Music Week

Expanded blog post, October archive (final).

Tweet: Music Week: 34 albums, 5 A-list

Music: Current count 43099 [43065] rated (+34), 41 [46] unrated (-5).

New records reviewed this week:

• Amyl and the Sniffers: Cartoon Darkness (2024, B2B/Virgin): [sp]: A-
• Jason Anick/Jason Yeager: Sanctuary (2023 [2024], Sunnyside): [cd]: B+(***)
• The Attic & Eve Risser: La Grande Crue (2023 [2024], NoBusiness): [cd]: A-
• David Bailis: Tree of Life (2024, Create or Destroy): [cd]: B+(**)
• Dharma Down: Owl Dreams (2023 [2024], Dharma Down): [cd]: B+(*)
• Etran De L'Aïr: 100% Saharan Guitar (2024, Sahel Sounds): [sp]: B+(***)
• Joel Futterman: Innervoice (2024, NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Hinds: Viva Hinds (2024, Lucky Number): [sp]: A-
• Shawneci Icecold/Vernon Reid/Matthew Garrison & Grant Calvin Weston: Future Prime (2024, Underground45): [cd]: B+(***)
• J.U.S X Squadda B: 3rd Shift (2024, Bruiser Brigade): [sp]: B+(***)
• Nick Lowe & Los Straitjackets: Indoor Safari (2024, Yep Roc): [sp]: B+(*)
• Michael McNeill: Barcode Poetry (2022 [2024], Infrasonic Press): [cd]: B+(***)
• Yuka Mito: How Deep Is the Ocean (2024, Nana Notes): [cd]: B
• Mavis Pan: Rising (2023 [2024], self-released): [cd]: B+(*)
• William Parker/Hugo Costa/Philipp Ernsting: Pulsar (2023 [2024], NoBusiness): [cd]: A-
• Pest Control: Year of the Pest (2024, Quality Control HQ, EP): [sp]: B+(***)
• Tyshawn Sorey Trio: The Suspectible Now (2024, Pi): [cd]: B+(***)
• Ben Waltzer: The Point (2023 [2024], Calligram): [cd]: B+(**)
• Immanuel Wilkins: Blues Blood (2024, Blue Note): [sp]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Arthur Blythe Quartet: Live From Studio Rivbea: July 6, 1976 (1976 [2024], NoBusiness): [cd]: B+(***)
• Electro Throwdown: Sci-Fi Inter-Planetary Electro Attack on Planet Earth 1982-89 (1982-89 [2024], Soul Jazz): [r]: B+(**)
• In the Beginning There Was Rhythm (1978-84 [2024], Soul Jazz): [sp]: B+(***)

Old music:

• George Adams-Don Pullen Quartet: Jazzbühne Berlin '88 (1988 [1991], Repertoire): [yt]: A-
• Ray Anderson: Harrisburg Half Life (1980 [1981], Moers Music): [yt]: B+(***)
• Black Arthur Blythe: Bush Baby (1977 [1978], Adelphi): [yt]: B+(***)
• Boombox 3: Early Independent Hip Hop, Electro and Disco Rap 1979-83 (1979-83 [2018], Soul Jazz, 2CD): [r]: B+(***)
• Deutsche Elektronische Musik: Experimental German Rock and Electronic Musik 1972-83 (1972-83 [2010], Soul Jazz): [r]: B+(*)
• Deutsche Elektronische Musik: Experimental German Rock and Electronic Musik 1972-83 (1971-83 [2013], Soul Jazz): [r]: B+(*)
• Lloyd McNeill: Elegia (1979 [2019], Soul Jazz): [r]: B+(*)
• Punk 45: I'm a Mess! D-I-Y or Die! Art, Trash & Neon: Punk 45s in the UK 1977-78 (1977-78 [2022], Soul Jazz): [r]: B+(**)
• Space Funk 2: Afro Futurist Electro Funk in Space 1976-84 (1976-84 [2023], Soul Jazz): [r]: B+(**)
• Wiener Art Orchester: Tango From Obango (1979 [1980], Art): [yt]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Big Bambi: Compositions for Bass Guitar & Bassoon, Vol. I (ESP-Disk) [09-27]
• Steve Coleman and Five Elements: PolyTropos/Of Many Turns (Pi) [10-25]
• Day Dream: Duke & Strays Live: Works by Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn (Corner Store Jazz, 2CD) [11-08]
• David Friesen: A Light Shining Through (Origin) [11-22]
• Al Jarreau: Wow! Live at the Childe Harold (1976, Resonance) [12-06]
• Thollem McDonas: Infinite-Sum Game (ESP-Disk) [10-18]
• Reut Regev's R*Time: It's Now: R*Time Plays Doug Hammond (ESP-Disk) [11-15]
• Steve Smith and Vital Information: New Perspective (Drum Legacy) [02-07]
• Dave Stryker: Stryker With Strings Goes to the Movies (Strikezone) [01-10]
• Friso van Wijck: Friso van Wijck's Candy Container (TryTone) [11-01]

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

File opened 2024-10-24 01:36 AM.

I've been trying to collect my thoughts and write my up Top 10 Reasons to Vote for Harris vs. Trump. I posted an early draft -- just the top 10 list -- on Monday afternoon at Notes on Everyday Life, then blanked out and didn't get to the second part ("Top 5 Reasons Electing Harris Won't Solve Our Problems") until Tuesday afternoon (and well into evening). I updated the NOEL draft that evening, and finally posted the file in the blog. That pushes this file out until Wednesday, and Music Week until Thursday (which still fits in October).

As of Tuesday evening, this week's collection is very hit-and-miss (100 links, 6023 words), typed up during odd breaks as I juggled my life between working on my birthday dinner, writing the endorsement, and struggling with my big remodeling project.

The endorsement could do with some editing, although my initial distribution of the link has thus far generated almost no comment (one long-time friend wrote back to disagree, having decided -- "even in a battleground state" -- to vote for Jill Stein). A year ago I still imagined writing a book that might have some small influence on the election. In some ways, this piece is my way of penance for my failure, but the more I got into it, the more I thought I had some worthwhile points to make. But now it's feeling like a complete waste of time.

The birthday dinner did feel like I accomplished something. The Burmese curries were each spectacular in their own way, the coconut rice nice enough, the ginger salad and vegetable sides also interesting, and the cake (not Burmese, but spice-and-oats) was an old favorite. I should follow it up with a second round of Burmese recipes before too long, especially now that I've secured the tea leaf salad ingredients.

Slow but tangible progress on the bedroom/closet remodel. Walls are painted now, leaving trim next. Paneling is up in closet, where I still have the ceiling and quite a bit of trim. [Wednesday morning now:] I've been meaning to go out back and polyurethane the trim boards, so I can cut them as needed, first to shore up the ceiling. But it's raining, so I'll give that pass for another day, and probably just work on this straggling post. Laura's report of morning news is full of gaffes by Biden and Hillary Clinton, who seem intent on redeeming the dead weight of their own cluelessness by imposing it on Harris. With "friends" like these, who needs . . . Dick Cheney?

Posting late Wednesday night, my usual rounds still incomplete. I'll decide tomorrow whether I'll add anything here, or simply move on to next week (which really has to post before election results start coming in). For now, I'm exhausted, and finding this whole process very frustrating.

Top story threads:

Israel:

• Mondoweiss:

  • [10-21] Day 381: Israel pummels northern Gaza amid intensifying extermination campaign: "Israel's conditions for a ceasefire with Lebanon include allowing the Israeli army to continue operating in Lebanese territory. Meanwhile, Israel steps up its extermination campaign in northern Gaza, targeting its last remaining hospitals."

  • [10-24] Day 384: Israel continues to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza: "The ongoing extermination campaign in northern Gaza is displacing Palestinians from shelters as dozens of residents have been abducted by the Israeli army. Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes hit Beirut's southern Dahiya district."

  • [10-28] Day 388: Ongoing Israeli assault rips through northern Gaza, shuts down Kamal Adwan Hospital: "The last functioning hospital in north Gaza is forced out of service as Israeli forces continue to besiege and bomb Jabalia and Beit Lahia. In southern Lebanon, Israeli forces continue to take heavy losses."

• Ruwaida Kamal Amer/Ibtisam Mahdi: [10-24] For Gaza's schoolchildren, another year of destruction, loss, and uncertainty.

• Tareq S Hajjaj: [10-25] Survivors of north Gaza invasion report Israeli 'extermination' campaign: "Survivors of the ongoing Israeli extermination campaign in north Gaza describe how the Israeli army is separating mothers from children before forcing them south, executing civilians in ditches, and directly targeting hospitals and medical staff."

• Shatha Hanaysha: [10-25] 'Our freedom is close': why these young Palestinian men choose armed resistance: "I met resistance fighters from the Tulkarem Brigade for an interview in the alleyways of Tulkarem refugee camp in the occupied West Bank. They talked about why they fight against Israel, and what their dreams are for the future." This is disturbing. I find it impossible to feel solidarity or even sympathy with people who would fight back against Israel, even if purely out of self-defense. But it is understandable, and has long been predicted, every time Israel has renewed its war on Gaza (going back at least to 1951): virtually all people, when oppressed, will fight back. That they should do so, why and why, is mostly a function of the people who are driving them to such desperate measures. We'd see less of this if only we were clear on who is responsible for setting the conditions that make such rebellion seem like the only recourse, especially if we made it clear that we'll hold those who control an area as the sole ones responsible for the rebellions they provoke. Sure, I can think of some cases where control was nebulous and/or revolts were fueled by external forces, but that is not the case with Israel in Gaza. Israel is solely responsible for this genocide. And if armed resistance only accelerates it, that is solely because Israel wants it that way.

• Gideon Levy: [10-25] Beatings, humiliation and torture: The IDF's night of terror at a Palestinian refugee camp: "Israeli soldiers abused people during a raid on a remote refugee camp in the territories. During their violent rampage, the troops detained 30 inhabitants, of whom 27 were released the next day."

• Mohammed R Mhawish/Ola Al Asi/Ibrahim Mohammad: [10-23] Inside the siege of northern Gaza, where 'death waits around every corner': "Limbs scattered on the streets, shelters set ablaze, hundreds trapped inside hospitals: Palestinians detail the apocalyptic scenes of Israel's latest campaign."

• Qassam Muaddi:

  • [10-24] Israeli army continues attempts to empty northern Gaza: "Following the Israeli army's claim to have displaced 20,000 Palestinians from Jabalia, local sources tell Mondoweiss that most of the displaced have relocated to other places in northern Gaza."

  • [10-29] Why Israel outlawed UNRWA, and what it could mean for Palestinian refugees: "Israel has banned the work of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, in Israel and East Jerusalem. The move could have a major impact on the agency's life-saving work and is part of an ongoing campaign to erase Palestinian refugee rights."

• Jonathan Ofir: [10-28] Israeli journalists join the live-streamed genocide: "A mainstream Israeli journalist recently blew up a house in Lebanon as part of a news report while embedded with the military. The broadcast shows how mainstream genocidal activity has become in Israeli society."

• Meron Rapoport:

  • [10-30] With or without Sinwar, Netanyahu has no interest in ending the war.

  • [10-23] Conversing as unequals: Jewish-Palestinian partnership at a crossroads: "Awni Al-Mashni and I have spent years meeting with Israelis and Palestinians across the land to discuss visions for the future. Do we still have answers?"

• Christiaan Triebert/Riley Mellen/Alexander Cardia: [10-30] Israel Demolished Hundreds of Buildings in Southern Lebanon, Videos and Satellite Images Show: "At least 1,085 buildings have been destroyed or badly damaged since Israel's invasion targeting the Hezbollah militia, including many in controlled demolitions, a New York Times analysis shows." Same tactics, reflecting the same threats and intentions Israel is using on Gaza, except that you can't even pretend to be responding to an attack like Oct. 7. Hezbollah is being targeted simply because it exists, and Lebanon is being targeted because Israelis make no distinction between the "militants" they "defend" against and any other person who lives in their vicinity. The numbers in Lebanon may not amount to genocide yet, but that's the model that Israel is following.

• Oren Ziv: [10-22] 'Copy-paste the West Bank to Gaza': Hundreds join Gaza resettlement event: "In a closed military zone near Gaza, Israeli settlers, ministers, and MKs called to ethnically cleanse and annex the Strip -- an idea that is growing mainstream."

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

• Yaniv Cogan/Jeremy Scahill: [10-21] The Israeli-American businessman pitching a $200 million plan to deploy mercenaries to Gaza: "Moti Kahana says he's talking to the Israeli government about creating a pilot program for 'gated communities' controlled by private US security forces." By the way, the authors also (separately) wrote:

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

  • Jeremy Scahill/Murtaza Hussain/Sharif Abdel Kouddous: [09-18] Israel's new campaign of "terrorism warfare" across Lebanon.

  • Ryan Grim/Murtaza Hussain: [10-29] Project 2025 creators have a plan to 'dismantle' pro-Palestine movement: "If Donald Trump wins next week, the Heritage Foundation has prepared a roadmap for him to crush dissent."

    The plan, dubbed "Project Esther," casts pro-Palestinian activists in the U.S. as members of a global conspiracy aligned with designated terrorist organizations. As part of a so-called "Hamas Support Network," these protesters receive "indispensable support of a vast network of activists and funders with a much more ambitious, insidious goal -- the destruction of capitalism and democracy," Project Esther's authors allege.

    This conspiratorial framing is part of a legal strategy to suppress speech favorable to Palestinians or critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship, by employing counterterrorism laws to suppress what would otherwise be protected speech . . .

    To achieve its goals, Project Esther proposes the use of counterterrorism and hate speech laws, as well as immigration measures, including the deportation of students and other individuals in the United States on foreign visas for taking part in pro-Palestinian activities. It also advocates deploying the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a law placing disclosure obligations on parties representing foreign interests, against organizations that the report's authors imply are funded and directed from abroad.

    In addition, the document also suggests using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, to help construct prosecutions against individuals and organizations in the movement. The RICO act was originally created to fight organized crime in the U.S., and particularly mafia groups.

    It occurs to me that the same laws and tactics could be used to counter Israeli political influence -- that that anyone would try that -- and that the audit trail would be much more interesting.

• Adrian Filut: [10-24] From Iron Dome to F-15s: US provides 70% of Israel's war costs.

• Tariq Kenney-Shawa: [10-29] Why the Democrats were Israel's perfect partners in genocide: "By masking support for Israel with hollow humanitarian gestures and empathy for Palestinians have diluted pressure to end the war."

• Akela Lacy: [10-24] How does AIPAC shape Washington? We tracked every dollar. "The Intercept followed AIPAC's money trail to reveal how its political spending impacts the balance of power in Congress."

• Mitchell Plitnick: [10-25] US efforts to entice Israel into minimizing its attack on Iran are only raising the chances for regional war: "The Biden administration is showering Israel with military aid and support to persuade it not to hit Iran's energy sector, but this will only increase Israeli impunity and push the region closer to war."

• Azadeh Shahshahahani/Sofía Verónica Montez: [02-26] Complicity in genocide -- the case against the Biden administration: "Israel's mass bombardment of civilians in Gaza is being facilitated, aided and abetted by the United States government." Older article I just noticed, but figured I'd note anyway. Reminds me that the only proper response to the "genocide" charge is to stop doing it. That at least enables the argument that you never meant the complete annihilation of everyone, because you stopped and left some (most?) target people still alive. Needless to say, the argument becomes less persuasive over time, where you've repeatedly missed opportunities to say this is enough, "we've made our point."

