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Monday, October 14, 2024


Speaking of Which

File opened 2024-10-08 11:43 AM.

I had the thought of writing up a "top ten reasons for voting for Kamala Harris and the Democrats this year," but haven't gotten much further than considering the possibility of adding a second list of "top five reasons why voting for Kamala Harris and the Democrats won't be enough." The former is obviously dominated by how bad the Republican offerings are, although you still have to establish that at least in some significant respects, Democrats are preferable. If you can't show that, you can't reject the "third party" option. The second list might even help there, in that most of my reservations are about programs that don't go far enough. The exceptions there are Israel/Palestine and Russia/Ukraine, where Harris doesn't go anywhere at all.

So while I have zero doubt that I will vote for Harris/Walz, and most likely for every other Democrat who bothers to run here in Kansas, I've spent most of my time here dealing with the pressing issues of war, which the election will have little obvious impact on. The best hope I can offer is a mere hunch that Harris has locked herself into a Netanyahu dittohead position out of the calculated fear that any sign of wavering might precipitate a sudden pro-Israel shift toward Trump, and scuttle her campaign, but that once she wins, she'll have more room to maneuver behind the scenes, and ease back toward the more viable ground of decency. In any case, decency isn't even an incidental prospect with Trump.

Monday night, I ended this arbitrarily, with little sense of how much more I didn't get to.


The following is a bit from Gideon Levy's The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe (pp. 9-11):

Israel's media have acted this way for years. They conceal the occupation and whitewash its crimes. No one orders them to do this; it is done willingly, out of the understanding that this is what their consumers want to hear. For the commercial media, that is the top and foremost consideration. In this way Israel's media have become the most important agent for dehumanization of the Palestinians, without the need for censorship or a government directing it to do so. The media take on this role in the knowledge that this is what their customers want and expect of it. They don't want to know anything about what their state and army are carrying out, because the best way to be at peace with the reality of occupation, apartheid and war is with denial, suppression and dehumanization.

There is no more effective and tried means to keep alive an occupation so brutal and cruel as dehumanization via the media. Colonialist powers have always known this. Without the systematic concealment, over dozens of years, and the dehumanization, it may well be that public opinion would have reflected greater opposition to the situation among Israelis. But, if you don't say anything, don't show anything, don't know anything and have no desire to know anything, either, if the Palestinians are not truly human -- not like us, the Israelis -- then the crime being committed against them goes down easier, can be tolerated.

The October 7 war brought all of this to new heights. Israel's media showed almost nothing of what was happening in Gaza, and Israelis saw only their own suffering, over and over, as if it was the only suffering taking place. When Gazans counted 25,000 fatalities in less than four months, most of them innocent noncombatants, in Israel there was no shock. In fact, shock was not permitted, because it was seen as a type of disloyalty. While in Gaza 10,000 children were killed, Israelis continued to occupy themselves exclusively with their captives and their own dead. Israelis told themselves that all Gazans were Hamas, children included, even the infants, and that after October 7, everyone was getting just what they deserved, and there was no need to report on it. Israelis sank into their own disaster, just theirs.

The absence of reporting on what was happening in Gaza constituted the Israeli media's first sin. The second was only slightly less egregious: the tendency to bring only one voice into the TV studios and the pages of the printed press. This was a voice that supported, justified and refused to question the war. Any identification with the suffering in Gaza, or worse, any call to end the war because of its accumulating crimes, was not viewed as legitimate in the press, and certainly not by public opinion. This passed quietly, even calmly, in Israel.

In Israel, people were fine with not having to see Gaza. The Jewish left only declined in size, great numbers of people said they had the scales removed from their eyes -- that is, October 7 led to their awakening from the illusion, the lies, the preconceptions they had previously held. It was sufficient for a single cruel attack for many on the left to have their entire value system overturned. A single cruel attack was sufficient to unite Israelis around a desire for revenge and a hatred not only of those who had carried out that attack, but of everyone around them. No one considered what might be taking place in the hearts and minds of the millions of Palestinians who have been living with the occupation's horrors for all these dozens of years.

What kind of hatred must exist there, if here in Israel such hatred and mistrust could sprout up after a single attack, horrific as it may have been. This "waking up" among the left has to raise serious questions about its seriousness and resilience. This wasn't the first time that the left crumbled in the face of the first challenge it encountered.

I've long been struck by the fickleness of the "peace camp" in Israel: in particular, by how quickly people who should know better rally behind Israeli arms at the slightest provocation. Amos Oz and David Grossman are notorious repeat-offenders here, but the effect is so common that it can only be explained by some kind of mass psychology so deep-seated that it can be triggered any time some faction sees an opportunity for war.


Top story threads:

Israel's year of infamy:

  • Mondoweiss: A website founded by Philip Weiss which has moved beyond its origins as a vehicle for progressive Jews to express their misgivings about Israel by providing an outlet for a wide range of Palestinian voices, this has long been my first stop for news about Israel/Palestine, and has been extraordinarily invaluable over the past year. Here's their: Palestinians reflect: One year of genocide:

    • Michael Arria: [10-10] A year of genocide, a year of protest: "Despite the horror we are watching unfold in Palestine, the movement challenging Israel has seen unprecedented growth and accomplishments in the past year." A reminder that every action produces a reaction -- perhaps not "opposite and equal," but things have a way of settling out over time.

    • Noura Erakat: [10-08] Five things we've learned since October 7. From an August 30 speech as part of a panel titled "All Eyes on Palestine."

      1. It has exposed the enduring colonial nature of international law
      2. This is a U.S. genocide of Palestinians
      3. Universities are an extension of the state's coercive apparatus
      4. Zionism has no moral legs to stand on
      5. Racism and power -- the invisibility and power of Palestinians
    • Tareq S Hajjaj: [10-07] After October 7, my home became a bag I carry with me: "I have lived through my own Nakba and understand why thousands of Palestinians fled their homes in 1948. I made the most difficult decision of my life and left Gaza, not knowing that what I carried might be all I will ever possess of my homeland."

    • Reem A Hamadaqa: [10-07] My martyrs live on: "Out from under the rubble, I see my martyrs waving for me. They all stand again. They smile. They live. They go back home."

    • Maen Hammad: [10-09] Photo essay: An autobiography of uprising: "Documenting one year of revolt from the occupied West Bank to the East Coast."

    • Hebh Jamal: [10-10] The Gaza I knew is gone with our martyrs: "We do not fight for Palestine for our family. I am no longer clinging to the hope of reunification and survival. We fight for Palestine because the liberation of its people means the liberation of us all."

    • Ghada Karmi: [10-08] The true lesson of October 7 is that Israel cannot be reformed: "The year since October 7 has shown us that Israel can neither be accommodated nor reformed. It must be dismantled, and Zionism must be brought to an end. Only this will finally alleviate the Palestinians' terrible ordeal over the past 76 years." This is an argument that I instinctively dislike and recoil from, but I do take the point that it is incumbent on Israelis to show that they are open to reform, the first step to which would be the recognition that they have done wrong, and the resolve to stop doing so, and to start making amends. Whether they can salvage some sense of Zionist legacy is an open question. The strands of thought and culture that drove Israel to genocide are woven deep in their history, and won't be easy to dispose of, but I wouldn't exclude all hope that Israel might recover.

    • Rawan Masri: [10-11] October 7 created a new world, but there is so much left to be done: "We live in an entirely new world than a year ago. The ugly, racist, violent logic dominating our lives has been irrevocably exposed. Will we allow that logic to prevail?"

    • Qassam Muaddi: [10-09] After a year of extermination, Palestine is still alive: "Palestinians have endured 76 years of the Nakba and now the 2024 genocide. Despite Israel and the West's desire to erase our existence, we continue to declare, 'We won't leave.'"

    • Salman Abu Sitta: [10-07] From ethnic cleansing to genocide: "I am a survivor of the 1948 Nakba who lived to witness the 2024 genocide. I may not live to see justice be made, but I am certain our long struggle will be rewarded. Our grandchildren will live at home once again."

  • Ruwaida Kamal Amer: [10-05] After a year of terror in Gaza, our souls feel suspended in time: "I've cheated death, mourned friends, and lost my livelihood. Just when I was on the cusp of leaving this torment, Israel shut our last crossing to the world."

  • Alice Austin: [10-07] A year after the Nova massacre, survivors are still paralyzed with grief: "The Nova festival was the site of October 7's largest massacre. Now, survivors and the families of those murdered are suing the state for negligence." One section head here is in quotes: "It's impossible to heal, because it's never-ending." But the massacre itself ended almost as quickly as it started. What has never ended has been the political use and psychological abuse of that massacre as a pretext for genocide. End that, and everyone can start healing.

  • Ramzy Baroud: [10-11] A year of genocide. "No one had expected that one year would be enough to recenter the Palestinian cause as the world's most pressing issue, and that millions of people across the globe, would, once again, rally for Palestinian freedom." In some limited sense that may be true, but I don't see how it works out. Not for lack of trying, but those "millions of people" haven't been very effective, nor is their fortune likely to change.

  • Joel Beinin: [10-07] Yahrzeit for October 7: Long note on Facebook, including:

    Since October 7, organizations of the American Jewish establishment, like the Jewish Federations and the Anti-Defamation League, have weaponized our grief, decontextualized it, promoted falsehoods about what happened that day, and deployed Israeli propaganda talking points to justify a genocidal onslaught against the Gaza Strip. Within days of October 7, Israeli political and military leaders publicly declared their intention to exact vengeance by destroying Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip. Leading with a campaign of mass bombing in densely populated areas that could only result in massive civilian deaths, they have done so. Israel's conduct of the war does not conform to any reasonable definition of self-defense.

    The second half of the piece is devoted to relatively old history, especially an event in 1971, which leads into the final paragraph:

    The January 2, 1971 attack on the Aroyo family and Israel's brutal response to it prefigure, albeit on a much smaller scale, the events of October 7, 2023 and their aftermath. Shlomo Gazit was correct. Israeli security cannot be achieved by committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing. Palestinian liberation cannot be achieved by murdering civilians.

  • Helen Benedict: [10-03] Ending the cycle of revenge: "Bereaved Israelis and Palestinians use their grief to advocate for reconciliation and peace together."

  • Robert Grenier: [10-05] How Israel's brutal war strategy has remade the Middle East: "Israel set out to reestablish military superiority. It succeeded -- at catastrophic human cost." Article misses the obvious question, which is why "military superiority" matters to anyone other than the military budget makers, as well as why the Hamas attack on October 7 made them think they had something to prove. As for "remaking the Middle East," it really looks much like it did just over a year ago, except for the humanitarian crisis which Israel itself is solely responsible for. (Sure, blame America for aiding, but had Israel not wanted to launch its multi-front war, Americans would have bowed and scraped just the same.)

  • Anis Shivani: [10-11] Israel won: I considered pairing this piece with Baroud (above) as a sobering counterpoint, but it has its own problems. While Palestinians have lost much, it's hard to say what (if anything) Israel has won. Also, he seems to be stuck on the notion that the US is the architect of Israel's foreign policy, whereas the opposite seems much closer to the truth.

  • Nick Turse: [10-07] Israel's year of killing, maiming, starving, and terrorizing the people of Gaza: "Taking stock of the human toll of one year of destruction in the densely packed Gaza Strip." Lots of statistics follow, ending with:

    Last year, images and video of the survivor of the October 7, 2023, strike in Abasan Al-Kabira, 11-year-old Tala Abu Daqqa, circulated online. In a short video, the young girl -- her face peppered with tiny cuts -- appears glassy-eyed, broken, shattered. That day, the first of the war, she became one of the now 2.1 million Palestinians in Gaza who have witnessed or directly experienced conflict trauma and one of the 1 million children in need of mental health and psychosocial support. Since the attack, at least 138,000 fellow Gazans have been killed or wounded.

    Numbers can't tell the full story of the suffering of children and adults living under a year of Israeli bombardment. No matter how accurate, figures can't capture the scope of their sorrow or the depth of their distress. An estimate of how many million tons of rubble Israeli attacks have produced can offer a sense of the scale of destruction, but not the impact of each strike on the lives of those who survived, and the effect on the future of Gaza given how many didn't.

    Numbers are wholly insufficient to explain Tala Abu Daqqa's anguish. Statistics can't tell us much about how living through such a catastrophe affects an 11-year-old child. Heartache defies calculation. Psychological distress can't be reduced to the score on a trauma questionnaire. There is no meaningful way to quantify her loss except, perhaps, by offering up two basic, final numbers that will stay with her forever: two parents and three sisters killed.

Israel:

  • Mondoweiss:

  • Jonathan Adler: Israel's paradoxical crusade against UNRWA: "Israeli officials are relying on UNRWA to prevent a polio epidemic -- while the Knesset advances laws to expel the agency." Paradox?

  • Dave DeCamp: [10-13] Israeli government done with ceasefire talks, seeks annexation of Gaza.

    Israeli defense officials told Haaretz on Sunday that the Israeli government is not seeking to revive ceasefire talks with Hamas and is now pushing for the gradual annexation of large portions of the Gaza Strip. . . .

    The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth has reported that Israeli forces in Jabalia are carrying out a "scaled-down" version of the "general's plan," an outline for the complete ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza and the killing of any Palestinians who choose to stay, whether by military action or starvation. The UN's World Food Program said Saturday that no food aid has entered northern Gaza since October 1. . . .

    If Israel is successful in cleansing northern Gaza of its Palestinian population, it would pave the way for the establishment of Jewish-only settlements in the area, an idea openly supported by many Israeli ministers and Knesset members. The general's plan calls for the tactics to be used in other parts of the Strip once the north is cleansed.

  • Tareq S Hajjaj: [10-09] Inside Israel's ongoing invasion of Jabalia in northern Gaza: "Israel laid siege to Jabalia in northern Gaza on the anniversary of October 7. Residents tell Mondoweiss that the Israeli army is forcibly conscripting civilians as human shields and shooting residents who attempt to evacuate."

  • Mohammed R Mhawish: [10-09] I'm still reporting on Gaza. But the blood on our streets is no closer to drying: "Palestinian journalists write for a future that doesn't involve counting the dead -- for the bombs to stop, the tanks to roll back, and the drones to disappear."

  • Ibrahim Mohammad/Mahmoud Mushtaha: [10-10] 'Dead bodies everywhere' in Jabalia camp as Israel besieges northern Gaza: "Gazans in the north are trapped in their homes as Israel launches a new military operation, threatening and shooting at fleeing residents."

  • Qassam Muaddi: [10-08] 'I can't feel anything anymore': women in a West Bank refugee camp reflect on a year of Israeli military raids on their homes: "After a year of near-constant Israeli military raids on their homes and private spaces, women are some of the most affected among the Palestinian residents of Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem."

  • Suzi Weissman: [10-07] Israeli politics is even more right-wing since October 7: Interview with Yoav Peled.

  • Mairav Zonszein: [10-07] On Israeli apathy. I resisted the word "apathy" here. It's a commonplace that many (most?) Israelis have lost the ability to recognize Palestinians as human beings -- a loss of empathy that makes them indifferent to horrendous violence. But it's easier to understand that as hatred than as apathy. And no doubt much Israeli propaganda is devoted to stoking hate, but that goes hand-in-hand with efforts to desensitize Israelis to the effects of violence directed at others, and ultimately to keep Israelis from realizing that their own violence is doing to themselves.

    The lawlessness and state violence directed at Palestinians for so long have started to seep into Jewish Israeli society. Mr. Netanyahu's refusal to assume responsibility for the security failures of Oct. 7, his grip on power despite corruption trials, his emboldening of some of the most radical and messianic elements in Israel are a testament to that. The nearly carte blanche support Israel has received from the Biden administration throughout much of this war has further empowered the most hard-line elements of the nation's politics. And yet many Israelis are still not making the connection between their inability to get the government to prioritize Israeli life and how expendable that government treats Palestinian life.

    Without this realization, it is hard to see how Israelis can pave a different path forward that does not rely on the same dehumanization and lawlessness. This, for me, has made what is already a dire, desperate reality seemingly irredeemable. For Israelis to start carving a way out of this mess, they will have to feel outraged not only by what is being done to them, but also what is being done to others in their name, and demand that it stop. Without that, I'm not sure that I, like other Israelis with the privilege to consider it, see a future here.

    Any state that allows such abuse will ultimately turn its anger and callousness on its own people.

Lebanon:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

  • Michael Arria:

  • Sunjeev Bery: [10-10] US foreign policy has created a genocidal Israel: "Without massive, unconditional US military subsidies, Israel would have had to practice diplomacy with their neighbors years ago." One could just as easily argue that Israel has steered the US toward increasing embrace, if not (yet) of full-blown genocide, then at least to the leading policies of "extraordinary rendition," "black sites," and "targeted assassination," as Israel became first the model, then the laboratory for the "war on terror" -- really just a cult that believes that sheer force can overcome all obstacles. Or one can argue that genocide is encoded in the DNA of our shared settler-colonial origins, a latent tendency which flowers whenever and wherever conditions allow.

    There can be no doubt that the American "blank check" has contributed significantly to those conditions. And on the surface, it would seem that the rare occasions when American presidents attempted to restrain Israel were successful: in 1956, Eisenhower forced Israel to retreat from Egypt; in 1967 and 1973 the US and Russia brokered UN ceasefire resolutions; in 1978, Carter halted Israel's intervention in Lebanon, and in 1979 Carter brokered a peace agreement with Egypt; in 1990-91, Bush restrained Israel from retaliating against Iraq, and pressed for peace talks, which ultimately led to Israelis replacing the recalcitrant Shamir with Rabin, leading to the ill-fated Oslo Accords. But in fact, every apparent accommodation Israeli leaders made to US pressure was systematically subverted, with most of the offenses repeated as soon as allowed: the war against Egypt that Eisenhower ended was relaunched with Johnson; the invasion of Lebanon that Carter held back returned with Reagan; the sham "peace process" under Clinton was demolished -- well, actually repackaged in caricature -- with GW Bush. But under Trump and Biden, American subservience -- which is part pure corruption, but also imbued in war-on-terror culture -- has become so complete that Netanyahu no longer bothers to pretend.

    Actually, Israel's die was set in two previous events where a realistically alternative path was possible and rejected -- in both cases, by David Ben-Gurion. The first was in 1936, when British authorities realized what a mess of their mandate in Palestine, and proposed, through the Peel Commission, to solve their problem with a program of partition and mandatory transfer: divide the land into two pieces, and force all the Jews to one side, and all the Arabs to the other. The division, of course, was unfair, not just in the ratio of people to land but especially in that nearly all of people forcibly uprooted and "transferred" would be Arabs. But Ben-Gurion, whose power base at the time was the Hebrew-only union Histadrut, saw in the proposal the prospect of an ethnically pure Jewish state, which could with independence and time build up a military that could seize any additional lands they thought they needed.

    The British proposal was not only rejected by the Palestinians, but precipitated a revolt which took the British (and the Israeli militias they encouraged) three years to suppress, and then only when the British to the main Palestinian demand, which was to severely limit Jewish immigration. But Ben-Gurion kept the drive for partition alive, eventually persuading the UN to approve it in diluted form -- the "transfer" was sotto voce, but when the British withdrew in 1948, Israel's militias merged into the IDF, significantly expanded beyond the resolution's borders, and drove more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes into exile. The resulting Israel wasn't as large or as pure as Ben-Gurion had hoped, but it soon became as powerful, as became clear in its wars against Egypt in 1956 and 1967 (and its defense in 1973).

    One can argue that Ben-Gurion did what needed to be done in order to found and secure Israel. But once Israel was free and secure, it had options, one of which was to treat its new minority fairly, earn its respect and loyalty, and disarm its neighbors by normalizing relations. Ben-Gurion didn't do that, but he did give way to his lieutenant, Moshe Sharrett, who was much more inclined to moderation. Ben-Gurion's second fateful decision was to return to politics, deposing Sharrett, and returning Israel to the path of militarism, ethnocracy and empire building. This led straight to the 1956 war, and its 1967 reprisal. Ben-Gurion had retired again before the latter, but he had left successors who would carry on his maximalist objectives (notably, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, and Ariel Sharon; meanwhile, he had rehabilitated his old enemies from the Jabotinsky wing, from Menachem Begin to Benjamin Netanyahu, and integrated into the political system the followers of the ultra-orthodox and ultra-nationalist Kook rabbis -- pretty much the entire spectrum of current Israeli politics).

    I like to think of Ben-Gurion's return to power as similar to Mao's Cultural Revolution: the last desperate attempt of an aging revolutionary to recreate his glory days rather than simply resting on his laurels. It is interesting that Ben-Gurion advised against the 1967 war, arguing that Palestinians wouldn't flee from Israel's advancing armies like they did in 1948, so any land gained would reduce the Jewish demographic majority he had fought for, and be burdened with a heavy-handed occupation. But once the war ended so decisively, he was delighted, and his followers were confident they could handle the occupation -- the bigger threat was that Egypt and Syria would fight to get their land back, as they did in 1973.

    While Ben-Gurion has had extraordinary influence on Israel's entire history, he has at least in one respect been eclipsed of late: he always understood that occupation was a burden, one that can and should be lightened by some manner of decency, and he also understood that Israel needs friends and alliances in the world, which again demands that Israel show some decency and respect. Shlomo Avineri ends his The Making of Modern Zionism with chapters on Ben-Gurion, Jabotinsky, and Kook. Ben-Gurion at least understood the rudiments of social solidarity, and saw practical value in it, even if his socialism was radically circumscribed by his nationalism. Most Israelis today no longer feel the need: like Jabotinsky, they believe that power conquers all, and that the powerful should be accountable to none; while some, like Kook, see their power as divinely ordained, as is their mission to redeem greater Eretz Yisrael, and purge it of its intruders. To them, America is just a tool they can use for their own ends. Indeed, it's hard to explain why Biden and his predecessors have indulged Israel so readily. Which, I suppose, is why Bery's thesis, that American power has always been rotten, cannot be easily dismissed. His conclusion is not wrong, except inasmuch as he implies conscious intent:

    The simple reality is that U.S. foreign policy remains just as bloody and horrific as it has always been. In earlier decades, "acceptable" losses included the 1 to 2 million civilians killed in Vietnam, another million dead in Indonesia, the carnage of U.S.-backed dictators across Latin America, and the hundreds of thousands killed during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Today's U.S. military and diplomatic interventions in the Middle East are no different.

    To end Israel's horrific actions in the Middle East, we must change the politics of America itself. This is no easy task, given the robust power and influence of pro-Israel -- and pro-war -- networks, donors, and lobbying groups inside the U.S. But it is the task at hand, and it should be the focus of every person of conscience, both within and outside the borders of the United States. As has been true in other regions of the world, U.S. foreign policy is the fundamental obstacle to justice, democracy, and peace in the Middle East.

    Page also included a link to a year-old article which adds background depth here:

  • Max Boot: [10-10] There is no purely military solution to Israel's security woes: And this from a guy who sees "military solutions" like a hammer sees nails.

  • Yaniv Cogan: [10-06] Blinken approved policy to bomb aid trucks, Israeli cabinet members suggest.

  • Daniel L Davis: [09-16] Israel's conduct in the war will consume us all: "Netanyahu used a sledgehammer when a scalpel was the right tool -- now everyone is paying the price."

  • Liza Featherstone: [10-06] The chicken hawks want war with Iran.

  • Jeet Heer: [10-11] The high cost of Biden's policy of unconditional support for Israel: "Beyond hobbling Kamala Harris's campaign, Biden is leaving behind a disaster that will last decades."

  • Khader Jabbar: [10-06] Israel and Iran: Unpacking Western media bias with Assal Rad: "Assal Rad joins The Mondoweiss Podcast to discuss media coverage of recent events in Palestine and Lebanon and the persistent pro-Israel bias in Western media."

  • Jake Johnson: [10-13] Alarm as Pentagon confirms deployment of US troops to Israel: "Netanyahu is as close as he has ever been to his ultimate wish: making the US fight Iran on Israel's behalf." The deployment is pretty limited -- "an advanced antimissile system and around 100 US troops" -- but it encourages Israel to provoke further armed responses from Iran, while making American troops handy targets for all sorts of terrorist mischief. Washington, conditioned to see Iran as a potential aggressor, probably sees this as purely defensive, urgent given Iran's threats (and occasional but mostly symbolic practice) of retaliation, and practical in that trained troops can get the system operative much faster than just handing the weapons over to Israel. Netanyahu, on the other hand, will see this as confirmation that the Americans are on the hook for war with Iran. They also understand that if/when Iran wants to hit back in ways that actually hurt, the US has many easier targets to hit than the patch of Israel this weapon system is meant to protect.

  • Imran Khalid: [10-09] Israel is the greatest threat to US strategy in the Middle East: "Netanyahu's push for a military victory beyond Gaza threatens to drag Washington into a broader regional war, challenging America's long-term interests in the region."

  • Rashid Khalidi:

    • [10-13] Israel is acting with full US approval: An interview with the noted historian, author of many books, including Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East (2013). I still find it a bit hard to buy into his main point:

      The first thing we have to do is to disabuse ourselves of the notion that the United States has any reservations about what Israel is doing. Israel is doing what it is doing in careful and close coordination with Washington, and with its full approval. The United States does not just arm and diplomatically protect what Israel does; it shares Israel's goals and approves of Israel's methods.

      The tut-tutting, the pooh-poohing, and the crocodile tears about humanitarian issues and civilian casualties are pure hypocrisy. The United States has signed on to Israel's approach to Lebanon -- it wants Israel to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas. It does not have any reservations about the basic approach of Israel, which is to attack the civilian population in order to force change in Lebanon and obviously in Gaza. . . .

      The United States helps Israel in targeting Hezbollah and Hamas leaders -- that is a fact. Anybody who ignores that and pretends that there's any daylight between what Israel does and what the United States wants it to do is lying to themselves or is lying to us.

      I don't have any evidence to contradict this, but this doesn't fit the model I have of American interests and motivations. The most likely part of this story is the low-level sharing of signals intelligence and targeting information, because that doesn't have to go through diplomatic levels where questions might be asked about what it's being used for. That sort of thing is pre-approved, not because Israel is doing America's dirty work but because US officials have, as a matter of political convenience, given up any pretense of independent thought where Israel is concerned.

    • [05-07] Violent settler colonialism caused this war: Earlier interview, happened to find it in an open tab.

  • Maureen Clare Murphy: [10-05] US admits it doesn't want diplomatic solution.

  • Paul R Pillar: [10-07] Biden is letting Israel trap the US into war with Iran: "One year after Hamas' Oct 7 attacks, regional conflict is raging with no end in sight."

  • Ben Samuels: [10-02] In US election, Israel might be the ultimate October surprise: "For the first time, there's a real chance that Israel may help sway the race. Election Day is 34 days away. Undoubtedly, many more surprises are in store, and none of them are likely to be pleasant."

  • Dahlia Scheindlin: [10-01] Hamas and Hezbollah trapped Israel on October 7. Now Israel is trapping Iran and America: "Tehran and Washington are facing tremendous dilemmas, trapped between two highly fraught options. Their choices will determine the fate of the Middle East for both the short term and for years to come." But the only real choice here is Israel's, as they can keep doing this until they get their desired result, which is America and Iran at war.

  • Ishaan Tharoor: [10-09] How Netanyhahu shattered Biden's Middle East hopes: "The Israeli prime minister tested and bested President Joe Biden's diplomatic strategy around the growing conflict in the Middle East." The logical fallacy here is in thinking that Biden ever had his own plans for anything involving Israel.

  • Nick Turse:

  • Jonah Valdez: One year of empty rhetoric from the White House on Israel's wars.

  • Sharon Zhang:

Israel vs. world opinion:

  • Kyle Anzalone: [10-13] Israel to seize UN agency's headquarters for new settlement housing: That would be the UNRWA offices in East Jerusalem.

  • Marjorie Cohn: [10-08] As Israel extends its genocide into the West Bank, it targets and kills children.

  • Julia Conley: [10-11] Hiroshima survivor and nuke abolitionist wins Nobel Peace Price, spotlights Gaza: "Toshiyuki Mimaki said he thought 'the people working so hard in Gaza' would be honored, referring to UNRWA aid workers."

  • Jim Fitzgerald: [10-14] Israel against itself and Israel against all.

    There is a good bit of evidence that suggests Israel is unraveling from within. It now appears that Zionism, like communism, is a self-defeating project. In June of this year, renown Jewish historian, Ilan Pappé, suggested [link follows] that the collapse of Zionism may be imminent. According to Pappé, "We are witnessing a historical process -- or, more accurately, the beginnings of one -- that is likely to culminate in the downfall of Zionism."

    In a manner eerily reminiscent of ancient Israel, modern Israel is quickly dividing into two separate states: the State of Israel and the State of Judea. The former identifies as a secular liberal democracy while the latter consists of far right religious zealots who want to establish a theocracy, and believe that God has promised them all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates.

    Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich is a leading figure of this latter group. In a new documentary produced by Arte, Smotrich claimed that "the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus."

    Not surprisingly, Smotrich's vision for the State of Judea includes annexing territories presently belonging to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. The members of this group, including, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security, believe that the events which transpired on October 7 provide the perfect pretext for them to realize their vision of Greater Israel.

    It should be noted hee that Smotrich's party only holds seven seats (out of 120) in the Knesset, although they seem able to use their limited leverage to dominate the coalition government agenda.

  • Adam Johnson/Othman Ali: [10-14] A study reveals CNN and MSNBC's glaring Gaza double standard: "Palestinians received far less sympathetic and humanizing coverage than either Israelis or Ukrainians, a Nation analysis has found." Nice to have the charts and all the rigor, but the conclusion has been obvious for many years. It's been engineered by "hasbara" architects, and reinforced by the whispers of money in editors' ears.

  • David Klion: [10-08] The failure of liberal Zionism: "Israel has behaved exactly as its harshest critics predicted."

    By scapegoating Netanyahu, who has dominated the Israeli political system for most of the past fifteen years, liberal Zionists have been able to preserve in their imaginations the idealized Israel many of them fell in love with decades ago -- the Israel that was founded by secular socialists from Eastern Europe and that branded itself as a paragon of enlightened governance, even as it engaged from the beginning in colonization, land theft, murder, and expulsion on a scale that Netanyahu's coalition can only envy. By denying the essential nature of the Zionist project and its incompatibility with progressive values, liberal Zionists have also been in denial at every stage about the war to which they have pledged at least conditional support. They have insisted that the situation is "complicated," which is the framing Ta-Nehisi Coates absorbed during his tenure at the predominantly liberal Zionist Atlantic, and which he denounced as "horseshit" following a trip to the occupied West Bank in the summer of 2023. "It's complicated," Coates told New York magazine last month, deriding that common talking point, "when you want to take something from somebody."

    A year after October 7, no one seriously believes there will be peace between Israel and the Palestinians in our lifetime. The bombed and starved children of Gaza will never forget what they've been subjected to, nor the world's general indifference; while it's not on the same scale, their counterparts in Israel will never forget the national trauma of the attacks. The "two-state solution" that liberal Zionists have verbally supported for years as the only possible just outcome is an obvious fantasy. Other, far more disturbing outcomes seem likelier; at present, it is hard to see what consequences Israel will face from continuing to kill and displace Palestinians on all fronts while seizing and occupying more and more of their land. If there is one lesson to be taken from the past dismal year, it's this: the liberal Zionist interpretation of the conflict has no predictive value, no analytical weight, and no moral rigor. It is a failed dream of the previous century, and it is unlikely to survive this one.

  • Gideon Levy: [10-10] Israel has lost its humanity as it celebrates its power to kill: "A hundred innocents, a thousand, even ten thousand dead Palestinian children - none of this changes the new Israeli mindset."

    The loss of humanity in public discourse is a contagious and sometimes fatal disease. Recovery is very difficult. Israel has lost all interest in what it is doing to the Palestinian people, arguing that they "deserve it" - everyone, including women, children, the elderly, the sick, the hungry and the dead.

    The Israeli media, which has been more disgraceful over the past year than ever before, voluntarily carries the flag of incitement, inflaming passions and the loss of humanity, just to gratify its consumers.

    The domestic media has shown Israelis almost nothing of the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, while whitewashing manifestations of hatred, racism, ultra-nationalism, and sometimes barbarism, directed at the enclave and its population.

  • Owen Jones: [10-03] What atrocity would Israel have to commit for our leaders to break their silence?

  • Jake Romm: [09-24] There's another way to hold Netanyahu accountable for the Gaza genocide: "A case for prosecuting the Israeli prime minister for the crime of persecution." Good case, but in what court?

  • Said Zeedani: [10-08] Gaza's governance must remain in Palestinian hands: "Amid plans for external interventions, it is vital to build a consensus around an interim body to manage Gaza's urgent needs and pave the way for unity." I have no idea who's saying what about "external interventions," but nothing serious can happen until Israel implements a ceasefire (with or without any Hamas consent -- even if the hostages are not repatriated immediately, they will be much safer with a ceasefire), agrees to withdraw its forces, and renounces any claim to the land of Gaza and/or its people. If we've learned anything from the last year, it's that Israel is not fit to occupy land without citizens. That shouldn't be a hard sell to Israel, as they have no settlers in Gaza to contest claims, and they've more than made their point about what they will do to people who attack them.

