Capitalism is presumably the first case of a blaming, rather than a repenting cult. … An enormous feeling of guilt, not itself knowing how to repent, grasps at the cult, not in order to repent for this guilt, but to make it universal, to hammer it into consciousness and finally and above all to include God himself in this guilt.

– Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion”

+ Kill 11 people riding in international waters on a dinghy with an outboard motor, broadcast the kill shot, gloat about it as if you’d sunk a Chinese battleship, then ask your minions to try to come up with a legal basis for the assassinations a couple of days later, if they could (they can’t)…

+ There is no legal justification for Trump’s military strike on an alleged “drug boat” off the coast of Venezuela. The boat, a simple speedboat, posed no threat to the US Navy vessels. The little boat could have easily been interdicted, searched for drugs and its occupants detained if any were found. No proof was offered that it was carrying drugs or was associated with the Tren de Aragua “narco-terrorist organization.” In any event, drug trafficking is not a capital offense, even when it’s been proven. Most countries would consider this an act of terrorism and mass murder under international law. Indeed, such a strike is also prohibited under US law.

+ The Trump Administration didn’t know where the boat was going or why 11 people would be taking up space on a small, open-air craft that was supposed to be packed with illicit drugs. Were they fisherman? Immigrants? Who could believe them? Rubio’s State Department has repeatedly lied about Venezuela and accused immigrants from the country of being Tren de Aragua gang members based solely on tattoos or the fact they’re wearing Air Jordans…

+ Marco Rubio on Tuesday: “These particular drugs were probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean.”

+ Trump later on Tuesday: “11 Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists were transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.”

+ On Wednesday, Rubio reversed himself to be in alignment with Trump, saying the boat was headed toward the US:

The President, under his authority as Commander-in-Chief, has a right under exigent circumstances to eliminate imminent threats to the United States, and that’s what he did yesterday in international waters, and that’s what he intends to do.

+ Can you pinpoint that “right,” Marco?

+ According to the New York Times, “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public  was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

+ If, in fact, the boat was traveling to Trinidad as Rubio first alleged (which makes more sense than it traveling the Caribbean 1200 nautical miles to Miami), what possible reason could the US have for striking it? (There is no justification for murdering the crew/passengers.)

+ Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: “We knew exactly who was in that boat. We know exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented.” So who were they, Pete?

+ Rep. Adam Smith, D-Washington:

The administration has not identified the authority under which this action was taken, raising the question of its legality and constitutionality. The questions this episode raises are even more concerning. Does this mean Trump thinks he can use the U.S. military anywhere drugs exist, are sold, or shipped? What is the risk of dragging the United States into yet another military conflict?

+ Ryan Good, former legal counsel at the Pentagon:

I worked at DoD. I literally cannot imagine lawyers coming up with a legal basis for the lethal strike of a suspected Venezuelan drug boat. Hard to see how this would not be ‘murder’ or a war crime under international law that DoD considers applicable.

+ Brian Finucane, for counsel for the State Department:

Despite labelling the targets ‘narcoterrorists,’ there is no plausible argument under which the principle legal authority for the U.S. so-called ‘war on terror’—the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force—authorizes military action against the Venezuelan criminal entity Tren de Aragua.”…Drug trafficking by itself does not constitute an ‘armed attack,’ nor a threat of an imminent armed attack, for the purposes in international law. Nor does drug trafficking represent the predicate for self-defense commonly recognized as required for the invocation of self-defense under criminal law in the United States…In my view, the U.S. attack on this supposed smuggling vessel constituted the introduction of U.S. armed forces into hostilities, triggering both the reporting requirements of the War Powers Resolution as well as its 60-day clock for withdrawing U.S. forces…U.S. armed forces were deliberately introduced into the situation with the U.S. president himself reportedly giving the order to ‘blow up’ the supposed smuggling vessel.

+ Murder is criminalized under the U.S. War Crimes Act, where it is defined as:

The act of a person who intentionally kills, or conspires or attempts to kill, or kills whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including those placed out of combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause.”

+ Can Trump shoot 11 people in the Caribbean and get away with it? Obama did.

