Daily Log

Starting to do some badly needed housecleaning, both in my physical and virtual worlds. As I do things, I'll add notes to this list.

Website(s):

• I thought it would be nice to have a permanent link to the latest Streamnotes column, so wrote arch/rhap/latest.php. Code reads my list file, picks out the latest monthly column, then writes a header "Location" directive to redirect to that column. First time I've written code like that, although I've needed it in the past, and will much more in the future.
• Made minor changes to /arch/rhap menu. Renamed rhwish.php "Search List," and added it and "Latest," while dropping "Missing."
• Looked at sitemap.php and found it's really out of date (file date Sept. 8, 2006). I need to go through this and make a number of changes, and also update the link menus to better reflect reality.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, August archive (complete).

Music: current count 31984 [31944] rated (+40), 236 [243] unrated (-7).

Spent most of last week listening to old records from my "unrated" list. Most, I think, are used CDs I bought between 1999, when we moved back to Wichita, and 2003-04, when I started getting a lot of promos for Recycled Goods and Jazz Consumer Guide. During that period I used to make regular trips to Oklahoma City (sometimes Tulsa, once even to Kansas City) where I'd pile up 30-50 CDs at a time. Also made a few cross-country trips in those years, where I would spend whole days traipsing around cities like Denver and Phoenix, scrounging around. In several cases I cleaned up on store closeouts. Actually, I did that for a few more years, but stopped buying locally after Yesterdays and Wherehouse went out of business, and that did much to break the pattern. (Wichita still has a number of CD Tradepost stores, but I've never liked them. Google also lists a Spektrum Muzik, which I should probably look into -- although at this point I'd be more tempted to sell than to buy.) Of course, the other thing that broke my shopping habit was Rhapsody. I started doing Streamnotes in late 2007, and my purchases plummeted after that.

Some unrated records are older LPs. Not sure when I started keeping a ratings list. I've had personal computers since about 1980 (an Ithaca Intersystems DPS-1 with a Z-80, 64K RAM, S-100 bus, two 8-inch floppy discs, ran CP/M, ran me close to $5,000, not counting the Heathkit terminal I soldered together; I actually had an Apple II before that, but decided it was crap and never bought from Apple again), so I could have started any time after that, but I certainly had one by the mid-1990s. That list didn't always have grades -- I assigned them mostly from memory, which had already begun to fail on many older/less played LPs. I sold off most of my LPs in 1999 before moving to Wichita, so may no longer have some items logged as unrated. (On the other hand, I recall dozens of early albums not on the records list, so it was never perfectly accurate.)

I started counting up unrated records in March 2003, when my rated count was 8,067 and the unrateds totalled 821. The unrated count jumped to 899 the next week after a bout of shopping. It went down for a few weeks, then shot up again, finally peaking at 1,157 in July 2004. I've gradually whittled it down since then, dropping under 1,000 in December 2004, under 800 in July 2007 (although it climbed back to 888 in April 2011), under 600 in December 2012, under 400 in April 2015, and under 300 in September 2018, and 243 last week. I thought I'd try to knock it down further this week. I gathered up a bunch of CDs from the list, and streamed a few I didn't bother hunting down. That explains both why I have so much "old music" this week, and why it seems so abritrarily selected. Still, my efforts were undone by a sudden burst of incoming mail (bringing the recent queue up to 26 albums, although most of their release dates are well into Fall).

Working off my unrated list results in some curious choices below. For instance, the Lenny Breau/Brad Terry album is only about a third of the one you'd probably buy these days, 2003's The Complete Living Room Tapes, but I cut that down to match the one I owned (didn't find it, but I remember the cover). Similarly, you'd buy the Michael Mantler twofer, where I only had the Silence half (probably on vinyl, but in this case I did bother to stream the other half. I listened to extra albums where they struck my fancy: by Arrow, Hackberry Ramblers, Jasper Van't Hof, Papa Wemba, and Jack DeJohnette (and threw in an average grade for the latter's box, since I've heard all the pieces and that's how they're available on Napster). But I didn't bother with the first Songhai album, or the earlier and later volumes by the Bluegrass Album Band, to mention a couple of obvious series. I imagine I'll keep nibbling away at the unrated list, but already I'm seeing diminishing returns.

Expect a new edition of XgauSez by the time you read this. I should also have an update to the Consumer Guide database real soon now. I've added the last batch of Expert Witness reviews to my local copy so I should be able to do an update any time. I'll send mail to the tech email list when I do, and go into more detail about redesign plans.

I reckon I can pass on a link that Joe Yanosik sent me: a piece by Geoff Edgers called The summer of 1969, when Elvis made his true comeback, which includes some bits of interview with Christgau.

Tried to get my new Synology backup server running last week, and ultimately failed. I'll take another shot at it this week. The machine also has potential as a media server -- something I have a clear need for, but never put enough time into to really figure out. Also made another Friday dinner for Max Stewart. Thought I'd do something easy/lazy this time, so made pastisio, a green bean ragout, and horiatiki salad: basic Greek country cooking. I felt good enough about it I might try something a bit more challenging next time.

New records reviewed this week:

• Clairo: Immunity (2019, Fader): [r]: B+(***)
• CP Unit: Riding Photon Time (2019, Eleatic): [r]: A-
• G-Eazy: The Beautiful & Damned (2017, BPG/RVG/RCA): [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Lehman Trio/Craig Taborn: The People I Love (2018-19 [2019], Pi): [cd]: A
• Nils Lofgren: Blue With Lou (2019, Castle Track Road): [r]: B+(*)
• Paal Nilssen-Love/Ken Vandermark: Screen Off (2008-18 [2019], PNL): [bc]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Cannonball Adderley: Swingin' in Seattle: Live at the Penthouse 1966-1967 (1966-67 [2019], Real to Reel): [r]: B+(***)
• Big Stick: Some of the Best of Big Stick (1985-91 [2019], Drag Racing Underground, EP): [r]: B+(**)
• Marvin Gaye: You're the Man (1972 [2019], Motown): [r]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Arrow: Soca Savage (1984, Arrow): [r]: B+(*)
• Arrow: Knock Dem Dead (1987 [1988], Mango: [r]: B+(**)
• The Bluegrass Album Band: The Bluegrass Album, Vol. 3: California Connection (1983, Rounder): [r]: B+(**)
• Lenny Breau & Brad Terry: The Living Room Tapes (1978 [1995], Dos): [r]: B+(*)
• Jack DeJohnette: Sorcery (1974, Prestige): [r]: B+(*)
• Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition: Tin Can Alley (1980 [1981], ECM): [r]: B+(**)
• Jack DeJohnette's Special Edition: Inflation Blues (1982 [1983], ECM): [r]: B+(*)
• Jack DeJohnette: Parallel Realities (1990, MCA): [r]: B+(*)
• Jack DeJohnette: Special Edition (1979-84 [2012], ECM, 4CD): [r]: B+(*)
• Manu Dibango: Wakafrika (1994, Giant): [r]: B+(**)
• Luderin Darbone's Hackberry Ramblers: Early Recordings: 1935-1950 (1935-50 [2003], Arhoolie): [r]: B+(***)
• Luderin Darbone's Hackberry Ramblers: Jole Blonde (1963-65 [1993], Arhoolie): [r]: B+(**)
• The Hackberry Ramblers: Cajun Boogie (1992, Flying Fish): [cd]: A-
• The Johnson Mountain Boys: At the Old Schoolhouse (1988 [1989], Rounder): [r]: B+(***)
• Ketama/Toumani Diabate/José Soto: Songhai 2 (1994, Hannibal): [r]: B+(*)
• Shoukichi Kina: Peppermint Tea House: The Best of Shoukichi Kina (1980-91 [1994], Luaka Bop): [r]: B+(**)
• Tony Lakatos/Rick Margitza/Gábor Bolla: Gypsy Tenors (2017, Skip): [r]: B+(**)
• Yo-Yo Ma: The Soul of the Tango: The Music of Astor Piazzolla (1998, Sony Classical): [r]: B+(**)
• Michael Mantler: No Answer (1973 [1974], Watt): [r]: B-
• Michael Mantler: Silence (1976 [1977], Watt): [r]: B
• Michael Mantler: No Answer/Silence (1973-76 [2000], Watt, 2CD): [r]: B
• Oujda-Casablanca Introspections, Vol. 1 (1988-93 [1994], Barbarity): [cd]: A-
• Romeo Must Die: The Album (2000, Virgin): [cd]: B+(***)
• Wallace Roney: The Wallace Roney Quintet (1995 [1996], Warner Bros.): [cd]: B
• Archie Shepp/Jasper Van't Hof: Live in Concert: Mama Rose (1982, SteepleChase): [r]: B+(*)
• Third World Cop [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack] (1999 [2000], Palm Pictures): [cd]: A-
• McCoy Tyner Big Band: Journey (1993, Birdology): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jasper Van't Hof/Ernie Watts/Bo Stieff Face to Face: Canossa (1998, Intuition): [cd]: B+(*)
• Viva La Musica & Papa Wemba: Pôle Position (1995, Sonodisc): [r]: A-
• Papa Wemba: Papa Wemba [Destin Ya Moto] (1988, Disques Espérance): [r]: B+(**)
• Papa Wemba: Papa Wemba [M'Fono Yami] (1988 [1989], Stern's Africa): [r]: B+(**)
• Papa Wemba: M'zée Fula-Ngenge (1999, Sonodisco): [r]: B+(***)
• Steve Williamson: A Waltz for Grace (1990, Verve): [cd]: B+(**)
• Yosuke Yamashita/Bill Laswell/Ryuichi Sakamoto: Asian Games (1988 [1993], Verve Forecast): [cd]: B

Grade (or other) changes:

• Viva La Musica/Papa Wemba: Nouvelle Écriture: Dans L' (1998, Sonodisc): [cd]: [was: B] B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Ray Blue: Work (Jazzheads): October 12
• Jeff Denson/Romain Pilon/Brian Blade: Between Two Worlds (Ridgeway): October 25
• DSC [Leon Lee Dorsey/Greg Skaff/Mike Clark]: Monktime (Jazz Avenue 1): September 13
• Avram Fefer Quartet: Testament (Clean Feed): November 8
• Haruna Fukazawa: Departure (Summit)
• Olli Hirvonen: Displace (Ropeadope): August 30
• Florian Hoefner Trio: First Spring (ALMA): September 27
• Todd Marcus: Trio+ (Stricker Street): November 15
• Derel Monteith: Connemara: Solo Piano Improvisations (self-released): October 18
• Derel Monteith Trio: Quantity of Life (self-released): October 18
• Vaughn Nark: Back in the Day (Summit)
• Dana Saul: Ceiling (Endectomorph): September 13
• Leo Sherman: Tonewheel (Outside In Music): October 25
• Emi Takada: Why Did I Choose You? (self-released): September 1

Weekend Roundup

There are more than a few "Trump's gone nuts" moments below. Not the first time this has happened, but the count is definitely rising (and continuing as the G-7 articles arrive). The Fallows links below offer an extended opportunity to plot Trump's decline. Also see Steve M: Even if Trump is impaired, he won't go quietly. He cites Charles Pierce recalling the 1984 Reagan-Mondale debate as the occasion when he realized that Reagan exhibited clear signs of Alzheimer's. I recall watching that debate, and thinking I've never seen a more one-sided drubbing, yet Reagan went on to a landslide victory that November. On the other hand, I also came away very annoyed with Mondale, who scored many of his points by being more resolutely (recklessly even) anti-communist than Reagan -- whose own Cold War ardor was undoubted but, at least in person, tempered by his genial incoherence.

Trump's incoherence is less benign, partly because he projects a degree of menace (resentment and vitriol) Reagan never projected. But also Reagan was never his own man. He was the front guy, hired as the face and mouth, reading from prepared scripts, happy to be playing a role, while his evil "kitchen cabinet" called the shots. Trump has always been a one-man show, with few (if any) competent advisers, but with great faith in his ability to wing it. Early on, all presidents are dazed and overwhelmed at first, allowing their staffs to hold sway over the administration. However, deference and ego eventually favor the president, who eventually take charge of what matters most. It took GW Bush well into his second term to get out from under Cheney's thumb. Obama and Clinton evolved faster because they knew more, but in both of those cases early staff decisions did a lot of damage. Trump got saddled with a lot of hardcore GOP regulars early on, but most of them have been purged, allowing Trump to replace them with flunkies distinguished mostly by their sycophancy. The result is that when Trump wigs out, we no longer have the comfort of "adults in the room" to contain the damage.

I imagine you could plot two curves here. One shows the increased fragility of the administration (and really the whole country) as competent people are replaced with ones who are less so (and/or are too crooked to know better). The other would is the increasing likelihood that Trump himself will break down and blow something up. (Too early to call his performance at G-7, but it should be enough to give you a fright.)

The Democratic presidential campaign thinned out a bit, with Seth Moulton, Jay Inslee, and John Hickenlooper ending their campaigns. Meanwhile, Joe Walsh will offer Trump some token ultra-conservative opposition.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem: Trump advisers are scrambling to sell the idea that a recession isn't going to happen. I've heard that the "yield curve inversion" has a perfect record of predicting recessions (10 for 10, no false positives), but in some ways Larry Kudlow's assurance that there won't be a recession is scarier.

• Eric Alterman: Dear Democrats, the mainstream media are not your friends: "Misplaced trust in the media has repeatedly led to disastrous debates."

• Binyamin Appelbaum: Blame economists for the mess we're in: "Why did America listen to the people who thought we needed 'more millionaires and more bankrupts?'"

• Peter Baker/Aurelien Breeden: Iranian official makes surprise appearance on sidelines of G7 summit.

• Josh Barro: This is how Trump will tank the economy and his presidency.

• Zack Beauchamp: Trump and the fragile belonging of American Jews: "The president's spree of anti-Semitic comments reveals why Jews can't feel truly safe in his America." Related: Jack Mirkinson: Trump is reportedly being a raging anti-Semite because he's mad Jews don't like him more:

  It gives me a stress headache to have to repeat this basic fact, but thinking that Jews will support you because you do some (terrible) stuff in Israel is . . . wait for it . . . really anti-Semitic! Not every Jew thinks that aligning with the far-right in Israel is a great plan. Not every Jew is (gasp!) even a Zionist or a supporter of Israel in the first place! It's almost as if Israel and Jewishness are two different things.

  Not that this sort of nuance is ever going to make it through the Fort Knox-like vault of stupidity surrounding Trump's brain.

• Peter Beinart: Bipartisan support for Israel is dead. That's a good thing. Related: MJ Rosenberg: Did Netanyahu just kill Washington's 'Pro-Israel' consensus? I doubt it, at least beyond repair, but Netanyahu's alignment of his right-wing policies with Trump and the Republican is increasingly bothering Democrats who otherwise wouldn't give Israel a moment's critical thought. And this is a case where the rank-and-file are miles ahead of the political class, as it's become blindingly obvious that the Israeli right is treating their minorities with the same contempt America's right threatens.

• Peter Blake/Keith Bradsher: Trump asserts he can force US companies to leave China. But they haven't been "US companies" for ages now. Most are multinationals, with significant non-American ownership stakes, but I doubt if many of the nominal US citizens would put their patriotism above their bottom-line interests, even if they thought Trump represents patriotism in some peculiar way. As for American equity stakes in China, most of them are in joint ventures they don't have this sort of control over.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • 'American Carnage' exposes the Republican slide into Trumpism: Review of Tim Alberta's book (subtitle: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump), which is on my reading list, probably next up.

    The Republican Party's political elite is obsessed with cutting taxes for the wealthy, but it recognizes the lack of popular support for its objectives and is forced to divert attention away from its main agenda by emphasizing cultural-war themes. The disconnect between the Republican Party's plutocratic agenda and the desires of the electorate is a tension it has never been able to resolve, and as it has moved steadily rightward, it has been evolving into an authoritarian party.

    The party's embrace of Trump is a natural, if not inevitable, step in this evolution. This is why the conservatives who presented Trump as an enemy of conservative-movement ideals have so badly misdiagnosed the party's response to Trump. The most fervently ideological conservatives in the party have also been the most sycophantic: Ryan, Mike Pence, Ted Cruz, Mick Mulvaney, the entire House Freedom Caucus. They embraced Trump because Trumpism is their avenue to carry out their unpopular agenda.

  • Trump is melting down because China won't give in on trade.

  • Trump says Jews should love him because he's almost literally Jesus. After carefully parsing the tweet, all Trump's really saying is that he loves being praised by an idiot ("Wayne Allyn Root is a Christian who converted from Judaism as well as a notorious conspiracy theorist and, naturally, a huge Trump fan"), which doesn't necessarily mean Trump's an idiot too (although it's no argument against, either). For more on Root, see Zachary Pleat/Courtney Hadle: The extremism of Wayne Allyn Root, who was promoted by Trump.

• Carrie Dann: 'A deep and boiling anger': NBC/WSJ poll finds a pessimistic America despite current economic satisfaction.

• Jason Ditz: US confirms Israel behind recent attacks in Iraq. Also: Israel attacked Syria 'to prevent Iranian strike on Northern Israel; and: Israel planning to attack Houthis in Yemen. Clearly, Netanyahu's reëlection campaign is in full swing. Also, he clearly has no worries that Trump will allow the UN or any major Western power to condemn such flagrant acts of war, let alone impose sanctions or any other form of punishment.

• Andrea Dutton/Michael E Mann: A dangerous new form of climate denialism is making the rounds.

