toyota, just above where Bill’s head had been. I’ve given a lot of incendiary speeches over the years and I really prefer it if people do not respond to them, no matter how crazy they might sound, with gunfire…

+ The murder of Charlie Kirk is awful, disgusting and about as American as it gets. But let’s recall that when two Democratic legislators and their spouses were assassinated by a Trump supporter in Minnesota a few weeks ago, Trump said nothing. Nada. Zilch…..When an anti-vaxxer fired 173 shots at the CDC HQ in Atlanta last month, Trump stayed quiet, which was probably welcome, given what he might have said.

The leaders of the Right didn’t waste much time counseling their ranks to restrict themselves to “thoughts and prayers” over the murder of Charlie Kirk. Even before the assassin had been identified or a motive uncovered, they blamed the “violent rhetoric “of the Left for Kirk’s death…

+ Senator Markwayne Mullin: “He was a Christian, and Christians are under attack right now from this far crazy left views that say they don’t feel safe. Well, they’re the ones going in and shooting up our schools and shooting up our churches and shooting people that they don’t agree with, like President Trump and now Charlie Kirk.”

+ Elon Musk: “The Left is the party of murder.”

+ Now this from Trump’s backroom Kissinger, Laura Loomer: It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization. If Charlie Kirk dies from his injuries, his life cannot be in vain. We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”

+ Of course, Loomer had directed some pretty harsh words at Kirk herself…

+ Christopher Rufo: “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”

+ Donald Trump: “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”

+ Some recent acts of political violence committed by MAGA/Trump supporters…

August 2025: Firing of 180 shots into the CDC headquarters in Atlanta and the killing of David Rose, a black police officer.

June 2025: Killing Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their Minnesota home.

June 2025: Shooting and critical wounding of Democratic state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in their Minnesota home.

April 2025:  Attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro.

Late 2022 and early 2023: A series of shootings at the homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico.

October 2022: Attempted kidnapping of Nancy Pelosi and assault on her husband, Paul.

January 2021: Storming of the Capitol, assaults on Capitol Hill and DC police, threat to lynch Mike Pence.

July 2020: Attack on the home of Obama-appointed District Judge Esther Salas that resulted in the murder of her son Daniel and the shooting and critical wounding of her husband, Mark.

July 2020: Attempted kidnapping of Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

August 2019: Mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso that killed 23 people and injured 22.

October 2018: The man who sent pipe bombs to the homes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, George Soros and other top Democrats in 2018 was a Trump supporter.

September 2018: Shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people and wounded six.

January 2017: Mass shooting at the Islamic Cultural Center, Quebec City, that killed six and injured 19.

August 2017: Killing of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville during the counter-protest to the Unite the Right rally.

+ Elizabeth Warren on calls for the Democrats to “tone down” their rhetoric: “Oh, please. Why don’t you start with the president of the United States? And every ugly meme he’s posted and every ugly word.”

+ Obama: “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.” Perfectly fine and appropriate sentiments, if only he’d speak this forcefully about the genocide in Gaza…

+ Many of those condemning the rise of “political violence” have supported two years of genocidal violence in Gaza and recently celebrated when the President of the US released a snuff film of a US Navy drone strike that killed 11 people in a small boat off the coast of Venezuela in violation of international and US law, as well as that most mysterious of all laws, the Law of the Sea. Our society, already among the most violent in the world, has been saturated in official violence done in our name since 9/11. In the last quarter-century of the forever wars, hundreds of thousands have been killed and maimed. These daily slaughters, many if not most of them rationalized by politicians and the pundits, have done more to twist the psyche of Americans than ideologies, video games or serotonin uplifters. And the ubiquitous presence of high-powered, military weaponry has provided the means for these bomb-shattered minds to go off on full-auto in their own perverted missions of retribution and revenge.

+ The late, great Paul Krassner: “When John Hinckley shot Reagan, Hinckley later came out against gun violence, Reagan came out in support of it!”

