Music Week

Expanded blog post, September archive (finished).

Music: current count 32156 [32117] rated (+39), 219 [229] unrated (-10).

When I ran the numbers, they came up a bit short of the list, so I rechecked and found 5-6 I had failed to register grades on. At least one of those should definitely have shown up in this week's list, so I added it, but that makes me suspect I may have slipped up elsewhere. So a reminder: The monthly compilation (link above) is more authoritative than the weekly ones (which are extracted from it). Also, note that some reviews now have a date after the grade. These are records that have future release dates. I've changed my mind several times on how to handle those cases.

Noticed the links in my Music index page needed some updating to reference 2019 files, of which Music Tracking turned out to require the most work: there were literally dozens of dumb typos keeping it from displaying, as well as a bunch of missing grades. I wanted to make sure there was a link to my EOY [Mid-Year] List Aggregate, where I started collecting mid-year best-of list info but have more recently supplemented that with review grades (usually 80+ at AOTY, but I'm tracking other sources as well, especially jazz).

I added several fan lists from an Expert Witness Facebook post, and that (well, plus adding in Michael Tatum's latest grades) was enough to tilt first place from Sharon Van Etten to Billie Eilish. There's still a structural problem that favors records released before July -- Lana Del Rey ranks highest among later releases at 28, and the highest June release is at 21 (Freddie Gibbs & Madlib; highest September release is Charli XCX at 68, followed by Brittany Howard at 73). By the way, one of those fan lists led me to Oompa, another to Octo Octa, and others to most of the African comps below, so they've earned their keep.

Revisited several albums while trying to wrap this up, and wound up promoting Oompa, Andrew Lamb, and Taylor Swift. Possible that Kwi Bamba and Alefa Madasgascar could have benefited from more attention.

New records reviewed this week:

• Karl Berger/Jason Kao Hwang: Conjure (2014 [2019], True Sound): [cd]: B [10-01]
• Randy Brecker/Ada Rovatti: Brecker Plays Rovatti: Sacred Bond (2019, Piloo): [cd]: B+(**) [10-25]
• Zack Clarke Trio: Vertical Shores (2017 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• DaBaby: Kirk (2019, Interscope): [r]: B+(***)
• Sam Dillon: Out in the Open (2018, Cellar Live): [r]: B+(**)
• Sam Dillon: Force Field (2018 [2019], Posi-Tone): [r]: B+(*)
• Harris Eisenstadt: Canada Day Quartet Live (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Gabriel Ferrandini: Volúpias (2017 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Vyacheslav Ganelin/Deniss Pashkevich/Arkady Gotesman: Variations (2018 [2019], Jersika): [r]: B+(*)
• The Garifuna Collective: Aban (2019, Stonetree Music): [r]: B+(**)
• Kano: Hoodies All Summer (2019, Parlophone): [r]: B+(*)
• Petros Klampanis: Irrationalities (2017 [2019], Enja): [cd]: B+(**) [10-18]
• The Baba Andrew Lamb Trio: The Night of the 13th' Moon (2018 [2019], LFDS): [bc]: A-
• Landline: Landline (2019, Loyal Label): [cd]: B+(**) [11-01]
• Guillaume Muller: Sketches of Sound (2019, self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Laura Noejovich: Laura Has New Standards (2018 [2019], Enchanted Meadow): [cd]: C+ [11-02]
• Octo Octa: Resonant Body (2019, T4T LUV NRG): [bc]: B+(***)
• Oompa: Cleo (2019, OompOutLoud): [r]: A-
• Miles Perkin Quartet: The Point in Question (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• Cene Resnik Trio 'Watch for Dogs': Shades of Colors (2016 [2019], Not Two): [r]: B+(**)
• Kendrick Scott Oracle: A Wall Becomes a Bridge (2019, Blue Note): [r]: B+(*)
• Matthew Snow: Iridescence (2018 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B+(***) [11-29]
• Something Blue [Alexa Tarantino/Nick Finzer/Sam Dillon/Art Hirahara/Boris Kozlov/Rudy Royston]: Maximum Enjoyment (2018 [2019], Posi-Tone): [r]: B+(*)
• The Souljazz Orchestra: Chaos Theories (2019, Strut): [r]: B+(*)
• STL GLD: The New Normal (2019, AR Classic): [r]: B+(**)
• Alexa Tarantino: Winds of Change (2019, Posi-Tone): [r]: B+(**)
• Ben Van Gelder/Tony Tixier/Tom Berkmann/Mathias Ruppnig: Scopes (2019, Whirlwind): [r]: B+(**)
• Mareike Wiening: Metropolist Paradise (2018 [2019], Greenleaf Music): [cd]: B+(*) [11-01]
• Eri Yamamoto Trio & Choral Chameleon: Goshu Ondo Suite (2018 [2019], AUM Fidelity): [cd]: A- [11-15]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Alefa Madagascar (1970s-80s [2019], Strut): [bc]: B+(***)
• Louis Armstrong: Live in Europe (1948-52 [2019], Dot Time): [r]: B+(**)
• Kwi Bamba: Kwi Bamba & L'Orchestre De Gama Berema (1997 [2018], Ouch!): [bc]: B+(***)
• John Coltrane: Blue World (1964 [2019], Impulse!): [r]: A-
• Nâ Hawa Doumbia: La Grande Cantatrice Malienne Vol. 1: Decouverte 81 a Dakar (1981 [2019], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [r]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Nâ Hawa Doumbia: La Grande Cantatrice Malienne Vol. 3: Korodia (1982 [2011], Awesome Tapes From Africa): [bc]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Randy Brecker/Ada Rovatti: Brecker Plays Rovatti: Sacred Bond (Piloo): October 25
• Tyshawn Sorey and Marilyn Crispell: The Adornment of Time (Pi)
• Andrés Vial/Dezron Douglas/Eric McPherson: Gang of Three (Chromatic Audio): October 4

Weekend Roundup

I noticed this image somewhere recently, and was reminded that I had used it every Weekend Roundup for several months early in the Trump regnum. While I eventually put the image aside, I have in fact done this every weekend since the reign of terror started, so figured I'm entitled to resurrect the image. You can find it in the notebook starting on February 5, 2017, and scroll up from there (the entries are last-in/first-out).

Last week's "whistleblower" story has, like a tropical depression growing into a hurricane entering warm Carribbean waters, mushroomed into this week's (and the rest of this year's, and most of 2020's) impeachment extravaganza.

Many links follow:

• David Atkins: The impeachment probe should include all of Trump's crimes: I'm sympathetic to this point of view, thinking it important to recognize and challenge all of Trump's crimes and misdeeds, but that's a tall order -- a lot of effort where you only need one conviction to send the miscreant packing. Others, below, argue for keeping it simple and moving fast, and I can't say they're wrong. On the other hand, you could do that, advancing the most universally agreed upon charge, then follow that up with additional articles of impeachment. Also should be possible to identify additional targets (e.g., Pence, Barr, Mnuchin). Related to Atkins, see Peter Certo: The case for impeachment goes way beyond Ukraine. A bigger list, still far from complete.

• Julian E Barnes/Michael S Schmidt/Adam Goldman/Katie Benner: White House knew of whistleblower's allegations soon after Trump's call with Ukraine leader: "The whistle-blower, a C.I.A. officer detailed to the White House at one point, first expressed his concerns anonymously to the agency's top lawyer."

• Zack Beauchamp: The whistleblower memo details Trump's systematic attack on American democracy.

• John Cassidy:

  • The Democrats are looking to strike quickly in the impeachment inquiry.

  • Trump's Ukraine defense is the same one he's used for years: I did it. So What?

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Lindsey Graham rests entire Trump defense on word he doesn't understand.

  • The Ukraine scandal is a fitting symbol of Trump's presidency. It may be his downfall.

  • The Ukraine scandal is not one phone call. It's a massive plot.

  • Trump is being impeached because he will not stop cheating.

  • Why Trump has finally forced the House to impeach him.

• Sarah Chayes: Hunter Biden's perfectly legal, socially acceptable corruption: "Donald Trump committed an impeachable offense, but prominent Americans also shouldn't be leveraging their names for payoffs from shady clients abroad." Why not add "or from shady clients at home"? Eugene Scalia is a pretty good example of the latter. On Biden, see: Michael Birnbaum/David L Stern/Natalie Gryvynak: Former Ukraine prosecutor says Hunter Biden 'did not violate anything'.

• Jane Coaston: "This is about Trump": 2020 GOP primary challengers endorse impeachment in their first debate.

• Sean Collins:

  • Trump reportedly told Russia he didn't care about 2016 election interference -- and aides buried the meeting notes.

  • 5 questions Attorney General William Barr should answer about Trump's call with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

  • /Alex Ward: The timeline of Trump's decision to withhold aid to Ukraine is increasingly suspicious.

• Gabriel Debenedetti/Benjamin Hart: How bad might impeachment be for Joe Biden's prospects?

• Daniel W Drezner: The strategic case for impeaching President Trump.

  So why impeach Trump? Because he will obsess about it. The moment it becomes a live option, the moment a trial in the Senate seems conceivable, he will talk about nothing else. He will rant to his staff and bore foreign leaders about it. He loves a fight. And every moment Trump thinks about impeachment is a moment he is not thinking about doing even more reckless things.

• Eleanor Eagan/Jeff Hauser: House Dems must ramp up other oversight: "House Democrats' oversight of President Trump has not been vigorous enough, and now is their opportunity to hold the entire administration accountable."

• Noah Feldman: A special counsel must investigate Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr: Safe to say, that isn't going to happen.

• Susan B Glasser: "Do us a favor": The forty-eight hours that sealed Trump's impeachment.

• David Greenberg: Stop comparing Trump's impeachment case to Johnson's . . . or Nixon's . . . or Clinton's.

• John F Harris: Trump killed the seriousness of impeachment: "Impeachment proceedings used to be news of unquestionable gravity. The week showed it's just more fodder for the ideological and culture wars." Actually, by this logic, it was the Clinton impeachment that led us to see the process as nothing more than partisan treachery. I could argue that the charges this time are graver and more urgent, and that the risks of letting those charges slide unchallenged are greater, but probably not enough to convince Republicans to disown their leader.

• Shane Harris/Josh Dawsey/Ellen Nakashima: Trump told Russian officials in 2017 he wasn't concerned about Moscow's interference in US election.

• Sarah Jones: Turns out that impeachment might not scare voters after all.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • It's hard to overestimate the ferocity of the impeachment and election fight ahead.

  • The impeachment process explained: What happens to Trump, now?

  • How broad should the House Democrats' impeachment investigation be?

  • Could impeaching Trump take down Biden?

• Jen Kirby: 6 key takeaways from the Ukraine whistleblower complaint.

• Josh Kovensky: Top takeaways from the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower complaint.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Republicans only pretend to be patriots: One aspect of this particular line of impeachment that I'm not looking for is how many Democrats will try to frame themselves as the true defenders of American security, while casting Trump and his Republican cronies not just as crass opportunists and hypocrites only really concerned with their own power and money, but as fools indebted to foreign powers:

    The irony is that in the past few years this paranoid fantasy, in which a major U.S. political party is de facto allied with an international movement hostile to American values, has actually become true. But the party in question is the G.O.P., which under Trump has effectively become part of a cross-national coalition of authoritarian white nationalists. Republicans were never the patriots they pretended to be, but at this point they've pretty much crossed the line into being foreign agents. . . .

    What an impeachment process would do now is get the truth about who really cares about defending America and its values -- and who doesn't -- out into the open. By forcing Republicans to explicitly condone behavior they would have called treason if a Democrat did it, Nancy Pelosi and her colleagues can finally put an end to the G.O.P.'s long pretense of being more patriotic than its opponents.

    It's easy (often downright demagogic) to smear Russia and Saudi Arabia for their associations with old enemies of America, but the real reason Trump does their bidding is because they represent the global oligarchy, a class that Trump belongs to and does regular business with.

  • The winners and losers of the latest Trump scandal.

  • Impeaching Trump is good for the economy: "It will slow down the administration's war on competence."

• Michael Kruse: 'If he's not in a fight, he looks for one.': "Trump's Ukraine scandal reflects his lifelong craving for a fresh enemy." Coincidence that the Ukraine phone call occurred a mere 24 hours after Mueller's Congressional testimony brought his special investigation story to a supposed close? Steve M. comments (Does Trump Want to Be Impeached?):

  Kruse's story has its share of macho quotes:

  "Trump is a predator," Republican strategist Alex Castellanos asserted last spring. "When something enters his world, he either eats it, kills it or mates with it."

  But although Kruse doesn't emphasize this point, a pattern emerges: Trump fights until he loses. Then he moves on to another arena and resumes fighting, until he loses again.

  The problem for Trump is that now he can't move to a more important arena. He's in the championship match. If he loses now -- if he has a compulsion to fight until he loses -- then he has nowhere to go but down.

  Health permitting, I'm sure he sees lots of money-raking opportunities after his presidency ends, even by impeachment (and none beneath his dignity). As a commenter notes:

  I'm not convinced Trump sees his current job as the pinnacle of possible jobs. First off, it requires a shit ton more work (and travel) than he wants to give. Second, although he is certainly using it for some nice grifting, there are way too many required activities that he can't monetize. I can see him being happy to capitalize on 'having been president' to sell his usual lines of crap (and charge directly for those rallies he will keep doing, without having to funnel bits of that cash stream through annoying campaign rules). Plus he'd like a big figure cash deal to call in to whatever show/podcast, something he can do from his golden toilet.

• Eric Levitz: GOP divided over how enthusiastically to cover for Trump's corruption on Ukraine.

• Martin Longman: How a whistleblower accomplished what Mueller could not.

• Dylan Matthews: The Trump-Ukraine scandal just got its Watergate-tapes moment.

• Ian Millhiser: The 4 possible crimes in the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower scandal, explained: Seems to me like a stretch to make a case that Trump violated the letter of these laws, although he has certainly run afoul of the ethical norms these laws are intended to embody. In particular, I cannot disagree that the transcript "reads more like a mafia shakedown".

  1. Did Trump or his associates violate campaign finance law?
  2. Does Trump's act constitute bribery?
  3. Did he commit extortion?
  4. Did he obstruct justice?

• Ella Nilsen/Li Zhou/Matthew Yglesias: 9 things everyone should know about the impeachment process. Generally Useful primer, but I have one bone to pick: When asking "how many presidents have been impeached?" they answer: "The House has initiated an impeachment inquiry for three presidents, through it has only charged two with articles of impeachment." They're right that the House only voted to impeach two presidents: Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, with neither ultimately removed from office by the Senate ("convicted" seems to be the favored term, but I'd say you're not impeached until the Senate does so). But while remembering Nixon, who dodged impeachment by resigning, and avoided jail by having his successor pardon him, they forgot another prominent impeachment target. See: Ronald G Shafer: 'He lies like a dog': The first effort to impeach a president was led by his own party. Like Johnson, Tyler was given the VP nomination by a party that wanted to broaden its appeal, was elevated after the death of a popular president, and turned out to be anathema to that party. If you know Tyler's name at all, it's probably via William Henry Harrison's catchy campaign slogan, "Tippecanoe, and Tyler too." On the other hand, see David Greenberg's argument above that historical impeachment analogies aren't very useful. Still, they offer a typology: Tyler and Johnson are cases where Congressional majorities tried to impose their will on obstructionist presidents; Nixon was a cases where a presidents overstepped his normal powers, with criminal contempt for legal norms; Clinton was a case a thin House majority thought it would be a good PR stunt to impeach with no chance of success. At this point, impeaching Trump is like Nixon (if you're a Democrat) or like Clinton (if you are a Republican).

• Jonathan O'Connell/David A Farehthold: Trump's other Ukraine problem: New concern about his business.

• Delia Paunescu: Here are the most damning parts of the whistleblower report against President Donald Trump.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • The Trump-Ukraine whistleblower complaint, explained.

  • The sudden Democratic shift in favor of impeaching Trump, explained.

• David Remnick: Nancy Pelosi: An extremely stable genius. Lousy title, but one a weak mind might find hard to resist. There's an old Gandhi quote about having to change his mind to stay aligned with his followers ("after all, I am their leader"). Had Pelosi not flipped on impeachment, she would have been lost as a leader. Now she's back in control of a much more unified party.

• Frank Rich: The case for a fast, focused Trump impeachment.

• James Risen: Donald Trump's call with Ukrainian leader, one day after Robert Mueller's Congressional testimony, shows the president is a brazen criminal.

• David Rohde: The whistle-blower complaint is democracy at work, not the Deep State.

• Aaron Rupar: Steve Mnuchin's efforts to spin Trump's Ukraine scandal were a disaster.

• Darren Samuelsohn/Quint Forgey: How Mitch McConnell could give impeachment the Merrick Garland treatment.

• Charlie Savage: 8 takeaways from the whistle-blower complaint.

