Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (final).

Tweet: Music Week: 30 albums, 2 A-list,

Music: Current count 40636 [40606] rated (+30), 14 [14] unrated (-0).

Seemed unlikely I would hit 30 albums this week, as I've started every day with something old (Fats Waller today), and often found myself uncertain what to play next. The two A- records this week were recommended by Brad Luen and Chris Monsen, having largely exhausted Phil Overeem's July 2 list. Only things that nudged me up to 30 were writing an extra-long Speaking of Which and, when my initial count was 29, an EP recommended by Harbinger Entity.

The reviews will have to speak for themselves. What follows is mostly rant, meant mostly just to clear my head, so no real reason for you not to jump to to the review section. End of the month, so the July archive is final (link above), but I'll post this before I wrap up the indexing.

I've been plagued by technical problems lately. My top problem today was getting a Fujitsu ScanSnap ix1300 scanner to work with my computer (a home-built running Xubuntu 22.04). The SANE supported devices list says it's supported (except for wi-fi, which I neither need nor want), but I've spent many hours trying to get it to work, wrote several letters, eventually called up Fujitsu. Bottom line seems to be: no way. Fortunately, I should be able to return it (assuming I can get the label printed and/or the QR code scanned, both of which are proving difficult). This appears to be a case not just of getting a proprietary driver in place but of much basic functionality embedded in applications programs.

The printer problem is due to the HP OfficeJet Pro 9010 I bought a year back, which is now refusing jobs sent from my computer. This is the worst purchase I ever made in my life, for lots of reasons, but in theory should work. I need to contact HP, and try to hold back my anger.

I still don't have the email problem fixed. I have a server, which my regular ISP (Cox) refuses to accept email from. I'm thinking about implementing a short-term workaround, but it's quite possible that the underlying problem is keeping other mail from being delivered. One effect of this is that I'm not getting any questions through my form. Also the mail lists are at least partly broken (at least I'm not seeing them). Another problem with the form is that the captcha package (securimage) is no longer supported, so I should probably find a replacement (or just punt).

Another distracting project here is that my Sony 5-CD changer is broken (and Sony is no longer making them). Most likely a bad belt, but getting to it has been arduous, and I'm still not there. (I've looked for professional repairs, but been turned off by the sticker shock, so I've been thrashing.) Given how little I use the upstairs system for, I'm wondering whether it might be better to just replace it with an iPod equivalent, assuming I can load up such a thing from my Linux computers. (If we ever get a new car, I may have to switch to something like that, replacing my well-stocked CD travel cases.) Any suggestions? Longer range, I'd still like to set up a network jukebox.

Also had a very annoying mouse problem (erratic response). I bought a replacement, but it had the same problem. Turns out the fix was to plug the wireless connector into the front USB port instead of the back one.

I also have the usual scads of house projects. Anything outside will have to wait until hell freezes over (minus a month or two, if we're lucky and have a decent autumn). Forecast is 107°F tomorrow, which would be the hottest so far this year (although no record).

End rant.

My friend Max Stewart is presenting a show of his photography (August 4, here in Wichita).

New records reviewed this week:

• Aila Trio: Shaped by Sea Waves (2022 [2023], Edgetone): [sp]: B+(***)
• Akmee: Sacrum Profanum (2022, Nakama): [bc]: B+(**)
• Aphex Twin: Blackbox Life Recorder 21f/In a Room7 F760 (2023, Warp, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
• Ingebrigt Håker Flaten & Paal Nilssen-Love: Guts & Skins (2022 [2023], PNL): [sp]: B+(**)
• Aldo Fosko Collective: This One Time (2023, Hitchtone): [cd]: B+(**)
• Gabriels: Angels & Queens (2023, Atlas Artists/Parlophone): [sp]: B+(**)
• Allan Harris: Live at Blue Llama Jazz Club (2023, Love Productions/Live at Blue Llama): [cd]: B+(**)
• High Pulp: Days in the Desert (2023, Anti-): [sp]: B+(**)
• Carly Rae Jepsen: The Loveliest Time (2023, Silent): [sp]: B+(***)
• Russ Johnson Quartet: Reveal (2022 [2023], Calligram): [cd]: B+(**) [08-04]
• Sarathy Korwar: KAL (Real World) (2023, The Leaf Label): [sp]: B+(**)
• Jessy Lanza: Love Hallucination (2023, Hyperdub): [sp]: B+(*)
• Large Unit: New Map (2021 [2022], PNL): [sp]: B+(**)
• Large Unit: Clusterfuck (2021 [2022], PNL): [sp]: B+(**)
• The Lemon Twigs: Everything Harmony (2023, Captured Tracks): [sp]: C+
• Mahalia: IRL (2023, Atlantic): [sp]: B+(***)
• Rita Ora: You & I (2023, BMG): [sp]: B+(**)
• Mehmet Ali Sanlikol & Whatsnext?: Turkish Hipster (2023, Dunya): [cd]: B
• Skrillex: Quest for Fire (2023, OWSLA/Atlantic): [sp]: B+(*)
• Skrillex: Don't Get Too Close (2023, OWSLA/Atlantic): [sp]: B+(**)
• Dudu Tassa/Jonny Greenwood: Jarak Qaribak (2023, World Circuit): [sp]: B+(*)
• Felo Le Tee/Mellow & Sleazy: The III Wise Men (2023, New Money Gang): [sp]: A-
• Sam Weinberg Trio With Chris Lightcap & Tom Rainey: Implicatures (2022 [2023], Astral Spirits): [bc]: A-
• YMA & Jadsa: Zelena (2023, self-released, EP): [sp]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Nina Simone: You've Got to Learn (1966 [2023], Verve): [sp]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Aila Trio: Aila Trio (2018, Hoo-Ha): [sp]: B+(**)
• High Pulp: Pursuit of Ends (2022, Anti-): [sp]: B+(*)
• Roots of Rock (1927-37 [1979], Yazoo): [sp]: B+(***)
• Co Streiff-Russ Johnson Quartet: In Circles (2011, Intakt): [r]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Aline's Etoile Magique: Eclipse (Elastic) [08-25]
• Kris Davis Diatom Ribbons: Live at the Village Vanguard (Pyroclastic, 2CD) [09-01]
• Ember: August in March (Imani) [08-11]
• Pascal Le Boeuf: Ritual Being (SoundSpore) [08-25]
• James Brandon Lewis Red Lily Quintet: For Mahalia, With Love (Tao Forms, 2CD) [09-08]
• Doug Richards Orchestra: Through a Sonic Prism: The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim (self-released) [09-08]
• Todd Sickafoose: Bear Proof (Secret Hatch) [09-29]
SLUGish Ensemble: In Solitude (Slow & Steady) [09-15]

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Started early enough, but once again this is chewing up Sunday evening. While I'm having a lot of trouble getting my own projects organized, it's almost therapeutic to stumble across a piece and write a few off-the-cuff comments.

Here's a Patriotic Millionaires meme, picturing Ronald Reagan, saying: "In 1984 I lowered the top income tax rate from 70% to 28%. Then I imposed the first ever income tax on social security benefits to make up for it."

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans: I've generally ignored the horserace articles, even the snippy ones about DeSantis's faltering (or rebooting, take your pick) campaign. Trump got back into the news cycle, provoked with additional indictments, which elicited the usual vicious incoherence. Elsewhere, Republicans have been very busy in their endless quest to hurt people and screw up the future.

• Zack Beauchamp: [07-28] Republicans are threatening to sabotage George W Bush's greatest accomplishment: It's a program I admit I hadn't heard of, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which "has saved as many as 25 million lives," and "is currently supporting treatment for over 20 million people who depend on the program for continued access to medication." So, just the sort of thing today's Republicans want to kill, all the more so since it gives them an opportunity to repoliticize AIDS and trash Anthony Fauci as one of the great monsters of our time. And if Bush's legacy gets trampled along the way, well, it turns out that he was just RINO scum all along.

• Jonathan Chait:

  • [07-26] Ron DeSantis's Nazi outreach is a strategy, not an accident.

  • [07-26] Conservatives have a new master theory of American politics: I'm always intrigued by theories, as they imply thinking, even when they derive from the right, where such skills have atrophied if ever they existed. This one's based on what Chait's calling Longmarchism, which argues that the Left has, over decades, implemented a "long march through existing institutions," infiltrating and capturing them to such an extent that only a political revolt by right-thinking Americans can restore the nation as God intended. Chait points to Christopher Rufo's America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (reviewed here) and Up From Conservatism: Revitalizing the Right After a Generation of Decay, an essay collection edited by Arthur Milikh. Chait does a decent job of debunking this nonsense, but a few points could be clearer:

    1. There is no control structure on the left -- nothing remotely resembling the cells Communists and Birchers tried to set up long ago, nor even anything similar to the economic ties Koch, Thiel, etc., have set up to direct the right. (Koch was a Bircher, so that kind of thinking comes naturally to him. The right would like you to think of Soros in those terms, but he's just an old philanthropist, throwing money at worthwhile causes, and not just political ones.)

    2. The ideas that the right so objects to are less the result of conscious political propaganda than common reactions to situations that most people face. People become anti-racist because they don't like the effects of racism. As America has become more diverse, tolerance and respect have become more necessary, if just to get by and to get along. Even businesses understand that. (If the left really had infiltrated corporate America, wouldn't we have also changed their views on profits, on unions, on pollution, etc.?)

• Tim Dickinson: [07-29] These Christian nationalists want to stone adulterers to death: "Aspiring theocrats want to install Old Testament justice in America." Interesting that the first person I thought of after seeing the headline was Newt Gingrich. Dickinson also wrote: [07-28] Vivek Ramaswamy is on the rise. So are Christian nationalist attacks on his religion: He's Hindu, but this is the first I've heard of anyone giving him grief for it. He seemed to get along swimmingly at a recent Christian confab in Iowa. I can remember when Protestants could get really worked up over points of theology -- my Grandmother, for instance, told me that the Lutherans she grew up with were "worse than the Catholics" -- but nowadays the only thing good Christians need to agree on is the others they all hate in common.

• Robert Downen/Carla Astudillo: [07-25] Ken Paxton's far-right billionaire backers are fighting hard to save him: Otherwise it's sunk cost: buying an Attorney General only to see him impeached.

• Kate Kelly/David Perlmutt: [07-30] Inside the party switch that blew up North Carolina politics: Tricia Cotham, who ran as a pro-abortion Democrat, then switched to the Republicans to override an anti-abortion bill veto. You've long known that there is little Republicans wouldn't do to steal elections, but Trojan horse candidates are a new low.

• Ed Kilgore: [07-24] First Republican debate: Who's in, who's banned, who's boycotting: The Fox News debate is on August 23. It shouldn't be hard to find something better to do on that day (though probably not outside).

• Kelly McClure: [07-29] Judge throws out Trump's lawsuit against CNN. Trump sued CNN for $475 million for defamation. For more details, see Andrew Zhang: [07-29] Judge dismisses Trump's 'Big Lie' lawsuit against CNN. Evidently "big lie" isn't recognized as a Nazi trademark, so can be used by others to refer to other big lies. Trump also objected to being called "Hitler-like," which either means he's a little touchy or he's holding out for something stronger. The lawsuit was dismissed "with prejudice," which is technical jargon judges use for "you're wasting my time." No mention in these articles for CNN's countersuit against Trump for calling them "fake news." Maybe they didn't feel like wasting the judge's time suing?

• Ian Millhiser: [07-27] What's new in the new indictment against Donald Trump? "Trump allegedly tried to destroy evidence in the federal case involving classified documents."

• Nicole Narea/Li Zhou: [07-27] Your 5 biggest questions about Trump's latest indictment, answered. Not really. My first one is whether the revised indictment would push his court date out, and that wasn't broached. I'd expect his lawyers to make such a motion. The whole thing about whether Trump might go to jail isn't very clear. My impression is that, unlike the New York hush money case, everyone who's been convicted of the crimes Trump is charged with here has gotten a jail term. (For a "legal scholar" view, see Tom Boggioni: [07-29] Trump 'may die in prison' if he doesn't strike a deal after 'shocking' new charges.) The authors ask whether it's even possible to jail Trump, given his Secret Service protection. But why does he even need extra protection if he's in jail? (Sure, laugh, but aren't jails supposed to be the safest places in America?) If not, maybe you can find a higher security facility, like Guantanamo? Or maybe cut a deal with the British and exile him to Saint Helena, like Napoleon? He might even like that idea, at least until he got there. (Maybe he could build a luxury golf resort there, and it would be a pilgrimage destination.)

• Tori Otten: [07-28] Madman Trump promises to run for President from prison if he's convicted. It's been done before (Eugene Debs in 1920), but "it is unclear how things would work if Trump won." Author also wrote: [07-28] Elise Stefanik wins the prize for stupidest Trump indictment reaction.

• Catherine Rampell: [07-27] A year after Dobbs, House GOP proposes taking food from hungry babies: The concerns of the "pro life" begin at conception, and pretty much end with delivery.

• Adam Rawnsley/Asawin Suebsaeng: [07-26] Trump struggles to find enough lawyers to handle his many indictments: Reminds me that when Duke Ellington was asked how he kept such a great orchestra together for so many decades, he confided a secret: "I pay them." Maybe Trump should try that. Maybe he should also try to be a better client. I heard somewhere that MAGA really stands for "make attorneys get attorneys."

• Zachary Siegel: [06-27] Their kids died of fentanyl overdoses. Republicans can't wait to exploit it. "Grieving parents are at risk of becoming mere props in the latest chapter of America's twisted war on drugs."

• Molly Taft: [07-21] The GOP darling who claims fossil fuels are good for humanity: Alex Epstein, who's written the books The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels (2014) and Fossil Future, and insists that oil is "a wonderful, live-sustaining product," while deriding "wasteful, unreliable solar and wind schemes." Koch loves him.

• Michael Tomasky: [07-28] Trump is an extremely dumb fascist: "The latest criminal indictment highlights his idiocy -- but also the threat he still poses to American democracy." He points out that "fascism is a sensibility far more than it is a political program." Trump certainly has that sensibility, no matter how much one might quibble over his political alignment with historic fascists. And dumb? Very. The one thing he has is instincts, which are disturbingly popular, but not very original, given how easy they were to pick up from Fox and the like.

• John Wagner/Amy B Wang: [07-26] Giuliani not contesting making false statements about Georgia election workers.

• Scott Waldman: [07-26] Conservatives have already written a climate plan for Trump's second term. They call this "Project 2025," and describe it as not a white paper but a "battle plan," to implement as soon as a Republican is sworn in as president in 2025. "It would block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the Environmental Protection Agency's environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department's renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California's car pollution standards; and delegate more regulation of polluting industries to Republican state officials."

• Brett Wilkins: [07-26] DOJ sues Greg Abbott over "barbaric" Rio Grande buoy barrier: I'd be more inclined to charge him with attempted murder, then add further charges with each additional victim. That may not fly, given that those specific charges are usually filed by states, but the feds must have something along those lines. Or they could just extradite him to The Hague, to be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. Of course, he'd probably use that for a campaign ad. For more, see Nicole Narea: [07-25] Biden is taking Texas to court over its floating border barrier.

Biden and/or the Democrats: Note separate pieces on Hunter Biden and Robert F Kennedy Jr much farther down. There are also pieces under various topics, including Ukraine, Israel, and the military. Democrats have enough excess baggage without having to pile it all on here.

• EJ Dionne Jr: [07-30] The GOP pays a price for its extremism. But Biden does, too. He means, Biden pays a price for the GOP's extremism; not that there's anything extremist about Biden. He blames this on the media's habit of repeating whatever Republicans say, even if only to debunk it afterwards. "A two-minute report on a congressional hearing will inevitably air whatever charges some right-wing committee chair makes. They lodge in people's memories no matter what might be said during those 120 seconds to debunk them." Dean Baker suggests a better approach: "Actually, competent reporters would simply report that Republicans on a House committee repeated long-debunked lies about President Biden and son: full stop."

• Rebecca Leber: [07-26] Biden's $250 billion lure to clean up the dirty legacy of fossil fuels. One section here is subtitled: "Balancing ambition, exhaustiveness, and speed will make all the difference." Sounds difficult, and given the pervasive influence of moneyed interests in all facets of American politics, it will be a tough trick for Democrats to pull off, but at least they try to balance off a broad range of interests. Handing this over to the Republicans is a sure recipe for disaster.

• Eric Levitz: [07-28] The 'AOC Left' has achieved plenty. Rejoinder to Freddie deBoer: [07-25] AOC is just a regular old Democrat now, a piece that I found too cloying to cite on its own.

• Josh Marshall: [07-28] Age, the blue sky and that enduring question of 'is Joe Biden too old?' Of course he is. But it's not like with athletes, where losing a step off the dribble or a couple feet off the fastball can wipe you out. He needs to pace himself, surround himself with good people, get help when he needs it, and prepare to bow out if/when it gets to be too much. And if needed, there is a clear succession plan in place (which unfortunately involves a couple old-timers from Congress, but odds of getting to them are rather slim). Assuming Kamala Harris is his running mate again, it would be reassuring for her to step up, and for him to let her. But the underlying situation is that Democrats have decided not to risk another open primary in 2024. If they did, there would be a fight between left and corporate wings of the party, and Biden uniquely disarms that gap. The left has a lot of popular issues to run on, but the system (and not just the DNC) is rigged against them -- e.g., Bloomberg spent $500 million on a suicide mission just to keep Sanders from getting the nomination in 2020; this year No Labels is a ready-built stalking horse for the Bloomberg class -- and the risk of letting any Republican (much less Trump) back in so grave that few progressives are willing to risk backing anyone better than Biden. The age issue will fade in the general election, where Teams R & D will rally to their side. And if, perchance, Republicans wind up nominating someone younger than Trump, Biden can always roll out Reagan's disarming quip, that he "won't hold his opponent's inexperience against him."

The Supreme Court:

• Robert Barnes: [07-28] Alito says Congress has no authority to police Supreme Court ethics: So the President and members of Congress aren't above the law, but Supreme Court Justices are? But if that was obvious, why would they dissemble so much to hide their side deals? More on Alito:

  • Josh Gerstein: [07-28] Alito: Congress can't regulate Supreme Court ethics. A tweet from: Laurence Tribe: "Justice Alito should know better: The power of Congress to regulate the non-judicial conduct of all Article III judges, including the Supreme Court Justices, is grounded in the Constitution's Necessary & Proper Clause, Article I, Section 8, Clause 18."

  • Ruth Marcus: [07-30] No, Justice Alito. Congerss should not butt out on Supreme Court\ ethics.

  • Adrienne Masha Varkiani: [07-28] Alito to Congress: You have no business snooping into our ethics.

• Ian Millhiser: [07-26] How Alabama could get away with defying the Supreme Court.

Climate and Environment:

• Matthew Cappucci: [07-25] Violent storms tear through Europe with 'gargantuan' hail in Italy.

• Judith Deutsch: [07-27] What is the 'cost' of climate change? My eyes quickly glaze over when I read pieces like this, where the point seems to be: incalculable but certainly much more than we can afford. But it raises many more questions, like what is the distribution of costs? And how much of those costs are actually charged to those responsible for them? The answer to the latter is certainly very little. While one can imagine schemes to bring the two closer in line, I'm doubtful that they can ever get even moderately close.

• Laura López González: [07-25] What you need to know about killer humidity. Quotes Jeff Goodell, whose latest book is The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet: "A wet bulb temperature of 95 degrees -- which basically means both outdoor air temperature and humidity levels are high -- is the upper end of human adaptability to humid heat. Beyond that, our generates heat faster than it can dissipate it." You may be familiar with that wet bulb temperature (35°C) from Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, where it finally motivates a long list of reforms.

• Umair Irfan: [07-26] What "record-breaking heat" actually means.

• Pablo Manriquez: [07-27] 100 degree days, wildfires . . . to Congressional Republicans, nothing to see here.

• Bill McKibben:

  • [07-11] Is it hot enough yet for politicians to take real action? Not really, but that's mostly because politicians can't take real action on something as big and independent as the climate or the economy. They can, at best, nudge it a bit. The question is whether they can recognize the need, and find something they can do that might lead to that nudge. As far as I can tell, there is one party that sees the problem, and for them, virtually every bit of news reinforces that view. And there's one party that doesn't see the problem at all, or if they admit to, don't see any possible solution. (See Manriquez above.) The next question is, when new people start to see the problem, will they also be willing to select the one party that takes the issue seriously?

  • [07-26] Heat waves and the sweep of history.

• Alissa J Rubin: [07-29] A climate warning from the cradle of civilization: "Every schoolchild learns the name: Mesopotamia -- the Fertile Crescent, the cradle of civilization. Today, much of that land is turning to dust."

Ukraine War:

• Connor Echols:

  • [07-28]] Diplomacy Watch: Putin fights to keep friends in Africa. There's an enigmatic "Putin has rejected a US offer to discuss the war" here, but nothing of substance. Russia's popularity among neutral African leaders appears to be waning.

  • [07-25] Uber Russia-hawk Victoria Nuland rises to acting deputy secretary of state: She's been serving as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Here's her Wikipedia page. Her husband is prominent neocon historian Robert Kagan, who was one of PNAC (Project for a New American Century) founders in 1998. Nuland bounced back and forth between State and outside think tanks, always taking a hard anti-Russian line, most notably in 2014, when she was in Kyiv and caught on tape picking who should take over Ukraine as Prime Minister.

  • [07-27] Biden roils oversight community with nominations for Ukraine aid watchdogs.

• Dave DeCamp: [07-27] Ukraine's Parliament votes to extend martial law, pushing back elections: So Ukrainians, and by extension their supporters in the West, are fighting for democracy, but they can't have it until their present leaders have met their war aims?

• Fred Kaplan: [07-27] Ukraine's new stategy against Russia: "Why Ukraine had to reboot its summer offensive." So it hasn't worked, but they're making adjustments, and both sides continue to inflict damage. Kaplan's conclusion: "the war remains, in some ways, what it has been almost from the beginning: a competition to see which side gives up first." Unfortunately, that conception only gives both sides reason to keep fighting.