+ Kirk was shot while he was answering, well, flippantly responding to, a question about mass shootings in the US: 

Q. “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last 10 years?”

Kirk: “Counting or not counting gang violence?”

+ Utah has some of the most permissive gun laws in the nation. You can open carry without a permit. There were almost certainly a lot of people packing weapons at Kirk’s speech. None of them prevented the shooting. None of them were able to append, disarm or shoot the assassin after the killing.

+ In fact, according to The Lever…

A recent Utah law forced state universities to allow anyone with a concealed weapons permit to openly carry a gun on campus. The Utah Valley University, where conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was killed with a suspected high-powered rifle yesterday, already allowed open carry — in part because a student there made a fuss about it in 2010, helping to inspire legislation that opened the door for the university to allow it. In other matters, in 2023, the Department of Education fined the college for not adequately filing security reports, for which the university eventually paid $200,000.

+ Will Trump send the National Guard to occupy Orem?

+ The Trump administration has issued a warning to immigrants that if they say anything negative about Charlie Kirk, their visas will be revoked. Naturally, Kirk’s murder would be used as justification for more deportations…

+ Charlie Kirk (2023): “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the 2nd Amendment. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a completely alternate universe.”

+ Would Kirk have considered the three kids shot at a high school in Evergreen, Colorado, on the same day “unfortunate” martyrs for the 2nd Amendment?

+ One of the two people detained, interrogated, and later released as suspects in the murder of Charlie Kirk was Zachariah Qureshi, an Arab-American conservative who works for the Heritage Foundation. Since Qureshi is a fervent supporter of Turning Point USA, his arrest and subsequent were almost certainly a case of racial profiling.

+ How long can a “statement” be when “engraved” on a bullet casing?

+ This trend of inscribing messages on and/or of signing ammunition is one of the more macabre pathologies of post-9/11 America. How many politicians have signed US-made, Israeli-launched bombs that have killed Palestinian children? Nikki Haley signed her Israeli bomb: “Finish them.”

+ Greg Grandin: “There’s a weird, dangerous transubstantiation going on in which the failed shooting of Trump is manifest in the killing of Kirk, allowing Trump simultaneously to escape martyrdom and claim, in the name of his figurative son, martyrdom.”

+ Soon after the following interview aired, Matthew Dowd, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, was fired as a commentator at MSNBC…

Katy Tur, MSNBC: “What about the environment in which a shooting like this happened?” 

Matthew Dowd: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially one of the most divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sorts of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.”

+ Tur asked a reasonable question. Doud gave a reasonable answer, even if it offended many on the right. But reason no longer matters. We’ve been beyond reason for some time, now.

+ What kind of “awful words” did Kirk say? How about this: “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.” Or this: “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic black woman, I wonder, is she there because of her excellence or is she there because of affirmative action?” Or this: “If you’re a WNBA pot-smoking black lesbian, do you get treated better than a US Marine?” Or this: “If I see a black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.” Or this: “The American Democrat Party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.”

+++

+ In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court gave Trump the green light to engage in racial profiling. In his concurring opinion, Justice Brett “Kegger” Kavanaugh expressly endorsed ICE and Border Patrol targeting any Hispanics they observe in Los Angeles speaking Spanish and then demanding their papers. Kavanaugh writes that if anyone is concerned about ICE/DHS using excessive force, they should be able to sue. But he has previously voted in Egbert v Hernandez to bar people from suing the federal government over similar violations of the 4th Amendment…

+ In Sotomayor’s dissent, she argues that today’s decision will make Hispanics “second-class” citizens, forced to “carry enough documentation to prove they deserve to walk freely”…

+ Steven Mazie, Supreme Court reporter for The Economist:

SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in a college applicant’s file is blatantly unconstitutional.

ALSO SCOTUS: considering race as one factor in targeting people to detain and deport is cool, cool cool.

+ Cato’s David J. Bier: “When ICE violates people’s rights and stops them without reason, the inevitable result will be unnecessary conflict that threatens everyone, even ICE agents themselves.”