+ Obama normalized extra-judicial assassinations, even to the point of droning US citizens in Yemen. Trump will use the precedent Obama set and take it to an entirely new level. If you can use the US Navy to assassinate people in international waters without offering any proof that they are a threat to the security of the country, why not in US waters or on US soil, for crimes real or imagined?

+ Rodrigo Roa Duterte, the former President of the Philippines, is currently in custody at The Hague, after being charged by the International Criminal Court for ordering the summary execution of alleged drug traffickers. Trump just ordered the summary execution of 11 alleged drug traffickers in international waters off the coast of Venezuela.

+ Venezuela is not a major producer or exporter of illicit drugs. 

+ Nearly all fentanyl comes into the US from China, Mexico or Canada.

+ Meanwhile, the leading producers of cocaine are:

Colombia: 65%
Peru: 27%
Bolivia: 8%

+ As for heroin, it’s Myanmar, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Colombia and Mexico.

+ Rubio: “Frankly, it’s a war. It’s a war on killers, it’s a war on terrorists.” Ask Congress to declare one, then…

+ But as the failed drug war (now well-into its sixth decade) has shown, the production of illicit drugs isn’t the main issue. Demand for them is. And all of that is driven by consumers in the US. In fact, America’s “drug problem” isn’t primarily with illicit drugs but prescription drugs people have been hooked on by Big Pharma and its pay-to-prescribe network of physicians and pharmacies. More than 14 million Americans either misuse or have some level of addiction to prescribed medications, particularly opioids or benzodiazepines. And when they can’t get those legally, they buy them off the streets.

+ Kenneth Roth, former head of Human Rights Watch:

If Trump can order people shot by calling them a drug trafficker or terrorist and declaring war, then none of us is safe. Criminal suspects must be arrested and prosecuted. Lethal force is allowed only as a last resort to meet an imminent lethal threat.

+++

+ When it comes to smuggling drugs into the US, nobody does it more frequently than US citizens…

+And if supplies run slow, they’ve often been able to count on the CIA to replenish the stockpiles and clear the runways.

+ As Nixon aide John Ehrlichman admitted in his diary, the drug war is “really all about the blacks.” Forty-eight years later, Ehrlichman elaborated on the real motives of the war on drugs to reporter Dan Baum:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

+ Trump has updated this nefarious strategy to target Hispanics.

+++

+ Sen. Mark Warner,  the vice chair of the Intelligence Committee, says he was denied a meeting with career intelligence workers because Laura Loomer objected. But how did Loomer know about a classified meeting? Who leaked it to her?

+ Trump: “The guy in Illinois, the Governor of Illinois, saying that crime has been much better in Chicago recently and Trump is a dictator. And most people say if you call him a dictator, and he stops crime, he can be a…he can be whatever he wants. I’m not a dictator by the way. But he can be whatever he wants…I have the right to do whatever I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If our country’s in danger, and it is in danger, I can do it.”

+ Chicago’s not even the murder capital of northern Illinois…Peoria, Kankakee, Rockford and Springfield all have higher crime rates than Chicago.

+ No US city ranks among the 25 cities in the world (with a population of more than 300,000) for murder rates. The top five deadliest cities in the world in 2023/24–Colima, Mexico (181.9), Durán, Ecuador (148), Ciudad Obregón, Mexico (138.25), Zacatecas, Mexico (134.6), and Nelson Mandela Bay, South Africa (102.82)–all had murder rates of more than 100 deaths per 100,000 people. By contrast, Chicago’s worst murder rate in the last five years was in 2021, when it saw 29.9 killings per 100,000 people, which didn’t even rank in the top 50.

+ Former mayor Lori Lightfoot on Trump’s threats against Chicago: “I’m sitting in a studio that is one block away from Trump Tower. They’re charging $800 a night for a room. They couldn’t be as bold and audacious to charge that kind of amount if this were a hellscape.”

+ The Pentagon has approved the use of the Great Lakes Naval Station by ICE, as it prepares to occupy the streets of Chicago. Department of Defense officials told the Washington Post that the Navy Station also could be used by US military forces who are called on to “assist” in ICE’s pogrom.