    Once Israel is out of the picture, other people can get involved, immediately to rescue the people -- for the most part de-housed, with many diseased and/or starving -- and eventually to repair and rebuild. Gazans have great needs and no resources or leverage, so reconstruction will depend on the generosity of donors -- which may quite reasonably come with strings attached (especially to respect Israel's security, to avoid future repeats of its brutality). The one point which must be respected is that in due course Gaza must be self-governing, its sovereignty vested in the people who live there and are free to choose their own leaders. Any "interim authority" must lead without prejudice to such a democracy. Among other things, this means that it should not ensconce previous political parties (like Fatah or Hamas), nor should it exclude former members. Gaza should rebuild on a clean slate.

  • B'Tselem: The pogroms are working - the transfer is already happening: I've cited this report before, but it popped up again in Mazin Qumsiyeh's newsletter, and is worth repeating, as it helps put the post-Oct. 7 genocide into its much deeper historical context, as a continuation of a process which Israelis were diligently working on before they could accelerate it under the "fog of war." (You may recall that the Nazi extermination program only began after they invaded Russia, although the Nazis were rabidly antisemitic from the start, and committed many heinous crimes against Jews well before they crossed the line we now know as genocide.)

    This is mostly a report on events in the West Bank prior to the Oct. 7 Gaza revolt, after which settler violence in the West Bank -- "in the past two yeras, at least six West Bank communities have been displaced" -- only increased.

    For decades, Israel has employed a slew of measures designed to make life in dozens of Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank miserable. This is part of an attempt to force residents of these communities to uproot themselves, seemingly of their own accord. Once that is achieved, the state can realize its goal of taking over the land. To advance this objective, Israel forbids members of these communities from building homes, agricultural structures or public buildings. It does not allow them to connect to the water and power grids or build roads, and when they do, as they have no other choice, Israel threatens demolition, often delivering on these threats.

    Settler violence is another tool Israel employs to further torment Palestinians living in these communities. Such attacks have grown significantly worse under the current government, turning life in some places into an unending nightmare and denying residents any possibility of living with even minimal dignity. The violence has robbed Palestinian residents of their ability to continue earning a living. It has terrorized them to the point of fearing for their lives and made them internalize the understanding that there is no one to protect them.

    This reality has left these communities with no other choice, and several of them have uprooted themselves, leaving hearth and home for safer places. Dozens of communities scattered throughout the West Bank live in similar conditions. If Israel continues this policy, their residents may also be displaced, freeing Israel to achieve its goal and take over their land.

Election notes:

  • Gail Collins/Bret Stephens: [10-07] How could the election be this close? Good question, to which the article only offers the oblique of answer of demonstrating how clueless two New York Times opinion columnists can be. Stephens, at least, wears his ignorance on his sleeve, going out of his way to quote arbitrary Blacks and Hispanics who think Harris is "too liberal," "overall untrustworthy," and "unsure how prepared she is to be president." (And see those traits as worrisome compared to Trump?) Stephens also wants Harris to "name some widely respected policy heavyweights as members of her brain trust -- people like Robert Rubin and David Petraeus. And announce that Liz Cheney will be her secretary of state." Collins keeps her cluelessness hidden better. She has a reputation for humor, but here it's mostly just egging Stephens on to say stupid things.

    PS: Speaking of stupid Stephens things, this piece came to my attention:

    • Bret Stephens: [10-01] We absolutely need to escalate in Iran. It's quite possible that this was the inspiration for the "preemptive strike on Iran now?" question that opened the VP debate. The editorial came to my attention via:

    • Kathleen Wallace: [10-11] We absolutely do not need to escalate anything New York Times.

      Despite what those afflicted with sociopathy at the top want us to believe, we are hardwired to help each other. We've heard how the military has to work so hard to train killers, to erase that hesitation to kill, and how so many shots taken in war are purposely missed ones. When we see such wanton glee at killing we can bet that an immeasurable number of hours have been spent in the indoctrination of hatred, to erase the inclination for community and mutual aid. . . .

      But we all know how kids often turn out after living in violent and hate-filled homes and that's basically what all of us have been toiling under our whole lives. We all know we've been propagandized, it's a constant task that we need to be aware of this fact and we need to recognize things like "passive voice" so popular in newspapers like the New York Times. All these people dying, not being killed! Children being called adult terms to take away our natural gut reaction to their deaths . . . I think many have been able to break out of the arrogant decrees that are brought down by religious institutions but still are enamored with the liberal intelligentsia media. If they say it, it must be true and there is no slant to the way it's delivered. Well, it will take some time and critical thinking for those "esteemed" edifices to be brought down. But for now, New York Times, you can go fuck yourself and your call to war, there's real work to be done and we don't have time for your shit.

      Author's ellipses in last paragraph (originally six dots, no idea why). I considered dropping the second half of that paragraph, but decided the author deserved to make the point, even if crudely.

  • Stanley B Greenberg: [10-09] Trump is laser-focused on the final duel. Harris is not. "That will put Trump and Vance in the White House." One problem with reporting based on polls is that polls most often ask stupid questions of people who are far short of well-informed, so they can chastise politicians for failing to cater to their nonsensical results.

  • Chris Lehman: [09-25] In 2024, the pundits are wronger than ever: "Most of the predictions, advice, and scolding emanating from the glow of TV news this year have proved flat-out wrong. Democrats should stop listening once and for all." Well, yes and no. It helps to start from the assumption that you're being lied to and being given faulty and often disingenuous advice, then try to work out what you can learn from that. On the other hand, there actually is a lot of pretty good, solid reporting and analysis available, if only you can figure out which is which.

  • Rick Perlstein:

    • [09-25] The polling imperilment: "Presidential polls are no more reliable than they were a century ago. So why do they consume our political lives?" Catching up with other Perlstein columns:

    • [10-02] Who are the 'undecided'? "It may not be about issues, but whether voters surrender to Trump's invitation to return to the womb." Here he draws on an article Chris Hayes wrote on undecided voters in 2004, and which hardly anyone seems to have understood or rediscovered in the last two decades of intense 24/7 political "coverage": basically, undecided voters are unable to think about political issues in terms of political choices. That's my simplification. Here's Perlstein quoting Hayes:

      Chris noted that while there were a few people he talked to like that, "such cases were exceedingly rare. More often than not, when I asked undecided voters what issues they would pay attention to as they made up their minds I was met with a blank stare, as if I'd just asked them to name their favorite prime number . . . the very concept of the 'issue' seemed to be almost completely alien to most of the undecided voters I spoke to." . . .

      Hayes: "I tried other ways of asking the same question: 'Anything of particular concern to you? Are you anxious or worried about anything? Are you excited about what's been happening in the country in the last four years?'"

      But those questions harvested "bewilderment" too. "As far as I could tell, the problem wasn't the word 'issue' . . . The undecideds I spoke to didn't seem to have any intuitive grasp of what kinds of grievances qualify as political grievances."

      That's the part that stuck with me word for word, almost two decades on. Some mentioned they were vexed by rising health care costs. "When I would tell them that Kerry had a plan to lower health-care premiums, they would respond in disbelief . . . as if you were telling them that Kerry was promising to extend summer into December."

      Of course, you don't have to be "undecided" to have no clue as to the policy domain that politics determines. Many uninformed or less than competently comprehending voters pick their allegiances on other seemingly arbitrary and often nonsensical grounds. These factors are rooted in psychology, and are expertly exploited, mostly by Republican operatives, perhaps realizing that their actual policy preferences have little rational appeal. Perlstein, after noting Trump's promise to be "your protector," reflects back on fascism:

      Millions of pages have been filled by scholars explaining the psychological appeal of fascism, most converging on the blunt fact that it offers the fantasy of reversion to an infantile state, where nothing can come and harm you, because you will be protected by an all-powerful figure who will always put you first, always put you first. It is simply indisputable that this promise can seduce and transform even intelligent, apparently mature, kind-hearted people formerly committed to liberal politics. I've written before in this column about the extraordinary film The Brainwashing of My Dad, in which director Jen Senko describes the transformation of her Kennedy-liberal dad under the influence of right-wing talk radio and Fox News -- and also how, after she explained the premise of her film for a Kickstarter campaign, scores of people came out of the woodwork to share similar stories about their own family members.

      I've learned a lot about the psychological dynamics at work from the X feed of a psychologist named Julie Hotard, who drills down on the techniques Fox uses to trigger infantilization in viewers. The people at Fox who devise these scripts, one imagines, are pretty sophisticated people. Trump's gift is to be able to grunt out the same stuff just from his gut. Trump's appeals have become noticeably more infantile in precisely this way. When he addresses women voters, for instance: "I am your protector. I want to be your protector . . . You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger . . ."

      Or when he grunts the other side of the infantilizing promise: that he will be your vengeance. His promise to destroy anything placing you in danger. Like when he recently pledged to respond to "one really violent day" by meeting criminals with "one rough hour -- and I mean real rough. The word will get out and it will end immediately."

      Or when he posted the Prayer to St. Michael the Archangel ("O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the power of God, cast into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls") illustrated by a 17th-century painting of said saint curb-stomping a defeated devil, about to run a sword through his head.

      Even on the liberal-left, many interpret the way Trump seems even more to be going off the rails these last weeks as a self-defeating lack of control, or as a symptom of cognitive impairment. They almost seem to celebrate it. The New Republic's email newsletter, which I cannot stand, is full of such therapeutic clickbaity headlines canvassing the same examples I talk about here: "Trump Proposes Stunningly Stupid Idea for Public Safety"; "Ex-Aide Says Trump's 'Creepy' Message to Women Shows He's Out of Touch"; "Trump Appears to Have Lost a Total Grasp on Things."

      I certainly don't disagree that Trump is becoming more cognitively impaired and out of touch with reality. But might not these impairments render him a better fascist seducer, as his invitations to infantile regression become ever more primal, ever more basic, ever more pure?

    • [10-09] Our cults, ourselves: "Is the best way to understand the MAGA movement to binge-watch docuseries about charismatic leaders sending their acolytes to ruin? Tune in and find out."

    • [09-18] Everything you wanted to know about World War III but were afraid to ask: "For generations, we thought fear of nuclear holocaust would prevent world war. Is that faith obsolete?"

    • [02-14] A cultural artifact that meets the moment: "Stephen King's Under the Dome nails how Trumpism functions at the most elemental of levels." This is the piece Perlstein cited in the "undecided" piece above, but worth breaking out here. I remember watching, and enjoying, the miniseries (2013-15), but had forgotten whatever political import it might have held, but I welcome the refresher course. The section on The Brainwashing of My Dad is kind of a coda. I should look into it further, although I can already think of several examples from my own family. (I had a pair of cousins, who shared the same cultural legacy -- small towns, church, hunting -- and could be socioeconomic twins, but one got her news from the BBC, the other from Fox.) This essay also refers to a "Part 1":

    • [01-31] A hole in the culture: "Why is there so little art depicting the moment we're in?" Starts with a letter, which includes this:

      My husband and I are old and sitting right slap dab in the middle of red Arkansas with MAGA friends and family all around. They try to pull us into their discussions but we change the subject. I stopped going to church because the churches no longer teach Christ's message, but Trump's message.

  • Harris endorsements:

Trump:

  • Peter Baker/Dylan Freedman: [10-06] Trump's speeches, increasingly angry and rambling, reignite the question of age: "With the passage of time, the 78-year-old former president's speeches have grown darker, harsher, longer, angrier, less focused, more profane and increasingly fixated on the past, according to a review of his public appearances over the years." This elicited letters: [10-09] In Trump's speeches, signs of cognitive impairment.

  • Zach Beauchamp: [10-09] What Trump really means when he says immigrants have "bad genes": "The ominous implication of an outburst that ties two strains of right-wing thought together."

  • Jonathan Chait: [10-10] Trump delivers historically illiterate lecture on tariffs: "Everything he says about this is wrong."

  • Margaret Hartmann: [10-10] Highs and lows from Melania Trump's baffling book. Bullet points:

    High: It's an actual memoir, not a picture book.
    Low: It reads like a generic college-application essay.

    High: The book is quite short.
    Low: There's too much filler.

    High: Melania shares some political views.
    Low: Her political takes make no sense.

    High: The insults are subtle and classy.
    Low: Some insults may be too subtle.

    High: The book is beautiful.
    Low: It won't stay beautiful for long.

    High: The book is endorsed by Donald J. Trump.
    Low: Donald J. Trump probably didn't read it.

  • Richard Lardner/Dake Kang: [10-09] It turns out Trump's 'God Bless the USA' Bibles were made in China: This week's least surprising headline.

  • Robert Lipsyte: [10-06] Growing old in the age (and that's the appropriate word!) of Trump:

    After Joe Biden was shuffled off stage on trumped-up charges of senility, I started thinking seriously about the weaponization of old age in our world. Who gets credit for old age and who gets the boot?

    At 86, I share that affliction, pervasive among the richest, healthiest, and/or luckiest of us, who manage to hang around the longest. Donald Trump is, of course, in this same group, although much of America seems to be in selective denial about his diminishing capabilities. He was crushed recently in The Great Debate yet is generally given something of a mulligan for hubris, craziness, and unwillingness to prepare. But face it, unlike Joe B, he was simply too old to cut the mustard.

    It's time to get real about old age as a condition that, yes, desperately needs and deserves better resources and reverence, but also careful monitoring and culling. Such thinking is not a bias crime. It's not even an alert for ancient drivers on the roads. It's an alarm for tolerating dangerous old politicians who spread lies and send youngsters to war, while we continue to willfully waste the useful experience and energy of all ages.

    He also mentions Rupert Murdoch (93) and Warren Buffett (94):

    Those old boys are anything but role models for me and my friends. After all, they've been practicing all their lives how to be rich old pigs, their philanthropy mirroring their interests, not the needs of the rest of us. In my pay grade, we're expected to concentrate on tips from AARP newsletters on how to avoid telephone scams and falls, the bane of the geezer class. And that's important, but it's also a way of keeping us anxious and impotent.

    But he does mention some other ancients, like Casey Stengel and Jules Feiffer, who he finds more inspiration in. And the Gray Panthers, founded by Maggie Kuhn -- a personal blast from the past, as I knew of them through Sylvia Fink Kleinman (who excused her own fine tastes, explaining "nothing's too good for the working class").

  • Nicholas Liu:

  • New York Times: [09-26] The dangers of Donald Trump, from those who know him: A big chart of sound bites from "administration insiders, the Trumps & Trump Inc., Republican politicians, conservative leaders, world leaders" -- including some who remain as steadfast supporters, like Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz. Oddly enough, the wittiest is Kim Jong-un's "a frightened dog barks louder."

  • Pamela Paul: [10-03] Donald Trump, you lucky dog.

    There are lists of Donald Trump's lies and lists of his alleged crimes. But the catalog of all the good things that have happened to the former president is equally unnerving. Every dog has its day, but Trump -- no fan of dogs, BTW -- has had far more good luck than the average mutt.

    Of course, the man was born lucky -- into a life of wealth and privilege and with looks that some women apparently find attractive. Like many indulged heirs, he quickly dispensed with those gifts, wasting away his fortune like a 20th-century tristate re-creation of "A Rake's Progress." It could have easily curdled into squalor from there.

    But one fateful day, along came "The Apprentice," visiting the sulky developer in his moldering office. As my colleagues Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig document in their new book, aptly titled Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father's Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, it was this improbable TV show that offered Trump a golden ticket out of bankruptcy and irrelevance, transforming him into a successful billionaire by pretending he actually was one.

    Also:

    Eight years ago Trump, who has been convicted of 34 felony charges in Manhattan and has been indicted in three other cases, told a rally full of acolytes, "I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters." It is fortunate for him, then, that he was able to appoint three justices to the Supreme Court who created the possibility for him to be granted immunity in the three remaining cases against him.

    It's impossible to attribute all of this to strategy or intelligence or even mere cunning. In the same way the mask-averse Trump contracted what we now know was a serious case of Covid, at age 74 and seriously overweight, miraculously bounced back with the benefit of cutting-edge treatment that did not include injecting disinfectant, these things happened independent of Trump's own actions and inclinations.

    Now here we are, with Trump crediting the outcome of two failed assassination attempts to divine intervention.

  • James Risen: [10-03] The reason Netanyahu and Putin both want a Trump victory: "so they can prolong and intensify their brutal wars." Actually, there's not much stopping them now, and any policy shift under Harris is purely speculative -- it's sure not something she's campaigning on. I don't doubt that Trump is preferred by both -- as a fellow right-winger, Trump is unbothered by human rights abuses, and he's notoriously open to bribery and flattery. Also, both have history of poking their noses into American domestic politics, although in that Putin is a piker compared to Netanyahu.

  • Tony Schwartz: [10-11] I was Trump's ghostwriter. A new biopic gets the most important thing right. The movie is The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi and written by Gabriel Sherman, based on "Trump's career as a real estate businessman in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as his relationship with lawyer Roy Cohn." (Sebastian Stan plays Trump, Jeremy Strong plays Cohn, and Martin Donovan plays Fred Trump Sr.)

    Watching The Apprentice crystallized two big lessons that I learned from Mr. Trump 30 years ago and that I've seen play out in his life ever since with more and more extreme consequences. The first lesson is that a lack of conscience can be a huge advantage when it comes to accruing power, attention and wealth in a society where most other human beings abide by a social contract. The second lesson is that nothing we get for ourselves from the outside world can ever adequately substitute for what we're missing on the inside.

    Also on The Apprentice:

  • Tatyana Tandanpolie: [10-08] Analysis shows Trump tax plan "taking money" from bottom 95% and "giving it" to richest 5%: "This is an enormously redistributive tax plan from low- and middle-income families to the wealthiest Americans."

  • Joan Walsh: [09-24] Trump is spiraling, and getting creepier, about women voters.

  • Lawrence Ware: [10-11] Republicans are not evil . . . well, not all of them: When I saw this, my first thought was that it might take off from a New York Times opinion piece I had noticed but didn't mention at the time. Author is based in Oklahoma, so no suprise that he regularly encounters Republican voters who seem decent enough even when they are wrong. As a writer, I am often tempted to use "evil," as few words make a point so succinctly. But almost always, the real target is some act or belief, not the person implicated in the moment. Aiming at the person loses that distinction, and makes it that much harder to ever recover.

    • Nicholas Kristof: [08-31] Here's why we shouldn't demean Trump voters. It's not just that some Trump voters have decent (even if misguided) motivations, and that grouping them all together is a logical fallacy, but that the habit and practice is bad for you too -- it makes you more like the person you are demeaning. That said, in this particular case, "misguided" is a really huge understatement.

    • Brad Warthen: [10-11] Kristof is right: don't demean Trump voters.

  • Li Zhou: [10-08] Donald Trump's many, many lies about Hurricane Helene, debunked: "Rampant disinformation is getting in the way of disaster response."

Vance, and other Republicans:

Harris:

  • Jonathan Chait:

    • [10-08] The race is close because Harris is running a brilliant campaign: "Stop complaining; the centrism is working." Or so says Chait, who only views every disappointed/disaffected leftist as a strategic gain, even though he can't begin to count the votes. No doubt that if Harris does manage to "pull a Hillary" and lose the election, Chait will be the first to blame it on the left.

    • [10-10] The election choice is divided government or unrestrained Trumpism: "Harris won't be able to implement her plans. Trump will." As a devout centrist, Chait may regard divided government as the best of all worlds, with each party making sure the other doesn't accomplish anything, or rock any boats. Indeed, no Democratic president has had a Democratic Congress for a full terms since Carter, and even the initial two-year stretches Clinton, Obama, and Biden inherited were hobbled by lobbyists and the filibuster.

  • David Dayen: [10-09] Harris in-home care plan recognizes information gap on seniors: "Trump has been blanketing Pennsylvania with dubious claims that Harris would cut Social Security and Medicare."

  • Susan Faludi: [10-06] Kamala Harris is turning a Trump tactic on its head.

  • Ed Kilgore: [10-09] Can Nikki Haley voters win it for Kamala Harris? I can believe that most of the people who voted for Harris in Republican primaries this year won't vote for Trump. But calling them "Nikki Haley voters" seems gratuitous, especially given that Haley is on board for Trump, so isn't one of them.

  • Branko Marcetic: [10-12] Is Kamala 2024 Clinton 2016?: "Republican endorsements, running to the right on foreign policy, an unambitious agenda of incremental change less important than how bad the other guy is. Where have we seen this before?"

  • Andrew Prokop: The rise -- and fall? -- of the New Progressive Economics: "Progressives conquered economic policy under Biden. Would they lose it under Harris?" How should I know? And not just because the article is a "member exclusive" I can't even get a glimpse of. (I did feel kind of bad about never giving what used to be my favorite news site any money, but less and less so every time I hit a paywall, especially on an article that is obvious bullshit.) In the first place, the premise that "NPE conquered Biden" is somewhere between greatly exaggerated and plain false. Biden moved somewhat out of the Obama-Clinton neocon rut because both the economics and the politics failed. Unlike Republicans, Democrats are expected to address and at least ameliorate real problems, and the old neoliberalism just wasn't working. Some new stuff got tried, and mostly worked. Other ideas got stymied, for which there was lots of obvious blame, as well as Biden's own lukewarm interest. But where is the evidence that Harris is going to abandon policies and proposals that are popular with Democrats just to help the rich get richer? The only thing I'm aware of is that she's had to cozy up to a lot of rich donors to raise her billion dollar campaign war chest, and they're going to want something in return. But by then, she'll be president, and in a better position to call her own shots.

  • Bill Scher: [10-10] No "deplorables," "you ain't black," "cling to guns": Harris's gaffe-free campaign: I suppose that's good news, but Scher is the most unflappable of Democratic Party apologists, so one doubts his ability to detect gaffes, let alone strategic missteps. The one I'm most worried about is her continuing political calculation to amp up vitriol against Russia and Iran. My guess is that as president she will pivot to a more moderate stance, because I don't see her as a neocon ideologue, but I do see her as politically cunning, so her stance tells me that she thinks it's the smart play viz. voters and the media. That's pretty depressing.

  • Matthew Stevenson: [10-11] Why Harris and Walz lose.

Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:

  • Robert Kuttner: [10-04] Biden's amazing win settling the dock strike: "The terms are a total victory for dockworkers and for smooth supply chain operation, as the White House faced down exorbitant shipper profits. What would Trump have done?"

  • Paul Starr: [09-20] What should Democrats say to young men? "Young men appear to be drifting right. Ignoring them means trouble." As an asymptomatic observer, I have trouble caring about this -- much like the "stolen pride" in the Arlie Russell Hochschild book (below): been there, got over that. Still, I do, as a matter of principle, believe that every voter counts, and that all pain (even the phantom variety) merits some kind of treatment. Cites:

  • Astra Taylor: [09] Divided and conquered: "In search of a democratic majority." "You've reached your free article limit," so sayonara. "The essay was partially adapted with permission from Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World Changing Idea, which I did buy a copy of, so I can probably reference it when I want a critique of Kevin Phillips (The Emerging Republican Majority, which is often counted as prescient, even if only with regret) and/or Ruy Teixeira/John Judis (The Emerging Democratic Majority, which isn't, so they recently rewrote it as Where Have All the Democrats Gone?), not that I couldn't write those myself.

Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:

  • David Dayen: [09-30] How Congress gets its groove back: "The Supreme Court's recent rulings will change how Congress writes laws. It may even force the legislative branch to take a hard look at its own dysfunctions." This is about the Court's recent dismantling of what's called the "Chevron defense," which while possibly disastrous for the normal functioning of the federal government, can (at least in theory) be rectified by Congress writing and passing more precise laws that leave less discretionary power in the hands of an increasingly politicized executive. But for that to happen, you first need a Congress that is willing and able to do the necessary work to deal with real problems. That obviously involves getting rid of a lot of Republicans, and tools like the filibuster, but it also suggests the need for much better Democrats. Otherwise, problems just multiply, while the courts further hamstring any efforts at remedy by executive order.

  • Sarah Jones: [10-10] The misogyny plot: A new report on the Kavanaugh hearings reveals a deeper conspiracy."

  • Ian Millhiser:

    • [10-05] We should call the Republican justices "Republicans" and not "conservatives": "Supreme Court journalist should tell the truth about what's going on at the Court." While I agree that "the arguments against treating the justices as partisan actors are unpersuasive," I worry that reducing them to partisan hacks will set expectations both for and against, reinforcing their stereotypical behavior. It is still the case that on occasion Republican justices can rule against their party's most craven arguments -- indeed, the legitimacy of the Court depends on at least some air of independence. Same for Democratic justices (which as far as I've noticed happens more often).

    • [10-08] Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett seem unsure whether to save a man's life: "It's unclear how the Supreme Court will resolve an unusually messy death penalty."

  • Stephen S Trott: [10-07] Why the Supreme Court's immunity ruling is untenable in a democracy.

Climate and environment:

Business, labor, and economists:

Ukraine and Russia: No "Diplomacy Watch" this week?

Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:


Other stories:

  • Matt Breunig/Zephyr Teachout: [09-27] Should the government break up big corporations or buy them? "Matt Bruenig writes that governments should nationalize more companies while Zephyr Teachout argues that freedom requires decentralized power." Ça dépend. Each case should be evaluated on its own merits. One could write a book on this.

  • Stephen F Eisenman: [10-11] What does fascism look like? A brief introduction: Most of this piece focuses on Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, with an eye toward architecture and aesthetics, but that leads to a section "what does fascism look like today?" that opens with a photo of the Pentagon. Conclusion:

    Huey Long, governor of Louisiana from 1928-32, himself often called a fascist, said: "American Fascism would never emerge as Fascist, but as a 100 percent American movement; it would not duplicate the German method of coming to power but would only have to get the right President and Cabinet." Fascism, as I said at the beginning of this brief survey, is easy to see in retrospect, but not in prospect. However, when it appears right in front of you, identification becomes simple -- signs and symbols appear everywhere. As we approach the U.S. election, we can clearly witness one political party's tight embrace of fascism -- but seeing it doesn't mean we can easily stop it.

    Those of us on the left, especially with any real sense of history, are quick to brand certain right-wingers as fascists -- the dividing line is where disagreement turns to hatred and a desire to kill us. To us, at least, it's not just a derisive label, but a full paradigm, which informs not just by analogy but by internal logic. However, the label "fascist" doesn't appear to have much utility in communicating with people who are not on our specific bandwidth. One thing I will point out is that throughout history, fascists have not only done bad things, they have repeatedly failed, often bringing to ruin the nations and folk they claim to love. By the way, Eisenman has a forthcoming book, The Young Person's Illustrated Guide to American Fascism, with illustrations by Sue Coe.

Obituaries

Books

Music (and other arts?)

Chatter

  • Lara Friedman: [09-28] Observations on the current the moment - a thread.

    Israel used 10/7 to manufacture US consent/collaboration to undo what Bibi & his Greater Israel/neocon fellow travelers (incl in US) have long viewed as historic errors forced on Israel by weak leaders & intl appeasers of terror.

    These are: Gaza disengagement (viewed as capitulation to Hamas), the Oslo Agreement (viewed as capitulation to the PLO), and withdrawal from southern Lebanon (viewed as capitulation to Hezbollah).

    Along the way the Biden Admin & Congress acquiesced to new Israeli-authored rules of war that, among other things, define every human being as a legitimate military target - a terrorist, a terrorist supporter or sympathizer, or a "human shield" -

    - & allowing the annihilation of huge numbers of civilians & destruction of entire cities; allowing entire populations to be displaced, terrorized, starved, & deprived of medical care; & normalizing killing of journalists, medical workers, & UN staff - all with impunity.

    The costs of these new rules of war will be paid with the blood of civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the US responsibility for enabling, defending, & normalizing these new rules - and their horrific, dehumanizing consequences will not be forgotten.

    In the countdown to the US November elections, continued Israeli impunity means that Netanyahu and his government have every incentive to continue to pursue their revanchist and genocidal goals in Gaza, the West Ban, and Lebanon.

    Absent some new US & intl seriousness to impose concrete consequences that change Israeli calculations, the only real question now is whether Bibi & friends will seize this moment to pursue the other long-held dream of neocons in both Israel and the US: regime change in Iran.

    If they do so - and following a year of genocide-with-impunity capped by Nasrallah's assassination, the likelihood is today higher than ever before - the decision will be in large part based on the certainty that the Biden Admin, more than any Admin before it, will back them.

    This backing - which they have every reason to assume is assured - includes money, military aid, & even US military action. & it is assumed, regardless of whether the Biden Admin wants such a war & regardless of Israel's tactics/the scope of the destruction and casualties.

    Likewise, such a decision will reflect an equal certainty that the Harris & Trump campaigns not only will support Israel in waging war on Iran, but will actively compete over who, as president, will stand more firmly with Israel in its push to remake the entire region.

    And to be clear: Bibi & friends have - in actions & words - been telling the world since 10/7 their intent. Anyone surprised things have reached this point was either not paying attention, was in denial, or was happily playing along.

    For anyone who thinks my analysis re "next up, Iran" is wrong, see: [followed by tweet from Jared Kushner, then video of Netanyahu]


Local tags (these can be linked to directly): music.

Current count: 209 links, 15228 words (19164 total)

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Tuesday, October 8, 2024


Music Week

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 43015 [43007] rated (+8), 42 [42] unrated (+0).

As I explained in my "PS" last week, I didn't expect to blog much this week. I did catch a break yesterday, and posted a fairly respectable Speaking of Which (131 links, 7251 words), but that was the first day I managed to listen to much new music, which is why this Music Week has anything at all, but as you can see, not much -- nothing A-listed, some solid high B+ (which next week will include Terrence McManus: Music for Chamber Trio), as I've been working through my rather stuffed promo queue in release date order.

I left Speaking of Which so abruptly when I posted last night that it would have been easy to add more stuff today. But I decided the more sensible approach is to open a new draft file right away, and start putting anything new and notable there. I have a trick devised to suppress display of unfinished draft posts, but for now I'll let this one go up in normal blog order, its incomplete nature implicit in its date (October 14) and the "(draft)" in the title. I usually only update the website when I have new posts, but if I do, you can observe whatever progress I've made.

Next week should be a bit better, for blogging that is, but there are still lots of distractions, and a lot of other work to do. The project of sorting out 75 years of accumulated life from my childhood home isn't really finished, but we made a lot of progress, and can take a break before going back to it. I have several boxes of stuff here, and will probably pick up some more later in the week. I did manage to find one day to rustle up some dinner before my brother and his wife headed back to Washington. My niece is still here for a couple more days.

My upstairs bedroom/closet project has languished, but I need to return to it, making it top priority after I post this. (But then I blew all afternoon, so I may get nothing done on it today. I did go buy a tool belt -- something I've never felt the need for before, but I need to be able to stand on a stool in a very confined space with at least five tools handy, including power drill and screwdriver.) Still mostly doing wall repair at this point, with painting after that. At least we got the paneling cut, which among other things means I don't have to get the walls very good. Once I finally get going, I figure I have about three days of work to go, plus whatever it takes to move back into the room. So I should wrap that up within the week, but it will take a lot of time away from here.

Seems like I've been plagued with a lot of minor tech problems lately: nothing insurmountable, but every little thing chews up a lot more time than seems right, and adds to my sense of ever increasing decrepitude.


New records reviewed this week:

El Khat: Mute (2024, Glitterbeat): "Home-made junkyard band" from Tel Aviv, a quartet led by multi-instrumentalist Eyal El Wahab, whose roots are in Yemen. Third album. Arab groove with extra angst. B+(*) [sp]

Forq: Big Party (2024, GroundUP): Jazz fusion group, led by Henry Hey (keyboards), one 1999 album and several since 2014, a fairly long list of players here. Seems to have some intersection with Snarky Puppy. B+(*) [cd]

Satoko Fujii Quartet: Dog Days of Summer (2024, Libra): Japanese pianist, has run many groups for many albums since the mid-1990s, bills this particular one as her "jazz-rock fusion quartet," a revival "after an 18-year pause" -- Bacchus was recorded in 2006 and released in 2007, also with Hayakawa Takeharu (bass), Tatsuya Yoshida (drums), and Natsuki Tamura (trumpet), after four previous 2001-05 albums -- I've heard three, liked Zephyros (2003) a lot, but I didn't care for Bacchus at all. b>B+(***) [cd]

Alden Hellmuth: Good Intentions (2023 [2024], Fresh Sound New Talent): Alto saxophonist, based in New York, first album, shifty postbop quintet plus guest trumpet/keyboards on several tracks. B+(***) [cd]

Keefe Jackson/Raoul van der Weide/Frank Rosaly: Live at de Tanker (2022 [2024], Kettle Hole): Tenor saxophone/bass clarinet player, from Chicago, live set in Amsterdam with a local bassist and another Chicagoan on drums. B+(***) [cd]

Simon Moullier: Elements of Light (2023-24 [2024], Candid): Vibraphonist, several albums since 2020, this mostly quartet with piano-bass-drums, plus a guest spot each for Gerald Clayton (piano) and Marquis Hill (trumpet). B+(*) [cd]

Patrick Shiroishi: Glass House (2023-24 [2024], Otherly Love): Alto saxophonist, from Los Angeles, prolific since 2014, no musician credits given here although there is a lot of piano/synths in the mix. B+(*) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Raphael Roginski: Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes (2024, Unsound): Polish guitarist, albums since 2008, this reissue first appeared in 2015. eight Coltrane tunes plus two originals, solo guitar, adding voice (Natalia Przybysz) on two pieces built around Hughes texts. Reissue adds four bonus tracks on a second CD. B+(**) [sp]

Old music:

None


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Terry Gibbs Dream Band: Vol. 7: The Lost Tapes, 1959 (1959 [2024], Whaling City Sound) [10-11]
  • Jason Keiser: Kind of Kenny (OA2) [10-25]
  • Kevin Sun: Quartets (Endectomorph Music, 2CD) [10-18]
  • Western Jazz Collective: The Music of Andrew Rathbun (Origin) [10-25]
  • Andy Wheelock/Whee 3 Trio: In the Wheelhouse (OA2) [10-25]

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Monday, October 7, 2024


Speaking of Which

Draft file opened 2024-10-02 12:17 PM. I expected to have very little time to work on this, and that's proved accurate. Now trying to wrap this up Monday afternoon, while I have a bit of a breather. But I already got distracted, and spent the last hour posting a dinner plate to Facebook, and writing further notes in the notebook. Nero wasn't the only one ever to fiddle while their country burns.