• Nate Silver: If this is Trump's best case, the Ukraine scandal is looking really bad for him.

• Mark Joseph Stern: William Barr hit a new low in his crusade to bury the whistleblower complaint.

• Matt Stieb:

  • Trump quotes ally who predicts a 'civil war like facture' in America if he is impeached. How many ways can you commit extortion? Republicans have repeatedly threatened to cripple government and/or the economy if the voters deny them power. In 2016, Trump made it clear that if he wasn't elected, he would refuse to accept defeat (as if that was simply a matter of his personal choice). Now he's threatening civil war if he's impeached and convicted. Maybe it's true that his fans will rise up in arms to save his sorry ass, but why should we tolerate such threats? The very intimation is proof positive of his unfitness for office.

  • Stephen Miller: Trump is the real whistle-blower uncovering corruption: "Which is true, in that Trump continues to casually expose his own levels of corruption."

  • Fox News in a state of 'bedlam' as Trump faces impeachment.

• Andrew Sullivan: The moment of truth for Brexit and Trump: Far from my favorite pundit, but it's worth pointing out that Brexit and Trump are allied projects, built on self-delusion, and fated for disaster -- something some of us recognized full well at the time, while many of those who bought into the fantasies have only buried their heads further. Plus this:

  But I bet Trump does not even understand the high crime he committed -- leveraging national-security policy to get a foreign government to smear a political opponent. Trump admires mafiosi, and always has. He has done his best to emulate them his entire life. Why would he not continue to do so? And a narcissist of Trump's proportions is simply unable to act in the interest of something other than himself, or see his personal interests as different than or subordinate to his public duties. So his psyche is stopping him from seeing what a big deal this is, while his eyes and ears see potential catastrophe. This will not end well. And it didn't help that Rudy Giuliani kept popping up on cable news, like a whirling dervish in a skull mask, digging his client into a deeper and deeper political grave.

  Another writer who has noted this US-UK crisis alignment: Amy Davidson Sorkin: Donald Trump and Boris Johnson: A tale of two crises.

• Margaret Sullivan: Trump, the TV president, finally meets a media story he can't control.

• Murray Waas: Trump, Giuliani, and Manafort; The Ukrainian scheme.

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells: How the security Democrats came around to impeachment.

• Alex Ward:

  • Trump threatens US officials who gave information to the Ukraine case whistleblower: And so, let the obstruction of justice begin.

  • The damning simpliity of the Ukraine-Trump scandal.

  • Why Ukraine is at the center of the latest Trump scandal: "The country has always been at the center of Trump's scandals."

As an intro to everything, see Vox's The 10 biggest stories you missed while you were glued to the Trump impeachment drama:

• A new report finds humans have caused irreversible changes to the Earth's oceans and places
• The UK's Supreme Court thwarts Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Brexit ploy
• The Trump administration slams the door on refugees
• The WeWork implosion is sending shockwaves across Silicon Valley
• The fight over Joker rages on -- before the movie has even arrived in theaters
• GM workers strike for second week
• Protesters in Egypt rise up against President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi
• Greta Thunberg versus Trump and some right-wing trolls
• Hate speech online is apparently fine, so long as it's only from politiians
• Spider-Man returns to the Marvel Cinematic Universe

My own link picks on some of these stories (but adding a few more):

• Jon Lee Anderson: At the UN, Jair Bolsonaro presents a surreal defense of his Amazon policies.

• Bernard Avishai: Netanyahu gets a dubious presidential mandate. What happens next? Four possible scenarios.

• James Bruggers: Southern state energy officials celebrate fossil fuels as world raises climate alarm.

• Cristina Cabrera: State Dept escalates investigation into Clinton emails amid Trump's Ukraine scandal.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • 5 things to know about Eugene Scalia, Trump's new labor secretary with a famous dad:

    1. He's a corporate lawyer who's spent his career fighting against workers.
    2. Scalia has a gift for unraveling consumer and worker protections.
    3. He famously helped overturn a labor rule to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome.
    4. He is a member of the right-wing legal group Federalist Society.
    5. He's done one or two good things for workers.

  • The hottest stop on the presidential campaign trail is the GM picket line.

• Juan Cole: Yemen's Houthis say they invaded Saudi Arabia, captured thousands of troops in Najran. But they also said they blew up Saudi Arabia's oil depot, something the US would rather blame Iran for. Beginning to look like the Saudis are getting some blowback for their savage intervention in Yemen.

• Eric Foner: The very soul of the republic: "Equality's vexed meaning in Gilded Age America." Review of Charles Postel's book, Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866-1896.

• Suzanne Gordon/Jasper Craven: The Trump Administration is sabotaging veterans' access to health care: "In its push toward privatization, the VA is actively thwarting Congressional oversight."

• Steve Helling: Honor student is struck in head by stray bullet while sitting at computer, dies on her 12th birthday.

• Sarah Jones: America's income inequality is reaching a tipping point.

• Anne Kim: How 2020 Democrats are a missing the message on the economy: "The candidates have yet to tackle the growing problem of regional inequality."

  When President Obama took office in 2008, Republican and Democratic districts enjoyed roughly the same median household income: $55,000 and $54,000, respectively. . . .

  Since then, median household income in Democratic districts soared to $61,000 in 2018, according to Muro and Whiton, while incomes in Republican districts fell to $53,000. The annual economic output of Democratic districts likewise skyrocketed, from $35.7 billion to $48.5 billion on average per district, while the economies of Republican districts shrank. The average Republican district's GDP is now just two-thirds that of the average Democratic district's GDP.

  Related: Claire Kelloway: How to close the Democrats' rural gap: "Forget Trump's tariffs. Big Ag is driving a new farm crisis."

• Jen Kirby:

  • Trump goes to the United Nations to argue against everything it stands for -- again. More on the UN:

    • Fred Kaplan: Trump is no longer even pretending to care about the ideals of the UN.

    • Charles Pierce: Trump's UN speech was a glimpse of how he views the world. It was, of course, insane.

    • Nahal Toosi: It's 'Dictator Day' at the UN -- with Trump in the middle.

  • UK's Supreme Court says Boris Johnson's suspension of Parliament was unlawful.

• Naomi Klein: The Green New Deal: A fight for our lives.

• Mike Konczal:

  • The student debt problem is a family crisis.

  • There are too few companies and their profits are too high: "As industries get more concentrated, businesses have to do less to earn more."

• Jill Lepore: Edward Snowden and the rise of whistle-blower culture: A review of Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record.

• Marianne Levine: Senate again rebukes Trump on national emergency declaration.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Americans' health-care costs are too damn high, study finds.

  • Trump's immigration policies are working (to make America poorer).

  • The Bernie vs. Warren debate we need: "Which candidate has the best unpassable plans doesn't matter. Which one has a better strategy for building the left's power does." By the way, Jacobin's Seth Ackerman replies to Levitz here: Why Bernie Sanders matters. Turns out, Jacobin has many articles making the case for Sanders over Warren; e.g.: Zaid Jilani: Why the differences between Sanders and Warren matter.

• German Lopez: More researh finds "stand your ground" laws lead to more homicides.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • The fight to end Roe v. Wade enters its endgame next week.

  • The biggest Second Amendment case to reach the Supreme Court in nearly a decade, explained.

• George Monbiot: For the sake of life on Earth, we must put a limit on wealth.

• Anna North: America's abortion debate is being defind by Fox News.

• Kim Phillips-Fein: The failed political promise of Silicon Valley. Reviews Margaret O'Mara's book, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.

• Charles Pierce: How many future terrorists did we create yesterday? "The United States bombed 30 farm laborers sitting around a campfire Wednesday. They surely have brothers and sons and friends who will not forget."

• Brian Resnick: Scientists: humans are rapidly turning oceans into warm, acidifying basins hostile to life: "A new UN report warns changes to the oceans this century will be "unprecedented." Related: Brad Plumer: The world's oceans are in danger, major climate change report warns.

• David Roberts:

  • Why the right's usual smears don't work on Greta Thunberg: "She keeps the focus on science, and they hate it." More on Thunberg:

    • Tom Engelhardt: Make America Greta again.

    • Umair Irfan: "You have stolen my dreams": Greta Thunberg rages at world leaders at UN climate summit.

    • Sonali Kolhatkar: Greta Thunberg isn't the only voice of her generation.

    • Anna North: Attacks on Greta Thunberg expose the stigma autistic girls face.

  • US politics is stuck. Can the climate movement shake it loose?

• Aaron Rupar: "Liddle', not Liddle": Trump's latest tweets are among his most bizarre yet. Reminiscent of the snipe hunt my Boy Scout camp leaders roped us into, I tried looking up the unrecognized word. All I found was this, which (apostrophe or not) is probably not what Trump was thinking. More serious is the one where he suggests that the whistleblower should be drawn and quartered.

• Robert J Shapiro: Trump's economic program has left most Americans worse off.

• David K Shipler: Interpreting Joe Biden is more complicated than you think.

• Chance Swaim: Wichita's mayor steered multi-million-dollar water plant contract to friends. The mayor is Jeff Longwell, who's also responsible for a shady deal to tear down Wichita's venerable minor league ballpark and practically give away adjacent city land, including a stretch of river front. Deep within Longwell's water plant scheme is a plan to privatize operation of Wichita's water supply. We fought against the first step a couple years ago, and were unable to stop funding of a company to do initial planning. Longwell's corruption built on that.

• Jennifer Szalai: 'The Enigma of Clarence Thomas' makes a strong case for its provocative thesis. Review of Corey Robin's new book on Thomas. For an excerpt from the book, see: Corey Robin: Clarence Thomas's radical vision of race.

• Taylor Telford: Income inequality in America is the highest it's been since Census Bureau started tracking it, data shows.

• Maureen Tkacik: Crash Course: How Boeing's managerial revolution created the 737 Max disaster. I've been ranting about Boeing's management for decades now. This cites a 2002 report, and before that the 1997 merger with McDonnell-Douglas, and those indeed appear to be turning points. My father, my brother, and many others I knew worked there, and what may have passed as good jobs when I was young (I was never so sure) grew steadily more troubled. One turning point was when Boeing moved their headquarters from Seattle to Chicago, a city they had no presence in, so management would never have to directly face the workers and the communities they were screwing. Still, for a long time, they managed to build planes that flew and landed safely. Then, even that changed:

  And indeed, that would appear to be the real moral of this story: Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software -- another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse. In the now infamous debacle of the Boeing 737 MAX, the company produced a plane outfitted with a half-assed bit of software programmed to override all pilot input and nosedive when a little vane on the side of the fuselage told it the nose was pitching up. The vane was also not terribly reliable, possibly due to assembly line lapses reported by a whistle-blower, and when the plane processed the bad data it received, it promptly dove into the sea.

• Nick Turse:

  • More US commandos are fighting invisible wars in the Middle East.

  • UN accuses US-Allied Forces of war crimes in Syria.

• Alex Ward:

  • The optimistic case for a US-North Korea deal, explained by a top South Korean official.

  • James Mattis fancies himself a defender of democracy. He missed a big chance to show it.

• Sean Wilentz: The culmination of Republican decay: Review of Tim Alberta's book, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. Also see: Eric Alterman: Making sense of Trump's rise, where he also reviews Alberta's book, along with Brian Rosenwald: Talk Radio's America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States and James Poniewozik: Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America. I've been reading Alberta's book, finding it a useful historical framework, although (as Wilentz points out) stuck in a very narrow tunnel, where resistance to Trump never extends beyond Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, and Paul Ryan (well, aside from quoting GW Bush's "that was some weird shit" inauguration line). As such, he doesn't offer any real insight into why many Republicans loved Trump before the election, and still more embraced him since.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The Zelensky call also shines light on Trump's financial corruption.

  • The strange career of Rudy Giuliani, from US attorney to Trump bagman, explained.

  • New claims that Trump failed to proect American journalists in Egypt demand investigation.

  • To beat Trump, try running an outsider: "A veteran like Joe Biden risks letting Trump off the hook for corruption."

    Let me be clear: If you are a single-issue "don't let the president's son do shady stuff" voter, and the choice on Election Day comes down to Donald Trump or Joe Biden, the correct choice is still Biden. . . .

    Specifically with regard to Hunter Biden and Ukraine, Trump was not conducting some kind of good government audit, he was holding core US foreign policy objectives hostage to his narrow self-interest. And this is something he does not just on extraordinary occasions but routinely. From Israel to India to Venezuela and beyond, Trump seems utterly incapable of viewing the public interest as having any standing or independent weight beyond his narrow politics. He quite openly believes that the entire Justice Department should serve his personal interests, rather than the interests of impartial justice, and his continued presence in office is a national scandal. . . .

    But by the same token, there's something perverse about moderate and allegedly electability-minded Democrats lining up behind a guy who was first elected to the Senate in 1972.

    If "experienced Washington hand" were the best formula for winning elections, then Hillary Clinton would have won in 2016, and veteran senators would outnumber young governors among successful presidential candidates. Voters don't like "the system," and the baggage that comes with it. The best way, by far, to make Trump own his corruption is to pick someone from outside the swamp to run against him, rather than letting him continue to position himself as the scourge of the establishment.

  • Democrats are stuck in a doom loop of premature polling.

• Li Zhou: Trump claims he wants to lower drug prices. He'll have to convince his own party to do it. But he won't convince his party, because they'll always defend moneyed interests against people, and because he won't really try, because he does too. But talk about it? Sure, he'll talk it up.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, September archive (in progress).

Music: current count 32117 [32080] rated (+37), 229 [227] unrated (+2).

Didn't get my unpacking done until late Monday afternoon, so that became the cutoff -- adding 2 rated albums from Sunday night, and flipping the unrated count from -9 to +2. Before unpacking, I had managed to empty the new jazz queue, but it's up to 12 now. And it turns out that most of the new records don't drop until November, so I probably shouldn't rush on them.

Robert Christgau's first post-Noisey Consumer Guide was mailed out last week. As he promised in his introduction (It's a Start), "the first one is free," so here it is. Follow one of the "Subscribe now" buttons to make get the second and subsequent consumer guides, plus any additional missives, delivered straight to your mailbox.

Probably because he was working off a backlog, but I had heard all but two albums from this month's offering (both various artists comps): The Daisy Age (Ace) and Lost in China (Riverboat). And I only found one of those streamable, so it's in this week's haul. This won't be a regular feature, but I thought I'd table up our grades (his first):

• Charlotte Adigéry: Zandozi (Deewee) [***, **]
• Hayes Carll: What It Is (Dualtone) [B+, A-]
• The Daisy Age (Ace) [A+, ?]
• Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell! (Interscope) [***, A-]
• Lost in China (Riverboat) [B+, **] *
• Madonna: Madame X (Interscope) [A-, A-]
• The National: I Am Easy to Find (4AD) [A-, **]
• The Paranoid Style: A Goddamn Impossible Way of Life (Bar/None) [A, ***]
• Pink: Hurts 2 B Human (RCA) [**, ***]
• 75 Dollar Bill: I Was Real (Glitterbeat/Tak:til) [A-, ***]
• Bruce Springsteen: Western Stars (Columbia) [*, B-]
• Taylor Swift: Lover (Republic) [A-, ***]

Presumably some of these differences can be chalked up to reports that he plays these records at least twice as many times as I do, plus has the benefit of working from physical copies. (I own none of them, although on his word I've ordered The Daisy Age, which Amazon informs me should arrive by Xmas.) The one I most likely shortchanged was probably the National, which I recall only gaving one spin. The only non-trivial differences are on Paranoid Style (I'm not nearly as impressed by Elizabeth Nelson as he is) and Springsteen (perhaps there is some redeeming social merit there, but I doubt it's worth digging out). Nelson, by the way, has a much-praised recent essay on The Mekons Rock 'N' Roll.

