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Tuesday, March 19, 2024

Monday, March 18, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Daily Log

I started to write a thing on two-state vs. one-state confusion in Israel/Palestine, then decided to pull it. Here's a salvaged fragment:

Not least because it extracts "two-staters" from the conflict and responsibility for its recent escalation. We need to consider a few definitions to clear up this muddle:

  • The fundamental political division is between left and right. The right promotes inequality and defends hierarchy, using all forms of persuasion including religion and violent force to secure and maintain its preferred order. The left believes that all people should be treated equally. If given no better alternative, the left may attempt revolution, but prefers democratic processes, because in the end, most people will agree to equality, while hardly anyone will submit to tyranny.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Daily Log

On Monday, I posted a review:

Laura Jane Grace: Hole in My Head (2024, Polyvinyl): Originally Thomas Gabel, singer-guitarist leader in punk group Against Me!, third solo album, a short one (11 songs, 25:28). Still sounds male, so you can just bracket the trans angle. Songs open up a bit towards folk, partly to expound on politics, e.g.: "out in the country is where fascists roam." B+(***) [sp]

Melody Esme, a former rock critic (under a different name) I respected enough to accept a Facebook friend request, commented:

I didn't get around to replying, but then Joey Daniewicz posted a screen grab of the review with this:

yo Tom Hull you cannot, cannot, cannot, absolutely cannot write about trans people this way

Esme chimed in again:

If I saw this review with no name attached, I'd assume a TERF wrote it

Even more upsetting considering LJG has been vocal about how much she wishes that name could be scrubbed from the Internet

Daniewicz added:

Per Melody's research, this isn't a one off. Tom Hull seems to have a compulsive name to deadname the trans subjects of his reviews.

Iris Demento, commented:

Sincerely doubt Tom meant harm but I agree. I profiled a trans artist in 2016 and didn't understand the negative gravity of deadnaming and I regret asking the subject for it as part of journalistic background, which I bet is where this impulse is coming from. Please rewrite this one without the "trans angle," deadnaming, or "sounds male." It's Laura's best in about a decade and she deserves the respect and professionalism.

I had been stewing on this since the original comment, and finally wrote this:

But I absolutely can, and did -- using the "archaic" meaning of those words, the one I first encountered in learning English, and not the one Joey seems to mean -- "write about trans people this way." And, as you may surmise and/or guess, so I have in the past, and there's little reason to doubt I will again in the future. Last time, as best I recall, I got roasted for not mentioning that an artist is trans, so with some people on this subject at least there may be no way out. I often do start reviews off with the actual name behind an alias: I find that a short list of background facts helps get me started, and mapping a real name to an alias helps (I think) connect me to that person, although it may well disclose attributes like sex or ethnicity that aren't necessarily relevant or important). "Deadnaming" is new vocabulary for me, although I can intuit its meaning, see its relevance, and still conclude it's not my problem. "TERF" I had to look up, and see no use for. Like "transphobic," it is a hateful term that is almost always be applied to castigate other people (unlike "racist" and "antisemite," which were originally coined by people to describe themselves). And note that I'm not saying that "*phobic" has no political value. It both suffices to label all-too-common attitudes and it turns the tables by pointing out that much hatred is used to mask fear. But when you apply to term to me, I have to ask "what's my fear?" -- and I can't find it. What I find instead is an effort at bullying, at coercing (even if just by guilt-tripping) me into using your wording and framing. And since I can't possibly mold myself into your mental framework, that's tantamount to telling me to just stop writing. I must say, it's tempting. On the other hand, I remember a day long ago when my boss told me I had a "bad attitude." I doubt she had any idea how bad that attitude would get once I embraced it. By the way, do some research of your own, on what "bracket" means. Start with Husserl. Before your time, most likely, but not before mine. Some of us earned the right to be archaic.

"TERF" stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. There is a long discussion of the term on Wikipedia, which of course links to Transphobia.

Note: The following postscript was written on 2024-03-16, but obviously belongs here.

I read several more comments the next day, then stopped for several days. When I returned to collect the more thoughtful ones here, I found the thread had 43 comments, which is probably more than my last ten Music Week notices had elicited. In chronological order (skipping a few with no interest). First, directly under my comment:

  • Joey Daniewicz: I didn't apply any of these terms to you. You've earned way less than you think, and this stands to be an area of deep personal embarrassment for your work.

  • Iris Demento: Tom if you admit that you're not familiar with the term "deadnaming" before today, please listen: doing it would not fly with any editor in 2024 whose publication isn't a Republican nest. Doing it in any workplace in 2024 would get you written up and sent to HR if not cause for termination. The level of disrespect and bigotry (and pain it causes) to knowingly call a trans person by their deadname at this time is considered to be on the level of calling someone a racial or homophobic slur. If those are things you also would not do (or defend by saying you've "earned the right to be archaic") you should not do this either. This is completely at odds with virtually all other evidence of your values that I have seen.

  • Heather Batson: I think the shocking thing here is there have been some big shifts in how we discuss trans topics and how a transition related name change is now treated as a special case. For most trans artists in 2024, a name change is not a simple artistic alias, though! It certainly makes sense to anchor her in her role with Against Me, but when a trans person changes her name in all areas of life, as Grace did, their birth name should not be thought of as their 'real name' but a wrong name forced on them for years. It is understood now that in this situation the 'real name' is the chosen legal name. This can be confusing when it comes to artists who may have a stage name separate from a legal name, but in the case of Grace, it is pretty easy to find that she is pained by her deadname and that Laura Jane Grace is clearly her real name. 'Sounds male' was like a gut punch level of rude. Like Iris, I am sure this is not intended to offend, so please know we are engaging because we care. I certainly don't want you to stop writing or feel you need my mindset on trans issues but I do want you to know that there is an updated style guide for best practices. I'm pushing 50 myself so I'm no youngster and I have to constantly relearn how to discuss certain things--but that is just part of how rapid culture shifts go!

  • Melody Esme: I don't care if you're personally transphobic or not. I think your review is deeply transphobic, and that your doubling down and disregarding terms relating to my community's shared experiences shows a lack of care in how you write about certain subjects of your reviews. Why bother reviewing Laura Jane Grace, or Backxwash, or Ezra Furman, or Laura Les, or SOPHIE, or any of the other trans artists who've put their souls into their art if you don't care to understand the fundamentals of what they're singing about? Who does it help to bring up an old name somebody purposefully shed because it causes them pain? "Laura Jane Grace" isn't a fucking non de plume, it's her name, and she's made it clear that the repeated printing of her old name hurts her. Your SOPHIE review deadnamed her and I don't even know how you did that, since her deadname has hardly even been reported -- I didn't even know it was publicly known until I read that review, to be honest. You don't include Kim Petras' deadname in your blurbs on her work, I'm guessing because it's hard to find, and the reviews don't suffer from that missing context at all. Your phobia is in your reluctance to change in a way that doesn't affect you at all but would make people in a marginalized community feel more comfortable and understood. In recent years, Christgau has made strides in improving the ways he writes about transgender artists -- even switching off on all of Ezra's (at the time) pronouns in his review of Twelve Nudes, which I thought was really cute. Rather than quitting writing, you could follow in his example and just stop writing about this one group of people in a way we unanimously find insulting and bigoted. Also, please never, ever, ever say that a trans woman sounds male. It kinda sucks a lot.

  • Eric Johnson: I'm sure you have earned the right to be archaic, but that's not really the issue.

    Archaic or modern, I'm sure you don't want to be hateful or hurtful. That's really the issue. Folks here are giving you credit for your good intentions and asking you to get your public words in line with those intentions. Please listen to them.

  • Eric Johnson: Tom Hull I hope it doesn't seem like I'm piling on. Again, this is on the Spirit of hoping you can understand why this is such a concern.

    I completely get being defensive here. But imagine going through a tremendous amount of physical, psychological, and medical work in order to make the way people see you on the outside match up with the way you have _known_ you are on the inside for a long time. Imagine doing that in a country where a major political party has turned you into a public target.

    Then imagine that someone who is ostensibly evaluating your music (or the music of another trans person) virtually ignores the musical content and spends pretty much the entire review claiming that all the work you put in making your inner and outer selves match was a charade, and claiming that "the trans angle" could be "bracketed" while really making the entire review about that angle.

    That's got to be a significantly worse feeling than the feeling we get when we get called out on account of our choices in words. So please don't let feeling sorry for yourself about this overcome the kind of empathy that makes you a good writer.

    Laura Jane Grace is not an alias, full stop. That's her name. That's who she is.

    For the record, I'm nearly 59. I know what it's like to feel like there's no right way to say something. But please listen to people who are trying to help you here.

Other comments (with threads):

  • Mark Kemp: Ugh! The weird thing is how much space the writer devotes, at this point, to LJG's transition (and, of course, the bizarre language he uses to talk about it), and how little he spends on characterizing the actual music. Reading this, I have no idea what the album sounds like.

  • Boris Palameta: Don't want to pile on here, I respect Tom a lot as a writer. And professional standards are important - though ever-shifting, as several have pointed out. And rightly so, as we listen and learn more about lived experience. As an old guy who's only recently begun to manage openly non-binary and trans staff, when they tell me what's important and what hurts, I believe them.

  • Alfred Soto: Tom, let me be as polite as possible. You seem more peeved that ugly-sounding neologisms are allowed to persist rather than trying to understand how/why they work. To respond like you did without referring to the people to whom those neologisms apply strikes me as a fundamental misunderstanding of how writing works, as if you thought a euphonic sentence couldn't possibly be amoral.

  • Phil Overeem: As a fellow older cis gender straight male with Kansas roots and pressurized conservative Christian post-birth incubating (I'm not sure we share that last part, Tom, but probably we do), I'd like to chime in. I was ignorant for a long time about trans people while fighting my way out of other modes of thinking until I moved to Columbia, Missouri, to teach. I have taught several trans kids, two in particular who hadn't begun transitioning when I first met / taught them and one of whom was the child of two good friends and fellow teachers. Watching those students struggle with family, friends, random hostile fellow humans, and institutions as they went through the process (including surgery) and found their true selves and as much happiness as anyone can expect in this world taught me extremely well. I have been fortunate to be able know them for that expanse of their lives. I'm still struggling to "see" my current trans students and a fellow worker with ease and habitual respect (I still screw up pronouns on occasion when my visual sense blinds what I know), but I'm getting there, and making sure I include material in class that speaks to them helps everyone--including me, because one of the best ways to really learn something is to teach it, especially over and over. Again, I'm not where I need to be, but I'm close, and it is essential I get there.

    I know you are a copious reader, and I've always been of the mind that, when all else fails, READ. I am including the covers of four very disparate books that have really opened my eyes and heart: a memoir (Lucy Sante's, which I just finished and am still processing), a YA novel--I try to read one every year--about an intersex kid, a NYC-set group of dazzling but often heart-rending stories about trans life by a trans Chilean author, and Torrey Peters' very complex (for a cis mind), funny, and torturous DETRANSITION, BABY.

    One reason I was so fully behind Anohni's album last year was how it dovetailed with the impact of my experiences with students and those books. It's really good aesthetically, but its power as a statement about how it must feel to be trans and try to live in this country (and world) made it impossible for me NOT to understand that feeling and feel it empathetically as much as that's possible for someone like me.

    Tom, we also both live in states where our legislators and many of our fellow residents are a straight-up danger to the lives of trans people, so I think that further obligates us to be as supportive as we possibly can as we keep trying to understand more fully.

    • Phil Overeem: Maybe I'm way off base with this reply and it's about linguistics more than anything. If so, I'm not sure it still wouldn't be helpful, but I'm just trying to help.

    • Tim Niland: I agree, when I moved to blue state New Jersey from the highly Republican/Catholic Upstate NY area where I grew up in 2001 I had no idea. Working in a public library for fifteen years was a big eye-opener for me, learning and becoming much more empathetic toward LGBTQI+ issues. It's a process, we all learn and grow, I don't think Tom meant ill will.

    • Phil Overeem: Tim, I cannot imagine he would be deliberately hurtful.

    • Alfred Soto: Phil, using the language of DeSantis to adduce his toughness sure doesn't help. [TH: what the fuck is he talking about here?]

    • Phil Overeem: I don't get why he used it. It doesn't sound like him. [TH: does Overeem know?]

    • Phil Overeem: Heather, thank you. I "read around" and in this case it's been really important. Have you read any of those?

    • Heather Batson: Phil Overeem during the pandemic I was in a book group with - a few gender variant and trans pals, and with them, I read detransition Baby and LOVED it. one of those friend told me too much about None of the Above so then I didn't read it 😂, and I recently heard a long interview with Lucy Sante that I really enjoyed so I'm on a waiting list for the ebook from the library but did not read yet!

  • Scott Coleman: Although the review makes me uncomfortable, so does reposting it here. A comment could have been sent to Tom on his site to discuss the issue. That may have been more effective in prompting a consideration of the very real issue and would likely have been perceived as less confrontational.

    • Joey Daniewicz: My impression had been that Tom had ignored engagement on the issue previously. Thanks for your comment

    • Kenneth Coleman: But we do this kind of thing all the time with Christgau reviews. While I think it's wrong to repost private conversations, this was a public review for all the world to see. And since Hull runs the Christgau site and does reviews in the same format, many of us view his site as something of a more jazz-friendly extension of the Consumer Guide. I suppose there's a difference in that Hull actually posts here on occasion. But if Christgau (or Greil Marcus) participated here, I would assume we could still use this space to point out problematic aspects of their reviews.

      I probably wouldn't have framed or worded my critique like Joey Daniewicz did, but I definitely support the crux of it--and his right to use this space this way. It's also evident here that more constructive attempts with collegial, good faith suggestions also hit a brick wall.

  • Greg Morton: I would just like to remind everyone that someday you'll be older too, and new conventions will happen faster than you can keep up with.

    • Alfred Soto: Greg sure, but I intend to keep my sense of empathy, especially when a thread has the folk he's referring to

      • Greg Morton: Just ftr, I was referring to myself with my previous comment. I didn't even know that there was such a thing as "deadnaming" til this all came up. And if I may be so bold, if there were an Empathy Quotient test I would happily compare my score with anyone. So much so that I feel a substantial regret for everyone involved in this conversation. Not least Hull, and Grace, who probably doesn't know that this battle is being fought in her name. And oh yeah, the 81 year old who prompted this whole site.

      • Brian O'Neill: Being ignorant of something is fine. However when I find I am guilty of this and it results in me saying or posing something that is hurtful, and I am informed of this, my response is to apologize, learn from it, and not do it again.

        The author's response in this thread did not instill me with confidence that he even understands the issue, let alone would take steps to not repeat it.

        • Alfred Soto: And the I-won't-back-down attitude in the post was jaw-dropping. Your boss thought you difficult? Um, okay?

  • Alfred Soto: I don't even know the posters who _liked_ Hull's post.

I was tempted to respond to Soto's last post: "I didn't notice any who did." Some were less hostile, but everyone who commented except me seemed to agree with the charges.

Another comment that occurred to me is: "Thank you for your comments. I will take them under advisement." I do, and I will, but at this late date, it seemed unwise to prime this particular pump.

But my gut feeling right now is pure trauma. It's exactly the same feeling I had after two gunmen broke into our house, hogtied me in the basement, ransacked the place, stealing everything they took a fancy in, then kidnapped my wife. (After several hours, she was abandoned in our car they stole, and contacted the police, who ultimately rescued me.) Well, it probably won't last that long (unless I keep writing this entry). Probably more like the time Dana Daum screamed at me for disobeying a software design order I found completely unreasonable. (It was, by the way, a grudge he never showed any sign of giving up.)

So this hurts. But most immediately, this makes me very angry. And that's something I'm not used to, and not at all comfortable with. That brings up the obvious question, which is whether I should retreat from my anger -- an easy way to do that would be to follow through on my threat to stop writing reviews, which is what I've mostly (but not yet publically) done this week, or channel that anger into more pointed writing. I'm reminded here that China Miéville, in his book on The Communist Manifesto, sees anger as valuable (maybe even essential) to political writing.

One thing I can say is that I won't be going on an anti-trans rant, nor am I likely to try to raise my unhappiness into a defense of free speech against the vigilantes of political correctness and cancel culture. (Does the DeSantis thing mean they think I'm calling them woke?)

One thing I will grant is that some of the points above deserve future consideration. But even having considered them, I still like my review. Aside from pissing off more people off than expected, it says what I wanted to say, precisely and economically. I'm loathe to follow Trump and claim it's a "perfect review" -- it certainly isn't (for one thing, the transition from "folk" to politics ought to be more secure, and I haven't figured out how the politics relates to the "trans angle" I perhaps too cavalierly brushed aside -- but for my everyday purposes it sufficed. In particular, I don't buy that "sounds male" is an insult, and it definitely isn't inaccurate.

True that I didn't really need to mention trans at all, and that may be the best way forward, but it seems like everywhere I look it's made up to be such a big deal. And it's hard to say it isn't without mentioning what it is.

Some of this will come out in next Monday's Music Week. How much, we'll see. I'm sorely tempted to quash it, but having written reviews before this blew up, I should probably go ahead and post what I have.

Super late here and now, but at least I won't have to start Sunday with this as something to do. "Reading Obits" edit done, should be good to go after a quick re-read. "Speaking of Which" crunch time. It won't be super-big, but I have a good start on it already.

Monday, March 11, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 36 albums, 6 A-list

Music: Current count 41974 [41938] rated (+36), 27 [21] unrated (+6).


New records reviewed this week:

  • Albare: Beyond Belief (2023 [2024], AM): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Bob Anderson: Live! (2023 [2024], Jazz Hang): [cd]: B+(*) [03-29]
  • Jonas Cambien: Jonas Cambien's Maca Conu (2023 [2024], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Ian Carey & Wood Metal Plastic: Strange Arts (2019 [2024], Slow & Steady): [cd]: B+(**) [03-22]
  • Giuseppe Doronzo/Andy Moor/Frank Rosaly: Futuro Ancestrale (2022 [2024], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Fire!: Testament (2022 [2024], Rune Grammofon): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Glitter Wizard: Kiss the Boot (2023, Kitten Robot, EP): [sp]: B
  • Laura Jane Grace: Hole in My Head (2024, Polyvinyl): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Dave Harrington/Max Jaffe/Patrick Shiroishi: Speak, Moment (2021 [2024], AKP): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Keyon Harrold: Foreverland (2023 [2024], Concord): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Brittany Howard: What Now (2024, Island): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Past Is Still Alive (2024, Nonesuch): [sp]: A-
  • Idles: Tangk (2024, Partisan): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Vijay Iyer: Compassion (2022 [2024], ECM): [sp]: B+(***)
  • The Last Dinner Party: Prelude to Ecstasy (2024, Island): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Little Simz: Drop 7 (2024, Forever Living Originals, EP): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Mike McGinnis + 9: Outing: Road Trip II (2023 [2024], Sunnyside): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Emile Parisien/Roberto Negro: Les Métanuits (2023, ACT): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Emile Parisien Quartet: Let Them Cook (2024, ACT): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Chris Potter/Brad Mehldau/John Patitucci/Brian Blade: Eagle's Point (2023 [2024], Edition): [sp]: A-
  • Joel Ross: Nublues (2023 [2024], Blue Note): [sp]: A-
  • Scheen Jazzorkester & Cortex: Frameworks: Music by Thomas Johansson (2022 [2024], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Patrick Shiroishi: I Was Too Young to Hear Silence (2020 [2023], American Dreams): [sp]: B+(***)
  • The Smile: Wall of Eyes (2024, XL): [sp]: B
  • Vera Sola: Peacemarker (2024, Spectraphonic/City Slang): [sp]: B+(**)
  • John Surman: Words Unspoken (2022 [2024], ECM): [sp]: A-
  • Michael Thomas: The Illusion of Choice (2023 [2024], Criss Cross): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Akiko Tsugura: Beyond Nostalgia (2023 [2024], SteepleChase): [sp]: B+(**)
  • The Umbrellas: Fairweather Friend (2024, Tough Love): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Yard Act: Where's My Utopia? (2024, Island): [sp]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Emahoy Tsegue Maryam Guebru: Souvenirs (1977-85 [2024], Mississippi): [sp]: B+(***)

Old music:

  • Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru: Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru (1963-70 [2016], Mississippi): [sp]: A-
  • Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru: Jerusalem (1972-2012 [2023], Mississippi): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Gigi W Material: Mesgana Ethiopia (2010, M.O.D. Technologies): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Hawkwind: Doremi Fasol Latido (1972, United Artists): [sp]: B+(***)


Grade (or other) changes:

  • The R&B No. 1s of the '50s (1950-59 [2013], Acrobat, 6CD): [cd]: [was: A-] A


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Neal Alger: Old Souls (Calligram) [03-01]
  • Sam Anning: Earthen (Earshift Music) [04-05]
  • Alex Beltran: Rift (Calligram) [03-01]
  • Julieta Eugenio: Stay (self-released) [03-29]
  • Julien Knowles: As Many, as One (Biophilia) [04-26]
  • Travis Reuter: Quintet Music (self-released) [04-19]
  • Claudio Scolari Project: Intermission (Principal) [03-25]
  • Dan Weiss: Even Odds (Cygnus) [03-29]
  • Hein Westergaard/Katt Hernandez/Raymond Strid: The Knapsack, the Hat, and the Horn (Gotta Let It Out) [02-25]

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Once again, started early in the week, spent most of my time here, didn't get to everything I usually cover. Late Sunday night, figured I should go ahead and kick this out. Monday updates possible.

Indeed, I wasted most of Monday adding things, some of which, contrary to my usual update discipline, only appeared on Monday. The most interesting I'll go ahead and mention here:

  • Alexander Ward/Jonathan Lemire: [03-11] If Israel invades Rafah, Biden will consider conditioning military aid to Israel. There are several articles below suggesting that the Biden administration is starting to show some discomfort with its Israeli masters. I've generally made light of such signals, as they've never threatened consequences or even been unambiguously uttered in public. I've seen several more suggesting that the long promised invasion of Rafah -- the last corner of Gaza where some two million people have been driven into -- could cross some kind of "red line."