• James Fallows: If Trump were an airline pilot: The latest in a circular file of notes posted when Trump does something dismaying (following his 152 installments on the 2016 campaign, written as Time Capsules), plus I don't know how many since Trump took office. I imagine that the only reason Fallows hasn't turned these into book form is that he hasn't figured out how deep the hole is. He explains:

  The one thing I avoided in that Time Capsule series was "medicalizing" Trump's personality and behavior. That is, moving from description of his behavior to speculation about its cause. Was Trump's abysmal ignorance -- "Most people don't know President Lincoln was a Republican!" -- a sign of dementia, or of some other cognitive decline? Or was it just more evidence that he had never read a book? Was his braggadocio and self-centeredness a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder? (Whose symptoms include "an exaggerated sense of self-importance" and "a sense of entitlement and require[s] constant, excessive admiration.") Or just that he is an entitled jerk? On these and other points I didn't, and don't, know.

  However, the last couple weeks seem to warrant further consideration:

  But now we've had something we didn't see so clearly during the campaign. These are episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting: An actually consequential rift with a small but important NATO ally, arising from the idea that the U.S. would "buy Greenland." Trump's self-description as "the Chosen One," and his embrace of a supporter's description of him as the "second coming of God" and the "King of Israel." His logorrhea, drift, and fantastical claims in public rallies, and his flashes of belligerence at the slightest challenge in question sessions on the White House lawn. His utter lack of affect or empathy when personally meeting the most recent shooting victims, in Dayton and El Paso. His reduction of any event, whatsoever, into what people are saying about him.

• Ian Frazier: When W.E.B. Du Bois made a laughingstock of a white supremacist: "Why the Jim Crow-era debate between the African-American leader and a ridiculous, Nazi-loving racist isn't as famous as Lincoln-Douglas." The latter was Lothrop Stoddard, a "versatile popularizer of certain theories on race problems" -- especially those of Madison Grant, head of the Bronx Zoo (where he exhibited an African Pygmy), also of the American Eugenics Society (which 'thought 'worthless' individuals should be sterilized"), lobbyist for the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924 ("which shut down most immigration to the US"), and author of The Passing of the Great Race (Hitler called the book "my Bible"). The debate question was "shall the Negro be encouraged to seek cultural equality," and, well, you can guess the rest. Well, maybe not: the first thing that popped into my mind, which was "why stop there?" Du Bois was too erudite and refined, too much of a gentleman, to belittle his sorry opponent. Stoddard went on to become a major Nazi apologist, and died in ignominy. Du Bois survived him, became a Communist, eventually giving up on the nation he had spent most of his life most so eloquently trying to integrate and save.

• Conor Friedersdorf: When Kamala was a top cop: "If elected, can the candidate be trusted to hold government officials accountable and oversee a progressive criminal-justice system? Her past says no."

• Susan B Glasser: Mike Pompeo, the secretary of Trump: "How he became a heartland evangelical -- and the President's most loyal soldier."

  Pompeo, an evangelical Christian who keeps an open Bible on his desk, now says it's possible that God raised up Trump as a modern Queen Esther, the Biblical figure who convinced the King of Persia to spare the Jewish people. He defines his own job as serving the President, whatever the President asks of him. "A Secretary of State has to know what the President wants," he said, at a recent appearance in Washington. "To the extent you get out of synch with that leader, then you're just out shooting the breeze." No matter what Trump has said or done, Pompeo has stood by him. As a former senior White House official told me, "There will never be any daylight publicly between him and Trump." The former official said that, in private, too, Pompeo is "among the most sycophantic and obsequious people around Trump." Even more bluntly, a former American ambassador told me, "He's like a heat-seeking missile for Trump's ass."

  Long piece with a lot of biographical detail: things I knew, like his relationship to the Kochs, but with more details and clarification. In particular, he's always touted himself as this great entrepreneur, but if he was so great, how come he quit to become a political toady for a bunch of rich guys? Even in the latter capacity, you'd expect more money to stick to his fingers.

• Tara Golshan:

  • Bernie Sanders's ambitious plan to double union membership, explained.

  • Trump says American Jewish Democrats are disloyal, claims "King of Israel" title.

• Adam Gopnik: The prophetic pragmatism of Frederick Douglass. The subject of a recent biography, David W Blight: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.

• Henry Grabar: After ICE: "On Aug. 7, immigration agents arrested 680 factory workers in Mississippi. Here's what happened next."

• David A Graham:

  • Trump longs to command the economy: "In his struggle against China, the president has begun to resemble his authoritarian rival Xi Jinping."

  • The longer Trump stays in office, the more Americans oppose his views: "The president is reshaping Americans' political views, just not the way he intended."

• Dan Grazier: Why the $1.45 trillion F-35 still can't get off the ground.

• Nikole Hannah-Jones: Our democracy's founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true. Introduction to a series of articles published last week as The 1619 project in The New York Times Magazine. Other essays in the series:

  • Matthew Desmond: If you want to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.

  • Linda Villarosa: Myths about physical racial differences were used to justify slavery -- and are still believed by doctors today.

  • Jamelle Bouie: America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others.

  • Wesley Morris: For centuries, black music has been the sound of artistic freedom. No wonder everybody's always stealing it.

  • Kevin Kruse: What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot.

  • Jeneen Interlandi: Why doesn't the United States have universal health care? The answer begins with policies enacted after the Civil War.,

  • Bryan Stevenson: Slavery gave America a fear of black people and a taste for violent punishment. Both still define our prison system.

  • Khalil Gibran Muhammad: The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the 'white gold' that fueled slavery.

  • Trymaine Lee: A vast wealth gap, driven by segregation, redlining evictions and exclusion, separates black and white America.

  • Mary Elliott/Jazmine Hughes: Most Americans still don't know the full story of slavery. This is the history you didn't learn in school.

  • Nikita Stewart: 'We are committing educational malpractice': Why slavery is mistaught -- and worse -- in American schools.

  Needless to say, this series hasn't been warmly received by pundits on the right, who may have given up on defending slavery and/or Jim Crow but would much prefer that no one else dredge such subjects up, let alone suggest that they have any persistent effects.

  • Zack Beauchamp: 1619 and the cult of American innocence.

  • J Brian Charles: The New York Times 1619 Project is reshaping the conversation on slavery. Conservatives hate it.

  • Eric Levitz: The '1619 Project' isn't anti-American -- it's anti-white identity politics.

  • Karen Turner/Jessica Machado: 5 things people still get wrong about slavery.

• Heather Hurlburt: Trump's contradictions dominate and disrupt another G-7.

• Umair Irfan:

  • Wildfires are burning around the world. the most alarming is in the Amazon rainforest. For more, see the photos. For more pieces on fires, especially in Brazil:

    • Zack Beauchamp: The right-wing populist wave is a threat to the climate.

    • Franklin Foer: The Amazon fires are more dangerous than WMDs: "One person shouldn't have the power to set policies that doom the rest of humanity's shot at mitigating rising temperatures.

    • Dhar Jamail: The Amazon is dying and Bolsonaro is fanning the flames.

    • Robinson Meyer: The Amazon cannot be recovered once it's gone.

    • Richard Pérez-Peña/Matina Stevis-Gridneff: Brazil's rainforest fires prompt alarm and anger in Europe.

    • Tom Phillips: Ex-minister: Bolsonaro 'most detested' leader as he neglects the Amazon.

    • Alexandria Symonds: Amazon rain forest fires: here's what's really happening.

    • Jonathan Watts: Amazon rainforest fires: global leaders urged to divert from 'suicide' path.

  • w/Tara Golshan: Bernie Sanders's Green New Deal, explained.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Today's Republicas use the filibuster just like the segregationists did. Well, not exactly. Most segregationists could credibly claim that they only used the filibuster on the one issue that mattered most to them, whereas Republicans since 2008 use it for literally everything (aside from their occasional "nuclear option" exceptions used to confirm racist judges). The key thing to understand about the filibuster is that it's designed to keep a political majority from doing things they were elected to do. That was why segregationists embraced it, and why Republicans have lately adopted it. It should be why Democrats finally move to get rid of it -- unless, that is, they're not really serious about changing things.

  • What if Obama had dropped Biden in 2012? Well, obviously, we wouldn't have Biden as a serious candidate right now. But Obama's only alternatives would have been to pick Hillary Clinton (who could have demanded the job in 2008, but didn't object to Biden) or someone younger designated as his successor. But Obama never gave any evidence of trying to build a legacy, or even a party beyond what he needed for his own reëlection. I doubt he ever thought Biden was a brilliant choice, but he was a safe one, and hadn't done anything especially scandalous as VP, so caution argued against making a switch. And if Democrats are so nostalgic for Obama they're willing to pick Biden over such obvious clones as Booker and Harris (or for that matter Castro), he's probably better off to remain aloof.

  • When Trump talks about Jews, he's really talking to evangelical Christians.

• Jen Kirby:

  • China hits back at the US with tariffs on $75 billion in goods.

  • 9 questions about the Hong Kong protests you were too embarrassed to ask. Related: Evan Osnos: China's Hong Kong dilemma.

• Paul Krugman:

  • From voodoo economics to evil-eye economics: "Are Democrats hexing the Trump boom with bad thoughts?"

  • The world has a Germany problem: "The debt obsession that ate the economy."

• Micole Lafond: Trump was just being sarcastic about thinking he's the 'chosen one,' okay? Sure, there are cases where one should admit that Trump was just trying to crack a joke. We shouldn't take those too seriously, or risk being charged as humorless scolds ourselves. (Trump's plead to Russia to hack Hillary's emails is one such case, although the evident fact that Russia went straight to work and hacked Hillary's campaign's emails makes the clip awfully tempting.) But surely part of the problem is that Trump isn't very funny, or more precisely: he's unable to establish the human bond that clues us in to when he's being flippant, as opposed to his array of other speech modes. He brags a lot, alternately praises or disses others, and speaks in vague and/or confusing terms about all matters of substance. It's tempting to dismiss all of his utterances as lies, because further taxonomy isn't worth the trouble (e.g.: is he serious or ironic? is his untruth ignorance or deceit? are his lies deliberate or inadvertent?).

• Jason Lange: Factory woes grip swing states that flipped for Trump in 2016.

• Eric Levitz: Trump is prioritizing the climate's destruction over his own reelection.

• Helen Lewis: How Britain came to accept a 'no-deal Brexit': "The debate over Britain leaving the European Union has polarized the country and normalized what was previously unthinkable."

• Ruth Margallt: How the religious right transformed Israeli education. I submit that it's impossible for an American to read this and not be reminded of the rationalizations for Jim Crow laws, or to not detect the fond desires of America's Christianist right. No wonder those are Israel's staunchest supporters in the US. They are full of envy. (Needless to say, so are the mad bombers; see the Ditz links above.)

  Unlike the United States, which enshrined separation of church and state in its Constitution, Israel is defined, in its basic law, as a "Jewish and democratic state" -- a muddled term that breeds near-constant battle over its meaning. Since its founding, Israel has had to rely on a series of fragile compromises between its secular leadership and its religious community. . . .

  In the past decade, since Netanyahu came into power, Israeli society has undergone a process so transformative that a new Hebrew word had to be brought into use for it: "hadata," or "religionization." Manifestations of hadata appear throughout civic life. On some public buses that pass through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, women have been forced to sit in the back, for reasons of "modesty." In the military, female soldiers are officially given the same opportunities as males, but the presence of just one religious male soldier in a unit can prevent female soldiers from serving there. Such discrimination is often done in the name of supposed inclusiveness: in order to accommodate the strictures of observant Jews, certain adjustments have to be made. Yet those called on to "adjust" are almost always women or members of the L.G.B.T. community. Just this week, Israel's attorney general said that cities could enforce gender segregation at public events, adding that "the justification for the separation is greater if the events are attended by a public that desires to be separated."

• Daniel Markovits: How life became an endless, terrible competition: "Meritocracy prizes achievement above all else, making everyone -- even the rich -- miserable. Maybe there's a way out." Author of the book, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite. Could be that this book has come too late, appearing as it is after Chris Hayes: Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, which argues that "meritocracy" is a sham argument intent on justifying inequality in a rigged oligarchy, and Robert H Frank: Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy, which which shows that success hardly ever has anything to do with merit. Still, ever since I read Hegel's "master-slave dialectic," I've enjoyed the argument that slavery destroys the master as well as the slave (maybe not as quickly, but as surely).

  Today's meritocrats still claim to get ahead through talent and effort, using means open to anyone. In practice, however, meritocracy now excludes everyone outside of a narrow elite. Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale collectively enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from households in the bottom 60 percent. Legacy preferences, nepotism, and outright fraud continue to give rich applicants corrupt advantages.

• Jena McGregor: Group of top CEOs says maximizing shareholder profits no longer can be the primary goal of corporations: A new statement from the Business Roundtable says "business leaders hould commit to balancing the needs of shareholders with customers, employees, suppliers and local communities." I'll believe it when/if I see it (in particular, when I CEO salaries dip back toward pre-1980 levels). But by this point, anyone should be able to see that the exclusive fetish for short-term profit leads to the looting and pillage of companies, shortchanging both customers and employees, and any communities foolish enough to grant or lend them money.

• PE Moskowitz: Everything you think you know about 'free speech' is a lie: "How far-right operatives manufactured the 'crisis' of free speech with books, think tanks -- and billions of dollars."

• Ella Nilsen/Li Zhou: Why Steve Bullock is refusing to help Democrats win a Senate majority.

• Anna North:

  • A man threatened to "slaughter" abortion doctors. It's part of a disturbing trend.

  • America's first generic abortion pill, explained.

  • Planned Parenthood leaves federal funding program due to Trump administration rule. Related: Margaret Talbot: How the Trump administration is stigmatizing abortion.

• Joseph O'Neill: Real Americans: Review of two books: Jill Lepore: This America: The Case for the Nation, and Suketu Mehta: This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant's Manifesto.

• Damian Paletta/Jeff Stein: Trump's wild week of tax ideas continues with new promise if GOP sweeps in 2020.

• Kelsey Piper: The surprisingly great idea in Bernie Sanders's Green New Deal: electric school buses.

• Andrew Prokop: David Koch has died at 79. Here's how he changed American politics. Not much temptation to cut the recently dead some slack in this case, although I suspect the following writers are giving him too much credit. It's always been Charles Koch who called the shots, both in business and in politics, and David's role has always been to support his older brother. I don't know what David's heirs are likely to do with all that money, but I'd be real surprised if any of them (unlike the other two Koch brothers) ever tried to buck Charles. I guess I have a certain grudging admiration for Charles and what he's accomplished -- not that he ever would have done so in a fairer and more just society. But David was just a bloke who was given enormous riches and used them to fortify his ego while making the world that much poorer. For more on Koch (and the Kochs):

  • Emily Atkin: How David Koch changed the world: Interview with Christopher Leonard, author of Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America. Here's Leonard's reply when asked "what does David's death mean for everything he worked for on climate change?":

    David Koch's tragic passing will have no impact whatsoever on the political strategies of the Koch network or the operation of the corporation. Charles Koch has always been the center of gravity for that, not David.

    The machine will continue to go forward as it has, even without David Koch at the forefront.

  • Jane Coaston: "David Koch walked the walk": a libertarian on the Koch brother's legacy: Interview with Nick Gillespie former editor-in-chief of Reason magazine.

  • Steve Fraser: How the Koch brothers and other family capitalists are ruining America (title courtesy of The Nation).

  • Sarah Jones: David Koch's monstrous legacy: This is about right:

    David Koch died before he could reap the full bounty of his works. We will not be so lucky. His legacy is poisoned water and dirty air, decimated unions, and Donald Trump. No amount of arts patronage can purify that stain. It is likely not coincidental that the small government the Kochs desire would leave artists and scientists at the mercy of billionaires' largesse. It's as if he and his brother wanted to pitch us all on their vision for the world: If we let their companies gobble as much as they could, they would throw us a scrap or two. Never enough to live on; just enough to hold us until the next handout. They would allow us a glimpse of beauty, a mirage of progress, so that we would readily accept a cage.

  • Malcolm Jones: Billionaire David Koch, who reshaped American politics and paved the way for Trump, has died.

  • Brian Kahn: David Koch escaped the climate hell he helped create. By the way, Kahn also wrote: Bernie Sanders' $16 trillion climate plan is nothing short of a revolution.

  • Jack Mirkinson: David Koch, a bad man, has died.

  • Charles Mudede: David Koch's death reminds us that billionaires are the black holes of society.

  • Charles P Pierce: The Koch money was a primary vector for the prion disease that's infected the Republican Party: "David Koch's worst legacy, however, will be on climate."

  • Michael Tomasky: The Koch network replaced the Republican Party.

• John Quiggin: Want to reduce the power of the finance sector? Start by looking at climate change.

• Adam K Raymond: Sarah Sanders passes through the revolving door, joins Fox News. Also: Matt Gertz: Of course Fox News hired Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

• David Roberts: The 6 things you most need to know about Trump's new climate plan: "It could actually increase air pollution, and it's a pretty bad deal."

• Yair Rosenberg: Trump keeps pushing anti-Semitic stereotypes. But he thinks he's praising Jews. Well, he also thinks he's the "least racist person in America." He's also a "stable genius." I'm struck by how matter-of-factly Trump's statements are identified as a racist, and even more so as anti-Semitic.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's new favorite poll inflates his approval rating by about 10 points.

  • The bizarre-even-by-Trump-standards past 72 hours, explained.

    President Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to release ISIS fighters in Europe as a form of punishment for countries like Germany and France; said he's strongly considering trying to change the Constitution by executive order (it doesn't work that way); indicated he hasn't ruled out trying to illegally serve more than two terms; rewrote history during comments about Russia's expulsion from the G8 that framed the situation in the most pro-Kremlin manner possible; and, despite five draft deferments, joked about giving himself the Medal of Honor.