I could do the same thing with Michael Tatum's latest A Downloader's Diary (51), which doesn't have much more I hadn't heard. Again, his grades first, mine after, '*' for ones I got to after the fact:

• Carsie Blanton: Buck Up (self-released) [A, A-]
• Blarf: Cease and Desist (Stones Throw) [A-, B-] *
• Car Seat Headrest: Commit Yourself Completely (Matador) [A-, **] *
• Stef Chura: Midnight (Saddle Creek) [A-, **]
• GoldLink: Diaspora (RCA) [A-, ***]
• Jambú (E Os Míticos Sons da Amazônia) (Analog Africa) [B+, ***]
• Kokoko!: Fongola (Transgressive) [A-, **] *
• Madonna: Madame X (Interscope) [A, A-]
• Purple Mountains: Purple Mountains (Drag City) [A+, ***]
• Sleater-Kinney: The Center Won't Hold (Mom + Pop) [B+, ?]
• Spoon: Everything Hits at Once: The Best of Spoon [B+, ?]
• Freddie Gibbs & Madlib: Bandana (ESGN/Keep Cool/Madlib Invasion/RCA) [***, A-]
• Mekons: Deserted (Glitterbeat) [***, ***]
• The Hold Steady: Thrashing Through the Passion (Frenchkiss) [***, A-]
• Imperial Teen: Now We Are Timeless (Merge) [**, ?]
• Ibibio Sound Machine: Doko Mien (Merge) [**, ?]
• Kate Tempest: The Book of Traps and Lessons (American) [**, *]
• Digital Kabar: Electronic Maloya from La Réunion Since 1980 (Infiné) [**, ?]
• Nilüfer Yanya: Miss Universe (ATO) [*, A-]
• Nigeria 70: No Wahala: Highlife, Afro-Funk & Juju 1973-1987 (Strut) [*, A-]
• Beyoncé: Homecoming: The Live Album (Parkwood/Columbia) [C+, *]
• Bruce Springsteen: Western Stars (Columbia) [B-, B-]
• Weyes Blood: Titanic Rising (Sub Pop) [B-, B-]
• Anderson .Paak: Ventura (12 Tone/Aftermath) [B-, ***]
• Marvin Gaye: You're the Man (Motown) [B-, **]
• Hama: Houmeissa (Sahel Sounds) [B-, *]
• Sebadoh: Act Surprised (Dangerbird) [B-, ?]
• Kim Petras: Clarity (Bunhead) [C+, ?]
• Offset: Father of 4 (Motown/Quality Control) [C+, ?]

So not much there I didn't know about and went on to find brilliant (and sure, I still have some listening to do), but the reviews themselves were way beyond anything I could have written (one reason, I'm afraid, I rarely bother anymore).

Took a dive into Teddy Edwards this week. Idea came up when I saw Out of This World as a new reissue, but given that it's digital only, I used the hard-copy dates. His best record remains Together Again!, with Howard McGhee (1961). I might also note that the Art Pepper box isn't quite up to many of his period recordings, including most of The Complete Galaxy Recordings, or a lot of the live bootlegs Laurie Pepper has been reissuing. Still remarkable.

September has five Mondays, one more after today, so I can wait until then to index September Streamnotes.

New records reviewed this week:

• Reid Anderson/Dave King/Craig Taborn: Golden Valley Is Now (2018 [2019], Intakt): [r]: B-
• AP6C [Alberto Pinton Sestetto Contemporaneo]: Layers (2017 [2019], Clear Now): [cd]: B+(**)
• Terrence Brewer & Pamela Rose: Don't Worry 'Bout Me (Strong Brew Music, EP): [cd]: B+(*)
• Taylor Ho Bynum 9-tette: The Ambiguity Manifesto (2019, Firehouse 12): [r]: B+(**)
• Jimmy Cobb: Remembering U (2016 [2019], Jimmy Cobb World): [r]: B+(*)
• Jimmy Cobb: This I Dig of You (2019, Smoke Sessions): [r]: B+(**)
• The Raymond De Felitta Trio: Pre-War Charm (2019, Blujazz): [cd]: B+(***)
• Laszlo Gardony: La Marseillaise (2019, Sunnyside): [cd]: B+(**) [10-24]
• Ghostface Killah: Ghostface Killahs (2019, Now Generation): [r]: B+(***)
• Gordon Grdina Quartet: Cooper's Park (2019, Songlines): [r]: B+(***)
• Keiji Haino/Merzbow/Balasz Pandi: Become the Discovered, Not the Discoverer (2019, RareNoise): [cdr]; B+(*) [09-27]
• Chrissie Hynde With the Valve Bone Woe Ensemble: Valve Bone Woe (2019, BMG): [r]: B
• Indoor Pets: Be Content (2019, Wichita): [r]: B+(*)
• Ethan Iverson Quartet With Tom Harrell: Common Practice (2017 [2019], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Jpegmafia: All My Heroes Are Cornballs (2019, EQT): [r]: B+(**)
• Led Bib: It's Morning (2018 [2019], RareNoise): [cdr]: B [09-27]
• Ben Markley Quartet Featuring Joel Frahm: Slow Play (2019, OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
• Monoswezi: A Je (2017, Riverboat): [r]: B+(*)
• Tish Oney With the John Chlodini Trio: The Best Part (2019, Blujazz): [cd]: B-
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: Efflorescence: Volume 1 (2018 [2019], Leo, 4CD): [cd]: B+(***)
• Peterson Kohler Collective: Winter Colors (2018 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Alberto Pinton Trio: Röd (2018, Clear Now): [bc]: B+(***)
• Noah Preminger Group: Zigsaw: Music of Steve Lampert (2018 [2019], self-released): [cd]: A- [10-04]
• Preservation Hall Jazz Band: A Tuba to Cuba (2019, Sub Pop): [r]: B+(*)
• Kojey Radical: Cashmere Tears (2019, Asylum/Atlantic): [r]: B+(*)
• Markus Rutz: Blueprints Figure One: Frameworks (2018 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
• Rachid Taha: Je Suis Africain ([2019], Naïve): [r]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Lost in China: Off the Beaten Track From Beijing to Xinjiang ([2017], Riverboat): [r]: B+(**)
• Art Pepper: Promise Kept: The Complete Artists House Recordings (1979 [2019], Omnivore, 5CD): [r]: A-

Old music:

• Teddy Edwards Quartet: Good Gravy! (1961, Contemporary): [r]: B+(**)
• Teddy Edwards: Heart & Soul (1962, Contemporary): [r]: B+(*)
• Teddy Edwards: Nothin' but the Truth (1966 [1967], Prestige): [r]: B+(*)
• Teddy Edwards Quartet: Out of This World (1980 [1981], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Teddy Edwards/Houston Person: Close Encounters (1996 [1999], HighNote): [r]: B+(**)
• Teddy Edwards: Smooth Sailing (2001 [2003], HighNote): [r]: B+(**)
• Steve Lampert: Venus Perplexed (2000 [2004], SteepleChase): [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Lampert: Music From There (2006 [2007], Bridge): [r]: B+(**)
• Alberto Pinton: Nascent (2012 [2013], Redhorn): [r]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Simone Baron & Arco Belo: The Space Between Disguises (GenreFluid) November 8
• Karl Berger/Jason Kao Hwang: Conjure (True Sound): October 1
• Petros Klampanis: Irrationalities (Enja): October 18
• Landline: Landline (Loyal Label): November 1
• Remy Le Boeuf: Assembly of Shadows (SoundSpore): November 1
• Guillaume Muller: Sketches of Sound (self-released): October 1
• Laura Noejovich: Laura Has New Standards (Enchanted Meadow): November 2
• Carmen Sandim: Play Doh (Ropeadope): October 25
• Matthew Snow: Iridescence (self-released): November 29
• Kevin Sun: The Sustain of Memory (Endectomorph Music): November 15
• Mareike Wiening: Metropolist Paradise (Greenleaf Music): November 1
• Eri Yamamoto Trio & Choral Chameleon: Goshu Ondo Suite (AUM Fidelity): November 15

Weekend Roundup

I had an idea for an introduction based on the book I've been reading: Tim Alberta's American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. I never really got the title until it appeared in the text 400+ pages in, and it wasn't anything like what I would have guessed. The line comes from Trump's inaugural address, where it climaxes a series of assertions that have virtually no connection to reality. I'd need to find the quote and unpack it a bit, but it basically confirms my suspicion that the Republican campaign in 2016 was basically an extortion racket. They had remarkable success at spoiling eight years of Obama, and they clearly intended to treat Hillary Clinton even worse should she win. The only way Americans could save themselves from the wrath of the Republicans was to elect one -- in which case, the downside was limited to incompetence and corruption. Of course, a better solution would have been to beat the Republicans so badly they couldn't do any real damage, but that was too much to hope for -- especially with Hillary as your standard bearer.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zack Beauchamp: Israel's election results show Netanyahu is in serious trouble: "No one outright won. But Netanyahu did worse than he hoped and may lose office because of it." More on this:

  • David M Halbfinger/Isabel Kershner: Arab parties back Benny Gantz as Israeli leader, to end Netanyahu's grip. Also see Ayman Odeh's statement: We are ending Netanyahu's grip on Israel.

  • Benjamin Hart: Benjamin Netanyahu is running out of options.

  • Yardena Schwartz: How Netanyahu's campaign against Israel's Aragb citizens backfired.

  • Richard Silverstein: Israeli elections: Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: The house just passed a bill that would give millions of workers the right to sue their boss.

• Jane Coaston: Defending Kavanaugh has become personal for conservatives, not ideological.

  Rather, the idea of Brett Kavanaugh is that he is a stand-in for conservative men, a blank slate upon which fears of liberal overreach ruining the lives and reputations of right-leaning heterosexual men can be projected. He's not Brett Kavanaugh -- he's your son, or your brother, or even you. . . . For many on the right, particularly those increasingly concerned about the potential weaponization of accusations of sexual assault against conservatives, that's enough.

• Justin Davidson: The challenges of constructing New York's tallest apartment building: Interview with architect Gordon Gill.

• Atul Gawande: Letting go: "What should medicine do when it can't save your life?"

• Tara Golshan: Bernie Sanders wants to put credit reporting companies like Equifax out of business.

• Umair Irfan: Greta Thunberg is leading kids and adults from 150 countries in a massive Friday climate strike. Other links:

  • Ella Nilsen: Greta Thunberg is not alone in her climate activism.

  • Somini Sengupta:

    • Climate protesters and world leaders: same planet, different worlds.

    • 'We will never back down': Scenes from the global climate protests.

    • Who's speaking at the UN Climate Summit? Several champions of coal.

    • How one billionaire could keep three countries hooked on coal for decades (w/Jacqueline Williams/Aruna Chandrasekhar).

  • David Wallace-Wells: It's Greta's world: Aka "The extraordinary rise of Greta Thunberg and her Hail Mary climate movement." One piece in the author's Welcome to the State of the World series. Other pieces:

    • Gallery: City by city, the world turns out for the climate strike.

    • Green New Deal's Rhiana Gunn-Wright: 'You don't see this sort of change this rapidly'.

    • Chris Hayes and Ali Velshi talk the state of climate journalism (and state of the planet).

    • Naomi Klein: 'Our future is radical. The present is pretty radical too.' Klein has a new essay collection, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.

      I think climate is bringing out barbarism. I don't think it's creating it, and I don't think it's the only factor. But I think there's a subconscious understanding, even among climate-change deniers, that we are entering an era of scarcity. . . . I also wouldn't have necessarily predicted Jair Bolsonaro. I think the extent to which, in country after country, we're seeing the worst people in the world being elevated to the most powerful positions is pretty startling. Boris Johnson -- these are people that are ready to just burn it down, and I think [we need to] understand what is behind that, and I don't think we really have understood what the commonalities are between the Trumps and the Bolsanaros and the Dutertes and the Modis.

    • Bill Gates: 'I don't see anything worthy of the word plan' to fight climate change.

• Sarah Jones: The future is ours for the taking: Interview with Ann Pettifor, author of The Case for the Green New Deal.

• Jen Kirby: Boris Johnson had a really bad day in Luxembourg. The Incredible Hulk was involved.

• Jill Lepore: Edward Snowden and the rise of whistle-blower culture: Review of Snowden's memoir, Permanent Record.

• Steven Levitsky/Daniel Ziblatt: Why Republicans play dirty: You probably recall their examples, and it wouldn't take much head-scratching to come up with their two analogues (post-Reconstruction southern Democrats, pre-WWI German conservatives -- although post-WWI were arguably even worse). I'd quibble with this claim: "Republicans leaders are not driven by an intrinsic or ideological contempt for democracy. They are driven by fear." But they wouldn't fear losing so much if they hadn't started out with their belief in a rightful socioeconomic hierarchy (with themselves at the top), a belief that starts with fear and loathing of what they take to be the lower orders. There may be cases where conservatives are willing to respect democracy, but doing so is not something that come naturally to those accustomed to ruling.

  Actually, there are other things to quibble with here. "As the collapse of democracy in Germany and Spain in the 1930s and Chile in the 1970s makes clear, these escalating conflicts can end in tragedy." Democracy didn't "collapse" in Spain or Chile: it was murdered by right-wingers who refused to accept popular election results, aided by malign foreign powers (Nazi Germany in Spain, the US in Chile). Germany was a local affair, where the traditional conservative powers backed the Nazis, not least because Hitler promised an end to what they really feared: a government of, by, and for the people. With their "dirty tricks," Republicans have revealed that they're no better nor even different from reviled conservative regimes of the past. Also, like their predecessors, they won't stop until they're stopped. Hopefully, we can do that with a peaceful election, before they manage to bring us all to ruin.

  Related, with many of the same examples, expressed more pointedly: Paul Krugman: Republicans don't believe in democracy.

• Eric Levitz:

  • David Brooks: Politics is too uncivil -- and anyone to my left is un-American. You might think that someone stepping forward to read and expose Brooks' inanity is a good thing because it saves us from having to do so, but does anyone really care anymore whatever Brooks is thinking (or in this case fantasizing) about?

  • Nancy Pelosi's drug plan pits Trump's base against GOP orthodoxy: Two problems I see: one is that in trying to balance off competing business interests, this still leaves a fair amount of slop as the various parties try to game the system; the other is that Trump's base has voted against its own best interests so regularly it's hard to imagine they'll punish Republicans for protecting drug monopoly profits.

• Ernesto Londoño: Imagine Jair Bolsonaro standing trial for ecocide at The Hague. Sure. I've often thought that the ICC was poorly designed, mostly because it's more important to expose world-class criminals than it is to actually incarcerate them. Also, any system of justice needs to be fair, even-handed, and consistently and universally applied. To do the latter, you need to be able to indict and trial people in absentia, but to do the former, you need to provide them with a defense, whether they participate in it or not. One way to do this would be to build up a list of certified judges, prosecutors, defenders, and expert investigators. Anyone can approach the court to bring a case, which would then be developed through stages, each with aimed at a degree of certainty in its verdict, mitigated by defense arguments, including limits to information and extenuating circumstances. All verdicts would remain tentative, subject to further litigation as more evidence is made available. The court would in theory be able to order punishment, but few trials are likely to get to that stage (as, indeed, few are now). But the court proceedings would also be publicly available, so other jurisdictions can build their own cases on them. But the key thing is that you would have a common standard and process for charging individuals with crimes against humanity (including war crimes), and we'd know just where any given culprit stands. This article shows how a case against Bolsonaro in such a court might proceed. You can probably think of a few dozen more such obvious candidates. Henry Kissinger would probably top my list, followed by GW Bush and Dick Cheney, with Donald Trump rising fast.

• Dylan Matthews: How a wealth tax could totally remake charity in the United States.

• Ian Millhiser: The astounding advantage the Electoral College gives to Republicans, in one chart.

• Bob Moser: Mitch McConnell: The man who sold America.

• Nicole Narea: The US just signed a deal that could send asylum seekers back to El Salvador.

• Delia Paunescu: The 51st state? Interview with Sean Rameswaram, Derek Musgrove, and Eleanor Holmes Norton on the movement for DC statehood. Related: Tara Golshan: House Democrats held the first hearing on DC statehood in 25 years: "Republicans are unified in their opposition."

• Daniel Politi: Pence took an eight-car motorcade to a Michigan island where vehicles are banned: Another little something to add to that list of norms being trashed by the Republican administration. Related: Erica L Green: US orders Duke and UNC to recast tone in Mideast Studies.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • The polls are in: here's who won -- and lost -- last week's debate.

  • Corey Lewandowski's chaotic congressional testimony, explained.

  • The latest news about the whistleblower complaint over Trump and Ukraine, explained: "Details remain murky. But there's been a scandal unfolding in plain sight." Previously wrote: What we know about the whistleblower complaint about President Trump, back when we knew even less. The week's most irritating story: one shouldn't assume that Trump is always in the wrong any time he does something contrary to the deep security state, as some Democrats do. Indeed, when this story first broke, it mentioned an unnamed "foreign leader," which was all it took Colbert-Kimmel-Myers to finger Putin or Kim. More links as this story unfolded:

    • Jonathan Chait: Trump's Ukraine scandal is hiding in plain sight.

    • Alex Emmons: William Barr has long tied to limit what a president must share with Congress. The whistleblower complaint is no exception.

    • Richard L Hasen: Trump's Ukraine gambit could be another campaign finance crime.

    • Fred Kaplan: The most serious clash over presidential power since Watergate: "If initial reports are true, Trump committed a blatantly impeachable offense and the administration is challenging the entire concept of congressional oversight."

    • Lisa Lerer/Reid J Epstein: Ukraine and whistle-blower issues emerge as major flashpoints in presidential race.

    • Robert Mackey: Reporters should stop helping Donald Trump spread lies about Joe Biden and Ukraine.

    • Renato Mariotti: Trump didn't bribe Ukraine. It's actually worse than that.