+ Nick Turse:  “Sending troops to Chicago could cost $1.6 million per day,  four times as much as housing the city’s homeless — plus it’s illegal.”

+ Trump the Crime Fighter…

+ So, the National Guard has cleaned a total of 3.2 miles of road at a cost of more than $1 million per day. Meanwhile, DC’s cleaning crews clean around 81 miles/day for around $150,000 day. It’s 170 times more cost-efficient per mile to fund DC’s existing work.

+ Each of the red states, whose governors sent their National Guard contingents to Washington, DC, has cities with higher crime rates than the nation’s capital.

+ Federal Judge Charles Breyer has blocked the use of the National Guard in Los Angeles: “[A]t Defendants’ orders and contrary to Congress’s explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws. … In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.” The injunction, which has been stayed until 9/12 pending appeal, would bar Trump from using the National Guard or any military troops in California to engage in “security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control,” and other similar operations. Breyer found that Trump is using the military as a “national police force with the president as its chief.”

+ Buried in a footnote in Judge Breyer’s scalding opinion that Trump’s deploying federal troops to LA violated the Posse Comitatus Act, after National Guard Maj. Gen. Scott Sherman objected to the Trump administration’s plans for a show of force in MacArthur Park. A Trump political appointee, Gregory Bovino, responded by “questioning Sherman’s loyalty to the country.”

+ Kristi the Puppy Killer: “I do know that LA wouldn’t be standing today if President Trump hadn’t taken action.”

+ South Dakota’s murder rate (4.5 per 100K) under Noem was higher than New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island…

+ Reichsleiter Stephen Miller, a Santa Monica diaper baby:

I grew up in Los Angeles, the city that I grew up in—in the 1980s and 1990s doesn’t exist anymore. Everywhere you look, there’s needles and druggies and criminals and vagrants…The Democrat Party as an institution at every level—its judges, its lawyers, its community activists, and its politicians—exists to serve these criminal thugs…[Trump is] ready to help and assist any community that wishes to be liberated from these criminal elements.

No crime or drugs in LA in the 80s and 90s, when the city was being flooded with CIA-sponsored crack? Easy Muthafuckin’ E would like a word…

+ The “founder” who wrote the following was born in St. Kitts and Nevis, less than 500 miles across the Caribbean from Trinidad and Tobago…

There are seasons in every country when noise and impudence pass current for worth; and in popular commotions especially, the clamors of interested and factious men are often mistaken for patriotism.

+ Fiscal conservatism in action!

+ The Justice Department is deliberating banning guns for transgender people as part of a range of options blocking “mentally unstable individuals” from committing acts of violence. Where’s the NRA’s denunciation of this gun-grabbing assault on the 2nd Amendment?

+ Gillian Branstetter, ACLU:

I just can’t emphasize enough how massive an escalation the targeted disarmament of a minority group is. Open the history books they haven’t banned yet and find out for yourself where this leads…You don’t have to be a gun owner or even like guns to see what this entails–a database of every person diagnosed with gender dysphoria and the suspension of their rights on that basis.

+ Meanwhile, the FBI is using the shootings in Minneapolis to promote a new theory of criminality: nihilistic violent extremism. “They’ve just given up.” Shocking. Who knew people like that stalked the streets and suburbs of America? Did someone in the Justice Department finally read Dostoevsky?

+++

+ Trump’s Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer: “I was elected as the Labor Secretary for all Americans.” Elected?

+ More than 445,000 federal employees saw their union protections canceled in August.

+ America’s billionaires are now worth $5.7 trillion. But just three of them account for more than $1 trillion of that wealth.

+ Chris Kempczinski, CEO of McDonald’s, says that Americans are now living in a “divided consumer landscape” created by  “a two-tier economy:” “ If you’re upper income earning over $100,000, things are good, stock markets are near all-time highs… What we see with middle and lower-income consumers is actually a different story.”

+ Fewer than 18% of Americans earn at least $100,000 a year, and most of them are buried in debt. The average full-time American worker earns about $62,500 a year.