• Richard Silverstein:

  • [10-04] 32 Iranian missiles struck Israel's major air base.

  • [10-10] Teetering on the brink: US proposes attacking Iran.

  • [10-12] Yom Kippur: Atoning for genocide: "Let's make something clear from the start: Jews don't have to apologize for Israel's sins. Israelis must do that."

  • [10-21] Shin Bet alleges Iran spy network active for two years.

• Ishaan Tharoor:

  • [10-25] Is Israel carrying out de facto ethnic cleansing? "A pro-settlement Israeli group and some Israeli lawmakers gathered a couple miles from northern Gaza's blasted neighborhoods to rally around settling Gaza."

  • [10-28] The world beyond the election: Middle East in turmoil: "Whoever takes office in January will face a region being reshaped by an emboldened Israel and the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia."

  • [10-30] The world beyond the election: So much for democracy vs. autocracy. The Biden framing was mostly horseshit, mostly because America has never cared whether other countries practiced democracy, not least because we don't do a good job of it ourselves, and are certainly willing to throw it out the window if the polls look unfavorable. But also I suppose it was a subtle dig at Trump, who's always been Team Autocracy. That the ardor seems to have faded is less a change of view than acknowledgment that it hasn't worked so well. Then there is this line: "Biden once framed the successful defense of Ukraine as a rejection of a world 'where might makes right.'" But what is the US "defense" of Ukraine but an exercise in might making right? And if that case isn't clear cut enough for you, what else can you make of Israel?

Israel vs. world opinion:

• Ahmed Alqarout: [10-29] How Israel is trying to beat the 'axis of resistance' by dominating the regional supply chain: "Israel has been able to insulate itself from the effects of the economic blockade imposed by the 'Axis of Resistance' through supply chain warfare in the Middle East and the broader region."

• Michael Arria:

  • [10-29] 'Thousands of people will die': Gaza doctors describe impact of Israel barring medical NGOs: "Israel has barred at least six international medical NGOs that had been providing crucial support to Gaza's decimated healthcare sector. Doctors in the banned groups say the move could result in thousands of additional deaths."

  • [10-22] The Shift: Poll shows Trump with slight edge among Arab American voters: The poll was from Arab News/YouGov. The split was 45% for Trump, 43% for Harris, and 4% for Jill Stein. Of chose, 29% chose Gaza as their biggest issue. Both candidates got 38% when asked "who would be better for the Middle East," but respondents thought Trump was more likely "to successfully resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict" (39% to 33%). A recent poll from Arab American Institute produced similar results. For more on recent Arab-American polling:

  • Richard Eskrow: [10-18] Dems are afraid Gaza will cost them the election. They're not afraid enough.

  Many people are critics of Harris for not taking a strong stand against Israel's genocide, but Arria relays a case where Israel's supporters are attacking Harris for not being supportive enough:

  It seems pretty clear that Harris was referring to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and not the student's reference to genocide, but this didn't stop pro-Israel voices from attacking the Vice President.

  "A very dangerous precedent," tweeted former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren. "I was disturbed to view the video in which Vice President Kamala Harris appears to confirm the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This is the first time that the White House has been linked to a libel which threatens Israel's legitimacy and security. I call on the U.S. administration to issue an immediate and complete denial."

  Just goes to show that Israel's front-line hasbara warriors realize that their arguments cannot withstand the admission of any doubt or ambiguity.

  • [10-24] The Shift: More campus crackdowns, DOJ lawyers call for Israel investigation: "Since the fall semester began last month we have seen schools implement a new round of repressive measures to crack down on Palestine activism."

  • [10-29] The Shift: Trump seeks to capitalize on voter frustration with Harris over Gaza: "The Trump campaign is clearly taking steps to capitalize on voters' frustration over Gaza. While Kamala Harris was getting booed by protesters in Michigan, Trump was also in the state making a play to Arab and Muslim voters."

  • [10-18] Samidoun's coordinator speaks out on the US and Canada's targeting of the group: Interview with Mohammed Khatib, European coordinator for the "Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network" group, accused of raising funds for the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine).

• Ramzy Baroud: [10-25] Israel's biblical wars of 'self defense': the myth of the 'seven war fronts'.

• Sam Biddle: [10-21] Meta's Israel policy chief tried to suppress pro-Palestinian Instagram posts: "Jordana Cutler, Meta's policy chief for Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, repeatedly flagged for censorship posts by Students for Justice in Palestine."

• Shane Burley: [10-01] US Jewish institutions are purging their staffs of anti-Zionists: "A months-long investigation found even the smallest hints of dissent are often met with unemployment."

• Sharaiz Chaudhry: [10-26] Generating consent for genocide: The BBC's complicity in Israel's crimes in Palestine and Lebanon: "The BBC is deceiving the British public and using its position to manufacture consent for Israel's genocidal assault in Palestine and Lebanon."

• Roy Eidelson: [10-23] The American Psychological Association is abandoning its commitment to human rights by refusing to speak out on Palestine: "The American Psychological Association claims to 'prioritize human rights advocacy,' but if its leaders want to truly honor that commitment they must recognize and address the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza today."

• Melvin Goodman: [10-28] The latest absurdities from the columnists of the New York Times: On Thomas L Friedman and Bret Stephens.

• Binoy Kampmark: [10-28] Crippling UNRWA: The Knesset's collective punishment of Palestinians.

• Ben Lorber: [09-05] The right is increasingly exploiting the horror of genocide: "Right-wing operatives are channeling the genocide in Gaza into mainstream antisemitism." This was bound to happen, although it's been slow to emerge, as most right-wing antisemites are actually big fans of Israel, and they're not especially sensitive to human rights abuses of any sort. [PS: On closer examination, I may have jumped to the wrong conclusion: that right-wingers were feigning horror at genocide to whip up antisemitic sentiments. Turns out this is mostly about a group called NatCon, where antisemitism claims the mantle of "Judeo-Christian nationalism" and supports genocide to the hilt.]

• Joseph Willits: [10-16] How Starmer's Labour government has enabled Israel's genocide.

Election notes:

• Charlotte Alter: [10-25] Some Democrats believe this might be an abortion election after all.

• Aaron Blake: [10-28] Can independent Dan Osborn win in Nebraska? And would it matter? "A new poll adds evidence that we could see a historic result in the Senate race, but it probably won't affect the chamber's majority."

• Julia Conley: [10-29] 'This is just the traceable money': $2 billion pumped into 2024 election by billionaire families.

• Bob Dreyfuss: [10-29] Pennsylvania's undecideds: "The 2024 election will likely turn on the Democrats' ground game."

• John Feffer: [10-23] Billionaires vs democracy: "The rich are trying to buy elections all over the world and consign democracy to the trash bin of history."

• Sarah Jones: [10-29] How did this become a gender-gap election: "Trump vs. Harris brings America's gendered political preferences into sharper focus."

• Tony Karon: [10-23] Voting in a time of genocide.

• Celinda Lake/Amanda Iovino: [10-30] A Democratic and a Republican pollster agree: This is the fault line that decides the election: Teases you with the "gender gap," the chart showing Trump +8 with men, Harris +9 with women (gap of 17 points), then offers you the 29-point gap by education, which shows Trump +10 for non-college, Harris +19 for college. Of course, both factors compound with a 43-point gap between non-college men (Trump +16) and college women (Harris +27), but non-college women still prefer Trump (+4) while college men go with Harris (+7).

• Nicole Narea: [10-27] What if Jill Stein or RFK Jr. decides the election? That you could even ask such a question shows that you understand nothing about third-party candidates, or at least their voters. Anyone who thinks that there is meaningful difference between the two major party candidates will vote for one or the other. Those who don't may register that opinion by voting for someone else, or they may just skip the whole process -- third-party voters are preferable, because at least they're showing respect for the process, just not for the two parties and their candidates. Stein and Kennedy decided to throw their names into the hat, but that's about it. Perhaps they made that decision hoping to spoil the election -- that's certainly the only message popular media has any interest in examining. But the voters' decisions are purely negative. Neither party has the right to claim third-party votes as rightfully theirs, because those votes were clear rejections of both parties.

  I've made what I felt was a pretty strong case that the two-party split really matters this year, and that one should vote for Harris vs. Trump. But the first commenter I got back disagreed and reiterated his decision to vote for Stein. I respect that.

• John Quiggin: [10-28] The end of US democracy: a flowchart:

  Go to the article for the chart, but each node has an assigned probability, which of course is just a wild guess, but this allows the possibility of adding them up:

  If the US were remotely normal, every entry on the left-hand edge ought to be equal to 1. Harris should be a sure winner, Trump shouldn't find any supporters for a coup, the MAGA Republicans in Congress should be unelectable and the moderate program proposed by Harris should be successful enough that Trumpism would be defeated forever.

  But that's not the case. There are two end points in which US democracy survives, with a total probability (excessively precise) of 0.46, and one where it ends, with a probability of 0.54. By replacing my probabilities at the decision nodes with your own, you can come up with your own numbers. Or you may feel that I've missed crucial pathways. . . .

  Note: Any Thälmann-style comments (such as "After Trump, us" or "Dems are social fascists anyway") will be blocked and deleted.

  The key here is "remotely normal, so that's the part you still have to puzzle out, and that's where the real problems and solutions lie.

• Catherine Rampell/Youyou Zhou: [10-22] Voters prefer Harris's agenda to Trump's -- they just don't realize it. Take our quiz." I hate these pieces, not least because they deliberately try to screw you over with misleading questions, but since I'm citing it, I figure I might as well score myself. The verdict was: "you supported 1 of Trump's policies and 4 of Harris's policies." The one "Trump proposal" I supported was: "Funding free online classes with money taken from private university endowments through taxes, fines, and lawsuits." I can see why Harris wouldn't have proposed that. I'm not wild about the funding mechanism, but private university endowments are a huge tax shelter that doesn't offer much public interest value, so I could see taxing them down. On the other hand, "free online classes" is a no-brainer. I think that continuing adult education is drastically underserved in America, and online classes would be a particularly cost-effective way of helping out. (I also favor free in-person classes, and I would fund it all from general funds, but I wasn't asked that.) The only thing that distinguishes this as a "Trump proposal" is that it's a bit harebrained. It's also a proposal that Trump will never lift a finger to implement, nor could he pass through his caucus.

• Eugene Robinson: The double standard for Harris and Trump has reached a breaking point: "One candidate can rant about gibberish while the other has to be perfect."

• Shaghayegh Chris Rostampour: [10-14] Why aren't Harris and Trump talking about nuclear weapons? "The threat is real and at times the call is coming from inside our own house." This doesn't really belong under "election," because, as noted, it's not something being contested, or even given much thought.

• David Sirota: How the 2024 election is normalizing corruption.

• David Wallace-Wells: [10-30] The election looks li ke an intramural squabble between billionaires: That, of course, is what you get when you reduce politics to a game of raising unlimited money.

• Endorsements:

  • Wajahat Ali: [10-29] Yes, I think Democrats are complicit in genocide. But Trump would be far worse: "There is simply no moral argument for allowing the former president to win in the name of opposing genocide."

    Donald Trump will be genocidal and a fascist. On Gaza, Trump promised he would let Israel "finish the job." That means fulfilling his mega-donor Miriam Adelson's wish of annexing the West Bank and standing pat as Israel moves to occupy northern Gaza on the graveyard of Palestinians. There's a reason why Israel's extremist national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, wants Trump to win and says he will be better for Israel. . . .

    With Harris and Democrats, there is an opening for Americans to organize, push, and pressure her administration to halt Israel's genocide and pursue progressive healthcare and economic policies. Democratic allies include Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, labor organizations and communities of color who remain committed to social justice, equity and peace. With the Republicans and Trump, no such allies exist. There's simply a fascist and a white Christian nationalist regime in waiting.

  • Matt Bai: [10-30] George W Bush is running out of time: "He should take this chance to get right with history, because history will certainly be hard on him." I've long suspected that Bush had a streak of plain human decency that he managed to suppress during his eight years as president. He ended that streak in disgrace, which come to think of it, is also how he started it, with many even worse moments along the way. But at least he hasn't compounded that disgrace, as most other ex-presidents have done. His withdrawal and silence is really all the recognition we need (or can hope for) that he is at least somewhat cognizant of his failures. Doing anything else at this point would only compromise his last shred of dignity.

    By the way, it's easy enough to see Dick Cheney's endorsement as nothing more than a favor to his daughter, who might still hope to continue her political career -- not as a candidate but in some other capacity -- by endearing herself to Harris. While Cheney is the most certifiably evil character in recent American politics, he's always had a soft spot for the women in his life.

  • Ben Burgis: [10-25] There's no pride in a Dick Cheney endorsement.

  • Jackie Calmes: [10-20] Top 10 reasons not to vote for Donald Trump: Plus: "Finally, the bonus, a positive reason to vote Harris. She's not only among the most experienced applicants for the job ever, but also: She's not Trump."

  • The Guardian: [10-25] The Guardian view on the US election and foreign policy: the world can't afford Trump again.

  • William Lewis: [10-25] On political endorsement: The Washington Post, presumably as directed by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, declined to endorse any presidential candidate this year, breaking with a practice that they've followed since 1976, even after it's been reported that they had a Harris endorsement ready to go. The publisher tries to explain this decision here. I'm not terribly bothered by this, probably because I deeply distrust the big money media anyway, especially their pretensions of independence. The Post, like the New York Times, goes out of their way to "balance" their proper news reporting -- never free from their own deep seated biases -- with right-wing "opinion" writers. However, many readers recognize Trump as not just a political opportunist but as such a perversely malign presence that they think he merits more rigorous scrutiny: that every mention that does not put his statements in historical context runs the risk of sanitizing and legitimizing ideas that most people upon reflection should find truly appalling. So this particular non-endorsement has elicited an interesting set of reactions, starting with economic sanctions:

    • Isaac Chotiner: [10-27] Marty Baron on the Washington Post's "spineless" endorsement decision: "The former executive editor discusses his relationship with the newspaper's owner, Jeff Bezos, who was reportedly behind the last-minute call to kill an editorial supporting Kamala Harris."

    • Charles R Davis: [10-25] "This is cowardice": Ex-editor blasts Washington Post after Jeff Bezos blocks Harris endorsement.

    • Kevin T Dugan: [10-30] What Blue Origin stands to gain after Jeff Bezos muzzled the Washington Post: "The Amazon owner claims he didn't pull an endorsement of Kamala Harris to aid his rocket company."

    • Griffin Eckstein: [10-24] Los Angeles Times editor resigns after billionaire owner blocks Harris endorsement: "Mariel Garza said the owner's decision to cut Harris endorsement 'undermines the integrity of the editorial board.'"

    • Eszter Hargittai: [10-29] Washington Post cancellations.

    • Dana Milbank: [10-27] Why I'm not quitting the Post: "And why I hope you don't, either."

    • Alexandra Petri: [10-26] It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president: "Isn't this what a newspaper is supposed to do?"

    • David Remnick: [10-30] Standing up to Trump: "Jeff Bezos endorsed a Trump-era slogan -- 'Democracy Dies in Darkness' for his newspaper, the Washington Post. Why wouldn't he let it endorse a candidate?"