Wound up after 2AM, arbitrarily deciding I've done enough. Maybe I'll add more while working on Music Week, but I should get back to working on house. Good news, though, is that working on blog is less painful than the house work has been.

When I got up this morning, I started reading the third chapter in Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America, it occurred to me that the following bit, while written about Champlain in the early 1600s, is most relevant today (pp. 81-82):

While violence was an essential institution of colonialism, it was never enough to achieve permanent goals of empire. As political theorists have long maintained, violence fails to create stability. It destroys relationships -- between individuals, communities, and nations -- and does so unpredictably. Once it is initiated, none can predict its ultimate course. While threats upon a population do over time result in compliance, more enduring stability requires shared understandings of power and of the legitimate use of violence. . . .

Nor could violence ever be completely monopolized. As in New Spain, Native peoples across North America quickly adopted the advantages that Europeans brought. Raiders took weapons as spoils of war and plundered Indians who were allied with Europeans or had traded with them. They stole their metals, cloths and, if possible, guns. Increasingly, they took captives to trade in colonial slave markets.

Apologists and propagandists for Israel really hate it when you describe Israel as a settler-colonial movement/nation. They resent the implicit moral derision -- every such society has been founded on racist violence, which we increasingly view as unjust -- but they also must suspect that it implies eventual failure: the cases where settler-colonialism was most successful are far in the past (especially in America, where the Indian wars ended by 1890, and full citizenship was accorded to Indians in 1924). But perhaps most troubling of all is the recognition that many others have started down this same road, and found that only a few approaches can work (or at least have worked), and only in limited circumstances.


Top story threads:

Israel: One year ago today, some Palestinians from Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- street gangs left free to operate in Gaza because Israel and the US refused to allow any form of political freedom and democratic self-governance in a narrow strip of desert with more than 2 million people, isolated from all norms of human discourse -- staged a jail break, breaching Israel's walls, and, as brutalized prisoners tend to do, celebrating their temporary freedom with a heinous crime spree.[*]

Most of the people in Gaza were refugees from Israel's "war of independence," known to Palestinians as "Nakba" for the mass expulsions of Palestinians. From 1948-67, Egypt had occupied Gaza. In 1967, Israel attacked Egypt, and occupied Gaza, placing it under military rule. The situation there became even more desperate after 2006, when Israel dismantled its settlements in the territory, locked down the borders, left local control to Hamas, and begun a series of increasingly devastating punitive sieges they rationalized as "mowing the grass."

As the situation in Gaza grew more desperate, Israeli politics drifted ever more intensely to the right, to the point where some parties advanced genocidal responses to the Gaza revolt, while even large segments of the nominal opposition concurred. Meanwhile, especially under Trump, the US has become a mere rubber stamp for whatever Israel wants. And what "Israel wants" is not just to extirpate Hamas and punish Gaza but to take out their fury on Palestinians in the West Bank, to complete the annexation of Palestinian land, and to export war all the way to Iran.

[*] Per Wikipedia, the 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel lasted two days (October 7-8), during which 1180 Israelis (379 security forces, 797 civilians) were killed, and 251 Israelis were taken captive, while Israeli forces killed 1609 "militants" and captured 200 more. At the end of those two days, Israel had secured its border with Gaza, and had gone on the offense against the people and infrastructure of Gaza. Israel's subsequent slaughter and destruction has been so indiscriminate, and so systematically destructive of resources necessary for sustaining life, that it is fairly characterized as genocide -- a judgment that is consistent with the clearly stated intentions of many Israeli political leaders. Moreover, the genocide in Gaza, has provided cover allowing Israelis -- including vigilante settler-mobs protected by IDF forces -- to attack Palestinians in the West Bank, and Israeli aggression has now has spilled over into Lebanon.

  • Mondoweiss:

  • Anadolu Agency: [10-07] 1 year of Gaza genocide: Psychological terror 'part of Israel's genocidal plan' -- UN Special Rapporteur.

    The ongoing violence has created a cycle of anxiety and trauma in the besieged Strip, leaving young people particularly devastated.

    Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health, spoke to Anadolu about the mental health crisis in Gaza.

    The amount of anxiety and the exposure to trauma, as well as the level of anticipation of violence, is very abnormal

    Mofokeng said, emphasizing the persistent threat of violence as a major contributor to the psychological distress.

    She highlighted that 50 per cent of Gazans were already suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) before the relentless violence they experienced since 7 October, 2023. "We have to talk about it as a deliberate infliction of mental trauma," she added. The psychological impacts, manifesting as anxiety, nightmares, depression and memory loss, are compounded by the absence of adequate mental health resources.

    Yet, some scars remain invisible, Mofokeng pointed out, as many suffer in silence, with distress escalating into PTSD, eventually leading to complex mental health issues. These only intensify for children who have lost their entire family. She further noted that the lack of proper mourning and dignified funerals is "very detrimental," robbing families and communities of the chance to heal and opening wounds that may take a lifetime to mend.

    The absence of healthcare and therapy has exacerbated the situation. "The situation is much worse," she stressed.

  • Aluf Benn: [10-07] Pro-war, anti-Netanyahu: that has been the Israeli liberal conundrum in a terrible year: "The horrors of 7 October burst the bubble for progressives who had marched for democracy at home but sidelined the Palestinian issue." Editor-in-chief of Haaretz.

  • Tareq S Hajjaj: [10-07] After October 7, my home became a bag I carry with me: "I have lived through my own Nakba and understand why thousands of Palestinians fled their homes in 1948. I made the most difficult decision of my life and left Gaza, not knowing that what I carried might be all I will ever possess of my homeland."

  • Qassam Muaddi:

    • [10-04] 'Bodies shredded into pieces': unprecedented Israeli airstrike in West Bank kills 20, including entire family: "An Israeli airstrike on a residential building in Tulkarem killed 20 Palestinians in the first such attack in two decades. 'We've been living through the occupation's raids for more than a year now, but this was different,' says an eyewitness."

    • [10-07] Israel's year of war on the West Bank: "While Israel has been carrying out a genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, its military and settlers have been waging another campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, moving ever closer towards Israel's goals of annexation." This is an often neglected but increasingly important part of the story. This makes it clear that the root problem is not Hamas or Palestinian "national ambitions" but the fundamental, all-pervasive injustice of the apartheid regime. I was hoping in early days that the powers could separate Gaza and the West Bank, deal with the former by cutting it loose, and save the more entangled West Bank occupation to later, at which point cooler heads might prevail. But hotter heads made sure peace was never given a chance, because they saw the cover of war as useful for promoting their real goals.

  • Baker Zoubi: How weapons from the Gaza war are killing Palestinians on Israel's streets: "Arab crime organizations are carrying out attacks using smuggled military explosives, with experts accusing the government of turning a blind eye."

Lebanon:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

  • Spencer Ackerman: [10-03] The year after October 7th was shaped by the 23 years after September 11th (director's cut): "9/11 gave Israel and the US a template to follow -- one that turned grief into rage into dehumanization into mass death. What have we learned from the War on Terror?" Unfortunately, "this post is for paying subscribers only," so I don't know how he relates the US reaction to 9/11 to the previous year's demolition of the Oslo Accords and the breakout of the Shaul Moffaz Intifada (more commonly called "Al-Aqsa," but Moffaz was the instigator).

  • Michael Arria:

  • Erin Banco: [10-04] Inside the US intel dilemma on Gaza a year after Oct. 7.

  • Erin Banco/Nahal Toosi: US officials quietly backed Israel's military push against Hezbollah.

  • Matthew Duss: [10-07] Joe Biden chose this catastrophic path every step of the way: "What's happening in the Middle East was enabled by a president with ideological priors, aides who failed to push back, and a cheerleading media establishment."

    There's a 23-year-old quote from Benjamin Netanyahu in The New York Times that I've been thinking a lot about lately. Reached on the evening of September 11, 2001, the then-former prime minister was asked what the terrorist attacks that brought down the Twin Towers and killed almost 3,000 people meant for relations between the United States and Israel. "It's very good," he said. Then he quickly edited himself: "Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy."

    He may have been rude and insensitive, but he was also being uncharacteristically honest. Like any demagogue, Netanyahu knew instinctively that enormous pain could be easily transformed into permission.

    In addition to providing Israel's then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a freer hand in crushing the second intifada, Netanyahu also saw America's trauma as an opportunity to achieve a wider set of regional security goals. As Congress was considering the Iraq invasion, he came to the United States to lend his support. "If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region," he assured a congressional committee in September 2002.

    This is part of a series called October 7: A year of unfathomable misery and political failure: "Hamas's horrific terrorist attack on that day gave Israel the excuse it desired to destroy Gaza -- and America did nothing to stop it."

    • James Robins: [10-07] Israel is trapped by its own war machine: link title, actual, with sub: "The missed moral lesson of October 7: Hamas's attack should have triggered not military retaliation but the immediate resumption of negotiations for a just peace." Of course, it didn't, because Israel has never considered justice a consideration in its very rare and never serious efforts at negotiation -- they look for leverage, and play for time. But I do recall making the same point on 9/11: I thought it should be viewed as a wake-up call, as a time when the first thing you ask yourself, have I failed? Netanyahu (and Bush) couldn't ask that question, much less answer it. But if you just give it a few minutes of thought, you'll realize that every war is consequential to a series of mistakes. The least you can do is to learn from such mistakes, but the people who yearn to fight wars never take the effort to learn.

    • Yousef Munayyer: [10-07] A year that has brought us to the breaking point: "Alongside the mass graves and beneath the tons of rubble, there may lie another victim: the very possibility of a jointly imagined coexistence."

    • Emily Tamkin: [10-07] One year after Ocrtober 7, American Jewry has been "broken . . . in half": "The casualties in the Middle East include thousands of innocents lives and (for now) any hope of peace. The casualty here? The dream of a liberal Zionism."

  • Nicholas Kristof: [10-05] Netanyahu ran rings around Biden for a year. What failure. That's the link title. The page title is less pointed: "Biden sought peace but facilitated war."

  • Trita Parsi: [10-01] Iran bombs Israel, but buck stops with Biden: "If Israel's response sucks us into war, it will be on the administration's hands. Here's why." People really need to get a better idea of motivations, costs, and imagined rewards.

    Biden's strategy has been to put enormous effort into deterring Iran and its partners from retaliating against Israel, while doing virtually nothing to discourage Israel from escalating in the first place. This lopsided approach has in fact been a recipe for escalation, repeatedly proving to Netanyahu that Washington has no intention of bringing pressure to bear on Israel, no matter its actions.

    The situation is actually worse than this, because Israel sees nothing but positives from provoking a war that pits Iran and the US. For starters, it keeps the US preoccupied with external threats when the real enemy of peace is Israel itself. And if Americans get hurt in the fracas, Netanyahu understands that will only make the Americans more determined to fight Iran, just as he knows that his periodic attacks on Iran and its friends only make them more determined to strike back, even if just ineffectively, at Israel.

  • Mitchell Plitnick: [10-05] The United States and Israel set out to remake the Middle East, again: "The mood in Washington today is similar to 2003 when the neocons of the Bush administration sought to remake the Middle East. This time, a joint vision shared by Israel and the Biden administration seeks to remake the region in the West's vision."

  • Dave Reed:

    • [09-29] Weekly Briefing: Israeli attacks on Lebanon are lighting a powder keg in the Middle East.

    • [10-06] Weekly Briefing: A year on from October 7 Israel is out of control:

      The images coming out of Lebanon and Gaza are horrifying. As I write this, well over a million Lebanese civilians are displaced as the Israeli military carries out punishing bombing raids across nearly the entire country, and over 2,000 have been killed. We've watched them drop so-called "bunker buster" bombs on residential blocks in Lebanon's capital, Beirut, in an attempt to kill the leadership of Hezbollah, never mind the civilians who may be in the way. Like in Gaza, Israel is targeting hospitals and schools, border crossings, and infrastructure. That the international community is allowing this to go on is nothing short of a calamity.

  • Responsible Statecraft: [10-03] Symposium: Will US-Israel relations survive the last year? "We asked if the post-Oct. 7 war has permanently altered Washington's 80-year commitment to the Jewish state." Collects statements from: Geoff Aronson, Andrew Bacevich, Daniel Bessner, Dan DePetris, Robert Hunter, Shireen Hunter, Daniel Levy, Rajan Menon, Paul Pillar, Annelle Sheline, Steve Simon, Barbara Slavin, Hadar Suskind, Stephen Walt, Sarah Leah Whitson, James Zogby. While several are critics, it is pretty obvious that the "special relationship" has held fast, with the Biden administration providing unstinting support despite reservations that they are unable or unwilling to act on, with most of Congress even more emphatically in thrall.

  • Daniel Warner: [10-04] No more bro hugs: Time to reset US/Israel relations.

Israel vs. world opinion:

VP Debate

  • Zack Beauchamp: [10-01] The only moment from the VP debate that mattered: "Vance's 'damning non-answer' on the 2020 election exposed the true stakes for democracy in 2024." I'm a bit chagrined that the one Vance lie that Walz chose to push back hard on was the "fate of democracy." It's not that I don't appreciate the threat, but to understand it, you need some context. To borrow Grover Norquist's metaphor, the program of the right since the 1970s -- cite Potter Stewart if you like -- has been to shrink democracy "down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub." We've barely noticed the shrinkage, but only started to panic now that we can identify Trump as the one threatening to finish the job. So right, it matters, a lot even, but it's a bit like waiting until a hurricane or flood or fire to discover that something is screwy with the climate -- another comparable oops!

  • Gabriel Debenedetti: [10-02] How Tim Walz saved himself: "At first, he looked overmatched by JD Vance. Then came abortion, health care, and above all, January 6.

  • Maureen Dowd: [10-05] JD smirks his way into the future. But first, a bit on Trump v. Harris:

    In a Times/Siena College poll last month, 55 percent of respondents said Trump was respected by foreign leaders while 47 percent said that of Harris.

    The ad claims Harris is not tough enough to deal with China, Russia, Iran or Hamas. It features actors playing Vladimir Putin, Hamas fighters and a tea-sipping ayatollah watching videos of the candidate who wants to be the first woman president. It ends with four clips of Kamala dancing -- a lot better than Trump does -- and a clip of Trump walking on a tarmac with a military officer and a Secret Service agent. The tag line is: "America doesn't need another TikTok performer. We need the strength that will protect us."

    Even though Trump lives in a miasma of self-pity and his businesses often ended up in bankruptcy, somehow his fans mistake his swagger and sneers for machismo. What a joke. Trump is the one who caves, a foreign policy weakling and stooge of Putin. . . .

    In a Trumpworld that thrives on mendacity, demonizing and dividing, sympathy is weakness.

  • Ariel Edwards-Levy/Jennifer Aglesta: [10-02] CNN instant poll: no clear winner in VP debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance. But even those who thought Vance "won the debate" had doubts about him.

    Debate watchers said, 48% to 35%, that Walz is more in touch than Vance with the needs and problems of people like them, and by a similar margin, 48% to 39%, that Walz, rather than Vance, more closely shares their vision for America.

  • M Gessen: [10-03] The real loser of the VP debate: "It's our politics." And: "In this audio essay, Gessen argues that when we put Trump and his acolytes on the same platform as regular politicians and treat them equally, 'that normalization degrades our political life and degrades our understanding of politics.'"

  • Ed Kilgore: [10-02] Snap polls show VP debate was as close as the presidential race.

  • Eric Levitz: [10-02] Vance's one weird trick for selling Trumpism to normies: Just lie: "The Republican VP candidate isn't a moderate, but at the debate Tuesday, he played one on TV."

  • Katy O'Donnell: [10-04] JD Vance says 'illegal immigrants' are keeping you from owning your own home.

  • Andrew Prokop/Dylan Scott/Abdullah Fayyad/Christian Paz: [10-02] 3 winners and 2 losers from the Walz-Vance debate: W: JD Vance's code switching abilities; L: The narrative that Tim Walz is a media phenomenon; W: Obamacare; L: The moderators; W: A surprising amount of decency. The bottom line is that Vance lied outrageously (but smoothly) in his attempt to make Trump out as a reasoned, skillful public servant, while Walz somewhat awkwardly dialed his own criticism back. From point two:

    It was not exactly a masterful showing, though. Walz seemed uncomfortable in the format compared to the smooth-talking Vance, he didn't really seem to have one overarching message that he kept returning to, and he often missed opportunities to call out Vance's lies and misrepresentations.

    On the moderators:

    From the start, Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan, the CBS news moderators, made it clear they did not think it was their job to keep the candidates grounded in reality. . . . The questions themselves were either not probing enough or poorly framed.

  • Jeffrey St Clair: [10-04] Notes from a phony campaign: the great un-debate: "This week's vice-presidential debate, one of the most tedious and dull in US history, was praised by the punditocracy for its civility. Is civility in politics what we need when the current government is arming a genocide and the rival campaign wants to arrest 15 million people and deport them?" Also: "Why did Walz try to humanize a jerk who claims Haitians are BBQing pets?"

  • Margaret Sullivan: [10-02] JD Vance's slick performance can't hide the danger of another Trump presidency: "Vance may have prevailed on tone and presentation, but at the end of the day Walz is on the side of democracy."

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [10-01] VP debate: preemptive strike on Iran now? "This was the only foreign question of the night, which made it easier for everyone, apparently." The question was horrible, even to suggest such a thing. The obvious answer was: no, never, wars should be ended, not started when there is any chance of avoiding one. The answers -- unlike John McCain's "bomb bomb bomb Iran" refrain -- at least were evasive, but in failing to address the question, allowed it to hang in the air, as if the idea is something a sane person might consider. It wasn't, and should have been flagged as such.

Election notes:

  • Ed Kilgore: [10-07] Harris and Trump are deploying party defectors very differently: They may be calculating differently, but the dominant issue is the same. Trump is using Gabbard and Kennedy as testimony that he's the lesser world war threat, without him having to soften his tough guy image. Harris, on the other hand, is attracting some Republicans with extreme neocon credentials, like the Cheneys -- not primarily to show that she's the hawk in the contest, but their support does reassure the neocons that she's likely to stick with the conventional wisdom on foreign policy (which is decidedly neocon, despite their disastrous track record).

  • Ariel Wittenberg/Avery Ellfeldt/Thomas Frank: [10-04] Helene hit Trump strongholds in Georgia and North Carolina. It could swing the election. Voters have to ask themselves whether they want competent government which wants to help folks when they're down, or a bunch of corrupt cronies trusting the market will magically heal itself.

Trump:

Vance, and other Republicans:

  • David Daley: [10-04] Two men have re-engineered the US electoral system in favor of Republicans: "If the right strews constitutional chaos over the certification of this presidential election, two people will have cleared the path." Leonard Leo (who packed the Supreme Court) and Chris Jankowski (who refined the art of gerrymandering).

  • Moira Donegan: [10-01] The leaked dossier on JD Vance is revealing in all the things it doesn't say.

  • Ed Kilgore: [10-04] Oklahoma wants a Trump Bible in every public-school classroom: "For state school superintendent Ryan Walters, not any old Bible will do for the edification of Oklahoma's children."

  • No More Mister Nice Blog:

    • [10-05] Extremist Republican derangement has many faces, not just one.

    • [10-06] I made an ad attacking Donald Trump without all the obvious stuff. "Here's the ad, on YouTube. Or just watch it here (40 seconds):

    • [10-04] The "liberal" media is measuring the White House drapes for JD Vance -- again.

    • [10-02] No, JD Vance did not win last night's debate. Starts by citing the New York Times' debate pundit grid -- 'Vance's excellent reviews will enrage Trump': 13 writers on who won the vice-presidential debate -- which provides a ready index of what kind of people are inclined to be more impressed by a slick liar than by a normal guy struggling to keep his debate prep points ready. Follow that with "ordinary people" polls, one giving Vance a 51-49 lead, the other 42-41 with 17% judging the debate a tie.

    • [09-30] Margaret Sullivan inadvertently demonstrates that even a better press couldn't save us from Trump: The Sullivan article is here: [09-30] The three phases of normalizing Trump's attack on Harris in Wisconsin: "The media did what it always does, and it's not good enough."

      I don't mean to pick on Margaret Sullivan. I think the fact that even she can't find the words to explain what's so horrifying about this suggests that maybe there aren't any words -- or to be more precise, maybe there aren't words that can convey what's so horrifying about this to people who've watched Trump for the past nine years and still aren't horrified.

      Calling a political opponent "mentally impaired" and "mentally disabled" ought to be a very bad look for any candidate, and it should be self-evidently bad for reasons Joe Scarborough noted this morning:

      "If [Harris] were so quote stupid, if she were so quote mentally impaired, if she were quote so mentally disabled, why did she destroy him in a debate for 90 minutes, humiliate him, and beat him so badly that he refuses to even debate her on Fox News?"

      "That's question number one," he continued. "And if she's had this mental condition from birth, then why did he give her thousands of dollars in 2014 for her political campaign when she was running for the United States Senate?"

      But it's unsuitable language for any candidate to use -- except it isn't anymore, because talk radio and Fox News coarsened the political culture, in lockstep with Republican politicians from Newt Gingrich on, and now there's a large percentage of the voting population for whom there's nothing a Republican can say that will lead to a withdrawal of support, except perhaps a kind word about a Democrat. . . .

      Trump can't be discredited any more than he already has been. Our only recourse is a large turnout by people who are neither impressed by his rhetoric nor numbed by it.

  • Matthew Stevenson: [10-04] JD Vance: mob lawyer.

    If you're Vance, the only reason you agree to take Trump on as a client is the hope that he will pay your seven-figure fees before you, yourself, end up in jail.

    Alas, as the history of broken dreams isn't one of the subjects taught at Yale Law School, Vance seems to be missing the point that most of his predecessors -- Michael Cohen, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Cheseboro, Jenna Ellis, Rudy Giuliana, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Alina Habba (to list only a few Trump attorneys who are drifting up the river) -- never got paid and will probably end up in jail long before Trump himself is fitted with an oversized orange necktie.

  • Nicholas Wu/Madison Fernandez: [10-04] House Democrats' new bogeyman: Project 2025: "The party is making a concerted effort to go on the attack using the controversial set of conservative policy proposals." It's about time. Similar plots have been circulating for decades, but this year's edition exposes the threats exceptionally tangible form. Moreover, it's never been easier to imagine Republican apparatchiki blindly following whatever master plan they're given. Project 2025 makes clear and comprehensible how pervasive rotten ideas are throughout the Republican Party.

  • Li Zhou: [10-03] Elon Musk's nonsensical lies about immigrant voting, briefly explaned: "Musk and Republicans have embraced falsehoods that undermine the legitimacy of the election."

Harris:

  • Jonathan Chait: [10-03] Kamala Harris is right to get endorsements from bad Republicans: Like Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales. Of course, Chait loves this because it gives him another excuse to take digs at Sanders and AOC, who also, like Chait, support Harris. Different people have different reasons for who they vote for, and these particulars aren't totally deluded in thinking a public announcement might help, and probably won't hurt. What bothers me is the suggestion that they see Harris as more in tune with their neocon warmongering legacy, and that their endorsements can be taken as evidence that Harris is more war-prone than Trump.

  • Ellen Ioanes: [09-20] Kamala Harris and Oprah humanized the consequences of state abortion bans: "Harris and Winfrey spoke to the family of Amber Thurman, who died after doctors delayed abortion-related care."

  • Michael Kruse: [10-04] The woman who made Kamala Harris -- and modern America: "Shyamala Gopalan's immigrant story explains the roots of a multiethnic society that has defined the country in the 21st century -- and also become a political flashpoint."

  • Christian Paz: [10-04] What young voters see in Kamala Harris: "How the vice president seems to have fixed one of Biden's biggest vulnerabilities."

Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:

Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Business, labor, and economists:

Ukraine and Russia:

Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:


Other stories:

Obituaries

Books

  • Richard Slotkin: [10-05] To understand Trump vs. Harris, you must know these American myths: The author has mapped out the entire history of American mythmaking in his book A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Struggle for America, so applying his methodology to one more election is pretty easy. I've read his book, and previously cited various reviews. I've long placed great importance on the notion of myth -- paradigmatic stories that are widely believed, transcending fact and fiction -- so I'm very used to this form of critique. Still, there is a risk that his categories have become too pat, and forcing new facts to fit them tends to lose your grip on anything new. For instance, it's easy enough to see Trump playing off the "lost cause playbook," but those of us who grew up in what was still the Jim Crow era should be struck by how much weirder it seems this time around. On the other hand, when Democrats (like Obama/Clinton) embrace "American exceptionalism," they look naive and foolish, and easily loose track of the reforms they understand we need.

  • Jennifer Szalai: [09-29] Ta-Nehisi Coates returns to the political fray, calling out injustice: "The Message marks his re-entry as a public intellectual determined to wield his moral authority, especially regarding Israel and the occupied territories." More on the book below, but first a good introduction is a bit of CBS Mornings interview with Coates. A quick sampling of reviews. (I have a copy of the book, but haven't cracked it open yet.)

Music (and other arts?)

Chatter

  • Peter Beinart: [10-01] this first question: would you support a preemptive strike on Iran rather than how would you stop this regional war pretty much encapsulates what is wrong with US media coverage of this conflict


Local tags (these can be linked to directly): music.

Original count: 131 links, 7251 words (9735) total).

Current count: 131 links, 7256 words (9742 total)

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Monday, September 30, 2024


Music Week

September archive (final).

Music: Current count 43007 [42995] rated (+12), 42 [26] unrated (+16).

Too many distractions this past week to spend any serious time listening to new music. I wouldn't be surprised if I come up with even less next week, although things should settle down shortly thereafter.

Again I took an extra day for Speaking of Which, mostly because that's how I set the file up. I expected it to be similarly abbreviated, but I wound up with 171 links, 10275 words -- nowhere near record length, but pretty substantial, with lots of interesting stuff.

Then I rushed this out on the same day, to keep it within September. I may update this (and/or Speaking of Which) on Tuesday, but really need to be working on something else.


PS [10-01]: I rushed this post out late last night, to squeeze it into September, which mostly mattered because I didn't want to take the extra time to dig out this week's paltry offering and replant it in the now extant but empty October Streamnotes file. In the clear light of morning -- something I prefer to sleep through, but once again failed today -- I can add a few more words. It takes me a while to get going these days, so this is prime time for collecting my thoughts.

When I do get moving, my main task today will be to work on the small (12x12) second bedroom upstairs, and its adjacent L-shaped closet. The house was built in 1920, which means the walls and ceilings were plaster on lathe. When we bought the house, in 1999, the room had ugly wallpaper and the ceiling was painted with a glittery popcorn finish. The closet was also wallpapered, with a pattern simulating wood. We hated all those things, but lived with them. I built a bookcase that covered the entire west wall, except for the closet door. I built another bookcase I situated on the east wall, just north of the big window. The other side of the window had a standalone bookcase, as did the north wall next to the east corner. The rest of the north wall, underneath its own big window, was occupied by a futon, usable as a spare bed, on a crude platform I had built. Laura's desk was up against the south wall.

A few years after we arrived, I noticed a crack in the ceiling, near the southwest corner, extending from the entry door out about three feet. I watched that crack grow over twenty-some years. A few months ago, some of the plaster had detached and lowered an inch or two, making its collapse inevitable. I started thinking about ways to push it back up and/or patch it over, but did nothing before it did collapse. I started looking for help to repair it, and finally found some.

Finding more cracks in the same ceiling, we decided to recover the whole ceiling with a new layer of 3/8-inch plaster board. We -- meaning our money and their labor, but I wasn't exctly a passive bystander -- did that last week. To prep, we had to move everything out of the room. For good measure, I also had them steam off the wallpaper, so I could paint the walls, and I cleared out the closet. Some years ago, I figured the walls weren't worth the trouble of repairing, so could be covered up with paneling. I bought several sheets, stored in the garage wood pile for an opportune time, such as now.

Riverside Handyman did the ceiling, including a quick paint, and took down the room wallpaper. I used his steamer to work on the closet, where the walls proved to be as bad as anticipated. That leaves me with the task of finishing the painting, fixing up the closet, and moving everything back so we can reduce the upstairs clutter to normal levels. Big push today (and probably tomorrow, and possibly longer) will be to sand and prep the bedroom walls, caulk the window frames, and mask them off for painting. But also I need to finish prepping the walls and ceiling in the closet -- the latter has a big hole, which used to provide attic access, to fill in and level. The walls mostly need a rough mud job, filling in cracks, corners, and some large missing chunks, but it won't need much sanding, as it will all be covered with paneling.

Aside from impatience, I have another deadline, which is that my brother, his wife, and their daughter are coming for a visit, arriving late Wednesday. They won't be needing the bedroom, and chances are I can put them to work on various projects -- not just this one, as I have more lined up -- but one point of the trip is a separate project, which is to finally sort through the stuffed attic of our ancestral family home on South Main Street.

My parents bought that small house in 1950, a few months before I was born, and lived their until they died, in a three-month span of 2000. They both grew up on farms -- my mother in the Arkansas Ozarks, my father in the Kansas Dust Bowl -- and through the Great Depression, moving to Wichita in the 1940s for war work. They were resourceful and self-sufficient, which among much more meant that they kept a lot of stuff. My father's "super-power" was his knack for packing things to maximize use of space -- I'm pretty good at that myself, but not nearly as good as he was at remembering what he had and where it was.

After they died, we cleared out some obvious stuff, but left most of it for my brother, who moved into the house, and added his own stash. When his work took him to Washington, my sister -- who had inherited the deed -- moved in with her grown son (and her own stash), who still lives there, after she died in 2018. While the attic has been plundered several times over the years -- that "wall of books" in the bedroom I'm working on mostly date from my purchases from before I left home in 1972 (or 1975) -- one harbors the suspicion that there are still precious memories (probably just junk to others, as antique treasures aren't very likely) buried in deep nooks and crannies.

So the plan is to gather some younger folk willing and able to do the spelunking to drag everything out, so we can sort it all out into the obvious categories (trash, recycle, desired by one of us, or deferred/repacked). They're figuring two days, which strikes me as optimistic, but not inconceivable. I think part of the operation should be to catalog everything (except the rankest trash) into a spreadsheet for future reference -- especially everything that gets deferred. I could use some sort of database of my own stuff, especially as I feel increasing need to unburden.

I'm not sure of the schedule for all of this. My niece is just budgeting enough time for the housecleaning, but my brother may be able to stay a bit longer. However long that is, I will mostly be occupied with them, while letting my usual grind slide. Plenty to do later, as we wrap up the year with another Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll. Obvious point from below is that the unheard demo queue has grown considerably. And that doesn't count the download offers waiting in a mail directory, if indeed I ever get to them. (I did download the new Thumbscrew, but most just get shunted aside.)

This week's King Sunny Adé albums were a side-effect of Brad Luen's Ten favorite African albums of 1974. I didn't manage to get to the Adé albums on his list, because I started looking for gaps in my own list, especially as the 1974 albums Luen cites are late entries in multi-volume series.

Having just finished Timothy Egan's Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis, I felt it was time to dust off my copy of Ned Blackhawk's much broader Native/American history, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. I've long had non-expert but somewhat more than passing knowledge of the subject -- I'm guessing I've read ten or so more/less focused books, starting c. 1970 with Peter Farb, Alvin Josephy, and especially Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins -- and I've often of late found myself thinking back on that history, especially for insights into possible evolution of settler-colonial societies.


Breaking news today: Iran launches about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Scroll down and the previous headline reads: "Israel's recent airstrikes destroyed half of Hezbollah's arsenal, U.S. and Israeli officials say." As I've noted, Hezbollah's arsenal was always intended not to attack Israel but to deter Israeli attack. Obviously, it was never sufficient to do so, and even less so as Israel is amassing tanks on the Lebanon border. I've never bought the argument -- so often and readily repeated by American media -- that Hezbollah is some kind of Iranian proxy, its strings pulled from Tehran, or that Hezbollah has any aggressive intent against Israel beyond what it sees as self-defense, or that Iran has any designs against Israel beyond the self-defense of its co-religionists in the region. But Israel's latest attacks on Lebanon are, as was undoubtedly their intent, forcing Iran to fight back.