+ More than 70% of Americans now believe the “American dream” doesn’t apply to them. And they have good reason to believe that.

+ There are more than 500,000 houses on the market than there are potential buyers, the largest gap in US history, and a sure sign that more and more people can’t afford the houses they’re living in or the ones they want to buy. A survey by Redfin finds that 36% of American workers do not have an emergency fund to cover housing payments.

+ A survey of 1,700 American companies reveals that they are preparing for the steepest increase in medical costs in the last 15 years. Meanwhile, layoffs rose by 39% in August to 85,979.

+ The US manufacturing sector has undergone six straight months of contraction.

+ Dollar General may soon have to change its name. Its CEO announced this week that Trump’s tariffs have forced the company to raise prices. The Wall Street Journal reported Walmart, Target and Best Buy have also raised prices, claiming the hikes are in response to the tariffs, and Hormel Foods, J.M. Smucker and Ace Hardware say they’re poised to raise prices.

+ Meanwhile, Rep. Pat Fallon (TX) attacked people on food stamps: “We have a message for those kind of folks: If you’re able-bodied and you want to milk the taxpayer, those days are over. Get off the couch, stop eating the Cheetos, stop buying the medical marijuana…”

+ According to the Wall Street Journal, US companies announced only 1,494 new jobs in August, the lowest for the month since 2009.

+ For the first time in years, the number of job seekers (7.2 million) in the US has outstripped the number of job openings (7.18 million) But the situation is likely substantially worse, since at least 40% of companies posting listings for jobs that don’t exist.

+ US workers work an average 12 40-weeks more a year than German workers…

US worker: 1,811 hours/year
German worker: 1,340 hours/year

+ According to a new study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research, the 400 richest Americans paid an average effective tax rate of 24% from 2018 to 2020, compared with a 30% rate for all other taxpayers.

+ William Pulte, Trump’s top housing regulator, wants to allow crypto to be used as collateral for mortgages: “FHFA ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which package and securitize loans for investors in the housing market, to develop proposals allowing them to ‘count cryptocurrency as an asset for a mortgage’ during the application process.”

+ The number of student loan borrowers who are seeking to defer their payments (10.2 million) is more than 3 times higher than last year (2.28 million).

Why stay in college?
Why go to night school?
Gonna be different this time?
Can’t write a letter, can’t send no postcard
I ain’t got time for that now

+ A report from Payroll Integrations 2025 Employee Financial Wellness found that 38% of employees have withdrawn money prematurely from their retirement accounts, but Gen Z seemed to be the most desperate for funds. Almost 50% of young adults have already tapped into their retirement funds, compared to 31% of millennials, while a little more than 40% of Boomers and Gen Xers had dipped into theirs.

+ According to a Stanford study, the corporate adoption of AI has been linked to a 13% decline in jobs for young people in the U.S.

+ Who wanted this? The Trump administration has canceled the Biden era rule making airlines compensate passengers for flight delays and disruptions.

+ Fox Business on the Trump family crypto-scam: “My goodness. $5 BILLION. Eye-popping numbers…crypto-friendly legislation coming from the president, who is, in turn, cashing in on crypto. A conflict of interest.”

+++

+ On Tuesday, California was hit by more than 10,000 lightning strikes in less than 24-hours, igniting wildfires up and down the state.

+ China currently has 339 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity under construction, that’s nearly two-thirds of the world’s existing capacity. 

+There’s a reason for this…

+ The data center for Zuckerberg’s Meta, now under construction outside Cheyenne, Wyoming, will consume more power than all of the homes in the Cowboy State.

+ Trump’s Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright, got brutally fact-checked on Elon Musk’s own platform this week for his inane deprecations about solar energy…

+ Nicholas Fulghum, Senior Energy and Climate Data Analyst at Ember Energy: “Covering the planet in solar panels would produce around 150-200 million TWh of electricity a year. That is 1,000x more than the global primary energy consumption of ~180,000 TWh. There’s wrong and then there’s @SecretaryWright wrong, who is LEADING THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY.”