    • Isaac Stanley-Becker/Aaron C Davis/Josh Dawsey/Christian Davenport: [10-30] For Jeff Bezos and his businesses, Washington has become more important: "Executives at companies founded by the billionaire Post owner have sought contact with trump. He argues he didn't end presidential endorsements out of self-interest."

    • Margaret Sullivan: [10-25] The Washington Post and LA Times refused to endorse a candidate. Why? Or more pointedly, why now?

    • Siva Vaidhyanathan: [10-29] The Washington Post is a reminder of the dangers of billionaire ownership.

  • J Michael Luttig: [10-29] My fellow Republicans, it's time to say enough with Trump. Also cites his previous endorsement from August.

  • Phil Mattingly: [10-23] 23 Nobel Prize-winning economists call Harris' economic plan 'vastly superior' to Trump's.

  • The New Yorker: Harris for President: "The Vice-President has displayed the basic values and political skills that would enable her to help end, once and for all, a poisonous era defined by Donald Trump."

  • Hamilton Nolan: [09-20] The weird and stupid Teamsters non-endorsement fiasco: "Refusing to endorse a presidential candidate will do nothing to stop Trump and the GOP's war on workers."

  • The Observer: [10-26] Americans who believe in democracy have no choice but to vote for Harris

  • Edith Olmsted: [10-25] "Extreme danger": Harris earns a stunning endorsement over Trump: "Kamala Harris has earned an eleventh-hour show of support from Palestinian,Arab, and Muslim community leaders." I cite their statement down in the "chatter" section.

  • Rick Perlstein: [10-23] Science is political: "For only the second time in its 179-year history, Scientific American has endorsed a candidate for president: Kamala Harris.

  • April Rubin:

    • [10-23] 23 Nobel prize-winning economists back Harris' economic proposals. This is up from [06-25], when 16 Nobel economists see a Trump inflation bomb.

    • [10-24] 82 Nobel-prize recipients in science fields endorse Harris.

  • Bernie Sanders: [10-30] How can I vote for Kamala Harris if she supports Israel's war? Here's my answer: "Trump says Netanyahu is doing a good job and Biden is holding him back. Even on this issue, Trump is worse."

  • Catherine Shoard: [10-30] Arnold Schwarzenegger endorses Kamala Harris: 'I will always be an American before I am a Republican': "The former Republican governor said that he was backing the Democrat because a Trump victory would mean 'four more years of bullshit.'"

  • Bret Stephens: [10-29] A conservative case against Trump: This one gives me no comfort. He's in the running for worst right-wing pundit in America, and much of his rationale centers on his understanding that Trump is less reliable than Harris when it comes to supporting war and genocide: among other things, he worries that "allow Putin to succeed in Ukraine, and Israel's threats from Russia's allies in Iran, Syria and Yemen will multiply."

  • Wikipedia: I ran this last week, but the lists keep growing:

    • List of Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign endorsements.

    • List of Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign endorsements.

    • News media endorsements in the 2024 United States presidential election.

Trump:

• Trump's Madison Square Garden spectacle:

  • Jamelle Bouie: [10-29] Trump is less confident than he says. His rally at Madison Square Garden proves it.

  • Matt Ford: [10-29] The Madison Square Garden rally is a vision of a second Trump term: "There's no clearer picture of a presidency than the people with whom a would-be president chooses to associate."

  • Melissa Gira Grant: [10-29] Trump wasn't kidding with that fascist rally. Just ask his ICE chief. "While Stephen Miller and Tony Hinchcliffe were hurling racist tropes at Madison Square Garden, former ICE acting Director Tom Homan was on CBS explaining what the actual policies of mass deportation would look like."

  • Sarah Jones: [10-28] Why did Trump's MSG rally call Kamala Harris the antichrist? "For his Christian-right supporters, the election will be fought as spiritual warfare."

  • Branko Marcetic: [10-28] Trump's hateful rally has no real answer from Democrats.

  • Christian Paz: [10-29] Trump's Madison Square Garden rally showed how racism is the beating heart of election denial: "Trump's lies about electoral fraud rest on an argument about nonwhite people."

  • H Scott Prosterman: [10-30] Echoes and parallels from 1939 -- Trump's Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden: I wonder if part of the point wasn't do evoke comparisons like this, figuring that, like most historically informed attacks on Trump, they'll only solidify his support?

  • Greg Sargent: [10-28] Trump's ugly racist rally finally unmasks his real closing argument: "The Madison Square Garden rally didn't devolve into a hate fest. The hate fest was the point all along."

  • Alex Shephard: [10-28] It's not just Trump we have to fear anymore: "Trump's rally at Madison Square Garden was a parade of foot soldiers in a hateful movement that has become even bigger than the man who founded it."

  • V (formerly Eve Ensler): [10-29] Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden: the ultimate daddy projection screen.

  • Jimmy Kimmel Live:

    • Trump's nuttiest rally of all time.

    • For Republicans we love: Post-MSG, a "special monologue" trying to reason with Republicans.

• Zack Beauchamp: [10-31] Inside Trump's ominous plan to turn civil rights law against vulnerable Americans. Late-breaking but important article.

• Jasper Craven: Trump's cronies threw the VA into chaos. Millions of veterans' lives are on the line again.

• David French: [10-27] Four lessons from nine years of being 'Never Trump': His section heads:

  • Community is more powerful than ideology.
  • We don't know our true values until they're tested.
  • Hatred is the prime motivating force in our politics.
  • Finally, trust is tribal.

• Susan B Glasser: [10-18] How Republican billionaires learned to love Trump again: "The former President has been fighting to win back his wealthiest donors, while actively courting new ones -- what do they expect to get in return?"

  Trump's effort to win back wealthy donors received its biggest boost on the evening of May 30th, when he was convicted in Manhattan on thirty-four criminal counts related to his efforts to conceal hush-money payments to the former adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. After the verdict, Trump walked out to the cameras in the courthouse and denounced the case brought against him as "rigged" and a "disgrace." Then he departed in a motorcade of black Suburbans. He was headed uptown for an exclusive fund-raising dinner, at the Fifth Avenue apartment of the Florida sugar magnate José (Pepe) Fanjul. . . .

  Trump was seated at the head table, between Fanjul -- a major Republican donor going back to the early nineties -- and Stephen Schwarzman, the C.E.O. of Blackstone, the world's largest private-equity fund, who had endorsed Trump the previous Friday. Securing the support of Schwarzman was a coup for the Trump campaign. . . .

  Trump was fund-raising off his conviction with small-dollar donors as well; his campaign, which portrayed him as the victim of a politicized justice system, brought in nearly $53 million in the twenty-four hours after the verdict. Several megadonors who had held back from endorsing Trump announced that they were now supporting him, including Miriam Adelson, the widow of the late casino mogul Sheldon Adelson; the Silicon Valley investor David Sacks, who said that the case against Trump was a sign of America turning into a "Banana Republic"; and the venture capitalist Shaun Maguire, who, less than an hour after the verdict, posted on X that he was donating $300,000 to Trump, calling the prosecution a "radicalizing experience." A day later, Timothy Mellon, the banking-family scion, wrote a $50-million check to the Make America Great Again super PAC.

  Many more names and dollar amounts follow.

• Margaret Hartmann: [10-29] Melania Trump plays normal political wife for one week only: "From appearing at Donald Trump's racist MSG rally to insisting he's 'not Hitler' on Fox News, Melania is now conspicuously present."

• Doug Henwood: [10-30] Trumponomics: "What kind of economic policy could we expect from a second Trump term?" A fairly obvious assignment for one of our more available left-wing economists, but he comes up with surprisingly little here, beyond income tax cuts and tariffs -- much-advertised themes that are unlikely to amount to very much. I suspect this is mostly because, despite the obvious importance of the economy, there isn't much of a partisan divide on how to run it. Trump would be harder on workers (especially on unions), and softer on polluters and all manner of frauds, but those are just relative shifts of focus. He would also shift public spending away from things that might be useful, like infrastructure, to "defense," including his "beautiful wall."

• Michael Isikoff: [10-28] Trump campaign worker blows whistle on 'grift' and bugging plot: "A bombshell email claims millions were funneled from campaign to 'overcharging' firms -- and some went to a top Kamala Harris donor."

• Robert Kuttner: [10-30] Why so much hate? "Trump has tapped into an undercurrent of crude hatred and encouraged his supporters to express it. Where does all this hate come from?"

• Steven Levitsky/Daniel Ziblatt: [] There are four anti-Trump pathways we failed to take. There is a fifth. Authors of two books that have many liberal fans -- How Democracies Die (2018), and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point (2023) -- but never struck me as worth investigating, partly because their interest in democracy seems more concerned with formal elegance than with making government serve the people. The fifth path, when various legal schemes fail, is "societal mobilization" -- isn't that what we used to call "revolution"? The authors have written several "guest essays" over the years, including:

  • [2023-09-08] Democracy's assassins always have accomplices.

• Nick Licata: [10-29] Trump's playbook to win regardless of election night results.

• Nicholas Liu: [10-30] RFK Jr. claims Trump promised him "control" of CDC and federal health care agencies.

  • Andrew Prokop: [10-31] Trump really could empower RFK Jr. to wreck public health: "Even if Kennedy can't get Senate confirmation, he could still wield vast influence if Trump wins."

• Amanda Marcotte:

  • [10-25] "Daddy's home": Tucker Carlson's bizarre troll distills Trump's false promise to male voters: 'Trump wants dudes to believe he can bring women to heel, but instead, he'll leave men sadder and lonelier."

  • [10-28] Trump campaign's obsessive hate may not boost him, but it will cause long-term damage: "A deluge of swing state ads suggest trans people cannot co-exist peacefully with cis people."

  • [10-28] Elon Musk's "illegal" past doesn't feel like hypocrisy to MAGA -- Trump's hate rally in NYC shows why.

  • [10-30] In dual rallies, Trump celebrated fascism, but Kamala exposed its true face: "MAGA made a petulant case for white supremacy, but on the site of January 6, Harris reminded voters of its violence."

• Nicole Narea: [10-29] Would Trump's mass deportation plan actually work? "Here's what history tells us." Related here:

  • Christian Paz: [10-25] Polls say voters back "mass deportation." That's misleading. "Americans' opinions on immigration are more complicated than any one question can capture."

• The New Republic: [10-21] The 100 worst things Trump has done since descending that escalator: "Some were just embarrassing. Many were horrific. All of them should disqualify him from another four years in the White House."

• Timothy Noah:

  • [10-25] The influential men who disdain Trump -- but won't endorse Harris: "History will remember that Fraidy-Cats like Jeff Bezos and Mitt Romney went AWOL during their country's hour of need." Part one, followed by:

  • [10-29] The swelling ranks of influential men knuckling under to Trump: "More on the big shots -- from Mark Zuckerberg to Sean O'Brien -- who Trump has successfully intimidated into obeisance."

• Paige Oamek: [10-15] Trump's campaign manager has raked in an insane amount of money: "How in the world did Chris LaCivita make this much money from a campaign?"

• Rick Perlstein: [10-30] What will you do? "Life-changing choices we may be forced to make if Donald Trump wins."

• Molly Redden/Andy Kroll/Nick Surgey: [10-29] Inside a key MAGA leader's plans for a new Trump agenda: "Key Trump adviser says a Trump administration will seek to make civil servants miserable in their jobs." Spotlight here on Russell Vought, "former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget." Also on Vought:

  • Jake Johnson: [10-28] Leaked videos reveal Project 2025 architect's plan for far-right 'shadow' government: "Russell Vought, who served as director of the Office of Management and Budget during Trump's first term, said he wants to inflict 'trauma' on career civil servants and bulldoze opponents of the Republican nominee."

• James Risen:

  • [10-25] Mainstream media was afraid to compare Trump to Hitler. Now the press has no excuse. "Statements by John Kelly, Trump's former chief of staff, have made it nearly impossible for the media to avoid Hitler comparisons." Kelly's comments did pop up among the late show comics, but I wouldn't expect much more.

  • [10-22] Americans need a closing argument against Trump: "Too many Americans seem to be ignoring the risks that another Trump presidency would pose to the US. This is a warning to them." Included here because the author casually mentions: "Trump is a fascist who wants to overthrow the United States' democratic system of government." That's under the first section here, which is just one of several:

    1. Threat to democracy
    2. Imprison political opponents
    3. Eliminate reproductive rights
    4. Concentration camps and mass deportations for immigrants
    5. Create a theocracy
    6. Increase censorship and destroy the media
    7. A puppet for Putin
    8. Dictator for life

    Actually, I don't see many of these things happening, even if Republicans take Congress, and the last two are total canards. No one aspires to be a puppet, but aside from that, the rest are at least things Trump might think of and wish for. What separates Trump from the classic fascists has less to do with thought and desire than with checks and balances that make it hard for any president to get much of anything done. Still, a bad president can do a lot of damage, and any would-be fascist is certain to be a very bad president. As Trump has already proven, so we really shouldn't have to relitigate this.

  • [10-03] The reason Netanyahu and Putin both want a Trump victory: "Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu both want Donald Trump to win so they can prolong and intensify their brutal wars."

• Asawin Suebsaeng/Tim Dickinson: 'American death squads': Inside Trump's push to make police more violent.

• Sean Wilentz: Trump's plot against America: "A leading historian looks back at Philip Roth's novel and how it perfectly predicts the rise of Trump and his willing collaborators."

• No More Mr. Nice Blog:

  • [10-28] It's world-historical fascism, but it's also ordinary white-guy bigotry.

    Did yesterday's rally seem like the work of an organized, dangerous fascist party? Yes -- but the rally's rhetoric also seemed like ordinary casual conversation among bigoted white men when they think no one can hear them. Remember the cops who beat Rodney King in 1991 and sent messages to one another describing Black citizens involved in a domestic dispute as being "right out of 'Gorillas in the Mist'"? Remember the police official responsible for investigating workplace harassment in New York City being fired in 2021 after it was revealed that he'd written racist posts in a police discussion group called the Rant? . . .

    This is how bigoted men talk. Among cops, it reinforces a sense of grievance that often leads to brutality. It'll do the same thing among Trumpers if they win -- and, to a lesser extent, if they lose. This is a rising fascist movement, but it's built on ordinary hatreds that aren't new and that predate Trump's political career.

  • [10-24] Fascism and other matters.

  • [20-21] Donald Trump, relatable fuckup?

    I think young men find Trump's campaign-trail lapses relatable. It's not just that they might really believe Haitians in America are eating people's pets, or might enjoy Trump's smutty anecdotes. I think they also might notice that Trump is being accused of campaign incompetence or dementia -- and that endears him more to them.

    After all, many of them were diagnosed with ADHD because they couldn't sit still in school or stop disrupting class. They might not like Trump's taste in music, but they can relate to someone who shows up and just doesn't feel like doing the work.

    They appreciate the way Trump suggests that he not only can solve all the world's problems, but can do it quickly and easily -- he conveys a sense that he can succeed at many things without doing any hard work. That's what they want to do!Why are young men attending college at lower rates than young women? Aren't they attending the same schools as their sisters? Being good in school has always been seen as weird and unmanly by most Americans, and I think that mindset is having a greater and greater impact on young men's choices. Boys with good grades are seen as weird losers and not very masculine -- they're like girls, who are allowed to be good in school. It's much cooler to be an amusing fuckup.