+ ICE is the modern-day slave patrol. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling functions as a reification of its infamous decisions legalizing the Fugitive Slave Act–Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842) and Ableman v. Booth (1859)–allowing Trump’s marauders to pursue people into sanctuary states and cities based only on their race, and assault, detain and deport them unless they prove they are “free”…

+ Fox News: “A lot of protesters are being bused in. Is DHS looking at the financing of these so-called organic protests?”

Thomas Homan: “Absolutely. These protesters are being paid. They will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. They will be.”

+ Is it a crime to be compensated to protest? How many people have the CIA paid to protest in Ukraine, Georgia, Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran…?

+ Weren’t the Brooks Brothers rioters who disrupted the vote counting in Miami-Dade during the 2000 elections paid? Many were GOP operatives and congressional staffers who later got compensated with jobs in the Bush Administration.

+ If Trump deployed the National Guard to a city near you…

Would favor: 39%
Would oppose: 61%

CBS News Poll.

+ Jesse Watters:  “I don’t care about disappearing. I’m not even offended. So what, yeah, they’re disappearing from the country — exactly. That’s what we were elected to do. Make these people disappear. If they don’t have the paperwork, they don’t belong here. I’m sick and tired of having to deal with all these specific individuals. That’s what we mean by mass deportation. They are all going out. They are not going out fast enough. They should be going out way faster.”

+ According to the government of South Korea, more than 300 of the workers arrested and put in chains during the military-commando style ICE raid on the Hyundai plant in Georgia were South Korean citizens, all of whom had valid work visas. They were mainly engineers sent to Georgia to set up the plant, which is still under construction. Hyundai-LG has halted all operations in the US as a result. One lawmaker in Seoul urged the government to look into U.S. nationals teaching English on a tourist visa in South Korea. Well done, Stephen Miller.

+ Donna Hughes-Brown is an Irish citizen who has been a lawful resident of the US for 37 years. She’s married to James Brown, a U.S Navy veteran, who voted for Trump. Now she’s in ICE custody in Kentucky, separated from her husband, four children and five grandchildren, despite regularly renewing her Green Card on schedule..

Why? ICE says she’s being deported for reasons of “moral turpitude.” And what depraved crime did Donna commit? Twenty years ago, she wrote a check for $25 that bounced. She quickly repaid the money and got probation from the court.

Her husband James, now regrets his vote for Trump. “Trump advertised that he was getting criminal illegal immigrants and deporting them—which I agree with,” James Brown said. “But they’re not telling the truth about what’s actually happening to a lot of legal immigrants.”

+ HR 3486, the Stop Illegal Entry Act, would subject those who cross the border “illegally” to harsher punishment than convicted rapists.

+ Tom Homan is threatening mayors and governors: “ I don’t care who the mayor is. If mayors and governors don’t want to help, then get out of the way… They better not step over the line. They better not impede our efforts or there’s gonna be consequences. We’re coming!”

+++

+ More from Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Jane Fonda of the Far Right:

They believe in a “war economy”…They’ll say “Marjorie, you have thousands of jobs in your district that rely on these government contracts.’ Well, you want to know something, I’m not very interested in funding an economy that’s based on killing people, especially innocent people and children.”

+ How does one begin to speak about a President who depicts himself “presiding” over the napalming of America’s third largest city? His cult knows he’s a draft-evading coward that sent poor whites, blacks and Hispanics to kill, be maimed and die in his place so that he could blow his $400 mm inheritance on failed business scams, and who’d need three people to help him up if ever managed to squat like Robert Duvall, right?

+ Pete Hegseth on changing the Department of Defense to the War Department: “Maximum lethality — not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. We’re gonna raise up warriors. Not just defenders.”

+ “Tepid Legality” sounds like a good name for a thrash metal band.

+ Tim Barker: “AOC will only vote to fund the defensive aspects of the War Department.”