+ There are two options here: Wright destroyed a lot of brain cells when he drank fracking fluid to prove it was “safe.” Or he’s just lying. Probably both.

+ A bracing new report in Nature warns that the Earth’s ability to absorb carbon may be exhausted much sooner than thought: “Researchers report that Earth can safely store around 1,460 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide (GtCO₂) — a number much lower than the 10,000–40,000 GtCO₂ often cited in previous studies.”

+ According to OXFAM, the deepening drought in East Africa is worse than the one that devastated the region in 2011, when huge herds of cattle, sheep and goats were completely wiped out and 750,000 people perished from starvation and lack of water. Herder Mahmoud Ciroobey from Kalsheikh in Somaliland:

This drought is slowly killing everything. First, it “swept away” the land and the pastures; then it “swept away” the animals, which first became weaker and weaker and eventually died. Soon, it is going to “sweep away” people. People are sick with flu, diarrhoea, and measles. If they don’t get food, clean water, and medicines, they will die like their animals.

+ Decade after decade, the dry season in the Amazon rainforest has been getting longer and drier. A new study published in Nature Communications found that about 75 percent of the decrease in rainfall is directly linked to deforestation. In the first six months of 2025, Brazilian officials reported a 27 percent increase in tree loss nationwide over the same period last year.

+ The air quality in Squamish, British Columbia  (30 miles north of Vancouver) hit 800 on Wednesday. An AQI between 200 and 300 is considered “very unhealthy. An AQI above 300 is considered “hazardous.” An AQI of 800 is almost unbreathable.

+ Air pollution generated by the oil and gas industry causes more than 90,000 premature deaths across the US each year and results in hundreds of thousands of cases of childhood asthma and more than 10,000 incidents of premature birth annually, according to a new study by researchers at University College London and the Stockholm Environment Institute. Moreover, the report found that the burden falls disproportionately on the poor and communities of color.

+ NASA Administrator Sean Duffy says the US will send a four-man crew to the moon at the beginning of next year. Meanwhile, Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi still don’t have safe drinking water.

+ Jeremy Pikser: “They’re gonna go when it’s a full moon because it will be a bigger target then.”

+ This is utter nonsense from beginning to end. Trump:

Newsom didn’t allow the water to come from the Pacific Northwest. You know they have tremendous amounts of water in California, which most people don’t know. They send the water out into the Pacific Ocean. So I demanded that to be open. If that were open during the fire, you wouldn’t have had the fire because all the sprinklers would’ve worked in the houses. They had no water. They had no water in the fire hydrants. They wouldn’t have had the fires. They would have been put out after one house, two houses. But he stopped the water from coming in. And I had to send in the military to have that water opened, after the fires. And now that water, but he should have more, because they still restrict it. There’s something wrong with these people. There’s something really wrong.

+ Forget his bruised hand, there’s something really wrong with Trump’s brain…

+ In his own kind of eternal return, Trump keeps reentering the childhood he never grew out of…

+++

+ Why did Trump hit India with 50% tariffs, driving the Modi regime closer to China, even after the two countries engaged in border skirmishes as recently as four years ago? Because Trump insisted on taking credit for stopping a war, Modi says he didn’t stop (India v. Pakistan), and as a consequence, Modi refused to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Megalomaniacal diplomacy in action.

+ Will the ceremony be held in the Rose Garden or Four Seasons Total Landscaping?

Is Tutar invited?

+ Trump on why he decided to move Space Force HQ from Colorado to Alabama: “The problem I have with Colorado — they do mail-in voting. They went to all mail-in voting, so they have automatically crooked elections. And we can’t have that.” (Alabama allows mail-in voting.)

+ Tom Stephenson on the transformation of El Salvador into a prison state: ‘El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele has embraced his extemporary powers. Calling himself the “coolest dictator in the world”, the restorer of the state monopoly on violence has replaced the state and seized the monopoly for himself. Giving the US access to El Salvador’s expanded prison system as an offshore gulag has made him a darling of the American right. They praise him as a visionary leader, but his appeal lies in something more primordial: the assertion that a broken country can be fixed with sufficient state violence.’