    I am willing to believe that "Genocide Joe" is a bit unfair: that while he's not willing to stand up to Netanyahu, he's not really comfortable with the unbounded slaughter and mass destruction Israel is inflicting. I characterize his pier project below as "passive-aggressive." I think he's somehow trying (but way too subtly) to make Israel's leaders realize that their dream of killing and/or expelling everyone from Gaza isn't going to be allowed, so at some point they're going to have to relent, and come up with some way of living with the survivors.

I don't recall where, but I think I've seen some constructive reaction from Biden to the "uncommitted" campaign that took 13% of Michigan and 18% of Minnesota votes. So it's possible that the message is getting through even if the raw numbers are still far short of overwhelming. The Israel Lobby has so warped political space in Washington that few politicians can as much as imagine how out of touch and tone-deaf they've become on this issue.

Still, Biden has a lot of fence-mending to do.

I'll try not to add more, but next week will surely come around, bringing more with it.


Initial count: 181 links, 7,582 words. Updated count [03-11]: 207 links, 9,444 words.

Top story threads:

Not sure where to put this, so how about here?

  • Jacob Bogage: [03-08] Government shutdown averted as Senate passes $459 billion funding bill: In other words, Republicans once again waited until the last possible moment, then decided not to pull the trigger in their Russian roulette game over the budget. It seems be an unwritten rule that in electing Mike Johnson as Speaker, the extreme-right gets support for everything except shutting down the government.

Israel:

Israel vs. world opinion: Note that Biden's relief scheme for Gaza, announced in his State of the Union address, has been moved into its own sandbox, farther down, next to other Biden/SOTU pieces.

  • Kyle Anzalone: [03-07] South Africa urges ICJ for emergency order as famine looms over Gaza.

  • James Bamford: [03-06] Time is running out to stop the carnage in Gaza: "Given the toll from bombing and starvation, Gaza will soon become the world's largest unmarked grave." Actually, time ran out sometime in the first week after Oct. 7, when most Americans -- even many on the left who had become critical of Israeli apartheid -- were too busy competing in their denunciations of Hamas to notice how the Netanyahu government was clearly intent to commit genocide. At this point, the carnage is undeniable -- perhaps the only question is when the majority of the killing will shift (or has shifted) from arms to environmental factors (including starvation), because the latter are relatively hard to count (or are even more likely to be undercounted). Of course, stopping the killing is urgent, no matter how many days we fail.

  • Greer Fay Cashman: [03-07] President Herzog faces calls for arrest on upcoming Netherlands visit.

  • Jonathan Cook: [03-07] How the 'fight against antisemitism' became a shield for Israel's genocide.

  • Richard Falk: [02-25] In Gaza, the west is enabling the most transparent genocide in human history.

  • Noah Feldman: [03-05] How Oct. 7 is forcing Jews to reckon with Israel. Excerpt from his new book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.

  • Daniel Finn: [03-07] Slaughter in Gaza has discredited Britain's political class.

  • Fred Kaplan: [03-06] Four things that will have to happen for the Israel-Hamas war to end: I have a lot of respect for Kaplan as an analyst of such matters, but the minimal solution he's created is impossible. His four things?

    1. The Hamas leadership has to surrender or go into exile. ("Qatar will have to crack down on Hamas, or perhaps provide its military leaders refuge in exchange for their departure from Gaza.")
    2. "Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Sunni powers in the region will have to help rebuild Gaza and foster new, more moderate political leaders."
    3. "Israel will at least have to say that it favors the creation of a Palestinian state and to take at least a small movement in that direction." Why anyone should believe Israel in this isn't explained.
    4. "The United States will have to serve as some sort of guarantor to all of this -- and not only for Israel."

    In other words, every nation in the region has to bend to Israel's stubborn insistence that they have to maintain control over every inch of Gaza, even though they've made it clear they'd prefer for everyone living there to depart or die. In any such scenario, it is inevitable that resistance will resurface to again threaten Israel's security, no matter how many layers of proxies are inserted, and no matter how systematically Israel culls its "militants." Short of a major sea change in Israeli opinion -- which is a prospect impossible to take seriously, at least in the short term -- there is only one real solution possible, which is for Israel to disown Gaza. Israel can continue to maintain its borders, its Iron Walls and Iron Domes, and can threaten massive retaliation if anyone on the Gaza side of the border attacks them. (This can even include nuclear, if that's the kind of people they are.) But Israel no longer gets any say in how the people of Gaza live. From that point, Israel is out of the picture, and Gaza has no reason to risk self-destruction by making symbolic gestures.

    That still leaves Gaza with a big problem -- just not an Israel problem. That is because Israel has rendered Gaza uninhabitable, at least for the two million people still stuck there. Those people need massive aid, and even so many of them probably need to move elsewhere, at least temporarily. Without Israel to fight, Hamas instantly becomes useless. They will release their hostages, and disband. Some may go into exile. The rest may join in rebuilding, ultimately organized under a local democracy, which would have no desire let alone capability to threaten Israel. This is actually very simple, as long as outside powers don't try to corrupt the process by recruiting local cronies (a big problem in the region, with the US, its Sunni allies, Iran, its Shiite friends, Turkey, and possibly others serial offenders).

    Sure, this would leave Israel with a residual Palestinian problem elsewhere: both with its second- and lesser-class citizens and wards, and with its still numerous external refugees. But that problem has not yet turned genocidal (although it's getting close, and is clearly possible as long as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are part of Israel's ruling coalition). But there is time to work on that, especially once Israel is freed from the burden and horror of genocide in Gaza. There are lots of ideas that could work as solutions, but they all ultimately to accepting that everyone, regardless of where they live, should enjoy equal rights and opportunities. That will be a tough pill for many Israelis to swallow, but is the only one that will ultimately free them from the internecine struggle Israelis and Palestinians have been stuck with for most of a century. There's scant evidence that most Israelis want that kind of security, so people elsewhere will need to continue with BDS-like strategies of persuasion. But failure to make progress will just expose Israelis to revolts like they experienced on Oct. 7, and Palestinians to the immiseration and gloom they've suffered so often over many decades decades.

  • Colbert I King: [03-08] The United States cannot afford to be complicit in Gaza's tragedy: True or not, isn't it a bit late to think of this?

  • Nicholas Kristof: [03-19] 'People are hoping that Israel nukes us so we get rid of this pain': Texts with a Gazan acquaintance named Esa Alshannat, not Hamas, but after Israeli soldiers left an area, found "dead, rotten and half eaten by wild dogs." Kristof explains: "Roughly 1 percent of Gaza's people today are Hamas fighters. To understand what the other 99 percent are enduring, as the United States supplies weapons for this war and vetoes cease-fire resolutions at the United Nations, think of Alshannat and multiply him by two million."

  • Debbie Nathan:

  • Vivian Nereim: [03-10] As Israel's ties to Arab countries fray, a stained lifeline remains: The United Arab Emirates is still on speaking terms with Israel, but doesn't have much to show for their solicitude.

  • Ilan Pappé: [02-01] It is dark before the dawn, but Israeli settler colonialism is at an end.

  • Mitchell Plitnick: [03-07] Replacing Netanyahu with Gantz won't fix the problem.

  • Rebecca Lee Sanchez: [03-06] Gaza's miracle of the manna: Aid and the American God complex.

  • Philip Weiss:

  • Brett Wilkins: [03-06] AIPAC's dark money arm unleashes $100 million: "Amid the Netanyahu government's assault on Gaza and intensifying repression in the West Bank, AIPAC is showing zero tolerance for even the mildest criticism of Israel during the 2024 US elections."

America's increasingly desperate and pathetic empire: I started this section to separate out stories on how the US was expanding its operations in the Middle East, ostensibly to deter regional adversaries from attacking Israel while Israel was busy with its genocide in Gaza. At the time, it seemed like Israel was actively trying to promote a broader war, partly to provide a distraction from its own focus (much as WWII served to shield the Holocaust), and partly to give the Americans something else to focus on. Israel tried selling this as a "seven-front war" -- a line that Thomas Friedman readily swallowed, quickly recovering from his initial shock at Israel's overreaction in Gaza -- but with neither Iran nor the US relishing what Israel imagined to be the main event, thus far only the Houthis in Yemen took the bait (where US/UK reprisals aren't much of a change from what the Saudis had been doing, with US help, for years). So this section has gradually been taken over by more general articles on America's imperial posture (with carve outs for the still-raging wars in Israel/Gaza and Ukraine/Russia.

  • Ramzy Baroud:

    • [03-04] To defend Israel's actions, the US is destroying the int'l legal system it once constructed: I'm not sure that the US ever supported any sort of international justice system. The post-WWII trials in Japan and Germany were rigged to impose "victor's justice." The UN started as a victors' club, with Germany and Japan excluded, and the Security Council was designed so small states couldn't gang up on the powers. And when Soviet vetoes precluded using the UN as a cold war tool, the US invented various "coalitions of the willing" to rubber-stamp policy. The US never recognized independent initiatives like the ICJ, although the US supports using the ICJ where it's convenient, like against Russia in Ukraine. The only "rules-based order" the US supports is its own, and even there its blind support for Israel arbitrary and capricious -- subject to no rules at all, only the whims of Netanyahu.

    • [03-08] On solidarity and Kushner's shame: How Gaza defeated US strategem, again.

  • Mac William Bishop: [02-23] American idiots kill the American century: "After decades of foreign-policy bungling and strategic defeats, the US has never seemed weaker -- and dictators around the world know it."

  • Christopher Caldwell: [03-09] This prophetic academic now foresees the West's defeat: On French historian/political essayist Emmanuel Todd, who claims to have been the first to predict the demise of the Soviet Union (see his The Final Fall: An Essay on the Decomposition of the Soviet Sphere, from 1976), has a new book called La Défaite de l'Occident. Caldwell, who has a book called The Age of Entitlement, seems to be an unconventional conservative, so even when he has seeming insights it's hard to trust them. Even harder to get a read on Todd. (The NYTimes' insistence on "Mr." at every turn has never been more annoying.) But their skepticism of Biden et al. on Ukraine/Russia is certainly warranted. By the way, here are some old Caldwell pieces:

  • Brian Concannon: [03-08] US should let Haiti reclaim its democracy.

  • Gregory Elich: [03-08] How Madeleine Albright got the war the US wanted: NATO goes on the warpath, initially in Yugoslavia, then . . . "the opportunity to expand Western domination over other nations."

  • Tom Engelhardt: [03-05] A big-time war on terror: Living on the wrong world: "A planetary cease fire is desperately needed."

  • Connor Freeman: [03-07] Biden's unpopular wars reap mass death and nuclear brinkmanship.

  • Marc Martorell Junyent: [03-07] Tempest in a teapot: British illusions and American hegemony from Iraq to Yemen. Review of Tom Stevenson's book, Someone Else's Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony.

  • Joshua Keating: [03-09] The Houthis have the world's attention -- and they won't give it up: "What do Yemen's suddenly world-famous rebels really want, and what will make them stop?" One lesson here is that deterrence only works if it threatens a radical break from the status quo. The Saudis, with American support, have been bombing the Houthis for more than a decade now, causing great hardship for the Yemeni people, but hardly moving the needle on Houthi political power. So how much worse would it get if they picked a fight with Israel's proxy navy? Moreover, by standing up to Israel and its unwitting allies, they gain street cred and a claim to the moral high ground. For similar reasons, sanctions are more likely to threaten nations that aren't used to them. Once you're under sanctions, which with the US tends to be a life sentence, what difference does a few more make? It's too late for mere threats to change the behavior of Yemen, Iran, North Korea, and/or Russia -- though maybe not to affect powers whose misbehaviors have thus far escaped American sanctions, like Israel and Saudi Arabia. But for the rest, to effect change, you need to do something positive, to give them some motivation and opportunity to change. In many cases, that shouldn't even be hard. Just try to do the right thing. Respect the independence of others. Look for mutual benefits, like in trade. Help them help their own people. And stop defending genocide.

  • Nan Levinson: [03-07] The enticements of war (and peace).

  • Blaise Malley: [03-06] Opportunity calls as Cold War warriors exit the stage: "Will Mitch McConnell's replacement represent the old or new guard in his party's foreign policy?"

  • Paul R Pillar: [03-06] Why Netanyahu is laughing all the way to the bank: "David Petraeus said recently that US leverage on Israel to do the right thing in Gaza is 'overestimated' -- that's just not true."

  • Robert Wright: [03-08] The real problem with the Trump-Biden choice: This piece is far-reaching enough I could have slotted it anywhere, but it has the most bearing here: the problem is how much Trump and Biden have in common, especially where it comes to foreign affairs: "America First" may seem like a different approach from Biden's, but the latter is just a slightly more generous and less intemperate variation, as both start from the assumption that America is and must be the leader, and everyone else needs to follow in line. Trump thinks he can demand the other pay tribute; Biden possibly knows better, but his pursuit of arms deals makes me wonder. Wright cites a piece by Adam Tooze I can't afford or find, quoting it only up to the all-important "but" after which the Trump-Biden gap narrows. While I'm sure Tooze has interesting things to say, Wright's efforts to steer foreign policy thinking away from the zero-sum confrontations of the Metternich-to-Kissinger era are the points to consider.

  • Fareed Zakaria: [03-08] Amid the horror in Gaza, it's easy to miss that the Middle East has changed.

Election notes: Sixteen states and territories voted for president on Super Tuesday, mostly confirming what we already knew. Biden won everywhere (except American Samoa), even over "uncommitted" (which mostly got a push from those most seriously upset over his support for Israeli genocide). Trump won everywhere -- except in Vermont, narrowly to Nikki Haley, who nonetheless shuttered her campaign (but hasn't yet endorsed Trump). Dean Phillips dropped out of the Democratic race after getting 8% in his home state of Minnesota and 9% in Oklahoma. He endorsed Biden. I'm not very happy with any of the news summaries I've seen, but here are a few to skim through: 538; AP; Ballotpedia; CBS News; CNBC; CNN; Guardian; NBC News; New York Times; Politico; USA Today; Washington Post. One quote I noticed (from CNN) was from a "reluctant Democrat" in Arizona: "It's hard to vote for someone with multiple felony charges; and it's also very hard to vote for someone that is pro-genocide."

  • Michael C Bender: [03-06] How Trump's crushing primary triumph masked quiet weaknesses: "Even though he easily defeated Nikki Haley, the primary results suggested that he still has long-term problems with suburban voters, moderates, and independents."

  • Aaron Blake: [03-08] The Texas GOP purge and other below-the-radar Super Tuesday nuggets.

  • Nate Cohn: [03-07] Where Nikki Haley won and what it means: Inside the Beltway (61%), Home base and Mountain West cities (57%), Vermont (56%), University towns (56%), Resort towns (55%): In other words, the sorts of places that would automatically disqualify one as a Real Republican.

  • Antonia Hitchens: [03-06] Watching Super Tuesday returns at Mar-a-Lago.

  • Ro Khanna: [03-07] The message from Michigan couldn't be more clear: Actually, these figures (see Nichols below) are hardly enough for a bump in the road to Biden's reelection -- unlike, say, Eugene McCarthy's New Hampshire showing in 1968, where Lyndon Johnson got the message clearly enough to give up his campaign. What they do show is that the near-unanimity of Democratic politicians in support of Israel is not shared by the rank and file.

  • Adam Nagourney/Shane Goldmacher: [03-09] The Biden-Trump rerun: A nation craving change gets more of the same: I bypassed this first time around, but maybe we should offer some kind of reward for the week's most inane opinion piece. Wasn't Nagourney a finalist in one of those hack journalists playoffs? (If memory serves -- why the hell can't I just google this? -- he finished runner-up to Karen Tumulty.)

  • John Nichols: [03-05] Gaza is on the ballot all over America: "Inspired by Michigan's unexpectedly high 'uncommitted' vote, activists across the country are now mounting campaigns to send Biden a pro-cease-fire message." Uncommitted slate votes thus far (from NYTimes link, above): Minnesota: 18.9%; Michigan: 13.2%; North Carolina: 12.7%; Massachusetts: 9.4%; Colorado: 8.1%; Tennessee: 7.9%; Alabama: 6.0%; Iowa: 3.9%.

  • Alexander Sammon:

    • [03-09] Katie Porter said her Senate primary was "rigged." Let's discuss! "Her complaint was kind of MAGA-coded. But it wasn't entirely wrong." Adam Schiff had a huge fundraising advantage over Porter, as Porter did over the worthier still Barbara Lee. This is one of the few pieces I've found that looks into where that money came from (AIPAC chipped in $5 million; a crypto-backed PAC doubled that), and how it was used, explained in more depth in the following:

    • [03-05] Democrats have turned to odd, cynical tactics to beat one another in California's Senate race. Schiff wound up spending a lot of money not trying to win Democrats over from Porter and Lee -- something that might require explaining why he supported the Iraq War (which itself partly explains why he got all that AIPAC money) -- but instead spent millions raising Republican Steve Garvey's profile. In the end, Schiff was so successful he lost first place to Garvey (on one but not both of the contests: one to finish Feinstein's term, one for the six year term that follows), but at least he got past Porter and Lee, turning the open primary into a traditional R-D contest (almost certainly D in California).

  • Michael Scherer: [03-08] Inside No Labels decision to plow ahead with choosing presidential candidates: "The group announced on a call with supporters Friday plans to announce a selection process for their third-party presidential ticket on March 14 with a nomination by April." More No Labels:

  • Li Zhou: [03-06] Jason Palmer, the guy who beat Biden in American Samoa, briefly explained.

Trump, and other Republicans:

Biden's band-aid folly: Unveiled in Biden's State of the Union address, q.v., but for this week, let's give it its own section:

  • Alex Horton: [03-08] How the US military will use a floating pier to deliver Gaza aid: "Construction will take up to two months and require 1,000 US troops who will remain off shore, officials say. Once complete, it will enable delivery of 2 million meals daily."

  • Jonathan Cook: [03-10] Biden's pier-for-Gaza is hollow gesture.

  • Kareem Fahim/Hazem Balousha: [03-08] Biden plan to build Gaza port, deliver aid by sea draws skepticism, ridicule. Sounds like they had a contest to come up with the most expensive, least efficient method possible to trickle life-sustaining aid into Gaza, without in any way inhibiting Israel's systematic slaughter.

  • Miriam Berger/Sufian Taha/Heidi Levine/Loveday Morris: [03-05] The improbable US plan for a revitalized Palestinian security force: Because the US did such a great job of training the Afghan security force?

  • Noga Tarnopolsky: [03-09] The Biden plan to ditch Netanyahu: "The 'come to Jesus moment' is already here, according to Israeli and US sources." I don't give this report much credit, but it stands to reason that eventually Biden will tire of Netanyahu jerking him around just so he can further embarrass both countries with what is both in intent and effect genocide. I do see ways in which Biden's initial subservience is evolving into some kind of passive-aggressive resistance. Rather than denounce Israel for making reasonable aid possible, Biden has challenged Israel to spell out what they would allow, and agreed even as these schemes are patently ridiculous. It's only a matter of time until Israel starts attacking American aid providers. For another piece:

  • Zack Beauchamp: [03-08] Are Biden and the Democrats finally turning on Israel? "Biden's new plan to build a pier on the Gaza coast seems to say yes. The continued military aid to Israel says otherwise."

Biden's State of the Union speech: A section for everything else related, including official and unofficial Republican responses:

Biden and/or the Democrats:

Legal matters and other crimes:

  • Elie Honig: [03-08] Biden's looming nightmare pardons: Ever since this "former federal and state prosecutor" started writing for Intelligencer, his pieces have sounded like stealth briefs from the Trump legal team, even if not things they would actually want to own. This one at least assumes things not yet in evidence: that Trump is actually tried and convicted and sentenced to jail time -- the power may be to pardon, but all he's asking for is commutation of prison time, not full pardons. As that's increasingly unlikely before November, the assumption may also be that Biden wins then, so has some breathing room before having to consider the issue, which would leave plenty of time for this discussion, unlike now.

  • Josh Kovensky: [03-05] Feds slap 12 new counts on Bob 'Gold Bars' Menendez: Senator (D-NJ).

  • Ian Millhiser: [03-10] Do Americans still have a right to privacy? "With courts coming for abortion and IVF, it's hard not to wonder what the Supreme Court will go after next."

Climate, environment, and energy:

Ukraine War:

Around the world:


Other stories:

Michelle Alexander: [03-08] Only revolutionary love can save us now: "Martin Luther King Jr's 1967 speech condemning the Vietnam War offers a powerful moral compass as we face the challenges of our time."

Indivar Dutta-Gupta/Korian Warren: [03-04] The war on poverty wasn't enough: "While Lyndon B Johnson's effort made some lasting impacts, the United States still has some of the highest rates of nonelderly poverty among wealthy nations." As the article notes, Johnson's programs brought big improvements, but the Vietnam War hurt him politically, and his successors lost interest: e.g., Nixon's appointment of Donald Rumsfeld to run the Office of Economic Opportunity. And while Republicans deserve much of the blame, Democrats like Daniel Moynahan and Bill Clinton were often as bad, sometimes worse.

Henry Farrell: [02-27] Dr. Pangloss's Panopticon: A very thoughtful critique of Noah Smith's "quite negative review of a recent book by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity. There are complex issues at dispute here, many much more interesting than those that dominate this (and all recent) posts. Dr. Pangloss (from Voltaire) stands in for techno-optimism: the idea that unfettered innovation, accelerated as it is through modern venture capitalism, promises to deliver ever-improving worlds. Panopticon (from Jeremy Bentham) is an early form of mass surveillance, a capability that technology has done much to develop recently, with AI promising a breakthrough to the bottleneck problem (the time and people you need to surveil other people).

Luke Goldstein: [02-23] Crunch time for government spying: "Congress has a few weeks left until a key spying provision sunsets. Both reformers and intelligence hawks are plotting their strategies."

Oshan Jarow: [03-08] The world's mental health is in rough shape -- and not getting any better: "Guess where the US ranks?"