    When we express horror at Trump's latest baffling act on the campaign trail, I think we sound, to these young men, like annoyingly responsible scolds. Obviously, they like Trump's offensive humor because they like offending people, but they also relate to Trump's refusal to restrain his speech because trying to avoid giving offense to people is hard work. It's almost like schoolwork, and the same people are good at it, for the same reasons -- because they're grade-grubbing goody-goodies who seem to like spoiling everyone else's fun.

  • [10-29] No, Trump is still not "a spent and exhausted force": Disputes the Jamelle Bouie piece I cited above.

  • [10-30] A war at home is still a war, guys:

    This is a reminder of one reason Donald Trump is winning over some young men, apart from the bro-ishness and misogyny of his campaign: Trump and his surrogates have young men convinced that a vote for Harris is a vote for war. Trump regularly says that a Harris presidency will lead to World War III, while he'll instantly, magically, and single-handedly end all the major wars taking place right now and prevent future wars by means of a slogan, "Peace Through Strength." Harris, regrettably, has welcomed the support not only of Liz Cheney (who has stood up for the rule of law in recent years) but also of her father, whom nobody admires these days and who was unquestionably a warmonger.

• Seth Meyers: [10-31] A Closer Look: Trump's embarrassing garbage stunt might be his most surreal photo op ever.

Vance, and other Republicans:

• Zack Beauchamp: [10-23] The banality of Elon: "When it comes to politics, Elon Musk's ideas are utterly, revealingly conventional."

• Dan Diamond: [10-30] Mike Johnson vows major changes to Affordable Care Act if Trump wins election. This, of course, led to:

  • Emine Yücel: [10-30] Trump camp attempts damage control after Johnson caught being too explicit about gutting ACA.

  • Dylan Scott: [10-31] Republicans are serious about cutting people's health care: "Donald Trump's election could allow the GOP to gut Medicaid and protections for preexisting conditions."

• Tony Romm: [10-29] Musk's plan to cut $2 trillion in US spending could bring economic turmoil. And why does anyone care what Musk thinks? Oh yeah, because Trump's his bitch.

• Matt Sledge: Mitch McConnell group funneled cash to a PAC pitting Arab and Jewish voters against Harris.

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells: [10-28] The improbable rise of JD Vance.

• Jessica Washington/Shawn Musgrave: Inside Ron DeSantis's quest to trample the wioll of Florida voters on abortion.

Harris:

• James Carville: [10-23] Three reasons I'm certain Kamala Harris will win: Spoken like the hack-consultant he's always been:

  1. Trump is a repeat electoral loser. This time will be no different.
  2. Money matters, and Harris has it in droves.
  3. It's just a feeling.

  His feeling?

  For the past decade, Trump has infected American life with a malignant political sickness, one that would have wiped out many other global democracies. On Jan. 6, 2021, our democracy itself nearly succumbed to it. But Trump has stated clearly that this will be the last time he runs for president. That is exactly why we should be exhilarated by what comes next: Trump is a loser; he is going to lose again. And it is highly likely that there will be no other who can carry the MAGA mantle in his wake -- certainly not his running mate.

• Lydie Lake: [10-30] Harris's final push before election day: "Kamala Harris delivered her closing argument in a charged pre-election rally near the White House."

• Colleen Long/Darlene Superville/Nadia Lathan: [10-25] Beyoncé and Kamala Harris team up for Houston rally. One big thing they talked about was abortion, including how in Texas "the infant death rate has increased, more babies have died of birth defects and maternal mortality has risen.

• Chris Megerian/Colleen Long/Steve Karnowski: [10-17] Following death of Hamas leader, Harris says it's 'time for the day after to begin' in Gaza. If by "day after" you mean the day after the killing ends, that's been overdue since Oct. 8, 2023 (and really many years before), but the statement would seem to reject the idea that the war has to go on until there are no Palestiniains left to kill, which seems to be Netanyahu's agenda.

• Christian Paz: [10-24] How "Trump is a fascist" became Kamala's closing argument: "Brat summer is over; 'Trump is a fascist' fall is in." I chased this piece down after Nathan J Robinson tweeted:

  One of the main mistakes Hillary Clinton made was making her central message "Trump is bad" without offering a positive case for why she would be a good president. The error is being repeated.

  A quick search reveals more complaints about this as a strategy, along with much consternation that Harris is blowing the campaign, possibly letting Trump win. I get that the "Trump is a fascist" jab is suddenly fashionable thanks to the Kelly quote, although it's been commonplace for years among people who know much about the history of fascism, and are willing to define it broadly enough that a 78-year-old American might qualify. I'd say that Trump is a bit more complicated and peculiar than simply being a generic fascist, although sure, if you formulated a generic F-scale, he would pass as a fascist, and it wouldn't be a close call. But I have two worries here: one is that most Americans don't know or care much about fascism -- other than that it's a generic slur, which judging from his use of the word (e.g., to slam "radical leftists") seems to be his understanding; the other is that there are lots of other adjectives and epithets that get more surely and much quicker to the point of why Trump is bad: even fancy words like sociopath, narcissist, oligarch, and misanthrope work better; as well as more common ones like racist, sexist, elitist, demagogue; you could point out that he's both a blowhard and a buffoon; or you could settle for something a bit more colorful, like "flaming asshole." Or rather than just using labels/names, you could expand on how he talks and acts, about his scams and delusions -- sorry if I haven't mentioned lies before, but they come in so many flavors and variations you could do a whole taxonomy, like the list of fallacies (many of which he exemplifies -- at least the ones that don't demand much logic).

  As for Robinson's complaint, I think that's typical of left intellectuals, who've spent all their lives trying to win people over on issues. Politicians have to be more practical, especially because they have to win majorities, while all activists can hope for are incremental gains. Harris has a lot of planks in her platform, and if you're seriously interested in policy, there's a lot to talk about there (and not all good, even if, like most leftists, you're willing to settle for small increments). But to win an election, she needs to focus on the elements that can get her majority support.

  And the one key thing that should put her over the top is that he's Donald Trump, and she isn't: that the only chance we voters have of getting rid of Trump is to vote for her. To do this, she needs to focus relentlessly on his negatives. She doesn't need to toot her own horn much, as every negative she exposes him for is an implicit contrast: to say "Trump is a fascist" implies that "I am not." That may not be saying much, but it's something, and it should be enough. And Robinson, at least, should know better. I find it hard -- I mean, he's just co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky -- seriously expects any Democrat to offer "a positive case for why she would be a good president." All any voter can do is pick one item from a limited, pre-arranged menu. Sometimes you do get a chance to vote for someone you really like or at least respect, but quite often the best you can do is to vote against the candidate you most despise.

  That choice seems awfully clear to me this year. Unfortunately, it appears that many people are still confused and/or misguided. At this point, I don't see any value in second-guessing the Harris campaign. I have no reason to think they don't want to win this as badly as I want them to win. They have lots of money, lots of research, and lots of organization. They think they're doing the right things, and I hope and pray they're right. It's endgame now, so let them run their last plays. And if they do lose, that will be the time to be merciless in your criticism. (That'll be about the only fun you'll have in the next four years. By the way, if you want a head start, check out this book.)

  • [08-08] "Trump is weird" will only get Kamala Harris so far: This is an older article by Paz, kicking off the "voters want to hear from Harris about Harris, not Trump or Biden" mantra.

  • Brian Bennett: [10-25] Why Harris' closing argument is focused more on Trump than her.

  • Sidney Blumenthal: [10-28] We are witnessing the making of a fascist president in real time.

  • Anand Giridharadas: [10-23] Real men reject fascism: "A note on Harris's closing argument."

  • Susan B Glasser: [10-24] Donald Trump and the F-word: "Kamala Harris embraces the 'fascist' label for the ex-President, without any certainty that it will disquality him."

  • Dylan Matthews: [10-23] Is Trump a fascist? 8 experts weigh in. "Call him a kleptocrat, an oligarch, a xenophobe, a racist, even an authoritarian. But he doesn't quite fit the definition of a fascist." Had the head writer read the article, they would have seen that it all depends on the definition, and here 8 "experts" are all over the map, although they all pretty much agree that Trump is an awful person and a dangerous politician who is up to no good. Unless you're writing a comparative historical analysis of right-wing political movements, that should be understanding enough to vote against him.

  • Jan-Werner Müller: [10-29] No, Trump is not a fascist. But that doesn't make him any less dangerous.

  • Robert Reich: [10-21] Trump's closing argument: full-throated fascism.

  • Alex Shephard: [10-25] This is what's missing from the fascism argument against Trump: "Yes, of course he's a threat to American democracy. But voters need to know how it affects them."

  • Michael Tomasky: [10-25] The best reason for calling Donald Trump a fascist? Easy: He is. "The famous 'closing argument' should be multipronged. But the f-word must be prominent in the mix."

  • Jonathan Weisman: [10-17] Harris and Democrats lose their reluctance to call Trump a fascist: "Since Gen. Mark Milley was quoted as saying Donald Trump is 'fascist to the core,' a term avoided by top members of the Democratic Party is suddenly everywhere." For me, the word "fascist" packs a lot of info in a small package. For others, that info may be undecipherable, in which case the charge rings hollow, or perhaps just scatalogical. But obviously you don't get to be a general without studying a bit into WWII, which is where Milley and Kelly are coming from.

  • Marc A Thiessen: [10-24] Harris's closing argument is dishonest, desperate and hypocritical: "Trump isn't a fascist, and he didn't say he would use the military against his political opponents." But still not nearly as "dishonest, desperate and hypocritical" as this (or pretty much any) Thiessen column. Here's just one example:

    • Veronica Stracqualurst: [10-14] Trump suggests using military against 'enemy from within' on Election Day.

• Jennifer Rubin: [10-27] To understand the US economic success is to love Harris's plan: "Kamala Harris's economic proposals would build on the remarkable US comeback since the pandemic."

Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:

• Aaron Blake: [10-30] Did Biden call Trump supporters 'garbage'? It comes down to an apostrophe. "Republicans have long strained for a new Hillary Clinton-"deplorables" moment, but Biden's defense is entirely plausible." It mostly comes down to "who gives a fuck." I'm not in favor of epithets applied to broad swathes of people, but anyone offended by this is awfully thin-skinned.

  • Paige Oamek: [10-30] Trump trashes Democrats after claiming what Biden said was mean: "Donald Trump is back to his usual self, mere hours after complaining about Joe Biden's 'garbage' comment." Of course, I could have filed this in the Trump section, with so many other dumb and/or mean things he's saying, but I wanted to stress what I meant by thin-skinned.

  • Jonathan Chait: [10-30] Biden 'garbage' controversy is pure Republican hypocrisy: "Conservative snowflakes have a fainting spell over his stumble."

  • Eric Levitz: [10-30] The big lie behind Biden's "garbage" gaffe scandal: "Only one presidential candidate is pledging to treat Americans who vote against him as enemies."

• Joseph Bullington: [08-19] Republicans will weaponize rural suffering as long as Democrats ignore it: "JD Vance is a poser, but he's telling a dangerously compelling story about rural America that Democrats are doing nothing to defuse."

• Adam Johnson: [07-12] The best counter to Project 2025 is a Progressive Project 2025: "If President Biden -- or any Democratic replacement -- wants to get back in the race, they need a positive moral vision to run on, not just dire warnings." Obviously, the subhed is dated, and even if true (which it probably isn't), it's too late to affect the 2024 election. I'm not opposed to articulating "a positive moral vision" -- after Gaza, I'd even welcome a negative one, like "not that" -- but naming it "2025" implies you're seeking to power to implement big changes almost immediately, and that is neither realistic nor a very conducive vibe.

• Nicholas Lemann: [10-28] Bidenomics is starting to transform America. Why has no one noticed?

• Branko Marcetic: [10-23] The US isn't moving right -- the Democrats are.

• Li Zhou: [10-26] Michelle Obama made the case for abortion rights in a way Joe Biden never could: "In a searing speech, Obama laid out exactly what's at stake."

Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:

• Ian Millhiser:

  • [10-28] A new Supreme Court case could change the result of the presidential election.

  • [10-28] The Trumpiest judges in America want to toss out thousands of lawfully cast ballots.

  • [10-28] If Harris wins, will the Supreme Court steal the election for Trump? "It depends on how much Harris can run up the score."

  • [10-30] The Republican Supreme Court just blessed an illegal voter purge: "This is the latest in a string of favors this Court has done for the Republican Party."

Climate and environment:

• Andrea Mazzarino: [10-27] The All-American ravages of extreme weather.

• Olivia Rosane: [10-30] 'This is climate change': Devastating flooding kills more than 70 in Spain. Death count now seems to be at least 95, with more missing.

Business, labor, and Economists:

• Dean Baker:

  • [10-21] The Biden-Harris job boom: "Donald Trump seems to have forgotten what the economy was like when he left office. He talks as though it was booming and then Biden sank it. In fact, the opposite is the case."

  • [10-22] CNBC hides the extent to which Trump tax proposal would hurt moderate and middle-income families.

  • [10-23] Patent monopolies and pharmacy benefit managers: protectionism leads to corruption.

  • [10-28] Four more items in the wages outpacing prices debate.

• Paul Krugman:

  • [10-21] Trump on the Civil War, in his own words: "It's hard to compromise with those who consider any criticism a threat."

  • [10-24] How Trump could bankrupt Social Security: "Retirement benefits for millions of Americans are on the line."

  • [10-28] Trump's biggest con: pretending he's on the side of working men and women: "He's even more antilabor and pro-plutocrat than orthodox Republicans."

Ukraine and Russia:

• Sam Bull: [10-25] Diplomacy Watch: Ukraine and allies reeling as war heats up: "Russian progress and North Korean involvement prompt tough words and fu nding surge from US."

• Ariel Petrovics: [10-31] Why sanctions on Russia are literally backfiring.

• Lydia Polgreen: [10-29] We've just had a glimpse of the world to come. She's talking about "a lavish global summit in the Russian city of Kazan," the BRICS conference, where "Vladimir Putin looked like the cat who ate the canary." US sanctions were supposed to isolate Russia, to cripple its economy, and bring them back begging for peace and mercy. How has that worked out?

  • Amelia Nierenberg: [10-21] Understanding the BRICS summit: "The group, which seeks to rebalance the global order away from the West, will meet on Tuesday." Here's a primer.

  • Sarang Shidore: [09-01] American power just took a big hit.

• Aaron Sobczak: [10-24] Advocates demand Biden declassify Ukraine strategy: "We don't want a situation where we're engaged in a war without an achievable plan for victory."

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

• Noam Hurowitz: [10-23] Meet the world's least popular president: "With a 92 percent disapproval rating, Peru's Dina Boluarte is testing the very limits of disdain."

• Nick Turse: [10-23] The global war on children.

Other stories:

• Ross Rosenfeld: [10-30] How America's craven plutocrats busted the myth of the business hero: "The members of the billionaire executive class have billed themselves as great men of history beyond scrutiny and reproach. his is the year that shattered that illusion." Sorry to break this, but that illusion has been pretty thoroughly debunked at least since Ida B. Wells. And while I appreciate the occasional Harris supporter in their ranks, she isn't really that much of a reach: arguably she'll do better by them than their culturally simpatico golf cheat buddy.

• Jeffrey St Clair: [10-25] Roaming Charges: Antic dispositions: Some tidbits:

  • More than half of Trump's supporters don't believe he'll actually do many of the things he claims he'll do (mass deportations, siccing the military on domestic protesters and political rivals), while more than half of Harris's supporters hope she'll implement many of the policies (end the genocide/single-payer) she claims she won't. And that pretty much sums up this election.