• Daniel Larison: [07-26] Did the US know the Ukraine offensive might fail, and if so, when? Some prominent Americans are still in denial: e.g., Democratic Senators Mark Kelly and Tammy Duckworth: [07-24] We've been on the front lines. We know what Ukraine needs. More and fancier weapons, of course. That piece in turn led me to David Axe: [02-20] Some of the best weapons in the world are now in Ukraine. They may change the war. They haven't, at least yet. Even if Ukraine, at considerable cost, manages to gain some ground back this summer, it's hard to see a military path to the "victory" they desire. And what about those "best weapons in the world"? They're not looking so hot -- more like what you should expect when the arms industry is in corrupt embrace with a military that has only tested their wares in places like Afghanistan and Somalia. "Refusing to negotiate with an adversary, whether out of pride or ideological hostility to diplomacy, is usually self-defeating."

• Eve Sampson/Samuel Granados: [07-22] Ukraine is now the most mined country. It will take decades to make safe. Maybe the US should have signed that international treaty outlawing the use of mines, which would have put some pressure on Russia and Ukraine to conform. Same for cluster bombs. The "ordnance contamination" map reminds us that the problem isn't just mines. All kinds of shells and bombs can fail to explode, lying in wait for a future disturbance. "The sheer quantity of ordnance in Ukraine is just unprecedented in the last 30 years. There's nothing like it."

• Katrina vanden Heuvel/James Carden: [07-28] When facts cut through the fog of war: "As the Ukraine counteroffensive grinds on, conditions on the ground are now too obvious to ignore. Is it time for talking, yet?" Of course. It's never not been time to talk. Just as it's always been obvious that no definition of victory could justify the costs war has exacted on both sides.

Israel:

• Peter Baker/Ronen Bergman: [07-29] Biden presses ahead with effort to broker Israeli-Saudi rapprochement. Wholly on Israel's terms, of course, because the US is no longer master of its own foreign policy re Israel. And those terms, as with Trump's Abraham Accords, are Saudi acquiescence as Israel tightens the screws on Palestinians.

• Zack Beauchamp: [07-24] What Israel's new judicial law reveals about its democracy. Even most technically, the idea that the ruling junta would pass a law that prevents the Supreme Court to considering whether its acts are "reasonable" strongly suggests that they are planning acts that are clearly unreasonable. Since the Court has rarely objected to anything the government has done to Palestinians, those planned acts may well be directed at Israeli Jews. At least, that's who are protesting.

• Jonathan Guyer: [07-26] What Israel's judicial overhaul means for Palestinians. Israel's Supreme court has been "no reliable supporter of Palestinian rights," but the bill's supporters, specifically Yariv Levin, cite cases the Supreme Court has blocked as "unreasonable," and they were all directed against Palestinians.

• Mitchell Plitnick: [07-24] Leading liberal Zionist voices call for ending US aid to Israel. They're thinking of military aid, which Israel doesn't need, and mostly uses against its own people (why not call Palestinians that? the phrase was used very effectively against Saddam Hussein for his attacks on Iraqi Kurds). Links provided, starting with Nicholas Kristof.

• David Remnick: [07-24] In Israel, a glimpse of a Trumpian future. Americans, not unlike people elsewhere, inevitably view the present through the prism of their own experience. Hence, the idea that Israel might become like Trump terrifies a long-time Zionist supporter like Remnick. I'm much more worried that America, Trumpy as it already is, might become even more like Israel. (By the way, that's long been the fantasy of neocons and Christian Zionists, so we've experienced a fair amount of that already.)

• Richard Silverstein:

  • [07-26] Israel is bullying progressives on borrowed time.

  • [07-27] Judicial crisis: An existential battle for Israel's future.

• Philip Weiss:

  • [07-24] New Israeli law is shock to US Zionists, who fear break with American Jews.

  • [07-26] Awareness grows that Israel's crisis stems from a core issue: it's an apartheid state.

Around the world:

• Priti Gulati Cox/Stan Cox: [07-27] The war you're not reading about: "Struggle and suffering in Sudan."

• Jody Ray: [07-29] How Tunisia became the EU's border guard.

• Nick Turse: [07-27] Niger coup leader joins long line of US-trained mutineers. Also:

  • Ellen Ioanes: [07-30] Niger's coup and the international community's opposition, explained.

  • Alex Thurston: [07-28] Niger becomes the latest domino falling to Western-trained militaries.

Other stories:

Dean Baker:

• [07-25] Why we do this crap: Review of The Ends of Freedom, by Mark Paul. Not a new idea -- Baker cites Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King as predecessors -- but the argument here is that a bunch of basic economic needs should be provided as rights (work, housing, education, health care, basic income and banking, a healthy environment), wrapping up with a final chapter ("How Do We Pay for It?").

• [07-21] The Chinese need to stay poor because the United States has done so much to destroy the planet: John Kerry went to China last week to scold them for not doing enough to limit greenhouse gases (see: China's Xi rebuffs Kerry's call for faster climate action), even though one may legitimately wonder what sort of example the US set during its period (now distantly remembered) of comparable economic growth. Although the Chinese economy has grown very fast in recent years, its per capita income is still way below the US, so it shouldn't surprise us that its political leaders feel the need to make up the difference. And in any case, China seems much more committed to reducing emissions than the US is -- what with the still-powerful Republicans actively sabotaging any effort the Biden administration makes. As Baker notes, "China is by far the world leader in wind energy, solar energy, and electric cars." He adds: "If we did want an opportunity to put our money where our mouth is, the United States could adopt a policy of making all the technology that is develops fully open-source, so that everyone in the world could take advantage of it, without concerns about patent monopolies or other protections."

Ben Burgis: [07-28] The Pentagon budget is obscene, even without the right-wing culture-war amendments. It's also untouchable politically, especially as Democrats have, for various reasons, become its biggest supporters.

• Connor Echols: [06-26] Proposed military slush fund would risk new boondoggles.

• Binoy Kampmark: [07-28] Dotty domains: The Pentagon's Mali typo leak affair.

• Branko Marcetic: [07-29] NATO's expansion into Asia is the mother of bad ideas: Not a fine turn of phrase, but yes, a very bad idea. I could easily list five, maybe ten, instances where NATO would only make the situation worse. Taiwan is the big one, as it would shatter the "one China" fictions that seem to be so important to the Beijing regime. I'd also worry about the bad smell of Europe's former imperialists joining together to "protect" their favored "allies" in Asia and elsewhere.

• George Will: [07-26] It's time to end the 'era of Great Distraction': I'm not suggesting you read him, but wanted to note that this is what they're calling the Global War on Terror these days: a Great Distraction that caused us to lose focus on the big threats we need to spend trillions preparing for war with: Russia and China. Ends with an ominous warning, so you'll know that he's serious: "Time will tell -- soon -- whether we have refocused too late."

John Ehrenreich: [07-30] The making of Robert F Kennedy Jr: A long, critical, but not totally unsympathetic review of the fringe presidential candidate's public life. (I went with the subtitle above; the actual published title suggests that someone at Slate is eager to throw both author and subject under the bus.)

Jonathan Guyer: [07-24] The dark -- and often misunderstood -- nuclear history behind Oppenheimer, explained by an expert: Christopher Nolan's new Oppenheimer movie, serendipitously paired with Barbie, produced a bunch of links last week. This interview with Alex Wellerstein, author of Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, adds substantially to the discussion. Turning to the present, he says: "If you disengage, then the only people who are really making decisions on this issue are going to be the people who have a lot to gain from it. And that's how you end up in a situation with arms races, when the military, Congress, and contractors are making a lot of the decisions."

• Kai Bird: [07-17] The tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer: By the co-author of the book the movie is based on.

• Aja Romano: [07-24] Barbieheimer: Destroyer of worlds, savior of cinema. Reminds me of an old Minutemen album, Project: Mersh, where the cover image is a bunch of marketing types sitting with coffee and charts, and one of them exclaims, "I got it! We'll have them write hit songs." After several years of doldrums, with big budgets going almost exclusively to superhero fantasies, it's like someone decided to roll the dice on making good films on topics people could take seriously. Sure, there have been some decent films the last few years, but I can't remember when two films like these were the industry's major product rollouts at the same time. Also see David Dayen: [07-28] Barbenheimer reveals the drastic choices of Hollywood executives: "The big opening weekend contrasts with everything the studios have been doing for the last couple of decades."

• Ryu Spaeth: [07-25] Who are the Japanese in Oppenheimer? I was intrigued by the title, as I was surprised that there were any. After reading the article, my surmise was right, unless they dug up some documentary reels of devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But if the question is about the decision to kill so many people with such a "cruel" (Hirohito's word) weapon, we should entertain the question of just who we thought they were. It's hard for Americans now to appreciate how racist Americans then were regarding all Asians (though perhaps a bit less hard than it was in the years BT [Before Trump]). John Dower wrote about this in War Without Mercy.

• Jonathan Stevenson: [07-28] Why 'Oppenheimer' matters: "The father of the atomic bomb still speaks to the danger of complacency."

• Alissa Wilkinson: [07-27] The nuclear bomb's enduring, evolving place in pop culture.

Sarah Jones: [07-27] Walking out of the Dream Factory: Writers and actors are still on strike, as are many others.

Elias Khoury: [07-28] Anti-imperialism is both morally correct and absolutely necessary for the left.

Eric Levitz: [07-25] Why elite colleges do affirmative action for the rich. He means why elite colleges perpetuate the elite class system by favoring the rich -- especially through legacy admissions -- but the affirmative action programs that were just outlawed also existed to benefit the rich, because that's what elite colleges are all about. Related:

• Fabiola Cineas: [07-25] Affirmative action for white college applicants is still here: I rather wish he wouldn't call it "affirmative action," which can be read as an attempt to score points by reassigning a deprecating term, like "corporate welfare" or "socialism for the rich." Most likely he just means it as irony, as Ira Katznelson did with his book title, When Affirmative Action Was White, which showed how many New Deal programs, including Social Security, were written to avoid benefiting blacks.

Carlos Lozada: [07-18] A look back at our future war with China: Lozada was book review editor at the Washington Post, since graduated to opinion writer at the New York Times, but he's still just digesting books. There are a lot of books on developing conflicts between the US and China, many assuming that superpower conflicts are inevitable and likely to blow up in war. The books he touches on here have titles like Destined for War, Danger Zone, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, and The Avoidable War. Also Party of One, whose loose cannon author argues that "Xi's China is brash but brittle, intrepid but insecure, . . . a would-be superpower in a hurry, eager to take on the world while wary of what may come."

Dylan Matthews: [07-28] How "windfall profits" from AI companies could fund a universal basic income: "Companies like OpenAI and Google could make unthinkable profits from successful AI. Will they share the wealth?" Silly question. Given his hypothetical, he probably means: "will we tax it from them?" Although the question too obvious to ask is: "why should we give it to them in the first place?" Such profits depend on monopoly pricing, and that is a grant the government gives to companies, for reasons that are increasingly difficult to explain let alone justify. The other point hardly anyone is making is that nearly all of the misuses we can envision for AI are tied to its commercial exploitation. There are lots of good reasons for slowing AI down, which is why lots of people are talking about regulations. But regulating AI monopolies is going to be incredibly difficult, both technically and politically. It would be much simpler to limit the money flow, which would allow us to make more judicious decisions on how we use it.

Note that I'm not arguing against the author's "global UBI" proposals. They have some merits, but aren't dependent on this particular tax stream.

• Alexander C Karp: [07-25] Our Oppenheimer moment: The creation of AI weapons. CEO of defense contractor Palantir Technologies, so he's selling, but mostly he's worried that engineers might grow a conscience, as Oppenheimer did (belatedly, maybe). "The preoccupations and political instincts of coastal elites may be essential to maintaining their sense of self and cultural superiority but do little to advance the interests of our republic." On the other hand, putting nukes on autopilot . . .

• Sara Morrison: [07-27] The tricky truth about how generative AI uses your data.

Rani Molla: [07-25] A UPS strike would have been worse than you think. I'm pleased to see this strike not happening. Of course, my sympathies would have been with the union members had they struck, as I am with all unions, almost all of the time. But I'm a bit worried that a rash of strikes could provoke a backlash, as happened in 1946, leading to a Republican Congress passing Taft-Hartley (with enough racist Democratic support to override Truman's veto; unfortunately, Truman spent a lot of his time leading up to 1946 badmouthing strikers, who had spent WWII under wage controls while defense contractors were guaranteed cost-plus-10% profits).

Sara Morrison: [07-24] Welcome to X, the wannabe "super app" formerly known as Twitter. It's not only hard to imagine Musk's "super app" taking off, it's hard to comprehend what kind of ego could think it has a chance. One of the core problems of capitalism is that people don't have enough money to satisfy all the people who want to take it away. Back when Microsoft was top dog, they spoke of a "vig," which is a piece of all the commerce on the internet, much like what you'd pay your local mafiosi for protection. That didn't go over well, then other companies came along, each with its own angle to take a cut.

Musk faces two big problems. One is "first mover advantage," which is the tendency of first entrants to dominate the markets they open up. This is especially true where network effects are critically important: Google, Facebook, Twitter, and many others became unstoppable once they gained enough users that their networks became their strongest selling points. (And mostly they did this by offering services for free, a point Musk doesn't seem to understand.) The other is coming up with a new angle that's so incredibly attractive that people will sell their souls and worldly possessions to get in on it. After 25 years of fevered competition, how many great, and exploitable, ideas are left? Facebook thought they had one in VR, but how's that worked out? And everybody's hot for AI, but that's many different things to various people -- many of them mere productivity enhancements, to be bundled into other products and services.

Also:

• Paul Krugman: [07-27] What's in a name? Musk/Twitter edition.

• Jill Lepore: [07-26] Elon Musk's X factor: "The surprising personal and cultural reasons for his 'X' affection and rebranding of Twitter."

• Aja Romano: [07-24] The weird sorrow of losing Twitter.

Nicole Narea: [07-26] What the new Fed interest rate hike might mean for the economy: For starters, it shows that Powell's still willing to give recession a chance? Related:

• Dylan Scott: [07-29] 3 reasons the US might actually fix inflation without a recession:

  1. Pandemic-related economic disruptions have dissipated
  2. The labor market has been gradually normalizing
  3. People didn't freak out.

  The latter point isn't totally true.

Claire Potter: [06-28] The right's campus culture war machine: "How conservatives built a formidable network for ginning up scandal in higher education." Review of Amy J Binder/Jeffrey L Kidder: The Channels of Student Activism: How the Left and Right Are Winning (and Losing) in Campus Politics Today, and Bradford Vivian: Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education. One difference is that left student politics is spontaneous and local, whereas right organizes students for broader political purposes. As the pull quote puts it: "Conservatives are playing a long game that treats youth as junior partners in a larger political enterprise. They pay students more and invest heavily." A couple more quotes:

But what both books show is that the right is better positioned to take advantage of the scandals -- some provoked and others resulting from poor decisions -- that do erupt. National student organizations are better at channeling students with conservative leanings into professional activism aimed at creating bad press for higher education. Right-wing media is so effective at seizing on and amplifying controversies, making sure that the distortions that proliferate on social media become the focus of higher education coverage, that mainstream news organizations are often just covering the coverage rather than investigating events. The networks that sustain the campus culture wars are not only powerful and well-financed; they operate far beyond campus. . . .

As it turns out, however, conservatives are much better than liberals at recruiting and training students. Conservatives have "managed to build an elaborate, well-funded organizational space," Binder and Kidder write, "that galvanizes young supporters and grooms future leaders by pulling them outside the confines of campus" and into paid work that sets them up for postgraduation careers as movement conservatives.

Nia Prater: [07-24] Can last-ditch lawsuits kill congestion pricing in New York? I really hope so. I don't feel up to the full rant now, but I really hate the whole idea. (And to the extent that it is championed by liberals I fear it will be a political disaster, not unlike the 55 mph speed limit. On the other hand, I wouldn't be terribly opposed to the idea that Paul Goodman proposed in 1949: banning all cars from Manhattan.) For what it's worth:

• Paul Krugman defends the congestion pricing plan here: [07-24] An act of vehicular NIMBYism. I'm not convinced. For the case he's talking about, you could simply raise the existing toll, without having to do whatever they're planning on doing to collect and police the tax. If you carry this logic to extremes, everybody's car will have to be tracked everywhere, and everyone will eventually get billed for the congestion they cause. The effect is to turn every road into a toll road. There's a simpler way to tax people for road use, which is to tax gasoline, as we've done forever (but evidently it's more agreeable to levy phantom tolls than to raise the gas tax; there's also another whole scheme to tax miles instead of gas, arguing that only taxing gas would give electric cars a free ride -- why don't we just consider that a feature?).

It's no accident that the vogue for solving policy problems with economic cost-benefit solutions began when inequality started kicking off. Any time you make something depend on the ability to pay, you drive inequality upward. There may be cases where that's easier than other solutions, but as a general rule, it not only favors the rich, it drives people to become rich, by penalizing people who aren't. It also undermines the idea that government should provide free services. And if services for some reason have to be rationed for some reason, it makes their distribution unfair.

Andrew Prokop: {07-26] The drama over Hunter Biden's plea deal, explained. The judge threw Republicans in Congress a lifeline to continue their harping on the president's troubled son. Jonathan Chait [07-28] argues that The Democrats can't wave away their Hunter Biden problem, but why not? It's just noise coming from Republicans who have nothing better to rant about. It's not part of the value proposition to be decided in the 2024 elections. Hunter Biden is hardly the only presidential scion to trade on his family name while getting into drugs and other sleaziness. Consider George W Bush, who is arguably worse because he got into politics after he supposedly cleaned up. (You might say his past related to his character, and there's something to that, but it was really Dick Cheney's character that should have bothered us.) What's unique about Hunter Biden is that he's being prosecuted for infractions that would barely have warranted a wrist slap for anyone else (ok, at least for any wealthy, competently-lawyered white male). Of course, by all means, feel free to tackle such sleaze in general (which includes certain Supreme Court justices).

Jeffrey St Clair: [07-28] Roaming Charges: Fighting our real enemies. Starts with stories about the late Sinéad O'Connor. I don't have any, and barely remember her music, but they make for better reading than her obituary (or this one). He also reprinted her 2013 piece: It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

PS: I took a break from the above to read Phillip Maciak: [07-28] Behind the rage of Raylan Givens, on the TV series Justified: City Primeval (we've watched three episodes so far). The essay touches on race privilege, the sketchy relationship between policing and justice, and the deep anger of machismo, but it's also fiction, and entertainment (a lot of both).

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 31 albums, 5 A-list,

Music: Current count 40606 [40575] rated (+31), 10 [17] unrated (-7).

I published another Speaking of Which last night. With a couple edits today, it comes to 5,264 words (85 links). Big news since then is that Israel, under Netanyahu's far-right government, has passed its bill to curtail Israel's Supreme Court from overruling anything the government does. Presumably this will help keep Netanyahu, who has been fighting corruption charges, out of jail, and will further protect his allies, some of whom have long criminal records. Many Israelis, and many long-time American supporters of Israel, regard this law as an assault on what's long passed for democracy in Israel. Here are some New York Times reports:

• What's next for Israel's judicial overhaul?

• Protests intensify across Israel despite Netanyahu's offer to delay broader judicial overhaul: Live updates.

• U.S. confronts tight but turbulent relationship with Israel.

I'll probably have more to say about this next week. Meanwhile, for a more critical view -- which compared to the New York Times, also means a more balanced view -- Mondoweiss is a good source. The first article out there is: New Israeli law is shock to U.S. Zionists, who fear break with American Jews.

While looking at the Times, I noticed an obituary for Reeves Callaway (75). I'm not sure whether I ever heard of him, but he led pretty much the life I imagined for myself when I was a teenager (my actual models were Colin Chapman, Carroll Shelby, and Carlo Abarth -- I liked to imagine shutting down my neighbor's GTO with one of Abarth's souped-up Fiat 850s).

I don't have much to add about this week's record reviews, except that it's gotten hard for me to think of things I really want to listen to next. Not only am I playing more non-work CDs when I get up, I'm finding myself stuck in extended patches of silence (or tinnitus). Very little in my demo queue has been released, and I inadvertently jumped the gun on a couple items.

In the Old Music section, Allen Lowe has been rhapsodizing about Tony Fruscella. I previously gave his 1955 eponymous album -- the only one released under his name in his brief lifetime (1927-69) -- a B+(***), which on replay seems about right. I only found two more albums, and didn't bother with the one I couldn't date. Jazz Factory has boxes of everything, but I haven't heard them.

As you probably know, Tony Bennett died last week, at 96. I liked his big hit when it came out, and I've always thought he was a good singer and a generally cool guy, but stuck in a niche that was neither jazz nor rock. So I thought I'd try a few of his early albums, focusing on things that seemed closer to jazz, but that didn't last long. (Another Lowe favorite, Dave Schildkraut, showed up in the Bennett credits, but I can't say as I noticed him in the music.) I considered a 1987 compilation called Jazz, but didn't have the time to track down where it all came from, so passed for now. My grade list for Bennett is here. Nothing A-listed, or even close, I'm sorry to say.

Looks like the heat has finally arrived here in Wichita, with 100F forecast every day through Friday. Still not the worst we've ever seen. I still have a long list of domestic projects, which have been frustrating me no end. Despite service calls, I'm still not receiving server email. I did get the server admin messages rerouted, so that's manageable. I have a new scanner to set up. Also a broken CD player: if I can't fix it (and thus far I haven't even managed to take it apart), I'll need to find service. I did manage to get the car oil changed (a typically bad experience with this dealer). I still need to line up a new doctor, as mine quit. Probably much more I'm blotting out of my increasingly feeble mind. At least July has one more Monday, so I don't have to face wrapping up the monthly archive yet. Got a couple packages in the mail today, to be unpacked next week.