    That was Wednesday. And that's an incomplete list of all the outlandish stuff Trump said on that day alone. . . .

    Some of it is laughable. Some of it -- the anti-Semitic tropes, for example -- is not. All of it is evidence that more than two and a half years in the role haven't helped Trump settle into his job. In fact, if the past 72 hours are any indication, things in the White House are less settled than ever.

  • Trump echoes NRA talking points, showing that "background checks" talk was all a charade.

• Martin Selsoe Sorensen: In Denmark, bewilderment and anger over Trump's canceled visit. Also: Rick Noack/John Wagner/Felicia Sonmez: Trump attacks Danish prime minister for her 'nasty' comments about his interest in US purchase of Greenland.

• Amy Davidson Sorkin: The failure to see what Jeffrey Epstein was doing: "Money offers one explanation for why people seemed to ignore the obvious. But money, here, is really shorthand for a range of ways to exert influence."

• Emily Stewart:

  • Trump's fake tax cuts are back.

  • Trump's potential recession playbook: conspiracies, lies, and scapegoats.

• Jonathan Swan/Margaret Talev: Trump suggested nuking hurricanes to stop them from hitting US. Also Matt Stieb: Trump wanted to nuke hurricanes to stop them from hitting US coast. Slightly different subject, but Stieb also wrote: In war on the press, Trump allies weaponize bad posts.

• Matt Taibbi: Trump 2020: Be very afraid. Reporter goes to Cincinnati, immerses himself in a Trump rally, loses his bearings and part of his mind. Hopefully, he'll detox and recover -- if not fully, at least enough to earn his keep.

• Cal Thomas: Socialism never? and The seduction of socialism. Thomas is worried about the youth of America being seduced by the aura of socialism, an allure he aids by spreading the net wide enough to include George McGovern (pictured at the top of one article) and Che Guevara. He offers McGovern and Walter Mondale as proof that Americans will never elect a socialist, while complaining that "people who wear Che Guevara T-shirts are ingorant of history and of the number of people Guevara killed during and after the Cuban revolution." I guess I don't know that number either, or how many people Bautista killed trying to put the revolution down, but one figure I'm pretty certain of is that life expectancy in Cuba is much higher now than it was before the revolution -- despite all the hardships imposed by the US embargo (you know, the one Obama ended, and Trump restored). Thomas thinks "socialism has long needed pushback in America from those opposed to it," as if red scares, smears and McCarthyite witch hunts never occurred to anyone before. I mention this because I was skimming through Bhaskar Sunkara's The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality when I noticed Thomas' rant. After a rather silly introduction, well over half of the book sketches out a rather comprehensive history of socialist (well, mostly communist) political movements, including a frank disclosure of purges, gulags, and starvation in Russia and China -- the sort of history Thomas wants us shocked with. I knew nearly all of this, but by the time it was done I found myself wondering: does anyone really need to know this history? Why not just start from scratch with current conditions and trends and known and well reasoned solutions, ditching the historical baggage (not least the term "socialism")? I had a cousin ask me recently whether I'm a Republican or a Democrat, so I said Socialist -- not normally how I identify myself, but my political identity was forged in response to the Vietnam War, and I've never forgiven the liberals/Democrats for their authorship of that. My cousin immediately translated Socialist to Democrat, much to my chagrin but for all practical purposes she was right, as my socialism and their liberal democracy are converging these days. On the other hand, the side that really works hard to bury its history is the one Thomas and his ilk belong to.

• Anya van Wagtendonk:

  • "I have no plan right now," Trump says amid escalating Chinese trade war.

  • Trump "ordered" US companies out of China. Despite claiming otherwise, he can't do that.

• Matt Viser: Evoking 1968 at town hall, Bidenasks: What would have happened if Obama had been assassinated?

• Kenneth P Vogel/Jeremy W Peters: Trump allies target journalists over coverage deemed hostile to White House.

• John Wagner: Trump quotes conspiracy theorist claiming Israelis 'love him like he is the second coming of God'.

• David Wallace-Wells: The political status quo is no match for climate change.

• Alan Weisman: Burning down the house: Review of two recent books on climate change: David Wallace Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, and Bill McKibben: Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?.

• Ken White: Thirty-two short stories about death in prison: "These stories don't mention Jeffrey Epstein, but they are about him."

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Fed Chair Jerome Powell says he can't fix trade war's damage to the economy.

  • Michael Bennet's plan to prevent and end recessions, explained. Yglesias is right that there are a lot of good ideas in here. In particular, this shows that someone has learned from the mistakes Obama's crew made in crafting their 2009 "stimulus" bill. The fact is that the main thing that kept 2008-09 from plunging us as deep as the Great Depression was "automatic stabilizers" -- and thanks to Republican austerity policies, they've been weakened since. One idea that hasn't been discussed enough is:

    Create a "fast track infrastructure fund" -- a special pool of money that state and local governments could tap during a downturn if they do the advance planning needed to get projects off the ground quickly.

    Extended low interest rates, the Fed's main tool, should have led to a major (and much needed) infrastructure project, but the misguided expectation of a quick recovery and the insistence that public works projects be "shovel-ready" for immediate impact kept them from being included. A ready-to-go project list would be a big help in filling demand gaps, as well as paving the way for wise investmentss. I'd go even further: since every recession recovery since the late 1980s has been week, it might be a good thing to plan on a constant long-term level of stimulus. Even more certain that we need more and better infrastructure.

  • America has a million fewer jobs than we thought.

  • Trump's failed plan to buy Greenland, explained. Minor update to the previous week's explainer, the main change being the insertion of "failed" into the title.

• Brandy Zadrozny/Ben Collins: Trump, QAnon and the impending judgment day: Behind the Facebook-fueled rise of The Epoch Times.

• Li Zhou:

  • Trump escalates the US-China trade war by announcing tariff hikes -- on Twitter.

  • How bad would a recession be for Trump in 2020? 8 experts weigh in. One thing no one mentions here is that a recession starting near election time could be bad for Democratic chances of implementing programs based on higher tax rates and more spending. The argument would be that higher taxes would further shrink the economy, and more spending would lead to unsustainable levels of debt. (Sure, feel free to gag when your hear Republicans saying this, but what matters is whether the Democrats' econ team caves in, which they did in 2009.) It's an irony (or perhaps a tragedy) of history that practically the only times when left-democratic parties gain power are when they have to set their agenda aside to salvage failing capitalist systems. As for election results, conventional wisdom may not be infallible. In 2008, McCain had no effective answers to the collapse, but the Tea Party turned out to be very effective politically in 2010. What they offered was total crap, but enough people bought into it to render Obama and the Democrats impotent, which is a big part of why the long recovery didn't help Hillary in 2016. A new recession will regenerate the Tea Party, and Trump will jump right on that bandwagon.

  • Mitch McConnell is calling on Democrats to keep the filibuster. He ignores just how much he's done to blow up Senate rules.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, August archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31944 [31902] rated (+42), 243 [259] unrated (-16).

Rated count needs some explanation. There are only 28 records listed below, so everything else comes from finding bookkeeping errors from previous weeks (or possibly longer). I refer to my "ratings database," but it's nowhere close to normalized. When I rate a record, I usually have to note that fact in 4-5 different places, which makes it pretty easy to miss one (or two). On the other hand, that gives me something better than my memory for checking errors. The process is tedious, so I don't do it often, but once I noticed a couple of errors, I made a pretty thorough effort this time.

The actual week count should be even lower. By the time I finished my bookkeeping exercise, I had added 4-5 more records since my usual Sunday evening cutoff. Normally, I would have saved those grades for next week, but under the circumstances, I figured I might as well get all the anomalies out at once. Two things cut into last week's count: I spent a day cooking and playing oldies; and I spent the better part of four days streaming through a single title: Mark Lomax's 400. The latter is actually 12 albums rolled into one. Parts of it are on Napster, so I started there, but after thrashing over how to grade the various parts, I decided to just stream the whole thing, broken up over 5-6 sessions over 4 days. The cumulative experience was so overpowering I wound up giving it an A, an exception to my usual rule of giving that grade only after repeated play over time. (Five plays is usually minimal; I've only played all of 400 once, although some parts did get two or three listens; on the other hand, my cumulative time is 12-15 hours, so I wouldn't call this grade casual.)

Afterwards, I went back and streamed several of Lomax's earlier albums, but had trouble grading them: even his earliest work is close in power and depth to his latest, but I tended to hedge the grades down rather than turn myself into a rubber stamp. I should note that I've heard two of his albums before: The State of Black America was a Jazz CG pick hit at the time (2010, grade: A), and Isis and Osiris was an A- in 2014. I hadn't noticed anything else he did until I stumbled across the new one (it showed up when I added all of this year's 4.5+ star All About Jazz reviews into my in-progress EOY Aggregate). There's more I haven't explored yet on his website.

Aside from Lomax, more old music this week. I checked out several old SABA/MPS albums after I found Cosmic Forest on Napster. Finally, when I was doing my bookkeeping it occurred to me that this might be a good time to cut down on my "unrated" count by streaming records I own(ed) but never graded. That list was once up in the 700-range (from back when I was buying used CDs by the ton), but it's been bouncing around 250 for quite a while now. I started with the Milton Babbitt record last night, and I built a checklist today, so I'm likely to do more of that in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, I'll note that this week's unpacking are all October/November releases, and indeed most of what I have in the physical queue doesn't drop until the Fall. So I'm not feeling a lot of urgency there.

I mentioned that dinner, so might as well file a note on it here. I didn't have time to plan much, but thought salmon teriyaki would be easy. I make it fairly often, but usually just serve it with a couple of Chinese sides, as I've only rarely dabbled in Japanese cuisine. I thought I would try some things this time, but had only the vaguest plan, bought groceries as options, and wound up swapping in Chinese and Korean recipes when they seemed likely to be tastier. Final menu was something like this:

• Salmon teriyaki
• Udon noodles and matchstick vegetables with peanut-lime sauce (China Moon)
• Grilled Japanese eggplant with garlicky peanut sauce (China Moon)
• Carrot and daikon salad
• Braised mushrooms (fresh shiitakes and baby portabellos) (a Korean recipe)
• Shrimp gyoza, with dipping sauce
• Miso soup
• Strawberry shortcake

I originally planned on stir-frying the cooked noodles with cabbage and other vegetables, but I overcooked them and figured the best way to salvage them would be to sauce them quickly, and recalled the Tropp recipe. It called for the carrot and daikon I was planning on using anyway, plus cucumber (so I scratched my planned cucumber salad; I had enough carrot and daikon to use them in the noodles and separately as a salad). I had a Japanese recipe for the mushrooms, but decided the similar Korean version would be tastier (adds onion and garlic to the braising liquid, which uses dark instead of regular soy, and maple syrup instead of sugar). Max Stewart was a big help in pulling this off.

Various technical projects up in the air at present. I got stuck in trying to update the Christgau database, so will have to get back to that. He does have a new piece on Jimi Hendrix, and I've added a lecture on music and politics he gave shortly after Trump took over. I've also bought a new Synology box for backups, but don't have it configured yet. Everything's a struggle these days.

New records reviewed this week:

• Don Aliquo/Michael Jefry Stevens: Live at Hinton Hall: The Innocence of Spring (2019, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Arashi [Akira Sakata/Johan Berthling/Paal Nilssen-Love]: Jikan (2017 [2019], PNL): [bc]: B+(**)
• Mark Doyle: Watching the Detectives: Guitar Noir III (2019, Free Will): [cd]: B+(*)
• Moy Eng/Wayne Wallace: The Blue Hour (2018 [2019], Patois): [cd]: B
• Binker Golding & Elliot Galvin: Ex Nihilo (2018 [2019], Byrd Out): [r]: B+(*)
• Joel Harrison: Angel Band: Free Country Vol. 3 (2018, HighNote): [r]: B
• David Kikoski: Phoenix Rising (2019, HighNote): [r]: B+(***)
• Dr. Mark Lomax, II: 400: An Afrikan Epic (2019, CFG Multimedia -12CD): [dl]: A
• New York Voices: Reminiscing in Tempo (2017-18 [2019], Origin): [cd]: B
• Paal Nilssen-Love: New Brazilian Funk (2018 [2019], PNL): [r]: B+(**)
• Paal Nilssen-Love: New Japanese Noise (2018 [2019], PNL): [r]: B+(*)
• Houston Person: I'm Just a Lucky So and So (2018 [2019], HighNote): [cd]: A-
• Pom Poko: Birthday (2019, Bella Union): [bc]: B+(*)
• Michael Jefry Stevens Quartet: Red's Blues (2017 [2018], ARC): [bc]: B+(**)
• Anders Svanoe: 747 Queen of the Skies: State of the Baritone Volume 3 (2018, Irabbagast): [bc]: B+(**)
• Ezra Weiss Big Band: We Limit Not the Truth of God (2019, OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
• Saul Williams: Encrypted & Vulnerable (2019, Pirates Blend): [r[: B+(*)
• Gabriel Zucker: Weighting (2016 [2018], ESP-Disk): [bc]: B

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Nicola Conte Presents Cosmic Forest: The Spiritual Sounds of MPS (1965-75 [2018], MPS): [r]: B+(**)

Old music:

• George Gruntz: Noon in Tunisia (1967, SABA): [r]: B+(***)
• George Gruntz: St. Peter Power (1968, MPS): [r]: B-
• The Mark Lomax Sektet: Tales of the Black Experience (1999 [2001], Blacklisted Musik): [r]: B+(***)
• The Mark Lomax Trio: Lift Every Voice! (2004, Blacklisted Music): [r]: B+(**)
• The Mark Lomax Quartet: We Shall Overcome: Spirituals & the Blues Vol. 2 (2013 [2014], CFG Multimedia): [r]: B+(***)
• The Mark Lomax Quartet: Requiem for a FallenKing: A Tribute to Elvin Jones (2013 [2016], CFG Multimedia): [os]: B+(***)
• Jas. Mathus and His Knock-Down Society: Play Songs for Rosetta (1997, Mammoth): [r]: B+(*)
• Dewan Motihar Trio/Irene Schweizer Trio/Manfred Schoof/Barney Wilen: Jazz Meets India (1967, SABA): [r]: B+(**)
• Robert Taub: Milton Babbitt: Piano Works (1985 [1986], Harmonia Mundi): [r]: B+(***)
• Waiting to Exhale [Original Soundtrack Album] (1995, Arista): [r]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Roberto Magris Sextet: Sun Stone (JMood): November 1
• John Yao's Triceratops: How We Do (See Tao): October 16
• Jason Yeager: New Songs of Resistance (Outside In Music): October 4

Initial reviews I wound up pulling in favor of a single long Lomax review:

Mark Lomax II: The First Ankhcestor [400: An Afrikan Epic Pt. 1] (2019, CFG Multimedia): Drummer, produced two very impressive mainstream jazz records in 2010 and 2014, but otherwise has managed to stay off my radar. This is the first installment in the 12-part 400: An Afrikan Epic, commemorating 400 years since the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. In the beginning, there was the drum, so it's just drums here. Cover refers to "ngoma lugundu". Looks like it may be a credit, but translates as "the drum that thunders." B+(***)

The Mark Lomax Quartet: The Coming (Alkebulun: The Beginning of Us) [400: An Afrikan Epic Pt. 4] (2019, CFG Multimedia): A "musical depiction of crossing the Atlantic." Rather short (3 tracks, 31:31), starts with narration before the group takes charge: Edwin Bayard (tenor/soprano sax), Dr. William Menefield (piano), Dean Hullett (bass), the leader on drums. They're an impressive bunch, even without the message. B+(***)

The Mark Lomax Quartet: Dance of the Orishas (Alkebulan: The Beginning of Us) [400: An Afrikan Epic Pt. 3] (2019, CFG Multimedia): A-

Further notes on Lomax: 400:

 *  Alkebulan: The Beginning of Us
 1. Alkebulan: 01-{1-6}: The First Ankhcestor: celebration of the drums
    importance to Afrika -- all drums, "Ngoma Lungundu" [tr?] building to
    "Talking Drums"
 2. Alkebulan: 02-{1-5}: Song of the Dogon: portrait of a mystical ethnic
    group in West Afrika -- piano and bass enter, soon adding Edwin Bayard's
    magnificent sax
 3. Alkebulan: 03-{}: Dance of the Orishas: music inspired by the Yoruban
    spiritual tradition -- quartet
 4. Alkebulan: 04-{}: The Coming: musical depiction of crossing the
    Atlantic
 *  Ma'afa: Great Tragedy
 5. Ma'afa: 05-{}: Ma'afa: remembering to forget and forgetting to
    remember. Some strings.
 6. Ma'afa: 06-{1-2}: Up South: portrait of racism in America -- one of
    the best riff pieces here ("First Conversation")
 7. Ma'afa: 07-{}: Four Women: tribute to important black women -- heavier
    strings, all strings?
 8. Ma'afa: 08-{}: Blues in August: tribute to black men
 *  Afro-Futurism: The Return to Uhuru
 9. Afro-Futurism: 09-{}: Tales of the Black Experience: Sankofan view of
    Afrikan history
10. Afro-Futurism: 10-{}: Ankh & the Tree of Life: culturally relevant
    spiritual belief systems
11. Afro-Futurism: 11={}: Spirits of the Egungun: spiritual, cultural,
    political return to self
12. Afro-Futurism: 12={}: Afrika United: becoming . . . again

Weekend Roundup

Too late to write an introduction now. Maybe I'll add a postscript later.

Some scattered links this week:

• Zeeshan Aleem:

  • Trump's obsession with crowd sizes, explained.

  • Trump calls Rashida Tlaib's reversal on visiting Israel "a complete setup".