  • Barnett R. Rubin, former US diplomat: "Why do people keep saying that US politics is polarized? Look at the big picture. Genocide enjoys broad bipartisan support."

  • Fox News' Brian Kilmeade defended Trump's statement that he wants the "kind of generals that Hitler had." Kilmeade: "I can absolutely see him go, it'd be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do, maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who were Nazis or whatever." Kilmeade and Trump may not be "cognizant" of the fact that several "German generals" (von Stauffenberg, Friedrich Olbricht, and Ludwig Beck) tried to blow Hitler to bits and Germany's most famous General, Rommel, was forced to kill himself after being implicated in the plot.

  • Hours after the Washington Post announced its decision not to endorse [Kamala Harris, directed by Post owner Jeff Bezos], the Associated Press reported that Donald Trump met with executives from Blue Origin, the space company owned by Bezos that has a $3.4 billion NASA contract to build a spacecraft to take astronauts to the moon and back.

  • Eugene Debs: "I'd rather vote for something I want and don't get it, than vote for something I don't want and get it."

  • Trump: "I worked a shift at McDonalds yesterday." A McDonalds shift is eight hours, not 18 minutes . . . Dukakis in a tank looked less ridiculous.

  • Sounds familiar . . . [followed by a tweet which reads: "In 1938, Benito Mussolini closed off a wheat field & did a photo shoot showing him harvesting hay in order to portray himself as a common working man. He was surrounded by workers who had been vetted as loyal to the party." Includes a picture of the shirtless Fascist with cap and aviator goggles.]

  • Since 2001, forest fires have shifted north and grown more intense. According to a new study in Science, global CO2 emissions from forest fires have increased by 60% in the last two decades.

  • Christian nationalist pastor Joel Webbon called for the public execution of women who falsely claim to have been sexually assaulted: "MeToo would end real fast . . . All you have to do is publicly execute a few women who have lied."

  • Montana Senate candidate Tim Sheehy, on why he wants to abolish the Dept. of Education: "We formed that department so little Black girls could go to school down South, and we could have integrated schooling. We don't need that anymore."

  • Edward Luce, associate editor of the Financial Times: "Hard to overstate what a sinister figure Elon Musk is. Never seen one oligarch in a Western democracy intervene on anything like this scale with unending Goebbels-grade lies." Musk is the most obnoxious kid in middle school who is running the campaign of the school bully for student council without even being asked because even the school bully doesn't want to be around him . . .

Obituaries

• Barbara Dane: She started as a folksinger, and I heartily recommend her Anthology of American Folk Songs (1959), better than her memorably titled 1973 album, I Hate the Capitalist System, but she also recorded albums with Earl 'Fatha' Hines, Lightnin' Hopkins, and the Chambers Brothers, and I liked her 2016 jazz album Throw It Away enough for an A-.

  • Alex Williams: [10-25] Barbara Dane, who fought injustice through song, dies at 97: "She was highly regarded as a folk, blues and jazz singer. She was also ardently left-wing and prioritized social change over commercial success."

  • Jackson Albert Mann: [10-26] Socialist singer Barbara Dane was a true American radical.

• Fethullah Gulen:

  • Ishaan Tharoor: [10-21] Fethullah Gulen, Muslim cleric and target of Turkey's Erdogan, is dead: "Turkish authorities accused him of being the mastermind behind a 2016 coup attempt to topple the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan."

• Phil Lesh:

  • Jon Pareles: [10-25] Phil Lesh, bassist who anchored the Grateful Dead, dies at 84.

  • Brett Wilkins: [10-25] Phil Lesh, Grateful Dead founding bassist, dies at 84.

• Lewis Sorley:

  • Lewis Sorley, 90, who said the US won (but then lost) in Vietnam, dies: [10-30] Military historian. I've always hated the very idea of his book, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam, where he claimed that America could have and should have won the war in Vietnam, but was sabotaged by the peace movement, a fickle media, and weak-willed politicians. In Sorley's worldview, the war should have gone on forever.

• Also:

  • Claire Daly, master of the baritone saxophone, dies at 66.
  • Teri Garr, comic actress in offbeat roles, is dead at 79.
  • Gary Indiana, acerbic cultural critic and novelist, dies at 74.
  • Rudy May, a stingy master of the curveball, dies at 80.
  • Fernando Valenzuela, pitcher whose screwballs eluded batters, dies at 63.

Books

• Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Message

  • Hamid Dabashi: [10-17] How Ta-Nehisi Coates broke free of liberal Zionism.

  • Adam Johnson: [10-18] Ta-Nehisi Coates is challenging the cognitive dissonance of pro-Israel liberalism: "Coates is taking critiques of Zionism into the mainstream, chipping away at Israel's increasingly dubious liberal self-image."

• Juan Cole: Gaza Yet Stands:

  • Juan Cole: [10-26] Gaza Yet Stands: Juan Cole's new book.

Music (and other arts?)

• Rick Lopez: [10-24] Update.01 to The Sam Rivers Sessionography: A Work in Progress: Fulfilling his subtitle, with a very substantial addition, on top of a "magnificent" and "gorgeous" (to quote my own blurb) 764-page book that already seemed definitive. By the way, those words were written in advance of this "press release" quoted on page 3:

  Michael Hull's Fifth Column Films has begun work on a feature-length documentary about Sam Rivers through the lens of The Sam Rivers Sessionography, a book by Rick Lopez. Rivers was a musical genius who spent his life obsessed with creating intricate compositions that pushed music to places no one else could conceive of. It's only fitting that his biographer has invented an entirely new way to understand the life of an artist through a minutely detailed portrait that could only flower from the uniquely focused mind of Lopez. Rivers was a massive talent who has been mostly forgotten by the American jazz scene and is rarely included in the conversation about great masters of the art. Lopez's book and this film aim to correct that oversight, and make the case that Sam Rivers should take his place in the pantheon of the 20th century.

  Full disclosure: Michael Hull is my nephew. He started in Jason Bailey's Wichita-based film crew (e.g., My Day in the Barrel), produced a film Smokers no one has heard of, wrote a novel that hasn't been published and, most relevant here, made the superb documentary Betrayal at Attica. I've admired Lopez since I first discovered him twenty-some years ago, so the idea of introducing him and Mike was blindingly obvious. (I was also the person who introduced Mike and Liz Fink, although the gestation period on that project took much longer.) We have some money invested in this project, which you can take as a caveat if you wish, but I regard more as a vote of confidence. Still some ways to go, but here's a preliminary trailer and more information.

• John McWhorter: [10-24] It sounded like dancing, drinking and sex. It blew people's minds. I only noticed this piece on "the long, syncopated journey from Scott Joplin to Beyoncé" because Allen Lowe complained about it: "his views of ragime are just bizarre and beneath even the most minimal amount of knowledge, full of stereotypes and really thirdhand historiography"; Phil Dyess-Nugent added: "Having made his name writing about some things he seemed to understand, John McWhorter has since demonstrated his cluelessness on a vast array of subjects." That's my general impression of the few columns I've read, especially since his ridiculous Woke Racism book. This I'm less sure about, maybe because I don't know or chare that much about ragtime (or, I might as well admit, Beyoncé), so I'm mostly just noting a lot of name-dropping and connect-the-dots that favors obvious over interesting.

• Riotriot: [10-30] Takes by the ocean: Zambian nightlife and spongian jawbox.

Chatter

• Peter Daou [10-27]

  QUESTION: Who is worse for Palestinians, Trump or Harris?

  ANSWER: Harris is worse for Palestinians.

  WHY?

  1. Harris and Biden are already culpable for a year-long genocide.
  2. Like Trump, Harris vows to keep giving Israel unconditional support.
  3. Therefore, Trump can never match Harris's death toll.
  4. Rewarding Harris's war crimes with a vote emboldens Netanyahu and opens the floodgates for future tyrants.
  5. If Trump wins and Democrats suddenly decide massacring children is wrong, Trump will face much greater resistance to letting Israel commit atrocities.

  Bottom line: Voting third party is the only moral choice, but if liberals insist on comparing Trump to Harris, Harris is worse for Palestinians.

  I found this immediately after posting my preliminary draft on who to vote for president and why, so I've already explained why I disagree with Daou's conclusion so strongly. But perhaps I should stress one very important point, which is that voting is not a moral choice; it is a political choice. I'm not going to write a disquisition on the difference, but will insist that it is a category error to vote based on morality. As for Daou's five points:

  1. True, but the order is wrong, like saying "Speer and Hitler are already culpable," where the clearest charge against Speer (and Harris) is not breaking with their leader. By the way, Biden is more like Speer than to Hitler -- in playing follow-the-leader, but also given their critical position in the arms pipeline.
  2. Not false, but Harris (unlike Trump and Graham) has never said "finish the job," and she's not unaware of the human toll Israel's "self-defense" is taking, so I'd say that continued "unconditional support" is slightly less likely from her. Admittedly, that's a thin reed she has often taken pains to cover up.
  3. No way of predicting, but no reason to underestimate Trump's capacity for getting people killed. His general contempt for most of the world suggests quite the opposite.
  4. Clearly, massively false. Netanyahu's preference for Trump is widely known, not only through his own words and acts but through mutual donors like Myriam Adelson.
  5. Hard to know where to begin with this variation on "if the fascists win, the revolution will hasten." Ever hear of "moral hazard"? Sure, some Democrats may learn to blame the genocide on Trump -- as some Democrats came to blame Nixon for Vietnam -- but most will simply be shocked and search for scapegoats to blame, especially "pro-Palestinians" like Daou.

  Daou's conclusion that "Harris is worse for Palestinians" is horribly wrong, even if "Harris is no good for Palestinians" may well be true. But I wouldn't be much swayed if one could argue that one candidate would be good or better, because I've never looked at this conflict through that prism. I never quite bought the argument that "Palestinians have dug their own graves," but I did have sympathies for Israel at one point, which may be why I still wish to emphasize that genocide is bad (and I mean really bad) for Israel (and for America, which is implicated not just due to recent arms support but via longstanding cultural and political mores), and that in itself is reason enough to oppose it. (And sure, it's even worse for the killed than the killers, and that's another reason to oppose it, but it doesn't have to be the only one.)

  Some more comments on Daou's tweet:

  • Nathan J Robinson: Peter, this doesn't make sense. It could absolutely get worse under Trump. Any pressure to provide any aid whatsoever to Gaza will disappear. Greater pressure may be brought on Egypt to let Israel fully ethnically cleanse Gaza. Don't assume this is as bad as it can get.

  • Andrew Revkin: I sense @RudyGiuliani would disagree with you, @peterdaou, on who's worse for Palestinians. Here's how he explained the Trump plan at the #MSGRally tonight in his own words.

  • Films For Action: When we think of Trump in power again, we recall that even a genocide can get much worse. Trump just said that Netanyahu must "go further" in Gaza while criticizing Biden for "trying to hold him back." The full statement is highly worth reading: [link to Arizona Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Progressive Democrats Statement on Presidential Election].

  • Shadowblade: Who moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem?

  • Jonathan Blank Films: [Link to 'Trump would be the worst': Palestinians react to US presidential race.]

• Nathan J Robinson: [12-27] [comment attached to a clip of Tucker Carlson's MSG rally rant] The level of uncontrolled rage is terrifying, but I think if Trump is elected you will see it get far worse. The amount of overt racism will increase, the view of Democrats, leftists, migrants being scum in need of elimination. JD Vance has made clear that Pinochet is the model.

• Mehdi Hasan: [10-30] Donald Trump is going around telling Michigan Muslims he'll end the war, be the peace president, and how pro-Muslim (!) he is.

  Meanwhile, Dems sent Bill Clinton to lecture Michigan Muslims on how it's all Hamas's fault that Israel is massacring kids and killing civilians holding white flags.

  Whether or not they end up losing Michigan, at this point the Dems deserve to lose Michigan. Sheesh.

• Aaron Rupar: [10-31] Trump on Liz Cheney: "Let's put her with a rifle standing there with 9 barrels shooting at her. Let's see how she feels about it. You know, when the cuns are trained on her face."

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

Original count: 228 links, 11718 words (15894 total)

Current count: 253 links, 12905 words (17532 total)

Speaking of Which: Top 10 Reasons to Vote for Harris vs. Trump

Blog link.

Daily Log

Birthday dinner was yesterday. I wrote up this post on Facebook:

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes, and especially to those who so kind for allowing me to cook for them. Plate photo below. Coconut rice in middle, surrounded by (cw from top): "eggplant delight"; beef curry with potatoes; okra; pork curry with mango pickle; "punchy-crunchy ginger salad" (sort of); chicken coconut curry; sweet potato curry. I shopped Wednesday. Thought I'd do more Thursday, but decided to go with what I got. Made the three meat curries Thursday evening, as well as oatmeal stout cake for dessert. They took a long time -- seems like everything does these days -- but I was pleased with the results (I wound up using Patak Mango Relish with the pork). Finishing up today was more of a struggle. The sweet potato is a variation on a pumpkin-tamarind, but took much longer. The salad is made with pickled ginger, but I didn't have several ingredients, and wound up trying a lot of different things in it before I got something that seemed to work. As I said, this was my first stab at Burmese. Clearly I have much more to learn, but the advertised "rivers of flavor" were certainly there.

I also wrote a letter to Jan Barnes with more detail on the dinner, the work involved, and future plans:

My hip condition has been diagnosed as sacroiliac joint dysfunction. That's where the pelvis fuses into the spine, so it's different from what they try to fix with hip replacement surgery. It does sometimes manifest as lower back pain. I've never been diagnosed as having arthritis, although pretty much everyone I've ever known has had it by the time they reached my age (now 74). I'm not sure what the technical definition is, but popularly it seems to be a synonym for getting old and creaky. I have some probable arthritis in my hands, but I also probably also have carpal tunnel syndrome, and suspect each makes the other worse.

I did get some physical therapy for the sacroiliac pain, but it didn't help much. The idea was to strengthen your hip muscles to relieve pressure on the joints, but the effect was to add muscle pain to joint pain. Had I stuck with it, presumably the muscle pain would fade and I'd be better. I've found that prednisone works much better, but so far I've hoarded my pills for future really bad days -- like when I do a lot of cooking. I figured yesterday would be one, especially after much pain the day before, but I held off on taking my last pills, and in the end didn't need to. That I can stand the pain I have suggests that other people have it much worse than I do. Or maybe that I have inherited some of my mother's high tolerance for pain. And possibly that bitching about it is itself therapy.

First day of cooking, as noted, was spectacularly successful. Second day was a chaotic mess. I started with the topping on the cake, which turned out perfect (although the "new" can of sweetened condensed milk was much browner than expected, I used it anyway, as the broiler would brown it anyway; I just had to be careful not to burn it). After that, I roasted eggplants, and made a sweet potato tamarind curry (recipe was for pumpkin, with sweet potato offered as an alternative, noting it would take longer to cook -- well over an hour in my case, vs. 8 minutes the recipe expected for pumpkin). I finished the "eggplant delight," which was not as good as I expected, but at least had one dish on the table. I sliced the okra and shallots, to stir-fry later. (I had, by that point, prepped big piles of chopped onions, garlic, shallots, ginger, shrimp powder, serrano chiles, cilantro, and mint, as most of the recipes call for them in various combinations.)