New records reviewed this week:

• Blur: The Ballad of Darren (2023, Parlophone): [sp]: B+(*)
• The Cucumbers: Old Shoes (2023, self-released, EP): [cd]: A-
• Sammy Figueroa: Something for a Memory (Busco Tu Recuerdo) (2022 [2023], Ashé): [cd]: B+(**)
• Paulo Fresu/Omar Sosa: Food (2023, Tuk Music): [sp]: B+(**)
• Max Gerl: Max Gerl (2023, JMI): [cd]: B+(*)
• Jenny Lewis: Joy'all (2023, Blue Note): [sp]: B+(**)
• Doug MacDonald: Big Band Extravaganza (2022 [2023], DMAC Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Donny McCaslin: I Want More (2023, Edition): [sp]: B
• Lori McKenna: 1988 (2023, CN): [sp]: A-
• Near Miss: The Natural Regimen (2022 [2023], Kettle Hole): [cd]: B+(***)
• Palehound: Eye on the Bat (2023, Polyvinyl): [sp]: B+(**)
• Nate Radley & Gary Versace: Snapshots (2023, SteepleChase): [sp]: B+(**)
• The Rempis Percussion Quartet: Harvesters (2023, Aerophonic, 2CD): [cd]: A-
• Marc Ribot/Ceramic Dog: Connection (2023, Knockwurst): [sp]: B+(**)
• Arman Sangalang: Quartet (2022-23 [2023], Calligram): [cd]: B+(**) [08-04]
• Lisa Marie Simmons/Marco Cremaschini: NoteSpeak 12 (2022 [2023], Ropeadope): [sp]: A-
• Tyshawn Sorey Trio: Continuing (2022 [2023], Pi): [cd]: A-
• Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway: City of Gold (2023, Nonesuch): [sp]: B+(***)
• Paul Tynan & Aaron Lington: Bicoastal Collective: Chapter Six (2022 [2023], OA2): [cd]: B
• Colter Wall: Little Songs (2023, Black Hole/La Ronda): [sp]: B+(***)
• Adrian Younge: Jazz Is Dead 18: Tony Allen (2023, Jazz Is Dead): [sp]: B+(*)
• Nicole Zuraitis: How Love Begins (2022 [2023], Outside In Music): [cd]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra: 60 Years (1961-2019 [2023], The Village): [bc]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Count Basie/Tony Bennett: Basie/Bennett: Count Basie and His Orchestra Swings/Tony Benneett Sings (1958 [1959], Roulette): [r]: B+(*)
• Tony Bennett: Cloud 7B+(*)
• Tony Bennett: The Beat of My Heart (1957 [1996], Columbia/Legacy): [sp]: B+(**)
• Tony Fruscella: Tony's Blues: The Unique Tony Fuscella (1948-55 [1992], Cool & Blue): [sp]: B+(**)
• Shuckin' Stuff: Rare Blues From Ace Records (MS) (1955-81 [2002], Westside, 2CD): [sp]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• The Cucumbers: Old Shoes (self-released) [07-21]
• Mike Jones Trio: Are You Sure You Three Guys Know What You're Doing? (Capri) [08-18]
• Near Miss: The Natural Regimen (Kettle Hole) [07-07]

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

I saw a headline in the Wichita Eagle on Friday -- the article was unsigned but attributed to Las Vegas Review-Journal -- that puzzled me: "Bidenomics is just tired liberalism on steroids." So what is it they're trying to say? It's rejuvenated liberalism? Maybe they want it banned for doping? The phrase "on steroids" has largely lost its literal meaning, in favor of "much larger, stronger, or more extreme than is normal or expected." So at the very least it should cancel out "tired," leaving us with "Bidenomics is just liberalism." That may be the author's complaint, but why is that such a bad thing?

Trump waxes nostalgically about "make America great again," but the closest America ever came to something resembling conventional notions of greatness was the period during and after WWII, when liberalism was most pervasive and hegemonic. In many ways, the original MAGA movement was Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, but unlike Trump, Johnson had no desire for nostalgia. His signature program meant to extend New Deal progressivism to all Americans.

Johnson isn't remembered especially well today because he blew so much political capital on the Vietnam War. One lesson we should draw is that it's always a mistake to assume military might is some kind of measure of greatness. Liberals made that mistake in WWII, partly because the enemies were so abhorrent, and partly because the war effort was led by one of their own (brilliantly, I might add). Vietnam started to divide liberals, but I'm old enough to remember when most were staunchly on board, and I've never really forgiven them for that war -- or for allowing themselves to be duped into thinking that communism was such a threat to freedom that they should kill or punish anyone tempted to think otherwise, or for becoming the unwitting victims of their own witch hunts.

Since the 1970s "liberal" has become little more than an epithet, thanks mostly to the relentless slanders of the right -- "tired" is just one of the milder ones, leaving us with this puzzle: if liberalism is so tired, how can it be such a threat?

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans:

• Zak Cheney-Rice: [07-21] What the most diverse GOP primary ever says about the GOP. Nothing, really, except that the media's preoccupation with looks is silly and stupid. (As, I might add, was Seth Meyers' endless riffs on Robert Mueller's look.) Not that I never wondered whether the more fervent racists in the Republican Party would find it hard to vote for a black Republican, but I got my answer when Jesse Helms voted for Clarence Thomas. Republicans will continue to vote for whoever they're told to, regardless of personal prejudices. And sure, Democrats can be every bit as dazzled by this skin game. Bill Clinton famously wanted a cabinet that "looked like America," and he got his point as far as looks go. But beneath that surface, damn near everyone in his cabinet had Ivy League degrees, which put them in a very small and exclusive minority, just like Clinton.

• Diana Falzone/Asawin Suebsaeng/Adam Rawnsley: [07-11] Murdochs start to sour on DeSantis: 'They can smell a loser'.

• Shane Goldmacher/Maggie Haberman: [07-23] A 'leaner-meaner' DeSantis campaign faces a reboot and a reckoning: So after a review of the candidate's "challenging learning curve" this is what his consultants advised: get meaner? Adam Serwer predicted as much when he titled his anti-Trump book The Cruelty Is the Point. For another view of this, see Nicole Narea: [07-20] Ron DeSantis is really bad at running for president.

• Margaret Hartmann: [07-14] Trump Super-PAC paid Melania $155,000 to choose tableware: May seem like something anyone could do, but economics teaches us that in a free market, marginal value is everything. But sure, if you aren't smart enough to understand that the market is perfect, this could just look like graft.

• Jeet Heer: [07-23] Young Americans for Freedom hates freedom: Interview with Lauren Lassabe Shepherd. Note that YAF also hate most Americans. Jeer also wrote: [07-21] Why Trump 2.0 would be much worse: You already knew that, didn't you? He's made it clear that this time he's out for revenge, and he won't accept staff that will get in his way, as many did in his first term. But also, what would a Trump win say about the electorate? In 2016, it was naive and foolish to view him as an outsider who would "drain the swamp," but at least he presented himself that way. This time he's a known quantity, and there's no excuse for thinking he'll ever be anything else (except worse).

• Shayna Jacobs: [07-19] DeSantis, others sued over alleged 'election police' voter intimidation.

• Hugo Lowell: [07-21] Fulton county prosecutors prepare racketeering charges in Trump inquiry.

• Charles P Pierce:

  • [07-21] Republicans will turn any anodyne bit of Congressional business into performative hatred.

  • [07-21] Thursday was a total crackpot day on Capitol Hill.

• Nikki McCann Ramirez:

  • [07-19] Trump is already fundraising off of his DOJ target letter.

  • [07-21] Michael Cohen settles lawsuit against Trump Organization days before trial: The suit was about unpaid legal bills. How much Trump settled for is unspecified.

• Jennifer Rubin: [07-23] Trump's made-for-MAGA arguments keep losing in court.

• Ashlie D Stevens: [07-18] Michigan attorney general charges 16 in 2020 Trump fake elector scheme.

• Tessa Stuart: [07-20] Nebraska teen sent ot jail over illegal abortion: "Celeste Burgess was arrested after Facebook turned over her private messages to police."

• Kevin Sullivan/Lori Rozsa: [07-22] DeSantis doubles down on claim that some Blacks benefited from slavery.

• Jonathan Swan/Charlie Savage/Maggie Haberman: [07-17] Trump and allies forge plans to increase presidential power in 2025: Much of this deals with the likelihood that the Republican-packed Supreme Court will allow a Republican president such license -- "the unitary executive theory" is basically a fancy term for dictatorship. Still, most ominous are the direct quotes from Trump, like his promise to "find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education," where "radicals" are pretty much anyone who believed in what used to be called "liberal education." (In typing that, I flashed on "liberal indoctrination," which is not what the phrase means, but testimony to the way conservatives see education as a process of indoctrination.)

  Even more striking is this Trump quote:

  We will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists. And we will throw off the sick political class who hates our country.

  Aside from the red baiting, which just goes to show that Trump is always most at home with jingoism, the rest of that doesn't sound so bad. There certainly are warmongers, both deeply embedded in the state and in the revolving door businesses, foundations, and lobby shops that feed and further them. Same for globalists, although that's a fuzzier term: almost no one believes in "one world government," but lots of business interests promote global trade and finance, and they are well-represented in government, and among the donor class. As for "the sick political class that hates our country," that sounds like most Republicans. Still, I don't trust Trump to get rid of anyone who should be expelled. Rather, he seems to want a return to the spoils system, where everyone in the government works for the political interests of the president.

• Michael Tomasky: [07-21] McCarthy's vow to erase Trump's impeachment sums up the GOP's sickness. "It's a cult of one man -- not a political party anymore in any remote sense of the word. Trump says jump, and they ask how high. In fact, these days Trump rarely even has to say jump. A certain situation arises, and congressional Republicans anticipate that he's about to say jump, so they start jumping, trying to guess the height that will please him most." That's just the first of three reasons Tomasky gives why the Republican Party has become: "an extremist cult that has no incentive to behave otherwise."

• Mary Tuma: [07-21] Testifying against Texas, women denied abortions relive the pregnancies that almost killed them. No reason to file this elsewhere. It's not just policies that Republicans want to implement to make our lives more miserable. It's also about things they've already done.

Biden and/or the Democrats:

• Kevin T Dugan: [07-14] Biden's student-loan forgiveness program just got even bigger.

• Mike Konczal: [07-21] "Bidenomics" vs. "Reaganomics"

The Supreme Court:

• Ian Millhiser: [07-17] How the Supreme Court put itself in charge of the executive branch: "The major questions doctrine, explained."

• Walter Shapiro: [07-19] Sonia Sotamayor's book scandal is banal and troubling: "The Supreme Court justice's buckraking hardly compares to that of her conservative coleagues. But it still says a lot about how much Washington has changed." Well, it says two things: one is that no one in America thinks they're making enough money, even with a cushy lifetime job and pension; the other is that when other Justices are mired in scandals showing them to be truly corrupt, any innocuous bit of buckraking looks suspect.

• Stephen Siegel: [07-21] Clarence Thomas's cherry-picked originalism on affirmative action: "Originalism" originally meant whatever Antonin Scalia wanted it to mean, because only he claimed unique, divine, infallable insight into the minds of the crafters of the Constitution. Since his death, other conservatives have stepped up as originalism's self-appointed oracles, no less dishonestly than Scalia.

Climate and Environment:

• Kate Aronoff: [07-20] America's deadly heat isn't (officially) a major disaster: "Why doesn't the federal government recognize that this extreme weather is a catastrophe?" Probably because catastrophes are supposed to be rare events, and this summer's heat wave seems inevitable, something that we can expect to recur every summer for the rest of our lives. But also note that the purpose of such declarations isn't simply to acknowledge reality, but to allow the government to act to help the victims of disasters, and Republicans really don't like that (except when hurricanes hit Florida, for some reason). See Julia Rock: [07-19] New GOP bill would curb Biden's power to fight climate change. Because, well, heaven forbid that he should do things that would help people.

• Umair Irfan: [07-21] It's even hot underwater.

• Rebecca Leber: [07-21] The invisible consequences of heat on the body and mind: "Heat has bigger effects on us than we may realize."

• Matt Stieb: [07-20] 7 eye-popping numbers from tghe worldwide heat wave.

• Dan Stillman: [07-19] With record heat expected, these 5 maps show what's to come across the US.

• Molly Taft: [07-14] The media has no idea how to cover extreme heat.

• Tish Harrison Warren: [07-23] Rising heat deaths are not just about the temperature: "While it is important to highlight heat deaths as another example of the devastating toll of climate change, it is also important to say that, often, when people die of heat, they are actually dying of poverty."

• Li Zhou:

  • [07-17] Why Canada's wildfires will affect air quality for weeks to come. As of Monday morning, there were 882 active wildfires in Canada, most in British Columbia (373) and Alberta (121), with 579 deemed "out of control." "Experts have warned that the rest of the season could prove as damaging as the first part."

  • [07-17] The "new abnormal": The rise of extreme flooding, briefly explained. Interviews with several experts.

Ukraine War: The great "counteroffensive" has been going for more than a month now, but the New York Times hasn't changed its maps page since July 9.

• Blaise Malley: [07-21] Diplomacy Watch: Russia plays hardball with Black Sea grain deal: Formal withdrawal from the deal was followed by bombing of the port of Odesa.

• Andrew J Bacevich: [07-17] Ukraine and the great revival of American empire: "Kyiv's fate has always been an afterthought. The real goal is reinvigorating NATO and, by extension, US primacy."

• Andrew Cockburn: [07-18] The $850 billion chicken comes home to roost: "The military industrial complex is not designed to actually fight wars. If so, you wouldn't see Ukraine struggling right now to win one." Quotes Jim Burton, who wrote the 1993 memoir Pentagon Wars, as saying the US defense system is "a corrupt business -- ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom."

• Daniel L Davis: [07-19] Why Ukraine's counter-offensive is failing.

• Tamar Jacoby: [07-17] Ukraine's other front: The war on corruption. Ukraine's reputation for corruption goes back to its founding, creating a clique of oligarchs and mobsters, much like Russia, so this is bound to be a sensitive subject as the country is being flooded with arms and other support.

• Jen Kirby: [07-19] How bad will things get now that Russia has quit its grain deal with Ukraine?

Around the world:

• Syrus Jin: [07-21] US-Korea policy is 'trapped in a pattern of cyclical amnesia': "After 70 years, Washington needs to escape this Sisyphean tragedy of tough talk without any results." Also:

  • Gabriela Bernal: [07-20] It's time to end the forever war on the Korean Peninsula. Author previously wrote: [2022-11-03] Is anyone else concerned that 'deterrence' isn't working with North Korea? I'd go farther and say that deterrence is a fundamentally flawed concept: that it hardens disputes, and risks provoking the very wars that it's supposedly meant to prevent.

• Jo-Ann Mort: Ehud Barak: There's a phrase for what Bibi wants -- "de facto dictatorship". Barak also added: "Never in our history as a state has Israel suffered such a destruction of value in such a short time." Still worth remembering how Barak walked away from deals with Syria and Arafat, paving the way for the long-term rise of the Israeli right.

• Eric Alterman: [03-22] The New York Times and Israel: What is (and isn't) fit to print: "Netanyahu accuses the paper of record of anti-Israel bias. But for decades now, the opposite has been true."

• Richard Silverstein: [06-26] Israel's creeping genocide: "Pogroms in 20 Palestinian villages targeted by masses of settler-thugs protected by the IDF."

• Li Zhou: [07-21] Vox, the far-right party making gains in Spain, explained: I've seen a number of pieces predicting a Vox breakthrough, but they wound up in third, with 12.39% and 33 seats (down 19 from before, so not enough to form a coalition with the conservative PP (33.05%, 136 seats, vs. 31.70%, 122 seats for PSOE).

Other stories:

David Byler: [07-17] 5 myths about politics, busted by data: Or proven, depending on how you read the data:

1. Democrats aren't young. Both parties are old. Their breakdown has 30% of Democrats 65+, 28% 50-64, 29% 30-49, and 14% 18-29. But the older cohorts lean Republican (+7 and +5), and the younger ones favor Democrats (+8 and +5). They don't give you the median, but the median Democrat is 5-8 years younger than the median Republican.
2. Republicans aren't rural. Democrats aren't urban. Both are mostly suburban (57-53, edge Democrats), but as they note, "Democrats fare best in neighborhoods that are close to the city center, while Republicans thrive in exurbs and small metros." As for the rest, the urban split is 27-11 Democrats, the rural 36-16 Republicans.
3. Religious Democrats and secular Republicans are both common. The secular ("unaffiliated," a somewhat broader category) split is 39-14 Democrats, with Republicans leading 59-33 among Protestants and 21-17 with Catholics ("other" splits 10-6 Democrats). But they also note that the number of Republicans who seldom or never attend church has shot up from 30-42% (time frame unclear), so while Republicans are more likely to identify as Christian, they may be less than committed.
4. Both parties rely on White college graduates -- not just Democrats. Democrats have an edge among "white, college educated" of 37-31%, which is surely higher than it was even 10-20 years ago, maybe a reversal, as Republicans have had a big advantage there.
5. The Hispanic vote is not the GOP's only route to victory. I don't really get this point: "Republicans could very well win in 2024 by building on recent gains with the White working-class and Asian American voters, regaining recently lost college-educated suburbanites or finally making inroads with Black voters." Really? Based on what policy mix?

I see lessons here for Democrats, in that they need to hold onto and expand their substantial share of mainstream voters, especially ones free enough of Republican prejudice as to still have options. Of course, it's also important to keep the groups Republicans offer no joy to, which means offering tangible benefits, and not just taking them for granted. (Failure there may not translate to Republican votes, but to non-voting.) But I also don't put much stock in multisectoral statistical breakdowns and their attendant identity politics

As for Republicans, they're already performing way above where they should be if voters were rational and voted their best interests. How they improve on that is hard to imagine. They're certainly not going to change course, at least as long as the current one seems to give them a chance to squeeze through on some technicality. Their only real hope is that Democrats discredit themselves -- a card they've been playing, with diminishing returns, since the check kiting scandal of 1993.

Robert Crawford: [07-20] How media makes impact of U S forever wars invisible: Review of Norman Solomon: War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine. An excerpt from this book is here: The convenient myth of "humane" wars. There's also an interview with Solomon: [06-23] How America's wars become 'invisible'.

Tyler Austin Harper: [07-19] 'Barbie' and 'Oppenheimer' tell the same terrifying story: Author ties them both to the search for the Anthropocene boundary stratigraphy. Nuclear fallout is one obvious marker, as it was non-existent before the Trinity test in 1945 and the subsequent annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only to be followed by hundreds of further atmospheric tests (528, according to Arms Control Association, with 215 by US and 219 by USSR, 50 by France, 23 China, and 21 UK). But another marker would be to look for buried plastics, which are if anything more ubiquitous. The coincident release of two movies exploring such geologically important shifts is unlikely enough that some people have turned it into a thing. And many are writing on one, the other, or both. I should note that I haven't seen either movie, and I'm not likely to soon -- we just don't do that anymore, but I also gather that the formerly pretty good Warren Theatres we once had here have turned into rat traps under soon-to-be-bankrupt Regal.

• Siddhant Adlakha: [07-21] Who's who in Oppenheimer: A guide to 36 scientists, soldiers, and reds. One error here is under Edward Teller, where fission and fusion are reversed. Also, although Teller was the main proponent of a fusion bomb, I doubt that he would have insisted on doing it first, given that such bombs were more difficult, and depended on fission reactions to generate the heat to trigger thermonuclear explosion. Teller's "Super" wasn't tested until 1952, or weaponized until 1954.

• Haydn Belfield: [07-22] "Cry baby scientist": What Oppenheimer the film gets wrong about Oppenheimer the man.

• Jorge Cotte: [07-21] The many enigmas of Oppenheimer.

• Connor Echols: [07-21] What 'Oppenheimer' leaves out: Argues that the first victims of the nuclear age were New Mexicans exposed to nuclear fallout from the Trinity Test. There's a case to be made for that, and also for counting thousands (perhaps millions) of other exposed to explosions up to the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (many developing symptoms only later). Other victims of cancers eventually included virtually every Manhattan Project scientist of note. (I can't think of any exceptions.) I'm unclear on how much thought was put into the dangers of radiation before the bombs were developed and dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The dangers of radiation poisoning were recognized by then, if far from perfectly understood.

• Whizy Kim: [07-21] This summer's biggest hit? The Barbie marketing team.

• David Klion: [07-21] Oppenheimer is an uncomfortably timely tale of destruction.

• Tori Otten: [07-21] Barbie breaks box office records as conservatives keep whining about it.

• Alexandra Petri: [07-22] The Barbie movie, according to conservative criticism. The article is satire, I think, but starts with links to people you're unlikely to find interesting.

• Grace Segers: [07-20] Can Barbie have it all.

• Alissa Wilkinson:

  • [07-20] In the beginning, there was Barbie.

  • [07-20] Oppenheimer is an audacious inquiry into power, in all its forms.

Idrees Kahloon: [06-05] Economists love immigration. Why do so many Americans hate it? Well, economists think growth can be infinite. More practical souls ask: where are you going to put it all?

Dylan Matthews: [07-17] The $1 billion gamble to ensure AI doesn't destroy humanity: "The founders of Anthropic quit Open AI to make a safe AI company. It's easier said than done."

Matt McManus/Nathan J Robinson: [07-21] Are we in the grip of an 'American cultural revolution'? Christopher Rufo thinks it's already happened, but he's belatedly fighting back in his book: America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Sounds like good news, at least until I read the fine print:

The "revolution," in Rufo's telling, is comprised of -- wait for it -- diversity programs at colleges, Black Studies departments, protests against police brutality, and corporations that tweeted pro-BLM platitudes in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing. His evidence for dangerous revolutionary changes in our society consists of things like the appearance of the term "institutionalized racism" in the newspaper.

Since "the radical left conquered everything," you might wonder if Rufo is smuggling his missives from jail or some cave, but he's actually been appointed by Ron DeSantis to the board of trustees of New College. I know Robinson's made it his life's worth to debunk the so-called thinkers of the right, but why bother with one this hallucinatory?