  • Ahead of a far-right rally in Portland, Trump tweets a warning to antifa. By the way, I saw a Facebook meme worth noting: caption was "Anti-fascists disrupting a large gathering of white supremacists . . ."; picture was of American troops landing in Normandy on D-Day.

• William Astore: Militarization has become our national religion: "As attitudes toward war grow dangerously worshipful in the US, quitting our endless wars becomes all the more difficult."

• Zack Beauchamp: Trump's transparent attempt to manipulate American Jews.

• Peter Beinart:

  • Netanyahu banned Omar and Tlaib because the occupation must be hidden to survive.

    AIPAC said "every member of Congress should be able to visit and experience our democratic ally Israel firsthand."

    Of course they think that. Most officials of mainstream American Jewish organizations have never been to the places Tlaib and Omar planned to go. They've never talked to Palestinians whose homes are about to be bulldozed because they lack the building permits that, as non-citizens under military rule, they can't get. They've never heard Palestinian parents explain the terror they feel when Israeli soldiers come in the middle of the night to take their children to be interrogated, often for days, in the absence of a lawyer.

    They've never stood in a Palestinian village that receives a few hours of water per day and seen swimming pools in the settlements nearby. They've never visited the village of Beit Ur al-Fauqa, home to Rashida Tlaib's grandmother, where according to a 2015 report, local children waded through sewage channels to reach a high school enclosed by the separation barrier on three sides. American Jewish leaders think Netanyahu is a fool because they don't realize how much he has to hide.

    He's not a fool. He may have barred Omar and Tlaib partly because Donald Trump asked him to. He may have felt the stunt would appeal to right-wing voters in Israel's upcoming elections. But he likely also understood that if Omar and Tlaib brought the American media with them to the West Bank, they might begin to puncture the cocoon that he and his American Jewish allies have worked so hard to build.

  • What Trump gets wrong about antifa.

• Jared Bernstein: Trump's trade policy is a disaster. Here's what the next president should do. I would stress that the US should switch sides and work against patent rents rather than furthering them. This is part of what Bernstein means by "more stakeholders," as rent-seeking corporate interests have dominated American "trade" strategy.

• Jamelle Bouie: America holds onto an undemocratic assumption from its founding: that some people deserve more power than others. By the way, this piece is part of something called The 1619 Project, a set of articles occasioned by the 400th anniversary of the introduction of slavery in what became the United States.

• Peter Branner: The Anthropocene is a joke: "On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch." Well, yeah, but there's more to it than "inflates our own importance by promising eternal geological life to our creations." As an event, human activity over the last 10,000 (or for that matter 250) years has had more impact on more of the earth than just about any "event" in the geological record -- comparison to the K-T asteroid could go either way. That it will last for millions of years like past eras and epochs may be a conceit, but geologists 65 million years from now will find us easier to find than K-T was for us. It may be a joke, but it's one we're very much stuck inside of.

• Ronald Brownstein: The limits of Trump's white identity politics.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • The $15 minimum wage bill has all but died in the Senate.

  • Trump's plan to let employers discriminate against LGBTQ workers, explained.

  • The Trump administration wants to make it harder for unemployed workers to get benefits: "A new rule would let states deny benefits to those who fail a drug test."

  • The US labor shortage, explained: Two basic solutions: "employers need to raise wages by a lot"; "the US economy needs more low-skilled immigrants."

• Damian Carrington: World's nations gather to tackle wildlife extinction crisis. Meanwhile, Trump's trying to accelerate it.

• Zak Cheney-Rice: Steve King's views on rape are inseparable from his racism. Also: Tara Goldshan: Steve King says without rape and incest, there wouldn't "be any population of the world left"; also Ryan Bort: Steve King devised an insane formula to claim undocumented immigrants are taking over America; and Tessa Stuart: Steve King's view of rape and incest is not abnormal among GOP lawmakers (I think they mean "unusual").

• Jelani Cobb: How the trail of American white supremacy led to El Paso

• Jason DeParle: How Stephen Miller rode an anti-immigration wave to the White House: "Behind Mr. Miller's singular grip on the Trump anti-immigrant agenda are forces far bigger than his own hostility toward the foreign-born."

• Sadanand Dhume: Modi's decision on Kashmir reveals a brittleness in India. Related: Krishnadev Calamur: Modi's Kashmir decision is the latest step in undoing Nehru's vision.

• John Feffer:

  • Is America crazy? "Mass shootings, economic inequality, a racist president: have we grown dangerously accustomed to a country gone mad?"

  • The GOP's sinister new nationalism: "The party's assault on "globalists" and "cosmopolitans" pushes against internationalism when it's needed most."

• Conor Friedersdorf: Trump's hate makes the 'squad' stronger.

• Jim Golby/Peter Feaver: It matters if Americans call Afghanistan a defeat. But it will take years to sort out, not just to see what happens after US/NATO troops make their long-procrastinated but inevitable departure, but also due to how various interest groups choose to spin it. It should be easier to agree that it was a mistake, but even now few Americans recognize that the post-9/11 decision to overthrow the Taliban was profoundly wrong.

• Emma Goldberg: This is how Israeli democracy ends.

• Jeffrey Goldberg: He's getting worse: "Trump is turning the American presidency into a platform for the wholesale demonization of minorities."

  I watched the video recording of the rally in Panama City shortly after reading the El Paso killer's so-called manifesto. It is a document littered with phrases and rhetorical devices injected into mainstream discourse by the president and his supporters -- talk of a "Hispanic invasion," accusations that Democrats support "open borders," and the like. As Trump faces the possibility that he will lose the presidency next year, he may become more enraged, and more willing to deploy the rhetoric of violence as a way to keep his followers properly motivated. The Panama City speech was an important moment in Trump's ongoing effort to make the American presidency a vehicle in the cause of marginalizing and frightening racial minorities; the killings are a possible (and predictable) consequence of such rhetoric.

• Michelle Goldberg: With Trump as president, the world is spiraling into chaos: Attacks "Donald Trump's erratic, amoral and incompetent foreign policy." Actually, I find his "amoral" a refreshing change from the sanctimonious posing of other presidents, both Cold War and later. I think that his ability to suspend moral judgments has made it possible to negotiate with Kim Jong-un and the Taliban where others had been unwilling. Sure, he doesn't have much to show for his efforts -- "erratic" and "incompetent" take a toll. Also, On the other hand, he seems to have never met a dictator he doesn't like, he still falls back on spouting moral cant when faced with leftist governments like Cuba and Venezuela.

• Tara Golshan: Bernie Sanders versus the "corporate media," explained.

• Adam Gopnik: After El Paso and Dayton, three ways to think about mass shootings.

  Everything that Donald Trump does as a demagogue involves, in classic demagogic fashion, giving license to others to act on their impulses without shame. And the fact that he, in a classic demagogic move, then recoils from the consequences of his words does not make them less empowering. Trump's rote condemnation of bigotry, during his brief comments at the White House on Monday morning -- seemingly authored by some other hand, and delivered with his usual insincerity, right down to his naming the wrong Ohio city -- cannot permit him to escape responsibility for what his more spontaneous words may have wrought.

  But also:

  Second distinction: there is a difference between those who fight to make gun control impossible and those who use guns to kill people. The majority of the first, much larger group often view weapons as powerful symbols of personal autonomy. (The deaths of innocents are, seemingly, a price necessarily paid for that idea of freedom.) . . . People who oppose gun control at every turn often cite the sense of control and power that weapons provide, regardless of how false that sense may be. The vast majority of those people will never shoot anyone, but they help put lethal weapons in the hands of those who will.

• Rebecca Gordon: How the US created the Central American immigration crisis.

• David A Graham:

  • Trump didn't make the storm, but he's making it worse: "The president didn't put any of the globe's authoritarians in office, but he's encouraged their worst instincts." He lists a few cases, with Bolsonaro in Brazil a glaring omission (perhaps because he can't be sure the US had nothing to do with installing him), or Putin in Russia or Johnson in the UK. Nor does he mention cases where Trump has tried to destabilize governments with the aim of replacing them with friendlier autocrats (Iran, Venezuela, Cuba) -- places where Trump clearly is intent on making storms.

    Neither a Chinese crackdown in Hong Kong nor Modi's move in Kashmir nor blocking Omar and Tlaib would have been unimaginable without Trump as president, but each incident shows how Trump's indifference to democratic norms, and his sometimes open antagonism toward them, shapes world leaders' behavior. These recent examples are part of a much longer record. Trump implicitly endorsed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's antidemocratic power grab. He has lifted up Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as he cracks down on dissent and centralizes power. He has ostentatiously refused to blame Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for the murder of the journalist (and U.S. resident) Jamal Khashoggi, citing the importance of American arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Trump has declined to speak out against abuses and outrageous statements like those of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte. He has coddled Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Polish President Andrzej Duda as they crack down on dissent.

  • Obama warned Trump -- but he didn't listen: "The 44th president became a devotee of unilateral presidential actions -- and then saw many moves quickly reversed once he left office." Many of Trump's executive orders should prove equally easy to undo, although reversing the effects may be difficult or impossible (e.g., his pardons).

• Conn Hallinan: Rivers of dust: The future of water and the Middle East.

• Dominic Holden: Trump's latest proposal would let businesses discriminate based on LGBTQ status, race, religion, and more.

• Umair Irfan: Russian cities are still chocking under smoke from massive Siberian wildfires. Satellite images show that the smoke has spread into and beyond Alaska.

• Neil Irwin: How the recession of 2020 could happen: "The freeze-up in business confidence, caused in part by the trade war, could wind up affecting consumer confidence."

• Sarah Jones: The NRA is in trouble, but don't count it out yet.

• Peter Kafka: The CBS and Viacom merger, explained. Actually, that's the link I followed. Title here is different.

• Isabel Kershner/Sheryl Gay Slotberg/Peter Baker: Israeli decision on Omar and Tlaib inflames politics in two countries.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Primary voters are focused on beating Trump, so the candidates are, too. I appreciate policy wonkery as much as anyone (probably more than most), but I've been saying all along that candidates need to distinguish themselves by two things: prove themselves to be the most effective critics of Trump and his Republican masters and toadies, and show their commitment not to their personal campaigns but to rebuilding the Democratic party top-to-bottom. The primaries should simply be a contest over those two points. It would appear that one candidate who's belatedly figured (half of) this out is Beto O'Rourke: see Alexander Burns: Beto O'Rourke's new approach to 2020: 'taking the fight to Donald Trump'. Kilgore writes:

    One of the many, many neurotic fears Democrats took away from the 2016 election is that Trump hypnotized Hillary Clinton into focusing on his unsavory character instead of promoting her own potentially popular policies and agenda, which undermined her ability to mobilize her base or to persuade swing voters.

    I've often faulted both Obama and the Clintons for putting themselves above the party and running highly personalized campaigns that left them saddled with Republican majorities rendering them unable to deliver on most of their campaign promises. To some extent, this suggested that the "New Democrats" were ashamed of the party's past -- a concession which hurt the party but allowed them some distance, which proved beneficial to liberal donors (and ultimately made the candidates rich).

    Unfortunately, Kilgore's buzzword is "electability," which is often defined as whoever caters most flagrantly to the indecisive center. That seems to be an even thinner slice of the electorate this year than usual -- e.g., the latest Fox poll shows Biden to be running just 2% better vs. Trump than Sanders is. That's not much gain for sacrificing most of your platform.

  • Trump's state-by-state approval rating should scare the MAGA out of him.

  • Do conservative evangelicals like Trump not despite but for his hatefulness? Well, duh! Of course, we're only talking about those evangelicals who do like Trump. I've long noted a division among my evangelical brethren between believers who want to help their fellows and who take delight in damning those they dislike to hell. The latter have been easy prey for Republican strategists, but they've long been disappointed by how little the GOP has delivered. For them, Trump is the Hand of God, set upon the Earth to vanquish the heathen. For more, see Emma Green: Why some Christians 'love the meanest parts' of Trump: Interview with Ben Howe. Green also wrote: What conservative pastors didn't say after El Paso, and Trump has enabled Israel's antidemocratic tendencies at every turn.

  • It's filibuster -- or bust -- for Democrats in the near future.

• Catherine Kim: Jeffrey Epstein's death and America's jail suicide problem: "Suicide is the leading cause of death in jails." Related: Jeanne Theoharis: I tried to tell the world about Epstein's jail. No one wanted to listen.

• Jen Kirby:

  • Rep. Rashida Tlaib's on-again, off-again visit to Israel, explained.

  • The pro-democracy protests rocking Moscow, explained.

• Carolyn Kormann: The Trump administration finds a new target: endangered species.

• Paul Krugman: From Trump boom to Trump gloom: "The smart money thinks Trumponomics is a flop."

• Eric Levitz:

  • If this Fox News poll is right, Trump is a goner.

  • Donald Trump, a very fit man of the people, fat shames own supporter.

  • By barring Omar and Tlaib, Netanyahu did BDS a huge favor.

• PR Lockhart: Why police violence needs to be treated as a public health issue.

• German Lopez: The Trump Justice Department's war on progressive prosecutors, explained.

• Jane Mayer: "Kochland" examines the Koch Brothers' early, crucial role in climate-change denial. The author who reported extensively on the Kochs in Dark Money: The hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, reviews Christopher Leonard's new book on the Kochs: Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America.

  Because the Kochs opposed the candidacy of Donald Trump, in 2016, many have assumed that they are antagonistic to the Trump Administration. To the contrary, Leonard writes, with the help of allies such as Vice-President Mike Pence, "the politics that the Kochs stoked in 2010 became the policies that Trump enacted in 2017." Whether announcing his intention to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, placing shills from the oil and coal industries at the head of federal energy and environmental departments, or slashing taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy, Trump has delivered for the Kochs. "Kochland" quotes Charles Koch telling his allied political donors, in 2018, "We've made more progress in the last five years than I had in the previous fifty."

• Syreeta McFadden: What Toni Morrison knew about Trump: "In her 1993 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the late author cautioned against the distraction of the 'political correctness' debate."

• Bill McKibben: Don't burn trees to fight climate change -- let them grow.

• Timothy McLaughlin: Hong Kong's protests have cemented its identity.

• Claire Cain Miller: Why the US has long resisted universal child care. Doesn't really explain why beyond listing some rationalizations for not having it, but does point out the costs and loss of opportunity that lack entails.

• Abdulla Moaswes: What's happening in Kashmir looks a lot like Israel's rule over Palestine.

• Bob Moser: Texas is bracing for a blue wave in 2020. Yes, Texas.

• Steven Mufson/Chris Mooney/Juliet Eilperin/John Muyskens: 2°C: Beyond the limit: "Extreme climate change has arrived in America. Maps plot temperature changes from 1895 to 2018, showing that while nearly everywhere has gotten hotter, the biggest changes are widely scattered -- these are places where we are already living in the long-feared (and rapidly approaching 2°C future.

• Charles P Pierce: Kansas stepped down as the craziest state there is. Tennessee stepped up. Not that he doesn't still have things to say about Kansas . . . and Mississippi.

• Adam K Raymond: Truck drives through crowd of ICE protesters outside Rhode Island prison.

• Brian Resnick: The Endangered Species Act is incredibly popular and effective. Trump is weakening it anyway.

• Frank Rich: Trump is panicked that his trade war will start a recession.

• David Roberts:

  • Fracking may be a bigger climate problem than we thought.

  • The GOP's climate change dilemma: "It's Frank Luntz vs. Grover Norquist in a battle for the GOP's future." Doesn't it always boil down to soundbites and clichés? Luntz's polling shows that the GOP is losing the public debate on climate change (plus he "had a come-to-Jesus moment on climate change when he was forced to evacuate his Los Angeles home in the face of the Skirball Fire in 2017"), so he's trying to fashion some wording in favor of a carbon tax (the oil industry's proferred token solution -- not that they're seriously in favor of it, but at least it's worse for coal). Norquist, on the other hand, has kept the party hostage to his "no new taxes" pledge, so he's not having any of it.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump's baffling, self-defeating attack on the New York Times.

  • Why Trup's blurring of the line between campaigning and governing matters, explained by an expert: Interview with Jordan Libowitz.

  • Trump's bizarre attempt to defend retweeting an Epstein conspiracy theory.

  • Trump official suggests famous Statue of Liberty sonnet is too nice to immigrants: "This isn't the first time the Trump administration has beefed with the Statue of Liberty."

  • Why the Trump administration is going after low-income immigrants, explaind by an expert: Interview with Marielana Hincapié.

• Dominic Rushe: Top US bosses earn 278 times more than their employees.

• Robert Scheer: Democracy dies without alternative media: Interview with Peter Richardson, who wrote A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America and American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams.

• Eric Schlosser: Why it's immigrants who pack your meat.

  The immigration raid last week at seven poultry plants in rural Mississippi was a perfect symbol of the Trump administration's racism, lies, hypocrisy, and contempt for the poor. It was also a case study in how an industry with a long history of defying the law has managed to shift the blame and punishment onto workers.

• Daniel Shapiro: Israel's massive self-own: "Trump's racism and Netanyahu's dependency have driven a bulldozer through the bipartisan consensus."

• Matt Shuham:

  • Shell workers who skipped Trump speech took financial hit.

  • House GOP's reported talking points for shootings: Note 'violence from the left'.

• Richard Silverstein: Trump is the only reason Netanyahu banned the US congresswomen. They'll both regret it.

• Emily Stewart: Cardi B's very on-brand love for Bernie Sanders, explained. Also, with Tara Golshan: Cardi B and Bernie Sanders's video, and her longstanding interest in politics, explained.