I started work on the "punchy-crunchy ginger salad," which as it turned out I only had about half of the specified ingredients for, but I figured it was my best candidate among the salads. It took hours to fiddle with until I got something I liked. The "punchy" is pickled ginger, like they serve in sushi restaurants (although the recipe cautioned to use the white rather than the more common pink). I had two aged but unopened jars in the pantry, as well as some lost in the back of the refrigerator. I didn't like the taste of the first jar I opened, so threw it out. The second wasn't great either, but good enough to use. I took out half of the jar, chopped it up, and put it in my salad bowl. (Later, when I thought it wasn't punchy enough, I added the rest, as well as some of the pickling fluid.)

The ginger would be mixed with shredded Chinese (napa) cabbage, but all I saw on my shopping day were soft and wilted, so I bought a small white cabbage head instead. I shredded one quarter of it, mixed it in, then decided I wanted a bit of color, so I shredded a similar amount of romaine lettuce. Then I added three roma tomatoes, sliced lengthwise in narrow strips, then crosswise into thirds. That was the basic salad part. Next bit was to add the "crunchy," which called for roasted split peas, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, toasted sesame seeds, fried garlic slices, and chopped roasted peanuts. I only had the latter three, so I scrambled to find other things that might work. I thought cashews would be good, but couldn't find any (among the dozen other bags of nuts I stock; I did throw some hazelnuts in). I also felt short on "punchy," so I chopped up some pickled mango and mustard stem, and threw that in.

For dressing, the recipe called for lime juice and garlic oil. I didn't have the latter (or the presence of mind to dig out the roasted garlic in the refrigerator, which was packed in suitable oil), so I used toasted sesame oil, and supplemented the lime juice with pickled ginger juice. In the end, I decided it was good enough to serve, and a nice complement to everything else.

Meanwhile, I stir-fried the okra and shallots (which turned out very good -- the only dish I had no leftovers of), and started to heat the coconut milk for the rice. For the latter, I used the thicker "coconut cream," only to have it boil over, and put one burner out of commission. I started again on another burner, and failed to time what I was doing. In the end, some stuck to the bottom of the pan, but the part on top was done, and separated and fluffed up fairly nicely. Meanwhile, I scrambled for pans and reheated all of the curries. I was pretty frazzled by that point, trying to clean up a bit while moving between the salad and the burners, and in a particularly dumb moment, sliced my thumb, so had to bandage that up.

Eventually I got it all out into serving dishes, and (aside from the eggplant) it all turned out to be remarkably good. Six people total, not enough to eat all of the food, but plenty for the event. Despite the mess at the end, I wasn't as exhausted as is often the case with these dinners, so could socialize a bit. Later served the cake and three shrink-flated "pints" of Haagen-Dasz. (Cake recipe suggests making orange-date ice cream, which I've done in the past, but didn't attempt this time.)

I spent the last month thinking about this project, and now it's done, about as well as I had hoped. I have a fair amount of unused groceries and things, some of which I may use for a "leftovers" dinner some time next week. I wasn't able to make the famous "tea leaf salad" (which seems to be the "national dish"), mostly because I couldn't find the fermented tea leaves that go into the dressing, but also I didn't fully understand the "crunchy" mix-ins that go into it. In my frustration, I went on Amazon and ordered the missing ingredients: a jar of tea leaves, and a bag of "roasted beans" for the crunchy bits, but won't get them until mid-week. The rice and curries will keep, so that will be the new value-added to the "leftovers" dinner.

Other than that, I guess I'm ready to move on. I've barely started my weekly blog posts, but I do have a good start on my "Top Ten Reasons to Vote for Harris vs. Trump," so I'll move onto that first. Also need to get the upstairs room done. I have all of the paneling up in the closet, leaving the ceiling and the exoskeleton trim. (Walls are plaster-on-lath, so it's hard to find studs to secure shelves and drawers to. Plus the walls are all crooked anyway. The paneling is mostly glued up -- temporarily being held in with screws -- but I left gaps on all the edges, figuring I'd add 1x2 trim all around, and I could then attach other things to the trim boards. So I still have all the latter to do.) I should get the walls painted either today or tomorrow, then I still need to paint the trim (windows, doors, baseboards), which will take another day or two. Then we can start moving back in.

Also need to get working on my jazz poll project, which will kick off in mid-November, and take most of my time up to the end of the year.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, October archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 26 albums, 5 A-list

Music: Current count 43065 [43039] rated (+26), 46 [41] unrated (+5).

Published another abbreviated Speaking of Which yesterday. Came to 212 links, 12063 words, but I added some more stuff this morning, and may add even more before this is posted. My computer time (listening and writing) was limited last week, mostly by a home repair project that drags on and on, with little hope of winding up soon. Well, maybe a little hope: the collapsed ceiling is repaired, old wallpaper removed, walls patched up, the bedroom walls primed, half of the closet paneling put up, and we just got back from buying finish paint. If I can muster the time, the paint and paneling should be doable in 2-3 days, but I haven't been able to get many good working shifts in, and I've repeatedly been snagged by Murphy's law.

Plus, I have another project this week, which is being pushed ahead by a deadline, plus the thought that it might be a lot more fun to do. That's my annual birthday dinner, scheduled for Friday, with at present nothing more than a concept: my first ever stab at making Burmese cuisine. I've often picked out exotic locales for past birthday dinners, and in my peak years managed to make twenty-some dishes.

But I've never picked one I had so little experience with and knew so little about. My experience is one take-out meal in New York at least 12 years ago. The reason I can date it is because I bought a Burmese cookbook shortly after, but it didn't have the dish that most delighted me from the restaurant, and nothing else really caught my eye, so I've never cooked anything from it. The concept came from seeing that cookbook on the shelf, and thinking maybe I should finally do something with it.

I may have made a dish or two from broader area cookbooks -- Charmaine Solomon's The Complete Asian Cookbook introduced me to all hot spots from India through Indonesia and China to Japan -- and I've gone deep on Indian (although not necessarily Bengali), Thai, and Chinese, which border old Burma (now Myanmar), so I expect to be working within those parameters. But as of Tuesday afternoon, I still don't have a menu, much less any shopping or prep done. My only move so far has been to buy a second Burmese cookbook, plus one that's more generically southeast Asian. (I haven't generally been listing cookbooks in my "recent reading" roll, but added my old Burma: Rivers of Flavor last week, so I figured I might as well spotlight the new books as well.) Generic southeast Asian may well be what I wind up with -- especially given that the local grocers are mostly Vietnamese, plus a couple Indian.

I'm torn between working on the room and on the menu next, but either option seems more enticing that diddling further on this post. Should be enough here for any decent week.

New records reviewed this week:

• Nick Adema: Urban Chaos (2023 [2024], ZenneZ): [cd]: B+(***)
• JD Allen: The Dark, the Light, the Grey and the Colorful (2024, Savant): [sp]: B+(**)
• Andy Baker: From Here, From There (2018 [2024], Calligram): [cd]: B+(**)
• Basic: This Is Basic (2024, No Quarter): [sp]: B+(***)
• Big Freedia With the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra: Live at the Orpheum Theater (2023 [2024], Queen Diva): [sp]: B+(***)
• Anne Burnell & Mark Burnell: This Could Be the Start of Something Big (2024, Spectrum Music): [cd]: B
• Chris Corsano/Joe Baiza/Mike Watt: Corsano Baiza Watt Trio (2023 [2024], Yucca Alta): [bc]: B+(*)
• Doug Ferony With His Swingin Big Band: Alright Okay You Win (Ferony Enterprizes Music)
• Ingebrigt Håker Flaten/(Exit) Knarr: Breezy (2024, Sonic Transmissions): [sp]: B+(**)
• Floating Points: Cascade (2024, Ninja Tune): [sp]: A-
• Darius Jones: Legend of e'Boi (The Hypervigilant Eye) (2024, AUM Fidelity): [cd]: A-
• Doug MacDonald and the Coachella Valley Trio: Live at the Rancho Mirage Library (2024, DMAC Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Mark Masters Ensemble: Sui Generis (2023 [2024], Capri): [cd]: B+(**)
• Gurf Morlix: In Love at Zero Degrees (2024, Rootball): [sp]: B+(**)
• Eric Person: Rhythm Edge (2024, Distinction): [cd]: B
• Jason Robinson: Ancestral Numbers II (2023 [2024], Playscape): [cd]: A-
• Snotty Nose Rez Kids: Red Future (2024, Savage Mob): [sp]: B+(***)
• Moses Sumney: Sophcore (2024, Tuntum, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
• Ohad Talmor/Chris Tordini/Eric McPherson: Back to the Land (2023 [2024], Intakt, 2CD): [sp]: B+(***)
• Fred Thomas: Window in the Rhythm (2024, Polyvinyl): [sp]: B+(*)
• Tropical Fuck Storm: Tropical Fuck Storm's Inflatable Graveyard (2024, Three Lobed): [sp]: B+(*)
• Jack Wood & Nichaud Fitzgibbon: Movie Magic: Great Songs From the Movies (2024, Jazz Hang): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jamie xx: In Waves (2024, Young): [sp]: A-
• Dann Zinn: Two Roads (2024, Ridgeway): [cd]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• William Basinski: September 23rd (1982, Temporary Residence): [bc]: B+(*)

Old music:

• Adema Manoukas Octet: New Roots (2021 [2022], self-released): [bc]: B+(***)
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe: The Swinging Gospel Queen 1939-1947 (1939-47 [1998], Blues Collection): [sp]: A-
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Live in 1960 (1960 [1991], ORG Music): [sp]: B+(**)
• Sister Rosetta Tharpe: Sister on Tour (1961, Verve): [sp]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• The Attic & Eve Risser: La Grande Crue (NoBusiness) [10-04]
• Arthur Blythe Quartet: Live From Studio Rivbea: July 6, 1976 (NoBusiness) [10-04]
• Bill Evans: In Norway: The Kongsberg Concert (1970, Elemental Music, 2CD) [11-29]
• Joe Fonda Quartet: Eyes on the Horizon (Long Song) [11-15]
• Joel Futterman: Innervoice (NoBusiness) [10-04]
• Andrew Hill: A Beautiful Day Revisited (2002, Palmetto, 2CD) [11-01]
• B.B. King: In France: Live at the 1977 Nancy Jazz Pulsations Festival (Deep Digs/Elemental Music) [11-29]
• Michael McNeill: Barcode Poetry (Infrasonic Press) [10-01]
• William Parker/Hugo Costa/Philipp Emsting: Pulsar (NoBusiness) [10-04]
• Emily Remler: Cookin' at the Queens (1984-88, Resonance, 2CD) [11-29]
• Sara Serpa: Encounters & Collisions (Biophilia) [11-15]
• Spinifex: Undrilling the Hole (TryTone) [11-22]
• Sun Ra: Lights on a Satellite: Live at the Left Bank (1978, Resonance, 2CD) [11-29]

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

File initially opened 2024-10-16 01:00 PM.

Late Monday night, I'm posting this, without any real sense of where I'm at, how much I've looked at, and how much more I should have considered. I have no introduction, and at this point can't even be troubled to think up excuses. (Perhaps I'll write something about that in tomorrow's Music Week -- assuming there is one: my problem there isn't lack of records but no time, given other demands and priorities.) One thing I am confident of is that there is a lot of material below. Maybe I'll add more on Tuesday, but don't count on it.

Top story threads:

Israel's year of infamy: Given the hasty nature of last week's Speaking of Which, it was inevitable that I'd need another week (or more) for one-year anniversary pieces.

• Spencer Ackerman: [10-03] The year after October 7th was shaped by the 23 years after September 11th: "9/11 gave Israel and the US a template to follow -- one that turned grief into rage into dehumanization into mass death. What have we learned from the so-called 'war on terror'?" That it feels better to make the same mistakes over and over again rather than learn from them? Worth noting that the US response to 9/11 was modeled on Israel's by-then-long war against the Palestinians (recently escalated in the Sharon's counter-intifada, effectively a reconquista against Palestinian Authority, which saved Hamas for future destruction).

  • [10-10] Gaza is a laboratory for future warfare: Podcast with Paris Marx.

• Haidar Eid: 10-13] A vision for freedom is more important than ever: "We must focus on the present as conditions in Gaza worsen daily, but a clear strategy and political vision are crucial to inspire people around the world as to what is possible."

• Dave Reed: [10-13] Weekly Briefing: Looking back at a year of Israeli genocide.

• Jeffrey St Clair: [10-18] Israel unbound: October in Gaza, one year later.

  A retaliatory military operation that many wizened pundits predicted would last no more than a month or so has now thundered on in ever-escalating episodes of violence and mass destruction for a year with no sign of relenting. What began as a war of vengeance has become a war of annihilation, not just of Hamas, but of Palestinian life and culture in Gaza and beyond.

  While few took them seriously at the time, Israeli leaders spelled out in explicit terms the savage goals of their war and the unrestrained means they were going to use to prosecute it. This was going to be a campaign of collective punishment where every conceivable target -- school, hospital, mosque -- would be fair game. Here was Israel unbound. The old rules of war and international law were not only going to be ignored; they would be ridiculed and mocked by the Israeli leadership, which, in the days after the October 7 attacks, announced their intention to immiserate, starve, and displace more than 2 million Palestinians and kill anyone who stood in their way -- man, woman or child.

  For the last 17 years, the people of Gaza have been living a marginal existence, laboring under the cruel constrictions of a crushing Israeli embargo, where the daily allotments of food allowed into the Strip were measured out down to the calorie. Now, the blockade was about to become total. On October 9, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant warned: "I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, food, or fuel; everything is closed." He wasn't kidding.

  This goes on for 14 more paragraphs, all deserving your attention, before he descends into his usual plethora of bullet points -- dozens of them, his attention never straying to the more pedestrian atrocities he often (and compared to most others exceptionally) reports on. He ends with this:

  The war of revenge has become a war of dispossession, conquest and annexation, where war crime feeds on war crime. Not even the lives of the Israeli hostages will stand in the way; they will become Israeli martyrs in the cause of cleansing Gaza of Palestinians. . . .

  It's equally apparent that nothing Israel does, including killing American grandmothers, college students, and aid workers, will trigger the US government, whether it's under the control of Biden, Harris, or Trump, to intervene to stop them or even pull the plug on the arms shipments that make this genocidal war possible.

  Followed by a list of sources:

  • Linda Bilmes/William Hartung/Stephen Semler: United States spending on Israel's military operations and related US operations in the region, October 7, 2023-September 30, 2024.

  • Rasha Khatib/Martin McKee/Salim Yusuf: [07-20] Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential.

  • Adam Taylor/Leo Sands/Kelly Kasulis Cho/Adela Suliman: [10-14] What to know about US support for Israel after a year of war.

  • Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor: [04-24] 200 days of military attacks on Gaza: "A horrific death toll amid intl. failure to stop Israel's genocide of Palestinians."

  • UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: Reported impact snapshot, Gaza Strip (16 October 2024).

  • UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs: [10-15] Humanitarian situation update #229, Gaza Strip.

  • World Food Program: [10-17] New Gaza food security assessment sees famine risk persisting amid ongoing fighting and restricted aid operations.

• Oren Yiftachel: [10-15] Is this Israel's first apartheid war? "Far from lacking a political strategy, Israel is fighting to reinforce the supremacist project it has built for decades between the river and the sea." The author thinks so, while acknowledging the long history of war that preceded this year's war:

  While its eight previous wars attempted to create new geographical and political orders or were limited to specific regions, the current one seeks to reinforce the supremacist political project Israel has built throughout the entire land, and which the October 7 assault fundamentally challenged. Accordingly, there is also a steadfast refusal to explore any path to reconciliation or even a ceasefire with the Palestinians.