Jeffrey St Clair: [07-21] Roaming Charges: Political crying games. He starts with the Congressional smackdown of Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) for identifying Israel as "a racist state" -- a reaction so shrill Jayapal wound up voting for a Resolution proclaiming that Israel is "not racist or an apartheid state" and that "the United States will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel." No doubt such eternal fealty will be tried repeatedly as Israel's state lurches farther and farther to the right.

St Clair offers two quotes, one from Prime Minister Netanyahu ("Israel is not a state of all its citizens but rather, the nation state of the Jewish people and only them") and former PM Ehud Barak ("who says that the current government is 'determined to degrade Israel into a corrupt and racist dictatorship that will crumble society'"). When it does, bank on Congress to pass another near-unanimous Resolution reassuring Israel of America's eternal submission. Israel is no longer an ally. America has become its vassal.

The only argument I can imagine against Israel being a racist state is to question whether Jews are a race. While that has been a common claim in the past, it makes no sense to regard Jews as a race in America or Europe. However, in Europe, government-issued identity cards specify who is a Jew, and who is not, with the latter group subject to further distinctions. And those cards determine the rights you have, and how you are treated by the state, and probably how you are treated by many other organizations. Maybe there's a fancier word for that system, like ethnocracy, but if you're an American, that system sure sounds like racism. And if you know anything about South Africa, you'll probably see affinities to their since-abandoned system of Apartheid.

St Clair also mentions on RFK Jr's attack on Biden for "threatening Israel with ending of the special relationship between our two nations," and his pledge, "As President, my support of Israel will be unconditional." And he quotes Nikki Haley: "The U.S.-Israel alliance is unbreakable because Israel's values are American values." I've long felt that American neocons were jealous of Israel's freedom to bomb their neighbors (and their own people; I'd say "citizens" but they aren't recognized as such) with no fear of repercussions, but I'm not sure most Americans actually share those values. Which ones they do share are hard to pin down, especially given that the most vehemently pro-Israeli Americans are hoping for a rapture which will, or so they believe, consign all Jews to hell. But if you're pro-Israel enough, you never have to worry about being tagged as anti-semitic. (Just consider RFK Jr.)

St Clair also includes more than you want to know about Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town," including a contrast to the late Tony Bennett, whose experiences in small town America included the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery civil rights march.

More links related to the above:

• Jonathan Bernstein: [07-20] Here's what's wrong with Jason Aldean's vision of America.

• Julia O'Malley: [07-19] Starving orcas and the fate of Alaska's dispapearing King Salmon.

• Jonathan Ofir: [07-20] Yes, Israel is a racist state.

• Tori Otten: [07-21] Republicans rush to defend Jason Aldean for racist song filmed at lynching site.

• Mitchell Plitnick: [07-20] Herzog's bland speech shows Israel still has great power in DC. Also from before the speech: Richard Silverstein: [07-14] Israeli President Herzog to address joint session of Congress: "A kindler, gentler version of Israeli apartheid."

• Pram Thakker: [07-21] Never enough: Now Republicans want to censure Jayapal for Israel comments.

PS: While American politicians are tripping all over themselves to swear allegiance to Israel, note that American elites are starting to have second thoughts:

• Max Boot: [07-23] Israel's biggest security threat is Benjamin Netanyahu.

• Thomas L Friedman: [07-23] Only Biden can save Israel now.

Tweet from No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen:

Marjorie Taylor Greene warns Joe Biden is trying to "finish what FDR started" by trying to address problems related to "rural poverty," "education," and "medical care." She warns it's similar to when LBJ passed "Medicare and Medicaid."

The White House responded:

Caught us. President Biden is working to make life easier for hardworking families.

This may prove to be the silver lining in the right-wing bubble: that they can no longer hear themselves when they say things that are incredibly unpopular.

Biden also responded by using Greene as narrator for a 30-second political ad.

I've been reading Peter Turchin's End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration, which is a comparative history of several millenia of revolution and civil wars, attempting to glean some quasi-scientific insight into the evident disintegration all around us. Thumbnail histories going back as far as Nero's Rome are always interesting, but his conceptual framework is rather oddly framed if not plainly wrong. He sees two forces that drive societies to the brink of disintegration. Mass immiseration is widely recognized as one. But his main one is what he calls "elite-overproduction," by which he a fractious rivalry between multiple aspirants ("elites," if you must, but limiting that term to the political arena). Whether this is caused by too many elites or simply by weak governing structures is less clear. If sheer numbers of princes were the problem, you'd expect Saudi Arabia to be the most fractious country in the world today, which it plainly isn't.

Given the key concern of immiseration, and his identification of a "wealth pump" driving it, much of Turchin's current political analysis is quite reasonable. But then I ran across this (pp. 219-220):

The Democratic Party has controlled its populist wing and is now the party of the 10 percent and of the 1 percent. But the 1 percent is losing its traditional political vehicle, the Republican Party, which is being taken over by the populist wing. Tucker Carlson, rather than Donald Trump, may be a seed crystal around which a new radical party forms. Or another figure could suddenly arise -- chaotic times favor the rise (and often rapid demise) of new leaders. Earlier I argued that a revolution cannot succeed without large-scale organization. The right-wing populists intend to use the GOP as an already existing organization to group power. An added advantage is that control of one of the main parties offers them a non-violent legal route to power.

Two fairly staggering problems here: if the Democrats are the party of the 1%, how come most known one-percenters are big Republican donors? And how come Republicans campaign for them -- especially with tax cuts, deregulation, and anti-labor measures -- so shamelessly? Given this, it's especially bizarre to paint the Republicans as opposed to plutocracy. Sure, they pander to prejudices and exploit the fears of some people who have not fared well under plutocracy, but where are their programs to shut down the "wealth pump" and offer help to reduce immiseration?

It is true that some of the very rich hobnob with Democrats, that many Democrats are very solicitous of their support, and that Democrats like Clinton and Obama have rewarded such benefactors handsomely -- including doing very little to slow down the wealth pump. Some rich Democrats may see the need for sensible reforms -- Franklin Roosevelt was called "a traitor to his class," but his New Deal did much more than just rescue the poor from the Great Depression: it also saved the banking system, rebuilt industry, and built a large amount of infrastructure, which led to the post-WWII boom. Some may simply be thinking about how much damage dysfunctional Republican ideas could do. And some may simply regard the Democrats as offering better service for their interests.

Turchin's fascination with Tucker Carlson may be excused as he wrote this book before Fox fired him. Still, I have to think that part of Turchin's confusion lies in his overly broad notion of elites, which at various times he divides into economic and credentialed classes. The Democrats have made gains among the latter, mostly because the Republicans have turned savagely against education and expertise, especially science. Still, characterizing this latter-day know-nothingism as "counterelite" conflict ignores who's really in charge, functioning mainly to deflect blame where it is due.

Daily Log

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Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 32 albums, 5 A-list,

Music: Current count 40575 [40543] rated (+32), 17 [17] unrated (-0).

First up is a new Speaking of Which yesterday, with 75 links (2550 words). I do this every week, but like to provide the link here, partly because it takes a lot of work (even relatively short ones like this), and partly because my Twitter announcements for Music Week typically get more than twice as many views as my Speaking of Which announcements.

And yeah, I'm still on Twitter, and not on Mastodon or Blue Sky or (heaven forbid!) Threads (nor for that matter Instagram, or many other things I may not even be aware of; while I am on Facebook, my use is minimal, more to follow family and old friends, and not to promote my writings or even opinions; hence I rarely accept friend requests unless I know you personally). And (checking now) I see that my Twitter followers have dropped back under 600 (a pinnacle I thought I reached last week), and last week's Music Week announcement was viewed by half as many people used to be the case, so maybe it is true that Elon Musk has set fire to his $44 billion, or maybe he just wants me to take a hint.

I started yesterday's column with a pitch to ask me questions, or at least offer some feedback, only to discover that the form isn't working. That may explain why I haven't heard anything since February. The first obvious problem has to do with the captcha software, which has stopped serving images. (I just checked and the same software is till generating images on the Christgau website, so that may have just been a red herring.) I disabled it, then tried testing again, and while it seemed to work, I didn't get the forwarded mail, so there is an as-yet-undiagnosed server problem as well. So stand by, but know you don't have to use the form: regular email works.

I wrote a fairly long comment reply to one of Allen Lowe's Facebook screeds. I thought maybe I would expand it here, but don't feel up to it at the moment. A slightly better formatted version is in my notebook under "Daily Log." One point I do want to take exception to is Lowe's claim: "THERE IS NO LONGER ANY EXCUSE for critic/voters to be unaware of anyone, to just pull the lever for the same person year after year" (for which he then gives a fictional example). But there is a big excuse, which is the finite amount of listening time in each day, far short of what's available let alone of the still vast amount that isn't available (at least free, and who knows how much there is that isn't even that?).

Lowe's had a bug up his ass about jazz polls recently. I've been pretty explicit about the limits and biases built into even the best critics polls -- I also talk a bit about this in my JJA Podcast -- but please, we're doing the best we can, with limited hours and lots of other pressures (not least of which is money). (And let me add that the better I get to know my fellow critics, the more impressed I am with how much they know, and how hard they work to share their knowledge and understanding.)

Jazz polls will never give you a perfect accounting of genius (or whatever they're imagined to be measuring). What they do offer is a chance to learn something you don't already know. And that's a good thing, because the odds that you know it all are nil. As an example, at least 25% of the records that get votes in the Francis Davis Jazz Poll every year were previously unknown to me.

Also, for future reference, Phil Overeem reposted another Allen Lowe piece in response to Robert Christgau's A- review of Lowe's America: The Rough Cut. I think what he's trying to say is that roots are dirty, which is practically the definition everywhere but music.

Aside from Hwang, which I got in the mail, and who is one of those guys I've voted for "year after year" (at least since Billy Bang died), all of my picks below are someone else's recommendation. Most of the misses, too. That's just how it always works.

New records reviewed this week:

• African Head Charge: A Trip to Bolgatanga (2023, On-U Sound): [sp]: B+(**)
• The Harry Allen Orchestra: With Roses (2023, Triangle7): [sp]: B
• Jeff Babko/David Piltch: The Libretto Show (2022 [2023], Tudor Tones): [cd]: B+(*)
• Caterina Barbieri: Myuthafoo (2023, Light-Years): [sp]: B+(**)
• Selwyn Birchwood: Exorcist (2023, Alligator): [sp]: B+(*)
• Julie Byrne: The Greater Wings (2023, Ghostly International): [sp]: B+(**)
• Carook: Best of Carook (So Far) (2021-22 [2023], Atlantic): [sp]: B+(***)
• Carook: Serious Person (Part 1) (2023, Atlantic, EP): [sp]: B+(***)
• Alex Coke & Carl Michel Sextet: Emergence (2022 [2023], PlayOn): [cd]: B+(*)
• Maria Da Rocha/Ernesto Rodrigues/Daniel Levin/João Madeira: Hoya (2022 [2023], Creative Sources): [cd]: B+(**)
• Oivia Dean: Messy (2023, EMI): [sp]: B+(*)
• Deer Tick: Emotional Contracts (2023, ATO): [sp]: B+(*)
• Gabriel Espinosa: Bossas and Boleros (2022 [2023], Zoho): [cd]: B-
• Orrin Evans: The Red Door (2020-22 [2023], Smoke Sessions): [sp]: B
• Drayton Farley: Twenty on High (2023, Hargrove): [sp]: B
• Gel: Only Constant (2023, Convulse, EP): [sp]: B
• Kevin Harris & the Solution: Jazz Gumbo (2023, Blujazz): [cd]: B-
• PJ Harvey: I Inside the Old Year Dying (2023, Partisan): [sp]: B+(*)
• Jason Kao Hwang Critical Response: Book of Stories (2023, True Sound): [cd]: A-
• The Japanese House: In the End It Always Does (2023, Dirty Hit): [sp]: B+(*)
• The Malpass Brothers: Lonely Street (2023, Billy Jam): [sp]: B+(***)
• Gretchen Parlato/Lionel Loueke: Lean In (2022 [2023], Edition): [sp]: B+(*)
• Bruno Parrinha: Da Erosão (2023, 4DaRecord): [cd]: B+(*)
• Kim Petras: Feed the Beast (2023, Island): [sp]: B+(*)
• Ernesto Rodrigues/Florian Stoffner/Bruno Parrinha/João Madeira: Altered Egos (2023, Creative Sources): [cd]: B+(***)
• Ernesto Rodrigues/Fred Lonberg-Holm/Flak/João Madeira/José Oliveira: The Giving Tree Moving On (2023, Creative Sources): [cd]: B+(**)
• Bill Scorzari: The Crosswinds of Kansas (2022, self-released): [sp]: A-
• Tiny Ruins: Ceremony (2023, Ba Da Bing): [sp]: B+(*)
• Josie Toney: Extra (2023, Like You Mean It): [sp]: B+(**)
• Young Thug: Business Is Business (2023, Atlantic): [sp]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• John Coltrane With Eric Dolphy: Evenings at the Village Gate (1961 [2023], Impulse!): [sp]: B+(***)
• L'Orchestre National Mauritanien: Ahl Nana (1971 [2023], Radio Martiko): [sp]: B+(***)
• Piconema: East African Hits on the Colombian Coast (1978-84 [2023], Rocafort): [bc]: A-

Old music:

• The Ultimate College Party: 50s & 60s Party Anthems (1953-62 [2014], Jasmine, 2CD): [cd]: A

Grade (or other) changes:

• Elle King: Come Get Your Wife (2023, RCA): [sp]: [was: B+(**)] A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Geof Bradfield Quintet: Quaver (Calligram) [08-04]
• Aldo Fosko Collective: This One Time (Hitchtone) [05-23]
• Max Gerl: Max Gerl (JMI) [07-28]
• Allan Harris: Live at Blue Llama Jazz Club (Love Productions/Live at Blue Llama) [07-28]
• Russ Johnson Quartet: Reveal (Calligram) [08-04]
• Low Country: Low Country (Ropeadope) [07-28]
• Chad McCullough: The Charm of Impossibilities (Calligram) [08-04]
• Arman Sangalang: Quartet (Calligram) [08-04]
• Mehmet Ali Sanlikol & Whatsnext?: Turkish Hipster (Dunya) [07-21]

Daily Log

Allen Lowe posted this on Facebook (you can follow the link, but I might as well quote it:

Was just thinking about a recent discussion on another timeline about the supposed dearth of good new players in jazz; I think there's lots of good work. But I will also mention, as I have frequently lately, that the polls and the critics are a mess, and largely to blame for our lack of exposure to so many worthy players. I blame it on critics' dependency on pricey publicists, which most musicians cannot afford unless, maybe, they are already making enough $$$$ in the business (yes, our version of Catch 22). Someone suggested it has always been like this, and I advised that I thought it was a bit better in the '50s and '60s, in which there seem to have been more odd and unconventional names being documented.

I think I have changed my mind about this, and want to explain why I think this problem -- of musical recognition and (lack of) variety, as personified by the same poll winners year after year -- is particularly effed up and inexcusable these days, and the result of lazy critics/voters. TODAY we have a democratizing force -- the internet -- which makes almost everything available and accessible. THERE IS NO LONGER ANY EXCUSE for critic/voters to be unaware of anyone, to just pull the lever for the same person year after year -- "Joe McGlib won last year for miscellaneous intstrument? Well, he must still be playing so I will vote for him." Now everything is around and within reach -- and only laziness and a desire to be spoonfed is what is messing us up, leading to this musical malaise, or whatever it is that some of us feel.

There are still plenty of great players, whether they feel the blues or not. You just gotta look out for 'em. Do some reading, do some listening. Get up off your butt -- no, wait, sit back down on your butt, start that laptop, stare at that screen, listen to this music and that music. You might learn something (but of course I know as I post this that nothing will ever change).

I tried to craft a response:

I'd like to weigh on on several points here (as briefly as possible; maybe I'll expand in a blog post):

1. One of the first things I discovered when I started my jazz guide for the Voice 20 years ago is that nearly everyone recording jazz is really good, so I had to keep raising the cutoff line on what I could write about, because I simply didn't have the space or time to do more. One result is that my picks wound up being very personal, meaning I had to discount a lot of perfectly fine music because other things appealed to me more.
2. I also discovered that there is a vast amount that I never got a chance to listen to. Streaming helps, but there's still an awful lot that I know about but don't have access to, and who knows how much more that I don't even know about. And I listen to, and write about, 700+ jazz albums per year (plus another 500+ non-jazz), so I really don't have many more hours to "listen to this music and that music."
3. Critics and publicists (and let's not forget publications/media) are symbiotic, and that skews things. I've written about this regarding polls, but it permeates the whole system, like capitalism. Even I am hard-pressed to imagine a revolution to fix it. Meanwhile, if you want the sort of publicity that gets you into polls and magazines, the only practical way to do that is to hire a publicist. If that strikes you as unfair, you're right, but search back for the keyword above.
4. Because of these skews (and not just these; there's a lot to be unpacked here, like how pubs select records for advertising synergy, matching them up with sympathetic critics willing to put in long hours for low pay), polls don't reliably measure much of anything. Best to think of them as an opportunity to learn something you didn't know (or quite understood) before. Because the odds that you know it all are nil.
5. I started writing for Christgau in 1974, and we've been friends ever since. He's always been a jazz fan, but gave up on trying to being any kind of expert around 1990, and since then he only rarely picks records that dovetail into his own very broad semipop aesthetic. (By the way, he previously wrote a rave on Allen's "American Pop," back in 1998.) I built and maintain his website, which has more than 80% of all he's written professionally.
6. Neither Christgau nor I have any formal music training or talent, which probably makes us aliens on this list.
7. I have no idea who "Joe McGlib" is. But then, about 10% of the musicians on DownBeat's ballot are people I didn't recognize, which I take as further evidence of (2) above. There is no chance that "it was a bit better in the '50s and '60s." You merely thought you knew more of the world then, because it was so much smaller.

Phil Overeem added this to my comment:

Tom, I am right there with you on 1 & 2, and when you say that "nearly everyone who is recording jazz is really good" and "my picks wound up being very personal"? I REALLY get that. I listened to three review copies yesterday I'd let sit while I was on vacation, and they were each marked by skilled playing, interesting compositional ideas, and even a unified sound (one was by a pretty big name). But they just didn't spark me, and there went three hours (I do feel an obligation to listen to everything I'm sent, unless it's someone I just can't abide or it's the third solo bass album I've received in a row--I've actually LOVED one of those).

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Too late for an introduction.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans: Seems like a relatively tame week for evil, but there are always examples.

• Aaron Blake: [07-15] Indictment paints tale of Chinese interests and 2016 Trump campaign: This doesn't strike me as anything Trump was culpable for, but does offer a lot of juicy details on how influence peddling works in and around political campaigns. That "Individual-1" is James Woolsey just confirms that he's a sleazebag, which you must have already suspected.

• Philip Bump: [07-14] The staggering scale of Donald Trump's speaking fees.

• Ryan Cooper: The GOP's Tommy Tuberville problem: "The Alabama senator's blockade of military promotions reveals the party's real position on abortion."

• David Dayen: [07-14] Jim Jordan misfires in attacks on Lina Khan. Or, per Bradley Blankenship: [07-15] Corporate America really doesn't like FTC chair Lina Khan challenging . . . corporate America.

• Ed Kilgore: [07-15] Tucker Carlson hijacks Christian right confab in Iowa.

• Joan McCarter: [07-16] Greene owns McCarthy, and he doesn't even realize it: And the picture of them cuddling is much cuter than one I cited a couple weeks ago.

• Nicole Narea:

  • [07-13] The GOP's anti-FBI turn, explained. I have to chuckle a bit. Where where these principled opponents against politicization of the FBI when Hoover was targeting antiwar and civil rights movements?

  • [07-14] Iowa has implemented one of the strictest abortion bans in the US. The latest poll in Iowa showed that 61% supported abortion rights, but this is what you get when you elect Republicans.

• Li Zhou: [07-14] How Republicans turned a must-pass defense bill into an "extremist manifesto". Republicans have this bizarre idea that the US military should be a captive training ground for their future militia soldiers. There certainly are examples of right-wing fanatics with military backgrounds, in part because access to guns is a recruiting tool. But the military is also the most thoroughly integrated organization in America, and the importance of, for lack of a better term, wokeness hasn't been lost on their officers. But also, military service is one of the few occupations where public service is respected and admired, which is one reason many ex-military people are running for office as Democrats. Even the Supreme Court carved out an exception for the military from its recent ruling against affirmative action, citing "national security." For more on this:

  • Dan Balz: [07-15] House Republicans wage 'woke' culture wars with the military.

  • Robert Schlesinger: [07-13] Far-right Republicans' radical, bigoted attack on the Defense bill: "Even the military isn't safe from the GOP's war on wokeness."

  • Tessa Stuart: [07-10] Republicans push to strip abortion access for veterans.

• Alex Skopic: [07-13] The Espionage Act is bad for America -- even when it's used on Trump: Sure, I agree. I also think drug possession laws are bad for America, and should be repealed. If somehow the Espionage Act got repealed, I'd be happy to pardon anyone convicted under it, as I would anyone convicted under drug possession laws, including Trump and the Rosenbergs (not that we can bring the latter back to life). Until then, I don't much care. After all, Trump had plenty of opportunity to pardon people convicted under this act (or charged, like Julian Assange), and never did. He was too busy pardoning his cronies and fellow creeps.

Biden and/or the Democrats: Necessarily a grab bag, but we're probably stuck with it.

• Eric Levitz: He's one of the better writers at New York Magazine, but I find a lot to quibble with this week:

  • [07-11] Biden's unpopularity is more mysterious than it looks. Returns to the subject of his previous piece: [07-06] It makes sense that Bidenomics is unpopular (so far), admitting that "the unpopularity of both Biden and his economy are stranger than I'd previously allowed." I find both arguments unconvincing, but I'm not sure I got them right. One problem is that lots of things are only explicable with statistics, but they don't carry the same weight as experience. And even experience is subject to interpretation. By all objective measures, the 1980s were a great decade for me, but I didn't credit Reagan with any of that, and in fact I blamed him for a lot of problems that hadn't really materialized yet, but which seemed all but inevitable given his policies. If you expect the economy to go to hell when a Democrat or Republican takes over, it isn't hard to find evidence that you're right -- especially given that both have primarily given us more inequality.