Sarah Kaplan: [03-06] Are we living in an 'Age of Humans'? Geologists say no. A recent proposal for delineating a stratigraphic boundary for the Anthropocene, based on "a plume of radioactive plutonium that circled around the world" in 1952, was proposed recently and, at least for now, voted down. More:

Alvaro Lopez: [03-08] The making of Frantz Fanon: Review of Adam Shatz's new book, The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. Also:

Rick Perlstein: [03-06] The spectacle of policing: "'Swatting' innocent people is the latest incarnation of the decades-long gestation of an infrastructure of fear."

Dave Phillipps: [03-06] Profound damage found in Maine gunman's brain, possibly from blasts: "A laboratory found a pattern of cell damage that has been seen in veterans exposed to weapons blasts, and said it probably played a role in symptoms the gunman displayed before the shooting." Robert Card was a grenade instructor in the Army Reserve for eight years. He went on to shoot and kill 18 people and himself. Something not yet factored into the "Costs of War" accounting. Another report:

Jeffrey St Clair: [03-08] Roaming Charges: Too obvious to be real.


I ran across a link to this David Brooks [02-08]: Trump came for their party but took over their souls. A normal person would have little trouble writing a column under that headline. Even Brooks hits some obvious points, like: "Democracy is for suckers"; "Entertainment over governance"; and "Lying is normal." But the one that really upsets Brooks is: "America would be better off in a post-American world." The other maxim that Brooks castigates Trump for is "Foreigners don't matter." This leads to his rant against "isolationism," which inevitably devolves into invoking the spectre of Neville Chamberlain.

Brooks celebrates the triumph of Eisenhower over Taft in 1952, when "the GOP became an internationalist party and largely remained that way for six decades" -- glorious years that spread capitalist exploitation to the far corners of the globe, transforming colonies into cronies ruled by debt penury, policed by "forever wars" and, wherever the occasion arose, ruthless counterrevolutions and civil wars.

Meanwhile, instead of enjoying the wealth this foreign policy generated, America's middle class -- the solid burghers and union workers who, as Harry Truman put it, "voted Democratic to live like Republicans" -- got ground down into their own penury. The Cold War was always as much about fighting democracy at home as it was about denying socialism abroad, much as the "war on terror" was mostly just an authoritarian tantrum directed against anyone who failed to submit to America's globe-spanning military colossus.

Sure, it is an irony that blows Brooks' mind that it now seems to be the Republicans -- the party that most celebrates rapacious capitalism, is most devoutly committed to authoritarian rule, and whose people are most callously indifferent to the cries of those harmed by their greed -- should be the first give up on the game.

Of course, they weren't. The left, or "premature antifascists" (as the OSS referred to us in the 1940s, before "communists and fellow travelers" proved to be a more effective slur), knew this all along, but that insight came from caring about what happens to others, and solidarity in what we sensed was a common struggle. It took Republicans much longer to realize that globalized capitalism, under the aegis of American military power, not only didn't work for them personally, but that it directly led to jobs moving overseas, and all kinds of foreigners flooding America. And since Republicans had put so much propaganda effort into stoking racism and reaction, not least by blaming Democrats (with their "open borders" and focus on wars as "humanitarian") for loving foreigners more than their own people.

I was pointed to Brooks' piece by a pair of tweets: Simon Schama linked, adding: "Heartfelt obituary by David Brooks for the expiring of last vestiges of the Republican Party. No longer has supporters but 'an audience.' Lying normalised. Total abandonment of internationalism." To which, Sam Hasselby added:

People have really memory-holed the whole Iraq catastrophe which is in fact what normalized a new scale of lying and impunity in American politics. It was also a lie which cost $7 trillion dollars, killed one million innocent Iraqis, and displaced 37 million people.

Yet Iraq War boosters like Brooks still have major mainstream media gigs, while Adam Schiff trounced Barbara Lee (the only member of Congress to vote against the whole War on Terror) in a Democratic primary, and Joe Biden became president -- finally giving up the 20-year disaster in Afghanistan, only to wholeheartedly embrace new, but already even more disastrous, wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

Saturday, March 09, 2024

Daily Log

Cloudland Blue Quartet published a "#13at13" list: "Here are 13 of the 16 LPS I owned at the age of 13. No wonder I am warped . . ." As best I can make out:

  • The Animals: The Most of the Animals
  • The Who: A Quick One
  • Various Artists: Fill Your Head With Rock
  • Various Composers: The World of Your Hundred Best Things
  • Alice Cooper: Love It to Death
  • The Rolling Stones: Gimme Shelter (Live)
  • Black Widow: Black Widow III
  • Hawkwind: Doremi Fasol Latido
  • Mott the Hoople: All the Young Dudes
  • T Rex: Ride a White Swan
  • Uriah Heep: Demons and Wizards
  • Uriah Heep: Magician's Birthday
  • Alice Cooper: Billion Dollar Babies

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Daily Log

I got this message via Facebook from Ken Brown:

Tom - since you know by far the most about the Brown family, I have a question: someone once told me that the Brown boys went to school until they were old enough to pick cotton, and they then picked cotton until they were old enough to run away from home. So, my dad maybe only went to the 5th or 6th grade? What do you know? I do have some letters that my dad wrote to my mom - and you can barely read the handwriting.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, March archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 38 albums, 5 A-list

Music: Current count 41938 [41900] rated (+38), 21 [22] unrated (-1).

I'm having a rough time getting anything done, which is my best explanation for wasting most of last week on a still-unfinished Speaking of Which -- posted well after midnight last, with a few further adds flagged today. The most important add is the link to Pankaj Mishra's The Shoah after Gaza (also on YouTube).

I've neglected pretty much everything and everyone else. My apologies to anyone expecting a response from me. As I must have noted already, I gave myself a month to write a quick, very rough draft of my long gestating political book, with the promise that if I couldn't pull it off, I'd shelve the idea once and for all, and spend my waning days reading fiction -- forty years later, I still have a bookmark 300 pages into Gravity's Rainbow, and enough recollection I'm not sure I'll have to retrace -- while slipping in the occasional old movie and dawdling with jigsaw puzzles (ok, I'm already doing the latter). I certainly wouldn't have to plow through any nonfiction that might be construed as research -- e.g., a couple items currently on the proverbial night stand: Franklin Foer's book on Biden, or Judis/Teixeira on the missing Democrats.

That month was supposed to be January, but the Jazz Critics Poll and EOY lists lapped over without me starting, so I decided I'd give it February. I still have no more than a fragment of a letter stashed away in a notebook entry, so the obvious thing to do at this point is admit failure, and be done with it. Aside from easing my mind -- the last six months have been unbearably gloomy for my politics, my prognostications turning markedly dystopian -- ditching politics might be good news for those of you more interested in my writing on music.

Two small projects that I've also neglected are: a thorough review of the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll website, which is missing some unknown quantity of historical material (hopefully Davis has it stashed away), and needs some modernization; I'm also behind on maintenance, not to mention the long-promised redesign, of the Robert Christgau website. It would also make sense to reorganize my own data along those same lines, as even now it's virtually impossible for even me to look up what I've written about any musician.

I also have neglected house projects: the most pressing of which is the imminent collapse of a chunk of ceiling in my wife's study room. I used to be pretty competent at carpentry and home improvement tasks. About all I can claim to have managed in the last month has been replacement of two light bulbs, which took me weeks (in my defense, both involved ladders and unconventional sockets).

Nothing special to say about this week's music. A copy of the year 2023 list has been frozen, but I am still adding occasional records to my tracking file, jazz and non-jazz EOY lists, and EOY aggregate, but mostly just my own belatedly graded items. But I'm not very focused on what I'm listening to, and often get stuck wondering what to play next. I can't say I've reached the point of not caring, but I'm getting there.

My most played record of the last couple weeks is The R&B No. 1s of the '50s, especially the final disc, which has left me with Lloyd Price's "I'm Gonna Get Married" as the ultimate earworm. I should probably bump the whole set up to full A. I played the last three discs while cooking on Saturday, and I'm satisfied with them. Then I started Sunday and Monday with disc 6. As this post lapsed into Tuesday, I was tempted again, but had unfinished Vijay Iyer queued up.

Found this in a Facebook comment: "I'm not sure keeping up with Tom Hull is possible. The very thought makes my synapses cry out, 'no mas, no mas.'" But from my view, they really just keep coming poco a poco. During the long delay from listing out this file to posting it -- mostly spent on the Speaking of Which intro -- I only managed to collect four more reviews for next week: two marginally A- jazz albums (Joel Ross, John Surman), and two more marginally below A- (Vijay Iyer, Emile Parisien).


New records reviewed this week:

  • Black Art Jazz Collective: Truth to Power (2024, HighNote): [sp]: B
  • The Choir Invisible [Charlotte Greve/Vinnie Sperazza/Chris Tordini]: Town of Two Faces (2022 [2024], Intakt): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Djeli Moussa Condé: Africa Mama (2023, Accords Croises): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Gui Duvignau/Jacob Sacks/Nathan Ellman-Bell: Live in Red Hook (2022 [2024], Sunnyside): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Alon Farber Hagiga With Dave Douglas: The Magician: Live in Jerusalem (2023 [2024], Origin): [cd]: B+(***)
  • R.A.P. Ferreira & Fumitake Tamura: The First Fist to Make Contact When We Dap (2024, Ruby Yacht): [sp]: B+(***)
  • David Friesen: This Light Has No Darkness (2023 [2024], Origin): [cd]: B
  • The Fully Celebrated Orchestra: Sob Story (2023 [2024], Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Vanisha Gould and Chris McCarthy: Life's a Gig (2022 [2024], Fresh Sound New Talent): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Heems & Lapgan: Lafandar (2024, Veena Sounds): [sp]: A
  • Katy Kirby: Blue Raspberry (2024, Anti-): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Lapgan: History (2023, Veena Sounds): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Lapgan: Duniya Kya Hai (2021, Veena Sounds): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Lapgan: Badmaash (2019, self-released): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Les Amazones d'Afrique: Musow Danse (2024, Real World): [sp]: B+(***)
  • James Brandon Lewis Quartet: Transfiguration (2022 [2024], Intakt): [sp]: A-
  • Cecilia Lopez & Ingrid Laubrock: Maromas (2022 [2023], Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Corb Lund: El Viejo (2024, New West): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Brady Lux: Ain't Gone So Far (2024, 6483357 DK): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Mali Obomsawin/Magdalena Abrego: Greatest Hits (2024, Out Of Your Head): [bc]: B+(**)
  • QOW Trio: The Hold Up (2024, Ubuntu Music): [sp]: A-
  • Zach Rich: Solidarity (2021 [2024], OA2): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Dex Romweber: Good Thing Goin' (2023, Propeller Sound): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Ignaz Schick/Oliver Steidle: Ilog3 (2021 [2023], Zarek): [bc]:" B+(***)
  • Fie Schouten/Vincent Courtois/Guus Janssen: Vostok: Remote Islands (2023, Relative Pitch): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Håkon Skogstad: 8 Concepts of Tango (2023 [2024], Øra Fonogram): B+(*) [03-15]
  • Simon Spiess Quiet Tree: Euphorbia (2022 [2024], Intakt): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Sleater-Kinney: Little Rope (2024, Loma Vista): [sp]: B
  • Albert Vila Trio: Reality Is Nuance (2022 [2023], Fresh Sound New Talent): [sp]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Roberto Magris: Love Is Passing Thru: Solo/Duo/Trio/Quartet (2004 [2024], JMood): [cd]: A-
  • Jack Wood: The Gal That Got Away: The Best of Jack Wood, Featuring Guest Niehaud Fitzgibbon ([2024], Jazz Hang): [cd] [03-29]

Old music:

  • Gigi: Gigi (2001, Palm Pictures): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Gigi: Illuminated Audio (2003, Palm Pictures): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Gigi: Gold & Wax (2006, Palm Pictures): [sp]: A-
  • Barney McAll: Precious Energy (2022, Extra Celestial Arts): [sp]: B
  • Pajama Party: Up All Night (1989, Atlantic): [sp]: B+(**)
  • QOW Trio: QOW Trio (2020, Ubuntu Music): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Stacey Q: Greatest Hits (1982-95 [1995], Thump): [sp]: B+(***)
  • SSQ: Playback (1983, Enigma): [sp]: B+(**)
  • SSQ: Jet Town Je T'Aime (2020, Synthicide): [sp]: B+(*)


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Guillermo Gregorio: Two Trios (ESP-Disk) [2023-12-01]
  • Mercer Hassy Orchestra: Duke's Place (Mercer Hassy) [04-15)
  • Ellie Lee: Escape (self-released) [05-24]
  • Matthew Shipp Trio: New Concepts in Piano Trio Jazz (ESP-Disk) [04-05]
  • Ronny Smith: Struttin' (Pacific Coast Jazz) [04-19]

Sunday, March 03, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

I started this early, on Wednesday, maybe even Tuesday, as I couldn't bring myself to work on anything else. There's a rhythm here: I have twenty-some tabs open to my usual sources, and just cycle through them, picking out stories, noting them, sometimes adding a comment, some potentially long. By Friday night, I had so much, I thought of posting early: leaving the date set for Sunday, when I could do a bit of update.

I didn't get the early post done. Sunday, my wife invited some friends over to watch a movie. I volunteered to make dinner, and that (plus the movie) killed the rest of the day. Nothing fancy: I keep all the fixings for pad thai on hand, so I can knock off a pretty decent one-dish meal in little more than an hour. And I had been thinking about making hot and sour soup since noticing a long-neglected package of dried lily buds, so I made that too. First actual cooking I had done in at least a month, so that felt nice and productive.

This, of course, feels totally scattered. I'm unsure of the groupings, and it's hard for me to keep track of the redundancies and contradictions. And once again, I didn't manage to finish my rounds. Perhaps I'll add a bit more after initially posting it late Sunday night. But at the moment, I'm exhausted.


My wife mentioned an article to me that I should have tracked down earlier, but can only mention here: Pankaj Mishra: [03-07] The Shoah after Gaza. Mishra grew up in a "family of upper-caste Hindu nationalists in India," deeply sympathetic to Israel, so his piece offers a slightly distant parallel to what many of us who started sympathetic only to become dismayed and ultimately appalled by what Israel has turned into. Beyond that, the piece is valuable as a history of how the Nazi Judeocide -- to borrow Arno Mayer's more plainly factual term in lieu of Holocaust or Shoah -- has been forged into a cudgel for beating down anyone who so much as questions let alone challenges the supremacy of Israeli power.

There is also a YouTube video of Mishra's piece.

On Facebook, I ran across this quote attributed to Carolina Landsmann in Haaretz:

We (Israelis) continue to approach the world from the position of victim, ignoring the 30,000 dead in Gaza, including 12,000 children, assuming that the world is still captive to its historic guilt toward Israel without understanding that this is over. The era of the Holocaust has ended. The Palestinians are now the wretched of the earth.

It's impossible to go back to the pre-Oct 7 world. To the blame economy between the Jews and the world, which gave the former moral immunity. Enough; it's over. Every era draws to a close. The time has come to grow up.

There was a time, and not that long ago, when I still thought that the experience of victimhood would still temper the exercise of Israeli power: sure, Israel was systematically oppressive, and Israeli society was riddled with the ethnocentrism we Americans understand as racism, but surely they still had enough of a grip on their humanity to stop short of genocide. That's all changed now, and it's coming as quite a shock -- no doubt to many Israelis as they look at their neighbors, but even more so to Americans (not just Jews but also many liberals who have long counted on Jews as allies).

It's hard to know what to do these days, beyond the call for an immediate and unconditional ceasefire, and the constant need to remind anyone who's still echoing the Israeli hasbara that it's genocide, and by not opposing it, they're complicit. It may be unfair to go so far as to make placards about "Genocide Joe" -- he's just in thrall, having fully adapted to the peculiar gravity of the Israel lobby when he arrived in Washington fifty years ago -- as there is still a difference (maybe not practical, but certainly in spirit) between him and the people in Israel (and some Republicans in Congress) who really are committed to genocide. But in times like this, nice sentiments don't count for much.

Another important piece I noticed but skipped over on Sunday: Aaron Gell: [03-03] Has Zionism lost the argument? "American Jews' long-standing consensus about Israel has fractured. There may be no going back." There is a lot to unpack here. It's worth your time to read the interview with Ruth Wisse, with her absolutist defense of Israel, then the digression where the author considers the charge that Jews who doubt Israel are becoming non-Jews, ending in a reference to the Mishnah, specifically "by far the hardest to answer: If I am only for myself, who am I? Many Zionists long justified their project as providing a haven from anti-semitism, but their exclusive focus on their own issues, turning into indifference or worse towards everyone else, has finally turned Israel into the world's leading generator of anti-semitism.

Wisse insists that "the creation of the state changes the entire picture, because now to be anti-Zionist is a genocidal concept. If you're an anti-Zionist, you're against the existence of Israel . . . the realized homeland of nine million people." But later on, Gell notes: "I've spoken to dozens of anti-Zionists over the past few months, and not a single one thought Israel should cease to exist." They have various ideas of how this could be done, in part because they've seen it work here:

American Jews are justifiably proud to live in a successful multiethnic democracy, imperfect though it is. As citizens of a nation in which Jews are a distinct minority, we owe our well-being, our prosperity, and, yes, perhaps our existence to the tolerance, openness, and egalitarianism of our system of government and our neighbors. No wonder we shudder at Israel's chauvinism, its exclusionary nationalism, its oppression. It's all too obvious how we'd fare if the United States followed Israel's lead in reserving power for an ethnic or religious majority. Seen in this light, what's surprising isn't that some American Jews are anti-Zionists; it's that many more aren't.

I've been reading Shlomo Avineri's 1981 book (paperback updated with a new preface and epilogue 2017), The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, which offers a highly sympathetic survey of most of the reasons people have come up with to justify and promote Zionism. I'm still in the last profile chapter, on David Ben Gurion, before the initial epilogue, "Zionism as a Permanent Revolution." Immediately previous were chapters on Jabotinsky (who built a cult of power based on fascist models and used it to flip the script on race, promoting Jews as the superior one) and Rabbi Kook (who reformulated Zionism as God's will).

Ben Gurion's major contribution was the doctrine of "Hebrew labor," where Jews would fill all economic niches in the economy, leaving native Palestinians excluded and powerless. This was a significant change from the usual practice of settler colonialism, which everywhere else depended on impoverished locals for labor. Ben Gurion's union bound Jews into a coherent, self-contained, mutual help society, including its own militia, well before it was possible to call itself a state. But in doing so, he excluded the Palestinians, and plotted their expulsion -- his endorsement of the 1937 Peel Commission plan, his campaign for the UN partition plan, and finally his "War of Independence," remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba.

Ben Gurion was an enormously talented political figure, and his establishment of Israel through the 1950 armistices, the citizenship act, and the law of return, was a remarkable achievement against very stiff odds. He might have gotten away with it, but he couldn't leave well enough alone. He always wanted more, and he cultivated that trait in his followers. And while he feared the 1967 war, his followers launched it anyway, and in the end -- even as his fears had proven well founded -- he delighted in it. Like Mao, he so loved his revolution he kept revitalizing it, oblivious to the tragedy it caused. I expect the book, with its "permanent revolution" epilogues, will end on that note.

There is a lot of wishful thinking in the early parts of Avineri's book -- most obviously, Herzl's fairy-tale liberalism, but also the socialism of Syrkin and Borochov, which could have been developed further in later years, but it's appropriate to end as it does, with the real Israeli state. Great as he was, Ben Gurion made mistakes, and in the end the most fateful was allowing Jabotinsky and Kook, or more precisely their followers, into the inner sanctumm, from which they eventually prevailed in shaping Israel into the genocidal juggernaut it has become. The path from Jabotinsky to Netanyahu is remarkably short, passing straight through the former's secretary, the same as the latter's father. The other intermediaries were Ben Gurion's rivals of 1948, Begin and Shamir, who became favored tools in driving the Palestinians into exile, and future prime ministers.

Less obvious was Ben Gurion's decision to invite the Kookists into government, but what politician doesn't want to be reassured that God is on his side? Rabbi Kook was succeeded by his son, Zvi Yehuda Kook, whose Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) was the driving force behind the West Bank settlements, leading directly to Smotrich and Ben Gvir. The first casualty in Ben Gurion's schemes was the socialism that unified the Yishuv in the first place. That was what gave Israel its foundational sense of justice, a reputation that is now nothing but ruins.


Initial count: 174 links, 8,842 words. Updated count [03-05]: 193 links, 10,883 words.


Top story threads:

Israel:

Israel vs. world (including American) opinion: This week we lead off with a singular act of self-sacrifice, by an American, an active duty serviceman, Aaron Bushnell, in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington. I feel like I should add an opinion, but I don't really have one. My inclination is to view him as just another casualty of the more general madness, so not a hero or martyr or even a fool, but I'm also not so callous as to look the other way -- especially when so many people do have things to say.

Other stories:

  • Spencer Ackerman: [03-28] The anti-Palestinian origins of the War on Terror: Interview with Darryl Li, who wrote the report Anti-Palestinian at the core: The origins and growing dangers of US anti-terrorism law.

  • Ammiel Alcalay: [02-28] War on Gaza: How the US is buying time for Israel's genocide: "As the US ambassador to the UN recently made clear in a rare moment of honesty, Washington is fully committed to facilitating Israel's destruction of the Palestinians."

  • Kyle Anzalone: [03-01] US vetoes UN resolution condemning Israel for flour massacre.

  • Muhannad Ayyash: [02-26] Boycotting Israel could stop the genocide: At this point, this is probably just wishful thinking: "the world must ensure Tel Aviv's legal, economic and political isolation." The nice thing about BDS was that it provided a forum for grass-roots organizing against the apartheid regime in Israel: something that individuals could start and grow, and eventually recruit more powerful organizations, while ultimately appealing to the better consciences within Israel itself. That it worked with South Africa was encouraging.