+ Florida: Closed to immigrants, Open to viruses…

+ Is this the Cuban exile community’s response to Cuba still having the world’s best health care system, despite 6 decades of an asphyxiating embargo…?

+ Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, during a news conference about his plan to end every vaccine mandate in the state:

All of them. All of them. Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery. Who am I as a government or anyone else, who am I as a man standing here now, to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? What you put into your body is because of your relationship with your body and your God. I don’t have that right.

Of course, what starts as a decision between “you and your God” doesn’t stay between you and your God.

+ According to a 2024 study published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, childhood vaccinations prevented 1.13 million deaths, 508 million lifetime illnesses, and 32 million hospitalizations. The measles vaccine alone is credited with preventing 13.2 million hospitalizations, while the diphtheria vaccinations saved 752,800 lives.

+ What’s the likelihood RFK Jr testified truthfully when he said that he fired Susan Monarez as head of the CDC because when he asked her, “‘Are you a trustworthy person?’ she said ‘No.’”

+ Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) on the CDC purge: “This is the same group of so-called experts that told the entire country we should live in fear of monkeypox, but failed to tell us that unless you’re a homosexual man, you don’t have to worry about this at all, that monkeypox is a sexually transmitted disease.” Still homophobic after all these years…

+ The governors of California, Oregon and Washington State just announced a joint “West Coast Health Alliance” to counter the Trump/RFK destruction of the public health system in the US.

+ Vaccinated dogs aren’t the creatures with “cognitive issues”….

+++

+ According to a piece in the New York Times, Trump is openly conspiring with Adams, Sliwa and Cuomo to defeat Mamdani: “Trump is considering giving Adams a position in the administration as a way to clear the field in November’s mayoral election and damage the chances of the Democratic front-runner, Zohran Mamdani.” Anything to say, Sen. Schumer? What about you, Hakeem Jeffries?

+ He’d rather work with Trump than Zohran on lowering housing costs…

+ Rep. Tom Suozzi, the anti-abortion Democrat from NY: “Zohran Mamdani and every other Democratic Socialist should create their own party because I don’t want that in my party.” He doesn’t want feminists, gays, trans people, peace activists or greens in “his” party either. Maybe he’s the one who should be looking for a new party.

+ This is ridiculous, especially when you consider that both Bill Clinton and Obama aspired in their own ways to be Reagan…

+ Having “operatives” is a big part of the Democrats’ problem.

+ Rep. Thomas Massie on Trump’s rant that Congress’s pursuit of the entire Epstein files is a “hostile act”: “I don’t know if that’s precedented in this country to have a president call legislators to say that they’re engaged in a hostile act, particularly when the so-called hostile act is trying to get justice for people who’ve been victims of sex crimes.”

+++

+ In his latest Substack post (“On Anonymous Sources“), Seymour Hersh once again appears to claim sole credit for “exposing” the My Lai Massacre: .

In 1969, I exposed the My Lai massacre in a series of freelance reports for a small anti-Vietnam War Saigon-based writers’ cooperative known as Dispatch News Service. Earlier I had covered the war as a Pentagon correspondent for the Associated Press, and—despite that experience and my writing for the New York Times Magazine about secret US work on chemical and biological weapons as well as a book on the topic—I could interest no major media outlets in what I had uncovered about the massacre at My Lai. I had obtained access to an Army charge sheet accusing a young Army 2nd lieutenant named William Calley of being the “bad apple” who engineered the crime. My work for Dispatch won me many prizes, including a Pulitzer, and a front-page story in the New York Times about the award for foreign reporting going to a freelance writer. Then, as now, the Times was the place to be a reporter.

In fact, the slaughter was first exposed by Hugh Thompson, who tried to stop the killing, and wrote a report about it the day it happened. Then, in March 1969 (seven months before Hersh’s first story), another Army veteran and investigative journalist, Ron Ridenhour, wrote a detailed account of the war crime and sent it to Nixon, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and leading members of Congress. It wasn’t just Ridenhour, either. As I recounted in my piece “The Last Child of My Lai,” the day before Hersh’s first story for Dispatch News appeared, Wayne Greenshaw published a front-page piece in the Alabama Journal on the massacre, under the title: “Ft Benning Probes Vietnam Slayings: Officer Suspect in 91 Deaths of Civilians.”