  • [07-08] The 'greedflation' debate is deeply confused: Sure, he scores easy points against straw men or hacks -- Robert Reich is an example -- not least by pointing out cases where profits all but automatically rise when external events impact supply. (If you're as old as I am, you may remember the "windfall profits tax" passed in 1973, when OPEC forced oil prices way up, inadvertently making American oil men suddenly much richer.) On the other hand, I don't buy the argument that monopoly couldn't be raising prices now because if it existed, it would have raised prices previously. There are lots of reasons for monopolists not to fully exploit their power the moment they get it, but to do so when others give them cover for rising prices (as well as the incentive kick of raising costs). But also, "greedflation" provides an alternative to the cruel notion that inflation should be fought by taking away people's jobs.

  • [07-12] The case for Cornel West 2024 is extremely weak. But the case would be stronger if Levitz hadn't made a wrong turn in his first sentence: Cornel West recently decided that the best way for him to advance economic and social justice in the United States . . . thereby marginally increasing the odds of a second Trump presidency." I'm not interested in debating the last part, which as Levitz admits is a very marginal concern. The mistake is in thinking that West's campaign is only about "economic and social justice," and only in the US. If that's all that's at dispute, I'd happily concede that Biden is already making progress in that direction, and that West, no matter how much more he wants to achieve, isn't likely to do much better. If that's all he wants, he, like Bernie Sanders, would be better off working with Biden. But West has another major plank in his campaign, one that is diametrically opposed to both Republican and Democratic leaders, and that is foreign policy, and the almost certainty that current policies will lead to more wars that will eventually prove disastrous both for America and for the world. [E.g., see this interview; also another interview by Chris Hedges.] Not many people understand that, but that's all the more reason for West to stand up and argue the case. My biggest worry for 2024 is that some Biden miscalculation will throw us into a war, that will trigger a rebound for Trump, who is already arguing that only he can save us from world war. The rest of the article consists of minor arguments with a pro-West piece by Lily Sánchez, which pale in importance to this issue.

  • [07-13] A new order blocking Manchin's pipeline could hurt the climate: "Restricting Congress's authority to exempt energy projects from judicial review would undermine the green transition."

  • [07-15] Can extremely reflective white paint save the planet? If anyone does come up with a plausible geoengineering scheme for cooling the atmosphere, Democrats (in particular) will happily throw a lot of money at it. This is an example of a small hack that's unlikely to scale significantly, but at least it involves spending more to avoid simply cutting back on energy use -- one solution that no one serious considers plausible.

• Nicole Narea: [07-14] Biden's new plan to forgive $39 billion in student loans, explained: "More than 800,000 borrowers are now eligible for student loan forgiveness." Something else for Republicans to try to ruin.

• John Nichols: [07-14] Jesse Jackson's politics of peace: "His 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns called for ending military interventions, supported disarmament, and sought deep cuts in Pentagon spending." Not even Bernie Sanders has done that since, which is more evidence of how deeply rutted our thinking is on the military. I've long thought that Jackson would have won the Democratic Party nomination had he run in 1992, but he didn't, to avoid blame for losing a second term to GWH Bush. I also thought that Clinton owed him big time for not making the run, and I expected some kind of payoff for the favor, but never noticed one.

• Timothy Noah: [07-12] You'll be very surprised who's benefiting most from Bidenomics: Not really. "Red states, not blue ones, are seeing the biggest income gains." Isn't it always like that? Poor states vote Republican, and better off states bail them out.

Climate and Environment:

• Matthew Cappucci/Tamia Fowlkes/Shera Avi-Yonah: [07-16] Relentless heat wave reaching maximum strength. Phoenix hit 118°F; Sardinia 117°F, Sanbao (China) 126°F. Miami has "seen a record 36 days in a row with heat index value above 100 degrees."

• Julia Conley: [07-14] Death Valley expected to record highest temp ever on earth as climate crisis roars.

• Rachel DuRose: [07-13] There's no such thing as a disaster-resistant place anymore. Photograph is from flooded Montpelier, VT, but other examples abound

• Benji Jones/Umair Irfan: [07-12] 3 reasons why this summer is so damn hot: How many ways can you say "climate change"?

• Umair Irfan: [07-13] It's even hot in Antarctica, where it's winter. Map shows "record-low early winter sea ice around Antarctica."

• Viviane Callier: [2020-04-08] The Story of More: Five Questions for the Lab Girl, Hope Jahren: I recently read the paleobotanist's memoir Lab Girl, so when I saw she had a book subtitled How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here, I dug up this interview, and eventually ordered the book.

• Nathan J Robinson: [07-14] The world needs many new climate activists right now: Interview with philosopher Henry Shue, author of The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now, who likens the task to "the World War II generation's duty to stop fascism."

Ukraine War: Conspicuous by absence is any news on how well Ukraine's "counteroffensive" is going, which suggests it isn't. On the other hand, NATO met, and continues to rack up milestones, which as usual mostly involve arms sales. Wake me when we see some diplomacy, because once again nothing else matters. The Gessen piece is historical, stuff you should know. It doesn't mean that Putin's invasion was in any way justifiable, or that sending arms to help Ukraine fend off that invasion is bad policy, but understanding America's deep culpability for the conflict would go a long way toward negotiating a way out of it. Conversely, not recognizing how this all went wrong prevents us from understanding the chief lessons of this war: that deterrence and sanctions are more likely to provoke war than to prevent it; and that not just the combatants but the world cannot afford for wars like this to go on and on.

• Connor Echols: [07-14] Diplomacy Watch: Sweden gets NATO, Turkey gets F-16s? Hard to see how anything accomplished at the Vilnius NATO summit last week brings us an inch closer to peace in Ukraine, while the continued posturing gives Russia all the more reason to hold out.

• George Beebe: [07-14] America's strategy for the NATO alliance is failing.

• Keith Gessen: [06-12] How Russia went from ally to adversary: A valuable bit of history, referencing on several recent books: Vladislav Zubok: Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union; Mary Elise Sarotte: Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate; Philipp Ther: How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War; Philip Short: Putin; and William Hill: No Place for Russia: European Security Institutions Since 1989, where the argument is that Russia was too big to integrate into Europe, so had to be pushed outside. These books cover ground I know well enough to have jumped ahead and wrote the following based on one anecdote, but the piece both confirms what I already knew and adds more telling detail.

  This starts with what we might view as the original disconnect: Gorbachev decided that the Cold War was a stupid and dangerous waste, so he offered not detente but cooperation; Bush saw Gorbachev's offer as a surrender, and demanded spoils, starting with East Germany. Americans saw the Cold War as not only justified but as victorious. When the Soviet Union dissolved, Americans saw more opportunities to press their advantage. Well into the Putin years, Russia tried to accommodate American hubris, but eventually they realized that American ambition was insatiable, and that it was increasingly directed at painting Russia as their enemy. That, after all, was key to NATO's eastward expansion. The pro-West coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the event that snapped Putin's tolerance, and the pro-Russian revolts in Crimea and Donbas allowed Russia to push back. This led to a significant rethink of how Russia could reassert its dignity, the invasion in 2022, and the current war quagmire. Of course, in the minds of Americans and their European allies and clients, this only confirms their fears and their commitment to deterrence as the only way to contain Russia. As this history makes clear, it didn't have to wind up like this. But the whole history of the Cold War was based on equally spurious assumptions and misreadings, lessons which given the vogue of triumphalism Americans have still refused to learn.

• Jen Kirby: [07-12] What Ukraine did -- and didn't -- get from the NATO summit.

• Anatol Lieven: [07-11] The case for Ukraine's NATO membership is the zombie that won't die: Written pre-Vilnius. Also Ivan Eland: [07-11] Ukraine should never be admitted to NATO.

• Suzanne Loftus: [07-13] Rise in German far-right reflects growing sentiment against Ukraine war: This should be accounted as a risk of continuing the war, of not moving as quickly as possible toward a negotiated agreement. Even if the far right only favors Russia as a fellow fascist, it is a bad look for the left to be seen as warmongers.

• Bryan Metzger: [07-13] Here are the 70 House Republicans who voted to cut off all US military aid to Ukraine. Lest you think that Republicans are turning to pacifism and/or isolationism, consider Kwan Wei Kevin Tan: [07-13] Matt Gaetz is back on the anti-Ukraine hamster wheel and floating the suggestion that Russia, not Ukraine, should be part of NATO so the organization can become an anti-China alliance.

• Nathan J Robinson: [07-11] Biden's provision of cluster bombs to Ukraine is illegal and immoral. So is the use of those same weapons, and for that matter mines, by Russia and Ukraine. That none of the three have signed international treaties banning their use is no excuse. But the US sending such weapons into a war zone does make it hard for the US to condemn Russia's use of them.

• Kelley Beaucar Vlahos:

  • [07-12] Riddle this: How many casualties are there, truly, on both sides of Ukraine war? Estimates are all over the place, and none of them are credible.

  • [07-14] Biden taps US reserves for NATO mission in Europe.

Around the world: But mostly Israel, again.

• Basel Adra/Juval Abraham: [07-10] The destruction of this Palestinian community was green-lighted by Israel's Supreme Court.

• James Bamford: [07-07] In Jenin, as elsewhere, Netanyahu knows he can count on Washington's complicity.

• Jonathan Guyer: [07-11] The Biden administration's remarkably unambitious approach to Israel: "What we learned from Ambassador Tom Nides's exit interview with the Wall Street Journal."

• Mitchell Plitnick: [07-14] As the US-Israel relationship is questioned, its 'shared fictions' remain strong. Refers to a column by Thomas Friedman: [07-11] The US reassessment of Netanyahu's government has begun.

• Jeff Wright: [07-16] Israel has turned all of Palestine into 'an open-air prison' to further annexation plans: So concludes the UN Special Rapporteur.

Other stories:

Kai Bird: [07-07] Oppenheimer, nullified and vindicated: Co-author of the biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bird explains the campaign to get the federal government to admit that they erred in 1954 in revoking Oppenheimer's security clearance, thus excluding the director of the Manhattan Project from any further role in atomic weapons planning. The vindication didn't come until December 18, 2022, and serves as another example of something Biden's administration has done that Obama's was too chickenshit to venture. I will quibble with the assertion that Oppenheimer was "the chief celebrity victim of the national trauma known as McCarthyism." Sure, he was the bigger celebrity, but the execution of the Rosenbergs was a graver miscarriage of justice. But Oppenheimer is a clearer example of how McCarthyism worked: it meant that anyone with a vaguely leftist past could be crucified as a traitor, and hardly anyone would dare come to their defense -- especially liberals who could themselves be tarred as "fellow travelers."

Jonathan Chait: [07-11] In defense of independent opinion journalism: "The 'hack gap' between right and left has been closing." I'm not convinced. I won't deny that there are hacks on the left, but they differ significantly from hacks on the right. For one thing, they're not all aligned against their partisan enemies. Take Chait, for instance, who only seems truly happy when he's attacking people to his left -- a considerable number, given his support for the Iraq war, his pimping for charter schools, and his "Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination." But even when leftists slip into hackdom, they still start with commitments to truth and justice that are utterly alien to the right. Then, by the way, there is the deeper problem of objectivity, which is impossible, making it a claim one should always be suspicious of.

Bob Harris/Jon Schwarz: [07-04] Carl Reiner's life should remind us: If you like laughing, thank FDR and the New Deal: "Their comedy descends directly from the Works Progress Administration." The WPA did a world of good for America, but much of what they did, especially in the arts, would be considered too frivolous, and in many cases too controversial, for "taxpayer" funding these days. Until that attitude changes, we're stuck with a government distinguished mostly by misery: how miserable its workers feel, and how miserable they make the rest of us.

Noasm Hassenfeld: [07-16] Even the scientists who build AI can't tell you how it works: Interview with Sam Bowman.

Oshan Jarow: [07-14] Poverty is a major public health crisis. Let's treat it like one. You'd think that such an argument would make people more inclined to support anti-poverty measures, but Republicans have aligned themselves pretty firmly against public health (or at least doing anything about it).

Jess Lander: [07-13] What led to Anchor Brewing's downfall? Sapporo, some workers say. America's oldest craft brewer is going out of business, supposedly a victim of Covid or maybe bad marketing, but I'm suspicious of two ownership changes: in 2010, owner Fritz Maytag, who had rescued the brewery after prohibition, sold to Griffin Group ("a local beverage consulting company," which smells a lot like private equity even if they're not a big name), and in 2017 Griffin pawned the carcass on to giant Japanese brewer Sapporo. It's easy enough to say that the latter didn't understand American craft brewers, and to illustrate this with various marketing blunders, but the deeper truth is that they simply didn't care, especially after the workforce unionized in 2019. After all, it's not unusual for big companies to buy up small ones only to shutter them, leaving the larger company with one fewer competitor (even if, as in this case, one that barely mattered).

Back when I worked for a high-tech startup, where most employees owned a small sliver of stock, I concluded that the world would be much better if employees owned a controlling share of stock, thus resolving conflict with management. (Unions, valuable as they are as a balance against management power, usually increase conflict, especially when they lack legal rights, as is often the case in the US; on the other hand, in Germany, where "co-determination" gives workers a stake in management, unions align more closely with management.) I'd like to see many policies that help facilitate employee ownership. One of the most obvious ones would be to allow employees to claim defunct businesses, wiping out the company's previous debt obligations, and providing funding for a fresh start. I have no doubt that a company like Anchor could be revived, if handed over to workers who care about the product and the customers, and about their own jobs.

Shira Ovide: [07-14] We must end the tyranny of printers in American life: "Printers cannot be reformed. They must be destroyed, once and for all." I had to include this because my latest printer purchase, a HP OfficeJet Pro 9010, is the biggest purchasing mistake I've ever made. They insisted that I use a wireless connection, and while it is recognized by my Linux computers, I'm not able to send any jobs from them to be printed. (At one point, this worked, but even then scans couldn't be uploaded, at least not using sane.) One main reason for the wireless connection is the need to reorder ink as part of a subscription program that was originally offered for $2.99/month, then immediately raised to $4.99/month. Of course, they haven't sent me any ink, because I haven't been able to print. I've owned several HP printers going back to their LaserJet II in the 1980s, but they've never pulled anything like this before. At last, as Ovide will be happy to hear, I'm learning to live without printing. Now I need to figure out how to stop paying for nothing.

Kelsey Piper: [07-12] Stop looking to Mother Nature for answers to resource questions: "The silly way we think about resource scarcity." Followed, sad to say, by an equally silly answer. While it's true that we haven't discovered every earthly resource we might eventually manage to exploit, that's mostly because people keep assuming that only very short terms matter: a "50 year" phosphorus find may be a big deal for 50 years, but 50 years is a pretty short time frame.

Sigal Samuel: [07-11] Scientists unveil the key site that shows we're in a new climate epoch: Title has it backwards: some scientists decided we are in a new climate epoch, then looked for a geologic site that could be used as a marker between the old Holocene epoch and the new Anthropocene. They found one, but it's not based on climate change. Rather, what it marks is the appearance of fallout from nuclear bombs testing, which increased significantly around 1950. On the other hand, human impact on the geostratigraphic record goes back hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, eventually becoming dramatic enough to justify the term Anthropocene (much like the Cambrian is sometimes called the age of trilobites).

Jeffrey St Clair: [07-14] Roaming Charges: Clusterfuck in Vilnius. He's in a bad mood, starting with cluster bombs for Ukraine.

Two subjects I didn't want to say anything about are No Labels and RFK Jr. -- among other things, do I file them under Republicans, who they effectively work for, or Democrats? -- but if you want some well-reasoned analysis, turn to No More Mister Nice Blog:

• [07-16] Be very afraid of No Labels (unless you're Donald Trump).

• [07-16] I hope the mainstream media is proud of all the attention it gave RJF Jr.; also [07-14] Among dangerous bullshitters, game recognizes game; and [07-10] RFK Jr. doesn't have to try very hard to out-debate David Remnick.

An old piece I ran across, still worth mentioning:

• Alex Pareene: [2017-04-05] The long, lucrative right-wing grift is blowing up in the world's face.

• Rick Perlstein: [2012-11] The long con: Mail-order conservatism.

Daily Log

Clifford Ocheltree's "A-list" of "stand-alone blues albums, meaning not best-ofs or comps":

• Adams, Johnny;There Is Always One More Time
• Alexander, Arthur;Lonely Just Like Me
• Anderson, Kip;A Knife And A Fork
• Bell, William;This Is Where I Live
• Benton, Buster;Blues At The Top
• Bland, Bobby;Members Only
• Bland, Bobby;Years Of Tears
• Blues Boy Willie;Be Who?
• Bonds, Gary 'U. S.';Back In 20
• Bradley, Charles;Victim Of Love
• Bridges, Eugene 'Hideaway';Born To Be Blue
• Brown, Nappy;Long Time Coming
• Bryant, Don;Don't Give Up On Love
• Buddy Ace;Don't Hurt No More (Root Doctor)
• Burke, Solomon;Nothing's Impossible
• Burke, Solomon;Don't Give Up On Me
• Burks, Michael;Make It Rain
• Clark, W.C.;Heart Of Gold
• Clayton, Willie;Ace In The Hole
• Coleman, Gary 'BB';Romance Without Finance Is A Nuisance
• Cray, Robert;Strong Persuader
• Cray, Robert;Take Your Shoes Off
• Davis, James 'Thunderbird';Check Out Time
• Davis, Maurice;The Right Way
• Davis, Tyrone;For The Good Times
• Fields, Lee;My World
• Fields, Lee;Special Night
• Fields, Lee;Faithful Man
• Gaines, Earl;The Different Feelings Of Blues & Soul
• Gaines, Roy;Bluesman For Life
• Garrett, Vernon;Too Hip To Be Happy
• Gilmore, Joey;When The Gods Of Africa Meet The Ghosts Of Mississippi
• Green, Al;Lay It Down
• Haddix, Travis 'Moonchild';Winners Never Quit
• Hammond, Clay;Streets Will Love You
• Harrison, Sterling;South Of The Snooty Fox
• Hayes, Isaac;Branded - Raw & Refined
• Hightower, Willie;Out Of The Blue
• Hill, Z.Z.;I'm A Blues Man
• Hill, Z.Z.;Down Home
• Hinton, Eddie;Hard Luck Guy
• Holloway, Eddie;I Had A Good Time
• Hooks, Ellis;Undeniable
• Johnson, L. V.;Unclassified
• Johnson, Syl;Back In The Game
• Jones, Charlie;The Ultimate Charlie Jones
• Jones, Johnny & Charles Walker;In The House
• Jones, Sharon & The Dap Kings ;I Learned The Hard Way
• Jones, Sharon & The Dap Kings ;Soul Of A Woman
• Jones, Tutu;Inside Out
• King, Albert;I'm In A Phone Booth, Baby
• King, B.B.;Makin' Love Is Good for You
• LaSalle, Denise;A Lady In The Street
• Latimore;You're Welcome To Ride
• LaVette, Bettye;I've Got My Own Hell To Raise
• LaVette, Bettye;A Woman Like Me
• Lee, Frankie;The Ladies And The Babies
• Leon, Eddie;Let Me In Your Arms Again
• Little Buster & The Soul Brothers ;Right On Time
• Little Milton;Playing For Keeps
• Little Milton;Cheatin' Habit
• Lovejoy, Ronnie;Think About You All The Time
• Lynn, Trudy;1st Lady Of Soul
• McClain, Mighty Sam;Give It Up To Love
• Mendenhall, Frank;Hard Times
• Omarr, Vel;The Greatest Song I Ever Sang
• Payne - Edmonson Band;Master Of The Game
• Pickett, Wilson;It's Harder Now
• Price / Clay Band;This Time For Real
• Pride, Lou;Words Of Caution
• Pride, Lou;Ain't No More Love In This House
• Rawls & Luckett;Can't Sleep At Night
• Rawls, Johnny;My Turn To Win
• Rayford, Sugaray;The World We Live In
• Roberts, Roy;Sicily Moon
• Robinson, Tad;Back In Style
• Rodgers, Mighty Mo;Redneck Blues
• Rodgers, Mighty Mo;Blues Is My Wailin' Wall
• Saadiq, Raphael;The Way I See It
• Salgado, Curtis;Soul Shot
• Shannon, Mem;Memphis In The Morning
• Shannon, Preston;Midnight In Memphis
• Shields, Lonnie;Midnight Delight
• Sledge, Percy;Blue Night
• Staton, Candi;His Hands
• Swamp Dogg ;Resurrection
• Taylor, Johnnie;This Is Your Night
• Taylor, Koko;From The Heart Of A Woman
• Thomas, Rufus;That Woman Is Poison!
• Tillman, Robert 'Duke';Hurt By Love Before
• Walker, Charles;Changes
• Walker, Charles;Number By Heart
• Walker, Willie;Memphisapolis
• Ward, Robert;Fear No Evil
• Washington, Walter 'Wolfman';Wolf Tracks
• Watson, Johnny 'Guitar';Bow Wow
• Wayne, Bobby;Hit That Thing!
• White, Artie 'Blues Boy';Tired Of Sneaking Around
• Willis, Chick;From The Heart And Soul

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 31 albums, 4 A-list,

Music: Current count 40543 [40512] rated (+31), 17 [14] unrated (+3).

Another hefty Speaking of Which yesterday (80 links, 5441 words). I was panicking about my inability to get anything done, but once I settled into this piece, a calm settled over me, and I felt my thinking and (hopefully) my writing become clear. Perhaps I should stop worrying about whether anyone else reads and/or cares about these exercises, and just consider them therapy.