    But it was always going to be a much more difficult reach in Israel -- I could insert a half-dozen reasons here -- and it never came close to gathering the collective moral, let alone financial, force it had with South Africa. Now, about all you can say for it is that it allowed people of good will to express their disapproval without promoting even more violence. I would even agree that it's still worth doing -- Israel deserves to be shamed and shunned for what it's doing, now more than ever. And, as we witness what Israel is doing, many more people, indeed whole nations, may join us.

    But will boycotting stop the genocide now? Maybe if the US and NATO banded together and put some serious teeth in their threats, some Israelis might reconsider. But sanctions usually just push countries deeper into corners, from which they're more likely to strike back than to fold. I'm not about to blame BDS for Israel's rampant right-wing -- their racism dates back further than any outsider noticed -- but they would claim their ascent as the way of fighting back against foreign moralizers. Even if we could count on eventually forcing some kind of reconciliation, the people in power in Israel right now are more likely to double down on genocide. It's not like anyone in the Nazi hierarchy saw the writing on the wall after Stalingrad and decided they should call the Judeocide off, lest they eventually put on trial. They simply sped up the extermination, figuring it would be their enduring contribution to Aryan civilization.

    • Jo-Ann Mort: [02-28] BDS is counter-productive. We need to crack down on Israeli settlements instead: "A future peace depends on drawing a line between Israel proper and the illegal settlements in Palestinian territory." This article is so silly I only linked to it after the Ayyash piece above. It does provide some explanation why BDS failed, but it doesn't come close to offering an alternative. Israel has been continuously blurring and outright erasing the Green Line ever since 1967. (It started with he demolition of the neighborhood next to the Al-Aqsa Mosque's western wall, just days after the 7-day war ended.) There is no way to force Israel to do much of anything, but few things are harder to imagine them acceding to is a return to what from 1950-67 were often decried as "Auschwitz borders."

  • Phyllis Bennis:

  • Amena ElAshkar: [02-28] Gaza ceasefire: Talk of an imminent deal is psychological warfare. I haven't bothered linking to numerous articles about an imminent ceasefire deal because, quite frankly, possible deals have never been more than temporarily expedient propaganda, mostly meant to humor the hostage relatives and the Americans. If Israel wanted peace, they could ceasefire unilaterally, and having satisfied themselves that they had inflicted sufficient damage to restore their Iron Wall deterrence, leave the rubble to others to deal with. The hostages would cease to be a bargaining chip, except inasmuch as not freeing them would keep much needed international aid away. So why is Netanyahu negotiating with Hamas? Mostly to squirrel the deal, while he continues implementing his plan to totally depopulate/destroy Gaza.

  • Paul Elle: [02-26] The Vatican and the war in Gaza: "A rhetorical dispute the Church and the Israeli government shows the limits -- and the possibilities -- of the Pope's role in times of conflict." On the other hand, if you look at the Pope's recent comments on "gender theory," you'll realize that he has very little to offer humanity, and that a Church that follows him could be very ominous. (For example, see [03-02] Pope says gender theory is 'ugly ideology' that threatens humanity.) Sometimes I'm tempted to take heart in that the Catholic Church is one of the few extant organizations to predate, and therefore remain somewhat free of, capitalism. But in it the spirit of Inquisition runs even deeper.

  • Madeline Hall: [02-28] Israeli genocide is a bad investment: For one thing, Norway has divested its holdings of Israeli bonds.

  • James North:

  • Peter Oborne: [02-27] These ruthless, bigoted Tories would have Enoch Powell smiling from his grave: "The recent spate of vile anti-Muslim rhetoric from the Tories shows they have decided that stoking hatred against minorities is their only way to avoid electoral annihilation." Also in UK:

  • Charles P Pierce: [02-29] The US has enabled Netanyahu long enough: "Two democracies, hijacked for alibis."

  • Vijay Prashad: [02-14] There is no place for the Palestinians of Gaza to go.

  • Barnett R Rubin: [03-02] Redemption through genocide: "The ICJ ruled that Israel's Gaza campaign poses a plausible and urgent threat of genocide. Future historians of Jewish messianism may recount how in 2024 "redemption through sin" became "redemption through genocide," with unconditional US support."

  • Sarang Shidore/Dan M Ford: [02-29] At the Hague, US more isolated than ever on Israel-Palestine.

  • Adam Taylor: [02-29] Democrats grew more divided on Israeli-Palestinian conflict, poll shows. Interesting that the Democratic split has always favored "take neither side," from a peak of 82% down to 74% before Gaza blew up -- the 12% drop since looks to be evenly split. Republicans, on the other hand, never had any sympathy for Palestinians, and became more pro-Israeli since (56% would "take Israel's side," vs. 19% for Democrats).

  • Philip Weiss: [02-28] PBS and NPR leave out key facts in their Israel stories: "Pundits and reporters in the mainstream media have a double standard when it comes to Israel and all but lie about apartheid, Jewish nationalism, and the role of the Israel lobby."

America's empire of bases and proxy conflicts, increasingly stressed by Israel's multifront war games:

  • Juan Cole: [03-03] How Washington's anti-Iranian campaign failed, big time.

  • Dave DeCamp: [02-29] US officials expect Israel to launch ground invasion of Lebanon: "Administration officials tell CNN they expect a ground incursion in late spring or early summer." The logic here is pretty ridiculous, and if it's believed in Washington, you have to wonder about them, too. Israel had a lot of fun bombing Lebanon in 2006, but their ground incursion was a pure disaster. There's no possible upside to trying it again. The argument that Netanyahu will, for political expediency, enlarge the war in order to keep it going "after Gaza," overlooks their obvious desire to "finish the job" by doing the same to Palestinian enclaves in the West Bank.

  • Sasha Filippova/Kristina Fried/Brian Concannon: [03-01] From coup to chaos: 20 years after the US ousted Haiti's president.

  • Jim Lobe: [03-01] Neocon Iraq war architects want a redo in Gaza: "Post-conflict plan would put Western mercenaries and Israel military into the mix, with handpicked countries in charge of a governing 'Trust.'" Pic is of Elliott Abrams, who was the one in charge of US Israel policy under Bush, and who pushed Sharon's unilateral withdrawal of settlements from Gaza, so that Gaza could be blockaded and bombed more effectively. That directly led to Hamas seizing power in Gaza, so one could argue that Abrams already had his "redo in Gaza."

The Michigan primaries: Of minor interest to both party frontrunners, so let's get them out of the way first. Trump won the Republican primary with 68.1% of the votes, vs. 26.6% for Nikki Haley, splitting the delegates 12-4 (39 more delegates will be decided later). Biden won the Democratic primary with 81.1% of the vote, vs. 13.2% for an uncommitted slate, which was promoted by Arab-Americans and others as a protest vote against Biden's support for Israel's genocide in Gaza. Marianne Williamson got 3%, and Dean Phillips 2.7%. Everyone's trying to spin the results as much as possible, but I doubt they mean much.

Next up is "Super Tuesday," so here's a bit of preview:

Trump, and other Republicans:

Mitch McConnell, 82, announced he will step down as Republican Leader in the Senate in November. This led to some, uh, appreciation?

  • Ryan Cooper: [02-29] Mitch McConnell, Senate arsonist.

  • Jack Hunter: [02-29] Sorry AP: Mitch McConnell is no Ronald Reagan: "The paper deploys the usual neoconservative trope that their foreign policies are the same. They are not." Still, I hate it when critics think they're being so clever in claiming that old Republicans were so sensible compared to the new ones. Reagan's "willingness to talk to America's enemies" didn't extend much beyond Russia, and that only after the door had been opened by Gorbachev. He left nothing but disasters all over Latin America and the Middle East through Iran and Afghanistan.

  • Ed Kilgore: [02-29] Mitch McConnell's power trip finally comes to an end.

  • Ian Millhiser: [02-29] How Mitch McConnell broke Congress.

  • John Nichols: [02-29] Good riddance to Mitch McConnell, an enemy of democracy: Sorry to have to break this to you, but he isn't going anywhere. He'll serve out the rest of his six-year term. He's not giving up his leadership post out of a sudden attack of conscience. He's doing it so some other Republican can take over, and possibly do even worse things than he would have done. By holding out until November, he's giving Trump the prerogative of hand-picking his successor -- assuming Trump wins, of course.

  • David A Graham: Mitch McConnell surrenders to Trump: That's more like it, but at least he's given himself some time. If Trump wins in November, there'll be no fighting him. And if Trump loses, why should he want to be the one stuck cleaning up the mess?

  • Andrew Prokop: [02-28] How Mitch McConnell lost by winning.

  • Jane Mayer: [2020-04-12] How Mitch McConnell became Trump's enabler-in-chief: Sometimes an old piece is the best reminder. Had McConnell a bit more foresight and backbone, he could have swung enough Republican votes to convict Trump over Jan. 6, and followed that with a resolution declaring Trump ineligible to run again, according to the 14th Amendment -- such a resolution was discussed at the time, and would undoubtedly be upheld. Sure, it would have been unpopular among Republicans at the time, but popular will has almost never entered into McConnell's political calculus.

Biden and/or the Democrats:

  • Zack Beauchamp: [02-27] Biden has been bad for Palestinians. Trump would be worse. "On Israel, the two are not the same." Probably true, but this really isn't much comfort. Biden is effectively an Israeli puppet, with no independent will, or even willingness to caution Netanyahu in public, and as such has had no effect on moderating Israel's vendetta -- and may reasonably be charged with not just supporting but accelerating it. For instance, Biden did not have to send aircraft carriers into the region, threatening Iran and provoking Yemen and Lebanon. Nor did he have to accelerate arms deliveries when a ceasefire was obviously called for. As for Trump, sure, he doesn't even know the meaning of "caution." He is largely responsible for Netanyahu believing that he can get away with anything.

    • Dave DeCamp: [03-03] Poll: Majority of Democrats want a presidential candidate who opposes military aid to Israel: With Marianne Williamson unsuspending her campaign, there actually is one, but will anyone find out?

    • Isaac Chotiner: [02-28] Does the Biden administration want a long-lasting ceasefire in Gaza? Interview with John Kirby, Biden's National Security Council spokesman, explaining that Biden only wants whatever Netanyahu tells him to want. It's like a form of hypnosis, where Hamas is the shiny object that so captures America's gaze that it will support Israel doing anything to it wants as long as it's saying it's meant to eliminate Hamas. Sure, Biden understands that Palestinians are suffering, and he implores Netanyahu to make them suffer less, but he can't question his orders.

      The key to this is that he buys the line that Hamas is a cancer that can be excised from the Palestinian body politic, allowing Israel to regain its security. I hesitate to call that the Israeli line: sure, they developed it with their targeted assassinations (they go back at least as far as Abu Jihad in 1988), but Israelis never claimed one strike would suffice -- they tended to use metaphors like "mowing the grass"). It was only the Americans, with their romantic conceits about their own goodness and the innate innocence of ignorant savages, that turned this systematic slaughter into magical thinking. Israelis don't think like that. They understand that Hamas (or some other form of militant backlash) is the inevitable result of their harsh occupation. And, their consciences hardened by constant struggle (including their carefully cultivated memory of the Holocaust), they're willing to live with that brutality.

      If they can't distinguish Hamas from the mass of people they've emerged from, they see no reason to discipline their killing. They figure if they destroy enough, the problem will subside. Even if it inevitably erupts again, that's later, and they'll remain eternally vigilant. There are no solutions, because they don't want to accept the only possible one, which is peaceful coexistence. But silly Americans, they need to be told stories, and it's amazing what they'll swallow.

    • Mitchell Plitnick: [03-01] Biden memos show Palestine advocacy is working: "Two recent presidential orders show the Biden administration is feeling the heat from months of protests against his support for Israel's genocide in Gaza."

    • Alexander Ward: [03-01] 'We look 100 percent weak': US airdrops in Gaza expose limit to Biden's Israel policy.

    • Fareed Zakaria: [03-01] Biden needs to tell Israel some difficult truths. Only he can do it.

    • Erica L Green: [03-03] Kamala Harris calls for an 'immediate cease-fire' in Gaza: Promising title, but fine print reveals it's only the "six-week cease-fire proposal currently on the table," and that she's calling on Hamas, not Israel, the ones who are actually doing all of the firing, and who have already broken off talks on that particular proposal. A cease fire, especially where the war is so one-sided, doesn't need to be negotiated: just do it (perhaps daring the other side to violate it, but the longer it lasts, the better). Sure, prisoner exchanges have to be negotiated, but not cease-fire, which is just common sense.

  • Frank Bruni: [03-03] How Democrats can win anywhere and everywhere.

  • Michelle Goldberg: [03-01] The Democrat showing Biden how it's done: Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan. This follows on recent columns by Goldberg:

  • Ezra Klein: [02-16] Democrats have a better option than Biden: Starts by heaping considerable praise on Biden and his accomplishments of the last three-plus years, then lowers the boom and insists that he should step aside, not so much because one reasonably doubts that he can do the job for more years, but that he's no longer competent as a candidate. (Never mind that Trump is far from competent, in any sense of the term. He's a Republican, and one of our many double standards, we don't expect competency from Republicans, or for that matter caring, or even much coherence.) He goes into how conventions work, and offers a bunch of plausible candidates. It's a long and thorough piece, and makes the case as credibly as I've seen (albeit much less critically of Biden than I might do myself).

    Klein's columns are styled as "The Ezra Klein Show," which are usually just interviews, but this one is monologue, with multiple references to other conversations. He's had a few other interviews recently with political operatives, a couple adding to his insight into Democratic prospects, plus a couple more I'll include here. (Also see the pieces I listed under Ukraine.)

  • Paul Musgrave: [03-03] An inside look at how Biden's team rebuilt foreign policy after Trump: Review of Alexander Ward: The Internationalists: The Fight to Restore American Foreign Policy After Trump.

  • Bill Scher: [02-29] "Nightmare in America": How Biden's ad team should attack Trump: "In 1984, Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign ran a series of ads that evoked how different life felt in America compared to under his opponent's administration four years prior. Today, Joe Biden should do the same." Sure, there's something to be said here, if you can figure out how to say it. But Trump's going to be pushing the opposite spin, in many cases on the same set of facts, all the while pointing out the extraordinary efforts his/your enemies took to hobnob his administration and persecute him since he was pushed out of office. He's just as likely to embrace the Left's notion of him as their worst nightmare. Note that page includes a link to a 2020 article, which also cites Reagan: Nancy LeTourneau: Are you better off than you were four years ago?

  • John E Schwarz: [03-01] Democratic presidents have better economic performances than Republican ones.

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Ukraine War:

  • Connor Echols: [03-01] Diplomacy Watch: Russia could be invited to Ukraine-led peace talks. I don't really buy that "Ukraine's shift is a sign of just how dire the situation is becoming for its armed forces," but I do believe that Russia can more/less hold its position indefinitely, that it can continue to exact high (and eventually crippling) costs from Ukraine indefinitely, and that it can survive the sanctions regime (which the US is unlikely to loosen even in an armistice. All of this suggests to me that Zelensky needs to approach some realistic terms for ending the war, then sell them as hard to his "allies" as to Putin, and to the rest of the world.

  • Anatol Lieven/George Beebe: [02-28] Europeans' last ditch clutch at Ukrainian victory: "France's Macron raised the idea of Western troops entering the fray, others want to send longer range missiles."

  • Olena Melnyhk/Sera Koulabdara: [02-29] Ukraine's vaunted 'bread basket' soil is now toxic: "Two years of war has left roughly one-third of its territory polluted, with dire potential consequences for the world's food supply."

  • Will Porter: [02-28] Russia claims first Abrams tank kill in Ukraine.

  • Ted Snider: [03-01] How the West provoked an unprovoked war in Ukraine. The ironies in the title at least merit quotes around "unprovoked." The important part of the story is the relatively underreported period from March, 2021 when Biden added $125 million of "defensive lethal weapons" on top of $150 million previously allocated under Trump, up to the eve of the March 2022 invasion, when "Putin called Ukraine 'a knife to the throat of Russia' and worried that 'Ukraine will serve as an advanced bridgehead' for a pre-emptive US strike against Russia." It is unlikely the US would ever launch such a strike, but Ukraine had by then given up on the Minsk accords and was preparing to take back Donbas. Had they succeeded, Crimea would be next, and that (plus excessive confidence in his own military) was enough for Putin to launch his own pre-emptive attack.

  • Marcus Stanley: [02-28] Biden officials want Russian frozen assets to fund Ukraine war: "Not only will this prolong the conflict, but rock confidence in the Western-led world economic system."

  • Ishaan Tharoor: [02-28] Foreign troops in Ukraine? They're already there.

  • Ezra Klein:

  • [2022-03-01] Can the West stop Russia by strangling its economy? Transcript of an interview with Adam Tooze, doesn't really answer the title question but does provide a pretty deep survey of Russia's economy at the start of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. One minor note: I think Tooze said "Kremlinologists" where you read "the criminologists of the modern day have five, six, seven, eight different groups now that they see operating around Putin."

    PS: Unrelated to Russia, but for another Klein interview with Tooze, see: [2022-10-07] How the Fed is "shaking the entire system".

Around the world:


Other stories:

Lori Aratani: [03-01] Boeing in talks to reacquire key 737 Max supplier Spirit AeroSystems: Boeing spun the company off in 2005, including the Wichita factory my father and brother worked at for decades.

Marina Bolotnikova/Kenny Torrella: [02-26] 9 charts that show US factory farming is even bigger than you realize: "Factory farms are now so big that we need a new word for them." Related here:

Rosa Brooks: [02-20] One hundred years of dictatorship worship: A review of a new book by Jacob Heilbrunn: America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance With Foreign Dictators [note: cover has it "America First" in large white type, then overprints "Last" in blockier red].

Daniel Denvir: [02-28] The libertarians who dream of a world without democracy: Interview with Quinn Slobodian, who wrote the 2018 book Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, and most recently, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.

Adam Gopnik: [02-19] Did the year 2020 change us forever? "The COVID-19 pandemic affected us in millions of ways. But it evades the meanings we want it to bear." A review, which I haven't finished (and may never) of the emerging, evolving literature on 2020.

Sean Illing: [03-03] Are we in the middle of an extinction panic? "How doomsday proclamations about AI echo existential anxieties of the past." Interview with Tyler Austin Harper, who wrote about this in the New York Times: The 100-year extinction panic is back, right on schedule. I could write a lot more on this, especially if I referred back to the extinction controversies paleontologists have been debating all along, but suffice it to say:

  • Short of the Sun exploding, there is zero chance of humans going extinct in the foreseeable future. People are too numerous, widespread, and flexible for anything to get all of us. (Side note: the effective altruist focus on preventing extinction events is misguided.)
  • Human population is, however, precariously balanced on a mix of technological, economic, political, and cultural factors which are increasingly fragile, and as such subject to sabotage and other disruptions (not least because they are often poorly understood). Any major breakdown could be catastrophic on a level that affects millions (though probably not billions) of people.
  • Catastrophes produce psychological shocks that can compound the damage. By far the greatest risk here is war, not just for its immediate destruction but because it makes recovery more difficult.
  • People are not very good at evaluating these risks, erring often both in exaggeration and denial.

The Times piece led to some others of interest here:

Chris Lehman: [03-01] Border hysteria is a bipartisan delusion: "Yesterday, both President Biden and Donald Trump visited Texas to promise harsher immigration policies."

Andrea Mazzarino: [02-27] War's cost is unfathomable. I mentioned this in an update last week, but it's worth mentioning again. She starts by referring to "The October 7th America has forgotten," which was 2001, when the US first bombed Afghanistan, following the Al-Qaeda attacks of that September 11. In 2010, Mazzarino founded the Cost of War Project, which, as economists are wont to do, started adding up whatever they could of the quantifiable costs of America's Global War on Terror and its spawn. Still, their figures (at least $8 trillion and counting, and with debt compounding) miss much of the real human (and environmental) costs, especially those that are primarily psychic.

For instance, would we have the gun problem that we have had we not been continuously at war for over two decades? Would our politics have turned so desperately war-like? Certainly, there would have been much less pressure to immigrate, given that war is the leading producer of refugees. Without constant jostling for military leverage, might we not have made more progress in dealing with problems like climate change? The list only grows from there.

One constant theme of every Speaking of Which is the need to put aside the pursuit of power over and against others and find mutual grounds that will allow us to work together cooperatively to deal with pressing problems. There are lots of reasons why this is true, starting with the basic fact that we could not exist in such numbers if not for a level of technology that is complex beyond most of our understandings and fragile, especially vulnerable to the people who feel most unjustly treated. Our very lives depend on experts who can be trusted, and their ability to work free of sabotage. You can derive all the politics you need from this insight.

Michelle Orange: [03-01] How the Village Voice met its moment: A review of Tricia Romano's The Freaks Came Out to Write, a new "oral history" (i.e., history presented in interview quotes). I rushed out and bought a copy, and should probably write my own review, even if only because she left me out. More:

Rick Perlstein: [02-28] Kissinger revisited: "The former secretary of state is responsible for virtually every American geopolitical disaster of the past half-century."

Deanne Stillman: [02-21] Mothers, sons, and guns: Author wrote a book about Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother, recounted here, in light of high school shooter Ethan Crumbley and his mother, Jennifer Crumbley, who was convicted for her role leading up to the shootings.

David Zipper: [03-01] Driving at ridiculous speeds should be physically impossible: As someone who grew up with a great love of auto racing, I'd argue that driving at ridiculous speeds has always been physically impossible, even as limits have expanded with better technology. Of course, "ridiculous" can mean many different things, but I'd say that's a reason not to try to legislate it. I've long thought that the 55 mph speed limit was the biggest political blunder the Democrats made, at least in my lifetime. (Aside from Vietnam.) Not only did it impose on personal freedom -- in a way that, say, European levels of gasoline taxes wouldn't have done -- but it induced some kind of brain rot in American auto engineering, from which Detroit may never have recovered. (I can't really say. After several bad experiences, I stopped buying their wares.)