+ Trump: “We could’ve won every war, but we really chose to be very politically correct, or wokey.” I’d hate to see the un-woke versions of My Lai and Abu Ghraib…

+ George Washington’s Revolutionary Army was more integrated (woke) than any US armed force until the Korean War. (See Eric Foner’s excellent new collection of essays, Our Fragile Freedom.)

+ Rep. Thomas Massie: “If it is called the Department of War, can we finally acknowledge it commits Acts of War, which require Congressional Declarations according to our Constitution?”

+ JD Vance to Lara Trump: “It would not have shocked me if I had learned your father-in-law was in the Marine Corps—of course, he didn’t serve in the Marines, but he has a Marine Corps style of leadership.” If it hadn’t been for the bone spurs…

+++

+ Trump: “There’s no inflation.”

+ The consumer price index rose in August at a 2.9 percent annual rate, up from July. Weekly jobless claims rose to the highest level since 2021.

+ Fox’s Jesse Watters: “Prices are still high. Can’t Trump just bring in some corporate executives and just say guys, there’s going to be a socialist revolution in this country if you don’t do something, please do something?”

+ The 400 richest people in the U.S. are now worth a record $6.6 trillion. Their wealth grew by $1.2 trillion in the past year.

+ Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton: “AI will make a few people much richer and most people poorer.”

UBS has assessed the probability of recession at 93%.

+ The Wall Street Journal has crowned Larry Ellison as the richest person in the world, toppling Elon Musk. Ellison’s wealth increased by $200 billion this year, largely owing to the AI surge in  Oracle’s stock..

+ According to Bloomberg, new cars are now so expensive that more and more buyers need seven-year loan.

+ Percent of Gen Z parents who believe that a college degree guarantees long-term job security: 16%.

+ Bank of America survey: 53% of men and 54% women ages 18 to 28 are spending $0 a month on dating.

+ Financial Times: Americans face biggest increase in health insurance costs in 15 years.

+ Jason Calacanis: “Before 2030 you’re going to see Amazon, which has massively invested in [AI], replace all factory workers and all drivers … It will be 100% robotic, which means all of those workers are going away. Every Amazon worker. UPS, gone. FedEx, gone,.”

+ Mexico has lifted 8.3 MILLION people out of poverty since 2022

+ Home prices are falling in half of the US. But not in NYC, where Manhattan apartment rents hit a record for the fifth time in the past six months. New leases were signed at a median of $4,700 in July, up $75 from June, according to data from appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman.  Rents surged 9.3% from a year earlier, the second-biggest annual jump in the firms’ data going back to 2008.

+ The NY Fed reports that worker confidence in finding a new job has hit a new low.

+ Realtor Climate Risk Report: “More than one in four U.S. homes—amounting to $12.7 trillion in real estate—faces at least one type of  severe or extreme climate risk, like floods, hurricanes, and wildfires.”

+ Last year, Burgum’s home state of North Dakota produced 35% of its energy from wind power.

+ Apparently, they’ve forgotten all about how to store energy and the batteries containing the rare earth minerals they’re arm-twisting countries across to acquire?

+ Even as Trump is doing everything he can to shut it down, congestion pricing in NYC has succeeded in reducing vehicle traffic into Manhattan by 12%, meaning almost 18 million fewer vehicles trips since it went into effect.

+ Meet the Press’s Kristen Welker: “Goldman Sachs says 86% of the tariff revenue collected so far has been paid by American businesses and consumers. Do you acknowledge that these tariffs are a tax on American consumers?”

+ More bullshit from Kevin Hassett, in furtherance of the Trump admin’s relentless smearing of Portland and Chicago: “80% of the claims for unemployment over the last few months have come from blue states. So there are places like Portland and Chicago where people are fleeing the cities.”

+ The rise of the BRICS Nations

Share of Global GDP in 1995 – 2025

BRICS
1995: 17%
2003: 20%
2025:  34%

United States

1995: 22%
2003:20%
2025:15%

European Union
1995: 20%
2003:20%
2025:13%

+ At this week’s BRICS teleconference, Lula asked the member states to denounce US military pressure against Venezuela at the UN General Assembly. “The presence of a major power’s armed forces in the Caribbean Sea creates tension that is at odds with the region’s peaceful nature.”