Picks last week were non-jazz, but this week they're all jazz -- the band behind Aja Monet is practically all-star, while the others are more avant. Gerry Hemingway wrote a while back and asked if I'd be interested in him sending me something. I said sure, not expecting side credits, but they made my week. His own songs-with-vocals album Afterlife was perhaps the biggest, most pleasant surprise of 2022.

Spent most of today catching up with the indexing on June's Streamnotes, which entails the annual list and the artist index. Beware that the latter is 21,814 records long.

New records reviewed this week:

• Jason Adasiewicz: Roy's World (2017 [2023], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: A-
• Susan Alcorn/José Lencastre/Hernâni Faustino: Manifesto (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): [r]: B+(*)
• Jalen Baker: Be Still (2022 [2023], Cellar): [cd]: B+(*)
• João Barradas: Solo II: Live at Festival D'Aix-En-Provence (2022 [2023], Clean Feed) **
• Carlos Bica: Playing With Beethoven (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): [sp]: B
• Big Freedia: Central City (2023, Queen Diva): [sp]: B-
• Valentin Ceccaldi: Bonbon Flamme (2023, Clean Feed): [bc]: B+(***)
• Entoto Band: Entoto Band (2023, Guitar Globetrotter): [sp]: B+(**)
• Gloss Up: Before the Gloss Up (2023, Quality Control): [sp]: B+(***)
• HIIT: For Beauty Is Nothing but the Beginning of Terror (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(**)
• Jelly Roll: Whitsitt Chapel (2023, BBR Music Group): [sp]: B+(**)
• Kala Jula & Gangbé Brass Band: Asro (2019 [2023], Buda Musique): [sp]: B+(**)
• Izumi Kimura/Gerry Hemingway: Kairos (2022 [2023], Fundacja Sluchaj): [cd]: A-
• John Carroll Kirby: Blowout (2023, Stones Throw): [sp]: B-
• Kool Keith: Black Elvis 2 (2023, Mello Music Group): [sp]: B+(**)
• Lil Uzi Vert: Pink Tape (2023, Generation Now/Atlantic): [sp]: B+(**)
• Aja Monet: When the Poems Do What They Do (2023, Drink Sum Wtr): [sp]: A-
• Margaux Oswald/Jesper Zeuthen: Magnetite (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(***)
• Bruno Parrinha/Vine Leaf: Tales of Senses (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(***)
• Emanuele Parrini/Samo Salamon/Vasco Trilla: Eating Poetry (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(**)
• Phiik & Lungs: Another Planet 4 (2023, Tase Grip/Break All): [sp]: B+(*)
• Peso Pluma: Génesis (2023, Double P): [sp]: B+(**)
• Marek Pospieszalski: No Other End of the World Will There Be: Based on the Works of Polish Female Composers of the 20th Century (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(**)
• Sexyy Red: Hood Hottest Princess (2023, Heavy on It): [sp]: B+(*)
• Liba Villavecchia Trio: Birchwood (2022 [2023], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(***)
• WiFiGawd & Soudiere: 36 Chambers of Pressure Vol. 2 (2023, Purple Posse, EP) **

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Brew: Heat/Between Reflections (1998-2019 [2023], Clean Feed, 2CD): [cd]: A-
• Luther Thomas: 11th Street Fire Suite (1978 [2023], Corbett vs. Dempsey): [bc]: C+

Old music:

• Izumi Kimura: Asymmetry: Piano Music From Japan and Ireland (2009 [2010], Diatribe): [sp]: B+(**)
• Izumi Kimura/Cora Venus Lunny: Invisible Resistances (2022, Fairpoint): [sp]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Maria Da Rocha/Ernesto Rodrigues/Daniel Levin/João Madeira: Hoya (Creative Sources) [06-01]
• Gabriel Espinosa: Bossas and Boleros (Zoho) [06-23]
• Doug MacDonald Trio: Edwin Alley (DMAC Music) [08-01]
• Ernesto Rodrigues/Florian Stoffner/Bruno Parrinha/João Madeira: Altered Egos (Creative Sources) [06-01]
• Ernesto Rodrigues/Fred Lonberg-Holm/Flak/João Madeira/José Oliveira: The Giving Tree Moving On (Creative Sources) [06-01]
• Paul Tynan & Aaron Lington: Bicoastal Collective: Chapter Six (OA2) [07-21]

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

I could write about Israel every week, as every week some new outrage occurs there. I don't, because I tire of making the same points over and over, and because what happens there is mostly out of sight and therefore out of mind. But since the current Netanyahu government took power, built as it is on ultra-religious parties tied to settler aggression and violence, a direction has clearly emerged, which if unchecked will lead to the end of Jewish Democracy -- let's face it, there's never been universal democracy in Israel -- and eventually to genocide against Palestinians. The ruling junta's plot to break the judicial system, which sometimes acts as a brake on the government's violence, has been widely reported, because it's been widely protested by Israeli Jews and their sympathizers in the US. The violence directed against Palestinians has received much less attention, mostly in the form of pieces like: [07-04] Israel targets West Bank militant stronghold in major operation. Of course, it helps to know that all Palestinians are considered "militants," and any place they're in the majority is a "stronghold." For a brief introduction to what happened there, see Jeffrey St Clair: [07-07] The meaning of Jenin.

I'll follow up with some more links, but first I want to be clear on several points:

1. From its inception in the 1880s, Zionism has always been a colonial settler project, pitched to gain sponsorship by an imperial power. The UK adopted the movement in 1917 to use against the Ottomans. After the British withdrew in 1948, Israel became independent, but still needed allies for arms (first Russia, then France, then the US).

2. With British protection secured, the Zionist community (Yishuv) was segregated and grew self-sufficient, buying land while marginalizing Palestinian workers -- the powerful Jewish labor union insisted on only employing Jewish labor. The adoption of Hebrew as their national language further isolated Jews from Arabs. When Israel was declared, a separate-and-unequal society and economy already existed, reinforced by law.

3. Like all settler colonialists, Zionists understdood that success depended on numbers. In the US and Australia, an overwhelming number of settlers (aided by disease and superior arms) relegated the few surviving natives to reservations. But settlers never had a chance in places where they were a tiny minority (like Haiti or Kenya), nor were settlers ultimately able to retain power in places where they held substantial power but were still a minority (like South Africa and Algeria). When the British withdrew, the Jewish population of Palestine was about 35%. Israel attempted to solve this problem by partition (a UN-approved plan they agreed to but didn't honor), war, and the mass expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from land they occupied during the war. The Palestinians remaining in Israel were accorded some rights, but lived under a military justice system separate from Jews, and faced economic restrictions.

4. Israel never accepted its borders. (There are still Israelis who believe they are entitled to the East Bank of the Jordan, to southern Lebanon, and to Sinai.) It obliterated the UN partition plan, by seizing West Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Western Galilee, among other expansions. It then launched wars in 1956 and 1967 to seize more land. After 1967, Israel developed a complex system of control over the occupied territories, but they kept wanting more, to which aim they permitted settlers to claim an ever-expanding array of select locations.

In 1967, Israel faced three threats -- Arab attack, Palestinian uprising, and world opinion turning against Israel -- beyond the obvious demographic trap, but could have navigated their way around them. The threat of Arab armies (mostly Egypt and Syria) was largely ended by Israel's 1967 blitz, which gave them territories that could be returned for peace -- as finally happened with Egypt in 1979, and almost happened with Syria in 2000 (before Barak got cold feet and/or greedy). Israel could have organized Gaza and the West Bank into an indepdendent Palestinian state, which could have repatriated refugees, thus degrading the PLO and its offshoots. And world opinion -- which would later tip the balance against South Africa -- was most sensitive to injustice, which Israel had started to address by ending military rule within the 1967 borders.

But Israelis weren't satisfied, and given the belief system they had painstakingly constructed, probably couldn't be. They had built a military juggernaut, and doubled down on it, becoming one of the most thoroughly militaristic societies the world has ever known. Meanwhile, the state supported the ultra-orthodox, who moved from apolitical to nationalist and beyond. The stratification of society and economy inflated Jewish pride, while grinding Palestinians into resistance, which could be met with half-hearted accommodation (like Oslo), or simply with violence. Such violence risks international support, but as long as the US blindly follows, Israel can manage the rest.

I'm not insensitive to the plight of Palestinians under Israel's yoke. Nor do I see this oppression as steady state. Under the current political regime, Israelis will continue to take land and livelihood from Palestinians. Moreover, they don't fear violent uprising. They welcome it as an opportunity for even more violent reprisals. No one can doubt that Israel has the firepower to commit genocide. And more than a few Israelis already have the mindset. With more violence, more will join them, until some tipping point, which is becoming increasingly likely -- especially if the US swings back to some Christian Zionist fanatic or fool. Donald Trump is certainly the latter, if not necessarily the former.

But I'm also bothered by what Israel's cult of dominance is doing to them. They have ordered a society which is racist at its core, which is profoundly unequal and unjust, which is maintained both by psychological manipulation and brutality. That's no way to live. (Late in his life, Ariel Sharon admitted as much, not that he did anything about it.) As a result, Israelis are doomed to struggle and suffer, finding themselves increasingly out of step from the rest of the world -- not least from Jews in the diaspora, who are finding it increasingly difficult to even recognize their brethren.

Injustices everywhere increase the odds of revolutionary violence spilling into further war, which is a big reason -- even if sympathy and solidarity doesn't move you -- to worry and warn against them. However you measure such things, Israel is one of the most unjust nations in the world today. It's also one of the most heavily armed, so it's not like world opinion can do much if they snap. But the threat I worry even more about is that the US will see Israel as a model, and seek to replicate its injustices at 50 times the scale. If you don't know who I'm talking about, start with the Republicans section below.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans:

• Walker Bragman: [07-06] How Ron DeSantis turned Covid denialism in a major political weapon: "The Florida governor's deadly anti-public health politics may just help him outflank Trump, who looks like a moderate in comparison." I wouldn't call Trump a "moderate" here. He just likes to have it both ways, taking credit for the vaccination program while through his own miraculous recovery testifying that we didn't really need it. If you want to dwell on a pivotal moment in history, consider what would be different if Trump had died in Walter Mead instead of bouncing back. His recovery, more than anything else, revitalized his campaign -- and, of course, allowed him to carry on with his post-election nonsense.

• Philip Bump: [07-05] You can't be more conservative than Trump when he defines conservatism.

• Margaret Hartmann: [07-06] Trump sours on Kari Lake because she's too Trumpy. Follow up to reports a few weeks back touting her as Trump's vice-presidential running mate. Not only does she add gender balance to the ticket, she's already proved she can lose Arizona. Highlight is a Trump "truth" on Lake's new book: "I know this book is great, because I wrote the foreword." Hartmann also wrote: [06-29] Melania Trump releases 'Yearning to Breathe Free' NFT. Biggest surprise here is that Melania seems to have gotten into the NFT racket earlier than her husband.

• Nicole Narea: [07-06] 4 revelations from the latest unsealed records in the Trump classified documents case:

  1. Prosecutors relied on security footage to build their case against Trump
  2. Trump didn't initially argue to prosecutors that he declassified the documents
  3. Trump's lawyers probably never looked beyond the storage room for classified documents
  4. We still don't know all the reasons why prosecutors believed that Trump still had documents in his possession

• Timothy Noah: [07-06] The truth about the GOP and the deficit: All they do is raise it. You know this, right?

• Robert Schlesinger: [07-06] Ron DeSantis's ghoulish embrace of American Psycho Patrick Bateman: "The increasingly hopeless presidential candidate is now clinging to a weird right-wing meme in hopes of winning over the misogynistic-sociopath vote." Aka, "the base"?

• Marianna Sotomayor/John Wagner: [07-07] House Freedom Caucus votes to oust conservative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Further proof that they eat their own. (Mo Brooks is a previous example, in case you forgot.) Admittedly, not as dramatic as the guillotining of Robespierre. More like a playground squabble. Also note: the most unflattering pic of MTG to date.

• Michael Tomasky: [07-07] Pay attention to what you see: Donald Trump is losing his marbles.

• Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: [07-03] There are plenty of reasons to boo Lindsey Graham off a stage: "Let us count the ways." Provides many examples of Graham's warmongering over the years, but woefully incomplete, missing even such egregious examples as his insistence in 2008 that the US go to war with Russia over Georgia. But while he's a broken record on war, on many other subjects -- especially Trump -- the one thing he repeatedly shows us is how little thought occurs before he speaks. There's quite a bit on him in Mark Leibovich's Thank You for Your Servitude, where he is depicted as a habitual flunky who's always looking for a leader type to suck up to -- he's floundered since John McCain's death. (As Kathleen Parker put it: McCain's "death five years ago left his wingman without a lead pilot.")

  I still have this vague memory of a quote from him from back when he was still in the House (1995-2003), explaining that Republicans need to lock in as much power as possible while they still have the chance, because longer trends were working against them. That stuck with me as smart, cynical, and evil. But probably not an original thought, as those seem beyond him. Rather, as he's wont to, he just inadvertently spilled the beans about a plot that had already been hatched. Vlahos also cites: Jack Hunter: [2022-03-05] Sadly, Graham's call for Putin's assassination is not his craziest moment.

• Peter Wade: [07-09] DeSantis whines to Fox News that 'the media' is sabotaging his campaign. After all, that's his job.

Democrats: Like a shaggy old coat, the only thing protecting us from the life-sapping chill of Republican sociopathy. The latter should be so obvious by now that a Democratic rout in 2024 should be a lock, but still we worry.

• Jonathan Chait: [07-07] Non-white moderates are real Democrats -- not GOP pawns. My initial negative reaction here was to the hated word "moderates," which is used here for people (and not just non-whites) with a mix of conservative and liberal views. Some such views are reasonable and should be respected, while making an effort to bridge gaps and join forces.

• Michelle Goldberg: [06-30] Robert F Kennedy Jr and the coalition of the distrustful: This goes deeper than most critiques of Kennedy, noting how he personalizes conspiracism by starting with the assassinations of his uncle and his father. Paranoia works on the left as well as on the right, as there is little reason to trust official versions of most things. Other recent Goldberg pieces: [05-15] Whose version of Christian nationalism will win in 2024?; and [05-25] Ron DeSantis vs the 'woke mind virus'.

• Paul Krugman: [07-04] Biden versus the Bad News Bros, followed by [07-06] The rich are crazier than you and me.

• Jennifer Rubin: [07-07] A perpetually surprised media isn't doing its job: "When the media consistently gets the big stories wrong or fails to cover major economic changes, one would hope they'd look back to explain why their coverage diverged from reality and do a better job of covering actual developments rather than GOP talking points, process stories (how Biden is "selling" his plan) and polling." Also: "Democratic candidates would be smart to ask voters if they want to be ruled by judges who think constitutional law was frozen in the 19th century."

Courts and Law:

• [07-09] How abortion bans will strain an already failing foster system.

• Garrett Epps: [07-03] John Roberts's tiresome act: "The Supreme Court's conservative majority has taken a sledgehammer to precedent and balanced notions of judicial responsibility -- led by a chief justice who acts like he's just an ol' country lawyer."

• Michael Hudson: [07-07] Should there be a Supreme Court? Its role has always been anti-democratic.

• Ellen Ioanes: [07-09] A year after Dobbs, here's how states are legislating abortion.

• Ian Millhiser: [07-08] The importance of staying angry at the Supreme Court.

• Rob Pegorano: [07-07] A judge says Biden can't scold social media firms. That makes zero sense.

Climate and Environment: I can add that in Wichita, at least, we've been in a lucky bubble of nice weather, with major storm fronts bypassing us to the north or to the south. We did have three days over 100°F when the heat dome that's so impacted Texas spread north, but no record temps were threatened. We did have an exceptionally warm and early Spring, associated with a drought that really hurt the winter wheat crop (so farmers may dispute my use of "nice"). And while this week has brought a lot of rain -- still not enough to bring the year back to normal, but the farmers raising corn are optimistic -- we've been spared the severe weather that's repeated hit points to the east.

• Philip Bump: [07-07] Climate denialism has burnt to a crisp.

• Scott Dance: [07-08] Earth is at its hottest in thousands of years. Here's how we know.

• Jeff Goodell: [07-08] In Texas, dead fish and red-faced desperation are signs of things to come. Note that the author has a forthcoming book: The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.

• Benji Jones: [07-06] Yes, it's hot. But this could be one of the coolest summers of the rest of your life.

• Keren Landman: [07-06] 7 people have acquired malaria in the US. They're the first in 20 years. Well, in Florida and Texas. Just in time for Rachel DuRose: [07-06] We finally have malaria vaccines. The next hurdle: Distributing them.

• Ian Livingston: [07-07] Extreme heat wave bound for Phoenix and Southwest could be worst ever: "It's already hot and set to get much worse. Numerous heat records are at risk next week and probably beyond."

Ukraine War:

• Blaise Malley: [07-07] Diplomacy Watch: Washington may deny it, but looks like someone wants to talk to Russia. Still too early to declare that sanity is at long last breaking out, as details are few and veiled. The same "Track II" is discussed by Trita Parsi: [07-06] Former US officials reportedly open talks with Moscow. Also mentioned is Richard Haass/Charles Kupchan: [04-13] The West needs a new strategy in Ukraine: "A plan for getting from the battlefield to the negotiating table." Haass is outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations, where Kupchan is a senior fellow. Both are wired deep into the foreign policy blob, but aren't speaking in any official capacity. Kupchan wrote on [02-24]: US-West must prepare for a diplomatic endgame in Ukraine. It doesn't take a genius to see that much, but feigned ignorance is still the word in Washington, and will be until it isn't.

• Jen Kirby: [07-07] The US's controversial decision to send cluster munitions to Ukraine, explained.

• Patrick Leahy/Jeff Merkley: [07-07] Here's why supplying Ukraine with cluster munitions would be a terrible mistake.

• Marc A Thiessen/Stephen E Biegun: [07-08] Only NATO membership can guarantee peace for Ukraine: I don't think I've ever linked to one of Thiessen's columns before. He's never right about anything, but this one is outrageously dumb that I couldn't help. Just give it a second's worth of thought. NATO's proposition offers two things: one is access to American and European arms; the other is the deterrence provided by its vow to jointly defend any member (at least attacked by a non-member, as Greece and Turkey found out). Maybe NATO membership would have deterred Russia from attacking, but that was never an option: before 2014, Ukraine was effectively aligned with Russia; and as soon as the government flipped in 2014, ethnic Russian enclaves divided Ukraine, with Donbas proclaiming independence and Crimea being annexed by Russia. From that point, Ukraine could buy arms from the West, but NATO membership was out of the question as long as borders were disputed. But it's too late now for joining NATO to deter a Russian attack.

  Until Ukraine settles its borders with Russia, NATO membership would mean two things: a declaration of war [*], committing NATO members to send troops into the fight to reclaim Ukrainian territory; and it would undermine Zelensky's command -- unless you think NATO would give up command of its own troops. And in theory it would commit Ukraine to defend other countries -- not that any of them are currently under threat, but there are always "war games" to participate in (which is pretty much NATO's speed -- it was never designed to fight real wars, just to parade about and feel self-important). Ukraine actually has the best of possible deals now: unlimited arms and support, while retaining its own control and autonomy.

  As for "after the war," NATO membership might be possible, but the prospect only gives Russia more reason to prolong the war. At best, it's a chip that Ukraine can exchange in negotiations, but there may never be negotiations if Zelensky holds it too tight.

  [*] Biden has said as much: see Katie Rogers: [07-09] Biden says Ukraine is not erady for NATO membership.

Israel, and elsewhere around the world: See the introduction above.

• Julia Frankel: [07-02] Israel to buy more F-35 fighter jets from US. Deal expands fleet by 50% and deepens partnership.

• Jonathan Guyer: [07-06] What the siege of Jenin signals about the future of Israel and Palestine.

• David Hearst: [07-05] As Israel smashes up Jenin, its British apologists are enabling this violence.

• Mitchell Plitnick: [07-06] Israel does not have a right to self-defense for its occupation: Amen. More people should be saying this. When Israel shoots a "militant" or bombs a building anywhere in the occupied territories, that's a crime. When a Palestinian shoots back, that's self-defense. I'm not sure that the latter is justified[*], but I am sure that the former is not. The UN muddles the situation when they say that rockets from Gaza and F-15s from Israel are both war crimes, so "both sides do it." Only one side occupies, blockades, and strangles the other. People have a right to fight back when that happens. They don't have a right to do it.

  [*] Not all "self-defense" is justifiable. "Stand your ground" may be defensible in some cases, but it shouldn't be a license to shoot just anyone. Also, a violent response to aggression may be bad tactics politically, but still fairly described as "self-defense." If someone had shot Bull Connor during a civil rights protest, I'd be tempted to acquit that person, but it would have messed with the political narrative.

• Nathan J Robinson: [07-05] If you support Ukrainian resistance to occupation, you must also support Palestinian resistance to occupation.

• Salman Abu Sitta: [07-05] 'Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing': How Zionism engineering the expulsion of Iraq's Arab Jews: Review of revisionist historian Avi Shlaim's Three Worlds: Memoir of an Arab-Jew. As is well known, after WWII the Zionist settlement sent agents around Europe to organize the immigration of Jews to Palestine (mostly forbidden by the British). As independence approached, Israel also sent agents throughout the Arab world, in an effort to persuade or coerce as many as possible to immigrate. Iraq, which had been a home to Jews ever since the "first captivity" (the Babylonians), was a major target, and the exodus there was stimulated by acts of terror, mostly by Israeli agents.

• Philip Weiss: [07-04] Biden plays Netanyahu's lapdog -- but many in US are critical of Jenin onslaught.

• Mairav Zonszein: [07-07] From the Jenin raid to settlements, Biden is giving Israel's far-right government a green light.

Other stories:

Dean Baker: [07-09] Mixed progress in the fight against inequality and for democracy.

David Broder: [06-12] Silvio Berlusconi was the iconic political figure of our times: Trump, and maybe Putin, will be disappointed to have been overlooked, but if you've ever had trouble imagining what Trump might have been like if he had been twice as rich and not a fucking idiot, Berlusconi would fill the bill.