The atrocities committed in “Pinkville” were no secret to the Vietnamese. Within days of the massacre, investigators with the Census Grievance Committee in Quang Ngai City released a fairly accurate account of the killings. But in a striking parallel to the Palestinian journalists covering the genocide in Gaza today, the reports by the Vietnamese were denounced as “VC propaganda” and dismissed by the Army, US investigators and western reporters.

Ridenhour and Greenshaw’s ground-breaking work also goes unmentioned in Cover-Up, Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s new documentary on Hersh, which has been greeted with enthusiastic reviews following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. It’s also worth noting that Hersh’s reporting on the US’s biological and chemical warfare program for New York Times Magazine in August 1968 (and an earlier piece in the New York Review of Books in April 1968) leaned heavily on work first done by the Portland-based investigative journalist Elinor Langer (“Chemical and Biological Warfare,” Science, January 13/20, 1967).

+ In no way is this meant to detract from Hersh’s vital reporting, but to recognize the contributions of Thompson, Ridenhour, Greenshaw and Langer, who weren’t “anonymous” sources and shouldn’t be rendered as such. One of the reasons Alexander Cockburn dismissed journalism prizes, such as the Pulitzer, is that he believed, correctly, I think, that journalism is a collective endeavor, where one so-called “exposé” almost always builds on and is enhanced by the work of other journalists.

+ “Then as now, the Times was the place to be a reporter.” Really, Sy?

+ Merriam-Webster’s has enshrined “enshittification” into the official lexicon…

+ Emily Witt on the Manosphere: “The manosphere is confusing, because it’s a place where one can find both benign advice about protein consumption and ideas that have led to mass shootings. Its theories of evolutionary biology, mostly concerning what women were “built” to do, are reposted on social media by people such as Elon Musk. It’s annoying to have to take it seriously, just as it’s annoying to have to take the Taliban’s gender theories seriously.”

+ Every quarter, Secret Service snipers are supposed to demonstrate that they can hit a target while standing, sitting, kneeling, and prone. But a report by the Inspector General of the DHS revealed that of the Secret Service snipers met that requirement last year. I’m kind of glad about this. I find it impossible to root for snipers.

+ After the curtain fell on the premier showing of The Voice of Hind Rajab at the Venice Film Festival, the movie and its director, Kaouther Ben Hania, were greeted by the stunned audience with a 22-minute standing ovation, tears and shouts of “Free Palestine.” Too bad the real voice of Hind Rajab didn’t stun the Biden administration or the New York Times.

+ How to demonstrate you’ve never read the book…(Movie critic Geoffrey McNabb, writing in The Independent, pans Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein for not flipping Mary Shelley’s masterpiece on its head and making the Monster, instead of the mad scientist Dr. Frankenstein, “an agent of evil and chaos.”) The horror is the horror of prejudice, fear of the Other, which is playing out on Del Toro’s screen and live on a street near you…

I mixed reality with pseudo-God dreams
The ghost of violence was something I’d seen
I sold my soul to be the Human Obscene

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

The Trees are Speaking: Dispatches From the Salmon Forests
Lynda V. Mapes
(Washington)

Ctrl+Alt+Chaos: How Teenage Hackers Hijack the Internet
Joe Tidy
(Elliott & Thompson)

Vanished: an Unnatural History of Extinction
Sadiah Qureshi
(Allen Lane)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Private Music
Deftness
(Reprise)

Airline Highway
Rodney Crowell
(New West)

Mind Explosion
Shakti
(Abstract Logix)

Anti-Everything

“The hell with him, he thought bitterly. The hell with patriotism in general. In the specific and the abstract. Birds of a feather, soldiers and cops. Anti-intellectual and anti-Negro. Anti-everything except beer, dogs, cars and guns.”

– Philip K. Dick, Eyes in the Sky

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