Ironically, this political push for mandating "speed limiters" (even more euphemistically, "Intelligent Speed Assistance") on new cars is coming from tech businesses, who see surveillance of driving as a growth area for revenue. This fits in with much broader plans to increase surveillance -- mostly government, but it doesn't end there -- over every aspect of our lives. Supposedly, this will save lives, although the relationship between speeding and auto carnage has never been straightforward, and much more plausible arguments (e.g., on guns) go nowhere. My great fear here is that Democrats will rally to this as a public health and safety measure, inviting a backlash we can ill afford (as with the 55 mph speed limit, which helped elect Reagan).

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Daily Log

I woke up today early for me, a bit after nine, and read the chapter on Theodor Herzl in Shlomo Avineri's The Making of Modern Zionism. I tried going back to sleep, but never really made it, spending over an hour thinking, mostly about memoirs and the "obits" piece, which turned into an idea that I figure I should write down, a possible chapter for my "Utopian Essays & Practical Proposals" file (UEPP).

The idea is to build a "national registry": database, servers, and tools, all built and paid for by the government, using open source software. This would tie into several other UEPP topics, including: subsidized open source development; universal free computing infrastructure, with secure identification and strict protocols on privacy and tracking; and various applications that can be build thereupon. The Registry is an example of the latter.

Needless to say, in order for any of this to work, government has to become much more trustworthy than it is now, or might ever be as long as businesses and/or political organizations are allowed to shape and exploit technology for their own gain. That is a daunting challenge in its own right, so will largely be glossed over here. But I will say that the ability to implement proposals like this one, and have them accepted and used by large numbers of people, not only depends on much greater trustworthiness, it would also be a benefit of much better government.

The registry is a single, common repository for information about all people under its domain (let's say nation, so citizens and resident aliens, but could reference others). Each person, living or dead, would have a permanent record, initially drawn from public information. Other entities, like corporations, are also to be represented. Each record would list relationships and dates, minimally providing geneology and census data, so this would suffice as a public resource that could replace private ones like Ancestry.com.

Obviously, not all facts are known, so that needs to be noted, and information added needs to be identified and validated to whatever degree possible. There needs to be a system for adding comment on all items in the record, and a process for deciding what to keep, to question, and/or to prune from the records. In addition to the structured entries, it should be possible to add notes, including photos or other media, with their metadata.

The registry should be keyed to an identification system that can be used for all practical purposes. That's a separate project, and way beyond my competency to design, but would be useful for lots of things. There is much resistance to developing any sort of national identity system, although what we have now is worse, a bunch of incompatible systems (some federal, some state, many more imposed by the private sector), unreliable, hard to use, susceptible to excessive tracking, impossible to coordinate (a feature, if you believe the systems cannot be trusted).

The purpose of the identity system here is to keep track of who submits data, and who is permitted to see and manage it. One should generally be able to see and manage one's own data, and/or delegate this to a guardian. There should be rules for classes of data, where some is public, some is restricted, and some is private (with a strict process for law enforcement and admissibility in court). There should be a policy for disclosing additional information some time after death.

One example of data that needs to be collected but should not be exposed (at least by default) is contact information. One could use this for secure messages without disclosing the recipient's address. The process could be double-blind, so contact info can only be disclosed in the message content. The process could also evaluate the message for risks, notify the receiver whether the sender has a history of bad faith, and/or require additional points of identification or reference. This would be a big improvement over current systems, which shake you down to provide bits of information (like phone numbers) they've scraped from various places.

Some data should be available for statistical aggregation, in a form that validates the data without compromising the identity of its sources. This might be an owner option, with the researchers required to submit public proposals specifying their data request.

The database could conceivably grow to enormous dimensions. It would be tempting to hang all sorts of ancillary information on it -- basically anything that can be organized primarily by person (e.g., medical histories, criminal records, taxes). That needs to be worked out. What I'm more immediately interested in is the question that occurs every time I read an obituary: who was this person? I find standard obituary form very stultifying in this regard, especially as they are mostly revenue schemes perpetrated by newspapers. This might be a neat job for well-regulated AI: dig through the data, and condense it into a sensible one-to-three paragraphs.

Obviously, you don't want to train AI on the whole database, but the one thing it's most likely to be good for is sucking up, sorting, and summarizing a lot of data fast. I don't know how many people are interested in finding this out, but I'm guessing a lot of people would find this interesting. And I like the idea of blurring the boundary between the grandees the New York Times writes about and those literally buried in the back pages of their local (and fast disappearing) rags.


I didn't stop with this proposal. I also came up with a second idea, not unrelated, and not one that had never occurred to me before, but worth mentioning here: demand-only advertising. Back when I was working in advertising, I got rather deep into the art and science of it all, but later reverted to my initial instinct that it's one of the most completely evil things in the world today. At one point, I started a lexicon/keywords book, where I would write a page of two on a hundred or so terms.

One of the first I wrote was on advertising. I can't find that particular rant, but it started by denying that advertising is ever free speech. It is expensive speech, but calculated to pay dividends by manipulating people -- to shell out their money is merely the most mundane of the ulterior purposes it serves. Still, I find there are times when I'm desperate enough for information I'll go seeking out ads, skeptical as I am.

So let's imagine a system where advertisers are prohibited from pushing their messages, especially in media that you can't shut off or easily ignore (radio is the worst in that respect) or at least control the pace (with print you can usually skip ahead). But let the advertisers package their pitches, and put them on a server you can access when you finally want to.

We have a rough approximation of such a system today, in Amazon. It could be better organized, with better query tools, and options to buy elsewhere, as well as more warnings not to buy at all. Actually, this is one of several areas where Amazon has made real progress for us, only to run it as a predatory monopoly scam. Their "Marketplace" isn't a wheel we need to reinvent. The best solution would be to nationalize it, then make it more ethical. Same for their warehousing/shipping business. They've proven the efficiency advantages of scale. Breaking it up won't produce any more efficiency; if anything, the opposite. But why can every retailer enjoy the same level playing field? Or for that matter, every manufacturer (cutting the middle men out)?

Monday, February 26, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, February archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 36 albums, 11 A-list

Music: Current count 41900 [41864] rated (+36), 22 [20] unrated (+2).

Running late this week, but managed to get most things done that had to be done. Still, I'm a frazzled, nervous wreck as I try to wrap up this introduction, so don't expect much.

I didn't get done with Speaking of Which by bedtime Sunday, so (once again) posted what I had, with the promise of a Monday update. But I've made very little progress on that today, so I don't know where that leaves us. I still expect to post this by bedtime Monday evening, even if it's in a similar state of disarray. There is some chance of further updates on Tuesday, but right now I'm growing sick of all of it.

I did wrap up the February Streamnotes file (except for the last Music Week, which I may still manage to add, and the indexing, which I certainly won't get done in time). At least the empty March Streamnotes file is opened.

I also managed to save off my frozen year 2023 list. Subsequent additions to the active one will be flagged in a distinctive color. It looks like I added 91 such post-freeze records to the year 2022 file.

I added a few more lists to the EOY aggregate, most notably the long Aquarium Drunkard list, which pointed me to a few items and suggested many more. I had trouble focusing on things last week, so rated count was down, but A-list exploded from 2 last week to 9 this week (plus two upgrades from revisits -- I've been meaning to return to Bryan and Crowell; also, but not yet, Brandy Clark and Tyler Childers. That helped the Non-Jazz A-list catch up with the Jazz, now 84-83.


New records reviewed this week:

  • Acceleration Due to Gravity: Jonesville: Music by and for Sam Jones (2023 [2024], Hot Cup, EP): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Advancing on a Wild Pitch: Disasters, Vol. 2 (2023 [2024], Hot Cup): [bc]: A-
  • Tanner Adell: Buckle Bunny (2023, Columbia, EP): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Eric Alexander: A New Beginning: Alto Saxophone With Strings (2021 [2023], HighNote): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Aunty Rayzor: Viral Wreckage (2023, Hakuna Kulala): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Annie Chen: Guardians (2022-23 [2024], JZ Music): [cd]: B
  • Daggerboard: Escapement (2022 [2024], Wide Hive): [cd]: B+(**) [03-08]
  • DJ Finale: Mille Morceau (2023, Nyege Nyege Tapes): [sp]: A-
  • Drain: Living Proof (2023, Epitaph): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Emmeluth's Amoeba: Nonsense (2021 [2024], Moserobie): [cd]: A-
  • Christian Fabian Trio: Hip to the Skip (2022-23 [2024], Spicerack): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Friends & Neighbors: Circles (2022 [2024], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Romulo Fróes and Tiago Rosas: Na Goela (2023, YB Music): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Glass Beach: Plastic Death (2024, Run for Cover): [sp]: B-
  • Gordon Grdina/Christian Lillinger: Duo Work (2023 [2024], Attaboygirl): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Gordon Grdina's the Marrow: With Fathieh Honari (2023 [2024], Attaboygirl): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Enrique Heredia Trio: Plays Herbie Nichols (2019-22 [2024], Fresh Sound): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Kabeaushé: The Coming of Gaze (2023, Hakuna Kulala): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Kabeaushé: Hold On to Deer Life, There's a Blcak Boy Behind You! (2023, Monkeytown): [sp]: B
  • Noah Kahan: Stick Season (2022, Mercury/Republic): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Kaze: Unwritten (2023 [2024], Circum/Libra): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Anni Kiviniemi Trio: Eir (2023 [2024], We Jazz): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Doug MacDonald: Sextet Session (2023 [2024], DMAC Music): [cd]: B+(**) [03-01]
  • Eliza McLamb: Going Through It (2024, Royal Mountain): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Chase Rice: I Hate Cowboys & All Dogs Go to Hell (2023, Broken Bow): [sp]: A-
  • RVG: Brain Worms (2023, Ivy League/Fire): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Sunny Five [Tim Berne/David Torn/Ches Smith/Devin Hoff/Marc Ducret]: Candid (2022 [2024], Intakt): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Kali Uchis: Orquídeas (2024, Geffen): [sp]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Herb Geller: Fire in the West (1957 [2023], Jazz Workshop): [sp]: A-
  • Ghetto Brothers: Power-Fuerza (1972 [2024], Vampisoul): [sp]: B+(*)
  • If You Want to Make a Lover: Palm Wine, Akan Blues & Early Guitar Highlife, Pt. 1 (1920s-50s [2023], Death Is Not the End): [sp]: B+(*)
  • If You Want to Make a Lover: Palm Wine, Akan Blues & Early Guitar Highlife, Pt. 2 (1920s-50s [2023], Death Is Not the End): [bc]: B+(**)
  • Melba Liston: Melba Liston and Her 'Bones (1958 [2023], Jazz Workshop): [yt]: A-
  • Los Mohanes: La Tumbia (2017 [2023], Moli Del Tro): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Don Menza & Sam Noto: Steppin': Quartet Live (1980 [2023], Fresh Sound): [sp]: B+(***)

Old music:

  • Abyssinia Infinite Featuring Ejigayehu "Gigi" Shibabaw: Zion Roots (2003, Network): [yt]: A-
  • Afrorack: The Afrorack (2022, Hakuna Kulala): [sp]: A-


Grade (or other) changes:

  • Zach Bryan: Zach Bryan (2023, Warner): [sp]: [was: B+(***)] A-
  • Rodney Crowell: The Chicago Sessions (2023, New West): [sp]: [was: B+(**)] A-


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Albare: Beyond Belief (AM) [02-12]
  • Ian Carey & Wood Metal Plastic: Strange Arts (Slow & Steady) [03-22]
  • Stephan Crump: Slow Water (Papillon Sounds) [05-03]
  • Remy Le Boeuf's Assembly of Shadows: Heartland Radio (SoundSpore) [03-16]
  • David Leon: Bird's Eye (Pyroclastic) [03-08]
  • Queen Esther: Things Are Looking Up (EL) [04-09]
  • Ron Rieder: Latin Jazz Sessions (self-released) [03-04]
  • Jeremy Rose & the Earshift Orchestra: Discordia (Earshift Music) [03-01]
  • Jacob Shulman: High Firmament/Ferment Below (Endectomorph Music, 2CD) [03-01]
  • Julia Vari Feat. Negroni's Trio: Somos (Alternative Representa) [02-16]
  • Fay Victor/Herbie Nichols SUNG: Life Is Funny That Way (Tao Forms, 2CD) [04-05]

 

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Once again, I failed to finish my rounds by end-of-Sunday, so I'm posting what I have, with the expectation that I'll add more on Monday (look for red right-border stripes). One thing I didn't get to but seems likely to be worthwhile adding is No More Mister Nice Blog. That's where I first ran into the Katie Glueck article, and I see relevant posts on many of this week's politics articles. Charles P Pierce also has worthwhile takes on most of this.

This appeared after my cutoff, but is a good overview of everything else that follows: Andrea Mazzarino: [02-27] War's cost is unfathomable, where she starts by referring to "The October 7th America has forgotten," which was 2001, when the US first bombed Afghanistan, following the Al-Qaeda attacks of that September 11. In 2010, Mazzarino founded the Cost of War Project, which, as economists are wont to do, started adding up whatever they could of the quantifiable costs of America's Global War on Terror and its spawn. Still, their figures (at least $8 trillion and counting, and with debt compounding) miss much of the real human (and environmental) costs, especially those that are primarily psychic.

For instance, would we have the gun problem that we have had we not been continuously at war for over two decades? Would our politics have turned so desperately war-like? Certainly, there would have been much less pressure to immigrate, given that war is the leading producer of refugees. Without constant jostling for military leverage, might we not have made more progress in dealing with problems like climate change? The list only grows from there.

One constant theme of every Speaking of Which is the need to put aside the pursuit of power over and against others and find mutual grounds that will allow us to work together cooperatively to deal with pressing problems. There are lots of reasons why this is true, starting with the basic fact that we could not exist in such numbers if not for a level of technology that is complex beyond most of our understandings and fragile, especially vulnerable to the people who feel most unjustly treated. Our very lives depend on experts who can be trusted, and their ability to work free of sabotage. You can derive all the politics you need from this insight.


Initial count: 154 links, 7,499 words. Updated count: 178 links, 8,813 words.

Top story threads:

Israel: The genocide continues.

Reported casualty figures, as of 2/23, show 1,147 Israelis killed on October 7, plus 576 Israelis killed since. Palestinian deaths -- certainly undercounted -- are 29,514 in Gaza + 380 elsewhere in Israel. Since Oct. 7, Israelis are killing more than 51 Palestinians in Gaza for every soldier lost. No breakdown between soldiers lost in invading Gaza vs. elsewhere, but the latter numbers are probably very small. The kill ratio increases to 65-to-1 using the 38,000 estimate "when accounting for those presumed dead."

Israel vs. world opinion:

  • Ben Armbruster: [02-22] US intel has 'low confidence' in Israel's UNRWA claims.

  • Michael Arria: [02-22] The Shift: US vetoes UN ceasefire resolution again: "Joe Biden has stepped up public criticisms of Israel to save his faltering electoral prospects in Michigan, but there remains an incredible disconnect between these words and his administration's ongoing support for Israel's genocidal attack on Gaza."

  • Moustafa Bayoumi: [02-17] As Biden ignores death in Gaza, the 'Dark Brandon' meme is unfunny and too real.

  • Miguel A Cruz-Díaz: [02-23] On the shame of living through times of genocide. The article, about "suicidal ideation," is not exactly what I imagined from the title, but I'm not wired to take other people's tragedies personally. (I was tempted to say "for empathy," but I can imagine even if I only rarely feel.) But the title is evocative. I don't advise you feeling shame for what other people -- and not just the perpetrators, but also those making excuses, or just shrugging their shoulders -- are doing, but they definitely should feel ashamed (and if not, should learn).

  • Emily Davies/Peter Hermann/Dan Lamothe: [02-27] Airman who set self on fire grew up on religious compound, had anarchist past: Aaron Bushnell, whose protest echoed that of Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc during the Vietnam War.

  • Yves Engler: [02-21] The reasons for Canada's 'unwavering' support for Israel: "Canada's remarkable fidelity to an apartheid state committing genocide is driven by imperial geopolitics, settler solidarity, Christian Zionism and the Israel lobby in Canada, and the weaponization of antisemitism."

  • Richard Falk: [02-25] In Gaza, the west is enabling the most transparent genocide in human history.

  • Jonathan Freedland: [02-23] Hamas and Netanyahu are a curse on their peoples. Yet amid the horror, there is a sliver of hope: The "sliver" seems to be [02-23] Gaza ceasefire talks underway in Paris, but this ignores the core fact of this "war," which is that you don't need to negotiate a ceasefire when only one side is shooting. Just do it. Israel can even declare that if Palestinians do keep shooting rockets at Israel, there will be reprisals (short in time, but severe). That would be understandable. But negotiations just does something Israel claims it doesn't want to do, which is to elevate Hamas as the representative of the people of Gaza.

    The headline suggests that both Netanyahu and Hamas are unfortunate political choices, but Netanyahu was a choice, at least of the limited electorate within Israel, and there's plenty of reason to believe he's doing exactly what those who voted for him want. Hamas was never elected, because Palestinians have never been free to choose their own leaders. The West Bank is, well, complicated, but Gaza should be simple: all Israel has to do is stop attacking and step away. They've more than punished Hamas. They've destroyed most of the region's infrastructure. For at least the next 20 years, the only way people will be able to live in Gaza is through foreign aid, which they will basically have to beg for. If Israel takes itself out of the picture, and lets the UN organize a proper democratic government there, Hamas will release the hostages, and quietly disappear. (Sure, Hamas may still survive in the West Bank, and among exiles, but that shouldn't be Gaza's fault. Hamas has no life except as resistance to Israeli power.)

    The idea that some people who got to power purely through the use of terror -- and that's every bit as true of Netanyahu as of Hamas (and only slightly less for the Saudis and Americans and other parties invovled) -- can settle something in Paris that will bring peace to Gaza is absurd. Freedland writes: "To grasp it, the Palestinians need to be free of Hamas and Israelis free of Netanyahu." Swap those and you start to enter the realm of the possible: Palestinians need to be free of Netanyahu, which for Gaza at least is easy to do. And that would also make Israelis free of Hamas (except, of course, in the areas where they're still determined to rule rough over Palestinians, because such rule always begets resistance -- if not by Hamas, then by the next bunch that bands together to stand up for freedom and against injustice).

  • Thomas L Friedman: [02-27] Israel is losing its greatest asset: acceptance: This is one of those "if even Thomas Friedman sees a problem . . ." pieces. Israelis have a handicap here: they're so conditioned to expecting that the whole world hates them, they can't imagine how much worse it can get, or how that might impact them. They figure as long as the US stays in line, no problem. And they figure the US is way too big to worry about its own diminishing acceptance.

  • Mehdi Hasan: [02-21] Biden can end the bombing of Gaza right now. Here's how.

  • Robert Inkalesh: [02-23] Why the US must enage Hamas politically: I don't agree with this now, but I do believe that I do believe that America's refusal to accept the results of the 2006 Palestinian Authority elections -- I believe Israel, which had always preferred Hamas to the secular-socialist PLO, was only following the American lead -- was largely responsible for pushing Hamas back into violent rebellion, including the desperate attacks of Oct. 7. There is, of course, much room for debate as to how to apportion blame for the continued repression and resistance. Israel's behavior is fully consistent as a white settler colony overseeing a rigidly racist system of control -- call it "Apartheid" if you like, but it differs in some from the disgraced South African system, and often for the worse. It reflects a demented and ultimately self-destructive worldview, but they are pretty clear on what they're doing, and why. As for Americans, they're much harder to explain. Having developed two (or maybe three) such rigidly racist systems, then dismantled them without ever owning up to their crimes, they're amazingly ingenious at lying to themselves and others -- hypocrisy is much too superficial a word -- for the way they so easily rationalize and romanticize Israeli brutality as high moral dudgeon.

  • Jake Johnson: [02-22] "I think we should kill 'em all," GOP Rep. Andy Ogles says of Palestinians in Gaza. Makes him exhbit A (but not the only one) in:

  • Robert Lipsyte: [02-22] I'm heartbroken by the war in Israel.

  • Mitchell Plitnick: [02-23] Biden won't let Israel's rejection of a Palestinian state interfere with his delusions.

  • Philip Weiss: [02-21] The context for October 7 is apartheid, not the Holocaust: "The Israel lobby is attempting to indoctrinate Americans that the context for the October 7 attack is the Holocaust. This is a misrepresentation. The Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust."

America's expansion of Israel's world war:

Trump, and other Republicans: Well, South Carolina is done and dusted -- see [02-24] Trump defeats Haley in South Carolina primary, 60.1% to 39.2% (at the point with 92% counted). Also, if you care, How different groups voted in the South Carolina primary, according to exit polls. Nothing terribly surprising there, except perhaps that Trump had his best age split in 17-29 (66% vs. 63% for 65+). [PS: The final delegate split was 47 Trump, 3 Haley.]

CPAC: The erstwhile conservative (more like fascist) organization held their annual conference last week, headlined by Donald Trump, so we'll offer this as a Republicans overflow section. Before we get serious, probably the best introduction here is: [02-23] Jimmy Kimmel on CPAC: 'A who's who of who won't accept the results of the election'.

Biden and/or the Democrats:

  • Perry Bacon Jr: [02-26] Criticizing a president is always okay -- even one running against Trump: If you care about issues, you should say so, even when it's politically inexpedient. Otherwise, you lose your credibility, and any hope for eventual success. You reduce politics to a game, signifying nothing. If that's your view of it, you may already be a Republican -- although they've adopted some truly obnoxious issue stands, they're really just saying whatever they think gives them a slight advantage, because all they're really intererested in is power: seizing it, keeping it, cashing in on it.

  • Aaron Boxerman/Jonathan Weisman: [02-24] Biden caught in a political bind over Israel policy: "His steadfast support of the Gaza war effort is angering young people and Arab Americans in an election year. But any change risks alienating Jewish voters." Not really: recent polling has Jewish Americans favoring a ceasefire 50-34%. That's not as high as support for a ceasefire from Americans in general, but not enough to justify the NYT's antisemitic trope of painting "the Jews" as responsible for Biden's colossal blunder.