• Andrew Sullivan: The limits of my conservatism. More like vanities: like all "Never Trump conservatives," Sullivan does a lot of whining, blaming the left for his former comrades drinking the Trump Kool-Aid, and warning that more good conservatives will turn into vile reactionaries if the left keeps bullying them. More proof that conservatives always shoot left even when they recognize that the real enemies are to their right. (On the other hand, liberals have rarely had a problem with attacking the left, or with seeking allies among reactionaries for that purpose.) This gets pretty incoherent (e.g., "many leftists somehow believe that sustained indoctrination will work in abolishing human nature, and when it doesn't, because it can't, they demonize those who have failed the various tests of PC purity as inherently wicked"). Scrolling down, two further notes on "Are We Rome? Cont'd" and "Trump and Israel: A Special Relationship" make better reasoned points.

• Matt Taibbi:

  • The campaign press: members of the 10 percent, reporting for the one percent.

  • Bernie Sanders' chances depend on taking support from Biden, and soon.

• Emily Tamkin: Ilhan Omar is already changing Washington: "Banned by Isrel and demonized by Trump, she's been fighting business as usual in Congress' hidebound foreign policy club."

• Glenn Thrush: Obama and Biden's relationship looks rosy. It wasn't always that simple.

• Alex Ward:

  • "A shameful, unprecedented move": Democrats react to Israel blocking Omar and Tlaib's trip.

  • The US isn't the only major economy facing a possible recession: "Japan, Germany, the UK, and Brazil are seeing signs of trouble too." Also mentioned: South Korea, Italy, Hong Kong, Singapore, Argentina, Mexico, China.

  • What caused Russia's radioactive explosion last week? Possibly a nuclear-powered missile.

• Ben Westhoff: The brazen way a Chinese company pumped fentanyl ingredients into the US: Still, reminds me of the Opium Wars, and how what goes around comes around.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • What's up with the yield curve?

  • Trump's plan to buy Greenland, explained.

  • Pete Buttigieg's plan to use immigration to revitalize shrinking communities, explained: "Place-based visas could help America's declining cities." I can add that literally the only places in Western Kansas that are not shriveling up are towns with a lot of immigrants (e.g., Garden City and Dodge City). It's also true that an exceptionally high percentage of doctors in rural Kansas are foreign-born. On the other hand, immigrants would almost always be better off moving to areas that are growing and generating new opportunities. [PS: The map in the DeParle article above shows significant increases in foreign-born population almost everywhere in Western Kansas -- not just in areas that haven't lost population. On the other hand, the map shows relatively little change (<25%) in many large cities known for immigrants like Los Angeles, Phoenix, El Paso, and Miami.]

  • The yield curve inversion panic, explained.

  • Trump's China tariff climbdown, explained.

  • Immigration makes America great. Leaving aside the silly matter of what constitutes greatness, there is little wrong here, and it's useful to be reminded of these facts periodically. America is fortunate that there are still people who want to move here.

Daily Log

Finished reading Reed Hundt's A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining Decisions. Thought I'd save a couple of summary paragraphs toward the end. First, from p. 332:

Going forward, all the problems that needed solving in 2008-2009 are for the most part still begging for good governmental policies. Little that Trump has done or promises to do will give Americans better ways to go to work, cleaner water to drink, or less sewage in rivers. His administration will make climate change more severe and the urgency of battling rising waters even greater. His policies will leave healthcare less improved for most people than Obama's good bill had intended to do. His judiciary will deny most people redress for most social injuries.

I would edit this a bit much more harshly, like:

Going forward, nearly all the problems that needed solving in 2008-2009 are part still begging for good governmental policies. Nothing that Trump has done or threatens to do will give Americans better ways to go to work, cleaner water to drink, or less sewage in rivers. His administration is making climate change more severe and the urgency of battling rising waters even greater. His policies have left healthcare less improved for most people than Obama's mediocre bill had intended to do. His judiciary will deny most people redress for most social injuries, and will be a blight on our commitment to justice for decades to come.

Further drafts will no doubt get nastier and more resentful.

Then, on p. 333, his last paragraph, more aspirational, fares better:

Under terrible pressure, with limited knowledge, and boxed in by doctrines unsuited for this crisis, Barack Obama thoughtfully made more critical decisions prior to his inauguration than any president in American history, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln. He acted with courage, conviction, and compassion. Presidents for years to come will have difficulty measuring up to his rare combination of grace and acumen. His experience, however, should teach again the wisdom Abraham Lincoln shared with Congress on December 1, 1862: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Music Week

Expanded blog post, August archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31902 [31860] rated (+42), 259 [259] unrated (+0).

Running late again, mostly because I've been fiddling with the 2019 Metacritic file, adding extra points for high grades (not just midyear list picks) for most of the publications tracked by Album of the Year. The specific lists are noted here: in most cases one point for grades scored 80+, although for some relatively generous publications I've used 90+ (e.g., for AllMusic Guide, I'm counting 4.5 star records, but not 4.0 star ones). My latest project there has been to add points for All About Jazz grades of 4.5+ stars (4 stars is probably their median grade; at any rate it's very common). I've worked my way back to March 26, and the work has slowed down as I've had to check more release dates to separate 2019 releases out from the earlier ones (mostly late 2018's, but sometimes they review older releases). AOTY doesn't track AAJ (or any other jazz sources), so this has started to generate some jazz coverage. I should probably do Downbeat next.

Many of this week's picks are things I stumbled onto from various lists, and they're a pretty patchy group. I've finally started adding the final/latest Christgau EW reviews to his database, so a couple records (like the Diana Gordon EP) were suggested there -- which, by the way, led me to find Taana Gardner's disco classic (one of very few Christgau-rated A records I missed). Phil Overeem's latest list (link last week) led me to several things, including the George Jones United Artists Rarities, which sent me on a minor dive with a side of Little Jimmy Dickens.

The bigger dive this week was into the works of Jon Lundbom and Bryan Murray. This started with Balto Beats and swept up pretty much everything I had missed. (I had heard their often excellent records on Moppa Elliott's Hot Cup label, but missed almost everything else.)

The other smaller dive was into country singer-songwriter Tyler Childers. I initially graded his new one B+(***), but wondered if I shouldn't revisit 2017's Purgatory -- graded B+(**) by me at the time, but later a Christgau A-. Both of my initial reviews admitted that more spins may be called for, and it didn't take many. Also found two relatively crude earlier releases, which really brought his songwriting into focus. A couple more spins of the live EPs will raise could that grade as well, but the best songs are repeats from the debut -- probably still the best place to hear them.

One minor note: I've taken the time lock off the August Streamnotes draft file, which is where the monthly archive winds up. I won't do any indexing of the file until the end of the month, nor am I likely to be citing the URL in my weekly posts (although it's appeared in the notebook since I went weekly). But the naming convention is likely to be consistent moving forward, and you might spy something for the next Music Week there (e.g., the records I'm listening to as I'm writing this).

New records reviewed this week:

• Leila Bordreuil/Michael Foster: The Caustic Ballads (2016, Relative Pitch): [bc]: B+(*)
• Tyler Childers: Country Squire (2019, Hickman Holler/RCA): [r]: A-
• The Cinematic Orchestra: To Believe (2019, Domino): [r]: B+(**)
• Mark De Clive-Lowe: Heritage (2018 [2019], Ropeadope): [r]: B+(*)
• Mark De Clive-Lowe: Heritage II (2018 [2019], Ropeadope): [r]: B
• Elephant9: Psychedelic Backfire I (2019, Rune Grammofon): [r]: B+(*)
• Elephant9 With Reine Fiske: Psychedelic Backfire II (2019, Rune Grammofon): [r]: B+(**)
• Diana Gordon: Pure (2018, self-released, EP): [yt]: B+(*)
• Harbinger: Extended (2018 [2019], OA2): [cd]: B+(**)
• Mike Holober/The Gotham Jazz Orchestra: Hiding Out (2017 [2019], Zoho, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)
• Anne Mette Iversen's Ternion Quartet: Invincible Nimbus (2018 [2019], BJU): [r]: B+(***)
• Mark Kavuma: The Banger Factory (2019, Ubuntu Music): [r]: B+(*)
• LSD: Labrinth/Sia/Diplo Present . . . LSD (2019, Columbia): [r]: B-
• Lage Lund: Terrible Animals (2018 [2019], Criss Cross): [r]: B+(*)
• Jon Lundbom/Bryan Murray: Beats by Balto! Vol. 1 (2018 [2019], Chant): [r]: A-
• Moutin Factory Quintet: Mythical River (2019, Laborie Jazz): [cd]: B-
• Simon Nabatov Quintet: Last Minute Theory (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(**)
• Ola Onabulé: Point Less (2019, Rugged Ram): [cd]: B
• Mario Pavone Dialect Trio: Philosophy (2018 [2019], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(***)
• Alberto Pibiri & the Al Peppers: The Nacho Blues (2019, Alberto Pibiri Music): [cd]: B+(*)
• The John Pizzarelli Trio: For Centennial Reasons: 100 Year Salute to Nat King Cole (2019, Ghostlight): [r]: B+(**)
• Noah Preminger: After Life (2018 [2019], Criss Cross): [r]: B+(**)
• Jenny Scheinman/Allison Miller: Jenny Scheinman & Allison Miller's Parlour Game (2019, Royal Potato Family): [r]: B+(***)
• Fabrizio Sciacca Quartet: Gettin' It There (2019, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Paul Silbergleit: January (2018 [2019], Blujazz): [cd]: B+(**)
• Paul Zauner's Blue Brass feat. David Murray: Roots n' Wings (2019, PAO/Blujazz): [cd]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Tyler Childers: Live on Red Barn Radio I & II (2013-14 [2018], Hickman Holler, EP): [r]: B+(***)
• George Jones: United Artists Rarities (1962-64 [2019], EMI Nashville): [r]: B+(***)
• Masayuki Takayanagi New Directions Unit: April Is the Cruellest Month (1975 [2019], Black Forms Editions): [r]: B-

Old music:

• Balto Exclamationpoint/Plaidworthy: If the Big Hurt (2015, self-released): [bc]: B+(***)
• Balto!: Balto! (2016, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Balto!: Two Cans of Soup (2017, self-released, EP): [bc]: B-
• Balto!: Taco Cat Poops (2018, self-released, EP): [bc]: B+(**)
• Baltbom!: ¡!Baltbom!¡ (2015, self-released): [bc]: B+(*)
• Baltsticks!!: Play You, Play Me (2016, self-released): [bc]: B+(*)
• Bryan and the Haggards/Eugene Chadbourne: Merles Just Want to Have Fun (2012 [2013], Northern Spy): [bc]: A-
• Tyler Childers: Bottles and Bibles (2011, Hickman Holler): [r]: A-
• Little Jimmy Dickens: 16 Biggest Hits (1949-65 [2006], Columbia/Legacy): [r]: B+(***)
• Taana Gardner: Heartbeat (1981, West End, EP): [r]: A-
• George Jones: George Jones Sings the Hits of His Country Cousins (1962, United Artists): [r]: B+(***)
• George Jones: My Favorites of Hank Williams (1962, United Artists): [r]: B+(*)
• George Jones: George Jones Sings Like the Dickens! (1964, United Artists): [r]: B+(**)
• Jon Lundbom: Big Five Chord (2003 [2004], self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• Jon Lundbom & Big Five Chord: All the Pretty Ponies (A Live Recording) (2004 [2005], self-released): [r]: B
• Bryan Murray: What You Don't Forget (2007, Jazz Excursion): [bc]: B+(***)
• John Pizzarelli: P.S. Mr. Cole (1996-97 [1999], RCA): [r]: B+(***)

Grade (or other) changes:

• Tyler Childers: Purgatory (2017, Hickman Holler): [r]: [was B+(**)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Steve Lehman Trio/Craig Taborn: The People I Love (Pi): August 30
• Dave Miller Trio: Just Imagine (Summit): October 4
• Bill O'Connell and the Afro Caribbean Ensemble: Wind Off the Hudson (Savant)
• Mike Pachelli: High Standards (Fullblast): September 1
• Houston Person: I'm Just a Lucky So and So (HighNote)
• Lyn Stanley: London With a Twist: Live at Bernie's (A.T. Music)
• Tucker Brothers: Two Parts (self-released): October 3

Weekend Roundup

Again, spent a little over two days collecting what seems to be a bottomless series of links that show various aspects of the same basic fact: that Donald Trump is like all other conservatives in the sense that he believes some people (like himself) are innately superior to other people, and that the political system should be rigged to favor superior people over inferior ones, but even among conservatives, as an individual he is exceptionally ignorant, abusive, vain, and corrupt. Most weeks I take pains to remind you that what's wrong with him is just a reflection of his political beliefs, and we need to focus on the broader right-wing and not just on him. Still, this week he was such a flaming asshole that it's hard to get beyond the horror and disgust he reeks of.

Some scattered links this week:

• Gary Abernathy: Trump is not a racist. His voters aren't either. Nothing here convinces me of the title, and I doubt that's even the author's intent. Rather, he's saying that Trump and many of his voters don't think of themselves as racists, but the more they're called racists, the more likely they are to start identifying that way. I can see the logic here, even relate it to a personal incident. I had a boss once who complained that I had a "bad attitude" and, well, my attitude got much more pronounced after that. Still, we have a fair amount of empirical experience with calling Trump and Republicans racist, and thus far their response is almost always to deny rather than embrace it. Sure, they get upset and irritated, and some try to turn the tables and paint themselves as victims of racists, but as long as they're defensive they aren't that much of a threat. Moreover, the real problem with racism isn't that some people identify as racists. It's that lots more people practice racism, often without giving it much thought. Those people need to know that they're going to get called out on their racism when it's evident -- something that even the President hasn't been immune to lately. For more on Trump's history of being called racist, see Philip Rucker/Ashley Parker: The brand label that stokes Trump's fury: 'Racist, racist, racist.'

• Josh Barro: The Trump boycotts pose a grave danger to the Equinox and SoulCycle businesses. Also: Alex Abad-Santos: SoulCycle instructors are as mad about its investor's Trump fundraises as its riders are; Lizzie Widdicombe: Equinox members take a stand against Trump (sort of); Ilana Novick:. Billionaire Trump supporter Stephen Ross can't have it both ways.

• Jo Becker: The global machine behind the rise of far-right nationalism.

• Julie Bosman/Kate Taylor/Tim Arango: A common trait among mass killers: hatred toward women.

• Perrie Briskin: Why we should let more foreign doctors practice in America.

• Jason Burke: Norway mosque attack suspect 'inspired by Christchurch and El Paso shootings'.

• Cristina Cabrera: CBP chief forced to explain why ICE raids haven't targeted Trump's companies.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • The Mississippi ICE raids expose the biggest problem with US immigration laws: "They ignore the high demand for workers to fill low-skill jobs in America." I don't know. Maybe those jobs should pay more? Related: Angela Stuesse: The poultry industry recruited them. Now ICE raids are devastating their communities.

  • Trump described an imaginary "invasion" at the border 2 dozen times in the past year.

• John Cassidy:

  • Some reasons to be skeptical about Trump's embrace of gun control.

  • Donald Trump's trade war with China is spiralling out of control.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • Trump calling his white nationalist fans crazy is not the defense he thinks it is.

  • Biden: If elected President, I'll let Mitch McConnell block everything. What he actually said was "ending the filibuster is a very dangerous move," but that's a fair translation. I doubt he'll actually put "No We Can't" on his posters, but if that's what people hear, he'll lose.

• Zak Cheney-Rice: The sleight of hand at the heart of Trump's appeal.

• Helena Cobban: On "humanitarian intervention".

• William Cummings: 'Only in the Panhandle': Trump chuckles when audience member suggests shooting migrants.

• Cora Currier: Pushing out the border: How the US is waging a global war on migration.

• Chas Danner/Margaret Hartmann: Everything we know about Jeffrey Epstein's death: A news blip I would barely have noticed until I needed somewhere to hang the extra links:

  • McKay Coppins: Why conspiracy theorists will never believe the 'official' Epstein story/a>.

  • Margaret Hartmann: What the unsealed Jeffrey Epstein documents reveal about Donald Trump.

  • Harry Litman: Jeffrey Epstein's apparant suicide is unfathomable.

  • Dylan Matthews: The conspiracy theories about the Clintons and Jeffrey Epstein's death, explained.

  • Anna North: Jeffrey Epstein is dead. His story isn't over.

  • Charlie Warzel: Epstein suicide conspiracies show how our information system is poisoned.

  • David Frum: The shame and disgrace will linger: Still trying valiantly to be shocked by Donald Trump (here "accusing the Clintons of murdering Jeremy Epstein," but really, could be anything any week).

• Brady Dennis/Andrew Freedman: Here's how the hottest month in recorded history unfolded around the world.

• EJ Dionne Jr: On guns and white nationalism, one side is right and one is wrong.

• Kayla Epstein: Climate change isn't an intangible future risk. It's here now, and it's killing us.

• Steven Erlanger: Are we headed for another expensive nuclear arms race? Could be. Main problem with this "logic" is that the fix is already in: the intent to spend more than a trillion dollars to stockpile new bombs, regardless of whether anyone else shows up for the race.

• Helena Bottemiller Evich: 'It feels like something out of a bad sci-fi movie': "A top climate scientist [Lewis Ziska] quit USDA, following others who say Trump has politicized science."

• Mary Fitzgerald/Claire Provost: The American dark money behind Europe's far right.

  A recent openDemocracy investigation found that America's Christian right spent at least $50 million of "dark money" to fund campaigns and advocacy in Europe over the past decade. (By the measures of US political financing, this may not seem like a vast sum, but by European standards it's formidable. The total spend on the 2014 European elections, for example, by all of Ireland's political parties combined was just $3 million.)