    • Tom Nichols: If this isn't impeachable, nothing is.

    • Aaron Rupar:

      • Trump responds to Ukraine whistleblower scandal with contradictions and transparent falsehoods.

      • Rudy Giuliani's viral CNN meltdown over Trump and Ukraine, briefly explained.

    • Anya van Wagtendonk: A whistleblower alleges Trump requested 2020 election interference. Pelosi still says she won't pursue impeachment.

    • Matt Viser: Scrutiny over Trump's Ukraine scandal may also complicate Biden's campaign.

• Brian Resnick: More than a quartet of all birds have disappeared from North America since 1970. Related: Jeff Sparrow: This isn't extinction, it's extermination: the people killing nature know what they're doing.

• David Roberts:

  • The climate change policy with the most potential is the most neglected: He means public r&d funding.

  • Getting to 100% renewables requires cheap energy storage. But how cheap?

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's feud with California over emissions standards and homelessness, explained. Related: Ella Nilsen: Trump just started a huge legal battle with California over lowering car emission standards; also: Dana Goodyear: Trump's war on California and the climate.

  • The controversy surrounding the Times's handling of the latest Kavanaugh allegation, explained.

• Stephanie Savell: The imperial debris of war: "Why ending the Afghan War won't end the killing." Literally, as untold tons of unexploded munitions still wait their destiny. Other TomDispatch links:

  • William Astore: A wasteful weapon for America's forever wars: The F-35 program, as long-lived and as much a hopeless waste as America's war in Afghanistan.

  • Tom Engelhardt: Pyromaniacs, Inc.

  • Michael Klare: A formula for catastrophe in the Arctic: aka, "The Pompeo Doctrine."

  • Danny Sjursen: Living at war (forever).

• Dylan Scott: Bernie Sanders's plan to eliminate medical debt, explained.

• Mark Joseph Stern: The right's latest attack on academic freedom might actually work.

• Emily Stewart: "Corruption is breaking our democracy": Elizaeth Warren's case for the White House.

• Andrew Sullivan: When the ideologues come for the kids: Looks like a rant about "woke" people attempting to imposing their beliefs on impressionable children, I expected this piece to be borderline-awful, and it comes close. Still, reminded me that I've long thought that, while I fully support the rights of adults to adopt any religious beliefs they like, it's long struck me as cruel to impose those beliefs on their children. I don't see a way to prevent that from happening, although recognition that such harm is inevitable might spur us to providing helpful counselors, as well as practicing more tolerance. Still, in my experience, it's rarely the people who respect diversity who are the problem.

• Emily Todd VanDerWerff: The West Wing is 20 years old. Too many Democrats still think it's a great model for politics. My wife was a fan, but I never got into it, usually getting irritated and leaving the room after a few minutes. Two things stand out in my memory: how President Bartlett always had an appropriate Bible verse to quote for every occasion, and how often he went to his default distraction strategem (bombing Iraq). I found those trait horrifying, but some Democrats regard them as the magic recipe for political success. West Wing showrunner Aaron Sorkin went on to produce The Newsroom, which we rather quickly gave up on -- unfortunately watching a whole episode on the good cheer and excitement of everyone on hearing the news of Seal Team 6 killing Osama Bin Laden. PS: From Wikipedia on The West Wing:

  The show's ratings waned in later years following the departure of series creator Sorkin after the fourth season (Sorkin wrote or co-wrote 85 of the first 88 episodes), yet it remained popular among high-income viewers, a key demographic for the show and its advertisers, with around 16 million viewers.

• Alex Ward: The week in US-Saudi Arabia-Iran tensions, explained. More links on this:

  • Peter Baker/EricSchmitt/Michael Crowley: An abrupt move that stunned aides: Inside Trump's aborted attack on Iran.

  • Patrick Cockburn: The Saudi Arabia drone attacks have changed global warfare. If the attacks proved anything, it's that Saudi Arabia, despite all its super-expensive American firepower, is remarkably vulnerable to relatively cheap weapons. Cockburn usually writes on the Middle East, but applies some of what he's learned there to his homeland here: Boris Johnson's coup is eerily reminiscent of Erdogan's rise to power.

  • Karen DeYoung/Missy Ryan/Paul Sonne: US to send additional troops to Saudi Arabia after attacks on oil facilities.

  • Robert Mackey: Threatening new war for oil, Donald Trump calls his own offer of Iran talks "fake news".

  • Matt Taibbi: On Iran, Trump is all talk, and thank God: "For whatever reason, Donald Trump seems reluctant to go to war -- and in moments like the Iran crisis, we should be glad."

  • Mahal Toosi: Trump's deference to Saudi Arabia infuriates much of DC. Probably because much of DC is insufferably arrogant and conceited, a combo trait known as hubris. Still, Trump couldn't very well retaliate for Saudi Arabia without Saudi Arabia's approval, could he? And as much as you might want to slam Trump for showing weakness by backing off from his initial deranged lunatic posture, it's just possible that Saudi Arabia is the one getting cold feet, as they have the most to lose if larger-scale war breaks out.

  • Anya van Wagtendonk: US officials say their pressure on Iran is working -- and that's why tensions are getting worse: Pompeo and Mnuchin try to claim that the poisoned chalice is half full.

  • Robert F Worth: The end of Saudi Arabia's illusion: "Time to face reality: The United States doesn't want to go to war with Iran to protect its Arab allies."

  • Robin Wright: In Saudi Arabia, world oil supplies are in flames; also: Iran entrenches its "axis of resistance" across the Middle East. Wright gets most of her info here from Israel, a source with its own reasons for projecting Iran as a long-term "strategic" foe. Still, even this view suggests that would be to try to normalize relations with Iran, reducing Iran's supposed need for proxy conflicts, while giving Iran a positive stake in the world economy.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Bernie Sanders's housing-for-all plan, explained. The thing I'm most struck by here is the extent to which Sanders wants to federalize housing (most specifically renting) policy, so the same policies apply everywhere. This runs counter to decades of pro-market doctrine, and also to the custom of local control over housing (especially through zoning) that has long been the bread-and-butter of local politics.

  • Trump's weird ideas on the US-Saudi relationship, sort of explained: "Saudi Arabia pays cash."

  • This drawing explains a surprising amount about your political views.

  • The case for raising kids in the city.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, September archive (in progress).

Music: current count 32080 [32047] rated (+33), 227 [229] unrated (-2).

Held this back an extra day, as I couldn't quite get it together on time. Cutoff was late Sunday evening, after posting Weekend Roundup, so I've already got a jump on next week.

My listening was even more scattered than usual last week. My A-list finds all came so early that by weekend I forgot that I had any. I hoped Michael Tatum's new A Downloader's Diary -- his third this year after a prolonged lean patch, and his first since moving to Seattle -- would offer some major discoveries, but started with Blarf's Cease & Desist and found it really wasn't for me. Several other records impressed but didn't wow me. Two I had dismissed earlier got new spins, and minor grade upticks. Tatum's review of Purple Mountains is especially insightful, but describing the album as a "suicide note" doesn't do much to draw me in.

Tatum started writing his column in August, 2010, intent on filling in the void left by the second sacking of Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide (by MSN Music). Christgau rebooted at MSN in November 2010 with his Expert Witness blog, while Tatum continued his monthly columns into 2014 (skipping a couple along the way). I tried to help out by publishing (and archiving) his columns. In April 2014, he moved to Odyshape, ending later that year with a piece called The Pause Button. Since then, he's self-published (most recently at Medium), while I've intermittently updated the archive. After a couple thin years, he's made a strong return to form this year, with three columns so far. He's one of the sharpest and most lucid critics around, and deserves your readership and support.

Meanwhile, Christgau has been publishing his Expert Witness blog at Noisey, but that ended in June. With no new publisher forthcoming, Tatum might have had another hole to fill. But Christgau has come up with a new scheme to keep publishing new Consumer Guide capsule reviews. He's launching a subscriber newsletter, based on Substack, called And It Don't Stop. It will cost you $5/month to get a once-monthly batch of new reviews sent to your e-mailbox, plus there will be various extras -- he explains his plans here, in It's a Start. Subscribers will get their first batch of reviews delivered on Wednesday, September 18.

As you probably know, I built and maintain Christgau's website, with its database of 17,271 albums and 1,372 articles (or more, as that easy-to-find number is actually a subset). At some point (undecided at present) I'll add those new reviews and pieces to the website. This isn't fundamentally different from the various timelocks we've been using for years, where publishers insist that their payments merit a period of exclusivity. I don't have any real solutions here, but I do believe that we're all fortunate to have Christgau continuing to write for us. Subscribing helps.

Back to my list this week, aside from Tatum's picks, most of this week's records are things I became aware of feeding data into my metacritic list. I started this year's list by collecting mid-year lists, but then I made two discoveries/decisions: rank info in the lists wasn't very useful (most lists were unranked, and many were shorter than EOY lists so the scales didn't quite fit), so I just started counting references without any weighting; also, I found that I could rather easily supplement the lists with AOTY's ratings lists organized by publication, so I started adding those in (first for publications that didn't offer mid-year lists, eventually for nearly all non-metal sources), usually using 80+ as my standard (90+ for AMG and Exclaim!, where 80s are ultra-common). Thus, I've been able to pick up new records as they're released. The sampling is not as good for post-July records, but it gives newer records some recognition. Thus far, the top-rated August/September releases (points in front, my grades in brackets at end, just before that is the AOTY score and review count):

1. [24] Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell (Polydor/Interscope) 85/28 [A-]
2. [20] Sleater-Kinney: The Center Won't Hold (Mom + Pop) 76/29 [-]
3. [18] Bon Iver: i,i (Jagjaguwar) 80/31 [-]
4. [18] Ezra Furman: Twelve Nudes (Bella Union) 79/24 [A-]
5. [16] Marika Hackman: Any Human Friend (AMF) 84/19 [-]
6. [16] The Hold Steady: Thrashing Thru the Passion (Frenchkiss) 75/20 [A-]
7. [13] Charli XCX: Charli (Asylum) 79/20 [**]
8. [13] Clairo: Immunity (Fader) 74/21 [***]
9. [12] Blanck Mass: Animated Violence Mild (Sacred Bones) 79/20 [-]
10. [12] The Murder Capital: When I Have Fears (Human Season) 86/14 [-]
11. [11] (Sandy) Alex G: House of Sugar (Domino) 83/14 [-]
12. [11] Rapsody: Eve (Roc Nation) 86/7 [***]
13. [10] Kano: Hoodies All Summer (Parlophone) 86/12 [-]
14. [10] Shura: Forevher (Secretly Canadian) 79/18 [-]
15. [10] Jay Som: Anak Ko (Polyvinyl) 79/20 [-]
16. [10] Taylor Swift: Lover (Republic) 71/22 [***]
17. [10] Tropical Fuck Storm: Braindrops (Joyful Noise) 77/14 [-]
18. [9] Raphael Saadiq: Jimmy Lee (Columbia) 85/4 [A-]
19. [9] Sheer Mag: A Distant Call (Wilsuns) 76/11 [**]
20. [9] Tool: Fear Inoculum (Volcano/RCA) 79/20 [-]

I'm most surprised that Saadiq has gotten so few reviews. I'm less bothered that Lana Del Rey's point total only places her album at 31. That's a structural problem due to the fact that more mid-year lists were counted than ratings. AOTY's 85 score for the album rates it at 17, with 28 reviews topped only in the top 100 by Sharon Van Etten's Remind Me Tomorrow (84/35), Thom Yorke's Anima (82/29), Bon Iver's i,i (80/31).

I'll note that two 1970s rockers died last week: Eddie Money and Rick Ocasek. The former never interested me much, but I had one of his compilations on my unrated list, so figured I should check it off. Tried looking on Napster before going to my shelves, and found a later 2-CD 35-song edition in place of my 1-CD 15-cut item, so I wound up reviewing both. Ocasek, of the Cars, was more important, but I didn't have any unfinished business with them, so didn't bother. Last one of their records I played was the Cars' 1985 Greatest Hits, giving it B+(**), which is about where I pegged their first two albums (both B+ in my database).

I did some work on the Jazz Guides last week. I still have some group albums to fold in -- I left them out of the first pass because they involve more cross-referencing -- but otherwise am up to date (through August). Current page counts: 1791 + 829.

One thing that slowed me down in getting this out was that I started writing up a postscript to Sunday's Weekend Roundup. Despite vowing not to slip down any rabbit holes, I had trouble doing that. Spent much of today figuring I would polish this up a bit, but didn't manage that either. For what it's worth, I wrote these further notes on Monday:

• There was a breaking story that I barely touched on, but which may prove to be the week's most important. Start with: Everything we know about the Saudi oil attacks and the escalating crisis in the Gulf. The first problem here is that "everything we know" isn't very much, especially when you discount what various parties with their own ulterior motives have tried to claim (a list that starts with Mike Pompeo). Several sources noted that the Houthis in Yemen had claimed responsibility. Saudi Arabia has been bombing them for years now, so they have motive, but Pompeo doesn't see how they could pull such an attack off. The only other claim I've seen is here: Iranian drones launched from Iraq carried out attacks on Saudi oil plants. That would still involve flying drones 500-600 km, so I have to wonder whether it wouldn't have been easier to smuggle much smaller drones into the area, especially given that you don't need a lot of firepower when you're shooting at something as flamable as an oil refinery. Still, the real problem here isn't a "whodunit" or even its contextualization -- Saudi hostility and aggression against their neighbors (both direct, as in Yemen, and through proxies) is clearly at the root of this incident -- but a question of what the real powers will do next. Trump almost immediately tweeted that an American retalliation was "locked and loaded," awaiting only the Saudi government's direction. The implication is not only that Trump has subordinated American interests to the Saudis (as he has even more emphatically to the Israelis) with scant care for whatever the consequences may be. On the other hand, maybe the Saudis are coming to recognize how vulnerable they are to blowback from their wars. Too early to tell how this dangerous story sorts out.

• There is something very unsatisfying about the various Bolton links. While Bolton was well understood and his views roundly opposed, it isn't clear what he actually did while in the Trump administration, or whether he actually had any effect beyond adding to the chaos. A fly-on-the-wall insider account might help, although it's equally likely that no one will ever make any sense out of US foreign policy during the Bolton year-plus. A couple of odd data points: Bolton was fired after the Taliban deal was scuttled; before Bolton was fired, Trump seemed to be more open to meeting with Iran than after, as exemplified by his post-Bolton "locked and loaded" tweet. I've never had any doubt that Bolton was pure evil, but the first week without him has already brought into question Jeet Heer's title, John Bolton's ouster makes the world safer. Yet another piece I should have linked to: Robert Mackey: Threatening new war for oil, Donald Trump calls his own offer of Iran talks "fake news".

• I wasn't very happy with the Bacevich and Walt pieces on Afghanistan, or for that matter with Ward's piece on how the Democrats debated Afghanistan. Lots of things in US politics make it very difficult to extricate ourselves from wars that are going badly, and it seems like everyone falls into one such trap or another.

• On Samantha Power, also see: Jon Schwarz: A memoir from hell: Samantha Power will do anything for human rights unless it hurts her career.

• What bothers me most about the Jonathan Franzen fracas is how fervently his critics cling to stark and simplistic either-or dichotomies, when the actual problem is complex, with complicated tradeoffs that can be very hard to get at, let alone discuss rationally. It could take a book to unpack that line, especially as I've come at it through old problems in philosophy. But really, climate change has been happening for decades now -- Bill McKibben's first (1989) book on the subject was The End of Nature, and he wasn't talking about some hypothetical future. That leaves us with two obvious problems: how to adapt to the world we have altered (and will continue to), and how to limit further damage. Recognizing the already-occurring changes in no way excuses us from trying to keep the situation from worsening (Franzen says as much, although you'd have to read him to find out, as his critics' cariacature lose such details).

Also thought I'd note why I didn't link to anything on Tuesday's election in Israel: I basically didn't find anything very interesting on the subject. Still, if you're curious, you might read Zack Beauchamp's pre-election piece: Israel's election, and how Benjamin Netanyahu might lose, explained. Nearly everything I read predicted a Netanyahu win -- as did everything before the previous election, even though it ended with Netanyahu unable to form a government. Latest results I've seen are "too close to call," with Netanyahu/Likud trailing Blue and White by a very slim margin (25.7% to 26.3%), which probably means another hung election.