I am saddened by this, and do not approve, but it's time to reiterate a point that I just made just yesterday:

One thing that follows from this is that every violence from any side is properly viewed as a consequence of Netanyahu's incitement and perpetuation of this genocidal war.

I didn't write this up yesterday, but I did entertain the idea of offering an extreme example: suppose Hezbollah has a nuclear bomb, and could deliver it deep inside Israel, and explode it, killing a hundred thousand or more Israelis (including quite a few Palestinians), would that still be Netanyahu's fault. Yes, it would. (It would also lead to a "why didn't you tell us?" scene, like in Dr. Strangelove. And while it was a pretty safe bet that Hezbollah had no nuclear capability, perhaps Israel should have a think before "counterattacking" Iran in the same way it went after Lebanon.)

One way you know that this is all Netanyahu's fault is because he is the single person who could, even if just acting on a whim, put an end to the entire war. He has that power. He should be held responsible for it.


New records reviewed this week:

Manu Chao: Viva Tu (2024, Because Music): French-born Spanish singer-songwriter, sings in both, English, and several other languages; started group Mano Negra (1984-95), six solo albums 1998-2008 (a couple personal favorites there), returns after a 16 year break (although he's released several singles). First couple songs had me wondering, before he found his old groove, and delighted to the end. A- [sp]

Colin James: Chasing the Sun (2024, Stony Plain): Canadian blues-rocker, eponymous debut 1988, early albums had a retro-swing aspect -- especially those with his Little Big Band. B [sp]

Lizz Wright: Shadow (2024, Blues & Greens): Jazz singer, from Atlanta, started in a gospel group, eighth album since 2003. Impressive voice, but limited appeal. B+(*) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

None.

Old music:

Sunny Ade & His Green Spot Band: The Master Guitarist Vol. 1 (1970 [1983], African Songs): Nigerian singer-guitarist, has produced many albums from 1967 on, came to world attention in 1982 when Mango released his Juju Music, some of his earlier work later issued by Shanchie (The Best of the Classic Years and Gems From the Classic Years (1967-1974). I still recommend those (the former I have at A+, as does Christgau), but streaming offers other spots for toe-dipping, like this 6-or-10-song, 34:16 former LP (first "side" has five song titles mixed into one track). Date info is spotty. I'm not sure I'll be able to make fine distinctions among many similar albums, but this one is superb. A- [sp]

King Sunny Ade and His African Beats: The Message (1981, Sunny Alade): Robert Christgau, in his dive into Adé's early Nigerian albums (such as he could find), singled this one out as the pick of the litter (while alluding to another one with orange cover -- later identified as Eje Nlogba. Hard for me to be sure, but this is certainly a contender. A- [yt]

King Sunny Ade and His African Beats: Check 'E' (1981, Sunny Alade): Another nice Nigerian album, feels a bit slighter. B+(***) [sp]

King Suny Ade & His African Beats: Juju Music of the 80's (1981, Sunny Alade): More seductive grooves. B+(***) [sp]

King Suny Adé & His African Beats: Ajoo (1983, Sunny Alade): Cover just shows the man with electric guitar, which may be the focus, but the beats are complex, the groove sinuous, and the vocals neatly woven in, whatever they mean. Not sure I've heard it all -- first side for sure, and at least half of the second, but I'm satisfied. [Reissued in US by Makossa.] A- [yt]

King Sunny Ade & His African Beats: Bobby (1983, Sunny Alade): With Juju Music released internationally on Island, he continued releasing albums in Nigeria, with this one of several (five?) before his second Island-released album, 1984's Synchro System. This one is relatively subdued, although seductively so. B+(***) [sp]

King Sunny Ade: E Dide/Get Up (1992 [1995], Mesa): Island dropped him after Aura (1984), as best I recall due to the expense of touring with his big band. He kept up recording, with this one of the few albums to get much notice outside Africa. B+(***) [sp]

Batsumi: Batsumi (1974 [2011], Matsuli Music): South African jazz-fusion group founded in Soweto, South Africa in 1972. Some typical township jive riffs, attractive as ever, with other things, including vocals, that don't have quite the same appeal. B+(*) [sp]

Moldy Goldies: Colonel Jubilation B. Johnston and His Mystic Knights Band and Street Singers Attack the Hits (1966, Columbia): One-shot album by Bob Johnston (1932-2015), started c. 1956 as a songwriter (as were his grandmother and mother), recorded a couple rockabilly singles, but made his mark as a producer, scoring a hit for Timi Yuro in 1962, working for Kapp and Dot, and moving on to Columbia in 1965, which assigned him to produce Bob Dylan (through New Morning), Simon & Garfunkel, Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Flatt & Scruggs, Burl Ives, and Leonard Cohen, before going independent c. 1970 ("most successfully with Lindisfarne on Fog on the Tyne" -- so not so famous, but probably beat his Columbia salary). This, as I said, was a one-shot project, artist name folded into the subtitle (and compressed above), the credited musicians aliased (although most appear to have been obscure studio musicians). The eleven songs were all big hits from the previous year, things I still remember well from AM radio at the time, although if you're even a few years younger you may have missed more than a few. They were "goldies" by RIAA calculation, rendered instantly moldy by mock-skiffle arrangements and brass band, but 58 years later they've aged into postmodern classics. Compares well to Peter Stampfel's 20th Century in 100 Songs, except focused on a year that really holds up to the treatment. Of course, some people won't get the joke (although probably fewer now than then). Nadir is "Secret Agent Man" followed by "(You're My) Soul and Inspiration." If you're down with them, you'll love the rest. A- [sp]

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Nick Adema: Urban Chaos (ZenneZ) [10-04]
  • Jason Anick/Jason Yeager: Sanctuary (Sunnyside) [10-11]
  • Andy Baker: From Here, From There (Calligram) [10-04]
  • T.K. Blue: Planet Bluu (Jaja) [10-25]
  • John Chin/Jeong Lim Yang/Jon Gruk Kim: Journey of Han (Jinsy Music) [09-27]
  • Forq: Big Party (GroundUP) [09-13]
  • Satoko Fujii Quartet: Dog Days of Summer (Libra) [09-13]
  • Keefe Jackson/Raoul van der Weide/Frank Rosaly: Live at de Tanker (Kettle Hole) [08-04]
  • Darius Jones: Legend of e'Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) [10-04]
  • Brian Lynch: 7X7BY7 (Holistic MusicWorks) [10-25]
  • Mark Masters Ensemble: Sui Generis (Capri) [10-04]
  • Mavis Pan: Rising (self-released) [10-04]
  • Jason Robinson: Ancestral Numbers II (Playscape) [10-08]
  • Brandon Seabrook: Object of Unknown Function (Pyroclastic) [10-18]
  • Tyshawn Sorey Trio: The Suspectible Now (Pi) [10-11]
  • Ben Waltzer: The Point (Calligram) [10-04]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, September 30, 2024


Speaking of Which

As expected, I've had very little time to work on this all week. The idea of starting each week's post with an evolving executive summary will have to wait until next week, at the earliest.

Trying to wrap this up Monday afternoon, but I soon have to take a break to buy some lumber and tools, and I should spend most of the day working on the upstairs room (having wasted my weekend on what should have been a simple wiring job, and, well, much of the bulk below. I probably won't post this until late, so I'll likely find more, but in lieu of trying to summarize my main points, let me just emphasize two:

  1. I've tried very hard for very long to be as understanding as possible to Israelis, even though I never embraced the nationalist movement that founded and led the "Jewish State" (never mind the crypto-religious settler cult that currently holds sway over it). Nor have I been reluctant to criticize when I've sensed similar (correlative?) movements among Palestinians, even when I saw in them reflections of the dominant Israeli trends. I believe that people of all sides deserve human rights, and I'm sympathetic to those who are denied them, regardless of whose fault that might be (even when the fault is one's own). However, at this point Israel alone -- by which I mean the current governing coalition and all those who support them (not all Israelis, but most; not most Americans, but some) -- bear exclusive responsibility for all pain and suffering in the region, even their own. One thing that follows from this is that every violence from any side is properly viewed as a consequence of Netanyahu's incitement and perpetuation of this genocidal war. Just for the record, I don't approve of Hamas or Hezbollah violence any more than I approve of Israeli violence, but I understand that when Israel acts as it has been doing, human nature will respond in kind. Israel alone has the power to end this conflict. That they refuse to pay even the minimal rights of according Palestinians a right to live in peace and dignity puts this all on them.

  2. I have very little new to say about the US elections. Trump, Vance, and virtually every other Republican have proven to be even more boorish and benighted than previously imagined. Honest and decent American voters have to stop them, which means electing Democrats, regardless of their flaws. I will continue to note some of these flaws, but none of them can possibly alter the prime directive, which is to stop the Republicans. To that end, I will continue to note pieces that expose their failures and that heap derision on them, but I don't see that doing so here makes much difference. I, and probably you, know enough already. Aside from voting, which is the least one can and should do, I wouldn't mind tuning out until November, when we can wake up and assess the damages.

I could write much more about each of these two points, but not now.


Top story threads:

Israel: Israel dramatically expanded its genocidal war into Lebanon this week, which warrants yet another section, below

  • Mondoweiss:

    • [09-23] Day 353: Israel launches bombing campaign on Lebanon as Hezbollah retaliates: "Israel's intensifying bombardment of Lebanon has killed at least 274 people so far, while Hezbollah retaliates with rockets across Israel. The Israeli army also raided and forcibly shut down the Ramallah office of Al Jazeera."

    • [09-26] Israel's Genocide Day 356: Netanyahu denies accepting US-French ceasefire proposal with Lebanon: "As Israel expands bombing in Lebanon, Hezbollah rockets have reached reached Akka, Haifa, Tiberias, and the lower Galilee. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israel returned a truckload of decomposing bodies without identification that it had abducted from Gaza." First thing to note here is that they've changed the headline here: all previous entry titles started with 'Operation al-Aqsa Flood' (their quotes) before "Day." I've always dropped that part, as I found it both unnecessary and unhelpful: "Operation al-Aqsa Flood" lasted at most four days; everything since then, as well as most of those first four days, has been Israel's doing -- and I wasn't about to impose Israel's own declaration ("Operation Swords of Iron," which in itself says much about Israeli mentality). I'm not going to repeat the new title either (beyond this one instance), but I do consider it truthful, and have since about one week into the operation, by which time it was clear what Netanyahu had in mind (look back for quotes about Amalek; e.g.: Noah Lanard: [2023-11-03] The dangerous history behind Netanyahu's Amalek rhetoric: "His recent biblical reference has long been used by the Israeli far right to justify killing Palestinians").

    • [09-30] Day 360: Israel tells US Lebanon invasion 'imminent' as Hezbollah says it is 'ready to engage' Israeli forces: "Hezbollah's Deputy Secretary General said Hezbollah's military capacities remain intact, while Israel has reportedly informed the U.S. that an Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon is 'imminent.'"

  • Ahmed Abu Abdu: [09-25] Waste is piling up in Gaza. The public health implications are disastrous. "I am in charge of waste management in Gaza City. The Israeli occupation has launched a war on our sanitation facilities and waste management systems, creating an environmental and health crisis that will take years to recover from."

  • B'Tselem: The pogroms are working - the transfer is already happening: This is mostly a report on events in the West Bank prior to the Oct. 7 Gaza revolt, after which settler violence in the West Bank -- "in the past two yeras, at least six West Bank communities have been displaced" -- only increased.

    For decades, Israel has employed a slew of measures designed to make life in dozens of Palestinian communities throughout the West Bank miserable. This is part of an attempt to force residents of these communities to uproot themselves, seemingly of their own accord. Once that is achieved, the state can realize its goal of taking over the land. To advance this objective, Israel forbids members of these communities from building homes, agricultural structures or public buildings. It does not allow them to connect to the water and power grids or build roads, and when they do, as they have no other choice, Israel threatens demolition, often delivering on these threats.

    Settler violence is another tool Israel employs to further torment Palestinians living in these communities. Such attacks have grown significantly worse under the current government, turning life in some places into an unending nightmare and denying residents any possibility of living with even minimal dignity. The violence has robbed Palestinian residents of their ability to continue earning a living. It has terrorized them to the point of fearing for their lives and made them internalize the understanding that there is no one to protect them.

    This reality has left these communities with no other choice, and several of them have uprooted themselves, leaving hearth and home for safer places. Dozens of communities scattered throughout the West Bank live in similar conditions. If Israel continues this policy, their residents may also be displaced, freeing Israel to achieve its goal and take over their land.

  • Tareq S Hajjaj: [09-26] In Gaza, all eyes are on Lebanon: "People in Gaza hoped that an expansion of the Lebanese front would ease pressure on Gaza. Instead, Israel has escalated its massacres while global attention is elsewhere. They still hope the resistance in Lebanon will make Israel pay."

  • Vera Sajrawi: [09-25] In Israel's prisons, skin diseases are a method of punishment: "Prison authorities are allowing scabies to spread by restricting Palestinian inmates' water supply and depriving them of clean clothes and medical care."

  • Erika Solomon/Lauren Leatherby/Aric Toler: [09-25] Israeli bulldozers flatten mile after mile in the West Bank: "Videos from Tulkarm and Jenin show bulldozers destroying infrastructure and businesses, as well as soldiers impeding local emergency responders."

  • Oren Ziv: [09-23] Settlers attacked Bana's village. Then a soldier shot her through her window: "After Israeli settlers assaulted Palestinians with rocks and Molotov cocktails, soldiers raided Qaryut and killed a 13-year-old as she stood in her bedroom."

Israel targets Lebanon: Following last week's stochastic terrorist exercise -- detonating thousands of booby-trapped pages and walkie-talkies -- Israel escalated its bombing of Lebanon, Israel targeting and killed senior Hezbollah leadership, including long-time leader Hasan Nasrallah. In many quarters, this will be touted as a huge success for Netanyahu in his campaign to exterminate all of Israel's enemies, but right now the longer-term consequences of fallout and blowback are incalculable and probably even unimaginable. We should be clear that Hezbollah did not provoke these attacks, even in response to Israel's genocide in Gaza.

(In 2006, Hezbollah, which had been formed in opposition to Israel's 1982-2000 occupation of southern Lebanon, did act against Israel, as a diversion after Israel launched its first punitive siege of Gaza. Israel shifted attention to Lebanon, and conducted a horrific bombing campaign, as well as an unsuccessful ground incursion.)

Rather, Israel has repeatedly provoked Hezbollah -- which has tried to deter further attacks by demonstrating their ability to fire rockets deep into Israel, a strategy I regard as foolish ("deterrence" only deters people who weren't going to attack you in the first place; it works for Israel against its hapless neighbors, but when others try it, it just provokes greater arrogance and aggression by Israel). As I've stressed all along, Israel's expansion of the war into Lebanon serves two purposes: to provide "fog of war" cover for continuing the genocide in Gaza, and expanding it into the West Bank; and to lock reflexive US support in place, which is tied to the supposedly greater regional threat of Iran. The US could short-circuit this war by denouncing Israel's aggression, by demanding an immediate cease-fire, and by negotiating a separate peace and normalization with Iran (which Iran has long signalled a desire for). Instead, the Biden administration continues to let Netanyahu pull its strings.

Note that I haven't tried to subdivide these links, but events unfolded quickly, so dates may be significant.

  • Al Jazeera: [09-28] Israel kills Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in air strike on Beirut: "Hezbollah confirms Nasrallah's death as Israel says it hit the group's leaders at their headquarters in south Beirut."

  • Seraj Assi: [09-24] Israel is extending its genocidal war to Lebanon.

  • Elia Ayoub: [09-23] With page blasts and airstrikes, Israel unleashes its terror on Lebanon: "Israeli leaders have threatened to replicate the 'Gaza model' in south Lebanon. But Hezbollah may prove to be an even more challenging foe than Hamas."

  • Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor: Israel escalates its military attacks in Lebanon, targeting residential areas and civilians with intense raids.

  • Khader Jabbar/Abualjawad Omar: [09-27] From Gaza to Beirut: Abdaljawad Omar on the ripple effects of Israel's attack on Lebanon: Interview, from [09-25]. Omar has written several articles for Mondoweiss that I've been highly critical of. On the other hand, I see little to quibble with here:

    I may be exaggerating at some level, but those are the contours of how Israel viewed October 7. Not because it was really an existential risk. We already saw that in only two or four days, Israel was able to regain the Gaza envelope and the settlements surrounding Gaza. But on the level of the psyche, that's how it felt for most Israelis. So they want to regain the initiative. They saw October 7 as an opportunity to exact a price from everybody in the region who supports resistance. They want to destroy societies that are challenging them, whether in Gaza, Lebanon, or other places.

    The real desire is for an ultimate form of victory, this kind of awe-inspiring victory that will give them an answer to their existential questions.

    I think that on some level, the Israelis won the war, they won the victory. They want to create these awe-inspiring moments, like we saw with the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, which they have severely missed in contrast to how they were caught with their pants down on October 7.

    October 7 was a moment that not only stuck in the Israeli psyche, but the Palestinian psyche as well. Israel's genocide in Gaza inspired shock and horror, but didn't inspire a lot of awe. It didn't give Israelis the taste of power that Israeli identity was built on. But with Hezbollah, we've seen this awe factor come back, like the penetration of the communication devices and blowing them all up at once. This includes some of the operations that Israel has conducted in Gaza, like the extraction of some Israeli prisoners held by the Palestinian resistance.

    That's on a level of, if you want, psychological and aesthetic analysis. But on a political level, Israel finds this as an opportunity. It's already way deep into a war for 11 months, a war that is costing it a lot economically, socially, politically, and diplomatically. It sees that only more war will bring about better results in those domains.

    It will be able to establish what it calls deterrence. It will be able to put a line in the sand and say, if you ever challenge us again, this is what will happen to you. It will burn into the consciousness of the people of the region that Israel shouldn't be played with. All of these motivations coexist all at once in Israel's conduct -- and of course, for the settlers specifically.

    The only ones who have a real solution for this whole Palestinian question, instead of managing the conflict or shrinking the conflict or destroying the possibilities for two states or one state, are the settlers who say that we should change the paradigm with the Palestinians. They say, we should destroy Palestinian existence in the land of Palestine.

    So for the settlers, the "ultimate victory" is to get rid of as many Palestinians as possible from the river to the sea, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, and establish the kind of pure religious Jewish state that they have always dreamed of. For them, war is desirable. It maintains the possibility for ethnic cleansing, it maintains the possibility for genocide. It means it still keeps the possibility of total victory open. Of course, even in their wildest dreams, even if they clear out all of the Palestinians from Palestine, I think the Palestinian question will not go away.

    I don't have time to ruminate on this right now, but there is a lot to unpack here.

  • Ken Klippenstein: [09-23] Beep, beep! "Israel's pager caper is a Wile E. Coyote vs. Road Runner exercise in futility."

    This is the less cinematic but no less depressing reality of the pager attack: it is just another version of the latest weapon in the never changing battlefield, one typified by these kinds of tit-for-tat attacks that never bring about a decisive ending or a new beginning.

    Before long, other countries and terrorist groups will buy or develop their own Acme Exploding Pagers, as Panetta hinted. The media's uncritically declaring Israel's latest caper a success creates an incentive for countries to do just that. Absent an honest assessment, hands will again be wrung, chins scratched, ominous warnings issued, and beep, beep! -- perpetual war will zip right on by.

    And of course when Hezbollah or some other group attacks our devices, the national security state will happily label it terrorism.

  • Edo Konrad: [09-20] What Israelis don't want to hear about Iran and Hezbollah: "For years, Israeli expert Ori Goldberg has tried to challenge commonly-held assumptions about the Islamic Republic and its allies. Will anyone listen?"

  • Andrew Mitrovica: [09-28] The peace appeals of Israel's Western enablers are a cynical charade: "For the West, Lebanese lives are as disposable as Palestinian lives. Its calls for a ceasefire are no more than a sham."

  • Qassam Muaddi:

  • Nicole Narea: [09-28] Hezbollah's role in the Israel-Hamas war, explained.

  • Liz Sly: [09-29] Nasrallah's assassination shreds illusion of Hezbollah's military might. What military might? In 2006, Hezbollah was effective at repelling an Israeli ground incursion, which wasn't all that serious in the first place. But Hezbollah has no air force, no effective anti-aircraft defense, no tanks, few if any drones, a few small missiles that while more sophisticated than anything Hamas had in Gaza have never been able to inflict any serious damage. Sure, they talk a foolish game of deterrence, but no one in Israel takes their threat seriously.

  • Mohamad Hasan Sweidan: [09-20] No one is safe: the global threat of Israel's weaponized pagers.

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

  • Michael Arria:

    • [09-24] The Shift: Biden team admits they won't get ceasefire done. Cites the Sanger and Ward pieces below.

      • David E Sanger: [09-23] Biden works against the clock as violence escalates in the Middle East: "President Biden is beginning to acknowledge that he is simply running out of time to help forge a cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas, his aides say. And the risk of a wider war has never looked greater." It's hard to make things happen when you don't have the will to exercise your power. Still, it's pretty pathetic to think that a sitting US president needs more than four months to demand something as simple and straightforward as a cease-fire. (The hostage exchange is an unnecessary complication.) While I'm sure there are limits to presidential power, the problem here appears to be that Biden and his administration don't have the faintest understanding of what needs to be done. Nor do they seem to care.

      • Alexander Ward: [09-19] US officials concede Gaza cease-fire out of reach for Biden: "Biden administration is still pushing talks, but a breakthrough appears unlikely.

    • Arria also quotes Alon Pinkas in Haaretz:

      [Netanyahu] has a vested interest in prolonging the war for his political survival and in making it an election issue that could potentially harm Vice President Kamala Harris. It seems that the US finally and very belatedly realized it last week, which is why, however unfortunate, there is little the US will do until the election, unless it's forced to act in the case of a major escalation.

    • [09-26] The Shift: Tlaib target of (yet another) smear campaign: "Rep. Rashida Tlaib is being targeted by yet another smear campaign, after she criticized Michigan's AG for pursuing charges against Palestine protesters."

    • [09-27] Netanyahu defends Gaza and Lebanon attacks in UN speech: "Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations on Friday, vowing to continue waging war on Gaza and Lebanon. Israeli media reports the Israeli Prime Minister ordered massive strikes on Beirut just before giving the speech."

  • Sam Bull: [09-23] US sending more troops to the Middle East: "Now close to 50,000 American service members in the region as the threat of a wider war looms."

  • Tara Copp: [09-23] US sends more troops to Middle East as violence rises between Israel and Hezbollah: I've been saying all along that Israel's attacks on Lebanon (aka Hezbollah) are designed to trap the US into a role of shielding Israel from Iran. The thinking is that if the US and Iran go to war, the US will become more dependent on Israel, and more indulgent in their main focus, which is making Gaza and the West Bank uninhabitable for Palestinians. US troop movement prove that the strategy is working, even though it's pretty obviously cynical and deranged.

  • Dave DeCamp: [09-26] US gives Israel $8.7 billion in military aid for operations in Gaza and Lebanon.

  • Fawaz A Gerges: [09-30] The rising risk of a new forever war: Title from jump page: "The United States has not been a true friend of Israel." This is the relevant paragraph:

    Nevertheless, it is the only way forward. Israel's hubris in its attacks on Lebanon has been enabled by America's "ironclad" military support and diplomatic cover for its ally. In this regard, the United States has not been a true friend to Israel. Israel will not know lasting peace until it recognizes that its long-term security depends on reconciliation with the millions of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Its leaders must find a political compromise that will finally allow Israel to be fully integrated into the region. Top-down normalization with Arab autocrats is not enough.

  • Jamal Kanj: [09-27] Israel's war on Lebanon and Netanyahu's October Surprise to pick the next US president.

  • Yousef Munayyer: [09-25] How Anthony Blinken said no to saving countless lives in Gaza: "The secretary of state overruled his own experts, allowing bombs to continue to flow to Israel. How many more people would be alive today if he hadn't?"

  • Brett Murphy: [09-24] Israel deliberately blocked humanitarian aid to Gaza, two government bodies concluded. Anthony Blinken rejected them.

  • Ishaan Tharoor:

    • [09-20] A broader Israel-Lebanon war now seems inevitable: "This week's pager explosions in Lebanon represent a tactical victory for Israel. They also appear to lock the region into an escalatory spiral." I thought that tactics were meant to facilitate strategy, but it's hard to discern either in such massive, indiscriminate mayhem. Unless the strategy is to convince the world that Israelis are insane as well as evil, in which case, sure, they're making their point.

    • [09-23] World leaders gather at a UN desperate to save itself: "Ongoing crises in Sudan, Gaza and Ukraine have underscores the inefficacy of the world's foremost decision-making body. Great power competition may be to blame." You think? The UN has no power to enforce judgments, so the only way it can function is as a forum for negotiation, and that only works if all parties are amenable. There is nothing the UN can do about a nation like Israel that is flagrantly in contempt of international law. In many ways, the US is even more of a rogue force on the international scene. America's disregard for other nations has pushed other countries into defensive stances, further disabling the UN. Now it's just a big gripe session, as the speeches by Netanyahu and Biden made abundantly clear.

    • [09-24] Biden walks off the UN stage, leaving behind a world in 'purgatory': "In his last speech from the dais of the UN General Assembly, Biden highlighted his efforts to resolve the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Others remain skeptical."

    • [09-27] At the UN, overwhelming anger at Israel: "At the United Nations, world leaders cast Israel's heavy-handed campaigns in Gaza and the inability of the UN system to rein it as a danger to the institution itself."

  • Robert Wright: [09-27] Biden and Blinken, Israel's lawyers.

Israel vs. world opinion:

Election notes:

Trump:

Vance, and other Republicans:

Harris:

  • James Carden: [09-25] When odious foreign policy elites rally around Harris: "We should take seriously those responsible for some of the bloodiest, stupidest national security decisions in recent memory." Cheneys, of course, and a few more mentioned, as well as reference to this:

  • Adam Jentleson: [09-28] Kamala Harris said she owns a gun for a very strategic reason: "She has been doing an effective job of vice signaling from the left." First I've heard of "vice signaling," and this definition doesn't help: "Vice signaling means courting healthy controversy with the enforcers of orthodoxy -- the members of interest groups who on many critical issues have let themselves off the hook for accurately representing the views and interests of those they claim to speak for." I have run across "virtue signaling" before, which is a term used to deride views from the left as mere ploys to make one seem more virtuous -- an implicit put-down of anyone who doesn't agree. "Vice signaling" has the same intent, but opposes virtue by embracing its opposite vice. Why these terms should exclusively be directed against the left is counterintuitive -- throughout history, "enforcers of orthodoxy" have nearly always come from the right, where "holier than thou" is a common attitude, and snobbery not just accepted but cultivated.

    The actual examples given, like embracing fracking and threatening to shoot a home invader, may help Harris break away from cartoon left caricatures, and that cognitive dissonance may help her get a fresh hearing. That may be part of her craft as a politician -- as a non- or even anti-politician, I'm in no position to tell her how to do her job. Nor do I particularly care about these specific cases. But I am irritated when leftists who've merely thought problems through enough to arrive at sound answers are dismissed as "enforcers of orthodoxy."

  • Padma Lakshmi: [09-21] As a cook, here's what I see in Kamala Harris. There's a lot in this piece I can relate to, put my own spin on, and imagine her spin as not being all that different.

    Talking about food is a way to relate to more Americans, even those uninterested in her politics. We've all been eating since we were babies, and we're experts on our own tastes. Talking about food paves the way to harder conversations. Food removes barriers and unites us.

    Ms. Harris evinces clear delight in cooking and in talking about almost any type of food -- a passion that is core to who she is, like basketball for Barack Obama or golf for Donald Trump.

    She is omnivorous and a versatile cook.

    That Obama and Trump would go for sports is in itself telling (as is that Trump went for the solo sport, vs. a team sport for Obama, one that requires awareness of other people and the ability to make changes on the fly). I've only watched one of the videos (so far, making dosa masala with Mindy Kaling, which was chatty with less technique than I would have preferred -- I understand the decision to use the premix batter, after at least one stab at making it from scratch).

  • John Nichols: [09-20] Kamala Harris is winning the Teamsters endorsements that really matter: "The national leadership may have snubbed her -- but Teamsters in the swing states that will decide the election are backing her all the way." They all matter. Not clear whether the non-endorsement was reaction to the DNC snub, which I never quite understood. Still, the choice for labor is so overwhelming this time the national leadership appears pretty out of touch.

Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:

  • Ethan Eblaghie: [09-26] The Uncommitted Movement failed because it refused to punish Democrats: "The Uncommitted movement failed to move the Biden-Harris administration policy on Gaza because unaccountable movement leaders were unwilling to punish Democrats for supporting genocide." They failed, if that's the word you want to use, because they didn't get the votes. I doubt this was due to lack of sympathy for their issue: most rank-and-file Democrats (as opposed to party politicians, who of necessity are preoccupied with fundraising) support a cease-fire, and many are willing to back that up with limits on military aid[*]; but they also see party unity as essential to defeating Trump and the Republicans, and they see that as more critical/urgent than mobilizing public opinion against genocide. I can see both sides of this, but at this point the ticket and the contest are set, so all you can do is to pick one. While I have little positive to say about Harris on Israel, it's completely clear to me that Trump would be even worse, and I can't think of any respect in which he would be preferable to Harris. As for punishing the Democrats -- even with third-party and not-voting options -- don't be surprised if they never forgive you. So ask yourself, do you really want to burn the bridge to the people you're most likely to appeal to?

    [*] Michael Arria, in a piece cited above, has some polling:

    Recent polls show vast support for an arms embargo on Israel among Democratic voters.

    A March 2024 Center for Economic and Policy Research survey found that 52% of Americans wanted the U.S. to stop weapons shipments. That included 62% of Democratic voters.

    A June survey then from CBS News/YouGov found that more than 60% of voters should not send weapons or supplies to Israel. Almost 80% of Democrats said the the U.S. shouldn't send weapons.

  • Ken Klippenstein: [09-25] Biden's ode to perpetual war: "In final UN speech, President ignores a world on fire.

Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economists, the economy, and work:

Ukraine and Russia:

Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:


Other stories:

Obituaries:

  • Benny Golson:

    • Richard Williams: [09-25] Benny Golson obituary: "Tenor saxophonist whose compositions were valued for their harmonic challenge and melodic grace."

  • Fredric Jameson: A critic and philosopher, I remember him fondly from my early Marxist period, which certainly meant his books Marxism and Form: Twentieth Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (1971), and possibly The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (1972), but I haven't followed him since. Turns out he's written much more than I was aware of, especially many titles published by Verso Books.

    • Terry Eagleton: Fredric Jameson, 1934-2024: "reflects here on Jameson's humility, generosity, and unrivalled erudition."

    • Owen Hatherley: [09-28] Fredric Jameson's capitalist horror show: "We still live in the postmodern landscape defined by the Marxist thinker, who died this month."

      Jameson's work was both utopian and depressive, expansive in the field of its analysis and trained almost entirely on culture rather than politics. And he was rare among Marxist intellectuals in the neoliberal era to have managed to speak firmly to the present day. That is why his work affected so many. An entire strand of mainstream political thought is unimaginable without the influence of Jameson's fusion of hard cultural criticism, immense knowledge, refusal of low/high cultural boundaries, and his endlessly ruminative, open-minded dialectical curiosity, put in the service of a refusal ever to forgive or downplay the horrors that capitalism has inflicted upon the world. Jameson's Marxism was particularly tailored for our fallen era, a low ebb of class struggle, an apparent triumph of a new and ever more ruthless capitalism: "late", as he optimistically put it, borrowing a phrase from the Belgian Trotskyist Ernest Mandel.

      Also:

      "The dialectic," wrote Jameson, "is not moral." In the sprawling Valences of the Dialectic (2009), Jameson proposed "a new institutional candidate for the function of Utopian allegory, and that is the phenomenon called Wal-Mart". While conceding that the actually existing Wal-Mart was "dystopian in the extreme", Jameson was fascinated by its unsentimental destruction of small businesses, its monopolistic mockery of the concept of a "free market", and its immense, largely automated and computerised network of distribution of cheap, abundant goods. Perhaps it was a step too far to extrapolate from this -- as did Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski in their 2019 The People's Republic of Wal-Mart -- and portray the megacorp as a prefiguring of communist distribution networks. But what Jameson was up to, following Gramsci's and Lenin's fascination with Fordism and Taylorism, was an attempt to uncover what the new horrors of capitalism made possible. In the case of Wal-Mart, he argued, the answer was: a computerised planned economy. Jameson was a strict, 20th-century Marxist in remaining a firmly modernist thinker, refusing to find any solace in imagined communal or pre-capitalist pasts. But his unsentimental modernism did not preclude an outrage at the ravages inflicted by colonialism and imperialism in the name of "progress", an often overlooked thread in his work.