• Ben Freeman/Nia Harris/Cassandra Stimpson: The military-industrial jobs scam: $750 billion for the Pentagon, a record haul, but the "stubborn truth" is that more money begets fewer jobs. Also at TomDispatch:

  • Aviva Chomsky: How the Green New Deal is changing America.

  • John Feffer: How to decide the fate of the planet: "Is China or the Green New Deal the answer to climate change?"

  • Karen Greenberg: What the child detentions at the border really tell us.

  • Adam Hochschild: America's real war: "Trump's venom against the media, immigrants, 'traitors,' and more is nothing new." Remembering xenophobia 1917-23.

  • Robert Lipsyte: A comic stands up to racism: "When comedian Dick Gregory tried to bust the word."

• Conor Friedersdorf:

  • Dismantling Tucker Carlson's white-supremacy argument.

  • National service is a terrible idea: "John Delaney's plan amounts to forced labor."

  • What ails the right isn't (just) racism.

• Grace Gedye: Can journalism be saved from the tech giants? There's a problem here -- advertising revenues that previously supported newspapers and magazines have been sucked up by Google and Facebook, undermining the business viability of a free press -- but I don't see this "solution" as helping much. The proposal is to allow content-providers to band together to negotiate better terms with the tech giants. Seems to me that the real problems are deeper than revenue distribution, starting with the very model of depending on advertising to support journalism. We're actually going through a period where the marginal distribution cost of journalism has dropped to virtually nothing, which should make it cost-effective to dramatically expand production, but we're stuck with a business model (advertising + subscriptions) that drags both consumers and content-producers into a death spiral. The obvious way out of this is to free distribution while finding some other way to pay for content creation. In the long run, that way needs to be public funding, the trick being to come up with schemes that are responsive to diverse consumers, that are professional, and that are fair and as free as possible of corruption. That's a tough sell in a period when virtually everything is politicized, but we've tried commercializing everything, and have the present political mess to show for it.

• Shirin Ghaffary: Trump's executive order on social media bias is a distraction: "Trump is reportedly drafting an executive order on tech bias against conservatives, even though there's no proof this bias exists."

• Tara Golshan: Joe Biden accidentally said "poor kids" are just as bright as "white kids": "The former vice president immediately corrected himself to say "wealthy kids." Or, as Jim Newell put it: In Iowa, Joe Biden's mouth keeps getting away from his brain; also Matt Stieb: Joe Biden gaffes his way through Iowa.

• Constance Grady: The Dayton, Ohio, shooter reportedly kept a "rape list" of potential victims.

• Joan E Greve: New York Times changes front-page Trump headline after backlash. On Trump's Monday teleprompted speech, original headline read "Trump urges unity vs. racism." Later changed to "Assailing hate but not guns." Trump objected to the change: Allyson Chiu: Trump lashes out after New York Times amends 'bad' headline about his response to mass shootings. Both articles have scans of both cover pages, and various tweets. As Jamil Smith put it: "This is the 'Dewey Defeats Truman' of racism." For more: Aaron Blake: Why the New York Times's Trump headline was so bad.

• Jeff Halper: The meaning of Israel's massive housing demolitions in East Jerusalem.

• Mehdi Hasan: These 7 prominent conservatives have nothing i common with white supremacists, nothing at all: What we used to call "satire." FYI: Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Donald J Trump, Stephen Miller, Laura Ingraham, Candace Owens, John Cornyn.

• Fred Kaplan: Trump's new arms race makes the Cold War era look rational and restrained. "The secretary of defense is keen to test a type of missile that no one has requested for more than 30 years, without knowing where it would be stationed or why it's particularly needed."

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Is beating Trump the best Democrats can hope to achieve in 2020?: I don't mind some prudent skepticism, but this guy is trying hard to be a major killjoy. People, especially Democrats, need to understand that the difference between even the minimal Democratic agenda and Trump/Republicans is something that matters a lot, and they have to get serious about implementing that agenda. That means: first of all they have to win big, they have to make aggressive use of the power they gain, and they have to make the Republicans the shadow government of the super-rich own their failures, so they can build and run again and again until they succeed. The Democratic candidate should be the one who makes the strongest case for doing all that, as opposed to someone who's just marginally better than Trump.

  • Nadler makes it clear House is already in 'impeachment proceedings'. Related: Quinta Jurecic: Impeachment, but without the moral clarity.

• Jen Kirby: The Trump administration adds even more sanctions to try to push out Venezuela's Maduro.

• Ken Klippenstein: Leaked FBI documents reveal Bureau's priorities under Trump.

• Josh Kovensky: In new interview, Bill Barr sees Dirty Harry, Death Wish as justice done right.

• Paul Krugman:

  • China tries to teach Trump economics: "If you want to understand the developing trade war with China, the first thing you need to realize is that nothing Donald Trump is doing makes sense."

  • Tariff tantrums and recession risks: "If the bond market is any indication, Donald Trump's escalating belligerence on trade is creating seriously increased risks of recession."

  • Trump's China shock.

  • Trump, tax cuts and terrorism: "Why do Republicans enable right-wing extremism?" I would say it's because they've found a successful political strategy in provoking strong, irrational responses from their base, and they have few if any scruples about anyone acting on those impulses. Race is just one of those nerve points, but it's been successfully exploited by Nixon (his "Southern strategy"), Reagan ("welfare queens"), Bush I ("Willie Horton"), and no one's hit it harder than Trump. It's not the only one, but when you play it and follow with guns and war and general contempt for law and civility, it's not hard to figure out what happens next.

    But racism isn't what drives the Republican establishment, and my guess is that a majority of the party's elected officials find it a little bit repugnant -- just not repugnant enough to induce them to repudiate its political exploitation. And their exploitation of racism has led them inexorably to where they are today: de facto enablers of a wave of white supremacist terrorism.

• Michael Kruse: How San Francisco's wealthiest families launched Kamala Harris.

• Jason Lemon: Nearly all of Mexico's gun violence is committed with illegal firearms coming from US, officials say.

• Helen Lewis: To learn about the far right, start with the 'manosphere': "The sexist world has become a recruiting ground for potential mass shooters."

• Jonathan Lis: The only way to stop the catastrophe of a no-deal Brexit? Revoke article 50.

• PR Lockhart: Ferguson changed how America talks about police violence. 5 years later, not much else has changed.

German Lopez:

• Elizabeth Warren has a new plan to reduce gun violence by 80 percent: "Warren's plan combines various policies, from universal background checks to licensing to police reform, to bring down US gun violence."

• Guns are the problem: "America doesn't have a monopoly on hate or mental illness. What is has is a lot of guns."

• Sebastian Mallaby: How economists' faith in markets broke America: Review of Nicholas Lemann's Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream, and Binyamin Appelbaum's The Economist's Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society.

• Dylan Matthews: Stop blaming mental illness for mass shootings: "It's about the guns."

• Dana Milbank: A worried nation wonders: How can we keep Wayne LaPierre safe?

  The longtime head of the National Rifle Association, it turns out, is worried sick about his personal safety in this gun culture.

  After the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, he and his wife bravely waited out the uproar on the pink-sand beaches of the Bahamas, part of $542,000 in private jet trips and personal items the NRA bought for him. And now, thanks to some delightful reporting by my Post colleagues Carol D. Leonnig and Beth Reinhard, we know that last year's Parkland massacre left LaPierre so fearful for his personal safety that he tried to have the NRA buy him a $6 million French-chateau-style mansion with nine bathrooms in a gated Dallas-area golf course community.

  He told associates he was worried about his safety and thought his Virginia home was too easy for potential attackers to find.

  Ultimately, the financially stressed NRA didn't buy LaPierre the mansion. That's too bad, because, as the saying goes: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a French chateau."

• Rani Molla: Trump says Google is biased against conservatives. Here's how search actually works. One thing that remains unmentionable here is whether or to what extent advertisers influence Google search results. That's certainly my impression as a long-time user.

• Robert Myers: The 'warspeak' permeating everyday language puts us all in the trenches.

• John Nichols: Beto O'Rourke is doing what Donald Trump is simply incapable of: "The Texan is demonstrating real leadership in the wake of a horrific mass shooting by unequivocally condemning racism." I'm less impressed. I've seen his expletive-filled clip responding to "What can Donald Trump do?" several times, and while he's fumbling on, the only answer I can think of is "resign."

• Ella Nilsen: Trump's sudden push for a possibly doomed background check bill, explained.

• Helaine Olen: Trump's speech was like a hostage video.

• Mark Osborne: Florida white supremacist arrested for threatening shooting at Walmart, police say. Also: Tom Winter/Dennis Romero: FBI arrests Las Vegas man who allegedly wanted to shoot Jews, LGBTQ bar patrons.

• Keith Payne: The truth about anti-white discrimination: "Many white Americans feel that discrimination against whites is on the rise. Experiments suggests otherwise." By the way, I took a semester of psych during my brief tenure in high school, and learned a few things there. One key concept was projection: the tendency people have to impute their own beliefs and feelings to other people. We see projection everywhere. Especially we see white racists assuming that non-whites are racist against them. In 50 years since then, I've seen non-whites who were wary and cautious and sometimes even bitter, but I've never seen any say or do the sort of things I've seen white racists do hundreds of times.

• Jeremy W Peters/Michael M Brynbaum/Keith Collins/Rich Harris/Rumsey Taylor: How the El Paso killer echoed the incendiary words of conservative media stars.

• Daniel Politi: Elderly Washington couple dies in murder-suicide blamed on worries over medical bills: Another shooting guns weren't responsible for.

• Tom Porter: FBI agents are reluctant to pursue white nationalist extremists because they don't want to target Trump's base, former counterterrorism official says.

• Andrew Prokop:

  • Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok are both suing the Justice Department: "The two former FBI officials filed separate lawsuits this week, alleging improper political retaliation."

  • The polls are in, and here's who won the second Democratic debate: The most interesting of the polls was one by HuffPost/YouGov, which offered separate percentages for whether the debate performance improved or worsened opinion on the candidate. The difference produce a net change: Warren (+44), Buttigieg (+24), Booker (+20), Castro (+17), Yang (+13), Sanders (+12), Klobuchar (+8), Gillibrand (+7), Inslee (+4), Gabbard (+3), Biden (+2), Bennet and O'Rourke (-4), Harris (-5), Bullock and Williamson (-6), de Blasio (-14), Hickenlooper (-15), Ryan (-17), Delaney (-30). Compare this to last week's pundit rankings, which accorded wins to Biden (for not doing as poorly as last time) and Delaney (for talking a lot even though no one much liked what he had to say).

  • Democrats' confusing debate over an "impeachment inquiry," explained.

• Jennifer Rubin: Democratic candidates grasp the moral seriousness of this moment.

• Aaron Rupar:

  • Trump would rather blame Democrats than grapple with his "invasion" rhetoric.

  • Fox & Friends pushes incendiary "invasion" conspiracy theory -- even after El Paso shooting.

  • "Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger": Trump's speech about shootings ignored the real problem.

• Sigal Samuel:

  • Trump wants to "detect mass shooters before they strike." It won't work.

  • Facebook is building tech to read your mind. The ethical implications are staggering. Offhand, I'd say this is impossible. On further thought, you might be able to approximate it by subliminally planting thoughts in luser heads, then pretending they're authentic. That's something that Facebook has the vision and ethics (i.e., lack thereof) to aim at.

• Rosa Schwartzburg: The 'white replacement theory' motivates alt-right killers the world over.

• Somini Sengupta/Welyl Cal: A quarter of humanity faces looming water crises. This strikes me as an even more acute threat to humankind than climate change, not that the latter doesn't have something to do with it. Also: Christopher Flavelle: Climate change threatens the world's food supply, United Nations warns. Also by Sengupta: Earth's food supply is under threat. These fixes would go a long way.

• Matt Shuham: 'Ruthless': How it feels when the Trump administration guts your agency.

• Richard Silverstein: Expanding fight against Iran, Israel opens new military front in Iraq.

• Ali H Soufan: I spent 25 years fighting jihadis. White supremacists aren't so different.

• Emily Stewart:

  • The drama over Mitch McConnell's Twitter account, explained.

  • Why Joaquin Castro's tweet of a list of Trump donors is so controversial: "Take note: If you donate to a political campaign, some of your information will probably be made public." Well, it wouldn't be so controversial if showing public support for Trump wasn't something to be ashamed of. Castro's list of 44 Trump donors in San Antonio makes me want to see the comparable list for Wichita (not that I can't guess a few).

• David Swanson: Long after Hiroshima: Last week marked 74 years since the people charged with "thinking about the unthinkable" cavalierly went ahead and just did it. Maybe the bigger number next year will motivate some attention, like the 75th anniversary of D-Day (although it's harder to spin Hiroshima as a day to celebrate American chauvinism). Maybe the scuttling of arms control treaties and the trillion dollar scam to "renovate" America's nuclear bomb arsenal will bring out some protest.

• Matt Taibbi: Who's afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?.

• Giacomo Tognini: Here are the Democratic presidential candidates with the most donations from billionaires: Buttigieg (23), Booker (18), Harris (17), Bennet (15), Biden (13), Hickenlooper (11), O'Rourke (9), Klobuchar (8), Inslee (5), Gillibrand (4), Delaney (3). Warren has 2, tied with Bullock. Sanders has 0 (tied with Castro, De Blasio, and Ryan). One each for Gabbard, Yang, and Williamson. Not listed is Tom Steyer, who like Donald Trump is his own billionaire. (See: Jessica Piper: Billionaire Tom Steyer spends more than $7 million on ads in first month.)

• Peter Wade:

  • Trump blows up over report on his dismal performances in Dayton and El Paso: Leads off with what may be the creepiest photo-op of his presidency. By the way, Dahlia Lithwick agrees (although she uses a less pointed term): Trump's photo-op with the orphaned El Paso baby was the smallest moment of his presidency; also Graeme Wood: Trump's El Paso photo is obscene.

  • Walmart takes action to stop mass gamings: "The company will continue to sell the guns and ammunition needed to conduct mass shootings."

• Alex Ward:

  • Narendra Modi tells India that "a new era has begun" after Kashmir power grab.

  • The latest crisis between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, explained in under 600 words. By the way, more on Kashmir:

    • Richard Silverstein: India joins China and Israel as world's leading ethnic cleansers. Author previously (April 18, 2017) wrote: Kashmir-Palestine: India and Israel both use human shields to maintain military occupation.

    • Sameer Yasir/Suhasini Raj/Jeffrey Gettleman: Inside Kashmir, cut off from the world: "A living hell' of anger and fear.

• Richard Wolffe: Trump could renounce white nationalism -- but he can't pretend he cares. Personally, I couldn't care less whether "a president can offer comfort at times like these." I think it's stupid and wasteful for the president to scurry around to disaster zones -- in fact, that it causes more problems than it solves. Of course, it's even worse with a guy who's stupid, arrogant, and incapable of empathy. Embarrassing is the word -- one that applies to Trump literally every day.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Trump's Twitter rant about the Federal Reserve and the dollar, explained.

  • Billionaire Trump donor explains he's in it for the tax cuts, not the racism.

  • Trump's designation of China as a currency manipulator, explained.

    As is typically the case with Trump administration moves, it's not entirely clear what the administration is trying to accomplish here, in part because the administration doesn't do briefings in a well-organized way and in part because various players in the administration are often not on the same page. . . . And in this particular case, it's extremely unlikely the IMF will do anything, because China is not, in fact, manipulating its currency in any traditional sense. It's essentially a policy of the US government stamping its feet while it figures out what it wants to do next.

  • Joe Biden's rivals should attack him with some "Republican talking points": Obviously, not the one about Biden being too far to the left, but: "Joe Biden is old"; "Joe Biden is very establishment"; "the Biden family has made money off of politics."

  • Video games don't cause violent crime: "Research indicates that, if anything, it's the opposite."

• Stephen Zunes: Biden is doubling down on Iraq War lies.

Not news, but let me note in passing a few more historical links on intellectuals who had some influence on me:

• Johanna Fateman: The power of Andrea Dworkin's rage.

• Peter E Gordon: The utopian promise of Adorno's 'open thinking,' fifty years on.

• Tom Holland: America is not Rome. It just thinks it is.

• Judith Shulevitz: Kate Millett: 'Sexual Politics' & family values.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Music: current count 31860 [31831] rated (+29), 259 [257] unrated (+2).

I continue to be surprised at the pro-gun memes showing up in my Facebook feed. Consider this screed (from kin in Arkansas, if that matters):

"When I was in high school we had gun racks in trucks, and they had guns in them, and they were loaded. We even had fist fights! But never once did someone get pissed and go get a gun to shoot someone. We don't have a gun problem people, we have a people problem, a sin problem, a lack of heart and soul problem, a lack of respect for human life problem ,or even a mental health problem. . . . but we DO NOT have a gun problem! I think it's easier for some people to blame an inanimate object instead of taking responsibility."

This starts off with an anecdote which may have been true in the author's personal experience but is far from the general rule. Then it offers up a list of suspect people, blaming them and exculpating the guns they use to commit crimes. We watch a lot of crime stories on TV, and they invariably come down to motive and opportunity. Lots of people have motives that some people have killed for, but they don't do so because they never had the opportunity (or they had some scruples that inhibited them from striking out). Guns may do nothing on their own (there's a Steve Earle song called "The Devil's Right Hand" that argues otherwise), but when someone picks one up, they offer the opportunity of killing someone else, even at a distance. The basic idea behind gun control is to keep guns out of the hands of people who might use them criminally. One might argue that the government isn't smart or fair enough to make those decisions, but reasonable people could surely agree in minimal lists of guns that no one should have and people who should not have guns.