New records reviewed this week:

• Franco Ambrosetti Quintet: Long Waves (2019, Unit): [cd]: B+(***)
• Blarf: Cease & Desist (2019, Stones Throw): [bc]: B-
• Peter Brötzmann/Alexander von Schlippenbach/Han Bennink: Fifty Years After . . . Live at the Lila Eule 2018 (2018 [2019], Trost): [r]: A-
• Bill Callahan: Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest (2019, Drag City): [r]: B+(*)
• Car Seat Headrest: Commit Yourself Completely (2019, Matador): [r]: B+(**)
• Frankie Cosmos: Close It Quietly (2019, Sub Pop): [r]: B+(**)
• Deerhunter: Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (2019, 4AD): [r]: B
• DSC [Leon Lee Dorsey/Greg Skaff/Mike Clark]: Monktime (2019, Jazz Avenue 1): [cd]: B+(*)
• Dump Him: Dykes to Watch Out For (2019, Musical Fanzine/Get Better): [r]: B+(*)
• Avram Fefer Quartet: Testament (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [cd]: B+(***) [11-08]
• Ezra Furman: Twelve Nudes (2019, Bella Union): [r]: A-
• Jayda G: Significant Changes (2019, Ninja Tune): [r]: B+(*)
• Tim Hecker: Anoyo (2019, Kranky): [r]: B
• The Hold Steady: Thrashing Thru the Passion (2019, Frenchkiss): [r]: A-
• Cate Le Bon: Reward (2019, Mexican Summer): [r]: B
• Derel Monteith: Connemara: Solo Piano Improvisations (2017 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B+(**) [10-18]
• Derel Monteith Trio: Quantity of Life (2019, self-released): [cd]: B+(*) [10-18]
• Muna: Saves the World (2019, RCA): [r]: B+(**)
• Bruce Robison & Kelly Willis: Beautiful Lie (2019, Next Waltz): [r]: B+(**)
• Sheer Mag: A Distant Call (2019, Wilsuns): [r]: B+(**)
• Elza Soares: Planeta Fome (2019, Deck): [r]: B+(**)
• Colin Stranahan/Glenn Zaleski/Rick Rosato: Live at Jazz Standard (2018 [2019], Capri): [cd]: B+(*) [09-30]
• Taylor Swift: Lover (2019, Republic): [r]: B+(***)
• Emi Takada: Why Did I Choose You? (2018 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• Wilma Vritra: Burd (2019, Bad Taste): [r]: B+(*)
• Charli XCX: Charli (2019, Asylum): [r]: B+(**)
• Thom Yorke: Anima (2019, XL): [r]: B-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Creedence Clearwater Revival: Live at Woodstock (1969 [2019], Craft): [r]: B+(***)
• Jambú E Os Míticos Sons Da Amazônia (1974-86 [2019], Analog Africa): [r]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Eddie Money: The Essential Eddie Money (1977-95 [2003], Columbia/Legacy): [cd]: B-
• Eddie Money: The Essential Eddie Money (1977-91 [2014], Columbia/Legacy): [r]: C+

Grade (or other) changes:

• Stef Chura: Midnight (2019, Saddle Creek): [r]: [was: B+(*)] B+(**)
• Purple Mountains: Purple Mountains (2019, Drag City): [r]: [was: B+(**)] B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• The Raymond De Felitta Trio: Pre-War Charm (Blujazz)
• Laszlo Gardony: La Marseillaise (Sunnyside): October 24
• Ben Markley Quartet Featuring Joel Frahm: Slow Play (OA2): September 20
• Tish Oney With the John Chlodini Trio: The Best Part (Blujazz)
• Peterson Kohler Collective: Winter Colors (Origin): September 20
• Markus Rutz: Blueprints Figure One: Frameworks (OA2): September 20

Weekend Roundup

No time (or stomach?) for an introduction.

Some scattered links this week:

• Andrew J Bacevich: What to know what's next for Afghanistan? Ask Vietnam. I have my doubts about the analogy, but the final point about carelessness is well taken. Related: Stephen M Walt: We lost the war in Afghanistan. Get over it.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to annex a massive part of the West Bank, explained.

  • The real scandal behind the last week of Trump news: "Trump has spent the past week showing us that he's still fundamentally unfit for office."

  • The anti-liberal moment: "Critics on the left and right are waging war on liberalism. And liberals don't seem to have a good defense."

• Jared Bernstein: A generation of economists helped get us into this mess. A new generation can get us out. Refers to Binyamin Appelbaum's book, The Economist's Hour, for the first assertion.

• Jedediah Britton-Purdy: A shared place: "Wendell Berry's lifelong dissent."

• Alexia Fernández Campbell: Trump wants to cut the safety net. It kept 47 million people out of poverty last year.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • What if the only Democrat who isn't too radical to win is too old? Perhaps the reason neoliberals argue for Biden on electability grounds is that they recognize their positive program has no real appeal beyond the wealthy liberal donor class. At least with Biden, you get a cipher who signifies no big changes without even trying to explain why.

  • Watch Liz Cheney and Rand Paul fight over who Trump loves more:

    As befitting his very large ego and power and very tiny brain, Donald Trump is constantly surrounded by people trying to manipulate him. . . . On most issues, Trump does not know what to think, so he gravitates toward whatever position is expressed more sycophantically. The "debates" within the party therefore play out in the form of competitive groveling for his favor. . . . The secret here is that Paul and Cheney, while anchoring opposite sides of an intellectual debate within their party, both consider Trump a moron, but each thinks he or she can gain influence with him and his supporters by presenting the other one as his enemy.

  • John Bolton era ends with no casualties except Bolton's dignity: Talk about lowering the bar: "The fact we made it through Bolton's 17-month-long tenure without killing tens of millions of people counts as a major win." More on Bolton:

    • Christine Ahn: With Bolton out of the way, peace with North Korea is possible.

    • Quint Forgey: 'Mr. Tough Guy': Trump delivers vicious takedown of Bolton.

    • Susan B Glasser: Trump is finally rid of John Bolton, but does it really matter?

    • Fred Kaplan: Trump doesn't make many good decisions. Getting rid of John Bolton was one. Although, one shouldn't forget that he hired Bolton in the first place. Kaplan also wrote: Trump's bizarre Camp David stunt has imperiled the best chance in years for a negotiated peace in Afghanistan.

    • Aaron Maté: Ex-CIA analyst on why he predicted John Bolton's firing: Interview with John Kiriakou.

    • Danny Sjursen: John Bolton's living obituary.

    • Alex Ward: John Bolton left because Trump wouldn't let him start a war. Also John Bolton is out. Let the era of Trump Alone begin.

  • How Trump learned to make 9/11 a racket. Related: Zak Cheney-Rice: The uses of 9/11.

  • Trump has figured out how to corrupt the entire government. Given what he had to start with, it couldn't have been that hard. Trump's contribution was his venality and utter shamelessness, along with his implicit guarantee that none of his minions would bear any risk for doing business. (Note that Tom Price, Scott Pruit, and Ryan Zinke managed to lose their jobs anyway. But nobody's holding their breath waiting for Bill Barr to prosecute them.)

    None of these stories by itself has the singular drama of a Teapot Dome or a Watergate. Indeed, the mere fact that there is so much corruption prevents any single episode from capturing the imagination of the media and the public. But it is the totality of dynamic that matters. A corrupt miasma has slowly enveloped Washington. For generations, both parties generally upheld an assumption that the government would abide rules and norms dividing its proper functioning from the president's personal and political interests.

    The norm of bureaucratic professionalism and fairness is a pillar of the political legitimacy and economic strength of the American system, the thing that separates countries like the U.S. from countries like Russia. The decay of that culture is difficult to quantify, but the signs are everywhere. Trump's stench is slowly seeping into every corner of government.

• Sean Collins: Wilbur Ross's threat to fire NOAA officials over a tweet turns Sharpiegate into a real scandal.

• Manny Fernandez/Miriam Jordan/Zolan Kanno-Youngs/Caitlin Dickinson: 'People actively hate us': Inside the Border Patrol's morale crisis.

• Dexter Filkins: The moral logic of humanitarian intervention: A writer I never expect much from takes on a subject I'm not interested in (Samantha Power), least of all by him. Still, this raises real questions, like what gives her the right to decide who to "protect"? And how "humanitarian" is it really to intervene with anything from Seal Team 6 to full infantry divisions? And once you've done it so badly, what makes you think the next time will be any different? As Filkins notes, "during her years in the White House, it became clear that benevolent motives can have calamitous results."

• FiveThirtyEight: What went down in the Third Democratic Debate: The "live blog" transcript, followed by Who won the Third Democratic Debate?. More links:

  • Zack Beauchamp: The weird, telling Joe Biden debate moment that didn't get enough attention: "His Iraq and Afghanistan answer raises some serious questions about his fitness for office."

  • Laura Bronner/Elia Koeze: The third Democratic debate in 7 charts. One chart shows "Warren gained the most new potential supporters."

  • Ed Kilgore: The big three are still dominant in the Democratic race after the third debate.

  • Jen Kirby: 2020 Democrats hate Trump's China trade war. Too bad they don't have any better ideas.

  • Eric Levitz: Would you leave Joe Biden alone with Trump?

  • Delia Paunescu: The third Democratic presidential debate, explained in under 30 minutes: With Tara Golshan, Sean Rameswaram, Matt Yglesias.

  • William Rivers Pitt: Biden's "best night" was pretty damn bad.

  • Andrew Prokop: The big moment that didn't happen in the Democratic debate: "Warren did not confront Biden on bankruptcy -- an issue they've long disagreed on."

  • Bridget Read: Joe Biden sounded like a very broken record at the debate.

  • Dylan Scott/Tara Golshan: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren really do talk about trade differently.

  • Emily Stewart: Here are the best and most substantive answers of the third Democratic debate.

  • Alex Ward: The Democratic candidates' debate answers on Afghanistan were terrible. Not that Ward is any smarter; e.g., when he presents his "perils of a quick Afghanistan withdrawal" laundry list without any assessment of the costs and risks of not withdrawing.

• Lisa Friedman/Coral Davenport: Trump administration rolls back clean water protections.

• Masha Gessen: President Trump wages war on government and expertise, and our institutions surrender.

• Tara Golshan: Did Brett Kavanaugh perjure himself during his confirmation hearing? "New allegations are raising questions about whether he met the very high bar for perjury." Not the only Kavanaugh piece this week:

  • Anya van Wagtendonk: A year after his confirmation hearing, Brett Kavanaugh faces a new sexual misconduct allegation.

  • Dylan Matthews: Impeaching a Supreme Court justice, explained.

  • Hanna Rosin: 'The Education of Brett Kavanaugh' takes a hard look at the Supreme Court Justice and his accusers: Review of the new book by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly.

• Heather Hurlburt: Saudi oil attack prompts more incoherence from Trump administration.

• Umair Irfan: The best case for and against a fracking ban.

• Robert Kagan: Israel and the decline of the liberal order.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • GOP hangs onto bright-red North Carolina congressional district and Trump gloats.

  • How swing voters are thinking about 2020.

  • Warren continues to emerge as a potential Democratic unity figure. For some support of this idea, see Andrew Prokop/Christina Animashaun: Elizabeth Warren leads Joe Biden in ranked-choice poll.

• David Leonhardt: The forces that are killing the American dream: Review of Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream. For another review, see Robert Christgau: To bust you shall return.

• Eric Levitz:

  • The Republican Party is (probably) not doomed. Refers to, and argues with, Stanley B Greenberg: The Republican Party is doomed, which starts:

    The 2020 election will be transformative like few in our history. It will end with the death of the Republican Party as we know it, leaving the survivors to begin the struggle to renew the party of Lincoln and make it relevant for our times. It will liberate the Democratic Party from the country's suffocating polarization and allow it to use government to address the vast array of problems facing the nation.

    Levitz responds:

    It's possible the GOP is on the cusp of maxing out its appeal with rural voters and its capacity to bend election law to its own ends. But any persuasive case for the party's imminent demise must explain why the party's structural advantages will fail it. Establishing that Republicans have alienated a majority of Americans is insufficient. If this country were governed by popular sovereignty, the GOP would already be dead.

    Greenberg expands on his argument his new book: R.I.P. G.O.P.: How the New America Is Dooming the Republicans. Also on Greenberg: Michelle Goldberg: Dare we dream of the end of the GOP? Goldberg, by the way, also wrote: Mazel tov, Trump. You've revived the Jewish left.

  • Jonathan Franzen's climate pessimism is justified. His fatalism is not. I cited Franzen's article, What if we stopped pretending, favorably last week, so I was surprised to find the article widely attacked from the "left" -- I've lost track of the tweets (Roxanne Gay is the one name I recall), but this riposte by Jeet Heer seems typical: Jonathan Franzen pens another environmental disaster story ("the famed novelist is resigned to a global ecological catastrophe because his imagination can't move beyond the status quo"). I'm generally dismissive of complaints about "leftist thought police," but that pegs Heer pretty well.has little more to offer. Levitz is only marginally more sensible, conceding the facts if not the attitude. Other articles (mostly against) Franzen:

    • Eliza Barclay: 3 horrifying extreme weather scenarios the US doesn't talk about enough.

    • Kevin Drum: Jonathan Franzen isn't quite right, but he has a point.

    • Kate Marvel: Shut up, Franzen. "But I'm a scientist, which means I believe in miracles." Really?

    • Sigal Samuel: The controversy over Jonathan Franzen's climate change opinions, explained.

• Ryan Lizza: Biden camp thinks the media just doesn't get it: "The vice president's allies say neither detractors in the media, nor his rivals on the stump, understand the root of his appeal."

• Ian Millhiser:

  • Justice Sotomayor warns the Supreme Court is doing "extraordinary" favors for Trump.

  • The cracks in the GOP's gerrymandering firewall.

• Nicole Narea: The Supreme Court has delivered a devastating blow to the US asylum system.

• Tom O'Connor: US has spent six trillion dollars on wars that killed half a million people since 9/11, report says: George Bush effectively responded to Osama Bin Laden's 9/11 taunt with: "You think that's terror. I'll show you terror." Bush and the political class brought America down to Al Qaeda's level within weeks, and kept digging for 18 years and counting. While Bush is gone, the politicians and pundits who backed and blessed him have continued his path of destruction.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • How Fox News lets the Trump family off the hook for profiting off the presidency.

  • Trump's bizarre speech during the Dem debate illustrated the stark differences between the parties: "Trump talked about fake tax cuts while Democrats debated how to pay for their ambitious policies."

  • Why officials patronizing Trump's businesses is corrupt, explained for Kevin McCarthy.

  • The flawed thinking behind Trump's campaign to discredit mainstream polls, explained.

• Matt Taibbi:

  • We're only beginning to see the consequences of the Bush-Era assault on civil liberties.

  • The Pentagon wants more control over the news. What could go wrong?

• Anya van Wagtendonk:

  • The makers of OxyContin may have tried to hide $1 billion in assets.

  • A US military operation killed Osama bin Laden's son, Hamza, the White House confirms.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • What Joe Biden was trying to say about record players.

  • Joe Biden keeps on winning.

  • The 20-year argument between Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren over bankruptcy, explained.

  • Elizabeth Warren's plan to expand Social Security, explained.

  • The debate over swing voters versus mobilizing the base, explained. Argues for the importance of swing voters, as expected. Also notes that "extremists motivate the other party's base," suggesting that Trump will drive more Democratic voters to the polls than the left-right split in the Democratic Party. I could write a lot more about this, but for now will just note that Republicans have been much more effective at firing up their base (mostly by convincing them that everything the Democrats want to do is insanely radical) while appealing to centrists as sensible custodians of the status quo. Democrats seem to think it's impossible to do both at the same time, and suffer on both ends: many in their natural see them as willing to sell them out, while they often struggle to get any centrist votes.

  • The Trump administration's new plan to privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, explained.

• Li Zhou: Congress has only three weeks to avert another government shutdown.

More Notes

Tweeted this along the way:

Bush effectively responded to Bin Laden's 9/11 taunt with: "You think that's terror. I'll show you terror." Bush and the political class brought America down to Al Qaeda's level within weeks, and kept digging, 18+ years: [Link: U.S. has spent $6 trillion on wars that killed 500,000 people since 9/11.]

Music Week

Expanded blog post, September archive (in progress).

Music: current count 32047 [32020] rated (+27), 229 [227] unrated (+2).

I've had a couple weeks of nagging technology problems. Got up and found both computers dead, resembling an overnight power shutdown but no indications of that anywhere else in the house. Both are on UPS's. One definitely has a bad battery, so turns out to be very interruptible. The other (my main computer) remains a mystery, and repeated a few days later, but second time was easier to power cycle. No data loss, but a bit unnerving. Main computer developed a speaker glitch after that, introducing a lot of static into music I was streaming. Haven't figured that out either, but switched to secondary computer for streaming (but speakers are inferior). It's old and I'm finding it extremely slow. The thing that bothers me most is how slow it is to wake up: closer to a minute than the 2-3 seconds of the main computer. Monitor has something to do with that, but slow as it is, it still displays connect status 5-10 seconds before getting a screen image. Tempts me to build a new one, especially as some newer and faster technology has become affordable.