      [PS: From this, my first and evidently only free article, I clicked on Richard Seymour: [07-22] The rise of disaster nationalism: "The modern far-right is not a return to fascism, but a new and original threat." I could see this as a reasonable argument, as evidence of the "thought-provoking journalism" the publication touts, but I was stopped cold at the paywall ("as little as $12.00 a month").

    • Clay Risen: [09-23] Fredric Jameson, critic who linked literature to capitalism, dies at 90: "Among the world's leading academic critics, he brought his analytical rigor to topics as diverse as German opera and sci-fi movies."

    • AO Scott: [09-23] For Fredric Jameson, Marxist criticism was a labor of love: "The literary critic, who died on Sunday at age 90, believed that reading was the path to revolution."

    • Robert T Tally Jr.: [09-27] The Fredric Jameson I knew.

    • Kate Wagner: [09-26] The gifts of Fredric Jameson (1934-2024): "The intellectual titan bestowed on us so many things, chief among them a reminder to Always Be Historicizing."

    • Verso Books: [09-23] Jameson at 90: A Verso Blog series: "Our series honoring Fredric Jameson's oeuvre in celebration of his 90th birthday."

  • Kris Kristofferson:

  • Maggie Smith:

  • Also note:

Books

  • Patrick Iber: [09-24] Eric Hobsbawm's lament for the twentieth century: "Where some celebrated the triumph of liberal capitalism in the 1990s, Hobsbawn saw a failed dream." Re-reviewing the British historian's 1994 book, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991, which I started at the time, and have long meant to return to -- although after re-reading the first of what turned into his tetraology, The Age of Revolution (1789-1948), I found myself wanting to work through the intermediate volumes -- The Age of Capital (1848-1875) and The Age of Empire (1875-1914) first. Iber teases us with his conclusion:

    But if a classic is a work that remains worth reading both for what it is and for what it tells us about the time it was created, Hobsbawm's text deserves that status. It rewards the reader not because a historian would write the same book today but precisely because they would not.

    Hobsbawm's previous books are dazzling for the breadth of his knowledge, and his skill at weaving so many seemingly disparate strands into a sensible whole. This one, however, is coterminous with his life (into his 70s; his dates were 1917-2012), which gives him the advantages (and limits) of having experienced as well as researched the history, and having had a personal stake in how it unfolded.

  • Sandip Munshi: [09-25] Irfan Habib is one of the great Marxist historians.

  • Ryu Spaeth: [09-23] The return of Ta-Nehisi Coates: "A decade after The Case for Reparations, he is ready to take on Israel, Palestine, and the American media." Coates has a new book, The Message, coming out Oct. 1. I expect we'll be hearing much more about this in coming weeks. To underscore the esteem with which Coates is held, this pointed to a 2015 article:

    Here's are several fairly long quotes from Spaeth's article:

    In Coates's eyes, the ghost of Jim Crow is everywhere in the territories. In the soldiers who "stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs." In the water sequestered for Israeli use -- evidence that the state had "advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself." In monuments on sites of displacement and informal shrines to mass murder, such as the tomb of Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Muslims in a mosque in 1994, which recall "monuments to the enslavers" in South Carolina. And in the baleful glare of the omnipresent authority. "The point is to make Palestinians feel the hand of occupation constantly," he writes. And later: "The message was: 'You'd really be better off somewhere else.'" . . .

    His affinity for conquered peoples very much extends to the Jews, and he begins the book's essay on Palestine at Yad Vashem, Israel's memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. "In a place like this," he writes, "your mind expands as the dark end of your imagination blooms, and you wonder if human depravity has any bottom at all, and if it does not, what hope is there for any of us?" But what Coates is concerned with foremost is what happened when Jewish people went from being the conquered to the conquerors, when "the Jewish people had taken its place among The Strong," and he believes Yad Vashem itself has been used as a tool for justifying the occupation. "We have a hard time wrapping our heads around people who are obvious historical victims being part and parcel of another crime," he told me. In the book, he writes of the pain he observed in two of his Israeli companions: "They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth -- that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing." . . .

    The book is strongest when its aperture is narrow. There is no mention of the fact that Israel is bombarded by terrorist groups set on the state's annihilation. There is no discussion of the intifadas and the failed negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian leaders going back decades. There is even no mention of Gaza because Coates was unable to visit the region after the October 7 attack and he did not want to report on a place he hadn't seen for himself. ("People were like, 'Gaza is so much worse,'" he told me. "'So much worse.'") What there is, instead, is a picture of the intolerable cruelty and utter desperation that could lead to an October 7.

    "If this was the 1830s and I was enslaved and Nat Turner's rebellion had happened," Coates told me that day in Gramercy, "I would've been one of those people that would've been like, 'I'm not cool with this.' But Nat Turner happens in a context. So the other part of me is like, What would I do if I had grown up in Gaza, under the blockade and in an open-air prison, and I had a little sister who had leukemia and needed treatment but couldn't get it because my dad or my mom couldn't get the right pass out? You know what I mean? What would I do if my brother had been shot for getting too close to the barrier? What would I do if my uncle had been shot because he's a fisherman and he went too far out? And if that wall went down and I came through that wall, who would I be? Can I say I'd be the person that says, 'Hey, guys, hold up. We shouldn't be doing this'? Would that have been me?"

    • Ta-Nehisi Coates: [08-21] A Palestinian American's place under the Democrats' big tent?: "Though the Uncommitted movement is lobbying to get a Palestinian American on the main stage, the Harris campaign has not yet approved one. Will there be a change before Thursday -- and does the Democratic Party want that?" In the end, the DNC didn't allow a Palestinian speaker, calling into question their "big tent" commitment, and exposing how invisible and unfelt Palestinians have become even among people who profess to believe in democracy, equal rights, human rights, peace and social justice.

Chatter

  • Zack Beauchamp: [09-24] The Israel-Palestine conflict is in fact complicated and difficult to resolve fairly.

    Invariably, posts like these attract the absolute stupidest people who prove why it needs saying in the first place.

    PS: I replied: Reminds me of a joke: how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb really has to want to change. Palestinians have tried everything; nothing worked, so it looks difficult. But Israel has offered nothing. If they did, it would be easy.

    Many comments, preëmptively dismissed by Beauchamp, make similar points, some harshly, others more diplomatically. One took the opposite tack, blaming it all on Palestinian rejection of Israel's good intentions -- basically a variation on the argument that when one is being raped, one should relax and enjoy it. The key thing is that Israelis have always viewed the situation as a contest of will and power, where both sides seek to dominate the other, which is never acceptable to the other. When dominance proves impossible, the sane alternative is to find some sort of accommodation, which allows both sides most of the freedoms they desire. That hasn't happened with Israel, because they've always felt they were if not quite on the verge of winning, at least in such a dominant position they could continue the conflict indefinitely. Given that presumption, everything else is rationalization.

    One comment cites Ta-Nehisi Coates:

    For Coates, the parallels with the Jim Crow South were obvious and immediate: Here, he writes, was a "world where separate and unequal was alive and well, where rule by the ballot for some and the bullet for others was policy." And this world was made possible by his own country: "The pushing of Palestinians out of their homes had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means it had my imprimatur."

    That it was complicated, he now understood, was "horseshit." "Complicated" was how people had described slavery and then segregation. "It's complicated," he said, "when you want to take something from somebody."

  • Zachary D Carter: [09-25] Biden's Middle East policy straightforwardly violates domestic and international law.

    In just about every other respect Biden's foreign policy operation has been admirable, but the damage he has done to international conceptions of the U.S. with his Middle East program is on par with George W. Bush.

    PS: I replied: Funny, I can't think of any aspect of Biden foreign policy as admirable, even in intent, much less in effect. Same hubris, hollow principles, huge discounts for shameless favorites (arms, oil, $$). Even climate is seen as just rents. Israel is the worst, but the whole is rotten.]


I saw this in a Facebook image, and felt like jotting it down (at some point I should find the source):

Banksy on Advertising

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, ttakle a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no chance whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't . . .

Quite some time ago, I started writing a series of little notes on terms of interest -- an idea, perhaps inspired by Raymond Williams' book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, that I've kept on a cool back burner ever since. One of the first entries was on advertising, and as I recall -- I have no idea where this writing exists, if indeed it does -- it started with: "Advertising is not free speech. It is very expensive . . ." Williams would usually start with the history of the word, including etymology, then expand on its current usage. I was more focused on the latter, especially how words combine complex and often nuanced meanings, and how I've come to think through those words. Advertising for me is not just a subject I have a lot of personal experience in -- both as consumer or object and on the concept and production side -- but is a prism which reveals much about our ethics and politics. In particular, it testifies to our willingness to deceive and to manipulate one another, and our tolerance at seeing that done, both to others and to oneself.

In looking this up, I found a few more useful links on Raymond Williams (1981-88) and Keywords:

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): music.

Original count: 171 links, 10266 words (13367 total)

Current count: 171 links, 10271 words (13374 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Tuesday, September 24, 2024


Music Week

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 42995 [42976] rated (+19), 26 [23] unrated (+3).

After an abbreviated Speaking of Which yesterday, this is an even shorter Music Week. For most of last week, I've been prepping the house for arrival of a contractor, to fix the collapsed ceiling in a small upstairs bedroom. Main thing there was moving 25 years of accumulated living out to somewhere else. Some things got thrown away, but most -- including three bookcases of books -- just had to find temporary storage elsewhere. Contractor arrived today, and should have another couple days of work, after which I intend to refinish (mostly paint) everything, including a closet that long been the most wretched corner of a 100-year-old house.

So I haven't had much time to listen to music, or to write. Expect no more (and probably less) for next week, and probably the week after -- hopefully the bedroom will be done by then, but I expect project repercussions to spread far and wide. I'm looking forward to these weeks, figuring they'll produce more tangible accomplishments than I've felt from writing all year. Indeed, I'm rushing this out now, so I can go back to my closet and get a couple more hours of work in. Downside is that it can be physically wearing.

One minor accomplishment last week was when I fixed one of my "inventory reduction" dinners on Saturday: I turned shrimp and vegetables from the freezer, the end of a bag of dried pasta, and some aging items in the refrigerator into a small dinner of: shrimp with feta cheese, penne puttanesca, pisto manchego, and a lemon-caper sauce with green beans, artichoke hearts, and prosciutto; followed by a chocolate cake with black walnut frosting (one of my mother's standards).

I have nothing much to say about this week's music, other than that the Ahmad Jamal records were suggested by a question. I thought "why bother?" at first, then "why not?"


New records reviewed this week:

Benjamin Boone: Confluence: The Ireland Sessions (2023 [2024], Origin): Alto saxophonist, has some good records, especially the pair backing poet Philip Levine. Trio with bass and drums plus scattered guests, including singer JoYne on three songs. They're nice enough, but the saxophone is better. B+(***) [cd]

Michael Dease: Found in Space: The Music of Gregg Hill (2022 [2024], Origin): Trombonist, also baritone sax, has more than one album per year since 2010. Hill is a Michigan-based composer with no records of his own, but several of his students have released tributes to him recently, and this is Dease's second. Large group, eleven pieces, and probably the best yet. B+(***) [cd]

Delia Fischer: Beyond Bossa (2024, Origin): Brazilian singer-songwriter, plays piano/keyboards, recorded two albums 1988-90 as part of Duo Fênix, solo albums after that. As the title implies, the atmosphere here is familiarly Brazilian, but there is much more going on, including interaction of many dramatic voices, which suggest opera (or at least concept album). Not something I feel up to figuring out, but seems exceptional. B+(***) [cd]

Heems: Veena (2024, Veena Sounds): New York rapper Himanshu Suri, formerly of Das Racist, named his album (like his label) after his mother. His earlier 2024 album, Lafandar, tops my non-jazz list. This one is iffier, and not just because they redo the old phone message thing. B+(***) [sp]

Jason Kao Hwang: Soliloquies: Unaccompanied Pizzicato Violin Improvisations (2024, True Sound): Exactly what the title promises, which sets an upper bound on how enjoyable this can be, but he comes remarkably close to hitting the mark. Hwang became our greatest living jazz violinist when Billy Bang passed, and is a safe bet to maintain that claim until he, too, is gone. A- [cd]

Miranda Lambert: Postcards From Texas (2024, Republic Nashville): Country singer-songwriter, debut 2005, probably the most consistent one since, even if you count her Pistol Annies side project. Another batch of good songs. A- [sp]

Matt Panayides Trio: With Eyes Closed (2023 [2024], Pacific Coast Jazz): Guitarist, based in New York, fourth album since 2010, a trio with Dave LaSpina (bass) and Anthony Pinciotti (drums). B+(**) [cd]

Anne Sajdera: It's Here (2024, Bijuri): Pianist, some solo (two tracks), some trio (two more), some with various horns (four). B+(*) [cd]

Jason Stein: Anchors (2022 [2024], Tao Forms): Bass clarinet player, based in Chicago, leads a trio with Joshua Abrams (bass) and Gerald Cleaver (drums). Billed as his "most personal album to date," impressive when he hits his stride, but seems to back off a bit much. B+(***) [cd]

Nilüfer Yanya: My Method Actor (2024, Ninja Tune): British pop singer-songwriter, father is Turkish, third album. Didn't grab me right away, like the first two, but snuck up. B+(***) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

  • None.

Old music:

Charles Bell and the Contemporary Jazz Quartet: Another Dimension (1963, Atlantic): Pianist (1933-2012), only released two albums, one called The Charles Bell Contemporary Jazz Quartet in 1961, this this one a couple years later. Four originals, covers of "Django," "Oleo," and "My Favorite Things," with guitar (Bill Smith), bass (Ron Carter), and drums (Allen Blairman). B+(***) [sp]

Ahmad Jamal: Poinciana (1958 [1963], Argo): Early compilation LP, took the title song from Live at the Pershing, then tacked on seven songs from his September sets at the Spotlite (released in 1959 as Portfolio of Ahmad Jamal; Ahmad's Blues also comes from the Spotlite stand, but only two songs there are dupes from here). So this seems like a sampler for more definitive editions. B+(**) [r]

The Ahmad Jamal Trio: The Awakening (1970, Impulse!): With Jamil Nasser (bass) and Frank Grant (drums). B+(**) [r]

Ahmad Jamal: Live in Paris 1992 (1992 [1993], Birdology): French label, founded 1992 and ran up to 2005, associated with Disques Dreyfus. Mostly trio with James Cammack (bass guitar) and David Bowler (drums), with alternates on one track. B+(*) [sp]

Ahmad Jamal: I Remember Duke, Hoagy & Strayhorn (1994 [1995], Telarc): Covers as noted, plus a couple originals along those lines. With Ephriam Wolfolk (bass) and Arti Dixson (drums), but they don't add much. B+(*) [sp]

Ahmad Jamal: The Essence, Part 1 (1994-95 [1995], Birdology): The first of three volumes the label collected, this from live sets in Paris -- six quartet tracks with piano, bass (James Cammack), drums (Idris Muhammad), and percussion (Manolo Badrena), plus two tracks from New York with a different bassist (Jamil Nasser) and George Coleman (tenor sax). I wish we had more of the latter -- his bits are really terrific -- but without him I'm still reminded of how bright Jamal's piano is. A- [sp]

Ahmad Jamal: Big Byrd: The Essence, Part 2 (1994-95 [1996], Birdology): More quartet tracks from the same dates in Paris and New York, with guests Joe Kennedy Jr. (violin) on one track, Donald Byrd (trumpet) on the other (the 15:13 title track). B+(***) [sp]

Ahmad Jamal: Nature: The Essence, Part 3 (1997 [1998], Birdology): A later studio session from Paris, with the same quartet -- James Cammack (bass), Idris Muhammad (drums), Manolo Badrena (percussion) -- joined by Othello Molineaux on steel drum. Stanley Turrentine (tenor sax) drops in for one track, and is terrific. B+(**) [sp]


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week (incomplete):

  • Michael Dease: Found in Space: The Music of Gregg Hill (Origin) [09-20]
  • Doug Ferony: Alright Okay You Win (Ferony Enterprizes Music) [10-01]
  • Alden Hellmuth: Good Intentions (Fresh Sound New Talent) [09-08]
  • Randy Ingram: Aries Dance (Sounderscore) [10-18]
  • Ryan Keberle & Catharsis: Music Is Connection (Alternate Side) [10-18]
  • Peter Lenz: Breathe: Music for Large Ensembles (GambsART) [11-08]
  • Hayoung Lyou: The Myth of Katabasis (Endectomorph Music) [11-15]
  • Yuka Mito: How Deep Is the Ocean (Nana Notes) [10-11]
  • Simon Moullier: Elements of Light (Candid) [09-20]
  • Nacka Forum: Peaceful Piano (Moserobie) [10-18]
  • Dann Zinn: Two Roads (Ridgeway) [10-04]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, September 23, 2024


Speaking of Which

File opened: 2024-09-17 2:05 PM. Wrapping it up, rather arbitrarily, on Monday afternoon. I feared I would have little time to work on my weekly posts this week (and next, and the week after, when we expect visitors), so I limited my hopes to picking up a few links for future reference, collected in my spare time. This has grown larger than I expected, especially as I opened up and wrote several lengthy comments. Such informal writing comes easy, and feels substantive, where my more ambitious concepts so often flounder. So I count this as therapeutic, regardless of whether it's of value to anyone else.

My one ambitious concept this week was to write up an outline of an introduction, which would provide some kind of "executive summary" of current events. As events change little from week to week -- for some time now I've been starting each week with a skeletal template, which I refine and reuse -- it occurred to me that I could come up with a boilerplate introduction, which I could then copy and edit from week to week, but would cover the main points I keep returning to in scattered comments.

I came up with that idea back on Thursday, but here it is Monday and I still haven't started on it. So maybe next week? I'll start with a blanket endorsement of Harris and all Democrats, not because I especially like them but because they're the only practical defense against Republicans, who are set on a program to do you great harm, and in some cases get you killed. Then we'll talk about inequality and war, which top my list of the world's problems -- not that we can ignore the latter, but fixing them is really hard without ending war and reducing inequality. And when it comes to war and inequality, no example is more horrific than Israel, which as you'll read below, took a sudden, bizarre turn for the worse last week. Back in October, I explained my plan for ending the Gaza war. My thinking has evolved a bit since then, and it would be good to update it and keep it current.


I woke up early (way too early for me) Tuesday morning, and found this in my mailbox from Mazin Qumsiyeh (I've replaced URLs with linked article titles):

A regional war has just been officially declared and will likely soon become a global war. This accelerated with Netanyahu's refusal to do a prisoner swap and ceasefire deal for Gaza for 11 months (even against the wishes of his military commanders) with no prospect of that changing which meant continuation of the genocide and conflict with Lebanon, Yemen, and Iraq (yes supportive resistance forces to Israeli imperial hegemony). The Israeli regime escalated with a series of terrorist attacks on Lebanon including rigging pagers and walkie-talkies to explode killing and injuring scores of civilians. Then attacked Beirut apoartment buildings, then in the past 24 hours attacked homes throughout Lebanon killing 500 Lebanese civilians (most women and children like in Gaza) Israel escalates its military attacks in Lebanon, targeting residential areas and civilians with intense raids.

And yes the resistance from Lebanon and Gaza continues to target Israeli military forces. And attacks on the West Bank continue so that they can depopulate us Inside the brutal siege of Jenin.

An Interfaith Dispatch From the West Bank: Rabbis for Ceasefire and Hindus for Human Rights make a peace pilgrimage (mentions us): An interfaith dispatch from the West Bank.

The prospect and the solution? See this just published very short article of mine in Z Magazine A path forward or listen to this interview 5 Sept Heroes and Patriots Mazin Qumsiyeh and Abba Solomon, heroes and patriots or this talk 22 Sept UU Brevard, Flordia 9 22 24 Decolonization of people and nature in Palestine and globally, with Prof Mazin Qumsiyeh.

Question: How many more thousands of children have to be massacred (so far 20,000) before the world governments act?

Reminder: THIS DID NOT START 7 OCTOBER 2023 . . IT STARTED IN 1948 AND EARLIER WITH ETHNIC CLEANSING AND COLONIZATION. See Frequently asked questions, answers, and documentation on Gaza.


Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

  • Michael Arria:

    • [09-19] Jill Stein leads Kamala Harris among Muslim voters in swing states as Palestine supporters weigh choices amid Gaza genocide: "A recent poll shows Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein beating Kamala Harris among Muslim voters in multiple swing states as pro-Palestinian voters weigh the upcoming U.S. presidential race." I'm skeptical of any such polling, and not just because third-party support tends to evaporate in the closing days of the season. The article doesn't go into much detail about either the poll details or the question of how many voters are we really talking about here. CAIR estimates that there are over 2.5 million Muslim voters in the US (75% born in the US, 20-25% African-American), so about 1.5% of all registered voters. Contrary to the headline, the CAIR poll shows Harris slightly ahead of Stein, 29.4%% to 29.1%, trailed by Trump (11.2%), Cornel West (4.2%), and Chase Oliver (the Libertarian, 0.8%), with 16.5% undecided and 8.8% not voting.

    • [09-19] The Shift: Uncommitted Movement says it won't back Harris in election. If you read the fine print, you'll see that while they refuse to endorse Harris, they "oppose" Trump, and are "not recommending a third-party vote in the Presidential election, especially as third party votes in key states could help inadvertently deliver a Trump presidency given our country's broken electoral college system." They don't talk about not voting, but if you're leaning that way, please read the parts about Trump again.

    • [09-17] The Shift: Nearly 60% of Israelis say they'd vote for Trump: "Former President and GOP nominee Donald Trump remains a popular figure in Israel. A recent poll found that 58% of Israelis would vote for Trump, while just 25% would vote for Harris."

      This week Trump will give two speeches to pro-Israel audiences.

      First, he'll speak to a group of Jewish supporters in DC about countering antisemitism.

      Jewish Insider's Matt Kassel reports that Orthodox businessman Yehuda Kaploun and his business partner Ed Russo will host the event.

      A source told Kassel that the event will allow Trump to speak with Jewish leaders "about his plans to combat the wave of antisemitism and antisemitic behavior and enforce the laws for religious liberty to all."

      Miriam Adelson is expected to attend. The GOP megadonor is reportedly set to spend more than $100 million to elect Trump in November.

      In DC Trump will also address the Israeli American Council's (IAC) national convention. The IAC is led by lan Carr, who served as the envoy to combat antisemitism under Trump. Its largest donor is Adelson.

      I understand why people are disturbed the level of reflexive support for Israel that Harris has consistently shown, and how tempting it is to punish her at the ballot box, but the candidate who is most under Israel's thumb is clearly Trump. Harris at least has the presence of mind and decency to decry and bemoan the war, and offer that it must stop. Trump's allegiance is not just for sale here. It's done been sold.

  • Juan Cole: [09-17] A centrist Muslim alliance against an extremist Israel?

  • Edo Konrad: [09-20] What Israelis don't want to hear about Iran and Hezbollah: "For years, Israeli expert Ori Goldberg has tried to challenge commonly-held assumptions about the Islamic Republic and its allies. Will anyone listen?"

  • Daniel Larison: [09-19] A rare foreign policy win is there for the taking: "Iran's new reformist president wants to negotiate with the West; we should take him up on his request."

  • Jim Lobe: [09-18] 42 years ago today: the Sabra & Shatila massacre.

  • Nicole Narea: [09-18] What we know about the pager and walkie-talkie explosions in Lebanon and Syria: Unfortunately, Vox doesn't seem to know very much about this wave of exploding tech devices -- hundreds of pagers on Tuesday, followed by thousands of walkie-talkies on Wednesday, each packed with remotely-detonated explosives, and allegedly distributed by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria -- and more importantly, isn't able or willing to set the context and draw meaningful conclusions. Their subhed: "It's a dangerous escalation in the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel as the war in Gaza rages on."

    The first thing that needs to be noted is that the "conflict" is extremely asymmetrical. The background is that Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, intervening in a civil war to bolster a Phalangist (fascist) party thought to be favorable to Israel, which backed out of Beirut but continued to occupy southern Lebanon, up to its withdrawal in 2000 (except for a small sliver of territory[*], which remains as a sore point, which seems to be the point). Hezbollah developed as the most effective resistance organization to Israeli occupation. Once Israel withdrew (except for that sliver, see what I mean?), Hezbollah's mission was complete, but since Israel never signed any peace treaty with Lebanon, they continued to organize as a deterrent against another Israeli attack (as happened in 2006). Since then, except for that sliver, the only times Hezbollah has fired (mostly missiles) at Israel has been in response to Israel's periodic attacks on Lebanon. I'm convinced that Israel does this simply to provoke responses that they can spin into their cover story on Iran: Americans still bear a grudge against Iran over 1979, a feud they've relentlessly stoked since the 1990s, as it gives Israel a threat which is beyond its means, thus binding an American alliance that provides cover for their real agenda, which is to erase the Palestinian presence in all of Israel.

    The US could end this farce immediately by making a separate peace with Iran (and for good measure, with its alleged proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen). Obama took one step in that direction with the JCPOA "nuclear deal," which was the only realistic solution to "the Iranian nuclear threat" -- which Israelis had played up since the early 1990s[**]. But Netanyahu denounced the deal, and used the full power of the Israel lobby to undermine it, leading to Trump's withdrawal, and Biden's failure to reinstate. Had Israel been serious about the "nuclear threat," they would have celebrated JCPOA. Had the US understood Israel's objectives, they would have extended their "deal" with Iran to resolve other disputes and normalize relations.

    I had several other points in mind when I started writing this, but they're more obvious from the reporting, which I'll continue to collect below. Chief among them is that this is a patently Israeli operation, combining as it does a fascination with high tech and completely oblivious disregard for its impact on others, or even for the damage it will do to the future reputation of all Israelis. This is indiscriminate terrorism, on a huge scale. Exactly who in Israel is immediately responsible for this isn't yet clear, but whoever it is should be held responsible, first and foremost by the Israeli people, but until that happens, it is not unreasonable to sanction the state. Any nation, like the US, which claims to be opposed to terrorism would be remiss in not doing so.

    The most similar event I can recall was the Chicago Tylenol murders of 1982, which was probably the work of a single rogue individual (although it was followed by several copycat crimes, and was never definitively solved). The maker of Tylenol (Johnson & Johnson) took extraordinary measures to restore consumer trust (see How the Tylenol murders of 1982 changed the way we consume medication). While similar in terms of sowing mistrust, this case is orders of magnitude larger, and is likely to prove much more difficult for Israel to manage. No one ever thought for a moment that Johnson & Johnson wanted to poison customers, but Netanyahu's hands are not just tainted but dripping blood. Even if he is not personally responsible for this, the war and genocide are clearly his work, in conception and commission, and in his consistent refusal to end or even limit it. Moreover, there is no reason to trust Israel to investigate itself -- as it has claimed many times in the past to do, covering up and/or excusing many serious crimes along the way.

    [*] This sliver is called Shebaa Farms. When Israel withdrew from Lebanon, they continued to occupy this bit of land, arguing that it was originally part of the Syrian Heights, which Israel has occupied since 1967 (and later annexed, contrary to international law; it is now better known as Golan Heights). See Why is there a disputed border between Lebanon and Israel?.

    [**] What changed for Israel in 1990 was that after Saddam Hussein was defeated in Kuwait and bottled up and disarmed, they needed a new "existential threat" to replace Iraq and maintain American support. While the Ayatollahs weren't as chummy with Israel as the Shah had been, they maintained cordial relations all through the 1980s -- by far the most anti-American period of Iran's revolution. Israel helped arm Iran as a counterweight to Iraq's ambitions (including their role in Reagan's Iran-Contra scandal, which gave them insight into America's schizoid reaction to overthrowing the CIA-installed Shah). Trita Parsi explains all of this in Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (2007).

    • CNN [Tara John, et al.]: [09-18] How did pagers explode in Lebanon and why was Hezbollah using them? Here's what we know.

    • CNN [Charbel Mallo, et al.]: [09-18] Israel behind deadly pager explosions that targeted Hezbollah and injured thousands in Lebanon.

    • Caitlin Johnstone: [09-17] Turning people into involuntary suicide bombers to fight terrorism.

    • Daniel Larison: [09-18] Israel terrorizes Lebanon: "This was a reckless attack that makes a major war between Israel and Hezbollah much more likely."

    • Nikita Mazurov: A brief history of booby-trapping electronics to blow up.

    • Jonathan Ofir: [09-18] Israel's attack on Lebanon using exploding electronics is part of a long history and strategy of targeting civilians: "Israel's latest attack on Lebanon represents an expansion of its Dahiya doctrine which intentionally targets civilians to send a political message."

    • Paul R Pillar: [09-20] Wider war closer after Israel's attack on Lebanon.

    • Mitchell Plitnick: [09-18] I scraped this off Facebook.

      A friend asked me how I come to say that Israel targeted civilians with their attack on pagers purchased by Hezbollah.

      Here is my response:

      So let's start with this: being a Hezbollah "operative" does not make one a legitimate target nor does it mean you're not a civilian. Hezbollah operatives include clerks, messengers, secretaries, even medical workers. Bear in mind, Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government. Its activities cover a lot more than military actions. Therefore, targeting Lebanese people for their connection to Hezbollah is no different from targeting the janitor in the IDF's Tel Aviv headquarters. It's targeting civilians.

      Second, I am told by people I know and have seen it confirmed by at least two Lebanese journalists that many recipients of these pagers are not military. Israel certainly knows that.

      Third, Israel detonated these pagers en masse. They certainly knew they were sure to be in populated areas, with women and children nearby, but they certainly did NOT know who actually had each pager. That's not collateral damage. That's intentionally targeting civilians.

      Any ambiguity in any of this is negated by the fact that this is a blatant violation of international law, specifically the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons which explicitly bars booby-trapping ordinary items. Israel is a High Contracting Party to Article II, where this prohibition is seen:

      4. "Booby-trap" means any device or material which is designed, constructed or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object or performs an apparently safe act.

      3. It is prohibited in all circumstances to use any mine, booby-trap or other device which is designed or of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering.

      4. Weapons to which this Article applies shall strictly comply with the standards and limitations specified in the Technical Annex with respect to each particular category.

      5. It is prohibited to use mines, booby-traps or other devices which employ a mechanism or device specifically designed to detonate the munition by the presence of commonly available mine detectors as a result of their magnetic or other non-contact influence during normal use in detection operations.

      I'm very comfortable calling this the deliberate targeting of civilians.

    • Steven Simon: [09-18] Exploding pagers in Lebanon: taste of what's yet to come?

    Israel followed up the pager/walkie-talkie attacks with another round of bombing Lebanon, going all the way to Beirut. Some articles on this:

  • Annelle Sheline: [09-18] MBS: no Saudi-Israel normalization until Palestinians get a state: "The Kingdom's crown prince throws cold water on Biden's 'grand bargain,' days after Oman does the same." However:

Israel vs. world opinion:

  • Ramzy Baroud:

  • Medea Benjamin/Nicholas JS Davies: [09-17] Can the world save Palestine from US-Israeli genocide? Refers to a UN General Assembly resolution, which passed on 9/18:

  • Jonathan Cook: [09-20] Jewish Chronicle scandal: why was there no uproar over past pro-Israel disinformation? "Despite a deeply problematic track record, the paper's fake news is making waves only now, after it printed claims based on forged Hamas documents."

  • Georgia Gee: These human rights defenders were hacked by Pegasus. Now they want police to charge the spyware maker. "So far, no one has been able to hold the notorious Israeli spyware firm accountable for complicity in human rights abuses."

  • David Hearst: [09-11] How Israel's genocide in Gaza is creating enemies on all sides: "Netanyahu's refusal to end the war on Gaza and settlers' terrorism in the West Bank have sowed the seeds of hatred across the region."

  • Ziyad Motala: [09-12] The US must allow the World Court to adjudicate on Israel's genocide: "Israeli diplomats have reportedly been instructed to push Washington to scupper South Africa's case before the International Court of Justice."

  • Mazin Qumsiyeh: Links from his latest newsletters, one new, most old, but his writings rarely lose their relevance, as new events more often than not just confirm his insights.

    • [01-01] 2024: Year-end report, personal achievements (research papers, etc.), plans for the coming year.

    • [2023-12-29] Hope for 2024.

    • [2023-11-12] Are we being duped to focus only on Gaza suffering? This is an even bigger question today, as coverage of Gaza has settled into a mind-numbing tedium while Israelis have escalated attacks on the West Bank, and working hard to provoke a war with Hezbollah which will only further cloud their operations against Palestinians. The first two paragraphs here (my bold) are so accurate one has to wonder about all the pundits back then who were (and in many cases still are) clueless.