Sean T Byrnes: [07-06] The myth of Reagan's Cold War toughness haunts American foreign policy: I was just reminded of this in the Lindsey Graham articles above, where Graham's Reagan would be shooting Russian planes down. This is a review of William Inboden's book, The Peacemarker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. The book tries to pass Reagan off as a great diplomat. The reviewer is critical, and I'm more so, but sure, Reagan deserves some credit for overcoming his jingoism and letting the dissolution of the Soviet empire play out. But it's not like he learned any meaningful lessons from the experience. American hubris only grew after the Cold War, to no small extent out of the demented notion that Reagan's rhetoric and his military buildup had succeeded.

Sam Fraser: [07-06] Biden's disgraceful nomination of Elliott Abrams: It's not much of a reward: a seat on the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which can issue reports and make recommendations but has no policy role. The USACPD is variously described as non-partisan or bi-partisan (with four vacancies, is Biden obligated to appoint a Republican?). [PS: As the update to Corn, below, explains, Abrams was recommended by Republican congressional leaders to fill a Republican slot on the Commission. Still seems like Biden could have vetoed their recommendation, especially considering the embarrassment it caused.]

In any case, on paper Abrams looks like a perfect choice. He's had many titles involving "public diplomacy," and no one has more experience lying about human rights abuses by the US and its allies. Fraser mentions some of these, starting with the 1981 massacre in El Salvador that was the first of many things Abrams lied to Congress about. Fraser also reminds us that Abrams was finally convicted of lying to Congress in 1991, but avoided jail thanks to a pardon from GWH Bush. He also mentions Abrams' work for Trump to undo diplomatic relations with Venezuela and Iran. But for some reason he skips over Abrams' tenure under GW Bush, especially his role in dismantling the Oslo Accords and ending any prospect for a "two-state solution" in Israel. More on Abrams:

• Sarah Jones: [07-07] Why is the Biden administration rewarding Elliott Abrams? "It would seem the Biden administration is practically begging us not to take its human rights rhetoric seriously." This adds some details to Fraser's piece, but still doesn't address Israel.

• David Corn: [07-05] Why has Joe Biden just rewarded a guy who supported murderous war criminals?

• Jeet Heer: [06-07] Henry Kissinger, Elliott Abrams, and the rot of American foreign policy: "Our bipartisan elite is always willing to forgive war crimes by its made men."

• Caitlin Johnstone: [07-04] Presidents keep hiring Elliot Abrams because the US empire is just that evil.

• Branko Marcetic: [07-06] The nomination of Elliott Abrams is a stain on Joe Biden's human rights record.

• Charles P Pierce: [07-05] Congratulations to Elliott Abrams, hype man for murderous regimes past, on his new job.

I'm seriously baffled by the lack of reference to Abrams' role under GW Bush regarding Israel/Palestine. At the time, it was well known that he was in direct contact with Ariel Sharon, providing advice as well as cover for carving up the PA, especially the decision to dismantle settlements in Gaza and wall it up into a Hamas-run prison enclave. Afterwards, Abrams wrote a book about his role. I haven't read it, but I wrote up this Book Roundup entry at the time:

Elliott Abrams: Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2013, Cambridge University Press): A self-serving memoir in the manner of Dennis Ross and so many other failures, but Abrams didn't fail -- he was pure evil, and was remarkably successful not just at wrecking any prospects for peace in Israel's neighborhood but in making everyone involved, including the US, much meaner and crazier. No idea how much of this he admits to -- such creatures usually prefer to dwell in the dark.

Steve Fraser: [07-06] The return of child labor is the latest sign of American decline.

Eric Levitz: [07-06] It makes sense that Bidenomics is unpopular (so far): For one thing, I hate the term. New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, even Great Society were better. The only other president to get his own "omics" was Reagan, and hardly anyone ever understood what that was about. (Had they done so, they would have hated it.) Clement Attlee liked to speak of "leveling up" as a path to greater equality that didn't involve hardship. Biden's preferred term seems to be "middle out," which is less easily diagrammable, but at least graphic. The problem, of course, is that Biden's reforms, while more substantial than anything Obama or Clinton attempted, are still piecemeal, and depend a lot on companies to grow before the benefits trickle down to workers and the public. If that's a hard sell, it might help to offer greater rewards with more Democrats elected to Congress. And/or it might help to scare people about how much worse off Republicans would make us.

Annie Lowrey: [2019-10-21] $350,000 a year, and just getting by. We've heard variants of this many times before. They're always based on mistaking elite private services (e.g., education) for essentials and/or high savings rates based on the assumption that public programs like Social Security won't suffice.

Mark Oppenheimer: [07-07] In Tabula Rasa, John McPhee looks back at books not written. Since he turned 80, McPhee seems to have given up on writing about new travels and acquaintances, and settled for writing about writing, in this case "a charming, breezy collection of reminiscences about projects that didn't make it."

Adam Ozimek: [07-05] The simple mistake that almost triggered a recession: The "idea" is that the way to reduce inflation is to lay people off. I don't doubt that it works, but it's the worst of all possible solutions.

Nathan Robinson:

• [06-29] What 'economic freedom' would look like: Interview with Mark Paul, who "explains why we need an 'economic bill of rights' and why the right-wing libertarian conception of 'freedom' is bananas and won't actually make us free." Paul is the author of The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights.

• [07-07] How to explain socialism clearly in a way that actually persuades people: Interview with comedian and writer Danny Katch, author of Socialism . . . Seriously: A Brief Guide to Surviving the 21st Century, and several other books. For an excerpt, see his Socialism means expanding democracy to all of society.

Lily Sánchez: [07-08] Cornel West's presidential campaign deserves the left's solidarity: I wouldn't go that far, but it deserves some respect. West is going to be saying a lot of things that Biden won't say, and that deserve a respectful hearing. One hopes that if his arguments are persuasive, Biden (or whoever the Democratic nominee is) will adopt some of them. In any case, we should at least respect his freedom of speech, and see his campaign as an exercise thereof. Especially tiresome and disrespectful is the argument that he could act as a spoiler. If that happens, the only thing that proves is that the Biden/whoever failed to make the pretty obvious argument that a majority of voters would be better off with the Democrat than with the Republican. I know that no matter how much I might prefer West, it's extremely unlikely that I won't vote for the Democrat in 2024. But I'm not going to waste my breath denouncing West when there are Republicans that actually deserve taking down.

An alternative view comes from Ben Burgis: [06-13] Cornel West should challenge Biden in the Democratic primaries. This makes sense because we live in a two-party system, and the right has chosen one of those parties, which gives the rest of us only one realistic option. One result is that most of the left have aligned with the Democrats, as have most of the people the left needs to convince to achieve even the most obvious reforms. And sure, there are a lot of retrograde elements in the Democratic Party, but it's not beyond hope, or reason. One of my mantras is that the solutions are all on the left. Republicans are only interested in power, but Democrats are also interested in results, and that's what's moving them to the left. Well, along with Bernie Sanders, who by running with the Democrats has gotten a lot more open ears and doors than he ever could in a third party.

On the other hand, West may have his own reasons for running on the fringe. I can think of several, but no point speculating here.

Norman Solomon: [07-04] Patriotism and war: Can America break that deadly connection? I'd be happy just for a respite from the fireworks, which on the evening of the 4th were audible 50-100 times per minute for hours on end, well into the night. I always figured if you loved the land and the people you were good, but the never-before-permanent military became some kind of fetish after WWII. By the time I was a teenager, I was being told to "love it or leave it," where "it" was every stupid and senseless thing done in the name of "national defense." In that environment, the usual icons and tchotchkes like flags and anthems lost all their allure. Still, to the cultists who worship such things, our reluctance only proves that we should be chucked out (if not simply wiped out). On the other hand, we can still read the Declaration of Independence, which was what the day was originally about, as an aspiration we still need to work on. Meanwhile:

• Chantal Da Silva: [07-05] At least 17 mass shootings mark Fourth of July holiday weekend.

Too late for me tonight, but do take a look at the blog for No More Mister Nice Blog, especially First they came for the pro-LGBTQ retailers.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, July archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 36 albums, 4 A-list,

Music: Current count 40512 [40476] rated (+36), 14 [9] unrated (+5).

I wrote another substantial Speaking of Which yesterday. Well, it didn't seem like such a big deal until I started to wrap up, and added another 1300 words in the form of an 11-point summary of the current state of the Ukraine War. Well, not exactly "current state," which implies a reckoning of the battle lines and various economic factors, which I regard as minor and possibly trivial. What does matter is the mental state of the protagonists, which on both sides remains locked in bizarre belief that the war should continue to play out. I'll resist the temptation to write another 1300 words here, but I do insist that while the decision to invade was solely Russia's fault, and the efforts to thwart the invasion were justifiable, the unwillingness to even start to negotiate a peace deserves blame on both sides.

Laura Tillem cut out the Ukraine part and posted it to Facebook. It's already disappeared from my feed.

In case you missed it, I also published a TV Midyear Report last week. Since then, Endeavour ended, more or less successfully, so B+. The second episode of Ridley brought its case to a close, but I gather there are two more episodes to go, with another closed case. It's pretty solidly in B+ territory. We're still waiting for the last episode of Deadloch, which is only getting better. And I've started season 3 of The Great, and I'm enjoying it immensely (though still impatiently waiting for Peter III's demise, and a bit bothered by rumors that Nicholas Hoult is coming back as another character).

Favorite Facebook meme of the day: "People who wonder if the glass is half empty or half full, miss the point. The glass is refillable."

Weekly rated count continues to drop, as I've been starting off most days with something classic from the cases, before trying to find something new to check out. This has taken some scratching, but I wound up with four A- records, all (I think) initially suggested by members of the Expert Witness Facebook group, many of whom have spawned Substack newsletters. (It could be that I found LaVette on my own, but her records has been much admired by group members in the last few days.) I should construct a list, or at least add them to my "Music" navigation menu, but don't feel up to it today. For a while, I toyed with the idea of setting up my own Substack, but it still doesn't feel right, and the more people who do it, the less inclined I feel.

I thought of doing Madonna after news she was hospitalized. After a strong ending, I could have gone with an A-, but I noticed on Wikipedia that my grade for the previous one-CD sampler was B+(***), and finally decided that works here as well. Why make them extra work? It shouldn't be hard to compile an A- compilation of her post-1990 work, given that half of the albums are already there. Note that the Pet Shop Boys have a similar compilation, but I haven't been able to stream it yet.

Also not getting done today is the indexing I put off for last month's Streamnotes. Maybe next week. Other projects are falling by the wayside. The one that bothers me most is that the Sony CD changer upstairs is broken, so I haven't had any bedtime music for several weeks now. Seems like it's probably just a broken belt, but I haven't even managed to take it apart to see -- at least beyond removing the top, which allowed me to rescue the CD.

New records reviewed this week:

• JoVia Armstrong & Eunoia Society: Inception (2021 [2023], Black Earth Music): [cd]: B
• Tor Einar Bekken/Inga-Mei Steinbru: Jungle One Jungle Two Jungle Blues (2023, self-released): [bc]: B+(**)
• Ice Cold Bishop: Generational Curse (2023, Epic): [sp]: A-
• Samuel Blaser: Routes (2021-22 [2023], Enja): [sp]: B+(***)
• Pony Bradshaw: North Georgia Rounder (2023, Black Mountain Music): [sp]: B+(**)
• Dee Byrne: Outlines (2021 [2023], Whirlwind): [sp]: B+(**)
• Shirley Collins: Archangel Hill (2023, Domino): [sp]: B+(*)
• Chuck D as Mistachuck: We Wreck Stadiums: Homage to Rap & Baseball Heroes (2023, SpitSLAM): [sp]: B+(***)
• McKinley Dixon: Beloved! Paradise! Jazz! (2023, City Slang): [sp]: B+(*)
• The Sofia Goodman Group: Secrets of the Shore (2023, Joyous): [cd]: B+(*) [07-14]
• Daniel Hersog Jazz Orchestra: Open Spaces: Folk Songs Reimagined (2022 [2023], Cellar): [cd]: B+(*)
• Bettye LaVette: LaVette! (2023, Jay-Vee): [sp]: A-
• Brennen Leigh: Ain't Through Honky-Tonkin' Yet (2023, Signature Sounds): [sp]: B+(***)
• Mach-Hommy/Tha God Fahim: Notorious Dump Legends Vol. 2 (2023, self-released): [sp]: B+(*)
• Gabriela Martina: Homage to Grämilis (2023, self-released): [cd]: B+(*) [07-14]
• Okwy Osadebe and Highlife Soundmakers International: Igbo Amaka (2023, Palenque): [sp]: A-
• Rome Streetz: Wasn't Built in a Day (2023, De Rap Winkel): [sp]: B+(*)
• Brandon Ross: Of Sight and Sound (2023, Sunnyside): [sp]: B+(*)
• Marina Sena: Vicio Inerente (2023, Sony Music Brasil): [sp]: B+(***)
• Isach Skeidsvoll: Dance to Summon (2021 [2023], Ultraääni): [sp]: B+(***)
• Sam Smith: Gloria (2023, Capitol): [sp]: B
• Emilio Solla/Antonio Lizana: El Siempre Mar (2023, Tiger Turn): [cd]: B+(*)
• Sonar With David Torn and J. Peter Schwalm: Three Movements (2022 [2023], 7d): [sp]: B+(**)
• Joanna Sternberg: I've Got Me (2023, Fat Possum): [sp]: A-
• Sundy Best: Feel Good Country (2023, self-released): [sp]: B+(*)
• Pictoria Vark: The Parts I Dread (2022, Get Better): [sp]: B+(*)
• The War and Treaty: Lover's Game (2023, Mercury Nashville): [sp]: B+(**)
• Wild Up: Julius Eastman Vol. 3: If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich? (2023, New Amsterdam): [sp]: B+(***)
• Jess Williamson: Time Ain't Accidental (2023, Mexican Summer): [sp]: B+(***)
• Denny Zeitlin: Crazy Rhythm: Exploring George Gershwin (2018 [2023], Sunnyside): [sp]: B

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Joel Futterman: Inneraction (1984 [2023], Mahakala Music): [bc]: B+(***)
• Madonna: Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones (1982-2019 [2022], Warner, 3CD): [sp]: B+(***)
• Arthur Russell: Picture of Bunny Rabbit (1985-86 [2023], Audika): [sp]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Johnny Adams: There's Always One More Time (1983-97 [2000], Rounder): [sp]: B+(**)
• Christer Bothén 3: Omen (2019 [2021], Bocian): [bc]: B+(***)
• Bashful Brother Oswald: Dobro's Best (1976 [2008], Gusto): [sp]: B+(*)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Jeff Babko/David Piltch: The Libretto Show (Tudortones) [06-23]
• Jalen Baker: Be Still (Cellar) [07-07]
• Brew: Heat (Clean Feed) [06-23]
• Alex Coke & Carl Michel Sextet: Emergence (PlayOn) [07-07]
• Sammy Figueroa: Something for a Memory: Busco Tu Recuerdo (Ashe) [07-14]
• Jason Kao Hwang Critical Response: Book of Stories (True Sound) [06-31]
• Izumi Kimura/Gerry Hemingway: Kairos (Fundacja Sluchaj) [07-07]
• Bruno Perrinha: Da Erosão (4DaRecord) [05-28]
• The Rodriguez Brothers: Reunited: Live at Dizzy's Club (RodBros Music) [07-14]
• Nicole Zuraitis: How Love Begins (Outside In Music) [07-07]

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Started this early enough, but can't say as I brought much enthusiasm to it. Links are down to 63, words to 4752 (as I'm typing this, so a bit more [PS: now 68 links, 6061 words]). Main news was that the Trump Supreme Court finally (well, once again) lived up to our fears. It is, as Biden pointed out, still too early to resort to radical measures like expanding the court, but more and more people are grasping the need for bringing the Court back into the political mainstream. Still, the Court's partisan rulings aren't way out of whack given the still substantial extent of Republican power in Congress and in the States. What we need more than speculation about changing the Court is robust electoral victories. For instance, would the Court invalidate a law (as opposed to an executive order) that explicitly forgave student debt? Would the Court chuck out a voting rights act that applied to all states? Would the Court question a law which directs the EPA to regular carbon dioxide emissions? With this court, maybe, but until you pass the laws, we don't know. And until you get the power to pass such laws, you have no chance of expanding the Court (or impeaching a couple egregious examples).

I wrote quite a bit about Ukraine below. I should probably consolidate my recent points into something succinct (much more so than my still-useful 23 Theses on Ukraine). At the risk of being too schematic, let me point out:

1. It is important to understand what the US and NATO did to provoke the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and for that matter to provoke the regional revolts in Crimea and Donbas in 2014, not because they in any way justify Russia's reaction but because understanding is useful to figure out how to resolve the crisis.
2. And the extent of the current crisis is really huge, especially in Ukraine but also in Russia, and all around the world. And this crisis deepens with every day the war goes on. The long-term consequences are already unfathomable, and will only grow more so.
3. Russia is capable of fighting this war indefinitely, as long as its leadership believes necessary to secure its minimal goals, to the ever increasing destruction of Ukraine. Oh, and perhaps I should mention Russia's nuclear arsenal, which they are unlikely to use unless they get backed into a severe corner and/or get taken over by someone truly insane. Which, as far as we can tell, Putin is not, but he has gotten a bit wobbly.
4. We should recognize that Russia is "too big to fail." We all need Russia to be integrated into the world economy, and to participate in projects like limiting climate change. And to do that, we need Russia to have a stable political system (even if it doesn't fit our idea of democratic norms). Sanctions and disinvestment may have been reasonable responses to invasion, but are not things we should seek to maintain indefinitely).
5. On the other hand, Ukraine cannot afford to fight Russia indefinitely, even if the flow of arms is inexhaustible. The destruction of land and people have limits -- especially the latter, as it is unlikely that Ukraine's allies will send more than trivial numbers of volunteers to help Ukraine fight.
6. While I have no problem with arming Ukraine to defend itself against Russian invasion, we should recognize that its borders are arbitrary, and are ultimately subject to the will of the people who live there. A fair solution before the invasion would have been to let each disputed territory vote on whether it prefers to be part of Ukraine or Russia. The invasion and subsequent displacements have complicated this, but it should still serve as a basis for fairly resolving the conflict. Zelensky's refusal to negotiate until Russian troops retreat to their pre-2014 borders is not just impractical but wrong-headed.
7. Expansion is not a legitimate goal of NATO. The only legitimate goal is peace, and the only way to achieve it is to deëscalate the tension and hostility between Russia and the rest of Europe. On the other hand, Putin's actions would seem to justify both the existence and expansion of NATO, so it is largely up to him to show that NATO is no longer needed.
8. Once Ukraine is secure in universally recognized borders, it should be free to join the EU, NATO, and/or any other international arrangement. On the other hand, it is clear from the last year that Ukraine does not need to join NATO to obtain arms and other support necessary to defend itself. Such arrangements can continue, as long as Ukraine doesn't abuse them (e.g., by escalating the war against Russia).
9. The US and Europe need to fundamentally revise much of their strategic military thinking, based on its failure to prevent the current war. The practice of implementing sanctions against Russia has only aggravated the level of hostility (as well as preparing Russia to work around them). Sanctions are still better than armed reprisals, but only barely. They are more likely to provoke war than to deter it. Speaking of which, the idea of basing defense on deterrence is fundamentally flawed. It "works" primarily when the other country has no intention of attacking (as was the case between the US and USSR during the Cold War). Otherwise, it tends to incite wars, especially among relative equals, where there might seem to be an advantage to fighting now instead of later.
10. While the events leading up to Russia's invasion in no way excuse the invasion itself, those responsible for refusing to negotiate the current war are every bit as responsible for its continuation as Russia is for its launch. While it's certainly possible that Putin is in no mood to negotiate, that he has no opportunity is solely the fault of those in Kyiv and elsewhere who refuse to make the offer. I'm not saying that the US should force Ukraine to accept an adverse treaty, but that reasonable offers need to be entertained.
11. As A.J. Muste put it, the way to peace is peace. This war is what happens when you assign all power on all sides to people who don't have the slightest fucking understanding of that.

By the way, if you have some kind of publication and would be interested in reprinting the above on Ukraine, let me know, and I'll work with you on it. At present, this is a one-pass draft, with a couple extra points wedged in as seemed appropriate.

As usual, this is a quick scan through the usual sources. No doubt I missed much, but that's inevitable.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans:

• David Atkins: [06-26] Who's really in charge of the GOP? (Hint: It's not Trump): "Rabidly conservative base voters are the tail wagging the very sick dog." I wonder whether it's a good idea to blame the people for their leaders, no matter how much the latter pander to the baser impulses of the former. It's still the case that Republican legislators act with remarkable uniformity even when polls show the Republican base divided. That suggests that someone is coordinating, even if it isn't obvious who's in charge.

• Ryan Bort: [06-30] One thing GOP presidential candidates agree on: Marginalized Americans should suffer: "Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Nikki Haley, and other 2024 hopeful were quick to praise the Supreme Court's devastating decisions this week."

• Susan B Glasser: [06-28] Why Donald Trump was so mad at Mark Milley that he confessed to a crime: "The backstory on the tape that could get the ex-President convicted in the classified-documents case."

• Ginny Hogan: [06-29] Is Josh Hawley all right? "His new book Manhood advocates for a return to ancient values of family and masculinity. In reality, it reveals the Missouri senator's weird fixations." Another review of an easy target.

• Ed Kilgore: [06-29] DeSantis continues race to right with criminal-justice reform veto.

• Maria Laurino: [06-29] The right's new post-Dobbs panacea: The baby safe deposit box.

• Kelly McClure: [07-01] Trump thrilled with his appointed Supreme Court Justices -- calls them "gold": Although it appears that the ones who preceded him, Thomas and Alito, are the ones most closely tied to the gold. Or maybe the sleaze just hasn't caught up with the others yet.

• Heather Digby Parton: [06-26] Trump's messianic appeal can't be replicated.

• Christian Paz: [07-02] Florida's new immigration law previews a DeSantis presidency.