Synology backup server appears to be working, although I've only set up two machines to backup so far, and I haven't checked them for updates carefully. More things I need to learn about it. One source of frustration is that I'm using an appliance router/firewall that I don't totally understand. In particular, I have it providing DHCP addresses, but it doesn't seem to provide DNS, so my computers have no way (other than fixed /etc/hosts addresses, not necessarily right with DHCP) to find my other computers. Looking at the router manual now, and don't see anything about DNS (although it does have stuff on DHCP and DDNS).

Most disconcerting glitch of the week was not being able to log into my dedicated server last night to post my Weekend Roundup. I've been informed that CPanel (the web server management gui interface software) has been bought up by the same vulture capitalists who own Plesk (their competitor). CPanel's management is celebrating their newfound monopoly by raising their prices, and enforcing this by requiring new licenses, breaking my server. Took several hours to get the hosting company to fix it, and will cost me more bucks in the future (CPanel is already almost a third of my monthly charge). Things like this make me wonder if the server's worth the cost and trouble -- or perhaps remind me that it isn't.

Lots of other things made life difficult. I could begin to enumerate them, but may not come out the other end. Some of the just boil down to being old and decrepit, which no one wants to hear about. Much pain the day I tried to cook dinner for friends, ending with two planned dishes abandoned, my kitchen stool crashed to the ground, and the front door handle falling off. On the other hand, the dishes I did manage to finish were magnificent: duck à l'orange; a salad with grilled asparagus, zucchini, and bread cheese, over arugula with roasted tomatoes and basil pesto; a sweet potato gratin, and spiced carrots; with triple chocolate mousse cake for dessert (Laura has a pic on Instagram, but I can't find it).

Some of these things cut into my listening time, which was pretty scattered anyway. Two records I had held back from last week managed to slip over the A- cusp. After making a dent in my new jazz queue, I got stuck on Avram Fefer's Testament, which I've played at least five times without writing up a grade. Release date isn't until November 8, so I'm tempted to put it aside until then. At some point I started looking for country music, and was struck at how the first four albums I sampled -- Tanya Tucker, Molly Tuttle, Dee White, Matt Carson -- wound up at the same B+(**) with different virtues and flaws. Four more records were easier to spread out (Mercury Rev, Highwomen, Ian Noe, Weldon Henson). Checked out a couple of old Bobbie Gentry albums after listening to Mercury Rev, and was surprised to find that the "classic" was a much bigger mess than the revival.

Thought I'd work on a Book Roundup mid-week, then got confused by some sloppy bookkeeping. I managed to clean that up, and will try to have a post ready mid-week (but the way things are going, could be months). I'm slowly trudging my way through Tim Alberta's American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, which is a useful map of the various schisms on the Republican side since 2008, although it falls short of exploring the deeper roots of their cravenness and corruption. That's kept me from reading a couple of promising books I picked up at the library: Joseph Stiglitz's People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent, and Astra Taylor's Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone.

Also got a third book at the library, which I'm definitely not going to read but should at least crib some notes from: Mining the Social Web: Data Mining Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Github, and More (3rd edition). The one thing I want to do with it is to copy down a list of on-line resources, especially the APIs. On the other hand, I'm not finding many things I want to do in the examples. Maybe I should build a tech resources link page, if only for my own use. (I had several long ago, didn't update it, and finally disconnected them to stop getting mail from wannabe adds.)

New records reviewed this week:

• Matt Carson: No Regrets (2019, Bunba): [r]: B+(**)
• James Carter Organ Trio: Live From Newport Jazz (2018 [2019], Blue Note): [r]: B+(***)
• Avishai Cohen/Yonathan Avishai: Playing the Room (2018 [2019], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Marco Colonna/Agustí Fernandez/Zlatko Kaucic: Agrakal (2017 [2018], Not Two): [r]: B+(**)
• Lana Del Rey: Norman Fucking Rockwell (2019, Polydor/Interscope): [r]: A-
• Jeff Denson/Romain Pilon/Brian Blade: Between Two Worlds (2019, Ridgeway): [cd]: B+(*)
• Eliane Elias: Love Stories (2019, Concord): [r]: B+(*)
• Frode Gjerstad/Fred Lonberg-Holm/Matthew Shipp: Season of Sadness (2018 [2019], Iluso): [bc]: B
• Weldon Henson: Texas Made Honky Tonk (2018 [2019], Hillbilly Renegade): [os]: A-
• The Highwomen: The Highwomen (2019, Elektra): [r]: B
• Florian Hoefner Trio: First Spring (2018 [2019], ALMA): [cd]: B+(***)
• Urs Leimgruber/Jacques Demierre/Barre Phillips/Thomas Lehn: Willisau (2017 [2019], Jazzwerkstatt): [r]: B
• Mercury Rev: Bobbie Gentry's the Delta Sweete Revisited (2019, Partisan): [r]: B
• Ian Noe: Between the Country (2019, National Treasury): [r]: B+(***)
• Purple Mountains: Purple Mountains (2019, Drag City): [r]: B+(**)
• Michele Rabbia/Gianluca Petrella/Eivind Aarset: Lost River (2018 [2019], ECM): [r]: B
• Rapsody: Eve (2019, Roc Nation): [r]: B+(***)
• Enrico Rava/Joe Lovano: Roma (2018 [2019], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Raphael Saadiq: Jimmy Lee (2019, Columbia): [r]: A-
• Leo Sherman: Tonewheel (2019, Outside In Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Tanya Tucker: While I'm Livin' (2019, Fantasy): [r]: B+(**)
• Molly Tuttle: When You're Ready (2019, Compass): [bc]: B+(**)
• Dee White: Southern Gentleman (2018, Easy Eye Sound/Warner Music Nashville): [r]: B+(**)
• Young Thug: So Much Fun (2019, 300/Atlantic/YSL): [r]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• The Vaughn Nark Quintet: Back in the Day (1982-83 [2019], Summit): [cd]: B

Old music:

• Bobby Gentry: Ode to Billie Joe (1967, Capitol): [r]: B
• Bobby Gentry: The Delta Sweete (1968, Capitol): [r]: C+
• Weldon Henson: One Heart's Gone (2011, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Weldon Henson: Weldon Henson's Honky Tonk Frontier (2015, Hillbilly Renegade): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Franco Ambrosetti Quintet: Long Waves (Unit)
• AP6C [Alberto Pinton Sestetto Contemporaneo]: Layers (Clear Now)
• Terrence Brewer & Pamela Rose: Don't Worry 'Bout Me (Strong Brew Music)
• Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp: Efflorescence: Volume 1 (Leo, 4CD)
• Noah Preminger Group: Zigsaw: Music of Steve Lampert (self-released): October 4

Weekend Roundup

Hurricane Dorian, which last weekend was still wreaking unimaginable damage in the Bahamas while trudging slowly toward the Florida coast (or, for one poor soul with a rigidly linear flat-Earth imagination, Alabama), and a week later still exists, albeit downgraded to to post-tropical cyclone status, as it threads the strait between Newfoundland and Labrador, expected some time Monday to pass off the south coast of Greenland. The eye never crossed land on the east coast of the US, but came close enough to produce hurricane-force winds, storm surges, and scattered tornadoes from Florida to North Carolina. When it finally made landfall in Nova Scotia, it was still producing Category 2 winds, and Category 1 as far north as Newfoundland. It is officially tied with a 1935 "Labor Day" hurricane as the strongest ever recorded in the Atlantic.

Since Dorian formed in the tropical Atlantic on August 23, three more named storms have come and gone: Erin, which formed over the Bahamas ahead of Dorian, proceeded northeast to Florida then out into the Atlantic, eventually producing heavy rains in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick; Fernand, which formed in the Gulf of Mexico and landed in Mexico; and Gabrielle, which formed in the mid-Atlantic and is now headed toward Ireland and Scotland. The Atlantic hurricane season continues to November 30, with Humberto the next name.

The Atlantic put a paywall on their website this week, limiting readers to 5 "free" articles per month, so I probably won't bother with them any more. They've moved to the right over the past year (although not especially toward Trump -- David Frum and Conor Friedersdorf are regulars), which cuts down on their utility. My wife subscribes to a bunch of things, and I take advantage of that, but haven't added to her list myself. Back when we bought a lot of magazines, I recall liking Harper's more than Atlantic (at least when Lewis Lapham was editor), but I haven't read them in ages. Looks like they offer a better subscription deal than Atlantic.

My own website remains free in every sense of the word (including free of advertising and pitches for money), so I feel entitled to my high horse. Of course, I realize the need publications have to raise money to continue operations, and I understand that it's generally good for writers to get paid, especially for serious work. But I also recognize that few people have the wherewithal (much less the interest) to read everything of likely interest. In this world, paywalls help balkanize public discourse, helping to herd us into isolated, self-selected hives. This isn't a good system. Nor is advertising a good answer. Nor do we have the political will to support a development system that would make public goods (like, but not limited to, news) universally accessible. But that's the sort of solution we should be thinking about.

Some scattered links this week:

• Riley Beggin:

  • Trump cancels an imminent US-Taliban peace deal over a deadly attack: "Peace between US and the Taliban could have been announced as early as next week. Now it is off the table." For more on this, see AP explains: How Trump upended US-Taliban peace talks. Also note: Cristina Cabrera: Republicans criticize Trump's planned meeting with the Taliban scheduled days before 9/11. The Republican pictured there is Liz Cheney, whose father had much to do with starting America's longest-running (and first multi-generational) war. Among other things, this shows us how easy it is for warmongers to demagogue the debate.

  • Boris Johnson refuses to ask the EU for a Brexit extension. Some experts say he may go to jail for it.

  • GOP presidential hopeful Mark Sanford is running against Trump to talk about the national debt. Cristina Cabrera notes that South Carolina has "cancelled the GOP presidential primary for this election cycle."

  • The US military may have spent millions to help prop up a Trump resort.

  • The House Judiciary Committee plans to finally define its impeachment inquiry. Also note: Steve M's sage advice: Put Russia on the back burner and focus on Trump's self-dealing. Note that Pence and Barr were also recently implicated in feathering Trump's nest. Another thing they should consider writing up impeachment charges on is Trump's diversion of money allocated for Defense to his wall project, even if the money was going to be wasted where it was allocated. PS: Nicholas Fandos: Democrats to broaden impeachment inquiry into Trump to corruption accusations.

  • Hurricane Dorian gains strength again as it heads toward Canada.

• Jonathan Blitzer: The Trump administration's sustained attack on the rights of immigrant children.

• James Bruggers: Dorian one of the strongest, longest-lasting hurricanes on record in the Atlantic. Related: Bob Berwyn: Why are hurricanes like Dorian stalling, and is global warming involved?

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Eric Trump encounters journalism, is confused.

  • Democrats need to plan right now for Republican fiscal sabotage: "Lock in stimulus for the next recession while Republicans are still interested in stopping recessions."

  • Trump's most feared opponent: whichever Democrat is on TV right now: "Inside the Trump campaign brain trust's highly scientific model."

  • Trump somehow replaces unqualified Mideast envoy with even less qualified one. Out with Jason Greenblatt (see Ward below), in with Avi Berkowitz ("a 29-year-old Jared Kushner friend who graduated from law school in 2016").

  • Hitler parodies are gone but now Trump has made them real life.

  • Why Mike Pence is lining Trump's pockets with taxpayer dollars.

• David Daley: The secret files of the master of modern Republican gerrymandering: Thomas Hofeller, who died in August 2018. Daley wrote Ratf**ked: The True Story Behind the Secret Plan to Steal America's Democracy (2016).

• Tom Engelhardt:

  • Welcome to his world.

  • Is Donald Trump Big Brother?

• Garrett Epps: The Electoral College was terrible from the start: "It's doubtful even Alexander Hamilton believed what he was selling in "Federalist No. 68."

• Eric Foner: The lost promise of Reconstruction: "Can we reanimate the dream of freedom That Congress tried to enact in the wake of the Civil War?" Foner has written much about the Civil War and Reconstruction over the years. He has a new book: The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution.

• Jonathan Franzen: What if we stopped pretending: "The climate apocalypse is coming. To prepare for it, we need to admit that we can't prevent it." I've been thinking along these lines for a long time now (despite being on the slow side in picking up on global warming). As an engineer, I've always understood that it's a lot cheaper to prevent problems than to have to fix them later, but I've also seen so much breakage that I've had to put even more thought into repair, not least in planning for future repairs. So while I've been reading about how important it is to cut back greenhouse gas emissions, it's long been clear to me that we need a parallel effort to cope with the disasters we can't manage to prevent. One thing I had to give Clinton credit for was elevating FEMA to cabinet level and making sure it was well-managed and effective -- gains Bush's cronyism reversed, most visibly with Katrina, a combination of ineptness and corruption that Trump has only added to. There is much to be said for competent, responsive government, even if it's not competent enough to prevent problems from arising in the first place.

  All-out war on climate change made sense only as long as it was winnable. Once you accept that we've lost it, other kinds of action take on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the urgency of almost any world-improving action. In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons -- these are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it.

  Other links at the bottom of the article: a 2015 piece by Franzen: Climate change vs. conservation (original title: "Carbon Capture"); also Rachel Riederer: The other kind of climate denialism. In December, 2018, she also wrote: The not-so-uplifting year in the animal kingdom.

• Elaine Godfrey: Why Steve King's supporters are staying loyal: "The Iowa Republican's racist comments have made him a pariah among Democrats and Republicans alike. Buth is voters may be more devoted to him than ever."

• Julie Hirschfeld Davis/Michael D Shear: Trump Administration considers a drastic cut in refugees allowed to enter US.

• Masha Gessen: A summer of unprecedented brutality in Moscow. I don't doubt that the repression has been severe, but "unprecedented"?

• Maggie Haberman: Trump campaign manager sees President's family as political 'dynasty'.

• Dhar Jamail: Alaska's sea ice completely melted for first time in recorded history.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Iowa Republican Senator wants to gut Social Security 'behind closed doors': Wasn't her campaign slogan "make 'em squeal"?

  • What if Trump supporters love chaos as much as he does? I doubt if they think of it in those terms. But they hate the people who criticize Trump enough to take their opposition as vindication. And I doubt they worry about Trump's contribution to increasing chaos because they see that everywhere, perhaps as inevitable. (On the other hand, I do know at least one guy who explicitly explained his support for Trump as causing chaos.) Related: Thomas B Edsall: The Trump voters whose 'need for chaos' obliterates everything else. I don't regularly follow Edsall -- I found his 2006 book, Building Red America: The New Conservative Coalition and the Drive for Permanent Power useful, but found him more respectful of the American right than deserved -- but he's been developing this theme through a number of articles:

    • We aren't seeing white support for Trump for what it is: Aug. 28, 2019.

    • Trump needs his base to burn with anger: July 3, 2019.

    • The deepening 'racialization' of American politics: Feb. 27, 2019.

    • The paranoid style in American politics is back: Sept. 8, 2016.

  • Trump congratulates Poland for the catastrophe of its invasion by Germany. Add this to the not-so-short list of Trump's most tone-deaf utterances.

    Yes, I know, "congratulating" people he doesn't know anything about is one of the president's tics to cover his ignorance, much like his promiscuous use of modifiers like "great" or "greatest" for every phenomenon he dimly understands. But this particular example shows that the man and our nation would be better served if occasionally he just replied to some questions with: "Huh?"

• Jen Kirby: The week in Brexit drama, explained. Related: Mark Landler: Boris Johnson finds his party loyalists aren't as loyal as Trump's.

• Eric Lipton/Annie Karni: Checking in at Trump Hotels, for kinship (and maybe some sway): "To ethics lawyers, the most extraordinary aspect of the daily merging of President Trump's official duties and his commercial interests is that it has now become almost routine."

• Michael Mann/Andrew E Dessler: Global heating made Hurricane Dorian bigger, wetter -- and more deadly.

• Dylan Matthews: "Unions for all": the new plan to save the American labor movement.

• Dana Milbank: Sticks and stones break bones, but words hurt McConnell's feelings. Follow-up to Milbank's Mitch McConnell is a Russian asset. I don't doubt that he's someone's asset, but I doubt you'd have to look as far as Moscow. More on McConnell:

  • Jennifer Rubin: Mitch McConnell, the 'do nothing' Senate leader.

  • Greg Sargent: Mitch McConnell sinks to new lows in enabling Trump's corruption. Sargent also wrote: Behind Trump's craziness, there's always corruption. Here's the latest.

• Nolan Peterson: Pompeo says US 'delivered' on mission in Afghanistan. As the tweet that directed me to this exclaimed: "Unbelievably good news! We won! Who knew?" For more on Pompeo, see: Richard Silverstein: Pompeo: Israel's errand boy.

• Charles P Pierce:

  • Several states plan to cancel Republican primaries in favor of Donald Trump's re-election: South Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, Kansas. Trump won three of those in 2016, finishing 2nd in Kansas way behind Cruz (23%-47%).

  • The State Department appears to have adopted the mob's negotiating strategies.