      Israel's genocide of Gaza is intentional, planned and ongoing with no sign of slowing down. The contrary, with no water, food and medicine it is accelerating. Israel leaders boast openly that they do not care about what the UN, ICC, or ICJ say. Israeli fascist leaders say they do not care what statements are issued by governments. Nor do they care if public pressure causes some western leaders to moderate their "language" stating there is a "humanitarian catastrophe" unfolding in Gaza (without naming the perpetrator and continuing to support physically the genocide). Israel actually can use the humanitarian catastrophe (as if it is an act of God not their agency) as bargaining chips. The focus on "ceasefire negotiations" is actually a very clever strategy to continue the genocidal occupation and for impunity from facing tribunals for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

      Israeli leaders are crystal clear about their crimes and they get their way by genocide and total state terrorism against populations. If you have any doubt, listen to them (see below). They even say openly that if Hizbollah continues its resistance in South Lebanon, then all of Lebanon will pay a devastating price and Beirut will be like Gaza (i.e. totally devastated). Israeli military spokesmen gave the same threats to cities in the West Bank like Jenin and Tulkarem and even Ramallah. These are not idle threats. Many were complicit with Israeli apartheid regime by suppressing the truth and giving weapons to commit genocide. According to Israeli leaders global public opinion and "diplomatic" pressure will not end its carnage done to promote colonialism and greed. Many human rights advocates are at a loss as to how to end the carnage. While people focus on the carnage, few address its underlying cause. It is like focusing on suffering in concentration camps without identifying the source of that suffering (or even worse blaming the victims).

      Next line is a bit inflammatory ("Extreme nationalism leads to genocide: Nazis and Zionists"), but the error there is assuming causality from consequences. Extreme nationalism may be a necessary precondition, but something more is also required: the hubris of unchecked, unaccountable power. Plenty of kneejerk nationalists all around the world, but in Israel they've achieved a sense of invincibility unmatched since Hitler's Germany. That one exemplar claims to be for Jews and the other against just how unimportant the category is.

    • [2023-07-14] Lebanon & Palestine: A trip report.

    • [2023-07-03] Hope: present and future: Starts with an Israeli atrocity which, needless to say, predates the Oct. 7 Hamas revolt, and the even greater Israeli atrocities since then.

    • [2023-06-29] Changing ourselves: "As a zoologist and geneticist I am always puzzled about human (optimistically named Homo sapiens) behavior."

    • [09-22] End of empire? His grasp of US politics is less assured here. While his critique of Trump is sound enough, his points against the Democrats are harsh where I would be more generous. To pick out two of five:

      1. Harris courting of the lobby and supporting genocide undermines any remnant of illusion progressives,
      2. the Democrat party is corrupt and worked hand in glove with republicans against allowing other parties.

      The American political system is such that it is impossible for anyone to win without picking up a whiff of corruption. While some Democrats play that game as adeptly as Republicans, and when they can, shower their donors with favors as readily, most also see and feel some obligation to serve their constituents, or more generally "all the people." One thing nearly all Democrats have in common is their loathing for Trump and his shock troops, and this is almost always due to how repulsive they find the effect of his programs on ordinary people. The Israel lobby has done a masterful job of disappearing Palestinian humanity, but most Democrats can still see through that veil -- and, unlike most Republicans, once they see they will care and act. It's not unreasonable to hope that eventually their leaders, including Harris, will follow their rank and file [there's a good Gandhi quote I could look up and insert here]. This may seem like faint hope, but Qumsiyah has written eloquently about his hopes. I'm not going to deny that Harris, following Biden, has been complicit in and supportive of genocide and other hideous crimes against human rights, but I still believe that their support is squishy and conflicted, far from the hardened determination of Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and now Netanyahu, who would rather join Hitler in the bunker than give up their life's work.

  • Dave Reed: [09-15] Weekly Briefing: Zionism is now a dirty word.

  • Mona Shtaya: [09-16] Israel is joining the first global AI convention, here's why that's dangerous: "Over the last year Israel has weaponized AI in its genocide in Gaza, deploying AI-driven surveillance and automated targeting systems which has killed tens of thousands. Israel's participation in the first global AI treaty raises serious questions."

  • Jonah Valdez:

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [09-17] South Africa minister: countries have to 'boycott' Israel's war: "In a Washington appearance Tuesday, Ronald Lamola recalled how the world community ended apartheid in 1990."

Election notes:

  • Jonathan Chait: -[09-21] The case for 2024 indecision is feeble: "Trump-wary conservatives have run out of rational reasons to be undecided." His examples of still-vacillating conservatives include Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens.

  • Andrew Prokop: [09-17] What happened to Nate Silver: I'm not sure he was ever all that "beloved by progressives." In his 538 days, his focus was on getting it right, which meant anticipating contests Republicans would win, and calling them emphatically enough to claim the win. He started out as a useful corrective to a lot of polling bullshit, but after he blew the 2016 election, he overcompensated and turned into just another annoying pundit.

Trump:

Vance, and other Republicans:

Harris:

Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:

  • Rick Perlstein: [08-26] Say it to my face: "How Democrats learned to tell the plain truth and like it." Perlstein's columns have been terrific ever since he started writing for American Prospect, but somehow I missed this one, which came out of the DNC without being explicit about it (well, until the end). He gives examples from Clinton, Gore, Kerry ("the worst of them all"), and Obama. I don't think Harris is totally past running from her own shadow, but she's much better at at defending what's right, and attacking what's wrong.

Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economists, the economy, and work:

  • John Cassidy: [09-18] How inflation fooled almost everybody: "With the Fed poised to cut rates for the first time in years, what have we learned about the economic disruptions of the pandemic era?"

Ukraine and Russia:

Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:


Other stories:

  • Ryan Cooper: [08-05] The case for pragmatic socialism: "The times are right for a socialist agenda that America can accept. We even have examples of it in practice." I held this piece back for later perusal, but I rather doubt I'm ever going to finish reading it, much less argue with it. In my philosophy days, I was fairly simpatico both with Marxism and with Pragmatism, and never saw much of a problem there. (I certainly knew a lot more of Marxism, but I read a fair amount of Charles Peirce, and also of Kant and various neo-Kantians like Robert Paul Wolff -- although I gather he spent more time critiquing pragmatists than swimming with them.) At least the focus on praxis was shared, along with the suspicion of metaphysics. The thing is, I have very little interest in salvaging "socialism" as a slogan, even though I admire both the theory and the legacy, and I'm willing to do my bit in defense of both. I just think that at this point a fresh start might work better. There's something pragmatist in that, isn't there?

  • Jeffrey St Clair: [09-20] Roaming Charges: Cat scratch political fever: Starts with "Miss Sassy started the biggest political fire since Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a lamp and burned down Chicago." So, with Trump and Vance. Then includes a picture captioned "When sleazy immigrants [Don Jr. and Eric Trump] sneak into your country and kill your cats."

Obituaries

Books

  • Wendy Brown: [09-09] The enduring influence of Marx's masterpiece: "No book has done more than Capital to explain the way the world works." Essay "adapted from the foreword to the first English translation of Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 in 50 years." Somehow, I don't recall this "famous turn of phrase" that Brown cites: "Capital is dead labor that acts like a vampire: It comes to life when it drinks more living labor, and the more living labor it drinks, the more it comes to life." Brown continues:

    Capital's requirements of increased labor exploitation over time -- exploiting more workers and exploiting them more intensively -- and in space -- ever expanding markets for its commodities -- constitute the life and death drives of capitalism, drives that are as insatiable as they are unsustainable. They reduce the masses to impoverishment, concentrate wealth among the few, and pile up crises that spell the system's eventual collapse, overthrow, or, as we have later learned, reinventions through the social state, the debt state, neoliberalism, financialization, and the asset-enhancing and de-risking state. Since growth is essential for what Marx called the "realization of surplus-value" or profit, capitalist development becomes an almighty shredder of all life forms and practices, including its own recent ones. From small shops, family farms, and cities to gigantic industries, rain forests, and even states, everything capital makes or needs it will eventually also destroy. In Marx's summary, "Capitalist production thus advances . . . only by damaging the very founts of all wealth: the earth and the worker."

    I'm reminded here of how easy it is to explain all of the world's ills with one word: "capitalism." That's the lesson drawn by every person who ever fell under Marx's spell, but reading this now I'm most struck by the insatiability of the process, which dialectically impels us to limit and regulate growth. Even now, when we've seen much of the harm capitalism can do, and as we've clearly benefited from many efforts to limit its rapacity, that's still a tough sell to many otherwise well-meaning people (e.g., "progressives," who still hope to grow our way out of all earthly hardships).

    • James Miller: [09-19] Karl Marx, weirder than ever: "What good is one of the communist thinker's most important texts to 21st-century readers?"

  • Adam Gopnik: [2012-02-27] The big reveal: Old article, popped up in a link list, piqued my curiosity for reasons I may (or may not) get around to explaining. Basically, a review of Elaine Pagels: Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, first imagining the text as a blockbuster movie:

    The Bible, as every Sunday-school student learns, has a Hollywood ending. Not a happy ending, certainly, but one where all the dramatic plot points left open earlier, to the whispered uncertainty of the audience ("I don't get it -- when did he say he was coming back?"), are resolved in a rush, and a final, climactic confrontation between the stern-lipped action hero and the really bad guys takes place. That ending -- the Book of Revelation -- has every element that Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for Megan Fox. ("And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and' she repented not.")

    I have this mental image of a certain type of 19th century Midwest farmer-intellectual who thinks that all of the world's knowledge -- past, present, and future -- is locked in the pages of the Bible, waiting to be explored and conquered by obsessive scholars like themselves. I even have a specific name in mind: Abraham Lincoln Hull, my great-grandfather, born on an arid west Kansas homestead in 1870, shortly after his father (plain Abraham Hull) moved out from Pennsylvania, after the Civil War. He was a sheep rancher, but I've heard him described as "the laziest human being ever." I suspect he was just lost in his thoughts, which fed into sideline jobs of teaching and preaching. I never knew him, but I did know, until I approached 15 and he died at 70, thereby confirming his own biblically-derived prophecy. He also farmed, taught school, dressed up for church, and pondered Revelations. One of the few times when he asked me a question was when he was trying to figure out whether the founding of Israel was proof that the second coming was imminent. I lacked the presence of mind to figure out whether he was a premillennial or postmillennial dispensationalist, but I was struck by the crackpot nature of the question, and I've recalled the moment every time I've seen or heard of Christian Zionists wax on the subject -- going back at least as far as David Lloyd George in approving the Balfour Declaration.

    As it turned out, my father had his own very different take on Revelation, but I never made the slightest effort to understand his, just noting that it was opposed to my grandfather's, and suspecting that, as with most of his theories of everything, it erred on the side of the whimsical. Eventually, I realized that I too was fated to have a theory of Revelation, even without having read more than the occasional isolated verse (which is the only way I ever approached the Bible -- the idea that one could just read it as literature, like The Gilgamesh or Moby Dick, only occurred to me when I saw it listed in the Great Books curriculum). My theory is that the book was tacked onto the end of the Bible as a reveal, one of those joke endings that exposes everything that had come before it as an elaborate hoax. That suggests more intention than I can imagine early Christian clerics as being capable of. Still, some of the most dedicated scholars have easily wandered into reductio ad absurdum, especially when the subject is religion.

    While my "theory" was never more than a joke, it was pretty clearly derived from insights I gleaned while reading a book about Judaism: Douglas Rushkoff: Nothing Sacred: The Truth About Judaism. Rushkoff's thesis is that the internal logic of Judaism functions as an aid in helping you get through and past and over religion. The book isn't fresh enough in my mind to do justice to here (not that I have the time, anyway), but I will note that I had spent a lot of time on the history and evolution of puritanism, and found a similar dynamic at play there (e.g., the unitarians are direct descendants yet perhaps the most secular and tolerant sect in all of Christendom; but far more significant is the liberation puritan theology allowed to turn into "the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism").

  • Ed Park: Nuance and nuisance: on the Village Voice: Review of Tricia Romano's oral history, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture.

  • Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins/Kate Yoon: [09-12] The age of public austerity and private luxury: "A conversation with Melinda Cooper about the recent history of neoliberalism and her new book Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance. Cooper opens with:

    My overarching argument is continuous with the one I developed in Family Values [2017, subtitle: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism]. I question the idea that the neoliberal counterrevolution of the early 1980s was a backlash against Keynesianism as such. Instead, I see it as a backlash against the leftist social movements of the late 1960s and '70s, which were already engaged in a kind of immanent critique of actually existing Keynesianism. . . .

    My basic argument is that neoliberals of different stripes managed to create a regime of extreme public spending austerity for those primarily dependent on wage income, while at the same time ushering in a regime of radical spending and monetary extravagance for financial asset owners. We tend to see only the austerity side of the equation -- hence the illusion that this is all about the retreat of the state. But it's hard to explain the extreme wealth concentration that has occurred in recent decades if we don't also understand the multiple ways in which financial wealth is actively subsidized by the state.

    There's quite a bit here on how capital gains taxation (or lack thereof) subsidizes asset inflation -- my term, not a very popular one as it suggests assets aren't really worth as much as they seem, and also that inflation, like money, is "good for the rich but bad for the poor" (as Lewis Lapham liked to put it). Also more details on how the "Virginia school neoliberals" (like James Buchanan) "dovetailed" with the "supply siders" - despite different concepts, both sought to make the rich richer, at the expense of everyone else. Then back to politics:

    Having said this, I don't think economic liberalism as such ever works alone; it always works in alliance with some species of conservatism. This may be the communitarian/neoliberal alliance of a Third Way Democrat like Bill Clinton, or the neoconservative neoliberalism of George W. Bush.

    In today's Republican Party, we have something that looks like a neoliberal/paleoconservative alliance, and this brings complexities of its own. Paleoconservatism has clear connections to the white supremacist and theocratic far right; as a movement, it defines itself in opposition to neoconservatism, which it sees as too secular, too liberal, too internationalist, and too Jewish.

    However, the kinds of economic alliances made by paleoconservatives have been quite diverse. [Mentions Koch-favorite Murray Rothbard, drawing on Ludwig von Mises; "Ayn Rand devotee" Alan Greenspan; Pat Buchanan.] . . .

    I would say the contemporary Republican Party draws on all of these influences, Trump more haphazardly than others. In his first election campaign, Trump seemed to embody the kind of paleoconservative national protectionist policies espoused by Pat Buchanan or Steve Bannon -- and certainly on the issue of trade with China, he followed through on this.

    JD Vance sounds like he espouses an anti-neoliberal national protectionist position too, but then again he is one of several Republican right operators who are funded by the ultra-libertarian Peter Thiel. What unites these people is their affiliation to far-right paleoconservatism and their immersion in the world of private investment. This underwrites a deeply patrimonial, autarchic, and atavistic outlook that is sometimes dressed up in the garb of a more progressive anti-corporate agenda.

Music (and other arts?)

Chatter

  • Means testing is divisive, wasteful and punitive: [09-19] Israel has shown itself as a metastasizing threat to the whole world. Are you going to be comfortable getting on a plane with people carrying Israeli-made products?

  • Jeff Sharlet: [09-23] 49% of the class of '23 at Dartmouth, where I [t]each, went into finance or consulting. Even were [I] the most ardent capitalist -- I am really not that -- this would be a crushing statistic. So much energy, education, & intellect hoovered up by one sector. [I might have added: which produces nothing of value, being mostly parasitic, and often just predatory.]

  • Tony Karon: [09-24] Israel -- a Jewish supremacist state created by violently displacing the indigenous Palestinian majority -- was built on racist contempt for Arab life, limb and property. It is maintained today by the same people -- for Israel and its US backers, Arab lives don't matter. [image of headline: Israeli air strikes kill 492 people in Lebanon]


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Tuesday, September 17, 2024


Music Week

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 42976 [42939] rated (+37), 23 [28] unrated (-5).

Another week, another day delayed, as Speaking of Which ran into overtime. When I finally called time late last night, it had run to 290 links, 15664 words, which is the most words and 2nd most links since I twiddled with the software to automatically post counts at the end of the files. I'll probably fix some typos and add a few minor bits by the time I post this tonight, and they will be flagged as usual, but I don't expect to put much more work into it.

What I am doing new this time is to go ahead and open a draft file before I finish Music Week. The downside is that the new one will appear ahead of Music Week in the blog roll, but the headline will be marked (draft) to indicates that I'm not done working on it. I'll drop that marking when I decide the piece is to be posted, and mark later additions and major edits with my red change bars, as I've been doing.

I work in a local copy of the website, and update the public copy when I have something to post. But sometimes I have reason to update without having a new post. This new approach just saves me the trouble of hiding posts that are still in draft stage. I figure there's no harm in whatever glimpses readers may find. Regularly updated files, like the music lists, will also be more up-to-date, which means they will run ahead of Music Week. (This has always been the case, but it's less evident if I only update for blog posts.)


Big haul of A-list records this week. Several came from Robert Christgau's latest Consumer Guide, which had an unusually large number of albums I hadn't heard and took kindly to -- and perhaps most importantly, spurred me to finally check out the Kate Nash record, which I wound up liking more than anyone else. Note that the three songs he picked out are the the least string-driven, including both of the ones that Thaae didn't claim co-credit on. I loved the string stuff from the start, then only latched onto this tryptich after several plays, although they did help push it from A- to A.

I'll admit that it's possible that without the CG, I'd have left Smither and Wade at B+(***). Several albums I previously graded:

  • Louis Armstrong: Louis in London (Verve) [A-]
  • Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars: Ambassador Satch (Columbia/Legacy '09) [A-]
  • Zach Bryan: The Great American Bar Scene (Warner) [B+(**)]
  • Illuminati Hotties: Power (Hopeless) [B+(**)]
  • Romy: Mid Air (Young '23) [A-]

I haven't returned to any of them, but I did belatedly revisit Zach Bryan and bumped its grade from B+(***) to A-. Others I'll get to in due course. Amy Rigby was a previous Christgau B+, but I say it's at least as good as Smither and Wade. Much pre-CG speculation focused on Anderson, LL Cool J, MJ Lenderman, and Sabrina Carpenter -- the latter I already had at B+(***).

Two more records overcame my anti-EP prejudices, basically by blowing them to smithereens. Only A-listed jazz album this week was a delightful surprise from the most down-home of the Marsalis clan, although there are other fine records in the B+(***) niche. I've been maintaining the EOY Jazz file, so I'm perhaps overly conscious of far above historic norms this year's A-list is (73 albums, which is a typical year-end figure, one that would extrapolate to a totally unprecedented 100+ number. (By the way, I've been finding a lot of mistakes in my bookkeeping lately, including three albums from last week that I failed to add to the EOY Jazz file. If you see something amiss, please let me know.)

I have a rather uneasy relationship to Substack. I have a couple subscriptions I've been comped, and one more my wife pays for but where I'm still treated as a freeloader. I know of a half-dozen more ones by music writers that I regularly click on, but haven't subscribed to, and there are probably several times that many mostly political writers I'd enjoy reading when/if I could. But the first new one I immediately subscribed to is one launched by the terrific jazz critic Tim Niland. Here's his first batch of Music Capsules. By the way, his 822-page book of "selected blog posts 2003-2015" is still available.

The next few weeks for me are going to be, well, complicated. I doubt I'll be writing much, and may completely blow the usual schedules. Nothing dire. Just lots of distractions and other things to do.


New records reviewed this week:

Gino Amato: Latin Crsossroads (2024, Ovation): Pianist, Discogs gives him one credit (arranger), leads many musicians (including strings) and singers through a set of Latin-tinged standards from "Blackbird" to "Green Flower Street" via Monk and "Aranjuez." B+(*) [cd]

Laurie Anderson: Amelia (2024, Nonesuch): Spoken word artist, started with Big Science in 1982, the first of several remarkable albums, back here with the story of pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart on her ill-fated attempt to fly around the world in 1937. A- [sp]

Eric Bibb: Live at the Scala Theatre Stockholm (2024, Repute): Easy-going blues singer-songwriter, originally from New York, first album 1972, lives in Stockholm, evidently for some time, so the choice of venue isn't so strange. B+(**) [sp]

Peter Case: Doctor Moan (2023, Sunset Blvd.): Singer-songwriter, from Buffalo, debut 1986, I thought his 1993 album Sings Like Hell was pretty good, but the dozen or so since, until this one showed up on a blues list. Plays piano, and sings, like hell, but not the same way. B [sp]

Dawn Clement/Steve Kovalcheck/Jon Hamar: Trio (2021 [2024], self-released): Piano-bass-guitar trio. I have Clement listed as a singer, but she doesn't here. B+(*) [cd]

Coco & Clair Clair: Girl (2024, Nice Girl World): Atlanta duo of Taylor Nave and Claire Toothill, third album since 2017, synthpop with some rap, most sung, short (9 tracks, 24:03) but nearly every song tantalizes, confirming the line "my girl and I just made a hit." A- [sp]

Buck Curran: One Evening and Other Folks Songs (2021-22 [2024], Obsolete/ESP-Disk): Singer-songwriter, plays guitar, several albums since 2016, first I've heard, based on title I filed this under folk (hype sheet confirms: "freak folk") but it doesn't really belong anywhere: a second vocalist, sometimes the lead, Adele Pappalardo, complicates the "singer" part, and keyboardist Jodi Pedrali spreads out the music, with ambient instrumentals in the mix. The alternate "Black Is the Color" has some prog appeal. B+(*) [cd]

Zaccai Curtis: Cubop Lives! (2024, Truth Revolution Recording Collective): Pianist, studied in Boston, based in New York, brother Luques Curtis is a notable bass player (present here, along with three percussionists). B+(**) [bc]

The Vinny Golia Quintet 2024: Almasty (2024, Nine Winds): Saxophonist, all weight plus many clarinets, very prolific since his debut album 1977 -- most on his own poorly promoted label, so my own exposure has been limited. Free jazz quintet here with Kris Tiner (trumpet/flugelhorn), Catherine Pineda (piano), Miller Wrenn (bass), and Clint Dodson (drums). B+(**) [bc]

Hot Club of San Francisco: Original Gadjo (2024, Hot Club): Gypsy jazz group, or a fair facsimile of one, inspired by Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli's Hot Club de Paris, on their 15th album since 1993. B+(**) [cd]

Ill Considered: Infrared (2024, New Soil): British jazz group, active since 2017, improvises freely over deep world grooves. This seems a big darker than usual, though not without some moments. B+(**) [sp]

Ive: Ive Switch (2024, Starship Entertainment, EP): Korean girl group, six women, two listed as rappers, first single 2021, has a 2023 album, second EP (if I'm parsing this correctly), six songs, 18:13. They all sound like hits. A- [sp]

Julie: My Anti-Aircraft Friend (2024, Atlantic): Shoegaze band from Los Angeles, first album after an EP and several singles. Fills a niche. B+(*) [sp]

MJ Lenderman: Manning Fireworks (2024, Anti-): Guitarist, singer-songwriter from Asheville, North Carolina, is the great-grandson of saxophonist Charlie Ventura, has a couple solo albums and a band gig in Wednesday, which had a much-admired album in 2023. This one's also gotten a lot of hype. Seems lean at first, but fleshes out midway, mostly because the guitar gets denser, until eventually it's all that remains. (PS: When I added this to my EOY file, I found it on the line next to Adrianne Lenker's even more hyped Bright Future. Both are "good" albums hold little that I find interesting and/or pleasurable.) B+(***) [sp]

LL Cool J: The FORCE (2024, Def Jam): Rapper James Smith, first album (1985) went platinum, second album doubled that, third (Mama Said Knock You Out) probably his peak, got into acting early, landing a long-running role in NCIS in 2009, as the albums thinned out: just one in 2013, now this one. Title an acronym for "Frequencies of Real Creative Energy." Produced by Q-Tip, who really keeps it moving. A- [sp]

Delfeayo Marsalis Uptown Jazz Orchestra: Crescent City Jewels (2023-24 [2024], Troubadour Jass): The famous family's trombonist stays closest to home, especially in spirit, with a big band (and then some). "Ooh Poo Pah Doo" (Kermit Ruffins vocal) never needed this kind of firepower, but it's wonderful to behold. Only "Lil Liza Jane" returns to that vein, but the more generic standards are often delightful -- notably what may be the best "'Round Midnight" (Tonya Boyd-Cannon vocal) I've heard. A- [cd]

Chad McCullough: In These Hills, Beyond (2023 [2024], Calligram): Trumpet player, started in Seattle, recording for Origin from 2008, until he moved to Chicago, started a new label, and seems to have fallen in with a new group of musicians who are pushing him much further out on the postbop spectrum: Bram Weijters (piano/keyboard), Dave Miller (guitar), John Christensen (bass), Kobie Watkins (drums). B+(***) [cd]

Kate Nash: 9 Sad Symphonies (2024, Kill Rock Stars): British pop singer-songwriter, fifth album since 2007, all great, but I was slow getting to this, partly because I was warned off, and partly because it's been a while. Turns out there are ten songs (not 9), averaging a very unsymphonic 3:51 (total 38:30). I don't process sung words fast enough to rule on their sadness, but there's nothing mopey here: her phrasing is sharp and crisp, and most of the music is very sprightly. True that it's dominated by strings with pizzicato fillips, but only one violinist is credited. Nearly everything else comes from producer Frederik Thaae, whose credit reads: "keyboards, orchestra direction, percussion, programming (all tracks); background vocals (track 4), guitar (5, 10)." The effect is more Pet Shop Boys than Beethoven or Wagner. The delirious swirl of synth strings parts for the two songs that Thaae didn't co-write, but they too are remarkable. I don't keep a singles list, but if I did, "Millions of Heartbeats" would be near the top. Also "Vampyre" and "My Bile," and possibly "Ray" and "Misery." And maybe more. A [sp]

Amy Rigby: Hang in There With Me (2024, Tapete): Singer-songwriter, started in the 1990s in a group called the Shams, went solo, released a series of brilliant albums, including duos with pub rock veteran Wreckless Eric (who produced here), although they've been spread out since 2005's Little Fugitive. I'm glad to have this one. A- [sp]

Jeff Rupert: It Gets Better (2021 [2024], Rupe Media): Tenor saxophonist, teaches at University of Central Florida, recorded with Sam Rivers in the 1990s, has an album from 2009, several more since, including a joust with George Garzone. He sounds pretty mainstream here, but what else would you do with a dream rhythm section of Kenny Barron (piano), Peter Washington (bass), and Joe Farnsworth (drums)? B+(***) [cd]

Otis Sandsjö: Y-Otis Tre (2021-23 [2024], We Jazz): Swedish saxophonist (mostly tenor, but also baritone, clarinet, flute, keyboards, drums), based in Berlin, two previous Y-Otis albums since 2018, here with Petter Eldh (bass, electronics) and Dan Nicholls (drums, keyboards). B [sp]

Claudio Scolari Project: Intermission (2023 [2024], Principal): Italian drummer, debut 2004, also plays (or programs) synth here, leading a quartet with trumpet (Simone Scolari), electric bass (Michele Cavalca), and a second drummer (Daniele Cavalca, also into synths and keyboards). B+(***) [cd]

Kenny Wayne Shepherd Band: Dirt on My Diamonds: Volume 1 (2023, Provogue): Blues-rock guitarist-singer, debut album 1995, this is his 11th. B [sp]

Nala Sinephro: Endlessness (2024, Warp): Born in Belgium, father a saxophonist from Martinique/Guadeloupe, plays pedal harp, modular synthesizer, keyboards, and piano, second album seems viewed as jazz, whereas I filed her first one under electronica, the shift reflecting new prominence of saxophone (mostly Nubya Garcia, also James Mollison). B+(***) [sp]

Chris Smither: All About the Bones (2024, Signature Sounds): Folk singer-songwriter, released two albums 1970-71, one in 1984, then every couple years from 1991 on. I've heard most of them, and enjoyed many, but never got excited about him. Not about this one either, but it's going down so easy and pleasantly that I'm pretty satisfied. A- [sp]

Superposition: II (2024, We Jazz): Finnish jazz group, second album, names: Linda Fredriksson (alto/bari sax), Adele Sauros (soprano/tenor sax), Mikael Saastamoinen (bass), Olavi Louhivuori (drums), all with separate song credits. B+(**) [sp]

Verraco: Breathe . . . Godspeed (2024, Timedance, EP): Colombian DJ/producer, has one album (2020) and a half-dozen EPs, this one 4 tracks, 21:14. Nice one. B+(***) [sp]

Morgan Wade: Obsessed (2024, Ladylike/RCA Nashville): Country singer-songwriter, fourth album since 2018, last couple albums have been most impressive. This one sounds fine, but the preponderance of slow ones lulled me into apathy -- until I realized how many different songs caught my attention on one spin or another. A- [sp]

Gillian Welch/David Rawlings: Woodland (2024, Acony): Folk singer-songwriters, Welch grew up in a show biz family in New York before parting for Nashville in 1992, with a striking debut album in 1996. Rawlings played guitar on that album, and their partnership grew from there, with releasing albums under his name from 2009, and under both names in 2020. B+(***) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Alan Tomlinson Trio: Loft 1993 (1993 [2024], Scatter Archive): British trombonist (1947-2023), had an album in 1981, mostly played with Barry Guy (LJCO) and Peter Brötzmann, trio here with Dave Tucker (guitar) and Roger Turner (drums). B+(**) [bc]

Unholy Modal Rounders: Unholier Than Thou 7/7/77 (1977 [2024], Don Giovanni, 2CD): Village folkies Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber started recording old folk songs as Holy Modal Rounders in 1964, releasing two albums on Fantasy that are now beloved classics. Weber played guitar and straight man, while Stampfel's antic vocals were even scratcher than his fiddle, and they just got weirder, even altering their name in 1976 when they joined with Michael Hurley and Jeffrey Fredericks for one of the greatest albums ever, Have Moicy!. This live date picks up some songs from there, plus a nice mix of older tunes, some trad, plus covers given their unique spin -- "Goldfinger" I've heard before, but "I Must Be Dreaming" (the Coasters or Robins, not Neil Sedaka) is even better. A [sp]

Old music:

Ahmad Jamal: Ahmad's Blues (1958 [1994], Chess): Pianist (1930-2023), born Frederick Russell Jones in Pittsburgh, changed his name on his conversion to Islam in 1950, recordings start with Okeh in 1951, his January 1958 trio At the Pershing: But Not for Me was widely regarded as a breakthrough. Same trio here -- Israel Crosby (bass) and Vernell Fournier (drums) -- at the Spotlite Club in DC, in September. B+(***) [sp]


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Benjamin Boone: Confluence: The Ireland Sessions (Origin) [09-20]
  • Delia Fischer: Beyond Bossa (Origin) [09-20]
  • Rich Halley 4: Dusk and Dawn (Pine Eagle) [10-25]

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, September 16, 2024


Speaking of Which

Opened this file on September 11, 1:27 PM, with the big debate looming that evening. As I'm writing this Sunday evening, that start seems like ages ago. Little chance I'll make my rounds before nodding off tonight. I could see posting or of not, where the main reason for posting is to move earlier into doing endlessly delayed non-blog work.

Indeed, late Sunday night I decided to pack it in without posting. I don't expect I'll need to add much on Monday. And in general, I won't be circling back to publications I checked on Sunday, or reporting news that only broke on Monday.

Finally posted this late Monday night. I ran into a lot of pieces on Monday that added a lot of extra writing, in many cases including regrets that I didn't have time to write even more. Even with the extra day, I didn't make all the usual rounds. I also found myself needing to search for further articles on specific topics, which may wind up being a better way to go about doing this. I also hit a bunch of paywalls. That's a horrible way to run a democracy, but that's a rant for another day.

For what it's worth, this week, on initial post, has the most words (15635) and the third most links (288, behind 317 and 290) of any week since I embedded the counting software.


I was struck by the following passage from Annie Proulx's Fen, Bog & Swamp: A Short History of Peatland Destruction and Its Role in the Climate Crisis, where talking about the bogs in Germany she brings up some old Roman history. The significance here is about how arrogant empires seed their own destruction (p. 120):

Rome's first emperor, Caesar Augustus, was seventy-two years old and near the end of his rule when the legions suffered their catastrophic defeat on the edge of the Great Bog. Germania's population was rural, made up of farmer-warriors and their families living in small settlements at the time of the battle. There were no real towns, and private ownership of land had been unknown among the eastern barbarians fifty years earlier when Caesar conquered Gaul. In general, where colonial- and imperial-minded aggressors make their moves into new territories and encounter indigenous people, often very numerous and "complex, multi-lingual, culturally diverse," as the two groups gradually mix and confront each other, tribal identities begin to take shape and individual "tribal leaders" are named. For the aggressor, this bundling is the opening process of controlling the indigenous people who, up to that time, may not have seen themselves as distinct tribes. Suddenly, they are corralled by identity to a specific area.

The Roman system of conquest was to grant conquered people Roman citizenship and involve them in Roman customs and culture. What Rome got from its aggressive takeovers encircling the Mediterranean Sea was an increase of manpower to serve in the army, slaves and money from taxation of its new colonies.

The Roman legions were augmented by auxiliaries of men from conquered lands. Yet many of the vanquished hated the Romans, their martial ways, their enslavements, their self-proclaimed superiority, their heavy taxes and their strutting presence as overseers and governors in seized territories. At the same time the conquered population wanted to be joined to the powerful, to visit glittering Rome whence all roads led.

The next couple pages go into specifics about the battle, where over 13,000 Roman troops were slaughtered at a loss of 500 Germans. I had long been under the impression that the Roman Empire expanded steadily up to its maximum under Hadrian (117-138 CE; Wikipedia has maps from 117 and 125), but I've since learned that history is messier. I first heard about the German bog debacle after the Bush invasion of Iraq, when I noted:

Of course, this will take a while to play out, but the logic of self-destruction is clear. A while back Martin van Creveld compared the Bush invasion of Iraq to the disastrous Roman invasion of Germany in 9 BCE when Augustus marched his legions into a swamp, losing them all.