The problem there is finding reasonable people, especially among those on the right who have been propagating these stupid gun memes. Admittedly, there are people who would like to outlaw all guns, but they aren't numerous, and aren't in any position to reject reasonable compromises. My own position is that I dislike guns, and don't see any good reason for the vast majority of Americans (including myself) to own any, but I'm pretty resistant to the idea of outlawing things just because lots of people dislike them -- alcohol, drugs, and sex are cases we should have learned better than. On the other hand, I can occasionally see a case for prohibiting or strictly regulating some things that are especially dangerous, and I could understand wanting to include guns in that category.

Of course, there are some things that government is even more inept at dealing with than guns, and oddly enough they show up on the list of things pro-gun people like to blame gun violence on. Foremost is mental illness, which heads up Trump's list of scapegoats (along with ubiquitous things like violent video games). The fact is we don't do a very good job of treating (or even identifying) mental illness in this country, partly because we don't try (and conservatives are even more lax in this regard), but also because nobody's really very good at it. A rigorous system that tried to quarantine crazy people to keep them away from guns would be orders of magnitude more expensive and more hurtful than one that prohibited guns from all but the certifiably sane. Yeterday's meme blaming gun violence on drugs diagnosis without a solution.

I didn't mean to go down this rathole, but it just opened up -- as is so often the case. What I did want to do is quote a Barbara Ehrenreich tweet:

The mental illness we really have to fear is narcissism. It makes dumb, loathsome people feel virtuous and smart. Gun ownership is another form of narcissism. It makes little men feel big.

I'll also add this one from Adam Serwer, on Trump's Monday morning backpedal:

Trump sounds like a robot when condemning white supremacy and like himself when he's attacking religious and ethnic minorities because one is him pretending and one is him being himself.

Moving on, we have a week's worth of new music for you below. I added some grade data to my mid-year list aggregate, checking sites that hadn't produced lists and (usually) according one point for each record rated 80+ (based on AOTY lists. This had the surprise effect of boosting Sharon Van Etten's Remind Me Tomorrow to first place, 48-47 over Billie Eilish (gain from last week was 10-4). The only other notable shift was Weyes Blood, up from 15 to 10. Biggest drop was probably James Blake, 10-14.

Much of what I listened to last week came from looking at these lists. My other major source was Phil Overeem's July honor roll -- most impressively the MexStep record that came out mid-December, with no one noticing it in 2018 lists.

New batch of q&a from Robert Christgau up tonight: XgauSez.

New records reviewed this week:

• Iggy Azalea: In My Defense (2019, Bad Dreams/Empire): [r]: B+(***)
• John Bacon/Michael McNeill/Danny Ziemann: Refractions (2017 [2019], Jazz Dimensions): [cd]: B+(***)
• J. Balvin & Bad Bunny: Oasis (2019, Universal Music Latino): [r]: B+(**)
• B.J. the Chicago Kid: 1123 (2019, Motown): [r]: B+(*)
• Chance the Rapper: The Big Day (2019, self-released): [r]: A-
• Chuck Cleaver: Send Aid (2019, Shake It): [bc]: B+(***)
• Chick Corea/The Spanish Heart Band: Antidote (2019, Concord): [r]: B-
• Default Genders: Main Pop Girl 2019 (2019, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Pablo Embon: Reminiscent Mood (2018-19 [2019], self-released): [cd]: B-
• Empath: Active Listening: Night on Earth (2019, Get Better): [r]: B+(*)
• Filthy Friends: Emerald Valley (2019, Kill Rock Stars): [r]: B+(**)
• Fred Frith: All Is Always Now: Live at the Stone (2007-16 [2019], Intakt, 3CD): [r]: B+(***)
• From Wolves to Whales: Strandwal (2017 [2019], Aerophonic, 2CD): [cd]: B+(***)
• Rhiannon Giddens: There Is No Other (2019, Nonesuch): [r]: B+(***)
• Charles Wesley Godwin: Seneca (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(*)
• Maxo Kream: Brandon Banks (2019, Big Persona/RCA): [r]: B+(**)
• MexStep: Resistir (2018, Third Root): [r]: A-
• The Paranoid Style: A Goddamn Impossible Way of Life (2019, Bar/None): [r]: B+(***)
• Pink: Hurts 2B Human (2019, RCA): [r]: B+(***)
• Dave Rempis/Joshua Abrams/Avreeayl Ra + Jim Baker: Apsis (2018 [2019], Aerophonic): [cd]: A-
• Herlin Riley: Perpetual Optimism (2017 [2019], Mack Avenue): [r]: B+(*)
• Sasami: Sasami (2019, Domino): [r]: B+(*)
• Betty Who: Betty (2019, self-released): [r]: B+(**)
• Mark Wingfield & Gary Husband: Tor & Vale (2018 [2019], Moonjune): [cd]: B

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• The Tubby Hayes Quartet: Grits, Beans and Greens: The Lost Fontana Studio Session 1969 (1969 [2019], Decca): [r]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Bob Moses: When Elephants Dream of Music (1982 [1983], Gramavision): [r]: B
• Pink: Funhouse (2008, LaFace): [r]: B+(**)
• Pink: Greatest Hits . . . So Far!!! (2000-10 [2010], LaFace/Jive): [r]: A-
• Olaf Polziehn Trio Featuring Harry Allen: American Songbook Vol. 2 (2003, Satin Doll): [r]: B+(**)
• Olaf Polziehn/Ingmar Heller/Troy Davis/Harry Allen: American Songbook Vol. 3 (2006, Satin Doll): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Corey Christiansen: La Proxima (Origin): August 12
• Harbinger: Extended (OA2): August 12
• New York Voices: Reminiscing in Tempo (Origin)
• Alberto Pibiri & the AI Peppers: The Nacho Blues (Alberto Pibiri Music)
• Paul Silbergleit: January (Blujazz)
• Paul Zauner's Blue Brass feat. David Murray: Roots n' Wings (PAO/Blujazz)
• Miguel Zenón: Sonero: The Music of Ismael Rivera (Miel Music); August 30

Weekend Roundup

Starting this early (Friday), hoping to avoid the last-minute crunch. Not really news, but CNN's Democratic presidential debates got a lot of attention from the punditocracy this week. As usual, I didn't watch in real time (although my wife did, so I overheard some), but caught the "highlights" later (among the comics, Colbert was most informative). Let's group the links here, rather than clutter up the main section:

• David Axelrod: Elizabeth Warren is running a brilliant campaign.

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • 4 winners and 3 losers from the second night of the July Democratic debates: With German Lopez, Dylan Matthews, and Andrew Prokop. Winners: Joe Biden ("Well, this one's complicated"); Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders ("weren't there, but they loomed large anyway"); Cory Booker; single-payer activists. Losers: Kamala Harris; CNN, again; the DNC.

  • 3 winners and 4 losers from the first night of the July Democratic debates: With German Lopez, PR Lockhart, Dylan Matthews, and Ella Nilsen. Winners: Elizabeth Warren; John Delaney; the Republican Party ("several of the major issues were framed by the moderators in terms Republicans would love"). Losers: the policy needs of black voters; CNN; Beto O'Rourke.

  • Marianne Williamson isn't funny. She's scary. Picks on her views on depression and illness, which are not exactly tangential to either her career as a "self-help guru" or her political aspirations. As for funny, my take so far (and I know or care nothing about her career) is that she does a nice job of filling a niche in the Democratic Party that no one even imagined before: a soft focus on morals and emotions, like Ben Carson among Republicans. That role is unimagined because most Democrats try hard to be rational and grounded in reality, but sometimes she seems to be onto something at a primal, instinctive leve. Of course, much of what she says is, as Beauchamp puts it, "extremely vague and hard to parse, but managed to at times banal and at other times deeply weird."

• Ryan Bort: Jake Tapper and CNN totally botched the health care discussion.

• Alexia Fernández Campbell:

  • What Biden doesn't get about immigration.

  • Democrats aren't going to win working-class voters this way, says labor union president: "Democrats have to speak about how they are going to take the shitty jobs that exist in this economy and make them good jobs." Isn't that usually just a matter of making them pay better? When Robert Reich was auditioning to become Clinton's Secretary of Labor, he came up with the rationalization that it didn't matter if American factories shut down, because unemployed workers could always be retrained to become high-paid "symbol manipulators." Ever since then, the only answer neoliberal Democrats had to declining working wages and standards was to offer more education (and debt). But no matter how much money we plow into education (and I don't doubt that we should spend a lot more than we've been doing), we'll still have shitty jobs we'll need people to do. But we can decide whether we respect and value the people who do those jobs enough to accord them a decent wage and fair and equal rights -- a status we used to call "middle class." Interview with Mary Kay Henry.

• John Cassidy:

  • Where do Trump and the Democrats stand as the Summer recess arrives?

  • The battle over Barack Obama's legacy at the Democratic debates.

• Tim Dickinson: Can Joe Biden sell 'no we can't'? "The triumph of the progressives on night one of the Detroit debates portends trouble for the former vice president."

• FiveThirtyEight:

  • The second Democratic debate in 5 charts.

  • What went down on night two of the second Democratic debate.

  • What went down on night one of the Second Democratic debate.

  • Nate Silver: Where I think the candidates stand after the second debate.

• John F Harris: Democrats are veering left. It might just work. Cites Stanley Greenberg, who wrote a book about how Reagan "captured many working class Democrats who believed their party's liberalism was out of step with their lives. But now he "believes that the urgency voters feel for shaking up the status quo means there's less risk for candidates and the party in going too far than in not going far enough." For a contrary point, Harris cites Rahm Emanuel, whose fear and loathing of the left is even greater than his readiness to sell out Democratic voters. Greenberg has a book coming out in September: R.I.P. G.O.P.: How the New America is Dooming the Republicans.

• Umair Irfan: 2020 Democrats are getting more confrontational with the fossil fuel industry.

• Sarah Jones:

  • Joe Biden is the reason Obama's legacy is on trial.

  • How do you host a debate in Detroit without asking about labor rights?

• John Judis: The Democrats need to get their act together.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • Gravel '20 is done.

  • Why you can't ignore Marianne Williamson: "Mock her all you want, but Marianne Williamson speaks to people horrified by Trump who aren't satisfied with policy papers."

  • Trump outperformed his popularity in 2016. That might not happen in 2020. As I mentioned somewhere else here, many voters saw Trump as a solution to a very tangible problem in Hilary Clinton. Maybe they hated whatever it was they thought she stood for (and there was grounds for that from the right and also from the left), or maybe they just didn't want to subject themselves to four years of pompous clichés, inane backbiting, and petty pseudo-scandals blown way out of proportion. Maybe they even recognized the unfairness of the vitriol, but still, the only way to make it go away was to vote her down. But since 2016, he's dominated public consciousness, becoming the source of our public embarrassment to a much grosser extent than she ever was or could be. There will, of course, be a block of people that loves him no matter what, and another that despises him, but in between there's a slice that can break one way or another. If in 2016 they broke for Trump because they wanted to flip off the status quo and avoid its scandals, those exact same rationales suggest they'll break against him in 2020. That's probably not enough to seal his fate. I can imagine at least one other slice breaking the opposite way: people who support the status quo, even as it's been warped by Trump's malign rule. Moreover, I expect Trump will have a lot more money, and a much more professional campaign behind him this time, in lockstep with a pretty unified Republican Party. But still, the tables have turned on those last-minute impulse voters.

• Jen Kirby: Pete Buttigieg says he'd withdraw troops from Afghanistan in his first year.

• Eric Levitz:

  • Here's who won (and lost) the second Democratic debate, night two: In rank order: Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, Julian Castro, Michael Bennet, Jay Inslee, Bill de Blasio, Kamala Harris.

  • Here's who won (and lost) the second Democratic debate, night one: In rank order: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Marianne Williamson, Pete Buttigieg, Steve Bullock, Amy Klobuchar, John Delaney, Tim Ryan, Beto O'Rourke, John Hickenlooper.

  • What Andrew Yang gets wrong (and right) about robots.

• German Lopez:

  • Democrats have been discussing the same ideas on guns for 25 years. It's time to change that. Also: Michael Luo: The mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton should spur Democrats to propose big ideas on gun violence.

  • The Democratic debates neglected one of America's biggest public health crises: "The opioid epidemic hardly came up at all." I'd argue that's because it is a mere side-effect of a cluster of more central issues, like our failure to guarantee everyone's right to quality health care, and also the general malaise in much of the economy. Also, it's boring, aside from proposals like "executing drug traffickers or building a wall" that are stupid and/or cruel. But if you do want something on opioids, see: Sally Satel: The truth about painkiller addiction.

  • Joe Biden's long record supporting the war on drugs and mass incarceration, explained.

  • Kamala Harris's controversial record on criminal justice, explained.

• Robert Mackey:

  • Protesters target Joe Biden on deportation and Bill de Blasio on Eric Garner during Democratic debate.

  • Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders dominate Democratic debate set up to ambush them.

• Josh Marshall: Obama looms over the primary in invisible ways.

• Dylan Matthews: The presidential debates wasted too much time talking about stuff only Congress can do: "The president has a lot of power -- so why wouldn't the candidates talk about it?"

• Ella Nilsen: Jay Inslee points to Democrats' real problem: Mitch McConnell: "Even if the Democrats win the Senate, the filibuster stands in the way of their big plans."

• Anna North: Joe Biden's 1981 views on child care haven't aged well. Gillibrand called him out on it.

• Charles P Pierce:

  • Joe Biden is the product of a Democratic Party that was terrified of Ronald Reagan. I think this is the key point to understand about Biden, and why his campaign is intrinsically compromised. It's not so much that he believes in conservative maxims as that his instinct, which served him fairly well for decades, is to surrender ground to Republicans.

  • Debating the Obama presidency instead of the current one seems politically suicidal: "And yet, it's honest and justified. Just ask Julian Castro."

• Andrew Prokop:

  • What Biden meant to say in his bungled debate closing statement. This is the guy who "won" the debate? The longer he stays in the race, the busier the "what Biden meant to say" industry is going to be.

  • The Democratic debate's incoherent discussion about who could best beat Trump. Notable quote, from Warren against Delaney: "I don't understand why anybody goes to all the trouble of running for president of the United States just to talk about what we really can't do and shouldn't fight for."

• Max Read: Is Andrew Yang the doomer candidate?

• Frank Rich: The Democratic debates were built to fail.

• Rolling Stone:

  • Winners and losers on night 2 of the second Democratic debates. Winners: Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Jay Inslee, Andrew Yang. Losers: Michael Bennet, Bill de Blasio, Tulsi Gabbard. Treading water: Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro.

  • Winners and losers on night 1 of the second Democratic debates: Winners: Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Marianne Williamson ("go ahead, laugh"), Steve Bullock. Losers: John Delaney, Hickenlooper, Beto O'Rourke, Amy Klobuchar. Treading water: Pete Buttigieg, Tim Ryan.

• Aaron Rupar: "Your question is a Republican talking point": CNN frames debate questions around right-wing concerns: "Republicans weren't onstage during the Democratic debate -- but were living rent-free inside moderators' heads."

• Dylan Scott: The messy health care discussion at the second Democratic debate, explained.

• Emily Stewart:

  • about social media manipulation.

  • Bill de Blasio's new plan to "tax the hell" out of rich people, explained.

  • Why Bill de Blasio is so hated, explained.

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells: At the Democratic debate, Joe Biden defends the party's past.

• Alex Ward: The 2 veterans on the Democratic debate stage made a big promise about Afghanistan: That would be Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Buttigieg, who want out.

• Lawrence S Wittner: The Democratic debates need more questions about nuclear war.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • The weird controversy over Democrats "criticizing Obama" at this week's debate, explained.

  • Democrats are skipping the most important health care debate: "should this even be the priority?"

    Personally, I think the Medicare-for-all people are 100 percent correct. The current American health care system is bad and wasteful, and replacing it with something like the Canadian system would be a good idea. But the policy world is full of good ideas, and not every good idea can be your top priority. Prioritizing health reform has not, in the past, been an extraordinarily successful strategy for new presidents.

    I agree with the first line here, and would add that any presidential candidate who disagrees is not just wrong (in all their arguments and rationalizations) but a coward to boot. On the other hand, if I was in charge and didn't have the votes, I'd write up a good single-payer bill and hold it in reserve, while trying to pass a bunch of less ambitious reforms to the ACA framework. If the reforms are thwarted, either by politics or by the courts, you can always fall back on the single-payer bill, and that case would become more compelling. Meanwhile, there is a lot that can be done, and not just by throwing more money at the blood-sucking insurance companies. The long-term answer is not just single-payer (cutting the for-profit insurance companies out of the system) but reducing the profit motive in the provider system. (You'll never wring all the profit-seeking out of the system, but non-profit hospitals were a lot more cost-effective than HCA is.) One thing that could be done would be to build up government-supported non-profits that could compete against the profit-seeking companies. (The "public option" under ACA is one example, but non-profit options wouldn't have to be directly under government bureaucracy.) One might, for instance, change bankruptcy law to allow failed hospitals and service providers to be reorganized with public support and employee control. Another idea I've been kicking around would be to offer a bare-bones universal insurance (e.g., through the Medicare provider network) that would cover an initially small set of emergencies and illnesses. This would make private insurance supplemental (rather than primary), reducing its cost while allowing it to fit more customized needs. (You can see how this works with Medicare supplemental plans. Medicare at present does most of the heavy lifting, but still leaves a lot of deductible nonsense that makes supplemental insurance attractive. That could change if Medicare-for-All improved a lot, but that's going to be a hard battle to fight -- especially all at once.)