Does anyone else feel like we’re trapped in a Paul Verhoeven movie?

Q: Any lessons from your time in Washington, DC?

Elon Musk: “The government is basically unfixable…If AI and robots don’t solve our national debt, we’re toast.”

+ The top house buyer’s markets across the US, according to Zillow: 

1. Miami, Florida
2. North Port, Florida
3. New Orleans, Louisiana
4. Urban Honolulu, Hawaii
5. Deltona, Florida
6. Jacksonville, Florida
7. Austin, Texas
8. Jackson, Mississippi
9. Palm Bay, Florida
10. Tampa, Florida

+ Rand Paul on JD Vance and the US Navy droning that dinghy, assassinating 11 people: “What really ticked me off and got me going was for somebody [Vance] to glorify the idea of killing people without any due process and saying he just didn’t give a shit … That, to me, was a disdain for human life and a disdain for our process.”

+ You’ll probably feel like you’ve “just had some kind of mushroom” after reading Radley Balko’s round-up of the last month in Trumplandia…

+++

+ Paula White, Trump’s spiritual advisor: “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.”

+ Trump: “Things that take place in the home, they call a crime. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this is a crime.” I recommend revisiting Ivana’s account of the “little fight” Trump had with her after she insulted his hair implants, an episode vividly re-enacted in Ali Abbasi’s film, The Apprentice.

With his remarks about “little fights with the wife” made at, of all places, the Museum of the Bible, Trump lent considerable credence to Ivana’s accusation, recounted in Harry Hurt’s book, The Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald Trump…

+ Coincidentally, the lawyers for Jeffrey Epstein’s estate have given Congress a copy of the “birthday book” featuring Donald Trump’s crude letter and drawing that Trump said didn’t exist…

+ Molly Knight: “What a humiliating way for Don Jr. to find out that his dad sends birthday cards.”

Prem Thakker: “We’re releasing the Files. There are no Files. This video shows it’s a hoax. Ok, we edited it. Democrats made the Files. They’re real. Trump’s in them because he was an informant. Ok he wasnt I just mean he wanted to take Epstein down. That note to Epstein isn’t Trump. Ok, it is but…”

+ Jeffrey Sachs: “We all need to accept that the President probably raped kids and that’s not going to cost him his job.”

+ Rep. Jared Moskowitz on Mike Johnson’s now retracted assertion that Trump was a confidential informant against Epstein for the FBI: “If he was lying then, is he lying now?  I don’t think in the history of this country we’ve had a Speaker of the House say the president was an FBI informant. We need to hear from the FBI.”

+ Bill Pulte is the Trump official in charge of the Federal Housing Finance Agency who has accused Adam Schiff, Letitia James and Fed member Lisa Cook of mortgage fraud for listing two houses as principal residences. But a Reuters investigation shows Pulte’s father & stepmother, Mark and Julie Pulte, claimed primary residences on homes in Michigan & Florida, in order to get real-estate tax breaks on each house. Meanwhile, Pro Publica reported that at least three Trump cabinet members, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and EPA director Lee Zeldin, have claimed multiple homes as their primary residences on mortgages: “Chavez-DeRemer entered into two primary-residence mortgages in quick succession, including for a second home near a country club in Arizona, where she’s known to vacation.”

+ Maybe PULTE V. BESSENT will be one of the cage fights on the White House lawn…Speaking of “political violence,” according to Politico

At a private dinner with Trump allies last week, Treasury Secretary. Scott Bessent threatened to punch housing finance official Bill Pulte “in the fucking face.”  Bessent had heard from several people that Pulte was badmouthing him to Trump. “Why the fuck are you talking to the president about me? Fck you. I’m gonna punch you in your fucking face… I’m going to fucking beat your ass,” Bessent told a “stunned” Pulte.