By the time I wrote that, I had already noted a comparable Roman military disaster, when in 53 BCE Crassus led "across the Euphrates" into Iraq, where the desert proved as debilitating as the German bog -- although in both cases the real culprit was the Roman ego. Back then I was thinking more about the hubris of the invaders, but one could just well focus on the inevitability and resilience of resistance.

A short while later, I read this, from Timothy Egan, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis (2011, pp. 16-17):

What Curtis knew of Indians was informed, in large part, by depictions of dead natives he had seen in a book as a child. More than a thousand Eastern Sioux had been rounded up following an 1862 raid on settlers in Minnesota. The carnage was widespread in villages and farms in the southwest part of the state; by one estimate, eight hundred whites were killed in what became known as the Sioux Uprising. The Sioux had been roused to violence by repeated violations of their treaty, and by the mendacity of corrupt government agents who refused to make the required payments from the pact. In defeat, after the uprising, the Indians were sentenced to death. At the same time, many in Congress demanded that all Indians be wiped from the map, echoing the view of their constituents after the Sioux had caused so many casualties. President Lincoln commuted the sentences of most of the insurgents. But the death penalty remained for more than three dozen of them. On December 16, 1862, they were all hanged, the largest mass execution in American history. Curtis had studied an engraving of the lifeless Sioux in Mankato, Minnesota. Necks snapped, faces cold -- it haunted him. "All through life I have carried a vivid picture of that great scaffold with thirty-nine Indians hanging at the end of a rope," he wrote.


Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

  • Ruwaida Kamal Amer/Mahmoud Mushtaha: [09-12] 'People torn to pieces' in Israeli airstrike on Gaza displacement camp: "Israeli bombs set tents ablaze and left deep craters in the earth as the army attacked Al-Mawasi, a designated 'safe zone,' for the fifth time."

  • Michael Arria:

  • James Bamford: [09-13] Israel's crackdown on the West Bank has already killed an American citizen: Aysenur Ezgi.

  • Rachel Chason/Jennifer Hassan/Alon Rom/Niha Masih/Kareen Fahim: [09-15] Houthis fire missile from Yemen into central Israel, warn of more strikes: "Israeli forces said the missile Sunday did not cause any direct injuries, but Netanyahu threatens, 'we exact a heavy price for any attempt to harm us.'"

  • Ellen Ioanes: [09-11] How Israel keeps evading responsibility for killing Americans.

  • Fred Kaplan: [09-11] The key reason why we're not close to a cease-fire: That's an easy one -- "Netanyahu refuses" -- but one should note that Biden doesn't dare make his refusal the least bit awkward, even though that simply reinforces the ideas that he is helpless as a leader and/or he actually endorses as well as facilitates genocide. Previous American presidents have generally been able to prevail on Israeli leaders to make some gestures toward accommodating American needs, even if they really didn't want to (withdrawing from Sinai in 1957) and/or doublecrossed the Americans later (basically, every time since). Also, what the hell is this?

    Both sides' positions are reasonable, given their interests. Hamas fears that without a permanent cease-fire and total withdrawal, Israel will inflict utter devastation on all of its positions (and suspected positions) after the last hostage is released. And Israel fears that Hamas will attempt another Oct. 7 if the group isn't first destroyed as a political and military power.

    I mean, the Hamas position sounds reasonable, because that's exactly what Israel is doing, and without a permanent ceasefire has vowed to continue doing until the last Hamas fighter is dead, even if they have to kill every other Palestinian to get to him. But Israel has no grounds for any such "reasonable fear." Another "Oct. 7," if indeed any such thing is possible, will only happen if Israel recreates the same (or worse) conditions. There are many ways to prevent further eruptions from Hamas. Killing every Palestinian is the worst possible option.

  • Joshua Keating: [09-13] Can the world stop a massive oil spill in the middle of a war zone? "If the race to stop a spill in the Red Sea fails, it would be one of the worst in history."

  • Branko Marcetic: [09-13] The US government is a partner to Israel killing US citizens.

  • Mitchell Plitnick: [09-12] Israel's lie about a US activist's murder has exposed the Biden-Harris double standard on Palestine: "Israel's lie over the murder of U.S. activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi has been exposed, and in the process, so has Joe Biden and Kamala Harris's double standard on the worth of Palestinian lives."

  • Josephine Riesman/SI Rosenbaum: [09-10] Kamala is sending a subtle message on Israel. Is anyone listening? What she said in the debate was almost literally what she said in her DNC acceptance speech. "Subtle" is one word for it, if you assume that she's being completely honest, and has every intention of filling out every little detail. Or, less generously, you could say she's being cynical and deceptive. As I pointed out a while back, her "subtle" message would be more effective if she reversed the order of terms, and first bemoaned the massive destruction and loss of life before touting her deep commitment to a secure Israel. At this point, when most people hear "Israel's right to defend itself" they automatically translate it to a license to commit mass murder, because that is exactly what Israel has done every time they've uttered those magic words.

    The authors make their case at great length. I'm not completely dismissive, but I'm far from convinced. I do have some feeling for the pressure she is under, and of the stakes should she fail. I'm personally willing to let this play out through November, after which she will either have much more leverage, or will be totally irrelevant. Partly for that reason, I've moved this discussion away from the sections on Debate and Harris. But another part of that reason is that I feel her critics for failing to come out more clearly in favor of ceasefire and conflict resolution have every cause to speak their piece. And even to vote against her if they feel the need, although I think that would be a mistake, especially as an attempt to move your fellow Americans to be more critical and independent of Israel.

    Here's part of the piece:

    If you're trying to determine Harris' position on Israel from the mainstream news media coverage of it, you're likely confused.

    Headlines point in all directions, from "Harris' Support for Israel 'Ironclad' After Attack on Golan Heights" to "Harris Team 'Expressed Openness to a New Direction' on Israel Policy." One article claims there are "Democrats Working Inside the Party to Persuade Kamala Harris to Stop Weapons for Israel," while another dishes: "Harris Steps Out on Israel." But many explainers wind up throwing their hands in the air, like the Forward did: "Kamala Harris Wants to Support Israel, and Palestinians. It Will Be Even Harder Than It Seems." Indeed.

    But taken together, Harris' statements and movements around Israeli policy -- throughout her career but especially in recent months, after the candidacy was bestowed on her -- do add up to something.

  • Ali Rizk: [09-12] Is Gaza war feeding ISIS resurgence in Middle East? "As resources are drawn to Israel-Lebanon region, US troops are fighting the terror group more than ever."

  • Norman Solomon: [09-11] Undebatable: what Harris and Trump could not say about Israel and Gaza: Starts with "Kamala Harris won the debate. People being bombed in Gaza did not." Ends with: "Silence is a blanket that smothers genuine democratic discourse and the outcries of moral voices. Making those voices inaudible is a key goal for the functioning of the warfare state."

  • Jeffrey St Clair: [09-13] Murder in Beita: the IDF's killing of Aysenur Eygi.

  • Jonah Valdez: Most Americans want to stop arming Israel. Politicians don't care.

Israel vs. world opinion:

  • Gideon Lewis-Kraus: [09-08] The angst and sorrow of Jewish Currents: "A little magazine wants to criticize Israel while holding on to Jewishness."

  • Ben Lorber: [09-05] The right is increasingly exploiting the horror of genocide: "Right-wing operatives are channeling the genocide in Gaza into mainstream antisemitism." A report from the fifth annual National Conservatism (NatCon) conference ("the cutting edge of the Trumpian Right"). I'm not making a lot of sense out of this. Traditional right-wing antisemites, including some NatCon grandees, have more often been staunch supporters of Israel: Zionism both flatters their prejudices and offers them hope for their own societies becoming Judenrein. However, we're not dealing with especially clear-headed thinkers here, so it shouldn't be much of a surprise when they start confusing their complaints. Anyone who sees the atrocities Israel is committing and conflates them with all Jews (or even all Israeli Jews) is a fool -- and note that the most flagrant offenders here are the propagandists who try to equate any criticism of Israel with antisemitism. It's inevitable that people who don't know any better will take this hint and run with it, which seems to be Lorber's subject here.

    I hadn't run across Lorber before, but he has a book (co-written by Shane Burley), Safety through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism, and some older articles:

  • Craig Mokhiber: [09-10] No, Israel does not have a right to defend itself in Gaza. But the Palestinians do. "Basic morality and simple logic dictate that the right of self-defense belongs to the Palestinian people, not to their oppressor. And international law agrees." True that international law does recognize some right to self-defense, but it is not a moral principle, and I am suspicious of whatever logic you might think supports it. Although law often reinforces what we take to be moral, it has to deal not just with what people should do, but with real people in complex situations who do things that do not always conform with morality. One thing that people often do, whether by nature or culture, regardless of law, is attempt to defend themselves. Self-defense is used to describe a wide range of acts, from shielding your face from blows to throwing punches of your own. Modern weapons magnify and accelerate both threats and damage. Some are so powerful that they can harm bystanders, who never were threats, so never needed to be defended against. What law has to do is to decide whether self-defense is understandable and/or excusable, or should be condemned and possibly punished. To say self-defense is a right is to assert that acts which otherwise would be considered criminal should be not just tolerated but taken as exemplary, as precedents to encourage others to even greater violence.

    But in this specific case, to the extent that one allows such a right, why shouldn't Palestinians enjoy it same as Israelis? If you only allow Israel a right to self-defense, and allow it so broadly, you're really just saying that you think Palestinians are sub-human, that they don't count or matter, and might as well be slaughtered indiscriminately. As the last year has proven, that's no hypothetical. That's what Israel is doing, and anyone who thinks they have a "right" to do so is simply aiding and abetting genocide.

  • James Ray: [09-13] Electoral politics are not the way forward for the Palestine movement: "The question of how Palestine activists should engage in electoral politics has split the movement, but the 2024 election season should clarify why they are not an effective strategy for building power." I'll endorse the title, but the article itself leans way to heavy on "the Palestine movement," which I have some sympathy for but little faith or interest in. Electoral politics are set for the year, with nothing but the voting left to do. While there are important issues and major differences in candidates yet to be decided, lots of issues aren't on the ballot, including America's support for Israel's genocide against Palestinians -- which is how I prefer framing the issue, as it seems much broader (of interest to many more people) and deeper (of greater importance) than the question of where and when one can fly Palestinian flags.

    The movement, of course, can and must continue, using any tactics that seem likely to move public and/or elite opinion -- anything that would put pressure on those in power to act to halt these atrocities and start the long process of healing. I can argue that those of you who are intensely concerned with this issue should spend your vote on Harris and the rest of the Democrats -- it's not much, but it's yours, and if you don't vote, even out of righteous spite, you're wasting your right to participate in even our bare minimum of democracy. Also, by spoiling your vote, you're not just being negligent but showing contempt for people who need your help on issues that really matter to them -- the same people you need most urgently for your issue.

    I could also argue that Harris is more cognizant of and amenable to further pressure on this issue. I'm not going to plead this case here: it's just a feeling, not supported by clear statements on her part, or by a track record which shows any great will on her part to withstand the enormous pressures the entire political systems puts on politicians like her to pledge allegiance to Israel. My own inclination is to not just vote for her but to give her a free pass through November, as I don't see any constructive value in further embarrassing her on this issue (or in encouraging her to embarrass herself by reiterating her blanket support for Israel). But I'm not saying that anyone active on this issue should stop talking about it, and I'm not going to be holding any grudges against others who can't help but include her among the many American political figures who are complicit in this genocide. For pretty much the same reason, I may think that people who self-identify as "pro-Palestinian" have a dubious grasp of political tactics, I bear them no ill-feeling, because they at least are committed to opposing Israel's hideous and shameful reign of terror. Until the atrocities are stopped, whatever thoughts they may have about Palestinian statehood are mere curiosities.

    By the way, don't give Trump the same free pass until the election. Feel free to point out how his presidency contributed to the conditions that elected Israel's ultra-right government, that cornered and prodded Hamas into their desperate Oct. 7 revolt, and that revealed so many Republicans as genocide's biggest cheerleaders. This is not just a matter of setting the historical record straight, but it directly counters the ridiculous notion that Trump is some kind of antiwar candidate.

  • Ben Reiff: [09-11] Why did a British Jewish newspaper publish fake Israeli intelligence? "Israel's army suspects fabrications published in the Jewish Chronicle were part of a pro-Bibi influence campaign, while the article's author is not as he claims."

  • Stephen Semler: [09-12] Is Israel intentionally attacking aid workers? "We've compiled 14 incidents where humanitarians were attacked despite giving the IDF their coordinates and being clearly identified as civilians."

The Harris-Trump debate:

  • Vox [Andrew Prokop/Nicole Narea/Christian Paz]: [09-10] 3 winners and 2 losers from the Harris-Trump debate: The winners were: Kamala Harris, ABC News's debate moderators (David Muri and Linsey Davis), and Swifties for Kamala; the losers: Donald Trump, and Immigration. Once again, the Vox writer were out in force:

    • Ellen Ioanes: [09-10] Kamala Harris's and Donald Trump's wildly different tax plans, explained.

    • Joshua Keating: [09-11] Biden and Harris say America's no longer at war. Is that true? "Harris says US troops aren't fighting in any 'war zones.' What about Iraq, Syria, and the Red Sea?" Within the context of the debate, Harris had a point, which was useful in countering Trump's lie:

      Beyond the legal hair-splitting, Harris made the comment in the context of a defense of the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan, and it is true that under Biden, the US military posture overseas has significantly shrunk from what it was under the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations.

      (Trump has falsely claimed in the past that his presidency was the first in 72 years that "didn't have any wars," despite the fact that he oversaw four years of combat in Afghanistan as well as major military escalations in Iraq, Syria, and Somalia. At least 65 US troops died in hostile action under Trump's presidency.)

      That number under Trump was significantly less than under Obama, which in turn was less than under Bush. A comparable Biden number is probably less than Trump's, but not much less.

    • Eric Levitz: [09-11] Donald Trump lost the debate because he's too online: "The GOP nominee spoke to swing voters as though they were his Truth Social followers." Also note the section head: "For swing voters, many of Trump's ravings sounded like a summary of the sixth season of a show they'd never watched."

  • Intelligencer:

  • Emma Brockes: [09-11] Harris clearly beat Trump -- not that you'd know it from the right-wing media. Shame on them. "From the likes of Fox News has come a masterclass in post-debate pretzel logic. Surely the excuses must run out soon."

  • Frank Bruni: [09-12] Kamala Harris is serious. Donald Trump is not.

  • Margaret Carlson: [09-11] Harris shows how to dismantle a would-be dictator: "Humor, ridicule, gut punches, and that look of puzzlement and contempt were just some of the tools the vice president used to take down Trump."

  • Nandika Chatterjee: [09-12] Fox News host triggers Donald Trump by saying "he decisively lost" the debate with Kamala Harris: "Fox Business anchor Neil Cavuto said the debate wasn't close."

  • John Ganz: [09-11] Cats and dogs: "I can't believe I watched the whole thing!"

    Trump still has considerable powers of self-expression, which are often underrated by liberals, but they should not be overrated either. He has a very limited vocabulary and it constrains the extent to which he can articulate responses on any issue. So, he falls back into hyperbole -- everything is the worst, the best, the greatest. This can be effective, but often last night it sounded repetitive and, yes, kind of dull. If the American simply people tire of his antics, it will really be over for him. Harris's message of "let's turn the page" is a good one because it presents Trump as tiresome as much as fearsome.

  • Richard A Friedman: [09-12] Trump's repetitive speech is a bad sign: "If the debate was a cognitive test, the former president failed."

  • Susan B Glasser: [09-11] Donald Trump had a really, really bad debate.

  • Shane Goldmacher/Katie Rogers: [09-11] Harris dominates as Trump gets defensive: 6 takeaways from the debate: "Layout out bait that Donald Trump eagerly snatched, the vice president owned much of the night, keeping him on the back foot and avoiding sustained attention on her own vulnerabilities." As Rick Perlstein tweeted: "In a strictly intellectual sense, I'm very excited to see how the New York Times solves the linguistic puzzle of making that sound like a tie. It will require a Fermat's Last Theorum-level of ingenuity." Perlstein later linked to a NYT app article headline ("Fierce Exchanges Over Country's Future Dominate Debate") that satisfied his expectations, but when I searched for that headline, I found this article instead. Perhaps sensing that such precise (albeit vague) balance wouldn't stand up to scrutiny, they conceded the debate to Harris, while playing up whatever they could for Trump. The six takeaways:

    1. Harris set traps. Trump leaped into them.
    2. Trump played defense on his record.
    3. Harris seized the advantage on abortion.
    4. Trump didn't hide his disdain of Harris.
    5. Harris missed some opportunities.
    6. Trump missed Biden.
  • Nardos Haile: [09-10] "I went to the Wharton School of Finance": Harris getting Trump flustered makes for great TV.

  • Thom Hartmann: [09-13] Inside Trump's 'peace candidate' debate scam. This is an important subject -- one I wish he did a better job of handling. Trump should have zero credibility as a "peace candidate," well below Biden/Harris, even though they've set the bar pretty low. They at least have a modicum of empathy for the costs of war. As such, they can see some reason to stay clear of war, or to clean up the wars they've been given (e.g., Afghanistan). What Hartmann is pretty good at is pointing out "our media failures":

    Thus, Trump and the entire GOP are now furiously trying to rewrite their party's history of using unnecessary wars to get re-elected. And, according to opinion polls, it's working because America's corporate media pretty much refuses to point out Republican perfidy in any regard.

    Consider these indictments of our media failures. Polls show:

    • 52% trust Trump more compared to 37% for Harris on inflation (even though America has the lowest inflation rate in the developed world because of Biden's policies)
    • 51% trust Trump vs. 43% for Harris on handling the economy (even though Biden's economy beats Trump's by every metric, even pre-Covid)
    • 54% trust Trump more on border security compared to 36% for Harris (even though border crossings are at historically low levels now, lower than any time during Trump's non-Covid presidency)
    • 53% trust Trump vs. 40% for Harris on immigration (even though Trump wants to build concentration camps, go door-to-door arresting Hispanics, and again tear children from their mother's arms)
    • 51% trust Trump vs. 41% for Harris to stand up to China, even though Trump got millions in bribes from them for his daughter
    • And on crime and public safety, 48% trust Trump versus 42% for Harris, even though crime levels today are lower than any time during Trump's presidency

    None of these numbers would be where they are if our news organizations had accurately reported the facts.

  • Jeet Heer: [09-11] With her rope-a-dope strategy, Kamala Harris baited Trump into scaring swing voters: "Last night's debate will help give Democrats an edge. But strengthening the base remains crucial."

  • Fred Kaplan: [09-11] Harris exposed how easy Trump is to manipulate. Dictators have known this for a long time. Easy to manipulate, for sure, but when it comes to manipulation, you need proximity, which only his staff really has, and they've generally been able to cancel out any idea foreign dictators may have planted. While Trump threatens to break the mold on US foreign policy, in his first term, he was hamstrung by orthodox blob operatives, leaving him with nothing but a few ridiculous photo ops. A second term could be better or worse, but given how consistent (and wrong-headed) US foreign policy has been across both partisan administrations, he'll probably just make the same mistakes over and over again. It's not like he actually knows any better.

  • Ezra Klein: [09-11] Harris had a theory of Trump, and it was right: "The vice president successfully baited Trump's angry, conspiratorial, free-associating side. But what wasn't said was just as telling."

  • Robert Kuttner: [09-11] Notes for next time: "Kamala Harris did well in the debate but missed some opportunities to remind voters of Trump's sheer craziness."

  • Dahlia Lithwick:

  • Amanda Marcotte: [09-11] "The same old, tired playbook": Harris baits an aging Trump into being his grumpiest, weirdest self: "Even with the muted microphones, there is no 'sane-washing' Trump during the debate." There's also an interview of Marcotte by Alex Henderson.

  • Melanie McFarland: [09-11] "She whupped him": Kamala Harris won the debate by turning a potential disaster into a laugh-in.

  • Mary McNamara: [09-12] How Kamala Harris de-normalized Trump is less than 2 hours.

  • Harold Meyerson: [09-11] Normal meets weird: "And normal wins by a knockout in Tuesday's Harris-Trump debate."

  • John Nichols: [09-11] Kamala Harris won the debate about the future of American democracy: "Harris exposed Donald Trump as a clear and present danger, framing a stark choice and inviting voters to 'turn the page.'"

  • Andrew O'Hehir: [09-12] Trump's self-destruction was epic -- but this is America, so it might not be enough.

  • Molly Olmstead:

  • Bernie Sanders: [09-12] Kamala Harris was great in the debate. Will that be enough to win?

  • Bill Scher: [09-11] Kamala Harris is good at this: "The vice president laid out her plans for the future while Donald Trump was caught in a tangle of grievances about the past."

  • Adam Serwer: [09-14] The real 'DEI' candidates: Kamala Harris's evisceration of Donald Trump at the debate revealed who in this race is actually unqualified for power."

  • Rebecca Solnit: [09-11] Kamala Harris, unlike Donald Trump, was well prepared for this debate -- and won: "Harris spoke in lucid paragraphs, but Trump spouted lurid, loopy stuff."

  • Margaret Sullivan: [09-11] ABC's debate moderators did what some said was impossible: factcheck Trump.

  • Charles Sykes: [09-11] Trump blames everybody but himself: Talk about infinitely recyclable headlines! "He can't face the truth about his performance at the debate."

  • Robert Tait: [09-11] Republicans dismayed by Trump's 'bad' and 'unprepared' debate performance: "GOP lawmakers and analysts virtually unanimous that Trump was second best to Harris in first presidential debate."

  • William Vaillancourt: [09-12] Longtime GOP pollster Frank Luntz says Trump's campaign is over after bad debate.

  • John Zogby: [09-14] The polling is in and Harris won the debate. But Democrats shouldn't get cocky.

  • Steve M: [09-11] How the right-wing mediasphere -- and Trump's fragile ego -- set him up for failure last night. This elaborates on a theme that I've been noticing for years, which is that Trump is merely a receptacle for right-wing propaganda. Right-wingers have cynically formulated their propaganda to trigger incoherent emotions in their listeners -- a technique often dubbed "dog-whistling." To carry the analogy a bit farther, Trump isn't a whistler; Trump's just one of the dogs. What makes him the MAGA leader is his money, his ego, his ability to capture the media's attention. But as a thinker, as a speaker, as an organizer, he's strictly derivative, a second-rate hack picking up and repeating whatever he's been told. M explains:

    Trump has always been cultural conservative -- a racist, a fan of "law and order," an admirer of strongmen and authoritarians -- but years of binge-watching Fox News have made his opinions and prejudices worse. Now he has a set of opinions -- on renewable energy vs. fossil fuels, on immigration, and so on -- that are made up of talking points from the right-wing informationsphere. When he says that windmill noise causes cancer, he's repeating an idea spread by pseudo-scientists funded by the fossil fuel industry.

    But that's how his mind works -- his ego is so fragile that he can't bear to be wrong, so he clings desperately to any assertion that reinforces his notion that he's right. Windmills kill birds! Solar energy is useless when it's cloudy! Of course, the right-wing infosphere is a machine designed to reassure all of its consumers that their prejudices and resentments are right. . . .

    But in recent years, as Fox News has begun losing its primacy on the right while the Internet has increasingly been the main source for what rank-and-file right-wingers believe, fringe ideas have become more mainstream: Barack Obama birtherism, the allegedly stolen election in 2020, QAnon's notion of a vast elitist pedophile ring that somehow excludes all Republicans.

    And now we have the cats.

    When even J.D. Vance was spreading scurrilous stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats in Springfield, Ohio, I was surprised -- not because right-wingers are spreading hateful and dangerous blood libels about immigrants (that happens all the time), but because Republicans weren't confining the spread of this preposterous and easily disproved story to the fringier parts of their infosphere. They were going mainstream with this.

    But of course they were. In 2024, it's hard to restrict a story like this to the fringe. Naturally, Elon Musk promoted it, as did many online influencers and Trumpist members of Congress.

    Trump hates immigrants, so of course he seized on this story and talked about in the debate. Trump's confirmation bias is tied to his delicate ego, which always needs to say, See? I was right. A few years ago, he might not have even noticed this story. But the tiers in the right-wing mediasphere have collapsed, so the confirming messages Trump is exposed to are stupider. And he believes them. . . .

    Trump simply can't take in information that challenges his beliefs. His ego can't handle it. The right-wing infosphere flatters Trump the way dictators flatter Trump: by telling him what he wants to hear. That's the person Kamala Harris showed us last night, and that's why we can't allow him to win the presidency again.

  • Taylor Swift endorses Harris: I wouldn't be surprised to find that her lawyers drafted the statement (released on Instagram) weeks ago, but its timing does two useful things: it shows due diligence, as she waited for a moment when it would appear she considered both options fair and square, and it provided a singuarly conspicuous verdict on the debate, thereby underscoring its importance.

Trump:

  • Sasha Abramsky: [09-13] Trump is as gullible as he is a threat to democracy: "A decade into his political career, Donald J Trump is entirely at the mercy of his own BS."

  • David Atkins: [09-12] Trump doesn't understand tariffs, but he knows enough to be menacing. Trump's fascination with tariffs seems to be based on the notion that he can impose them arbitrarily and with impunity, so they function as a massive ego stroke. On the other hand, his opponents are nearly as simple-minded and dogmatic as he is. As I've said before, tariffs only make sense as part of a strategy to build up domestic industries (i.e., if you are doing economic planning, which is something most American politicians have long denounced). It now occurs to me that there may be better ways to do that than tariffs.

    Facts cannot penetrate Trump's narrow, incurious, egotistical worldview. He believes that as the leader of the world's dominant economy, he can bully the rest of the world into submission. And like Hoover -- not coincidentally, the only other president to preside over a net loss of jobs in the United States -- he will make an easily avoidable mistake that costs everyone.

  • Peter Baker: [09-09] As debate looms, Trump is now the one facing questions about age and capacity.

  • Charles R Davis: [09-08] Trump, lying about migrants and crime, says mass deportations "will be a bloody story": "he claimed he would use police and soldiers to deport at least 12 million undocumented people."

  • John Cassidy: [09-09] Donald Trump's new "voodoo economics": "The former president's tax plan would cost the government trillions of dollars. Tariffs and Elon Musk will pay for everything, he says."

  • Chauncey DeVega: [09-12] The problem with pinning Donald Trump down: Americans' attention spans are too short: "The American people are not well. Sick societies produce sick leaders." Time to "elect a new people"? Wouldn't it be much simpler to just slam Trump with the truth day and night until everyone sees him as an embarrassment?

  • Kevin T Dugan: [09-11] Trump's bad debate cost him nearly $500 million. The metric here is the value of Trump's Truth Social stock.

  • Eugene R Fidell/Dennis Aftergut: [09-13] Trump's plan to undermine foreign policy: The authors argue that Trump promised to violate the Logan Act, a law which "makes it a felony for private citizens, including presidents-elect, to interfere in foreign policy." I doubt that anyone, least of all Trump himself, is going to take his statements that literally, but the sloppy thinking is typical. The innuendo, that he's just a Putin stooge, is more barbed, but its plausibility is also based on his sloppy thinking.

  • Adam Freelander: [09-09] Exactly how Trump could ban abortion: "Whether the US bans it everywhere could be up to the next president."

  • David A Graham:

  • Elie Honig: [09-13] Jack Smith's reckless gamble: "The special counsel seems ready to bet the entire January 6 case against Trump on an improbable outcome."

  • David R Lurie: [08-19] Trump's carny act isn't working anymore: "His Folgers Coffee Conference showed a candidate in decline." Compares his Aug. 15 "press conference," with tables of grocery items, props for his wild claims about inflation, with a similar branding event from his 2016 campaign, describing the latter:

    It was all pretty darn weird; but the press lapped it up and, for the remainder of the campaign, gave Trump all the airtime and attention he wanted for similar performances.

    The Trump Steaks Conference was to become the template for Trump's political strategy during the ensuing decade, a mélange of elaborate (and often patently false) self-promotion blended with equally false and correspondingly vicious attacks on whoever happens to be Trump's opponent du jour.

  • Jason Stanley: [09-13] Donald Trump is openly running on a Great Replacement Theory campaign. If you're not familiar with GRT (especially as used by the American right), here's an index of articles.

  • Margaret Sullivan: [09-07] The power of a single word about media malfeasance: "It's 'sanewashing' -- and it's what journalists keep doing for Trump." She credits various pieces by Parker Molloy, Michael Tomasky, Aaron Rupar, and Greg Sargent, quotes some, quotes a definition, and notes:

    Here, as an example, is a Politico news alert that summarizes a recent Trump speech: "Trump laid out a sweeping vision of lower taxes, higher tariffs and light-touch regulation in a speech to top Wall Streets execs today." As writer Thor Benson quipped on Twitter: "I hope the press is this nice to me if I ever do a speech where no one can tell if I just had a stroke or not."

    Trump has become more incoherent as he has aged, but you wouldn't know it from most of the press coverage, which treats his utterances as essentially logical policy statements -- a "sweeping vision," even.

    After the intense media focus on Joe Biden's age and mental acuity, you would think Trump's apparent decline would be a preoccupation. He is 78, after all, and often incoherent. But with rare exceptions, that hasn't happened. . . .

    But why does the media sanewash Trump? It's all a part of the false-equivalence I've been writing about here in which candidates are equalized as an ongoing gesture of performative fairness.

    And it's also, I believe, because of the restrained language of traditional objective journalism. That's often a good thing; it's part of being careful and cautious. But when it fails to present a truthful picture, that practice distorts reality.

    I was pointed here by a Paul Krugman reference. I figured it was worth noting separately, and for good measure, I searched for "sanewashing Trump" and found it's suddenly been adopted widely of late. Links follow -- I skipped "Trump has not been 'sane-washed'," because it's at Atlantic, and I didn't want to blow one of my few "free article" credits on something as transparently worthless. (Parker Molloy critiques the Paul Farhi piece below, so you can find the link there.)

    But let me make a couple preliminary points. The term has never been used pre-Trump, because no previous candidate has ever given us such copious evidence of dubious sanity. It's not that we've never seen neuroses or delusions before, but they've never seemed so disconnected from reality. Trump has three personal problems that are relevant here, and while none of these are unprecedented, his combination is pretty extreme. (1) He lies a lot, and not just about things we're used to other politicians lying about. (2) He has very little grasp of policy ideas, but even his conventional policy ideas -- the ones common to most Republicans, most of which he thoughtlessly picked up from Fox News -- are ill-considered and unworkable, so detached from reality even before he embroiders and imbues them with his personal twists. (3) He is old and mentally clumsy, as well as extremely vain and conceited, states that we perhaps too readily associate with dementia.

    While "sane-washing" is new and especially Trump-specific -- unless the term ever appeared in the Republican campaign to impugn "Biden's dementia" -- the media angle is much older, this a mere inflection on the more common term "white-washing," which occurs when reporters suppress, sanitize, and/or rationalize their reporting. This has been going on for ages, but few if any candidates have benefited more from an indulgent press than Trump, not least because few candidates have ever needed so much indulgence. Worse still, the process has been self-normalizing, so rather than gently nudging Trump back into normal discourse (as white-washed Trump), he figures he can push his boundaries even further, confident the media will excuse further excesses (or that he can denounce them as 'fake news").

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [09-09] Rustbelt poll: Majority say Trump more likely to avoid war: "Survey finds strong support for Gaza ceasefire; most believe today's foreign policy doesn't put America first." The poll was designed and run by Cato Institute.

  • Elizabeth Warren: [09-14] What Donald Trump isn't telling us: Starts off with Trump's "concepts of a plan" for replacing Obamacare:

    Plans translate values into action. They test the quality of the ideas and the seriousness of the people advancing them. Plans reveal for whom candidates will fight and how effective they are likely to be. And in a presidential race, if either party's nominee is asked about his or her plans for something as fundamental as health care, voters should get a straight answer.

    The problem is not that Mr. Trump can't think up a way to put his values into action. The problem is that when he and other Republican leaders produce plans with actual details, they horrify the American people.

    Mr. Trump's health care values have been on full display for years. In 2017, Republicans controlled Congress, and their first major legislative undertaking was a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Every time they drafted something, independent experts would point out that their plan would toss tens of millions of people off their health insurance, jack up premium costs and slash benefits for those with ongoing health problems. . . .

    But at the debate, Mr. Trump displayed a new strategy. He seems to realize that his health-care plans are deeply unpopular, so he simply doesn't talk about them. Thus, after nine years of railing against the A.C.A. and trying mightily to repeal it, he has moved to "concepts of a plan," without a single detail that anyone can pin him down on.

    The new strategy might have worked -- except Mr. Trump's right-wing buddies have already laid out the plans. No need for concepts. Project 2025 has 920 pages translating Republican values into detailed action plans, including on health care: Repeal the A.C.A. Cut Medicare benefits. End $35 insulin. Stop Medicare drug price negotiations. Cut health-care access for poor families. Restrict contraceptive care. Jeopardize access to I.V.F. Ban medication abortion.