  • 3 winners and 4 losers from the Democrats' two-night debate extravaganza: Winners: Cory Booker (Yglesias thinks "neoliberal shill" is a compliment); Joe Biden; the Great Winnowing. Losers: knowing what powers the president has; comprehension of what is in these health care plans; all these housing plans; policy criticism of Donald Trump.

  • America deserves a debate between Joe Biden and his main progressive critics: "Elizabeth Warren versus John Delaney is not the drama we've been craving."

  • Elizabeth Warren's vision for changing America's trade policy, explained.

Lots of non-campaign news this week, but Donald Trump's flagrant racism caught the most attention, climaxing with two mass shootings which, despite pro forma denials, appear as the proof in the pudding.

Checked my Facebook feed shortly before filing this, and was rather surprised to find as many/maybe more pro-gun memes than anti, not that the former make any sense. One, for instance, links to a piece titled "Every Mass Shooting Shares 1 Thing in Common, NOT Guns": I didn't follow, but the picture shows a pile of pills. I doubt that, but even if lots of mass shooters popped pills, by definition every single one used a gun. All of those were forwarded by acknowledged friends. (Of course, I do also have anti-gun friends. They may even be in the majority, but lose out in this comparison because they tend to post their own thoughts instead of just propagating someone else's propaganda.)

Some links on this and other stories:

• Tim Alberta: 'Mother is not going to like this': The 48 hours that almost brought down Trump: "The exclusive story of how Trump survived the Access Hollywood tape." An excerpt from the book, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump. Ends with this memorable debate exchange:

  Donald Trump: If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation. Because there have never been so many lies, so much deception.

  Hilary Clinton: Everything he just said was absolutely false. It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country.

  Donald Trump: Because you'd be in jail.

  Trump later claimed "that debate won me the election." It was a lucky punch, but it landed because more people wanted to see her fail than so feared Trump they were willing to live with her constantly in their minds for the next four (or eight) years. It was not a moment American voters would be proud of.

• AP: Police: Rookie Texas officer shoots at dog, kills woman.

• David Atkins:

  • Trump still refuses to condemn violent white supremacy.

  • We have a gun problem, and we have a white supremacist terrorism problem.

  • Republicans won't go back to "normal" after Trump.

• Andrew J Bacevich:

  • An alternative to US world dominance.

  • In the Trump era, Americans can't agree on the past, much less the future.

  • America's other original sin: "We have never reckoned with the bloody US takeover of the Philippines, our first bite at empire's apple."

• Dean Baker:

  • Employment is high -- but job growth is slowing down.

  • Trump's fixation on intellectual property rights serves the rich.

  • The financial industry preys on 401(k) fees. It doesn't have to be this way. "Without change, we can expect a serious decline in retiree living standards."

  • Replace patent monopolies with direct public funding for drug research.

  • Under Trump, manufacturing job growth slows to a trickle.

  • Donald Trump's capricious tariffs open the door to corruption.

• Peter Beinart: The real reason so many Republicans love Israel? Their own white supremacy. Related: Jonathan Ofir: Racism is at the center of Israeli settler-colonialist venture: a review of Ronit Lentin's book, Traces of Racial Exception: Racializing Israeli Settler Colonialism. Ofir also wrote this update on changing alignments in Israeli politics: Israeli pols merge parties, and the right-wing seems stronger than ever.

• Phyllis Bennis: What the House anti-BDS resolution reveals about the Palestine solidarity movement. Related: Omar Barghouti: Why Americans should support BDS.

• Jared Bernstein: We can't fund the progressive agenda by taxing the 1% alone: "The tricky politics of taxing the 1%, the middle class, and everyone in between." Basic point here is well taken. To do everything we'd like to see the government do requires that tax revenues be increased. While current tax rates leave a lot of leeway for increasing taxes on the very rich, that's not necessarily enough -- especially moving forward, especially if we do other things to diminish inequality. It may also be easier to increase a range of taxes by a small amount than it would be to increase one tax (income) by a lot. For instance, the easiest way to fund the sort of basic health insurance I outline elsewhere here would be to tack it onto the payroll tax that already funds Medicare, even though that's the most regressive tax we use these days. It would also be good to implement a small VAT (basically, a national sales tax), which is also regressive but could be scaled up to raise significant revenue as needed. One fact worth recalling is that not every tax has to be progressive -- you can compensate with more sharply progressive tax rates on incomes and estates, which is all you really need to bring the 1% back into mainstream America. Democrats need to be wary of falling for Republican talking points, which is what they're doing when they deny any tax increases on the middle class. They need to convince people that the returns on their taxes will be worthwhile -- which is basically what FDR did when he designed the payroll tax to fund Social Security.

• Max Blumenthal: Behind the guise of adversarial journalism, CNN's Jake Tapper is taking America to war.

• Barbara Boland: Unqualified UN Ambassador is the perfect weak link: "Don't be surprised if Kelly Craft's lack of experience is exactly what Bolton and Pompeo wanted for their war cabinet."

• Bryce Covert: Right-wing troika: "The Republican Party's 50-state strategy." Review of Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's book, State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States -- and the Nation.

• Chas Danner:

  • Everything we know about the Dayton mass shooting: Nine dead, 16 injured, shooter a "young white man" with an AR-15-style assault rifle.

  • Everything we know about the El Paso Walmart massacre: Twenty dead, 26 injured, shooter "a 21-year-old white male gunman" with an AK-47-style assault rifle.

• Jesse Eisinger: How Trump's political appointees overruled tougher settlements with big banks.

• Henry Farrell: Don't ask how to pay for climate change. Ask who.

• Tara Golshan: Rep. Will Hurd's retirement reflects GOP's biggest electoral struggle in the House: Trump.

• Benjamin Hart: Trump seems thrilled that someone broke into Elijah Cummings's house.

• Sheldon Himelfarb: The next election will require a new kind of vigilance.

  The 2020 race has now begun in earnest, with the Democrats having their first primary debates last month [June]. Lurking in the background is something that once seemed inconceivable in modern-day America: the threat of election-related violence.

  As the Southern Poverty Law Center said earlier this year in an annual report, there has been a rise in domestic terrorism, hate crimes, and street violence. It's no surprise, then, that on June 26, Reddit -- the fifth-most trafficked website in the U.S. -- announced it was "quarantining" a popular message board with 750,000 followers because of active discussions involving violence against political figures. . . .

  Perhaps the biggest harbinger of election violence is the proliferation of disinformation, rumors, and hate speech. All of which are spreading further and with greater velocity than at arguably any other moment in American history.

• Rachel Hodes: What 'abolish ICE' really means: "It's about asking whether we need an immigration system that terrorizes the least dangerous people in this country." Related: Emily Ryo: How ICE enforcement has changed under the Trump administration.

• Eric Holthaus: Greenland is melting away before our eyes.

• Umair Irfan:

  • Russian cities are choking under smoke from massive Siberian wildfires.

  • Air travel is a huge contributor to climate change. A new global movement wants you to be ashamed to fly.

• b>Ellen Knickmeyer/Brady McCombs: Opponent of nation's public lands is picked to oversee them.

• Markos Kounalakis: Donald Trump's dangerous empathy deficit.

• Paul Krugman:

  • Trump's trade quagmire (wonkish).

  • Why was Trumponomics a flop? "Neither tax cuts nor tariffs are working."

    But why has Trumponomics failed to deliver much besides trillion-dollar budget deficits? The answer is that both the tax cuts and the trade war were based on false views about how the world works.

    Republican faith in the magic of tax cuts -- and, correspondingly, belief that tax increases will doom the economy -- is the ultimate policy zombie, a view that should have been killed by evidence decades ago but keeps shambling along, eating G.O.P. brains.

    The record is actually awesomely consistent. Bill Clinton's tax hike didn't cause a depression, George W. Bush's tax cuts didn't deliver a boom, Jerry Brown's California tax increase wasn't "economic suicide," Sam Brownback's Kansas tax-cut "experiment" (his term) was a failure.

  • A racist stuck in the past: "In Trump's mind, it's still 1989." Krugman picked 1989 because "that was the year he demanded bringing back the death penalty in response to the case of the Central Park Five," but for most of us that was just one year in a long continuum of viciousness (racist and otherwise).

• Bess Levin: As deficit explodes, GOP demands emergency tax cut for the rich: "Twenty senators have urged the Treasury to give the wealthy another tax cut via executive order."

• Gideon Levy: What Israel's demolition of 70 Palestinian homes was really about.

• Dahlia Lithwick: It's never "too soon" to talk about preventing mass shootings. It's always too late.

• Martin Longman:

  • How to campaign when nothing is possible. I suppose if I was a do-nothing "moderate" I'd take some comfort from this, realizing that even such a committed and principled radical as Bernie Sanders would preserve more status quo than another four years of Trump.

    If the Republicans maintain their majority in the Senate, the new Democratic president will not be enacting one iota of their top shelf legislative agenda. There will be nothing major on health care or college loans or immigration or climate change. Even judges will be only confirmed in the most belated and begrudging manner, and only if they've never said anything on the record that conservatives find irritating. All legislative progress that can be made will come as the result of leverage over must-pass bills, and the leverage will only be truly significant so long as the Democrats retain control of the House of Representatives. But navigating government shutdowns and threats of national default in order to attach a few things to appropriations bills is not going to turn many of a candidate's campaign promises into reality. . . .

    Yet, even if the Democrats win the trifecta and eliminate the legislative filibuster, they'll still have huge problems passing legislation. Even assuming that Nancy Pelosi can push the president's agenda through her chamber (and this is doubtful for some of the policies the candidates are pushing), there are senators (like Michael Bennet of Colorado, for example) on the record opposing much of the progressive candidates' agenda. . . .

    I absolutely understand that people are hungry for change. People are sick to death of Congress and want to break this gridlock. But it's a problem that is beyond the power of any candidate or any rhetoric to fix.

    On the other hand, while a left-committed candidate like Sanders or Warren might not get much more accomplished than mediocrities like Biden, Klobuchar, or Bennet, they would try, and be seen as trying, and their frustation and dedication would sustain the Party's slow drift to the left. And that would generate more creative discussion of real problems -- the solution to which is only to be found further left.

  • Business leaders flock to Trump for protections against socialism. Cites his previous piece, What if big business falls in completely with Trumpism?

• Annie Lowrey:

  • The Supreme Court is bad for your health: "Its decision to let states opt out of the Medicaid expansion turned out to have lethal consequences." Or, more pointedly, "did Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts kill almost 16,000 people?"

  • Conservatives are wrong about what's driving immigration: "It's jobs and social networks that bring immigrants to America -- not government benefits."

  • What Acosta has done other than let Epstein off the hook: "Trump said the [now-ex] secretary of labor is doing a 'fantastic job.' Is that right?"

• Andrew Marantz: The El Paso shooting and the virality of evil.

  The national conversation will now turn, as it should, to gun control, to mental illness, and to the President's practice of exacerbating racial tensions, which has been one of his avocations for decades and now appears to be his central reëlection strategy. But there's also a more specific question: what can be done about the fact that so many of these terrorists -- in Pittsburgh, in Poway, in Christchurch, in El Paso -- seem to find inspiration in the same online spaces? Each killer, in the moment, may have acted alone, but they all appear to have been zealous converts to the same ideology -- a paranoid snarl of raw anger, radical nationalism, unhinged nihilism, and fears of "white genocide" that is still referred to as "fringe," although it's creeping precariously close to the mainstream.

• Hilary Matfess: The progressive case for free trade. Related: Daniel Block: Free trade for liberals. This piece focuses more on European problems, and vainly posits that an alliance with American liberals would help "protect democracy, fight inequality, and save the environment." Lots of problems here, starting with the fact that US trade policy -- even under Democratic presidents -- has always been the province of business interests, and while those interests may like to tout "democracy" as a propaganda riff, fighting inequality and saving the environment never really was their thing. Moreover, any "Atlantic Alliance" is at present bound to reek of those nations' colonial/imperial pasts. On the other hand, other alliances have always been possible: internationalism was the hallmark of the labor movement at least since 1848, and could be again. But it will take some kind of political revolution before the US and Europe can see trade as a tool for promoting the welfare of all people.

• Anna North: The movement to decriminalize sex work, explained.

• Richard Parker: When hate came to El Paso.

• Charles P Pierce:

  • Trump's Cincinnati rally had some ripe bits of Presidential* insanity.

  • The President* is determined to staff the whole government with sycophants. Makes me wonder, is "psychophants" a word? Should it be?

  • Russia is full of environmental time bombs. So is Detroit.: "The United States has no room to gloat here."

• Elaina Plott: 'We're all tired of being called racists'. I'm getting tired of having to call them racists, too. Maybe they should do a better job of keeping their racism to themselves?

• Daniel Politi:

  • Trump characterizes mass shootings as a "mental illness problem": That's not likely to be much of a defense against people to point to Trump as at least partially responsible for the problem.

  • Beto O'Rourke: Trump is "racist" whose words lead to violence like El Paso shooting.

  • Gun violence in 2019: There have been 251 mass shootings in the US in 216 days.

• Nicholas Powers: When Trump calls people "filth," he's laying the groundwork for genocide.

• Andrew Prokop: From condemning "white terrorism" to condemning video games: Republican responses to El Paso shooting.

• Jennifer Rubin: There is no excuse for supporting this president. Looks like the Washington Post is piling on; e.g. EJ Dionne Jr: On guns and white nationalism, one side is right and one is wrong; Max Boot: Trump is leading our country to destruction. Needless to say, Trump's holding up his end of the feud. See: Jonathan Chait: Trump directs government to punish Washington Post owner.

• Philip Rucker: 'How do you stop these people?': Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric looms over El Paso massacre. Also: Ayal Feinberg/Regina Branton/Valerie Martinez-Ebers: Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes. Coincidence?

• Aaron Rupar:

  • At Cincinnati rally, Trump turns Baltimore violence victims into political pawns: "Explicitly demeaning blue cities and states is now a feature of Trump's campaign speeches."

  • The Gilroy, California, shooting highlights a big hole in Trump's logic about gun violence.

• Adam Serwer: White nationalism's deep American roots: "A long-overdue excavation of the book that Hitler called his "bible," and the man who wrote it." That would be Madison Grant, author of the 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race.

• Raja Shehadeh: The use and abuse of international law in the occupied territories: Review of Noura Erakat's book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine.

• Matt Shuham: Kobach used private border wall's email list to fundraise for Senate campaign: "This email could run afoul of campaign finance laws."

• Richard Silverstein: Trump donor, Elliott Broidy, paid Dennis Ross $10,000 to publish pro-Saudi op-ed in The Hill.

• Matt Simon: The bizarre, peaty science of Arctic wildfires.

• Danny Sjursen: US troops are back in Saudi Arabia -- this will end badly.

• Jordan Smith: As Trump fans the flames of anti-abortion rhetoric, Kansas offers a cautionary tale.

• Yves Smith: Hospitals squeal over Trump proposal to disclose insurance company discounts.

• Felicia Sonmez/Paul Kane: Republicans struggle to respond in wake of El Paso, Dayton shootings.

• Matt Taibbi: The rise and fall of superhero Robert Mueller.

• Nick Turse: Violence has spiked in Africa since the military founded AFRICOM, Pentagon study finds.

• Alex Ward:

  • John Ratcliffe, Trump's pick for top intel post, withdraws amid scrutiny over exaggerated bio: Well, that didn't take long. Some more on Ratcliffe, for the historical file:

    • Trevor Aaronson: Trump's pick for top intelligence job bragged of experience as terror prosecutor -- but he doesn't have any.

    • Erin Banco/Asawin Suebsaeng: Whistleblower allegations surfaced just before DNI pick John Ratcliffe withdrew.

    • Will Sommer: Trump intel pick John Ratcliffe started theory of FBI anti-Trump 'secret society'.

    • Michael Warren: With Ratcliffe, another Trump nominee withdraws with a damaged reputation.

  • US and Taliban may strike a deal allowing American troops to come home from Afghanistan. Also:

    • Dan Lamothe/John Hudson/Pamela Constable: US preparing to withdraw thousands of troops from Afghanistan in initial deal with Taliban.

  • The US just withdrew from an important nuclear arms treaty with Russia. Don't panic -- yet. Related:

    • Matt Korda: In memoriam: The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty dies at 32.

    • David E Sanger/Edward Wong: US ends Cold War missile treaty, with aim of countering China.

  • Trump announces tariffs on nearly all Chinese goods starting in September.

• Will Wilkinson: Conservatives are hiding their 'loathing' behind our flag: "The molten core of right-wing nationalism is the furious denial of America's unalterably multiracial, multicultural national character."

• Robin Wright: The rhetoric and reality of Donald Trump's racism.

• Matthew Yglesias:

  • Today's budget deal proves once again Republicans never cared about the deficit. Nothing really new here: I still recall when Nixon declared himself a Keynesian. With their tax giveaways, Reagan, Bush, and Trump didn't even have to admit as much. They merely understood that the rules are different when the Republicans are in power or in opposition. That's only hypocrisy if you pretend there's a general principle involved.

    The critical thing, however, is that if not for hypocritical Republican opposition, we could have been running these higher deficits in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015. And if we had done that, the economy could have recovered faster from the Great Recession, the unemployment rate could have fallen more rapidly, and hundreds of billions of dollars of national income that is now irretrievably lost could have been earned.

  • The Federal Reserve's interest rate cut, explained.

  • America's dual housing crisis, and what Democrats plan to do about it, explained: "A crisis of low incomes and a parallel crisis of tight supply."

  • Trump is approving an anti-competitive merger that will cost you money: "But he seems to have made money off the deal personally." The merger of Sprint and T-Mobile, currently the 3rd and 4th largest mobile phone networks.

• Li Zhou: The new bipartisan Senate bill aimed at making Big Pharma lower drug prices, explained.

Jul 2019