• Martin Pengelly: [06-27] Trump adviser suggested blowing up migrants' boats with drones, book says. The adviser is Stephen Miller. The book is Miles Taylor: Blowback: A Warning to Save Democracy from the Next Trump. The incident occurred in April 2018. Taylor was the Trump staffer who anonymously published A Warning in 2019.

The Supreme Court:

• Fabiola Cineas/Ian Millhiser: [06-29] The SCOTUS decision on affirmative action in colleges, explained. Affirmative action was never meant to be permanent policy. The idea was that, having discriminated so severely for so long, we should actively lean against discrimination. It was based on the principle that we can and should deliberately do things to affirm justice, and not just assume that the end of de jure discrimination will be sufficient. And it was a reaction to the slowballing of the "all deliberate speed" Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which by the late 1960s still had far to go. Whether affirmative action helped is hard to say: certainly there are cases where it did, but it was often implemented in bad faith, or in no faith at all, and often served as a rallying point for resistance, eventually allowing opponents to redefine their opposition as some kind of defense of civil rights. What hurts about the ruling isn't that now a few elite schools will have to work harder to show that they value diversity and oppose discrimination. Rather, what hurts is that the bigots finally won their case, even if they had to tone their racism down to do so. On the other hand, why not welcome the "race-neutral" rhetoric as vindication of the civil rights movement. And should those elite schools backslide, why not enforce the law and sue their asses for racial discrimination? Until this ruling, they could point to their affirmative action programs as a defense against such charges. Now they can't. Now they need to walk the walk, and should be held accountable when they fail.

• Daniel Boguslaw: [06-26] Samuel Alito's wife leased land to an oil and gas firm while the Justice fought the EPA.

• Kristine Bowman/Kimberly Robinson/Vinay Harpalani: [06-30] SCOTUS affirmative action ruling says military academies can still consider race in admissions.

• Kevin Breuninger/Chelsey Cox: [06-29] Supreme Court's Ketanji Brown Jackson blasts affirmative action ruling, clashes with Clarence Thomas.

• Jelani Cobb: [06-29] The end of affirmative action: "The scale of what has been lost is difficult to assess in the moment."

• Chas Danner: [07-01] Fallout from SCOTUS affirmative action, student-loan decisions.

• Matt Ford: [06-30] John Roberts begs the liberal Justices to stop criticizing the Court: "The chief justice doesn't like his conservative Supreme Court colleagues getting called out for judicial overreach." Of course, Roberts could limit the discrediting of the court, as he has done on occasion (if not nearly often enough) by moderating his opinions. The Supreme Court's right-wing majority is undermining the legitimacy of the institution, causing it increasingly to be recognized as a grave threat not just to democracy but to law and order. Dissent within the court at least shows that its rulings are not incontrovertible, and that the institution can eventually be saved from its current disease.

• Melissa Gira Grant: [06-29] The mysterious case of the fake gay marriage website, the real straight man, and the Supreme Court: The claimants were phony, the claim was imaginary, the case was hypothetical, and still the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in their favor, so anxious were they to exempt bigotry claiming to be religion from anti-discrimination law.

• Ankush Khardori: [06-29] The end of affirmative action is only the beginning: "Yet again, the Supreme Court's conservatives just get rid of precedents that they don't like."

• Jay Michaelson:

  • [06-29] What was affirmative action really about? And what happens now? One tangible effect of racism was income inequality, which was major before the passage of civil rights laws, and persists today. A big part of the problem was that we tried to solve the economic inequities of racism at the same time the nation as a whole was becoming -- and this was very much the effect of political policy -- more and more inequal. So while women, blacks, and other made marginal gains as compared to most white males, pretty much everyone lost ground to the very rich. And while the very rich is probably more diverse than 50+ years ago, that does the rest of us very little good.

  • [06-30] The Supreme Court sold its soul to the Christian Right.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • [06-29] The other big decision handed down by the Supreme Court today, explained: The unanimous decision replaces one vague standard with another one, one that would appear to allow more businesses to reject employee requests for accommodations on religious grounds.

  • [06-30] The Supreme Court will decide if abusive spouses have a right to own guns.

  • [06-30] The Supreme Court's lawless, completely partisan student loans decision, explained: "The Court's decision in Biden v. Nebraska is nothing more than an exercise of raw power. It bears no resemblance to actual law."

  • [06-30] Neil Gorsuch has a problem with telling the truth: "Gorsuch hands a victory to the Christian right by making false claims about an important First Amendment case."

• Christian Paz: [06-30] The Supreme Court just struck down Biden's student loan forgiveness plan. Here's Plan B. "The White House hasn't given up on loan forgiveness."

• Li Zhou: [06-30] Anti-trans bills keep losing in court: "Kentucky and Tennessee are the latest states to see parts of gender-affirming care bans targeting trans youth blocked by a federal judge." Laws have also been struck down in Arkansas, Florida, and Indiana.

Climate and Environment:

• Kate Aronoff: [06-30] Texas GOP offers workers the freedom to boil alive: "A new bill rolls back city-level rights for workers to take breaks during hot days -- as Texas swelters through a punishing heat wave." As cities in Texas have become more Democratic, the Republicans in control of the state have been working ever harder to deny cities the right to govern themselves.

• Matthew Cappucci: [06-30] Derecho tears through Plains and Midwest, cutting power with 100 mph winds: "The storms traveled more than 600 miles from Kansas to Kentucky-Tennessee border."

• Umair Irfan: [07-01] The unusual factors behind the extraordinary heat across the southern US.

• Li Zhou: [06-29] Why Canada's wildfires will affect air quality for weeks to come.

Ukraine War:

• Blaise Malley: [06-30] Diplomacy Watch: How is the West responding to Prigozhin's abandoned revolt? No real change, although one should consider the chances that Russian leadership could change from bad to worse. As for diplomacy, which remains the only viable option, the Vatican sent its envoy to Moscow, where he was received politely.

• Matthew Blackburn: [06-29] The dangers of Europe's blindness to a long war in Ukraine.

• Chatham House Report: [06-27] How to end Russia's war on Ukraine: British think tank, founded 1920, aka The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Title is misleading, because the only end to the war they approve of is a smashing defeat of Russia, because, well, if we don't teach them a lesson, they in the future they might do something like they just did. The report attempts to dispell nine "fallacies," all set up as strawmen to be beat down, even though most of them are fallacious, or at least evasive, to begin with. The only thing that keeps this from being a plan for perpetual war is the "it's now or never for Ukraine" sense of urgent hawkishness: "A protracted or frozen conflict benefits Russia and hurts Ukraine, as does a ceasefire or negotiated settlement on Russia's terms." Protracted war hurts everyone, but most especially the people of Ukraine.

• Keith Gessen: [07-01] Could Putin lose power? Author turns to historian Vladislav Zubok and others for analogies, but doesn't find much, so falls back on: "Regime stability is a funny thing. One day it's there; the next day, poof, it's gone." Nothing here convinces me that this is a germane question. Even if Putin is replaced, the most likely scenarios favor someone already close to power, with the same basic commitments and views as Putin. This may promote someone more cautious and conservative, like Brezhnev replacing Krushchev. It may even be someone willing to make a tactical shift to end a debilitating war, as when Eisenhower replaced Truman -- ending the Korean War while planting seeds for future wars, especially in Vietnam. Less likely would be the rise of a Lenin, who accepted defeat then regrouped to become a still greater threat. Regime change rarely changes regimes in any fundamental way. If that's your best hope, you really don't have much. On the other hand, with Putin you have someone who still has enough national power to make a deal and make it stick. It should be clear now that the US could have negotiated better deals with Mullah Omar and Saddam Hussein than they got by insisting on regime change.

• Masha Gessen: [06-26] Prigozhin showed Russians that they might have a choice: Talk about starry-eyed optimists: Prigozhin is a choice?

• Matthew Hoh: [06-30] Destroying Eastern Ukraine to save it. To take one example, Bakhmut had an estimated population of 71,094 in January 2022. The most recent estimate, much less precise, is ">500." The population of Mariupol, which fell to Russia relatively quickly, dropped from 425,681 to "<100,000." The total number of refugees from Ukraine has been variously estimated in excess of 8 million, plus millions more internally displaced within Ukraine, not counting an unknown number in Russia (one figure I've seen is 65,400). While the air war gets most of the press, the battle lines are mostly fought with artillery and small missiles, and the devastation is immense (e.g., Bakhmut). The longer the war drags on, the more devastating it will become. Zelensky's refusal to negotiate is based on the belief that Ukraine can regain its pre-2014 territory, but at the current rate, that will not only take years, it will deliver the "victors" nothing but a wasteland. By the way, Hoh includes a link to a [2022-03-15] piece by David Swanson: 30 Nonviolent things Russia could have done and 30 nonviolent things Ukraine could do. Number one was: "Continued mocking the daily predictions of an invasion and created worldwide hilarity, rather than invading and making the predictions simply off by a matter of days." Why is this sort of thing so hard for many people?

• Caitlin Johnstone: [06-29] Aging Iraq invaders keep accidentally saying 'Iraq' instead of 'Ukraine'.

• Frederick Kunkle/Kostiantyn Khudov: [07-02] Ukraine says Putin is planning a nuclear disaster. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plays is currently controlled by Russia, as was the now-destroyed Kakhovka dam. Both are in areas Ukraine is threatening to take back with its counteroffensive. It's not unusual for retreating armies to blow up things they're abandoning. (Both Russia and Germany blew up a Ukraine dam in 1941 and 1943, so the lesson is perhaps more vivid there.) By the way, the blown dam has reduced the power plant's access to cooling water.

• Branko Marcetic: [06-28] We shouldn't be cheering for state collapse in Russia: Starts by pointing out that Gen. Anthony Zinni in 1998 did a war game study of Iraq that concluded that removing Saddam Hussein would plunge Iraq into "bloody chaos," which is pretty much what happened five years later. Last week's mutiny revived dreams of regime change among hawks who dream of little else, but worse scenarios are possible if Putin should fall from power. Some links to older Marcetic pieces: [03-23] For Putin, Iraq War marked a turning point in US-Russia relations; and [06-13] Is the US military more intent on ending Ukraine war than US diplomats?

• Prisha: [07-02] CIA director calls Russia-Ukraine war 'once-in-a-generation opportunity' to recruit spies: Isn't this the sort of thing that you wouldn't say if it was true, because it would tip Russia off to the new spies, and that you wouldn't say even if it wasn't true, because it would give Russia cover for charging mere dissidents as being foreign spies? And wasn't Burns supposed to be the smart one among Biden's entourage of neocons?

• James Risen: [07-01] Prigozhin told the truth about Putin's war in Ukraine: "Yevgeny Prigozhin is a disinformation artist whose failed rebellion was marked by a burst of radical honesty." Risen also wrote: [06-24] Yevgeny Prigozhin's coup targets Putin and his "oligarchic clan".

• Mikhail Zygar: [06-30] Putin thinks he's still in control. He's not. Author of a book on the internal political dynamics of the Russian government (All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin) and the new (out July 25) War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, I linked to an interview with him last week. One of many premature obituaries, speculating about exposed weaknesses, his power "desacralized." The NY Times has been churning them out:

  • Andrei Kolesnikov: [06-27] Yesterday's Putin is gone.

  • Thomas L Friedman: [06-27] What happens to Putin now?

  • Serge Schmemann: [06-26] Prigozhin and the long and infamous history of failed Russian rebellions.

• Robert Wright: [06-30] Michael McFaul's dangerous muddle: The "influential Russia hawk, says Putin's handling of the [Wagner] crisis shows that fears of his using a nuclear weapon are exaggerated; Putin chose to negotiate with Prigozhin rather than fight, so we can assume that he wouldn't go nuclear if faced with big losses on the battlefield, including even the loss of Crimea." So, the more evidence that Putin is acting with sane restraint, the more recklessly we can trample over his "red lines"? One thing the hawks fail to understand is that evidence that Putin behaves rationally casts doubt on their picture of him as a tyrant with an insatiable lust for expansion. It actually suggests that he is someone who can be reasoned with, but to do so you'll need to match concessions to his, and not just beat him into submission. Unfortunately, the hawks are not just incapable of seeing possible compromises, they think the very idea of sitting down to negotiate is a sign of weakness. But it's really just a sign of contempt, a way of telling Putin you won't be satisfied until he's destroyed.

  The worst hawks, and McFaul is a good example, are obsessed with destroying Putin and Russia, and see Ukraine primarily as a cudgel to beat Russia with. That poisons their understanding of events. For instance, Wright writes:

  Yet McFaul seems to expect Putin, if cornered, to gracefully surrender -- because, according to McFaul, that's what happened last week. He says Putin "capitulated" to Prigozhin.

  Huh? Prigozhin had these demands: (1) Don't integrate Wagner's forces in Ukraine into the Russian military. (2) Fire Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. (3) Fire Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Prigozhin got none of these things. Plus, he got exiled! And the (probably few) Wagner troops who choose to follow him into exile won't be allowed to bring heavy armaments.

  The only concession Putin made was to withdraw his threat to prosecute Prigozhin for treason. That isn't much, seeing as how Putin has gone on to strip Wagner assets, and render Prigozhin powerless. On the other hand, he managed to avoid unnecessary bloodshed -- most likely, the "Russian blood" that Prigozhin claimed to have saved by accepting the deal was his own, although there always is a small chance that Russian soldiers would have refused to fire -- as they refused to support the coup against Gorbachev -- and that would have been disastrous. None of these things suggest to me that Putin is weak or foolish. He is, rather, someone who knows that his power and ambition have limits. I wish I could say the same thing for Zelensky, Stoltenberg, and Biden.

Around the world:

• Lee Hockstader:

  • [07-01] French cities are in flames over systemic racism.

  • [06-01] Germany has one politician who's serious about arming Ukraine: Meet Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, who not only insists that Ukraine must win its war with Russia, but who also aims "for Germany to succeed in transforming its anemic military into a dynamic fighting force that could buttress a muscular European defense." So add that to your list of risks of not negotiating an end to the Ukraine war as soon as possible.

• Nicole Narea: [06-30] France's protests over a police killing, briefly explained.

• Michael D Swaine/Jake Werner/James Park: [06-29] How a reckless report could increase the chance of a crisis with China.

Other stories:

Phyllis Bennis: [06-30] A tale of two tragedies at sea.

Lindsey Bever: [06-29] President Biden uses a CPAP machine for sleep apnea. Here's what to know. Not sure this should be news, but good on him. I use a CPAP machine, and sleep much better for it, and never doze off during the day or evening, as I sometimes did before. I know many other people who use them. My father didn't, but suffered severely. He dozed off literally every evening in front of the TV. A cousin asked him how he decides when to go to bed. His answer: when I wake up.

Mark Hill: [06-29] A billionaire baseball owner failed to extort Oakland, so he's scamming Nevada instead: "John Fisher, an heir to the Gap fortune, is being handed hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to screw over A's fans by moving his team to Las Vegas." Author notes that the move has "revived the national debate over public funding for private sports clubs," and adds that it's been proven that "the public never gets its money's worth." The debate it should stimulate is about expropriating the errant teams and redistributing ownership to the fans. That is, by the way, the reason the Packers are still in Green Bay, despite the fact that there are about 150 larger markets a greedy owner could shop the team to.

Elizabeth Kolbert: [06-26] How plastics are poisoning us: Draws on Matt Simon: A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies. I personally cannot imagine how we could go on without plastics. (Kenneth Deffeyes, who wrote Hubbert's Peak about the impending "peak oil" crisis, believed that even after we ran out of oil for fuel, we'd still need what little was left to make plastics.) But we're hearing more and more about this, and it's not going to let up.

Mike Lofgren: [07-01] There's no such thing as a conservative intellectual -- only apologists for right-wing power: "From Burke to Buckley to Patrick Deneen, we've seen a 200-year history of defending the indefensible." Starts with the famous Lionel Trilling quote which dismisses conservative thinking as "irritable mental gestures." I wouldn't go as far as the title, but that's largely because I've never been comfortable calling myself an intellectual. Over the last couple centuries, intellectuals have mostly emerged from the conservative class, and have occupied rarefied positions in establishment-controlled institutions, which they rarely failed to serve. It's hard for me to deny that Friedrich Hayek, John Von Neumann, or T.S. Elliot were real intellectuals, even if they were often wrong.

However, as Trilling claimed, the dominant intellectual tradition in America was liberalism, which allowed for dissent and debate, and expected progressive (but not revolutionary) change. But as the Cold War heated up, and even more so with Reagan's win in 1980, conservative instincts gave way to reactionary ones, as the right sought to build its own politically charged intellectual world, from which liberals and worse would ultimately be purged. On the other hand, the more they insist that truth be politically theirs, the less credibility they have. Conservative public intellectuals like William F. Buckley often came off as empty rhetoric wrapped up in a gauze of snobbery -- a tradition that continues today with the likes of George Will and David Brooks, but has more often given way to even baser impulses. The subject here is Deneen, who wrote Why Liberalism Failed and has a new book: Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. You don't need an extended survey to see why such books don't deserve to be taken seriously (despite Deneen's real academic credentials), but Lofgren indulges you. Here's a bit:

Modern conservatives are hag-ridden by demons -- the fallen state of man, the hopeless decadence of secular humanism, the imminent collapse of Western Civilization (a term always capitalized). They are radical rather than pragmatic, undeterred by the mountain of evidence that tax cuts don't increase revenue, an unregulated market is not stable, and banning abortion won't make people more moral. They crave power, are as humorless as a commissar, and entirely lack introspection as to their own fallibility.

That the first line could easily have come from Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950; there must be earlier examples but this one is explicit) just reminds us how timeless the imminent demise of the upper class has been. The only thing that's changed of late is that the whines have become ever more shrill, and the proposed remedies ever more crude. I've tracked conservative thought as expressed in recent books (they're here, but so is everything else, so it might be useful to break them out into their own file), and they've gotten so deranged of late that it's hard to give them any credit at all.

Blaise Malley: [06-20] Do laws preventing Chinese from buying US land even make sense? I'm inclined to say yes, because I think local ownership is better than distant ownership, especially across borders. Sure, it doesn't help that these laws are being pushed by Republican presidential candidates -- Ron DeSantis (FL) and Doug Burgum (ND) recently signed bills to this effect -- combined with jingoistic anti-Chinese bile. I'd go further and say that companies should be employee-owned, and that land should either be owner-occupied or regulated (some form of rent control).

Timothy Noah: [06-30] Bidenomics is working -- here's why the business press won't say so: "To economics journalists, bad news is always just around the corner -- especially when a Democrat is in the White House." He blames the business press, but it's something deeper than that: "Democratic presidents consistently outperform Republicans on managing the economy. This isn't anything new. It's been true for the past century. Folks just don't want to believe it." Part of the reason, I think, is that rank-and-file Democrats are never really satisfied with the greater growth under Democratic presidents, largely because it rarely trickles down to their own bottom lines. And that's partly because the long-term trend has been toward greater inequality, and Democrats have abetted that trend, largely in pursuit of donors. On the other hand, Republican presidents always claim to be presiding over perfect economics, even with more or less major recessions in each of them. Lots of pundits want Democrats to brag more, but I doubt that's going to do the trick. Better to point out the myriad ways Republicans are plotting to screw virtually everyone over.

Alex Shephard: [06-24] He made a mess of CNN. Now he's ruining Turner Classic Movies too. "David Zaslav, whose Chris Light hire butchered CNN, is vandalizing TCM, a beloved cultural institution."

Jeffrey St Clair: [06-30] Roaming Charges: Strange coup. Admitting he has no idea how the war in Ukraine will end, he doesn't have anything definitive to add about Prigozhin's mutiny, but voice a thought that's also occurred to me: "I've always believed that fragging of officers by US troops did more to end the US's rampages in Vietnam than the peace movement back home." At the very least, fragging ended the draft, which meant that the war could no longer be fought the way it had been for ten years. Russia's use of "conscripts and convicts" (as well as private militias like Wagner, and he also mentions "Chechen paramilitaries under the control of Ramzon Kadyrov, who has repeated urged the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine," so another less than happy camper) has got to be a vulnerability. (On the other hand, note that Ukraine is also using conscription, much more aggressively than Russia is, but it seems to be less of a morale problem, most likely because Ukrainians are defending their own land from invasion.)

Nikki Haley tweeted this:

Do you remember when you were growing up, do you remember how simple life was, how easy it felt? It was about faith, family, and country. We can have that again, but to do that, we must vote Joe Biden out.

Haley was born in 1972, by which time America had been divided by the civil rights movement and the racist reaction, by the Vietnam War and antiwar dissent, by women's liberation and a reaction that would soon kill the ERA, and by various cultural issues. She must have been pretty isolated to view those times as idyllic. I was born in 1950, before most of those fractures, in a period that could plausibly be remembered as a Golden Age of affluence and shared-interest, but the last word I would pick to describe my childhood is "easy." I mostly remember those years as demanding a lot of hard work. And threatening various terrors if we didn't work hard enough, or if we failed, or sometimes just for the hell of it. And we were fairly well insulated from the plight of the poorest. We never had to worry about where the next meal would come from, or that we might be evicted, or that we couldn't afford to see the doctor, in large part because we had little reason to fear that my father might lose his union job.

True that people today have things to worry about that we didn't. But that doesn't mean that we had it easy. As for Biden's role in ruining our country, I suppose that's easier to argue than it is to make a case that Haley or any other Republican could lead us into a promised land. But most of the things I can fault Biden for are cases where he simply went along with bad ideas other were pushing, and a number of those he seems to have grown out of. He's easy to mock, but he's the first president in my lifetime who's surprised me favorably. (To be fair, Haley surprised me favorably when she took those Confederate flags down, but she's not exactly playing that up in her campaign.)

St Clair's response to the Haley tweet:

Give Nikki credit. Perhaps she's talking about those easier, simpler days -- only a year ago -- when 10-year-old girls weren't forced to give birth to their uncle's child and 12 year-old boys weren't sent to work on the midnight shift sharpening cutting blades at the slaughterhouse.

Jun 2023