  Israel's supremacist order, which was once termed "creeping" and more recently "deepening apartheid," has long historical roots. It has been concealed in recent decades by the so-called peace process, promises of a "temporary occupation," and claims that Israel has "no partner" to negotiate with. But the reality of the apartheid project has become increasingly conspicuous in recent years, especially under Netanyahu's leadership.

  Today, Israel makes no effort to hide its supremacist aims. The Jewish Nation-State Law of 2018 declared that "the right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people," and that "the state views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value." Taking this a step further, the current Israeli government's manifesto (known as its "guiding principles") proudly stated in 2022 that "the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all areas of the Land of Israel" -- which, in the Hebrew lexicon, includes Gaza and the West Bank -- and promises to "promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel."

  My reservation here is that the "apartheid program" goes way back, at least to 1948 when Israelis declared independence and set up a separate judicial system for Palestinians in areas they controlled, retaining it even after Palestinians became nominal citizens of Israel. In effect, Israeli apartheid goes back to the "Hebrew labor" concept adopted by Ben-Gurion's Histadrut in the 1930s. (By the way, South Africa's Apartheid laws were only formalized in 1950, although, as with Israel, the roots of racist discrimination ran much deeper. The ideas behind South Africa's legal thinking drew heavily on America's Jim Crow laws, which were also notable sources for Nazi Germany's race laws.) So what's new since October 7 isn't apartheid, but the nature of the war, which has crossed over the line from harsh enforcement to genocide: the purpose of which is not just to punish Hamas for the insolence of rebellion, but to purge Israel of all Palestinians:

  Under the fog of this onslaught on Gaza, the colonial takeover of the West Bank has also accelerated over the past year. Israel has introduced new measures of administrative annexation; settler violence has further intensified with the backing of the army; dozens of new outposts have been established, contributing to the expulsion of Palestinian communities; Palestinian cities have been subjected to suffocating economic closures; and the Israeli army's violent repression of armed resistance has reached levels not seen since the Second Intifada -- especially in the refugee camps of Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarem. The previously tenuous distinction between Areas A, B, and C has been completely erased: the Israeli army operates freely throughout the entire territory.

  At the same time, Israel has deepened the oppression of Palestinians inside the Green Line and their status as second-class citizens. It has intensified its severe restrictions on their political activity through increased surveillance, arrests, dismissals, suspensions, and harassment. Arab leaders are labeled "terror supporters," and the authorities are carrying out an unprecedented wave of house demolitions -- especially in the Negev/Naqab, where the number of demolitions in 2023 (which reached a record of 3,283) was higher than the number for Jews across the entire state. At the same time, the police all but gave up on tackling the serious problem of organized crime in Arab communities. Hence, we can see a common strategy across all the territories Israel controls to repress Palestinians and cement Jewish supremacy.

  Near the end of the article, the author points to A Land for All: Two States One Homeland as an alternative, and cites various pieces on confederation. I'm not wild about these approaches, but I'd welcome any changes that would reduce the drive of people on both sides to kill one another.

Israel:

• Mondoweiss:

  • [10-10] Day 370: Israel strangles northern Gaza in apparent implementation of the 'Generals' Plan': "Israeli strikes target the last functioning bakery in northern Gaza while Israeli troops continue to besiege and invade Jabalia for the sixth day in a row. Meanwhile, Israeli forces encounter heavy resistance in southern Lebanon."

  • [10-14] Day 374: Israeli airstrike on Gaza hospital burns patients alive<: "Israel bombed displacement shelters across Gaza and aid distribution points in Jabalia, while Hezbollah intensified its fire on Haifa and Tel Aviv amid Israel's continued bombardment of southern Lebanese towns."

  • [10-17] Day 377: Israel says it killed Yahya Sinwar as the extermination of Jabalia continues: "Israel has committed a new massacre in Jabalia as it continues its siege on northern Gaza."

  • [10-21] Day 381: Israel pummels northern Gaza amid intensifying extermination campaign: "Israel's conditions for a ceasefire with Lebanon include allowing the Israeli army to continue operating in Lebanese territory. Meanwhile, Israel steps up its extermination campaign in northern Gaza, targeting its last remaining hospitals."

• Dave DeCamp:

  • [10-16] Netanyahu approves set of targets to hit inside Iran: "Israel is expected to attack before the November 5 US presidential election."

  • [10-16] Israeli soldiers say ethnic cleansing plan in North Gaza is underway: "A reserve soldier told Haaretz that anyone who remains in the north after a deadline 'will be considered an enemy and will be killed.'"

  • [10-17] Israel says Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar has been killed. More on Sinwar

    • David Dayen: [10-17] In Israel, the war is also the goal: "Yahya Sinwar's death is unlikely to change the situation in Gaza." This has long been evident, but it's nice to see new people noticing:

      That Netanyahu's personal and political goals vastly outweigh whatever could resemble military goals in this war in Gaza by now has become a cliché. Netanyahu wants to stay out of prison, and ending the war is likely to place him there. So new missions and operations and objectives sprout up for no reason.

      Suddenly Bibi's party has mused about re-settling northern Gaza for the first time in nearly 20 years, while transparently using a policy of mass starvation as a way to implement it. . . .

      The war has long passed any moment where Israel has any interest in declaring victory, in the fight against terror or in the fight for the security of its people. Even bringing up the fact of continued Israeli hostages inside Gaza seems irrelevant at this point. The war is actually the goal itself, a continuation of punishment to fulfill the needs of the prime minister and his far-right political aims. The annals of blowback indicate pretty clearly that incessant bombing of hospitals and refugee camps will create many Yahya Sinwars, more than who can be killed. That is not something that particularly burdens the Israeli government. Another pretext would serve their continuing interests.

    • Griffin Eckstein: [10-17] Harris sees "opportunity to end" to Israel-Gaza war in Hamas leader Sinwar's killing: Nice spin, especially after Biden's me-too statement, but naive and/or disingenuous. Surely she knows that the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't end with regime change or the later deaths of Saddam Hussein, Mullah Omar, or Osama Bin Laden. Sure, those deaths seemed like good ideas at the time, but by the time they happened many more people had been killed, and more people rose from nowhere to fight back, and then they too had to be killed, because once you -- by which I mean the kind of people who lead countries and start wars -- start killing, there's always more to do. Still, Harris deserves a nod for even imagining that some other path is possible. Whether she deserves it depends on whether she can follow through and act upon her insight. Unfortunately, to do so would mean she has to develop enough backbone to defy and put pressure on Netanyahu, which thus far she hasn't risked.

    • James Mackenzie/Nidal Al-Mughrabi/Samia Nakhoul: [10-17] Hamas leader Sinwar killed by Israeli troops in Gaza, Netanyahu says war will go on. Because the point never was Sinwar or Hamas or the October 7 revolt.

    • Qassam Muaddi: [10-17] Israel says it killed Yahya Sinwar as he was fighting the Israeli army: "The Israeli army said on Thursday that Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar had been killed in combat during an armed confrontation with an Israeli army patrol in Rafah."

    • Abdaljawad Omar: [10-21] It was only their machines: on Yahya Sinwar's last stand: "Yahya Sinwar's last stand laid bare Israel's weakness, exposing the truth about its post-heroic army that only survives from a distance and remains shielded by armor, unwilling to face its enemies head-on."

    • Bernie Sanders: [10-18] Sinwar is dead; we must end our complicity in this cruel and illegal war. Note that this is not a syllogism: the conclusion was true even when Sinwar was still alive.

    • Steven Simon: [10-17] The demise of Yahya Sinwar and his 'big project': "The Hamas leader overestimated Israel's fractures and underestimated Netanyahu's willingness to destroy Gaza." I'm not convinced that either of these assertions are true. I tend to see his "big project" as an act of desperation, aimed to expose Israel's brutality, as well as imposing some measure of cost for an oppression that had become routinized and uninteresting for most people not directly affected. It seems highly unlikely that he underestimated Netanyahu's monstrosity, although he might not unreasonably have expected that others, like the US, would have sought to moderate Israel's response. But even as events unfolded, Israel has done an immense amount of damage to its international reputation, as has America. While it's fair to say that Sinwar made a bad bet for the Palestinian people, the final costs to Israel are still accumulating, and will continue to do so as long as Netanyahu keeps killing.

    • Ishaan Tharoor: [10-20] What will Yahya Sinwar's death mean for Gaza? Not peace. Which kind of begs a question too obvious for mainstream media, which is why kill him if doing so doesn't bring you closer to peace?

• Jamal Kanj: [10-18] The Israeli General's Plan in Gaza: Genocide by starvation.

• Edo Konrad: [10-16] The 'pact of silence' between Israelis and their media: "Israel's long-subservient media has spent the past year imbuing the public with a sense of righteousness over the Gaza war. Reversing this indoctrination, says media observer Oren Persico, could take decades." I've long been critical of US mainstream media sources for their uncritical echoing of Israeli hasbara, but Israel -- where major media, 20-30 years ago, seemed to be far more open to critically discussing the occupation than American outlets were -- has become far more cloistered. Consider this:

  What Israeli journalists do not understand is that when the government passes its "Al Jazeera Law," it is ultimately about something much larger than merely targeting the channel. The current law is about banning news outlets that "endanger national security," but they also want to give the Israeli communications minister the right to prevent any foreign news network from operating in Israel that could "harm the national morale." What the Israeli public doesn't understand is that next in line is BBC Arabic, Sky News Arabic, and CNN. After that, they're going to come for Haaretz, Channel 12, and Channel 13.

  We are heading toward an autocratic, Orbán-esque regime and everything that comes with that -- in the courts, in academia, and in the media. Of course it is possible. It sounded unrealistic 10 years ago, then it sounded more realistic five years ago when Netanyahu's media-related legal scandals blew up. Then it became even more reasonable with the judicial overhaul, and even more so today. We're not there yet, but we are certainly on the way.

• Qassam Muaddi:

  • [10-15] What is the 'Generals' Plan'? Israel's ongoing ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza, explained: "The ethnic cleansing of northern Gaza as part of the so-called 'Generals' Plan' isn't new, but the only thing standing in its way is the will of 200,000 Palestinians to stay in the north and refuse displacement."

  • [10-17] Bombings, killer drones, and starvation: eyewitnesses describe Israel's extermination campaign in northern Gaza: "Testimonies from the brutal siege on the Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza describe massive air and ground assaults, including killer quadcopter drones, that are destroying infrastructure and causing catastrophic humanitarian conditions."

  • [10-21] Israel commits largest massacre yet in northern Gaza: "The siege of north Gaza and Jabalia refugee camp enters its third week as Israel has cut off aid to some 200,000 people. On Saturday, Israeli forces bombed Beit Lahia, killing at least 80 Palestinians, in one of the largest massacres in months."

Lebanon:

• Dave DeCamp: [10-20] Israel starts bombing banks in Lebanon: "The Israeli military is targeting branches of al-Quard al-Hassan, which Israel accuses of financing Hezbollah."

• Qassam Muaddi: [10-21] Israel presents its conditions for Lebanon ceasefire as Hezbollah intensifies operations: "Israel's conditions for a ceasefire in Lebanon include allowing Israel to operate inside Lebanese territory against Hezbollah and freedom of movement for Israel's air force in Lebanon's airspace."

• Adam Shatz: [10-11] After Nasrallah. Long piece, lot of background on Nasrallah and Hizbullah.

  It's hard to see what strategy, if any, lies behind Israel's reckless escalation of its war. But the line between tactics and strategy may not mean much in the case of Israel, a state that has been at war since its creation. The identity of the enemy changes -- the Arab armies, Nasser, the PLO, Iraq, Iran, Hizbullah, Hamas -- but the war never ends. Israel's leaders claim this war is existential, a matter of Jewish survival, and there is a grain of truth in this claim, because the state is incapable of imagining Israeli Jewish existence except on the basis of domination over another people. Escalation, therefore, may be precisely what Israel seeks, or is prepared to risk, since it views war as its duty and destiny. Randolph Bourne once said that 'war is the health of the state,' and Netanyahu and Gallant would certainly agree.

• Lylla Younes: Israel escalates attacks on Lebanese first responders -- potentially a war crime.

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

• Michael Arria:

  • [10-15] The Shift: Harris hits Michigan amid anger over Gaza policy: "And is Trump talking to Netanyahu?" He says he is:

    • Jasper Ward: [10-13] Trump says he recently spoke with Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu, which sounds much more ominous than his conversations with Putin, both evident violations of the Logan Act:

    • Ewan Palmer: [07-25] Donald Trump accused of repeatedly breaking 'Logan Act.

  • [10-17] The Shift: Another phony White House threat: "Biden has threatened to halt arms sales to Israel, but it's impossible to take the claim seriously."

  • [10-21] Leaked documents show Israel's alleged plans for Iran attack: "On October 18, two U.S. intelligence documents on a potential Israeli attack on Iran were leaked, one describing shifting missile deployments, and the other detailing possible Israeli rehearsals for a strike on Iran."

• Aida Chávez: After Israel killed Hamas leader, DC pushes to hand Palestine to Saudi Arabia: "Bent on a 'mega-deal' security pact with Saudi Arabia, Congress and the Biden administration see their chance."

• Matt Duss: [10-17] Yahya Sinwar's death can end this war: But it won't, because only Netanyahu can end the war, and he doesn't want to, because there are still Palestinians to dispossess and dispose of, and because Biden isn't going to make it hard on him to continue. But sure, if one did want to end the war, checking Sinwar off your "to do" list offers a nice opportunity. On the other hand, negotiating a ceasefire with a credible leader like Sinwar would have been even better. This piece was cited by::

  • Robert Wright: [10-18] Why Israel won't take the win.

• Ellen Ioanes: [10-19] There's no ceasefire in sight for Israel's Gaza war. Why not? Any author, like this one, that doesn't squarely answers "Israel" has simply not been paying attention.

• Anatol Lieven: [10-10] Blinken's sad attempt to whitewash Biden's record: "By not acting with political and moral courage, this administration has actually failed abysmally on numerous counts."

• Alan MacLeod: [10-17] Revealed: The Israeli spies writing America's news.

• Steve McMaster/Khody Akhavi: [10-15] Netanyahu: Thank you America for your service: "One year after Gaza invasion, US complicity is everywhere in the smoldering ruins."

• Trita Parsi:

  • [10-15] Biden is helping Netanyahu attack Iran -- and risking the lives of US troops in the process: "By sending troops and the powerful THAA anti-missile system to Israel, the US is only fueling escalation in the Middle East."

  • [10-20] Who leaked US classified docs on potential Israeli attack plans? "Some are citing an Iranian hack, but let's look at who else would benefit from this strategic leak."

• Mitchell Plitnick: [10-18] No, the US is not 'putting pressure' in Israel to end its war: "A letter from the Biden administration to Israel this week threatening to possibly withhold weapons raised hopes among some, but the delivery of a missile defense system and deployment of U.S. soldiers sent the real message."

• Aaron Sobczak: [10-14] Biden sends US troops to Israel weeks ahead of election: "Recent polling suggests there is no American support for this."

• Alex de Waal: [10-20] Israel, a behind-the-scenes powerbroker in Sudan: "Of the many foreign powers influencing this bloody conflict, Tel Aviv could help claw it back -- if it wanted to.