• William Rivers Pitt: Donald Trump is a category 5 liar.

• Katha Pollitt: Almost everything bad that Trump did this summer. Subhed says "Here's what you missed," as opposed to what she missed -- that "almost" covers a lot of ground. Related: Philip Rucker/Ashley Parker: Trump's lost summer: Aides claim victory, but others see incompetence and intolerance.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig found not guilty in Mueller spinoff case.

  • The Trump hush money mystery House Democrats should try to solve.

• David Roberts: A beginner's guide to the debate over nuclear power and climate change.

• Stephanie Savell: When is America going to end its shadow war on Somalia?

• Dylan Scott: The problem of medical det, and the wonky fight behind Bernie Sanders's plan to eliminate it, explained.

• Heidi Schierholz: Lawmakers must empower unions to combat growing inequality in US.

• Emily Stewart: The incredibly absurd Trump/CNN SharpieGate feud, explained. This may be the ultimate preaching-to-the-choir story, a fairly minor gaffe which developed legs only because Trump tripled down, reinforcing the easiest of all Trump critiques: that he's a moron. Other Sharpiegate links:

  • John Cassidy: "Sharpiegate" and Donald rump's perpetual cone of uncertainty.

  • Robinson Meyer: NOAA politicized the weather report.

  • Frank Rich: Sharpiegate and Trump's escalating war on reality.

  • Matt Stieb/Margaret Hartmann/Chas Danner: Trump won't rest until we accept his Sharpie-doctored hurricane map.

  • Summer Concepcion: Trump campaign is now selling markers as Hurricane Dorian map saga stretches on.

• Jeffrey Toobin: Trump's plan to host the G-7 revives the issue of emoluments.

• Alex Ward:

  • Iran is to blame for its recent aggressive actions. But so is Trump. Funny how foreign policy wonks ignore the aggressivenes of US economic sanctions, which is the provocation at the root of whatever countermeasures Iran has taken since then.

  • Trump's top Middle East peace envoy is quitting. There's still no Israel-Palestine deal. Jason Greenblatt, came in "with no foreign policy experience beyond holding staunch pro-Israel positions."

  • Trump is taking money from Puerto Rico's recovery and European security to fund his wall.

  • Trump is diverting $3.6 billion from the US military to build his border wall.

• Sheldon Whitehouse: The Supreme Court has become just another arm of the GOP.

• Jon Wiener: The White Power movement from Reagan to Trump: Interview with Kathleen Belew, who "explains the links among 'lone wolf' white supremacist attacks like those in Charleston, Christchurch, and El Paso."

• Graeme Wood: Robert Mugabe died too late: "Mugabe died yesterday in Singapore at the age of 95, far from the country he first liberated from white-minority rule, then laid waste to over a 37-year rule that began brutally and ended in pathetic squalor." Related: Steven Gruzd: Robert Mugabe's journey from freedom fighter to oppressor.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The constitutional change at the heart of the UK Parliament's endless deadlock.

  • The wild corruption of Trump's golf courses deserves more scrutiny:

    But I'm hung up on the Pence story and on Trump's habit of staying at his own clubs at taxpayer expense because in comparison to the bribery side of Trump's corruption, the outright theft is just so straightforward. There is no holder of any office in America who would be allowed to steer public funds directly to entities he controls. . . .

    But Trump has been stealing public funds out in the open from the beginning of his presidency which has tended to somewhat diminish the impact of the story relative to potentially secret scandals. There's nothing secret about his push to host the next G7 summit at his own luxury resort in Florida, for example, but it's extraordinarily scandalous.

    There have been some worthy attempts in the media at tracking this abuse. NBC calculated that Trump spent 295 days of his first 956 days in office at his own hotels. HuffPost put the overall tab on the president's golf outings at $102 million as of May, with a majority of that seemingly going directly to clubs he owns.

• Li Zhou: Elizabeth Warren blasts the plastic straw debate as a fossil fuel industry distraction tactic.

Book Roundup

When I published my last Book Roundup, back on June 1, I speculated that I would have another one "ready in a few weeks." I used to average 4-5 of these per year, and at one point collected enough material for 4 within a couple of weeks. But I only published one in 2018, so I had quite a bit of catching up to do. My first effort in 2019 came out in March. I had a lot of leftovers then, but didn't get around to publishing them until June, and forgot to file them in my archive, so I got confused last night, and started to edit June's post as new.

Other recent books also noted without comment:

Gretchen Bakke: The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future (paperback, 2017, Bloomsbury USA).

David W Blight: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018, Simon & Schuster).

Ian Bremmer: Us vs Them: The Failure of Globalism (2018, Portfolio).

Steve Brusatte: The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World (2018, William Morrow).

Steve Deace: Truth Bombs: Confronting the Lies Conservatives Believe (to Our Own Demise) (2019, Post Hill Press).

John Duffy/Ray Nowosielski: The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror (2018, Hot Books).

Ryan D Enos: The Space Between Us: Social Geography and Politics (2017; paperback, 2019, Cambridge University Press).

Brooke Gladstone: The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media (2011; paperback, 2012, WW Norton).

Michael Hudson: . . . And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year (paperback, 2018, Islet).

Chris Hughes: Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn (2018, St Martin's Press).

Michael Ignatieff: The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (2017; paperback, 2019, Harvard University Press).

Alan Jacobs: How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds (2017, Currency).

Robert Jervis/Francis J Gavin/Joshua Rovner/Diane Labrosse, eds: Chaos in the Liberal Order: The Trump Presidency and International Politics in the Twenty-First Century (paperback, 2018, Columbia University Press).

Eric Kaufmann: White Shift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities (2019, Henry N Abrams).

James Mahaffey: Atomic Adventures: Secret Islands, Forgotten N-Rays, and Isotopic Murder: A Journey Into the Wild World of Nuclear Science (2017, Pegasus Books).

Samuel Moyn: Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018, Belknap Press).

Jennifer Palmieri: Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World (2018, Grand Central).

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen: The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (2019, Oxford University Press).

Ruth Reichl: Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir (2019, Random House).

David Selbourne: The Free Society in Crisis: A History of Our Times (2019, Prometheus Books).

Jeanne Theoharis: A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (2018; paperback, 2019, Beacon Press).

Music Week

Expanded blog post, September archive (in progress).

Music: current count 32020 [31984] rated (+36), 227 [236] unrated (-9).

Rated count topped 32,000 this week. I'd count that as a milestone, if not exactly news, as the accumulation has been as steady as time since I posted my first rated count of 8,080 in January 2003. That was about the time I started writing Recycled Goods plus the occasional Village Voice review, leading up to Jazz Consumer Guide, and a bit of work for Rolling Stone, Seattle Weekly, and F5. Those outlets opened up a stream of promo copies that continues (somewhat abated, often just a trickle) to this day. But as the mail thinned out, I resorted increasingly to streaming to make up the difference and expand my horizons. Since 2003, I've averaged a bit less than 30 per week (28.75), a bit less than 1,500 per year (1495). If I made a chart of that, I imagine it would show an upward slant from 2003-11 (when Jazz CG ended, then a plateau, tailing off a bit the last couple years).

Before 2003, that 8,080 came from close to 30 years of record buying (with a few promos in the late-1970s). That averages out to about 5 records per week, 270 per year, but a graph wouldn't be flat: you'd find an initial bulge peaking around 1977-78, a long trough, and a marked increase from 1995 on. I listened to music in my teens, but never bought much until I got my first steady job around 1973. My early music writings start in 1974, including a few reviews for the Village Voice in 1975-79. I gave them up around 1980, when I landed an engineering job and moved to New Jersey. I cut way back on my record buying there, and it's possible that some years I bought less than 100, maybe as few as 50. I moved to Boston in 1985, and found myself spending more time in record stores. I started buying CDs relatively late, and my pace picked up around 1995 when I got into a big jazz/roots kick. That continued when I returned to Kansas in 1999, as I built up the level of expertise that allowed me to write Recycled Goods and Jazz Consumer Guide.

But what really got me back into writing, aside from losing my software engineering job and finding few suitable opportunities, was encouragement from Michael Tatum, Bob Christgau, and (decisively) Laura Tillem. Still, I never planned on making music my central (let alone exclusive) writing focus, and I've sometimes wondered whether it hasn't just been a zero-sum game. I could have spent the last 20 years writing free software (as I had started in the 1990s with Ftwalk. I put a fair amount of effort into an open source business plan for home automation, and could have returned to that, or developed any number of tangential ideas. I also had a scheme for writer-oriented websites, of which Robert Christgau's was intended as a prototype. (One more I built was for Carol Cooper.) Several things distracted me from those paths (although I still maintain those two websites).

The other path I considered was writing political philosophy, which had been my main interest before getting sidetracked into music critique in the mid-1970s. I had soured on politics by 1975, and as I turned away from music around 1980 I wound up reading mostly science (making up for turning away from my early interest), engineering, and business. Laura reminded me that I still knew quite a bit about politics and history, and I toyed with the idea of writing a political book in the late 1990s. September 11, 2001 got me to reading history, politics, and economics again. (You can peruse my reading list -- the data file for my "Recent Reading" blog widget, newly formatted -- here.) I wound up writing several tons of political commentary -- not quite what I envisioned, but scattered with a fair number of serious ideas (some much more distinctive than the grunt work I've cranked out on music).

Seems like I've always been a notoriously slow reader and a poky, easily distracted writer, so for a good while I just took some comfort in getting any writing done at all. The on-line notebook has about 6.5 million words since 2000, and I've compiled much of that into nine ODT files averaging 1500 pages each (4 on music, 4 on politics, 1 personal). I can't claim they're very good, but when I dip into them I often find things worth remembering and even repeating. Still, these days I'm more likely to think of them as opportunity costs: if only I had focused on one thing or the other, maybe I'd have something much better to show for all the effort. Rating (and more/less reviewing) 32,000 records has been a pretty ridiculous thing to do -- as proven by the fact that no one else has been so foolish to do something that required nothing more than a lot of disposable hours. The only thing that would have been a bigger waste of time was not bothering to take notes.

As I wrote the above, I listened to three more albums, including a rather nice one by Florian Hoefner that is certain to remain below damn near everyone's interest threshold. I have little more to add on the records listed below. One thing is that there's only one non-jazz album among the new releases (but three in the recent compilations). Partly, I played quite a few new albums from the promo queue. I also added the 4.5/5.0 star reviewed records from The Free Jazz Collective to my 2019 metacritic file, and that pointed me to more new jazz (including several 2018 releases I had missed). But partly it was just one of those weeks when I felt much more certain about the jazz I heard than the non-jazz. The non-jazz exceptions this week came from Phil Overeem's latest list update (ok, Two Niles was on his 2018 list, but I found it on the Bandcamp page for Star Band De Dakar).

I listened to two other non-jazz records from this list, but couldn't make up my mind and held them back: Lana Del Rey's Norman Fucking Rockwell (number 5) and Raphael Saadiq's Jimmy Lee (18). I'm attracted to and resistant to both, which means they'll probably wind up high B+, but I'm not certain enough to say. Thanks to working on the metacritic file, I'm probably more aware of new non-jazz right now than any time this year, but less sure of my ears. On the other hand, this is definitely a good year for jazz.

New records reviewed this week:

• Sophie Agnel/John Edwards/Steve Noble: Aqisseq (2016 [2018], ONJazz): [r]: B+(**)
• The Kenyatta Beasley Septet: The Frank Foster Songbook (2019, Art Vs Transit, 2CD): [r]: B+(**)
• Ray Blue: Work (2019, Jazzheads): [cd]: B+(**)
• Cat in a Bag: Cat in a Bag (2019, Clean Feed): [r]: B+(***)
• Corey Christiansen: La Proxima (2019, Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
• Peter Eldridge/Kenny Werner: Somewhere (2019, Rosebud Music): [cd]: C-
• Haruna Fukazawa: Departure (2019, Summit): [cd]: B+(*)
• Olli Hirvonen: Displace (2019, Ropeadope): [cd]: B+(**)
• I Jahbar and Friends: Inna Duppy SKRS Soundclash (2019, Bokeh Versions): [bc]: B-
• Michael Gregory Jackson Clarity Quartet: Whenufindituwillknow (2019, Golden): [bc]: B+(**)
• Roberto Magris Sextet: Sun Stone (2019, JMood): [cd]: B+(***)
• Todd Marcus: Trio+ (2019, Stricker Street): [cd]: B+(**)
• Joe McPhee/John Edwards/Klaus Kugel: Journey to Parazzar (2017 [2018], Not Two): [r]: B+(***)
• Dave Miller Trio: Just Imagine (2019, Summit): [cd]: B+(**)
• Nérija: Blume (2019, Domino): [r]: B+(*)
• Bill O'Connell and the Afro Caribbean Ensemble: Wind Off the Hudson (2019, Savant): [cd]: B+(**)
• The Ogún Meji Duo: Spirits of the Egungun (2019, CFG Multimedia): [r]: A-
• Mike Pachelli: High Standards (2019, Fullblast): [cd]: B+(*)
• Jason Palmer: Rhyme and Reason (2018 [2019], Giant Step Arts): [r]: B+(***)
• Jeff Parker/Jeb Bishop/Pandelis Karayorgis/Nate McBride/Devin Gray: The Diagonal Filter (2018, Not Two): [r]: B+(**)
• Pearring Sound: Nothing but Time (2018 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B+(***)
• David Sanchez: Carib (2018 [2019], Ropeadope): [r]: B+(***)
• Dana Saul: Ceiling (2018 [2019], Endectomorph): [cd]: A-
• Rob Scheps: Comencio (2019, SteepleChase): [r]: B+(**)
• Harvey Sorgen/Joe Fonda/Marilyn Crispell: Dreamstruck (2018, Not Two): [r]: A-
• Lyn Stanley: London With a Twist: Live at Bernie's (2019, A.T. Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• The Clifford Thornton Memorial Quartet: Sweet Oranges (2017 -2018], Not Two): [r]: B+(*)
• Tucker Brothers: Two Parts (2019, self-released): [cd]: B
• Ken Vandermark/Klaus Kugel/Mark Tokar: No-Exit Corner (2016 [2018], Not Two): [r]: B+(***)
• Luis Vicente/Vasco Trilla: A Brighter Side of Darkness (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• John Yao's Triceratops: How We Do (2018 [2019], See Tao): [cd], B+(**)
• Jason Yeager: New Songs of Resistance (2018 [2019], Outside In Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• Miguel Zenón: Sonero: The Music of Ismael Rivera (2019, Miel Music): [cd]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Prince: Originals (1981-91 [2019], Rhino/Warner Bros.): [r]: B-
• Sounds of Liberation: Unreleased (Columbia University 1973) (1973 [2018], Dogtown): [r]: B+(*)
• Star Band De Dakar: Psicodelia Afro-Cubana De Senegal (1960s-70s [2019], Ostinato): [r]: B+(***)
• Two Niles to Sing a Melody: The Violins & Synths of Sudan (Ostinato): [bc]: A-

Old music:

• Louis Moholo-Moholo: Duets With Marilyn Crispell: Sibanye (We Are One) (2007 [2008], Intakt): [r]: B+(***)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Taylor Swift: Lover (2019, Republic): [r]: [was: B+(***)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Keiji Haino/Merzbow/Balasz Pandi: Become the Discovered, Not the Discoverer (RareNoise): advance, September 27
• Led Bib: It's Morning (RareNoise): advance, September 27
• Colin Stranahan/Glenn Zaleski/Rick Rosato: Live at Jazz Standard (Capri): September 20

Weekend Roundup

The lead story for most of next week will be Hurricane Dorian, which as I write this (see here and here) is a Category 5 Hurricane moving slowly through the Bahamas toward the coast of Florida. It is expected to turn north and follow the coast (possibly without the eye making landfall) up to North Carolina, where it will most likely head back into the Atlantic. The current tracking forecast puts it off the coast of Palm Beach around 2PM Tuesday, Jacksonville 2PM Wednesday, close to the SC/NC border 2PM Thursday, and straight east of the NC/Va border 2PM Friday. Presumably the storm will lose intensity as it drifts north, but not as quickly as it would if it landed. Rain forecasts are relatively mild, but the coast will see storm surges and a lot of wind.

Dorian was still a tropical storm when it passed over the Windward Islands last Monday (55 mph winds in Barbados, 4.1 inches of rain in Martinique). It wasn't much stronger when it crossed Puerto Rico, but was predicted to intensify to Category 3 or 4 as it headed through the Bahamas to Florida. It did more than that, reaching sustained winds of 185 mph and gusts to 225 mph. The 2019 Atlantic hurricane season has been relatively mild so far, even compared to the forecasts (12 named storms, 5 hurricanes, 2 major). With the season about half over, there have been 5 named storms (TS Erin was named after Dorian, but has already dissipated), 2 hurricanes, 1 major (Dorian). The season continues through the end of November, so we're not much below expectations.