+ Britain’s ambassador to the US, Peter Mandelson, wrote this to his pal Jeffrey Epstein, after he’d been sentenced to jail for soliciting sex with a minor: “I think the world of you and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened. I still can’t understand it. It just could not happen in Britain.” Mandelson was sacked on Wednesday.

Rep. Martin Frost: “You’re here because you’re lap dogs to the president of the United States…”

Rep. Clay Higgins: “Words taken down, Mr. Chairman. My colleague just called me a lap dog of the president of the United States. I move for his words to be taken down.”

Caroline Downey, the National Review, on Iryna Zarutska’s murderer: “He should have been locked away for life because he was threatening the public. He was a menace to society.”

CNN: “He should have been locked away for life, for what now?”

+++

+ Sen. Elissa Slotkin, the former CIA officer whom the Dems are promoting as potential presidential material because of her “intelligence,” thinks the Manhattan Project was set up to get an atomic weapon before the…checks notes…Soviets did. (In fact, the Manhattan Project enabled the Soviets to acquire a nuclear weapon shortly after the Americans did, thanks to Klaus Fuchs and others.)

+ Former NYPD Commissioner Tom Donlon has referred Mayor Eric Adams, Chief of Department John Chell and Deputy Mayor Kaz Daughtry to US Attorney General Pam Bondi for criminal prosecution for “forged official documents, manipulated promotions, obstruction of justice, and retaliation.”

+ We’ll gladly keep Yosemite, the Giant Sequoias, the Redwoods, Kings Canyon, Mt Shasta, Napa Valley, Big Sur, Joshua Tree, the Sierra, the Getty, the Watts Towers, the LACMA, the Norton-Simon, the Dodgers, 49ers, Giants, Warriors, Lakers, Rams, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cal-Poly, Capitol Records, the Whiskey Go-Go and Snoop Dogg out here and you can keep, well, whatever it is you got there in Iowa. Deal?

+ Gross farm income

California: $68.1 billion
Iowa: 41.2 billion

+++

I’ve had my disagreements with Medea Benjamin over the years, but it’s amazing how they could pull this off…

+ Jacob Silverman: “You’re asking how those protesters got so close to the president? Code Pink is the most elite deep cover group of operators this country has ever produced. They will pop up in your living room.”

+ Trump was loudly jeered and booed during his appearance at the men’s finals of the US Open, where he and his entourage sat grotesquely beneath the sign: “Arthur Ashe Court.” What went unmentioned in most of the coverage was the fact that Trump and his gang were there as a “guest of Rolex,” a company that is facing 39% tariffs on its watches that Trump imposed a few weeks ago.

+ Arundhati Roy and I are about the same age and probably started inhaling these death sticks around the same time after reading many of the same books (especially the French ones) and watching the same films (also the French ones)–maybe French cultural exports need a warning label? …Anyway, I love the cover of her memoir and the memoir itself, which is terrific, at times terrifying, and ultimately quite inspiring…

+ I asked AI to translate this into English, idiomatic American English even, but it gave up…Trump: “So they have hostages, It could be a little bit less than 20, you know, they tend to die. Even though they’re young people, they’re dying. Young people don’t die. Young people stay alive…We have about 38 bodies. Bodies. Meaning bodies.”

+ James Joyce wasn’t just a revolutionary in the way he used language to tell stories. He was a revolutionary period: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland or my church.”

“Hasta la victoria Siempre”

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide
Batool Abu Akleen, Sondos Sabra, Nahil Mohana and Ala’a Obaid
(Biblioasis)

Science in Resistance: The Scientist Rebellion for Climate Justice
Fernando Racimo
(California)

Our Fragile Freedom: Essays
Eric Foner
(Norton)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Nueva Timbe
Harold López-Nussa
(Blue Note)

Who is the Sky?
David Byrne
(Matador)

Now and Then
Robbie Fulks
(Compass)

A Smoldering Evil Expresses Itself

“Fascism was not simply a conspiracy—although it was that—but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge, a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation.”

– Theodor Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality

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