  • Jackie Calmes: [02-14] Biden's polls aren't great. How much is the media's fault?

  • Ben Davis: [02-21] Biden visited East Palestine a year after Trump. This doesn't bode well.

  • William Hartung: [01-31] Tone deaf? Admin brags about 55% hike in foreign arms sales: "Washington's sanitized view of unleashing $80.9 billion in weapons on the world, especially now, is a bit curious."

  • Eric Levitz: [02-23] Biden is weak -- and unstoppable: "It will be hard to convince the president that he isn't the best of his party's bad options."

  • Norman Solomon: [02-25] Joe Biden's moral collapse on Gaza could help Donald Trump win. I'm not going to not vote for Biden in November even though I regard him as not just naive and/or negligent but materially complicit in the most crime against humanity in recent decades, but only because I fully realize that Trump would even be worse (as, indeed, his four years as president amply demonstrated). Still, by all means, tank Biden's polls and trash his prospects, at least until he starts to reverse course. And also note that lots of people are not fully apprised of how awful Trump has been on Israel in particular and on world war in general -- indeed, he is campaigning, Wilson-like, on having "kept us out of war" and steering us away from the path to "world war" that Biden is heading (even though, sure one might even repeat Wilson-like, he's done more than anyone to pave that path). If Biden fails to get his war under control, enough people are likely to fall for Trump's line to tip the election. Also linked to by Solomon:

  • Robert Wright: [02-23] Biden's tough love deficit: Two years after Ukraine, and 20 weeks after Gaza, turned into massive wars:

    There are lots of differences between those two events and between the wars they've brought, but there's one important commonality: how President Biden has reacted. In both cases he has come to the aid of a friend in need and done so in a way that wasn't ultimately good for the friend. Biden is good at showing love and catastrophically bad at showing tough love.

    With both Ukraine and Israel, the US has massive leverage -- by virtue of being a critical weapons supplier and also in other ways. And in both cases Biden has refused to use the leverage to try to end wars that are now, at best, pointless exercises in carnage creation.

    I'll add that both of these wars were advertised long before they broke out, coming out of long-standing conflicts, and only surprising to the those in Washington who pretended that peace can be secured simply by buying American arms and covering them with clichés about deterrence and sanctions. Most of the fault belongs to presidents before Biden: to Bush and Trump for indulging Israel's most right-wing fantasies (and Obama for not resisting them, reinforcing the idea that American reservations are not things Israelis need to take seriously); to Obama's pivot toward a renascent Cold War (after Clinton and Bush expanded NATO to Russia's doorstep); and to Trump for his half-assed mishandling of Ukraine, Russia, China, and everything else. On the other hand, every president inherits the mistakes of his predecessors. Thanks to Trump, Biden wound up with more than usual, but it was his job to fix them. In some cases he tried, and has even had some success. In others, he failed, sometimes not even trying. But here, he's made bad situations worse, and seems incapable of even understanding why.

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

  • Eric Levitz: [02-21] Why you probably shouldn't blow up a pipeline. Reaction to Andreas Malm's book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and the subsequent movie. My rejection of such notions is so deep-seated -- I'm still anti-Luddite, even after having developed some appreciation for the intractable problems they faced -- I've never had to wrestle with the issues, nor do I expect that I ever will. But I won't be surprised to see a rising tide of sabotage -- they've already coined the term "ecoterrorism" for this eventuality -- as climate distress worsens, especially if major powers are unwilling to reform and continue to set the standard for dealing with problems through repression and violence. [PS: Note, however, that in Kim Stanley Robinson, in his novel, The Ministry for the Future, expects to see a lot of "ecoterrorism," and sees it as promoting necessary changes.]

Economic matters:

  • Dean Baker: [02-21] The sham "The economy is awful" story: Per Baker's tweet: "Too bad they [New York Times] weren't allowed to run these when Donald Trump was in the White House." Next in my Twitter queue was Kevin Erdmann: "It's really crazy how interest rate casual stories get canonized without the slightest interest or curiosity in facts. EVERY story about housing will stipulate that the Fed's rate hikes slowed down sales." The chart shows that sales spiked after the worst of the pandemic in 2020, while interest rates were still low, and declined as interest rates increased, but since 2022 they're basically back to pre-pandemic levels, albeit with higher interest rates.

  • Farrah Hassen: [02-23] The rent's still too high! "A new Harvard study found that half of U.S. renter households now spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities. And rent increases continue to outpace their income gains. . . . Last year, homelessness hit an all-time national high of 653,100 people."

Ukraine War:

  • Responsible Statecraft: [02-22] The Ukraine War at two years: By the numbers.

  • Kyle Anzalone: [02-22] US officials see Ukraine as an active and bountiful military research opportunity.

  • Medea Benjamin/Nicolas JS Davies: [02-25] After two grueling years of bloodshed, it's time for peace in Ukraine.

  • Aaron Blake: [02-27] Zelensky's increasingly blunt comments about Trump: This isn't a good sign, but Trump has always wanted Zelensky to wade into the American political fray -- on his side, of course, but it's not like he can't play opposition just as well. Zelensky is careful to portay his interests as America's own, but Trump is unflappable in that regard.

  • Joe Buccino: [02-22] Ukraine can no longer win. This piece appeared in the Wichita Eagle right after the Doran piece, below. Added here after I wrote the Doran comment, but let's list it first.

  • Peter Doran: [02-24] Ukraine can win -- here's how: Author works for Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), one of our leading war tanks, out here to buck up the troops by, well, quoting Winston Churchill and Henry V. He's wrong on many levels, starting with the notion that anyone can win at war these days. Even when he has a point (that Russia's "manpower pool" isn't inexhaustible) he misses it (that it's still much deeper than Ukraine's). He points to the unpopularity of the war in Russia, the suggestion being that Putin will buckle if the West only shows we're firmly resolved to win, but hasn't Putin proven much more effective at stifling dissent than the democratic West has? Aside from greater resolve, he insists the keys to winning are faster deliveries of even more sophisticated weapons systems, and even tighter sanctions. How did the war planners miss that? He insists on "a clear and compelling definition of victory in Ukraine that advances our national interests." Note nothing here about the well-being of the Ukrainian people, who bear the primary costs of continued war. His definition? "The requirements of this victory include the Russian military ceasing to kill Ukrainians, departing Ukrainian territory and not threatening the existence of the country in the future." It should be obvious by now that the only way to achieve any way of this is through a negotiated settlement that leads not just to a ceasefire but to an enduring stable relationship between Russia, Ukraine, and the West. That may require lesser steps -- a ceasefire would be a good start -- but also means giving up impossible definitions of victory.

  • Steven Erlanger/David E Sanger: [02-24] Hard lessons make for hard choices 2 years into the war in Ukraine: "Western sanctions haven't worked. Weapons from allies are running low. Pressure may build on Kyiv to seek a settlement, even from a weakened position."

  • Ben Freeman: [02-22] The Ukraine lobby two years into war.

  • Joshua Keating: [02-22] Are Ukraine's defenses starting to crumble? "What Ukraine's biggest setback in months tells us about the future of the war."

  • Serhiy Morgunov/David L Stern: [02-25] Zelensky says 31,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed since invasion. His first public disclosure since Dec. 2022 ("up to 13,000"). He's also claiming 180,000 Russian troops have been killed. When the New York Times reported this story (31,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed in two years of war, Zelensky says, they also noted that Zelensky's number "differs sharply from that given by U.S. officials, who have said the number is closer to 70,000."

    A leaked Pentagon document had estimated deaths at 15,500-17,000 Ukrainian soldiers, and 35,000-42,500 Russian soldiers. That doesn't count at least 10,000 Ukrainian civilians killed. For more figures, some exaggerated, some minimized, see Wikipedia's Casualties of the Russo-Ukrainian War.

  • Marc Santora: [02-24] Ukraine's deepening fog of war: "Two years after Russia's full-scale invasion, Ukrainian leaders are seeking a path forward in teh face of ferocious assaults and daunting unknowns."

  • Paul Street: [02-22] 500,000 dead and maimed in Ukraine, enough already: It's been a long time since I've seen any figures for war in Ukraine, so this one caught me off guard.

  • Marc A Thiessen: [02-22] If Republicans want to help Trump, they should pass Ukraine aid now. I never cite him, mostly because he's pure evil (he got his start as Cheney's torture apologist), but my local paper loves his columns, so I run into him constantly, and occasionally read enough to reconfirm my judgment. But this one is especially twisted, so I offer it as an example of the mind games regular Republicans play to manipulate the deranged Trumpian psyches -- in effect, to keep them reliably evil. The pitch is that Republicans should keep the war going so Trump can fulfill his "I'll have that done in 24 hours" campaign promise once he's elected. Of course, if Trump does win, Thiessen will do his most to sabotage any peace moves, but in the meantime the war goes on and Biden gets the blame.

  • Katrina Vanden Heuvel/James Carden: [02-23] 10 years later: Maidan's missing history.

  • Walt Zlotow: [02-24] First 2 years of US proxy war against Russia finds both US and Ukraine in downward spiral.

Navalny/Assange:

  • The Observer: [02-17] The Observer view on Alexei Navalny's murder: Putin must be shown he can't kill with impunity: "Russia has been exposed as a rogue state that is a menace to the rest of the world." Isn't the Guardian supposed to be the flagship of Britain's left-leaning press? But I cringe any time I see an "Observer view" editorial, perhaps because so many of them are so full of spite yet so futile, combinations of hypocrisy and bluster. After fulminating for twelve paragraphs, they finally explode: "It's time to get real with Russia." So, like, no more patty-cakes? Like 74 years of "cold war" that actually started with US and UK troops fighting the revolution on Russian soil? That went on to using Afghan proxies to snipe at Russians in the 1980s? That after a brief respite when Yeltsin tried to adopt America's prescription of "shock treatment" nearly self-destructed Russia? That was followed by the relentless expansion of NATO combined with economic warfare including crippling sanctions?

    When they wail, "After Navalny, it's time to drop any lingering illusion that Putin's Russia is a normal country, that it may be reasoned with." If Russia is not "a normal country," and I'll grant that it isn't, perhaps that's because no one in the US/UK has tried to reason with it in dacades? Navalny is part of the price of this hostile rivalry, and unless he was some sort of spy, he wasn't even a price the US/UK paid. He was just collateral damage, like thousands of Ukrainians and Russians maimed and killed in Ukraine, the millions displaced, the many more who are denied food and fuel due to sanctions, and the millions of Russian subjects who are denied free political rights because they are living under a state whose security is constantly being attacked by the West.

  • Andrew Cockburn: [02-19] Tears for Navalny. Assange? Not so much.

  • Ellen Ioanes: [02-20] Where does the fight for a free Russia go now? "Yulia Navalnaya picks up her husband's battle against Putin."

  • Fred Kaplan: [02-21] Even if you hate Julian Assange, the US attempt to extradite him should worry you.

  • Margaret Sullivan: [02-20] The US justice department must drop spy charges against Julian Assange: 'You don't have to like him or WikiLeaks to recognize the damage these charges create."

  • Walt Zlotow: [02-22] Julian Assange is Biden's Navalny.


Other stories:

Mac William Bishop: [02-23] American idiots kill the American century: "After decades of foreign-policy bungling and strategic defeats, the US has never seemed weaker -- and dictators around the world know it." This is a pretty seriously wrong-headed article, its appeal to the liberal publisher based on the MAGA movement, prominent Republicans, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson for making America weak, the effect simply to "advance Putin's agenda." The key to American influence around he world was always based on nothing more than the perception that we would treat the world fairly and generously -- unlike the old colonial empires of Europe, or the new militarism of the Axis, or the growing Soviet-aligned bloc. Sure, the US was never all that innocent, nor all that charitable, but in the late 1940s seemed to compare favorably to the others. The US squandered its moral standing and good will pretty rapidly, and as the article notes, is losing the last of it with Biden's wholehearted support for Israeli genocide.

Marina Bolotnikova/Kenny Torrella: [02-26] 9 charts that show US factory farming is even bigger than you realize: "Factory farms aer now so big that we need a new word for them."

Nick Estes: [02-19] America's origin story is a myth: Daniel Denvir interviews Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.

David French: [02-25] What is Christian nationalism exactly? NY Times opinion columnist, self-described Never-Trump Conservative, professes as evangelical Christian, claiming the authority to explain his wayward brethren -- the flock Chris Hedges wrote about in his 2007 book, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America -- or at least to make fine distinctions between his kind and the others, who he's more inclined to dub "Christian supremacists." That works almost as well as Hedges' "Fascists" to identify the dictatorial and vindictive powers they aspire to, without implicating Christians who practice tolerance and charity, and allowing new nationalists to express their love for American diversity (as opposed to the old ones, wallowing in xenophobia and racism).

By the way, one term I haven't seen, but seems more to the point, is Republican Christianists (or, I guess, Christianist Republicans): those who enbrace the Republicans' cynical pursuit of coercive power at all costs, while justifying their lust and avarice as a divine mission. This piece led me to some older ones:

Katie Glueck: [02-19] Anti-Trump burnout: The resistance says it's exhausted: "Bracing for yet another election against Donald Trump, America's liberals are feeling the fatigue. "We're kind of, like, crises-ed out," one Democrat said." Well, if one Democrat said it, that's exactly the sort of thing you can count on the New York Times to blow up into a page one issue. Genocide in Palestine? Not so much. Reading their own paper, they don't seem to understand that Trump is out of power, and has been for 3.5 years now. Sure, he still talks a lot, but that's all he is. Trying to shut him up, even if we wanted to, not only isn't worth the effort, but would make things even worse. For most of us, there's nothing much we can do except wait until November, then vote against him.

Sarah Jones: [02-22] The right to a private life is under attack: Starts with the Alabama ruling on IVF (see Cohen, Millhiser, and others, above), but of course the Trump-supporting Christian Nationalists want much more than that: they want to run nearly every aspect of your life:

Our private freedoms are linked to public notions of equal citizenship. Conservatives attack the former in order to undermine the latter. It's an unpopular strategy, but as the scholar Matthew Taylor told Politico, "These folks aren't as interested in democracy or working through democratic systems as in the old religious right because their theology is one of Christian warfare." This is total war, and not just on women. Anyone who fails to conform is at risk.

More, especially on the IVF backlash:

Taylor Lorenz: [02-24] How Libs of TikTok became a powerful presence in Oklahoma schools: "The owner [Chaya Raichik] of the far-right social media account, who sits on a state advisory panel, has drawn attention since the death of a nonbinary student near Tulsa." I could have filed this under Republicans (above), as that's her mob, but didn't want to bury it under the usual graft and bullshit. Related here:

Garrison Lovely: [01-22] Can humanity survive AI? Long piece I haven't spent much time with as yet, although the subhed "Capitalism makes it worse" is certainly true. I don't know how good and/or bad AI will be, but it's generating a lot more press than I can follow, including:

Kelly McClure: [02-23] Ex-NRA chief funneled millions of dollars into his own pockets, according to a NYC jury: "Wayne LaPierre and other NRA executives were found liable for financial misconduct."

Anna North: [02-23] Mascuzynity: How a nicotine pouch explains the new ethos of young conservative men: "Stimulants, hustle culture, and bodybuilding are shaping young men's drift to the right." Not obvious to me why this has become "a gateway to right-wing politics." Unless, that is, you're broadening the definition of right-wing from servants of hierarchy/oligarchy to plain old, all-around assholes.

Rick Perlstein: [02-21] The neglected history of the state of Israel: "The Revisionist faction of Zionism that ended up triumphing adhered to literal fascist doctrines and traditions." This is, of course, directly relevant to what's happening in the Israel section above. The relationship is not just temperamental and ideological: Netanyahu's father was Jabotinsky's secretary and confidant.

Alissa Quart: [02-21] US media is collapsing. Here's how to save it. She's director of something called Economic Hardship Reporting Project

Aja Romano: [02-18] An attempt to reckon with True Detective: Night Country's bonkers season finale: Noted in the breach, as a remarkably bad review of a season and series where I'm hard pressed to find any points to agree with, either in praise (mostly of seasons one and three, where the flaws are most obvious) or in panning (seasons two and four, where the messes swamp out the positives). But I will say that the "bonkers season finale" was much more satisfying than any I imagined to that point. I at least took the political point, which is that the power of the rich, and the hopelessness of the people they carelessly grind down and toss aside, are never as complete as they imagine.

At the same time, I was also watching A Murder at the End of the World, which was, if anything, even messier (though just a close second for bone-chilling cold), and again mostly acquitted itself with a politically-charged "bonkers finale": the murders were orchestrated by AI, but the context was corporate megalomania, as represented by a billionaire obsessed with control and life-extension. Speaking of which:

Jeffrey St Clair: [02-23] Roaming Charges: Somewhat immature: Title is Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, commander of U.S. Space Forces Indo-Pacific, describing the "rules of engagement for orbital warfare," which is to say nobody agrees on any rules, or even knows what they are or should be. But who's that going to stop?

Ben Wray: [02-24] It's time to dismantle the US sanctions-industrial complex: "The US has built up an elaborate machinery for waging economic warfare on its rivals with little or no public debate. This sanctions-industrial complex is a disguised form of imperialism and a dangerous source of global instability."

Li Zhou: [02-23] America's first moon landing in 50 years, explained.

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

Daily Log

Clifford Ocheltree in Facebook on my Mingus review:

I liked the Mingus box a tad more, the music is solid BUT the set saves me shelf space AND enabled me to sell off the individual CDs. In essence the set became 'free' or no cost plus it does benefit from the remastering. The Jasmine 50s could indeed be shorter but, as I suggested about the 40s set, it provides context. Certainly, given the price, it serves as an educational experience for those younger than you or me.

I added this:

Packaging is so important in box sets that it's rather unfair just to write a review of streaming the music. Also sheer length leads to fatigue, which is one reason I'm so reluctant to even bother with them. On the other hand, I'm suspicious that reviewers who are gifted with the deluxe packages tend to be overly generous -- in part, because I know that when I'm the beneficiary, I often do cut them some slack. I could imagine myself bumping up the "Hot House" grade if I had the proper set. As I noted in the review, the Mingus set was a big time filler for me: my biggest disruption every day is figuring out what to play next, and the boxes saved me a lot of that. Plus it was the highest-rated Critics Poll album I hadn't heard, plus it's Mingus, and I really love Mingus (the hostname of one of my computers). Even with my cursory approach, I did learn a few things: I significantly bumped my very low grades of "Mingus Moves" and "Cumbia," and I finally heard the two last studio albums (more closely related to the post-Mingus big bands than to his own albums, but still very good). The "Changes" albums, which I bought on vinyl shortly after they came out (and as such were probably my first Mingus) slipped a bit from my memory, but not enough to downgrade them. So all-in-all, I think, a fair and worthwhile review. But sure, packaging could have made a difference. As would the ease of replaying individual discs.

Monday, February 19, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, February archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 36 albums, 3 A-list

Music: Current count 41864 [41828] rated (+36), 20 [23] unrated (-3).

I posted a long Speaking of Which just before bedtime late Sunday night. I didn't quite get through my usual rounds, so added some more stuff today, which in turn pushed this out late, again. Still unclear how far I'll get Monday night.

Fortunately, I don't have much to say about music this week. The rated count is down, but I hit up several boxes, including the big Mingus one I saw little point in but enjoyed anyway, and yet another iteration of the Massey Hall Quintet/Trio. Also, another big r&b oldies box, again not ideal but quite thoroughly enjoyed.

Very little progress to report on EOY lists, websites, book projects, or anything else. The links, of course, are in the usual place.


New records reviewed this week:

  • Joe Alterman: Joe Alterman Plays Les McCann: Big Mo & Little Joe (2023, Joe Alberman Music): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Carsie Blanton: Body of Work (2023, self-released): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Stix Bones/Bob Beamon: Olimpik Soul (2023 [2024], BONE Entertainment): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Peter Bruun/Søren Kjærgaard/Josas Westergaard: Thēsaurós (2022, ILK): [bc]: B+(*)
  • Mina Cho's Grace Beat Quartet: "Beat Mirage" (2023 [2024], International Gugak Jazz Institute): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Commodore Trio: Communal - EP (2023 [2024], self-relesed, EP): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Dogo Du Togo: Dogo Du Togo (2022, self-released): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Jose Gobbo Trio: Current (2023 [2024], self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Mary Halvorson: Cloudward (2023 [2024], Nonesuch): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Jon Irabagon: Survivalism (2024, Irabbagast): [bc]: B+(*)
  • Jon Irabagon's Outright!: Recharge the Blade (2021 [2024], Irabbagast): [bc]: B+(**)
  • Steven Kamperman: Maison Moderne (2023, Trytone): [cd]: A-
  • Liquid Mike: Paul Bunyan's Slingshot (2024, self-released): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Richard Nelson/Makrokosmos Orchestra: Dissolve (2023 [2024], Adhyâropa): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Nondi_: Flood City Trax (2023, Planet Mu): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Angel Olsen: Forever Means (2023, Jagjaguwar, EP): [sp]: B
  • Public Image Ltd.: End of World (2023, PIL Official): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Zoe Rahman: Colour of Sound (2023, Manushi): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Andrew Rathbun: The Speed of Time (2022 [2023], SteepleChase) **
  • Monika Roscher Bigband: Witchy Activities and the Maple Death (2023, Zenna): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Bobby Sanabria Multiverse Big Band: Vox Humana (2023, Jazzheads): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Adam Schroeder/Mark Masters: CT! Adam Schroeder & Mark Masters Celebrate Clark Terry (2023 [2024], Capri): [cd]: B+(***)
  • Matthew Shipp/Steve Swell: Space Cube Jazz (2021 [2024], RogueArt): [cdr]: B+(***)
  • Rajna Swaminathan: Apertures (2021 [2023], Ropeadope): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Tucker Brothers: Live at Chatterbox (2023 [2024], Midwest Crush Music): [cd]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • George Cartwright's GloryLand PonyCat: Black Ants Crawling ([2024], Mahakala Music) **
  • Late Night Count Basie (2023, Primary Wave): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Charles Mingus: Changes: The Complete 1970s Atlantic Studio Recordings (1973-78 [2023], Rhino, 7CD): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Charlie Parker/Dizzy Gillespie/Bud Powell/Charles Mingus/Max Roach: Hot House: The Complete Jazz at Massey Hall Recordings (1953 [2023], Craft, 2CD): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Sonny Rollins: Go West! The Contemporary Records Albums (1957-58 [2023], Craft, 3CD): [sp]: A-
  • Pharoah Sanders: Festival de Jazz de Nice, Nice, France, July 18, 1971 (1971 [2024], Kipepeo Publishing): [bc]: B+(***)

Old music:

  • Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown: Sings Louis Jordan [The Definitive Black & Blue Sessions] (1973 [2019], Black & Blue): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Millie Jackson: On the Soul Country Side (1977-81 [2014], Kent): [sp]: B+(***)
  • The R&B No. 1s of the '50s (1950-59 [2013], Acrobat, 6CD): [cd]: A-


Grade (or other) changes:

  • Sonny Rollins: Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders: Barney Kessel/Hampton Hawes/Leroy Vinnegar/Shelly Manne (1958, Contemporary): [was: B+] B+(***) [r]


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Bob Anderson: Live! (Jazz Hang) [03-29]
  • Lynne Arriale Trio: Being Human (Challenge) [03-01]
  • The R&B No. 1s of the '50s (1950-59, Acrobat, 6CD) [2013]
  • Dave Rempis/Pandelis Karayorgis/Jakob Heinemann/Bill Harris: Truss (Aerophonic/Drift) [04-23]
  • Håkon Skogstad: 8 Concepts of Tango (Øra Fonogram) [03-15]
  • Jack Wood: The Gal That Got Away: The Best of Jack Wood, Featuring Guest Niehaud Fitzgibbon (Jazz Hang) [03-29]

Daily Log

I wrote this in a letter to Michael Tatum. Obviously something I should have filed in the book draft, but will hold here until then:

Book files opened, but I haven't found any time to work on them, and the basic prep -- basically what to do with all the old stuff, which needs to be cleared out so I can lay out the beams I hope to build around, is daunting or, at least, given my discomfort with the tools, depressing. But I do find myself thinking about it much of the time, including every morning when I'm waking up, and keep coming up with what seem like good ideas -- often fed by recent reading, as I've finished Grandin and started into Geoghegan. Latest idea, given the extreme pessimism I'm developing around Biden, is to add a new section to the end of the book.