Some scattered links this week:

• Anya van Wagtendonk: This week in mass shootings:

  • Mobile, Alabama, high school football game shooting: what we know: "Ten people were injured at the game. At least six were shot. Police have made one arrest."

  • w/Sean Collins: Odessa and Midland, Texas shootings: what we know: "At least 21 people were shot. At least seven people were killed."

  If you'd like to keep score, see Neil Vigdor: 53 people died in mass shootings in August alone in the US.

• Liaquat Ahamed: The rich can't get richer forever, can they?: "Inequality comes in waves. The question is when this one will break." Reviews several books, including Binyamin Applebaum's The Economist's Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society (on Milton Friedman and his "Chicago school" of free market fundamentalists) and Branko Milanovic's Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World.

• David Atkins:

  • Do conservatives believe there are more bad people in America than elsewhere? Well, sure they do. For starters, they believe there are more conservatives in America than elsewhere.

  • The conservative pundit problem in the Age of Trump. Well, part of the problem, as he limits himself to conservative pundits cultivated to dialogue with centrist readers of the New York Times and Washington Post (David Brooks, George Will, Bret Stephens), most of which recognize that their brand as sane voices would be jeopardized by following Trump into the fever swamps of the alt-right. That skips over other pundits who've had no qualms about embracing Trump wholeheartedly (e.g., the ones syndicated in my hometown paper: Marc Thiessen and Cal Thomas).

• Max Boot: Here are 14 reasons I'll vote for any Democrat over Trump: He starts off by chastising Michael Bloomberg (whom "I have the utmost respect for") for stopping short if the Democratic nominee is Sanders or Warren, then goes on to list his 14 issues. A couple items here I actually lean toward Trump on, but nothing I would vote for him for. Boot and Bloomberg remain narrow ideologues, their differences reflect that the Democratic Left is more of a threat to oligarchs (like Bloomberg) than to neoconservatives (like Boot). But also that Boot still thinks that the Republican Party can be recover from Trump's heresies, corruption and bullshit, and must to keep the empire from collapsing.

• Quoctrung Bui/Karl Russell: How much will the trade war cost you by the end of the year? "About $460 over a year for the average family."

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Trump sends morning mistakenly adding question marks to tweets.

  • Why Trump wants even more pollution than industry does.

    But they are businesses. They might be willing to pollute the planet to make money, but it's not their objective. Trump is the product of right-wing media, which has spent years not only denying climate science but turning the issue into a zero-sum culture-war fight in which maximizing fossil fuel production is defined as victory. That, combined with the right's obsession with negating Obama-era policy accomplishments, produces a strange world in which the administration is demanding car companies and fossil fuel producers sacrifice their financial self-interest in order to accelerate climate change.

    Trump's partners in the business lobby thought they were undertaking a somewhat unethical yet pragmatic deal with the administration. But some men just want to watch the world burn.

    Not the only time I've seen that line this week. See: Tim Dickinson: Some men just want to watch the world burn.

  • Trump is ordering crimes to get wall built before election. Refers back to a Washington Post article: Nick Miroff/Josh Dawsey: 'Take the land': President Trump wants a border wall. He wants it black. And he wants it by Election Day. Trump is quoted there as promising his subordinates, "Don't worry, I'll pardon you." Regarding his pardon promise, see Randall D Eliason: Trump's pardon offer may have violated federal bribery laws.

  • Trump went to the mat for Putin at the G-7 Summit: I agree that Russia should be allowed back into the G-8. I'd go further and say that the US needs to get off its assumption of the right and duty to impose sanctions on any country that offends our sense of decorum and order -- a position that Trump only occasionally adheres to, usually only when the checks clear.

• Jane Coaston: The problem with primarying Trump. I would have guess it has something to do with money. Sixteen Republicans ran for president in 2016, because that many billionaires felt they had a chance backing whoever best fit their pocket. Regardless of how shaky Trump might look in the general election, running against him is a waste of money: he's consolidated his base within the Republican Party, and his brand and the Party's are now effectively synonymous. The article reads more like the problem is that the challengers are all idiots and cranks, which is the only sort you'd figure to bet against the smart money.

• David Cole: Trump doesn't think he's 'ever even heard of a Category 5' hurricane. Four such storms hit the US since he took office. "Trump has previously indicated several other times that Category 5 hurricanes are unprecedented weather events that either he or others had never heard of or witnessed."

• Summer Concepcion: Gillibrand campaign insiders felt Franken resignation foiled her bid: New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand gave up on her presidential campaign after failing to qualify for the September debates. This is one of the few reports I've seen that tries to assign blame, probably because they interviewed "Hillary Clinton's former communications director" -- obviously someone who knows a thing or two about deflecting blame elsewhere. Gillibrand was the first Senator to call for Franken's resignation, and I doubt she did so without considering how doing so would reflect on campaign. I thought that was unfair and unwise, but I wouldn't reject her for that. She's moved smartly to the left, and I would have easily picked her over Harris and Klobuchar (or Franken, even before the taint). But she's been a less effective advocate for progressive issues than Sanders and Warren, and her special focus on "women's issues" isn't very distinct. For more:

  • Amelia Thomson-Deveaux: Why Gillibrand's campaign to win women failed.

• Lee Fang: David Koch's most significant legacy is the election of Donald Trump.

• Peter S Goodman: Trump can battle China or expand the economy. He can't do both.

• Ryan Grim: A top financier of Trump and McConnell is a driving force behind Amazon deforestation: Stephen Schwarzman, of Blackstone, owner "in large part" of Hidrovias do Brasil.

• Gerald Horne: Jazz is a music of perseverance against racism and capitalism. Horne has a book: Jazz and Justice: Racism and the Political Economy of Music. Related (interview with Horne): Anton Woronczuk: White supremacy tried to kill jazz. The music triumphed.

• John Hudson/Josh Dawsey: Bolton sidelined from Afghanistan policy as his standing with Trump falters.

• Rex Huppke: Bret Stephens, Donald Trump and the epidemic of male fragility.

• Umair Irfan:

  • Why it's been so lucrative to destroy the Amazon rainforest.

  • The Amazon rainforest's worst-case scenario is uncomfortably near.

  • No, you can't just nuke a hurricane. But there are other options. Well, you could nuke a hurricane, but all you'd get is an exceptionally wide distribution of nuclear fallout. Reviews several only slightly less hare-brained geoengineering schemes.

• Sarah Jones:

  • The Tea Party is alive and well.

  • Capitalism is making us sick: A Q&A with Emily Guendelsberger about her new book, On the Clock. Subtitle: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Yes, Trump does terrible things constantly. Does that mean we shouldn't cover Biden's gaffes? Refers to Peter Hamby's "rant": "Are we really going to have a gaffe-fest over Joe Biden?": How clickbait and outrage porn are hurting readers -- and elevating Trump. Well, it's not as if Trump's gaffes have been underreported. One problem is that his gaffes don't seem to have much downside for Trump. Reporting them makes it look like he's being picked on by liberal media elites, endearing him to his base. On the other hand, Biden's gaffes undermine his central message, which is that he intends to restore competent and responsible leadership to the presidency. So, yeah, reporting on them hurts him, and is probably unfair. On the other hand, few in the media are up to reporting on substantive issues. Gaffes are more their speed, which winds up selecting for candidates who make lots of them (actually, good for Biden) and who can slough them off (better for Trump).

  • If the Democrats take the Senate, they plan to fix Obamacare, not pass Medicare for All. Sure. Some Democrats will balk at Medicare for All, especially in the expansive formulation that Bernie Sanders has proposed, but everyone agrees that the ACA framework can be tuned to work better, so that's where the initial focus will (and should) be. On the other hand, Democrats who want Medicare for All are likely to support better fixes to ACA, because they understand that single-payer is the preferred longer term solution, and because they're not the sort of people who will break an inadequate system in hopes of replacing it with a better one. Would-be saboteurs mostly belong to the other Party.

• Jen Kirby: Boris Johnson just suspended Parliament over Brexit. Here's what's going on. More on Brexit:

  • Nadeem Badshah: Thousands turn out for 'Stop the Coup' protests across UK.

  • Shami Chakrabarti: The cat is out of the bag -- Boris Johnson's shutdown is unconstitutional.

  • Isabel Hardman: What happens now? Four scenarios for Brexit's weirdest week.

  • Polly Toynbee: A civil war state of mind now threatens our democracy: "Boris Johnson's assault on parliament is unprecedented, but he can -- and must -- be stopped."

• Andy Kroll: The Trumpiest week ever: "Donald Trump's re-election strategy couldn't be clearer: chaos covering up cruelty."

• Paul Krugman:

  • The frauding of America's farmers. Memorable line: "Do farmers realize that their president considers their livelihood a joke?" Related: Alan Rappeport: Farmers' frustration with Trump grows as US escalates China fight.

  • Trump and the art of the flail: "Protectionism is worse when it's erratic and unpredictable."

• Sharon LaFraniere: Trial of high-powered lawyer Gregory Craig exposes seamy side of Washington's elite.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Don Jr. warns that Joe Biden might abuse presidential powers to enrich his lowlife relatives. Wonder where he ever got an idea like that?

  • Here are 7 'left wing' ideas (almost) all Americans can get behind.

    1. Weed should be legal.
    2. Workers should have representation on corporate boards.
    3. The credit-card interest rates are too damn high.
    4. Government officials shouldn't be allowed to own stocks or become lobbyists right after leaving office.
    5. The government should directly finance the development of new drugs, and then allow the breakthrough pharmaceuticals to be sold cheaply without a patent.
    6. All workers should be able to take up to 12 weeks of paid time off following a serious medical injury or childbirth.
    7. There should be a Green New Deal (of some sort).

  • Should NYC ax gifted programs to integrate its schools?

  • Trump's lawless wall and callous attacks on Puerto Rico are connected.

• Annie Lowrey: The next recession will destroy millennials: "Millennials are already in debt and without savings. After the next downturn, they will be in even bigger trouble." Related (Dec. 6, 2018): Derek Thompson: Millennials didn't kill the economy. The economy killed millennials. "The American system has thrown them into debt, depressed their wages, kept them from buying homes -- and then blamed them for everything."

• Dylan Matthews: Trump wants to cut taxes for rich people yet again: "Indexing capital gains to inflation, as Trump is considering, would overwhelmingly benefit the top 1 percent."

• Andrew Prokop: The inspector general report on James Comey's memos, explained. Related: Josh Marshall: Of course Comey was right to share the memos. Marshall, with his instinct for big stories, also weighed in on a previously unknown White House staffer getting fired: Getting fired ain't the story. Not clear whether "Ms. Westerhout" has a first name.

• David Roberts: Many businesses oppose Trump's deregulatory agenda. Here's why.

• Nouriel Roubini: The anatomy of the coming recession: posits three possible "negative supply shocks that could trigger a global recession" -- two involving Trump and China, the third oil. Roubini was pretty sharp on the coming of the 2008 recession. Related: Robert J Shiller: The Trump narrative and the next recession.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • The bizarre dog whistles in a campaign video Trump tweeted out, explained.

  • Trump's push to hold the G7 at a resort he still owns and profits from, explained.

• Jack Shafer: The fake feud between Trump and Fox. More on the "feud":

  • Matt Gertz: Trump's Fox criticism puts the network's entire con in jeopardy.

  • Arren Kimbel-Sannit: Trump delivers another blow to Fox News: 'Fox isn't working for us anymore!'

  • Greg Sargent: A Fox host's tirade against Trump exposes depths of the president's corruption.

• Ganesh Sitaraman: To rescue democracy, we must revive the reforms of the Progressive Era.

• Matt Stieb:

  • Leaked draft of UN climate report says warming oceans are 'poised to unleash misery'.

  • Joe Biden's composite war story that never happened.

  • Trump wants to log Alaska's Tongass, world's largest intact temperate rainforest.

  • The Federal Election Commission could be effectively sidelined in 2020. On the other hand, see: Sue Halpern: Filing the empty seats at the FEC won't fix America's corrupt elections.

• Matt Taibbi: John Hickenlooper is the new Joe Lieberman: "What Lieberman was to antiwar Democrats, Colorado's Hickenlooper is to environmentalists." Related: Aida Chavez/Akela Lacy: Senate Democrats' campaign arm is pressuring consultants not to work with leading progressive candidate in Colorado. Chavez previously wrote: National Democrats endorse John Hickenlooper, a proponent of fracking, in competitive Colorado primary.

• Philip Weiss: Trump will greenlight West Bank annexation to force Israeli pols to keep Netanyahu as PM, observers say. Other pieces on Israel and the war flare-ups that seem to be part of Netanyahu's reelection campaign:

  • Ruth Eglash: Netanyahu calls for boycott of Israeli TV channel over 'anti-Semitic' series co-produced by HBO. The show, "Our Boys," was created by three Israelis, who "have already received death threats online from right-wing Israelis." The show focuses on the lynching of a Palestinian teen-ager after three Israeli settler teens were killed in 2014. Netanyahu used the incidents to launch a brutal war on Gaza.

  • Yossi Gurvitz: If Americans want to understand Israel, they should think of 1950s Alabama, with an air force.

  • Kamel Hawwash: From Iraq to Lebanon, Israel attacks its neighbors with impunity: "With an election around the corner, Netanyahu has launched a regional show of force, safe in the knowledge that his targets are too weak to retaliate before the September vote."

  • Joshua Leifer: Israel's one-state reality is sowing chaos in American politics.

  • Ivan Levingston/David Wainer: The most undiplomatic of diplomats is Trump's man in the Middle East: "David Friedman has upended American policy in the unstable region."

  • Liz Sly/Suzan Haidamous: Another suspected Israeli strike in Lebanon as war fears intensify. Sly and James McAuley also wrote: Attacks blamed on Israel across three Middle East countries ratchet up tensions.

  • Sina Toossi: Israeli strikes seek to bait Iran and scuttle US-Iran diplomacy.

• Alissa Wilkinson: Political commentary can be both caustic and incisive. Molly Ivins showed America how. Interview with Janice Engel, director of the documentary Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins.

• Benjamin Wittes:

  • Thoughts on the impending prosecution of Andrew McCabe.

    Why is that shocking? Because as best as I can tell, the facts available on the public record simply don't support such charges. The only visible factor militating in favor of the Justice Department charging McCabe, in fact, is that the department has been on the receiving end of a sustained campaign by President Trump demanding McCabe's scalp.

  • What that Comey email report really says.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • It's time to talk about James Mattis's involvement with the Theranos scandal: "He's selling a book, not saving the country from Trump." I've seen several articles on Mattis this week, mostly about him being coy about what he will and will not say about his differences with Trump, when and if he will say anything, but this is the one piece that reflects directly on his character:

    But Mattis isn't out babysitting Trump anymore. He's trying to sell books. And while his thoughts and reflections on his time in the Trump cabinet are certainly somewhat interesting at this point we hardly need another person to tell us that the president is erratic, uninformed, impulsive and all the rest. This stuff isn't highly guarded state secrets, it's out in public on Twitter for everyone to see. Rather than dwelling on this stuff that's out there and obvious, it would be nice for journalists granted access to the retired general to ask some questions about Theranos.

    Fundamentally, Trump's rise to power is part of a broader epidemic of elite impunity in the United States. And Mattis's ability to dabble in questionable activity, cash a few checks, and then skate away with his reputation intact is very much part of the problem.

  • Donald Trump's escalating war of words with Fed Chair Jay Powell, explained.

  • The most dangerous idea in central banking, explained. Someone named William Dudley has suggested that the Fed sandbag the economy to hurt Donald Trump's reelection prospects -- or, to put a finer point on it, that the Fed shouldn't attempt to stimulate the economy when Trump's trade wars drag it down. Article points out that some Fed chairs have used their power over the economy to dictate political concessions -- e.g., Alan Greenspan vs. Bill Clinton. I'd add Ben Bernanke vs. Barack Obama, but in that case Republicans were livid that the Fed was doing anything at all to salvage the economy. According to law, the Fed is responsible for balancing competing demands for full employment and low inflation, but in practice the Fed has always kowtowed to the banking interests it is supposed to regulate.

  • The past 3 wild days in Trump's trade war with China, explained.

Further Notes

Dropped this item after finding myself going down a rathole:

• Ed Kilgore: What should progressives be willing to sacrifice on the altar of civility?Eve Fairbanks: The 'reasonable rebels', putting not undeserved emphasis on the links between conservatives who defended slavery 150 years ago and conservatives today. The point seems to be that treating others with civility implies tacit deference and compromise. I don't see why that should be the case. Within my fairly long life I've hardly ever felt the need to resort to verbal (much less physical) violence when confronted with someone I've disagreed with profoundly. I've long felt it important to try to respect others -- although some people do manage to make that difficult, usually when they show no respect to you.

Aug 2019