    As Project 2025's favorability plummets, Mr. Trump is once again scrambling. "I have nothing to do with Project 2025," he claimed at the debate. "I'm not going to read it." But it was written by many members of Mr. Trump's former administration and over 250 of the policies in the plan match his past or current policy proposals.

  • Agence France-Presse: [09-14] Laura Loomer, far-right flame thrower who has Trump's ear.

    Meet Laura Loomer, the latest fringe figure to set up in the presidential candidate's inner circle, and who has managed to shock even Trump's most extreme allies as he seeks to reclaim the White House.

    Loomer, a 31-year-old social media influencer and provocateur, has managed to squeeze into Trump's entourage as he is struggling to win over the independents and moderates needed to prevail in November's election against Kamala Harris, a race that is coming down to the wire. . . .

    Asked Friday about her incendiary posts and conspiracy theories, Trump -- a voracious consumer of social media who has previously amplified Loomer's posts on his own account -- shrugged them off, telling reporters in California: "I don't know that much about it."

    Trump declined to criticize Loomer, instead hailing her as a "free spirit" supporter with "strong opinions."

    More on Loomer:

  • Madeline Halpert/Laurence Peter: [09-15] Trump rushed to safety and suspect held after man spotted with rifle: Evidently someone was seen with a gun on a golf course where Trump was playing. Secret Service shot at a man, who dropped the gun and fled, and was later apprehended. Many articles call this "a shooting" and/or "an assassination attempt," which is something to look into, but not established fact. Presumably we'll know more soon, but I don't recall ever learning much about the previous "assassination attempt." While it would be bizarre to fake events like this -- the previous one seemed to spike his polls -- it's hard to rule anything out with Trump, or to assume that normal rules apply. It's also hard to care, possibly because he seems so keen on assassinating other folks that you can't discount the karma, and possibly because when I think of similar cases the one I always land on first is George Lincoln Rockwell.

Vance, and other Republicans:

Harris:

  • Jedediah Britton-Purdy: [09-12] Harris can win on the economy, but she needs a stronger message. Dean Baker reacted to this piece -- "the gist of the piece is that most people are hurting now, but Harris can turn things around by adopting a more populist agenda" -- adding that "it would be great to see Harris push a more populist agenda," but mostly attributing the problem to misinformation ("the media have lied to the public"), but also by asserting that "most people are not hurting how, or at least not more than they did in the past." One problem is that the whole system is rigged to maintain a level of economic pain, so most people feel precarious even when conditions are within normal bounds. Also not clear to me what Britton-Purdy's "clear economic program" actually is. Certainly there are lots of opportunities, but making them clear and tangible to voters is much easier said than done.

  • Marin Cogan: [09-11] Wait, Kamala Harris owns a gun?

  • Jill Filipovic: The big thing Kamala Harris is doing differently than Hillary Clinton: "The Democratic Party is finally figuring out how to right-size its focus on identity politics."

  • Jacob S Hacker: [08-14] Kamala Harris had a great health care idea in 2019. She should embrace it.

  • Heather Digby Parton: [09-13] Kamala Harris' big tent strategy -- and its success -- has thrown Trump for a loop. I personally find the Cheney endorsements damning, but when she mentioned them, I thought she got the "even" inflection just right. I suppose what that shows is that she's the politician, and I'm not. I'm skeptical of how many disaffected Republicans she can win over, but as long as she can pick up some without turning on (or off) her natural base, that not only helps her chances of winning, it opens up the possibility of winning big -- and that would be a good thing, even if it muddies the message a bit.

    I could go farther here and argue that for most Republicans, a big Harris win, even one that gave her a comfortable margin in Congress, would be a blessing. Trump and his movement are a dead end, desperately clinging to demographics that are slipping away, that can only be shored up by disabling democracy, while their policy prejudices only make problems worse, and their reflexive resort to force behind propaganda only makes their victims and opponents more desperate.

    In the 1970s, Republicans argued -- wrongly, I think, but not without reason -- that America has swung too far to the left, so they set about "rebalancing" government. Since then, they never let up, pushing inequality to levels that never existed before: the "gilded age" of the 1880s and the "roaring '20s" were past peaks, both ending in massive depressions, which were corrected with shifts back to the left -- never far, as the rich fared handsomely in the Progressive and New Deal/Great Society eras. Pace the Trump paranoia, they have little to fear from Harris and the Democrats -- even from the farthest left reaches of the party, whose actual programs proposed are modestly reformist, and easily compromised by lobbying.

    Capitalism doesn't help anyone develop a sense of enough, but common sense does, and Republicans need some of that. Especially, they need a break from the Trumpists, who are paranoid and delusional, prepared to burn it all down for the sake of idiot theories, just to exercise their malice against much of the world. It's good to respect the new Republicans who, like recovering alcoholics, are willing to break. The the Cheneys still have a lot of recovering to go.

  • Charles P Pierce: [09-16] Kamala Harris understands that an overly serious campaign is a losing campaign: "Our history is not all crises weathered and problems solved. It is also brass bands, and torchlight parades, and barrels of hard cider at rural polling stations." Point noted, but then: "Sorry. This article is for subscribers only."

  • Zephyr Teachout: [09-09] Stop calling Kamala Harris' anti-price gouging proposal price controls: "Her plan to control inflation is not some leftist plot. It's rooted in mainstream American legal tradition -- and sorely needed."

  • Rebecca Traister: [09-09] The people for Kamala Harris: "How a women-led movement,born in the devastation of 2016, put Democrats on the brink of making history." Magazine cover story article, takes the time needed to sketch out the big picture. This article was paired with:

    • Olivia Nuzzi: [09-09] The afterlife of Donald Trump: "At home at Mar-a-Lago, the presidential hopeful contemplates miracles, his campaign, and his formidable new opponent." Note, however, that the magazine cover used a different, more intriguing title: "Peering into Donald Trump's ear, and soul." (Actually, the Traister article also has a different cover title: "The joyous plot to elect Kamala Harris.")

  • The Cheney endorsements

Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:

Election notes:

Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economists, the economy, and work:

Ukraine and Russia:

Elsewhere in the world and/or/in spite of America's empire:


Other stories:

  • Yet another 9/11 anniversary:

  • WD Ehrhart: [09-13] Why I don't watch political speeches: A position I sympathize with, although I've never been tempted to throw things at the TV, other than the occasional snide comment. So I'd have to explain my aversion differently.

  • Nathan J Robinson/Current Affairs:

    • [09-13] The worst magazine in America: The Atlantic poses as a magazine of ideas, but its writers get away with terrible arguments. Its ascendance is a sign of the dire state of American intellectual life." Long article, seems like he spends a lot of time on effort on such obvious atrocities as Robert D Kaplan's "In Defense of Henry Kissinger." More interesting is Simon Sebag Montefiore's "The Decolonization Narrative Is Dangerous and False," which is about how we shouldn't describe Israel as a "settler colony" because the settlement took place over several generations, the "settlers" are no different from immigrants elsewhere, but their designation as "settler-colonists" marks them as "ripe for murder and mutilation." Robinson spends a lot of time on this piece, but that last bit is too insane for him to bother with further. What he does instead is spend considerable time discrediting the sort of mythmaking Montefiore's "caricature" attempts. Whole books have been written to that effect. Robinson makes good points here, but misses most of the angles I would have focused on -- like why does the "settler-colonial" analysis help or hinder you from understanding the history? and what's with this "murder and mutilation"? -- as well as the deeper question of why Atlantic's editors like to publish overblown articles by ill-tempered nincompoops?

      One reason could be that some articles, even if you know they're not just wrong but horribly so, should be published somewhere, if only for smarter people to knock them down. I don't know from Montefiore, but I can imagine someone deciding they want a piece on Kissinger, and wondering if Kaplan might have an interesting take. (I've read a lot of Kaplan, and while he's often wrong -- any time he opens a paragraph with "that got me thinking," you know some really insane shit is coming around the bend -- I've learned a lot along the way. Same for George Packer, source of another Robinson case study.) You're never going to convince me that Atlantic editorial choices are above political prejudices, or even that they are seriously dedicated to providing some sort of open forum, but you need more than just a few examples. You could really use some statistical analysis. But I suppose you could point out examples that are both countersensical and have no "prestige" reason to be published, like the sanewashing article I mentioned above. Robinson does get into this a bit later on, but mostly as asides to a big bang of extra example outrages.

      I sometimes wonder whether I should break down and subscribe to Atlantic. I frequently see links to articles that look like they may be interesting (some by writers I respect, like Adam Serwer and David Graham), and some that just look like arguments I want to knock down, but in the end, I'm just too cheap (and/or committed to free speech), so I almost never click on them. (My wife does pay for digital subscriptions, so sometimes I'm able to piggyback on her accounts, but she really loathes much of what appears in Atlantic, so it's not on her list.) Still, I regularly look at their table of contents to get the lay of the land. From Monday's list, here are some articles I might have considered (a few more I slipped into relevant slots above, especially on Trump and the debate):

    • [09-13] How the soul of New York City is vanishing: Interview with Jeremiah Moss "on what neoliberalism has done to the culture and soul of New York City."

    • [09-13] What doesn't get said: "Commentary around the first Harris-Trump debate focused on Harris's impressive performance. But both candidates accepted dangerous right-wing premises on climate, immigration, economics, and foreign policy." Well, as the joke goes: two campers are surprised by a bear in the woods. One says, "you can't outrun that bear." The other says, "I don't have to; I just have to outrun you." I hate Chait's concept of "the assignment"

      , but I accept that Harris has one, which is make sure she beats Trump in November, preferably by a lot. To do that, she needs to run fast and not trip and fall. (Trump tripping and falling would help, but isn't something you can count on.) I see three risks for her: one is that the war situation gets worse, with Biden and her getting by a public that isn't very sharp on such issues; the second is that she loses support from the money people, most likely by appearing too far to the left; the third is that in steering away from the left, she loses the enthusiasm she needs to get out the popular vote. She's done a pretty solid job of avoiding two and three so far, while Trump and Vance are proving to be even worse than expected, so I'm not inclined to nitpick. War I'm more worried about, but at this point turning on Israel may be the more dangerous option: I was thinking about what Netanyahu's latest threats against Yemen might mean, and wound up wondering what would stop him from exacting his "heavy price" with "a mushroom cloud." How would Biden and Harris react to that kind of "October surprise"? (Trump would probably cheer, and seize it as a wedge issue, which would only encourage Netanyahu.)

      Still, I don't have any beef with Robinson writing articles like this. He, and his readers, quite properly focus on issues. No need for them to stop during what Matt Taibbi used to call "the stupid season." That will pass, while the issues keep coming back, at least until someone finally takes them seriously.

    • [09-11] You've got to read books: "Not everyone has the available time or energy to do deep reading. But if you're going to make confident public pronouncements on matters that require a lot of research, books will help you avoid dangerous foolishness." Needless to say, I endorse this view. Following something Billmon did on his blog (defunct since 2006), I've kept a "current reading" roll and list going for 20+ years now, so I can check how much (and how little) I've read, and just what -- at least in book form. Curiously, I haven't read any of the four books Robinson cites on the 2000 Camp David negotiations, although I've read 3-6 (or maybe 12, depends on how you slice them) other books that cover the same ground -- we're in general agreement on the facts, but I wouldn't go around citing Quandt's "it's really complicated" explanation.

      This is a big subject, one that I can imagine writing quite a lot about. It's true that bad books can be worse than no books at all. (Robinson mentions Robert Fisk's Pity the Nation on Lebanon, which is monumental, but I've actually run into people who got everything they know about Lebanon from Thomas Friedman, and they're painful to deal with.) It's also true that one can learn to read bad books and get value out of them (like the aforementioned Robert D Kaplan library). But even journalists doing "first draft" history often get much better by the time their work comes out in book form (cf. practically everyone who started embedded and wound up with a book on Iraq -- hell, even George Packer got better with a bit of perspective; I wouldn't be surprised if Thomas Ricks' Fiasco had Gung Ho! as its working title).

    • [09-05] How to approach the crisis of mass incarceration: "Mass incarceration is extremely harmful to prisoners and society. But what do we do about it? The editors of Dismantling Mass Incarceration discuss." Interview with Premal Dharia, James Forman Jr., and Maria Hawilo.

Obituaries

Books

  • Zack Beauchamp: [09-11] How a 2006 book by a Harvard professor explains the Trumpist right's gender politics: "Harvey Mansfield's book on 'manliness' prefigured JD Vance's musings about 'childless cat ladies' by nearly two decades."

  • Daniel Immerwahr: [09-09] What if Ronald Reagan's presidency never really ended? "Anti-Trump Republicans revere Ronald Reagan as Trump's opposite -- yet in critical ways Reagan may have been his forerunner." A long review of Max Boot's "definitive" 880 page biography, Reagan: His Life and Legend.

    Recent events have forced Boot to ask if Reagan was part of the rot that has eaten away at Republicanism. Boot now sees him as complicit in the "hard-right turn" the Party took after Dwight D. Eisenhower which "helped set the G.O.P. -- and the country -- on the path" to Trump.

    And yet Boot sees a redeeming quality as well: Reagan could relax his ideology. He was an anti-tax crusader who oversaw large tax hikes, an opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment who appointed the first female Supreme Court Justice, and a diehard anti-Communist who made peace with Moscow. "I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help," Reagan famously quipped. But he delivered that line while announcing "record amounts" of federal aid. He viewed the world in black-and-white, yet he governed in gray.

    I rather doubt that Reagan wanted to "govern in gray." That was a concession to the Democrats who controlled Congress, to the still-existing liberal Republicans, to the liberal courts, and to the popularity of New Deal and Great Society programs. Reagan was realistic about what he could accomplish, but he did move the needle on all fronts. How anyone could see his program, or his personal charisma, as heroic escapes me.

    Here's another review:

  • Michael Ledger-Lomas: All roads lead to ruin: "Sunil Amrith's The Burning Earth takes us on a gloomy and bleak tour of how, in the name of progress, Western empires made a mess of everything."

  • Rohan Silva: [2022-09-19] Fen, Bog & Swamp by Annie Proulx review -- where have all out wetlands gone? I just read this book, and quoted a bit of it in the introduction, which is why I found this review. While there is much of interest in the book, it's connection to climate change never gets developed, beyond the occasional occasional notes that peatlands sequester a lot of carbon, so their loss has increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

  • Annie Levin: [09-16] Why you should host a hootenanny: "Outside of a church or karaoke room, singing is mostly left to the professionals. But anyone can -- and should -- partake in the joys of collective singing." I can imagine, but I gave up singing in public in 5th grade, when Lannie Goldston insisted that I lip-synch, and kicked me in the shins every time I slipped up and uttered a sound.

Chatter


It took me the better part of two days to finally insert all of the entries in my April 25, 2024 Book Roundup into my Book Notes file, which at this point is probably too long to be a useful web page (6944 paragraphs, 369868 words), but which I need to figure out whether I've mentioned a book before. I couldn't really start on a new post until that bit of housekeeping got done.

One thing I noticed there was this blurb on a 2017 book (presumably written then) that seems completely relevant to this week's news:

Nathan Thrall: The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (2017, Metropolitan Books): Hard to think about the conflict without considering how to end it, especially if you're an American, since we've long assumed that our mission on Earth is to oversee some sort of agreement. Thrall has been following the conflict closely for some time now, and writes up what he's figured out: that the only way it ends is if some greater power wills it. The title has a certain irony in that the Israelis, following the British before them, have often said that violence is the only language the Palestinians understand. But as students of the conflict should know by now, the only times Israel has compromised or backed down have been when they been confronted with substantial force: as when Eisenhower prodded them to leave Sinai in 1956, when Carter brokered their 1979 peace with Egypt, when Rabin ended the Intifada by recognizing the PLO, or when Barak withdrew Israeli forces from Lebanon in 2000. Since then no progress towards resolution has been made because no one with the power to influence Israel has had the will to do so -- although Israel's frantic reactions against BDS campaigns shows their fear of such pressure. On the other hand, one should note that force itself has its limits: Palestinians have compromised on many things, but some Israeli demands -- ones that violate norms for equal human rights -- are always bound to generate resistance. What makes the conflict so intractable now is that Israel has so much relative power that they're making impossible demands. So while Thrall would like to be even-handed and apply external force to both sides, it's Israel that needs to move its stance to something mutually tolerable. The other big questions are who would or could apply this force, and why. Up to 2000, the US occasionally acted, realizing that its regional and world interests transcended its affection for Israel, but those days have passed, replaced by token, toothless gestures, if any at all. It's hard to see that changing -- not just because Israel has so much practice manipulating US politics but because America has largely adopted Israeli norms of inequality and faith in brute power.

Curiously, I noted but wrote nothing about Thrall's later book:

Nathan Thrall: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (2023, Metropolitan Books).


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Tuesday, September 10, 2024


Music Week

September archive (in progress).

Music: Current count 42939 [42905] rated (+34), 28 [30] unrated (-2).

Speaking of Which overshot its Sunday deadline once again. Not sure whether I should brag about how hard I worked (154 links, 10515 words, several lengthy comments), or make excuses for the time I spent on other things -- notably, a fairly large menu for dinner Thursday. I added a bit more today, but not much. I figure most stories will keep, but I did add some more pieces on the late jazz critic Dan Morgenstern.

Big expense of time today was casting a ballot for the DownBeat Readers Poll, for which I've taken a few notes. I put very little thought into the effort, as the results are usually pretty worthless. I've already noted one vote I clearly didn't think through (Female Vocalist: Catherine Russell over Fay Victor; both have good records this year, but Victor's is my top-rated album; careerwise they're pretty comparable, with Victor taking the riskier path.)

What took considerable time was reformatting the album lists, which I used to check how much I've listened to: new jazz albums: 97/110 (88.1%), historical jazz (24/32, 75.0%), blues (23/34, 67.6%), and "beyond" (28/32, 87.5%). I'll nudge those numbers up a bit in coming weeks, but the first 3-4 new jazz albums I looked up weren't readily available.

One disturbing thing that emerged from the exercise was that I found four albums I had reviewed but didn't have an entry for in my database. I found all of the reviews in the Streamnotes archives. I also found this week's Patricia Brennan review back in the August archive. At my age, mental lapses like these are troubling. My eyes have also been pretty bad the last few days. I haven't gotten back to the "to do" list I started a couple weeks ago, let alone checked much off of it. We did manage to get the latest Covid boosters today, and stocked up on groceries. Plus I have this almost ready to roll out.

Seems like the A-list albums this week (except for Lowe) took a lot of extra plays. Hicks, Alvin/Gilmore, and Shorter all got upgrades the day after I had them filed at B+(***). The others got re-checks. The old rap records came off a checklist of 5-mic albums as rated by The Source (in a notebook entry). Oddly enough, all four albums I hadn't heard came in sequence, from 2001-10. I've often explained that my focus shifted in the 1990s from contemporary rock/rap/pop to jazz and oldies when I grew tired and/or disgusted with "grunge and gangsta." This just shows how completely I tuned gangsta out. Much more back then that I missed, including everything by the Scarface and Bun B precursor groups (Geto Boys, UGK). I doubt I'll do a dive any time soon, but the old school beats struck a chord, and not much really offends me these days.

Speaking of checklists, I compiled one based on two posts by Dan Weiss on "The Best 50 Rock Bands Right Now" (links therein). A couple of this week's records were sampled off this list, and there's still a dozen I haven't heard yet.

I didn't watch the Tuesday debate, but my wife did, and stuck with it to the end. She thought Harris did fine. I overheard bits, and watched the recap on Colbert. I heard Harris say a few things I really disagree with, especially on foreign policy. Literally everything I heard Trump say was a lie, but he delivered them with relentless conviction, which seems to be all that way too many people need. Plenty of time to rehash that next week.


New records reviewed this week:

Dave Alvin & Jimmie Dale Gilmore: TexiCali (2024, Yep Roc): Country-folksingers from California and Texas, the former starting in the Blasters, the latter in the Flatlanders, both with long and distinguished solo careers, Gilmore with an especially remarkable voice. This starts off rather perfunctory, but gets better, and better still, with "We're Still Here" an applause line, anticipating an encore. A- [sp]

Bacchae: Next Time (2024, Get Better): "Punk band from Washington, DC," Katie McD (vocals/keys), with guitar (Andrew Breiner), bass (Rena Hagins), drums (Eileen O'Grady), fourth album since 2024. B+(***) [sp]

Rahsaan Barber & Everyday Magic: Six Words (2022 [2024], Jazz Music City): Saxophonist (alto, soprano, tenor), fourth album since 2011, leads a sextet with trumpet (Pharez Whitted), trombone (Roland Barber), piano, bass, and drums, through a nice set of original pieces. B+(**) [cd]

Andrew Barker/William Parker/Jon Irabagon: Bakunawa (2022 [2024], Out of Your Head): Drummer, not a lot under his own name, but I remember a 2003 album with Matthew Shipp and Charles Waters fondly, also his work in Gold Sparkle Trio (also with Waters). Discogs gives him 65 credits since 1993. Of course, the bassist (also playing b flat pocket tuba and gralla here) has a great many more, and the saxophonist (tenor/sopranino) is up to 144 since 1998. Best part here is the gralla/sopranino clash. B+(***) [sp]

Beabadoobee: This Is How Tomorrow Moves (2024, Dirty Hit): Filipino-born, Beatrice Kristi Ilejay Laus, grew up in London, pop singer-songwriter, third album, opened on top of UK charts, limited US breakout. Girly voice, has a soft touch that I find rather appealing, but don't quite trust, until she delivers some substance. A- [sp]

Geoff Bradfield: Colossal Abundance (2023 [2024], Calligram): Tenor saxophonist, also plays bass clarinet and mbira, albums since 2003, this one mostly features an expansive 12-piece group with African percussion. B+(***) [cd]

Patricia Brennan Septet: Breaking Stretch (2023 [2024], Pyroclastic): Vibraphonist, if memory serves was the Poll winner for her debut album, has since only grown more ambitious. Wrote compositions here, also plays marimba and electronics, but this is mostly a powerhouse group, with saxophonists Jon Irabagon and Mark Shim, trumpet (Adam O'Farrill), bass (Kim Cass), drums (Marcus Gilmore), and percussion (Mauricio Herrera). A- [cd]

The Chisel: What a Fucking Nightmare (2024, Pure Noise): English punk band, second album. B+(*) [sp]

Clairo: Charm (2024, Clairo): Singer-songwriter Claire Cottrill, born in Atlanta but grew up in Massachusetts, started with home recordings in her teens, with an EP at 15 and a full album just before she turned 20. Third album here, relaxed and engaging. B+(***) [sp]

Greg Copeland: Empire State (2024, Franklin & Highland, EP): Folkie singer-songwriter from Los Angeles, three widely spaced albums (1982, 2008, 2020), the debut produced by Jackson Browne. This adds five more well-observed songs, 20:31. B+(**) [cd]

Elbow: Audio Vertigo (2024, Polydor): Britpop band, debut 2001, won a Mercury Prize in 2009, 10th album, only the second I've bothered with. Not bad, but still not very interesting. B [sp]

Fontaines D.C.: Romance (2024, XL): Irish post-punk band, from Dublin, fourth album since 2019, singer-songwriter Grian Chatten also has a solo album, sounds good. B+(**) [sp]

Future Islands: People Who Aren't There Anymore (2024,4AD): American synthpop band, based in Baltimore, Samuel T Herring the singer-songwriter, seventh studio album since 2008, has a beat, a vibe, and some human interest. B+(*) [sp]

Dylan Hicks & Small Screens: Modern Flora (2023 [2024], Soft Launch): Singer-songwriter (and novelist) from Minnesota, plays piano, called his first self-released cassette The New Dylan in 1990, has one album I've A-listed (2012's Sings Bolling Greene), a couple more that high in Christgau's estimation, though not quite in mine. I was surprised to receive this, but found it opens with a slow jazz instrumental, with horn section and cello, setting the mood before easing into a song. He sustains the jazzy vibe, reminding me of Donald Fagen, while interesting bits of songs sneak into your subconscious. A- [cd]

Illuminati Hotties: Power (2024, Hopeless): Indie rock (or twee pop?) band led by Sarah Tudzin, third album. B+(**) [sp]

Jon Irabagon: I Don't Hear Nothin\' but the Blues: Volume 3 Part 2: Exuberant Scars (2024, Irabbagast): Tenor saxophonist, fourth installment of a series that started in 2008 as a duo with Mike Pride (drums), added guitarist Mick Barr for Volume 2, and a second guitarist, Ava Mendoza, for Volume 3. Each album consists of one long improv piece, this one 45:52. B+(**) [bc]

Jon Irabagon Trio + One: Dinner & Dancing (2023 [2024], Irrabagast): Tenor/sopranino saxophonist, also alto clarinet here, trio with Mark Helias (bass) and Barry Altschul (drums) described as "longstanding" (I didn't find any previous "Trio" album, but they shared credit for a 2013 album, and there's one with Altschul from 2010.) The "+ One" is pianist Uri Caine. B+(***) [bc]

Tom Johnson Jazz Orchestra: Time Takes Odd Turns (2023 [2024], self-released): Not the minimalist composer, this one is a professor emeritus of psychology at Indiana State, has studied "effects of listening to sad music and personality styles of jazz musicians," first album, arranged for 20-piece big band plus some extras. B [sp]

Allen Lowe & the Constant Sorrow Orchestra: Louis Armstrong's America Volume 1 (2023-24 [2024], ESP-Disk, 2CD): In Lowe's America, Armstrong never died but just entered some parallel dimension where he continued to evolve, along with Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Dave Schildkraut, Bo Diddley, Ornette Coleman, Lenny Bruce, Roswell Rudd, and hundreds of others. I've long thought of him primarily as a historian, but he plays alto sax, has been making records since 1990, and significantly picked up the pace c. 2011 (cf. the 3-CD Blues and the Empirical Truth), which seems to have been around the time he somehow figured out how to tap into this extra dimension, and claim copyright for all he found. My eyes aren't good enough to read the microprint on the CD packaging, but it's online, and entertaining with or without the music, which sounds like something altogether different. Bill James came up with a concept he called "similarity scores," which is relatively easy to calculate for baseball players, as so much of what they do can be quantified, whereas very little for musicians can. But intuitively, the jazz figure Lowe is most similar to is Henry Threadgill, as they both make music that is new yet steeped in everything that came before. A- [cd]

Allen Lowe & the Constant Sorrow Orchestra: Louis Armstrong's America Volume 2 (2023-24 [2024], ESP-Disk, 2CD): Major personal peeve here is that something that was obviously intended as a single 4-CD work (the discs here are identified as "CD 3" and "CD 4," and the liner notes cited in the Volume 1 review cover them) has been split up into a pair of releases. I've spent a lot of energy the last couple years forcing poll voters to choose between related releases -- I thought the 2022 Mary Halvorson releases (Amaryllis, Belladonna) were distinct enough for an easy call, the Charles Lloyd "trilogy of trios" came out separately before they were eventually boxed, and the first two Ahmad Jamal Emerald City Nights were part of a series that lapsed into the next year -- but forcing people to split hairs between these two volumes will be tough. I'm not sure I can do it myself (although as I'm writing this, "CD 4" is sounding exceptional). One should mention somewhere here that the supporting cast, as noted on the front covers, includes "Marc Ribot, Andy Stein, Ursula Oppens, Lewis Porter, Loren Schoenberg, Aaron Johnson, & Ray Anderson," although there are others (not in the "liner notes" but in the fine cover print I can't read, which minimally includes Matthew Shipp, Ray Suhy, Elijah Shiffer, and Jeppe Zeeberg -- names I recognize as regulars and/or as more recent raves. A [cd]

Shelby Lynne: Consequences of the Crown (2024, Monument): Country singer-songwriter, 16th studio album since 1989. Ended before I had anything to say, which is probably unfair, but noteworthy in itself. B [sp]

Rose Mallett: Dreams Realized (2024, Carrie-On Productions): "Veteran jazz and soul singer," "living jazz legend," old enough for white hair, but nothing on her in Discogs, even for backup vocals at Motown, so this seems to be her debut album. Standards (counting BB King and Stevie Wonder), one original, striking voice, interesting arrangements. B+(***) [cd]

Brian Marsella/Jon Irabagon: Blue Hour (2019-22 [2024], Irabbagast): Duo, piano/keyboards and saxes (mezzo soprano/tenor/sopranino). Interesting clashes, but can get a bit sketchy for too long. B+(*) [bc]

Claire Rousay: Sentiment (2024, Thrill Jockey): Moved from Winnipeg to San Antonio, "is known for using field recordings to create musique concrète pieces," Discogs lists 26 albums since 2019, this by far the closest to a high profile label. B+(*) [sp]

Bria Skonberg: What It Means (2023 [2024], Cellar Live): Canadian trumpet player, half-dozen albums since 2009, also sings (quite well), recorded this one in New Orleans, which provides musicians and inspiration -- the better part of the album. B+(**) [sp]

This Is Lorelei: Box for Buddy, Box for Star (2022 [2024], Double Double Whammy): Solo album by Nate Amos, away from his group, Water From Your Eyes. B+(**) [sp]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

Raymond Burke: The Southland Recordings 1958-1960 (1958-60 [2024], Jazzland): New Orleans clarinet player (1904-86, trad jazz, his earliest recordings are collected by American Music in 1937-1949. This picks up three sessions, most previously unreleased, later but probably little different. B+(*) [sp]

Gastr Del Sol: We Have Dozens of Titles (1993-98 [2024], Drag City, 2CD): Chicago-based experimental rock group, principally David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke, released four albums 1993-98, the dozen titles here (103 minutes) mostly previously unreleased live dates, although this includes a 17:12 EP where the group expands to ten. Vocals are rare, but some talk got picked up. The music itself leans toward avant-minimalism, but not just that. B+(**) [sp]

Wayne Shorter: Celebration, Volume 1 (2014 [2024], Blue Note): First in a promised series of archival albums from the late saxophonist, a live set from the Stockholm Jazz Festival with a quartet of Danilo Perez (piano), John Patitucci (bass), and Brian Blade (drums) -- the same quartet that put Shorter back in business c. 2000 (cf. Footprints Live!). I've never been much of a Shorter fan, but this group gets him going, finally convincing me that there's something distinct to his soprano sax. A- [sp]

Old music:

Charles Bevel: Meet "Mississippi Charles" Bevel (1973, A&M): Google identifies him as an actor, multi-media artist, and lecturer, but Discogs credits him with two albums, this debut and one more from 2000. Easy as folk, light on the blues. B+(**) [yt]

Bun B: Trill O.G. (2010, Rap-A-Lot): Houston rapper Bernard Freeman (b. 1973), started in UGK, went solo in 2005 with Trill, sold enough for RIAA Gold, kept "Trill" in all of his subsequent titles, of which this was his third. The next-to-last of The Source's 5-mic albums -- Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, also 2010, was the last -- starts out as another gangsta retread, but ends strong ("All a Dream" and "It's Been a Pleasure"). B+(**) [sp]

Raymond Burke: Raymond Burke 1937-1949 (1937-49 [2014], American Music): Trad jazz clarinetist from New Orleans, the first batch (15 tracks from 1949) by Ray Burke's Speakeasy Boys, one track from 1937 with George Hartman's Band, others from 1942 with Vincent Cass and 1945 with Woodrow Russell. Sound is variable, but there is some real spirit here. B+(**) [sp]

Lil' Kim: The Naked Truth (2005, Atlantic): Rapper Kimberly Jones, recorded four albums 1996-2005, selling 15 million, only one more album since. This was her fourth, "the only album by a female rapper to be rated five mics by The Source," runs 21 songs, 76:31, mostly filler, and not just the skits and guest shots. B [sp]

Nas: Stillmatic (2001, Columbia): Rapper Nasir Jones, fifth album checks back on his 1994 debut Illmatic, justly famous, although I was warned off the stretch of albums that followed, including this one -- which, like the original, showed up recently on a checklist which added only a handful of post-2000 albums to its roster of 1990s classics. This remains haunted by gangsta myth, hooked by savvy samples. High point is "Rule," what "everyone wants." B+(***) [sp]

Scarface: The Fix (2002, Def Jam South): Houston rapper Brad Jordan, joined the Geto Boys in 1989 and never really left, despite a string of solo albums from 1991 on, this his 7th. Cold-blooded gangsta rhymes, so relentless it's hard to stay offended, especially given the beats, which is what made the '90s rock. B+(**) [sp]


Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

  • Gino Amato: Latin Crsossroads (Ovation) [09-01]
  • Dawn Clement/Steve Kovalcheck/Jon Hamar: Dawn Clement/Steve Kovalcheck/Jon Hamar Trio (self-released) [09-06]
  • Rebecca Kilgore: A Little Taste: A Tribute to Dave Frishberg (Cherry Pie Music) [10-28]
  • Delfeayo Marsalis Uptown Jazz Orchestra: Crescent City Jewels (Troubadour Jass) [08-30]
  • Eric Person: Rhythm Edge (Distinction) [10-01]
  • Claudio Scolari Project: Opera 8 (Principal) [04-05]

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