Lots of policy books are structured as long critiques of some major problem, followed by a brief how-to-fix-it section, an almost-never-convincing attempt to end on an optimistic note. But in my case, the how-to-fix-it section was the point of the book, a major integral part. To recap:

  1. Thinking about American history (not a real title, but basically the old four-eras model with some additional bells and whistles, notes on concepts, methods, my skepticism about determinism, etc.).

  2. The history of the Republican Party, how they started with a dialectic of principles and pragmatism, and evolved into completely cynical assholes.

  3. A "brief" survey of the many problem areas that have developed while they were happily playing politics, and why their superficial approach inevitably fails.

  4. A section on the Democrats, which could turn into three: one on how and why Democrats' attempts to compete politically by adopting key elements of Republican rhetoric inevitably fail, because Republican ideas are so fundamentally flawed, and because Democrats (unlike Republicans) are expected to actually solve problems, not just pretty them up; then develop a set of principles that can be used to solve problems (chiefly by resurrecting the concept of public interest, showing how that mostly involves social rights, and how the whole point of democracy is to assert social rights and the public interest against the corruption of private interests -- now wholeheartedly embraced by the criminalized Republican Party; finally conclude with a sketchy but more practical section on how Democratic candidates need to think and talk in order to succeed in their mandate: which is to win elections, and to solve problems, and to keep winning and solving. This last section is where we get into disposing of the various culture war wedge issues that Republicans dwell on (because, well, they don't have anything else, because they don't care about solutions, and they thrive on fear and chaos).

I could go back and expand the first three like the fourth. The second, for instance, starts with Richard Nixon, as the "godfather" of the modern Republican Party -- although it just occurred to me that he could have been Jesus, turning Goldwater into John the Baptist, seeing as how he was crucified, with Reagan spreading and sanitizing the gospel like Paul, and Trump finally the resurrection (there are actually books about this last bit, written by people who believe it). The second is also where the problem of dysfunctional government belongs, since that's largely the work of Republicans (unlimited money, gerrymanders, packing the courts, etc.).

The first is where I lay out the tool kit: introduce my model, then mention other models, then lay out the underlying concepts, and how they develop as myths. At some point I may simply list a bunch, with one-paragraph framing. Some will take a bit more, like liberal/conservative, left/right, etc.

The third is most in flux. Originally I was thinking of policy areas, with macro first, then things like health care, climate change, education, and inequality. Now I'm wondering if change itself isn't the problem area, so start with technology, and then show how it is shaped and given force by business. After that, well, it's mostly capitalism, impinging on most aspects of daily life. But recent events have brought war front and center, so that has to fit in somewhere (not as some primordial force, as many are inclined to believe, but, like it's oft-bound cousin politics, as struggle against equality).

Anyhow, the latest idea is to tack on a 5th (or 7th?) section, which is what I really think will happen if (and most likely when) my plans and pleas in the second half of the book are defeated (or more likely just ignored). There's something tantalizing about ending with a premature I-told-you-so. Saving it up for the end might also make the third section less grim (or at least shorter).

I know, I should probably save this off, and paste it into the book file, and expand in place.

The preceding took a bit over an hour (the time of one record), just off the top of my head. The idea is to spend a month writing like that, to see what it looks like then. Maybe not all off the top of my head -- may do some minor fact-checking to minimize the gross errors, but mostly, figuring that way I can keep track of the overall structure, so it makes sense and balances out. Then we can decide to go/no go.


Sunday, February 18, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Another week, dallying on work I should be doing, eventually finding a diversion in the world's calamities, reported below.

Note, however, that I didn't manage to finish my usual rounds by end-of-Sunday, so posted prematurely, and will try to follow up on Monday, the new pieces flagged like this one.

Initial counts: 151 links, 7,009 words. Updated: 171 links, 7,780 words.


Top story threads:

Israel:

Israel vs. world opinion:

America's expansion of Israel's world war:

Trump, and other Republicans:

Biden and/or the Democrats:

  • Gabriel Debenedetti: [02-17] Too old? Biden World thinks pundits just don't get Joe: "The president's friends and aides play media critic amid a political mess." They're probably right, but it's hard for outsiders to see, because Biden has never been a very good communicator, and that's never sunk in deep enough to save his latest gaffes from being attributed to obvious age. David Ogilvy advised: "develop your eccentricities while you are young. That way, when you get old, people won't think you're going gaga." But if they hadn't paid attention, that's what they'll think anyway, since that's the easiest answer. But people who have paid attention often come to a different appreciation of Biden. I was surprised when, as Biden was just sewing up the 2020 nomination, to see the "Pod Save America" guys appear on Colbert and profess not just support for Biden -- as any practical Democrat would -- but love. I take that to be the point of Franklin Foer's The Last Politician (on my nightstand but still unread as, well, I'm pretty upset with him since he sloppily endorsed Israeli genocide).

  • Elie Honig: [02-16] The real Biden documents scandal (it's not the old-man stuff).

  • Paul Krugman: [02-13] Why Biden should talk up economic success: I'm pretty skeptical here. Two big problems: one is that people experience the economy differently, so it's hard for most people to see how the big stats affect them personally, and the latter requires more personalized messaging; the other is that lots of people think the economy does wonderfully on its own, and that politicians can only muck it up. They're wrong, but telling people they're stupid or naive is a rather tough sell. What Biden should be doing is talk about case examples. He should identify problems, like high prices (drugs is a good one; gasoline is less good, but still affects people), low wages (minimums, unions, etc.), rent, debt, pollution, corruption, fraud, etc. -- the list is practically endless -- and talk about what he has done, and what he is still trying to do, to help with these problems. And also point out what businesses, often through corrupt Republicans, are doing to make these problems even worse. Every one of these stories should have a point, which is that the Democrats are trying hard but need more support to help Americans help themselves, and to keep Republicans from hurting us further. But just throwing a bunch of numbers up in the air doesn't make that point, at least in ways most people can understand, even if you're inclinled to believe Biden, which most people don't. And isn't that the rub? There are lots of good stories to be told, but Biden is such an inept communicator that he's never going to convince people.

  • Miles Mogulescu: [02-10] Biden's unqualified aid to Israel could hand Trump the presidency: I think this is true, even though anyone who knows anything knows that it was Trump who gave Israelis the idea that Washington would blindly support any crazy thing right-wing Israelis could dream up, and that was what increasingly pushed Hamas into the corner they tried to break out of on Oct. 7. However, Biden didn't so much as hint at any scruples over Israel, even after raging vengeance turned into full genocide. At this point, the war in Ukraine is slightly less of an embarrassment, but also shows the Biden administration's inability to think their way out of war. As I said last week, if Biden can't get his wars under control, he's toast.

  • John Nichols: [02-16] Michigan just became the first state in 6 decades to scrap an infamous anti-union law.

  • Ari Paul: [02-16] The media is cheering Dems' rightward turn on immigration.

  • Christian Paz: [02-12] Yes, Democrats, it's Biden or bust: "Even if voters or the establishment wanted to, there really isn't a viable process to replace Biden as the nominee." More "replacement theory":

  • Paul Rosenberg: This also led me to a couple of older articles also on tactics.

  • Dylan Saba: [02-15] Democrats are helping make the US border look more and more like Gaza.

  • Robert J Shapiro: [02-12] Based on incomes, Americans are a lot better off under Biden than under Trump.

  • Norman Solomon: [02-16] Dodging Biden's moral collapse is no way to defeat Trump.

  • Paul Starr: [02-15] It's the working class, stupid: Review of John Judis/Ruy Teixeira: Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Story of the Party in the Age of Extremes. I've been thinking about the same problem, so picked up a copy of the book, but haven't rushed to get into it. After all, these guys aren't exactly known as geniuses. Their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, tried to flip Kevin Phillips' 1969 book on how demographic trends favored Republicans, and didn't fare so well -- it's easier to be optimistic than to be self-critical. Starr lets them off easy, noting that he wrote a similar essay five years earlier (An Emerging Democratic Majority), so it's nice to have that reference.

  • Matt Stieb: [02-15] Biden picks up key Putin endorsement: Eliciting suspicion by Democrats that he's playing some kind of devious reverse psychology game, although his explanation ("[Biden] is a more experienced, predictable person") sounds eminently reasonable. Of course, it would have been more sensible to just dodge the questions, maybe even to admit that covert support for Trump in 2016 was a blunder. In their rush to demonize him -- which Navalny's death once again sends into overdrive -- people forget that he is the kind of guy, secure in his own power, that one can do business with, at least if you approach him with a measure of respect. Unfortunately, that seems to be a lost art in Washington, supplanted by a cult of power projection with no concern for doing right.

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

Ukraine War:

Valerie Hopkins/Andrew E Kramer: [02-16] Aleksei Navalny, Russian opposition leader, dies in prison at 47. I don't have any real opinions on Navalny, other than that his arrest and death reflects badly on Russia's political and justice systems, and therefore on their leader, Vladimir Putin. Like most people with any degree of knowledge about Russia, I don't have much respect let alone admiration for Putin. I could easily imagine that, if I were Russian, I would support whatever opposition seems most promising against Putin, and that may very well mean Navalny, but not being Russian, I also realize that it's none of my business, and I take a certain amount of alarm at how other Americans have come to fawn over him. I don't think that any nation should interfere in the internal political affairs of another, and I find it especially troubling when Americans in official positions do so -- not least because they tend to be repeat offenders, using America's eminence as a platform for running the world.

On the other hand, I don't believe that nations should have the right to torture their own people over political differences. There should be an international treaty providing a "right to exile" as an escape valve for individuals who can no longer live freely under their own government. Whether Navalny would have taken advantage of such a right isn't obvious: he did return to Russia after being treated for poisoning in Germany, and he was arrested immediately on return, so perhaps he expected to be martyred. That doesn't excuse Russia. If anything, that the story had such a predictable outcome furthers the indictment.

More on Navalny:

Speaking of prominent political prisoners, there's been a flurry of articles recently on Julian Assange:

Around the world:


Other stories:

Keith Bradsher: [02-12] How China built BYD, its Tesla killer.

Tim Fernholz: [02-15] How the US is preparing to fight -- and win -- a war in space: "Meet the startup trying to maintain American military dominance in space." Author previously wrote Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (2018). Few ideas are more misguided than the notion that anyone can militarily dominate space. Chalmers Johnson illustrated that much 20 years ago by imagining the result of some hostile actor launching "a dumptruck full of gravel" into orbit: it would indiscriminately destroy everyone's satellites, and everything dependent on them (including a big chunk of our communications infrastructure, and such common uses as GPS, as well as the ability to target missiles and drones).

Lydialyle Gibson: [02-12] We have treatments for opioid addiction that work. So why is the problem getting worse?

Umair Irfan: [02-14] Carmakers pumped the brakes on hybrid cars too soon.

Ben Jacobs: [02-13] The race to replace George Santos, explained: Written before Tuesday's vote, which gave the seat to Democrat Tom Suozzi, who was favored in polls by 3-4 points, and won by 8 (54-46).

Sarah Jones: [02-14] The anti-feminist backlash at the heart of the election.

Eric Levitz: [02-18] How NIMBYs are helping to turn the public against immigrants: "(In this house, we believe that high rents fuel nativist backlashes."

Charisma Madarang: [02-13] Jon Stewart skewers Biden and Trump in scathing 'Daily Show' return: I watched the opening monologue segment, and must say I didn't laugh once. It was about how much older Stewart is now than when he retired from the show 20 years ago, which was when Biden was the same age Stewart is now. And, yes, Trump's pretty old too. The most annoying bit was when Stewart, repeatedly, referred to being president as "the hardest job in the world." That it most certainly is not. As far as I can tell, it looks like a pretty cushy job, with lots (probably too many) people constantly at your beck and call, keeping track of everything and everyone, and preparing for every eventuality. It may be overscheduled, but Trump showed that doesn't have to be the case, and Biden doesn't seem to spend a lot of time in public, either. It may be dauntingly hard to fully comprehend, and the responsibility that comes with the power may be overwhelming, but Trump, and for that matter Biden, don't seem to be all that bothered. Maybe we should have presidents who know and care more, but history doesn't suggest that it makes much difference. Once they get their staffs in place, the bus pretty much drives itself. (Or, in Trump's case, wrecks itself, repeatedly.)

Later on, Stewart brought in his "team of reporters," tending to all-decisive diners in Michigan -- the sort of comedians who developed careers out of the old Daily Show, like Samantha Bee and John Oliver -- and sure, they were pretty funny, albeit in stereotypical ways (naïve/inept Democrats; vile/evil Republicans). More on Jon Stewart:

  • Jeet Heer: [02-16] Jon Stewart is not the enemy: "You don't defeat Trump by rejecting comedy." I agree with the subhed, but I'm still waiting for the comedy. For what it's worth, I think Messrs. Colbert, Myers, and Kimmel have done great public service over the last eight years in reminding us how vile, pompous, and utterly ridiculous Trump has always been, and I thank their audiences for robustly cheering them on. (It's nice to know you're not alone in thinking that.) Myers even does a pretty good job of reminding us that all Republicans are basically interchangeable with Trump, which is a message more people need to realize.

Ciara Moloney: [01-29] What peace in Northern Ireland teaches us about 'endless' conflicts: "If the international community can underwrite war, it can also underwrite peace and justice." Nathan J Robinson linked to this in a tweet, pace a quote from Isaac Herzog: "You cannot accept a peace process with neighbors who engage in terrorism."

Kevin Munger: [02-16] Nobody likes the present situation very much. Unclear where this is going, but it's something to think about:

I think that the pace of technological change is intolerable, that it denies humans the dignity of continuity, states the competence to govern, and social scientists a society about which to accumulate knowledge.

Dennis Overbye: [02-12] The Doomsday clock keeps ticking: The threat of nuclear weapons is real, but the metaphor is bullshit. The clock isn't ticking. It's just a visual prop, meant to worry people, to convey a sense of panic, but panic attenuates over time. So if 7 minutes haven't elapsed since the clock was set 77 years ago, why should we worry now? We clearly need a different system for risk assessment than the one behind the doomsday clock. We also need some much better method for communicating that risk, which is especially difficult, because there are actually dozens of different risks that have to be represented, each with their own distinct strategies for risk reduction. I'm not willing to enter that rabbit hole here, other than to offer a very rough swag that the odds of any kind of nuclear incident in the next 12 months are in the 1-2% range (which, by the way, I regard as alarmingly high, given the stakes, but far from likely; my greatest uncertainty has to do with Ukraine, where there are several serious possible scenarios, but the avoidance of them in 2023 and the likelihood of continued stalemate suggests they can continue to be avoided; by the way, I would count Chernobyl as an above-threshold incident, as it caused more damage, and more fallout, than a single isolated bomb; it should be understood that there is a lot more danger in nuclear power than just the doomsday scenario).

Jared Marcel Pollen: [02-14] Why billionaires are obsessed with the apocalypse: Review of Douglas Rushkoff's book, Surival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

Aja Romano: [02-15] Those evangelical Christian Super Bowl ads -- and the backlash to them -- explained. Also:

Brian Rosenwald: [02-14] The key to understanding the modern GOP? Its hatred of taxes. Review of Michael J Graetz: The Power to Destroy: How the Antitax Movement Hijacked America. The reviewer, by the way, had his own equally plausible idea, in his book: Talk Radio's America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States.

Becca Rothfeld: [02-15] The Alternative is just the book economists should read -- and won't: "Journalist Nick Romeo lays out eight examples of what we gain when we think about morality alongside money." The book's subtitle: How to Build a Just Economy.

Matt Stieb: [02-13] The millionaire LimeWire founder behind RFK Jr.: "Mark Gorton has done his own research on JFK, LBJ, vaccines, and the 2024 election."

Li Zhou:

The New Yorker: [02-17] Our favorite bookstores in New York City: From the days after I turned 16, got a driver's license, and dropped out of high school, up until perhaps as late as 2011 (i.e., when Borders show down), I spent large parts of my life carousing around bookstores -- at least two, often more like four times a week. (Since then, I mostly just do this.) I fell out of the habit here in Wichita (which still has Watermark Books, and a Barnes & Noble), but what really got me was find most of the bookstores I regularly sought out when visiting New York City had been turned into banks (Colisseum Books was especially saddening). So I'm pleased to see this article, and also to note that the only store listed I've actually been in was the Barnes & Noble. Not that I'm actually likely to get back there any time soon -- most of the people I knew there have departed, and I haven't traveled since the pandemic hit -- but at least one can again entertain the thought.


Also, some notes found on ex-Twitter (many forwarded by @tillkan, so please do yourself a favor and follow her; my comments in brackets):

  • John Cassidy: When 2 headlines are worth 10,000 word[s]. [Image of Wall Street Journal page. Headlines: "Biden Presses Netanyahu to Accept Plan"; "U.S. Is Preparing to Send Bombs, Other Arms to Israel"]

  • Tony Karon: Judge Biden by what he does, not by what he says. Israel can't sustain its genocidal war without the US munitions Biden keeps sending, while offering the equivalent of "thoughts and prayers" for the Palestinian civilians they'll kill [link to: US to send weapons to Israel amid invasion threat in Gaza's Rafah]

  • Nathan J Robinson: The worst serial killer in history killed nearly 200 children. A true monster. Unfathomable evil.

    So far Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu have killed over 10,000 children. Their evil reaches a whole other level of depravity.

    [Commenters belittle the comparison by pointing to the usual list of political monsters -- Hitler, Stalin, Mao -- without realizing that they're only adding to the list (which should, by the way, also include Churchill, Nixon, and GW Bush). Where Netanyahu ranks on that list is open to debate, but that he is morally equivalent isn't. As for Biden, he's certainly complicit, a facilitator, but things he's directly responsible for are relatively minor even if undeniably real (e.g., strikes against Yemen, Iraq, Syria; general poisoning of relations with Iran and Russia). I'm less certain that Stalin and Mao belong, at least the mass starvation their policies caused: that result was probably not intended, although both did little to correct their errors once they became obvious. Churchill's relationship to starvation is more mixed: the Bengal famine was mostly incompetence and lack of care, much like Stalin and Mao, but his efforts to starve Germans were coldly considered and rigorous.]

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Daily Log

Christgau Consumer Guide notes (my grades in brackets, - earlier, + after review:

  • Aesop Rock: ITS: Integrated Tech Solutions (Rhymesayers '23) B+ - [B+(***)]
  • Dogo du Togo: Dogo du Togo (self-released '22) *** + [B+(*)]
  • Jack Harlow: Jackman (Atlantic '23) A- - [B+(*)]
  • Hot House: The Complete Jazz at Massey Hall Recordings (1953, Craft '23) A + [B+(***)]
  • Millie Jackson: On the Soul Country Side (Kent) A- - [B+(***)]
  • James Kahn: By the Risin' of the Sea: Shanties for Our Times (self-released) *** - []
  • Jim Kweskin: Never Too Late: Duets With My Friends (StorySound) *** - []
  • The Mountain Goats: Jenny From Thebes (Merge '23) B+ - [B+(**)]
  • Meshell Ndegeocello: The Omnichord Real Book (Blue Note '23) * - [B+(*)]
  • Nirvana: Live at the Paramount (Geffen) ** - []
  • Okuté: Okuté (Chulo '21) A- - [B+(***)]
  • Bill Orcutt: Music for Four Guitars (Palilalia '22) A- - [B+(**)]
  • The Paranoid Style: The Paranoid Style Presents: The Interrogator (Bar/None '24) A - [A-]
  • Sleater-Kinney: Little Rope (Loma Vista '24) B+ - []

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

Music Week

Expanded blog post, February archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 51 albums, 2 A-list

Music: Current count 41828 [41777] rated (+51), 23 [21] unrated (+2).

I posted a long Speaking of Which just before bedtime late Sunday night. I didn't quite get through my usual rounds, so added some more stuff today, which in turn pushed this out late, again. Still unclear how far I'll get Monday night.

Fortunately, I don't have much to say about music this week. The rated count is down, but I hit up several boxes, including the big Mingus one I saw little point in but enjoyed anyway, and yet another iteration of the Massey Hall Quintet/Trio. Also, another big r&b oldies box, again not ideal but quite thoroughly enjoyed.

Very little progress to report on EOY lists, websites, book projects, or anything else. The links, of course, are in the usual place.


New records reviewed this week:

  • Colby Acuff: Western White Pines (2023, Sony Music Nashville): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Jim Alfredson: Family Business (2021 [2023], Posi-Tone): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Bill Anschell: Improbable Solutions (2020-23 [2024], Origin): [cd]: B+(*)
  • Alex Anwandter: El Diablo En El Cuerpo (2023, 5 AM): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Atmosphere: Talk Talk EP (2023, Rhymesayers Entertainment): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Bad Bunny: Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Manana (2023, Rimas Entertainment): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Barbie: The Album (2023, Atlantic): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Berlioz: Jazz Is for Ordinary People (2023, self-released, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Jaap Blonk/Damon Smith/Ra Kalam Bob Moses: Rune Kitchen (2022 [2023], Balance Point Acoustics): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Brothers Osborne: Brothers Osborne (2023, EMI Nashville): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Burial: Dreamfear/Boy Sent From Above (2024, XL, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Tré Burt: Traffic Fiction (2023, Oh Boy): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Willi Carlisle: Critterland (2024, Signature Sounds): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Jordan Davis: Bluebird Days (2023, MCA Nashville): [sp]: B+(*)
  • John Dierker/Jeff Arnal: Astral Chronology (2022-23 [2023], Mahakala Music, EP): [bc]: B+(**)
  • Drake: For All the Dogs (2023, OVO Sound): [sp]: B
  • Ana Frango Elétrico: Me Chama De Gato Que Eu Sou Sua (2023, Mr Bongo): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Andy Emler MegaOctet: No Rush! (2023, La Buissonne): [bc]: B+(**)
  • Ilhan Ersahin/Dave Harrington/Kenny Wollesen: Your Head You Know (2023, Nublu, EP): [bc]: B+(*)
  • Peter Erskine and the Jam Music Lab All-Stars: Bernstein in Vienna (2021 [2024], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
  • Greg Foat & Eero Koivistoinen: Feathers (2023, Jazzaggression): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Hardy: The Mockingbird & the Crow (2023, Big Loud): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Ayumi Ishito: Ayumi Ishito & the Spacemen Vol. 2 (2020 [2023], 577): [os]: B+(*)
  • Maria João & Carlos Bica Quartet: Close to You (2019-21 [2023], JACC): [bc]: A-
  • Cody Johnson: Leather (2023, Warner Music Nashville): [sp]: B
  • Ruston Kelly: The Weakness (2023, Rounder): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Knower: Knower Forever (2023, self-released): [sp]: B
  • Tony Kofi & Alina Bzhezhinska: Altera Vita (For Pharoah Sanders) (2023, BBE, EP): [sp]: B
  • Ella Langley: Excuse the Mess (2023, Sawgood): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Metric: Formentera II (2023, Metric Music International): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Mokoomba: Tusona: Tracings in the Sand (2023, Out Here): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Nickel Creek: Celebrants (2023, Thirty Tigers): [sp]: B-
  • Old Crow Medicine Show: Jubilee (2023, ATO): [sp]: B
  • Dave Pietro: The Talisman (2023 [2024], SteepleChase): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Dougie Poole: The Rainbow Wheel of Death (2023, Wharf Cat): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Noah Preminger/Kim Cass: The Dank (2023, Dry Bridge, EP): [bc]: B+(**)
  • Nicky Schrire: Nowhere Girl (2023, Anzic): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Laura Schuler Quartett: Sueños Paralelos (2021 [2023], Antidrò): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Sparks Quartet [Eri Yamamoto/Chad Fowler/William Parker/Steve Hirsh]: Live at Vision Festival XXVI (2022 [2023], Mahakala Music): [bc]: B+(**)
  • Peter Stampfel/Eli Smith/Walker Shepard: Wildernauts (2024, Don Giovanni): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Tani Tabbal Quartet: Intentional (2022 [2023], Mahakala Music): [bc]: B+(***)
  • Truth Cult: Walk the Wheel (2023, Pop Wig): [bc]: B+(*)
  • Turnpike Troubadours: A Cat in the Rain (2023, Bossier City): [sp]: B
  • Morgan Wallen: One Thing at a Time (2023, Big Loud): [sp]: B+(*)
  • Stephen Wilson Jr.: Søn of Dad (2023, Big Loud): [sp]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • Tubby Hayes: No Blues: The Complete Hopbine '65 (1965 [2023], Jazz in Britain): [bc]: B+(***)
  • Jeffrey Lewis: Asides & B-Sides (2014-2018) (2014-18 [2023], self-released): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Lou Reed: Hudson River Wind Meditations (2007 [2024], Light in the Attic): [sp]: B+(**)
  • Taylor Swift: 1989 (Taylor's Verison) (2023, Republic): [sp]: B+(***)
  • Barbara Thompson: First Light (1971-72 [2023], Jazz in Britain): [bc]: B

Old music:

  • The Paranoid Style: The Power of Our Proven System (2013, Misra, EP): [yt]: B+(***)


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Alon Farber Hagiga With Dave Douglas: The Magician: Live in Jerusalem (Origin) [02-24]
  • David Friesen: This Light Has No Darkness (Origin) [02-24]
  • Roberto Magris: Love Is Passing Thru: Solo/Duo/Trio/Quartet (2004, JMood) [03-01]
  • Zach Rich: Solidarity (OA2) [02-23]

Monday, February 12, 2024

Daily Log

Music Week got delayed. I did the cutover more/less on schedule, but thought I should catch up with some delayed bookkeeping, and it got the better of me: turns out I hadn't done the indexing not just for January but also for December and November of 2023. Those were all big months, and I still hadn't finished adding December to the artist directory when the clock ran out on Monday. Needless to say, hadn't written any text by they, either (although I did manage to add a postscript to Speaking of Which). Prospects for a Tuesday post are pretty good, which may even include the January indexing.

I noticed this post to the Expert Witness group on Facebook, from Elizabeth Nelson Bracy, auteur behind the Paranoid Style, with a new album out, The Interrogator.

I reviewed it last week, and liked it well enough to give it an A-, evidently without displaying the enthusiasm that grade usually denotes. A couple days ago, I heard from a frequent correspondent, who offered me a YouTube playlist of their 2013 debut, The Power of Our Proven System, a five-song EP I noted as unheard in my database. The letter included this: "I'm into Elizabeth Nelson's work even less than you are, and certainly less than Christgau and his brood." I played it three times, but only watched some of the videos -- which were collages of newsreel footage with bits of Nelson looking pensive and/or quizzical but not singing -- and wrote up a B+(***) review. So I wrote that just before the Nelson post appeared.

One more bit of background. Christgau's reviews are very favorable (grades: A-, A, A-, A-, A, A, A). He hasn't reviewed The Interrogator yet, but that's probably the only record I got to before seeing his review, so it's unsurprising that my reviews should trail and reflect his (my grades: ***, A-, ***, ***, A-, ***, ***, A-, A-; the reviews are more likely to note that the good music isn't that great, and that my slowness as grasping lyrics preclude analysis of her undoubtedly serious stances). I could write several more paragraphs here using Nelson as a prism for exploring where and why Christgau and I diverge (and after 50 years of engagement, I doubt I'm the only one who ever diverges, although his eight years of seniority seemed like much more at the start). For now, let me just quote from one of his early reviews, that pretty much established the theme for everything since (emphasis added):

Faster and louder, slower and more reflective, better recorded with a better drummer, this five-song EP is where Elizabeth Nelson fully vents her contempt for the 60s, structural injustice, the 60s, escapist liberalism, a charismatic mentor who brainwashed her with reason, the 60s, and the musical style she and her husband mean to be better at than anybody else in the world except maybe Sleater-Kinney. Her motto: "Don't think twice, it's all over now." Her self-promo: "Glam-rock for the end times."

The bold part there is the content, which I don't recall ever parsing (in the songs, that is, which might add some depth and/or detail beyond the review), which Christgau clearly admires, and which I have some doubts about (which 60s? whose 60s? and who was that mentor? -- Richard Hofstadter? mine was Robert Paul Wolff, and that makes a big difference). As for the music, don't get me started on Sleater-Kinney.

Anyhow, the post:

Hey gang,

Long-time member, first-time commenter here.

A lot of you are very nice people and I've enjoyed hearing your thoughts about music. A few of you are extremely toxic towards me, and that's enough for me to decide to leave the group. Before I do, I did just wanna say this:

No individual anywhere is under the remotest obligation to enjoy or even tolerate the Paranoid Style LP 'The Interrogator' or any of our other records. I couldn't be more okay with that. However: Weaponized comments like "I think she's just too smart for me" or "I just don't want to read a peer reviewed journal to understand a rock song" or "she talks pretty good, but . . ." are standard issue reactionary dog whistles. If that isn't clear enough you might need to do some reflections on yr group chat. It's basically the 2016 Trump campaign in microcosm.

For those special few: Have I taken screenshots of all of the ill-considered, misogynistic, potentially career-ending comments you've written about me? Of course. Will I do anything with them? Probably not. But trust and believe that I will remember all of the mean things you've said over the years regardless.

Mostly, I just want to say to Jon LaFollette that I DO think he is smart enough for the Paranoid Style. As someone who also went to ::checks notes:: Indiana University for grad school -- and I was a mediocre student!! -- I think he's actually in a uniquely good position to get my songs. That he doesn't like the material is totally groovy. That he chooses to dunk on any achievement my band and I have by pissing in the punch with his snarky slights just bums me out. To him I say: Respectfully, dude, you don't have to listen to my music. It's not a mandate. Last I checked, this is America. You can go and listen to any of the other zillions of albums released in the last ten seconds. Or pick up your guitar and work on your own alt-rock choogle. Write a better song than whatever I've put out. Release a record. Send it to me and I'll happily -- HAPPILY -- review it.

Nelson out.

Nelson gets a fair amount of press from the Expert Witness group, not just for her group's music but often for her writing. I haven't read a lot of the latter, partly because it seems like a lot of it is her catching up on stuff I'm old enough to have lived through, but mostly because I don't read much on music except for brief scans for prospecting. But I can remember when I was catching up myself, and how much I was into serious criticism at the time, so I liked seeing her on that track.

I don't recall any past hostility to her from the EW group: most are fans, some big (the new album has been getting advance hype for 3-6 months now), maybe the occasional reservation (I don't recall uttering any myself). But evidently what brought this to a head was a seemingly innocuous post by Steve Alter, linking to the Pitchfork review: "The score [7.4] is too low, but the words are pretty good." What kicked this off was a comment by Jon R. LaFollette:

Am I the only one who doesn't feel nearly smart enough to understand what the fuck this band is singing about half the time?

That was all I saw in the feed. I didn't recognize it as toxic at the time, but it did make me wonder whether talking about how smart Nelson is hasn't become some kind of cliché. Hadn't I just done that? (My summary line in my EP review: "straitlaced indie rock with copious smarts, a formula [they] have stuck doggedly with.") I'm reminded of people at parties who flip off a lot of names and concepts when they corner you: are they really so smart, or just being pretentious? I've never had that reaction to Nelson, but the more the cliché hardens into expectation, the more likely someone will turn it over.

So I took LaFollette's comment to be a harmless joke. (Four emojis weighed in: two hearts, two laughing/howling/hard to tell.) Hardin Smith responded with "I always keep a thesaurus and a big bottle of Prevagen handy when I listen to their stuff." LaFollette countered with "I just don't want to read a peer-reviewed journal in order to understand a rock song, ya know?" I'd score both of these as dumb (after having to google "Prevagen," so maybe add an esoteric to that): no one does that, and who even thinks such a thing? My rule of thumb on lyrics is if you get them, they're a plus or minus, but if you don't, they didn't matter.

None of this seems toxic, at least until Timothy Bracy -- Nelson's husband and the principal non-singer in the band -- jumps in with (directed to LaFollette): "Are you so smart that you got into law school (vaulting achievement that) or too dumb to grasp a fucking rock song? Clowntime." Further down, he explains:

With all due respect, Jon has been making the same nasty, belligerent, not very funny joke about every thing Elizabeth has released for seven years, and we have sat there and quietly consumed his abuse on the principle that "what is the point in engaging?" At a certain juncture, seeing your wife get repeatedly dragged by a mean, spirited anonymous (to me) individual gets hard to take- try it sometime. I think if you put yourself in my position you might be able to understand this. Why, exactly, does this person have license to throw snarky, personal-seeming elbows without consequences or pushback? Is that your definition of a healthy critical ecosystem? Having said that, not my best moment or rhetorical highpoint.

I perhaps should have ended that quote after the first line, but the rest backtracks a bit, so is fair to include. This elicited a thoughtful reply from Alter, and a reiteration from Bracy (which I will excerpt):

However, I think you are underrating the extent to which Jon's ongoing (and it has been ongoing) critique HAS been of a gratuitous and particularly personal nature. He obviously hates Elizabeth's music- which is fine- but he seems also to hate the very idea of the band even existing, and he's extremely caustic about it.

Adding the following on 02-15, but thematically this belongs here. LaFollette finally apologized:

I apologize to Elizabeth and Tim for my snarky comments about their music. I should have just kept my mouth shut as I know how hard the grind is for bands on the up-and-come. Far from my finest moment and I take responsibility for it. But to accuse me of dog-whistling for misogynists everywhere is a step too far. And as for supposedly being so damn smart, I went to the same school that gave Mike Pence a law degree. They let anyone in the club.

Joe Lunday, the group admin, also commented:

I second Barrett's comment. I also understand that the Bracys may have been added by a group member nearly nine years ago, and perhaps knowing nothing about the group, not considered that it would mean reading the chatter of people who are discussing your work. To respond to some of those comments with ad hominem attacks, macho bluster and empty threats isn't cool. If we're going to sometimes have artists in the group, they should consider that mobilizing the base in this way in a gang-up on a group member - based on the most ungenerous reading of slightly snarky criticism - isn't a fair use of their clout with a significant number of people in the group.

Given Facebook's "significance" algorithm, Barrett Whitener's comment appears after Lunday's seconding. Here it is:

As I said earlier, this sucks, and I'm truly sorry Elizabeth, whose work as a musician and a critic I admire like crazy, was unhappy with some comments. That said, this is a group where opinionated fans of a renowned music critic talk about music. Musicians (and certainly recording artists, and most certainly artists whose work is liable to come up here) shouldn't be too surprised if some sharp elbows get thrown sometimes.

I thought I might have had more to say about this, but a two-day-old Facebook rant suddenly seems like ancient history.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

It's pretty exhausting trying to wrap this up on Sunday evening, early enough so I can relax with a bit of TV, a few minutes on the jigsaw puzzle, a few pages in my current book, and maybe a bit of computer Mahjong before I run make to get a jump on Monday's Music Week. After a night's sleep, chances are good that I'll think of some introductory text, and stumble across a couple stories I initially missed. If I do, I'll add them and mark them accordingly, with that red right-margin border.

But if you want a pull quote right now, it's probably this:

But if Biden can't get his wars under control by October, I fear he's toast -- and will be deserving of the loss, even if no one else deserves to beat him. After all, the ball is in his court.

Initial counts: 145 links, 5,485 words.


Top story threads:

Israel:

Israel vs. world opinion:

America's expansion of Israel's world war:

Trump, and other Republicans:

Biden and/or the Democrats:

Lots of people have unsolicited advice for the Biden campaign, which frankly seems to need one, but New Republic came up with a bundle of them this week -- enough to break out from the news items above, so let's collect them here.

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

Ukraine War:

Around the world:


Other stories:

Al Jazeera: [02-02] Ex-CIA software engineer who leaked to WikiLeaks sentenced to 40 years: "Joshua Schulte had been found guilty of handing over classified materials in so-called Vault 7 leak.

Nicholson Baker: [01-31] No, aliens haven't visited the earth: "Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?"

Harry Brighouse: [02-05] What's wrong with free public college? Some reasonable points, but I'm not much bothered that a right to free higher education would benefit the middle class more than poorer students. Lots of worthwhile programs do the same, but we shouldn't, for example, give up on airline safety just because the beneficiaries skew up.

Elizabeth Dwoskin: [02-10] How a liberal billionaire became America's leading anti-DEI crusader: Profile of Bill Ackman. Another rich guy with money to burn, but how does having donated to Clinton and Obama make him any kind of liberal?

Nicholas Fandos: [02-10] What to know about the race to replace George Santos: "The special House election in New York pits Mazi Pilip, a Republican county legislator, against Tom Suozzi, a former Democratic congressman." In other words, the Democrats nominated the most anodyne white guy possible, while the Republicans calculated that the best way to advance their racist, sexist, nativist agenda was by nominating a black female Jewish immigrant from Ethiopia.

Abdallah Fayyad/Nicole Narea/Andrew Prokop: [02-09] 7 questions about migration and the US-Mexico border, answered. More border:

Rebecca Gordon: [02-11] Banning what matters: "Public libraries under MAGA threat."

Joshua Keating: [02-06] Welcome to the "neomedieval era": "Nations like the US have more firepower than ever before -- but they also appear weaker than ever. The upshot is a world that feels out of control."

Clare Malone: [02-10] Is the media prepared for an extinction-level event? "Ads are scarce, search and social traffic is dying, and readers are burned out. The future will require fundamentally rethinking the press's relationship to its audience."

AW Ohlheiser: [02-08] What we've learned from 20 years of Facebook.

Nathan J Robinson:

Jeffrey St Clair: [02-09] Roaming Charges: Comfortably dumb. Harsh on Biden. Quote:

  • Sen. Chris Murphy on the failed Border/Ukraine/Israel deal: "They are a disaster right now. How can you trust any Republicans right now? They told us what to do. We followed their instructions to the letter. And then they pulled the rug out from under us in 24 hrs." ["They"? You got nothing but embarrassed.]

  • It's instructive that MAGA has threatened to "destroy" James Lankford, the rightwing Senator from Oklahoma who wrote a border closure bill that gave them 99% of what they wanted and Democrats are lining up behind Biden for endorsing a bill that betrayed everything he'd ever promised on immigration.

Bryan Walsh: [02-10] Taylor Swift, the NFL, and two routes to cultural dominance: My minor acknowledgment of the week's overweening culture story, not that I have anything to say about it. Cultural dominance isn't what it used to be LVIII years ago, when the Chiefs I remember fondly -- Len Dawson, Otis Taylor, Ed Budde, E.J. Holub, Buck Buchanan -- got butchered by the Green Bay Packers (IV was much more satisfying), while the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and James Brown were regularly outdoing themselves. These days, even the largest stars seem much smaller than they did when I was fifteen, because we now recognize that the world is so much larger. I haven't watched football since the 1980s (or baseball since the 1990s), and while I still listen to quite a bit of popular music, I doubt that any new artist has occupied as much as 1% of my time since 2000. I've listened to, and clearly like, Taylor Swift, but I hardly recognize her song titles, and certainly couldn't rank them (as Rob Sheffield did, 243 of them). I suppose you could chalk that up to age, but I'm feeling the least bit nostalgic. I reviewed more than 1,600 records last year. In 1966, I doubt I heard more than 10 -- supplemented, of course, by KLEO and TV shows like Shindig! and Hullabaloo, but the universe I was conscious of extended to at most a couple hundred artists. Back then, I thought I could master it all. Now I know I never stood a chance.

I know I promised, but what the hell:

Li Zhou: [02-06] The Grammys' Beyoncé snubs speak to a deeper problem: Beyoncé was snubbed? "They're emblematic of how the awards have failed Black artists." As someone who has never had any expectation of Grammy ever doing anything right, I find the very notion that anyone could be so certainly deserving of a win as to be snubbed baffling.


Sorry for doing this to you, but I'm going to quote a Donald Trump tweet (quoted by Matthew Yglesias, reposted by Dean Baker, my emphasis added):

2024 is our Final Battle. With you at my side, we will demolish the Deep State, we will expel the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country, we will rout the Fake News Media, we will Drain the Swamp, and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all!

Yglesias responded: "This stuff is demented but it also serves to deflect attention from the boring reality that what he's going to do is cut rich people's taxes, raise prescription drug prices, let companies dump more shit in the water, etc etc etc." There's a lot of hyperbole in this pitch, but who can doubts that there are warmongers in the cururent government, that they are pushing us into more perilous foreign entanglements, and that Biden isn't likely to restrain much less break from them. There's good reason to doubt that Trump can fix this, but if he wants to campaign on the promise, many people will find slim chance preferable to none. Moreover, the rest of his pitch is coherent and forceful, and is likely to resonate with the propaganda pitch much of the media -- and not just the shills at Fox -- have been pushing over the last decade.

Countering that Trump won't really do this just feeds into the paranoia over the Deep State -- which, to be sure, thwarted him in 2017, but this time he knows much better what he's up against. Worse still is arguing that his actual government will be boring, with a side of petty corruption, just shows you're not listening, and also suggests that you don't much care what happens. If Trump did nothing more than check off Yglesias's list, he'd still be a disaster for most Americans. But at the very minimum, he's going to do much more than that: he's going to talk, and he's going to talk a lot, and he's going to bring more people into government and media who are going to add ever more vicious details to the mass of hate and pomposity he spews. And even though lots of us are going to recoil in horror, we'll still have to stuggle to survive being inundated by it all, all the while suffering the glee of our tormenters.

Of course, the "Final Battle" and "once and for all" is as over the top as the Book of Revelation he's taken to heart. But that it can't happen won't make them any less determined, or dangerous, or dreadful.