• Sarah Leah Whitson: [09-27] Shared zones of interest: "Harris and Trump's foreign-policy aims in the Middle East proceed from the same incentive structures and presuppositions about US supremacy." This is an important point, which could be developed further.

  There are two principal reasons for this. First, Harris and Trump's worldviews are grounded in an article of faith that has undergirded America's post-World War II foreign policy: maintaining U.S. hegemony and supremacy. There is full agreement, as Kamala Harris recently declared at the Democratic convention and reiterated in her debate with former President Trump, that the U.S. must have the "most lethal" military in the world, and that we must maintain our military bases and personnel globally. While Trump may have a more openly mercenary approach, demanding that the beneficiaries of U.S. protection in Europe and Asia pay more for it, he is a unilateralist, not an isolationist. At bottom, neither candidate is revisiting the presuppositions of U.S. primacy.

  Second, both Harris and Trump are subject to the overwhelming incentive structure that rewards administrations for spending more on the military and selling more weapons abroad than any other country in the world. The sell-side defense industry has fully infiltrated the U.S. government, with campaign donations and a revolving escalator to keep Republicans and Democrats fully committed to promoting their interests. The buy-side foreign regimes have gotten in on the pay-to-play, ensuring handsome rewards to U.S. officials who ensure weapons sales continue. And all sides play the reverse leverage card: If the U.S. doesn't sell weapons, China and Russia (or even the U.K. and France) will. There is no countervailing economic pressure, and little political pressure, to force either Harris or Trump to consider the domestic and global harms of this spending and selling.

  In the Middle East, the incentive structure is at its most powerful, combining the influence of the defense industry and the seemingly bottomless disposable wealth of the Gulf States. And there are two additional factors -- the unparalleled influence and control of the pro-Israel lobby, which rewards government officials who comply with its demands and eliminates those who don't; and Arab control over the oil and gas spigots that determines the prices Americans pay for fuel. As a result, continued flows of money, weapons, and petroleum will ensue, regardless of who wins in November.

  Whitson is executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now, after previously directing Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North African Division from 2004 to 2020. Here are some older articles:

  • [2023-03-28] Breaking away from secret concessions in the Middle East: "Saudi Arabia is exploiting great-power competititon to obtain security commitments from the US. This should be rejected."

  • [2022-06-24] America's Middle East 'withdrawal' breathes its last breath: "What was once a policy of disengagement has now become a policy of far more dangerous entanglement."

  • [2021-05-18] The Israel-Palestine narrative has evolved: "How words like 'apartheid,' 'land theft,' and 'ethnic cleansing' have entered the mainstream conversation."

  • [2021-04-15] Now is the time to end our 30-year war in Iraq: "The country is broken, but U.S. troops remain."

Israel vs. world opinion: Although my title is more generic, the keyword in my source file is "genocide," because that's what this is about, no matter how you try to style or deny it.

• Medea Benjamin/Nicolas JS Davies: [10-18] Israel's war on the world.

• Ana Gebrim/Marie-Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky: [10-05] Seeing and not seeing the catastrophe: Notes on fragmentation: "What prevents us from seeing and comprehending the catastrophe in Gaza? And why is there silence?"

• Patrick Howlett-Martin: [10-18] Israel's slippery slope to genocide: An extended comment on Omer Bartov, a Holocaust historian who has taken the question of Israeli genocide seriously -- see his initial [2023-11-10] What I believe as a historian of genocide, and his later [08-13] As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel, going deeper into the history of settler colonialism and its attendant genocides -- way too common to be called coincidental.

• New York War Crimes: [10-17] 'No one else is going to deliver the truth from Gaza': An interview with the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate: "Israel's slaughter of media workers in Gaza has been the most systemic attack on the press in world history. Shuruq As'ad of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate shares the conditions Palestinian reporters are facing while reporting on the genocide."

• KJ Noh: [10-16] Han Kang's Nobel Prize award is a cry for Palestine.

Election notes:

• Rachel M Cohen: [10-15] Nebraska is the only state with two abortion measures on the ballot. Confusion is the point. "The state's 12-week ban has already upended care. Anti-abortion leaders want to go further."

  • Audrey Hirsch: [10-15] Miscarriages are incredibly common. Abortion bans have made them less safe. "Since care for abortion and pregnancy is the same, restrictions on one have had disastrous impacts on the other."

  • Judith Levine: Abortion's future: "Activists, not elites, are leading the way forward in a world without Roe." Reviews several books:

    • Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer: The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America (Flatiron)
    • Shefali Luthra: Undue Burden: Life and Death in Post-Roe America (Doubleday)
    • Naomi Braine: Abortion Beyond the Law: Building a Global Feminist Movement for Self-Managed Abortion (Verso)

• Gabriel Debenedetti: Has a series of articles called "The Inside Game":

  • [10-14] David Plouffe on Harris vs. Trump: 'Too close for comfort': "The veteran strategist on the state of play for his boss, Kamala Harris, and what he thinks of the 'bed-wetters.'" He doesn't seem to have much to say about anything, which may be what passes as tradecraft in his world of high-stakes political consulting. It does seem like an incredible amount of money is being spent on a very thin slice of the electorate -- Plouffe is pretty explicit on how he's only concerned with the narrow battleground states.

  • [09-15] The WhatsApp Campaign: "Kamala Harris's team is looking for hard-to-find voters just about everywhere, including one platform favored by Latinos."

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

  • [09-21] How Kamala Harris knocks out Trump: "Mark Robinson's Nazi-and-porn scandal ignites an all-out push to win North Carolina."

• Errol Louis: [10-17] Hey Democrats, don't panic -- here's why.

• John Morling: [10-21] It is not too late for the Uncommitted Movement to hold Democrats accountable for genocide: "The Uncommitted Movement voluntarily gave up its leverage but it is not too late to hold Kamala Harris accountable for supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza." Yes, it is too late. The presidential election is about many things, but one thing it is not about is Israeli genocide. To insist that it is overlooks both that Trump has if anything been more supportive of genocide, and that while he was president, he did things that directly connect to the Oct. 7 Hamas revolt, and to Netanyahu's sense that he could use that revolt as a pretext for genocide.[*] On the other hand, punishing Harris suggest that none of the real differences between her and Trump matter to you. Most Democrats will not only disagree, they will blame you for any losses.

  [*] Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, abandoning a major tenet of international law. Trump ended the Iran nuclear deal. And Trump's invention of the Abraham Accords was widely considered as a major factor in Hamas's desperate attack.

• Andrew Prokop: [10-21] The big election shift that explains the 2024 election: "Progressives felt they were gaining. Now they're on the defensive." A new installment in a Vox series the point of which seems to be to tell leftists to go fuck themselves. As with the Levitz piece (also hereabouts), this article is half false and half bullshit. The false part starts with the "gaining" -- the success of the Sanders campaigns had less to do with ideological gains (although he made some, and continues to do so) than with his presentation of a non-corrupt alternative to a very corrupt system), and the adoption of some progressive thinking by Biden had more to do with the proven failures of much neoliberal thinking under Obama and Clinton -- and continues with the "defensive": Sanders' decision not to challenge Biden and (later) Harris was largely a concession to age, as well as a gesture of party unity against Trump and the increasingly deranged Republicans, but also a sense that Harris would be at least as willing to work toward progressive ends as Biden had been. That Harris, having secured the nomination with no real opposition from progressives or any other faction or interest group, should deliberately tack toward political orthodoxy may be disappointing to a few of us -- and in the especially urgent matters, like Israel's wars and genocide, we still feel the need to speak out[*] -- but the "assignment" (to use Chait's wretched phrase) is to win the election, and that involves reaching and convincing a majority of voters, way more than just self-conscious progressives, in an environment and culture that are severely warped by moneyed interests and mass media doublespeak. I'm inclined to trust that what she's saying is based on sound research and shrewd analysis with that one goal in mind. She's the politician, and I'm just a critic. If she loses, I'll take what little joy I can in dissecting her many failings, but if she wins, I can only be thankful for her political skills, at least for a few days, until her statements move from vote-grubbing to policy-making, in which case we critics will have a lot of expertise to offer.

  As for the left, I'm more bullish than ever. Capitalism creates a lot of benefits, but it is also a prodigious generator of crises and chronic maladies, and it fuels political ideologies that seek to concentrate power but only compound and exacerbate them. Anyone who wants to understand and solve (or at least ameliorate) thsee systemic problems needs to look to the left, because that's where the answers are. Granted, the left's first-generation solutions -- proletarian revolution and communism -- were a bit extreme, but over many years, we've refined them into more modest reforms, which can preserve capitalism's advances while making them safer, sustainable, and ultimately much more satisfying. Post-Obama Democrats haven't moved left but at least have opened up to the possibility that the left has realistic proposals, and have adopted some after realizing that politics isn't just about winning elections, it's also about delivering tangible benefits to your voters. (Obama and Clinton no doubt delivered tangible benefits to their donors, but neglect of their base is a big part of the reason Trump was able to con his way into his disastrous 2016 win.)

  No problems are going to be solved on November 5. What will be decided is who (which team) gets stuck with the problems we already have. Republicans will not only not solve any of those problems, they -- both judging from their track record and from their fantasy documents like Project 2025 (or Trump's somewhat more sanitized Agenda47 -- they will make them much worse for most people, and will try to lock down control so they can retain power even as popular opinion turns against them. Democrats will be hard-pressed to solve them too, especially if they revert to the failed neoliberal ideologies of the Clinton-Obama years. But when decent folk do look for meaningful change, the left will be there, with understanding and care and clear thinking and practical proposals. Left isn't an ideology. It's simply a direction, as we move away from hierarchy and oppression toward liberation and equality. It only goes away when we get there.

  [*] It's not like Communists did themselves any favors when in 1939, when after Stalin negotiated his "pact" with Hitler, they stuck to the party line and dropped their guard against Nazi Germany. Ben-Gurion did much better with his 1939 slogan: "We shall fight in the war against Hitler as if there were no White Paper, but we shall fight the White Paper as if there were no war." He ultimately succeeded on both counts.

  • David Weigel: [10-15] No matter who wins, the US is moving to the right: Prokop cites this piece, which argues that the rightward shift of 1980-2005 had been countered by a leftward drift from 2005-20, but since 2000 the tide has shifted back to the right. His evidence is superficial, mostly polling on language that correlates weakly with left/right. Biden may have talked more left in 2020 because he literally stole the nomination from Sanders, and desperately needed to shore up left support (which he managed to do). Harris got the nomination handed to her on a platter, with virtually no dissent from the left, so she's been free to wheel and deal on the right, for whatever short-term margin it might bring. But nobody on either side thinks she's more conservative or orthodox than Biden. That's why Republicans are in such a panic, so unmoored from reality.

• Tony Romm/Eric Lau/Adriana Navarro/Kevin Schaul: [10-18] Crypto cash is flooding the 2024 election. Here's who's benefiting.

• Matt Sledge:

  • Crypto billionaires could flip the Senate to the GOP. Here's what they want.

  • Elizabeth Warren's crypto haters are burning cash in her Senate race.

• Endorsements:

  • Wikipedia:

    • List of Kamala Harris 2024 presidential campaign endorsments.

    • List of Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign endorsments.

    • News media endorsements in the 2024 United States persidential election.

  • Stephen Rohde: [10-07] Why the Uncommitted and Undecided should vote for Kamala Harris: "In sharp contrast to the lawless dictatorship Trump promises in his second term, I urge Undecided voters to examine how Harris would preserve democracy and continue to strengthen the United States." He also explains that "since Uncommitted voters care about the humanity and self-determination of the Palestinian people, Harris is their best choice."

Trump:

• Mariana Alfaro: [10-20] Musk promises a daily $1 million lottery in questionable pro-Trump effort: "Legal experts raised concerns about the legality of the move because it ties a monetary reward to voter registration status, which is prohibited under federal law."

• Zack Beauchamp:

  • [10-16] Critiquing Trump's economics -- from the right: "What one of the right's greatest thinkers would make of Trumponomics." On Friedrich Hayek, who saw himself as a classical liberal, and who saw everyone else even slightly to his left as marching on "the road to serfdom." But nothing here convinces me he would have a problem with Trump -- he was, like most of his cohort, a big Pinochet fan -- let alone that his opinion (having been wrong on nearly everything else) should matter to me.

  • p10-18] The increasingly bizarre -- and ominous -- home stretch of Trump's 2024 campaign: "The past week of erratic behavior shows how he manages to be silly and scary at the same time."

• Jamelle Bouie:

  • [10-18] There is no precedent for something like this in American history: Starts with General Milley's assessment of Trump as fascist.

  • [10-19] One thing about Trump I am not worried about.

• Philip Bump: [10-18] Trump's age finally catches up with him: "The man who would (once again) be the oldest president in history has reportedly scaled back his campaign due to fatigue. So who would run his White House?"

• Zachary D Carter: [10-16] The original angry populist: "Tom Watson was a heroic scion of the Boston Tea Party -- and the fevered progenitor of Donald Trump's violent fantasies." Link title was: "They say there's never been a man like Donald Trump in American politics. But there was -- and we should learn from him." If you're familiar with Watson, who started out as a Populist firebrand and wound up as a racist demagogue, it's probably thanks to C Vann Woodward, if not his 1938 biography, Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel, then (as in my case) his 1955 book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow. But this, of course, is mostly about Trump.

  Something important happened at the end of Trump's presidency and the beginning of Joe Biden's. Nobody wants to talk about it -- not even conservatives bring up masks and school closures anymore, and much of the discourse surrounding inflation studiously avoids reference to the massive economic disruption of COVID-19. But one of the most important cultural artifacts of the period is the sudden spread of vaccine skepticism to the cultural mainstream. The anti-vaxxer delusion that vaccines cause autism has lingered at the fringes of the autism community in no small part because it provides narrative meaning to a difficult and random experience. There is tremendous joy in the life of a special needs parent, but there is also a great deal of fear and pain. Fear, because you do not know how the world will respond to your child, and pain, because you must watch your child struggle for no fault of their own. For many, it is more comforting to believe that their child's hardships are not a random act of fate but a product of deliberate malfeasance. The idea that bad things happen for bad reasons is more palatable than the belief that they happen for no reason at all.

  It is not only anti-vaxxers who seek such comfort. Americans on both the left and the right avert their eyes from the story of Tom Watson not only because the story is ugly and violent but because we insist on being able to control our own destiny. From Huck Finn to Indiana Jones, American mythology tends to write its heroes as variations on the story of David and Goliath -- tales of underdogs who secure unlikely triumphs against an overbearing order. Even when that order is part of America itself, individual heroism soothes the audience with the promise that the world's wrongs can be righted with enough derring-do. Horatio Alger's novels of children born into poverty could be read as an indictment of the Gilded Age social order, but the romance of these stories always lies in a boy taking fate by the horns. Watson disturbs us not only because he turns to evil but because an extraordinary leader's earnest, Herculean attempt to right the world's wrongs comes up short. To win, he assents to the dominion of dark forces beyond his control.

• Chas Danner: [10-15] Trump turned his town hall into a dance party after fans got sick. This was much ridiculed by late night comics, so I've seen much of Trump and Kristi Noem on stage, but very little of the crowd, which is usually the definition of a "dance party." How did the crowd react after his bumbling responses to five setup questions? It's hard to imagine them thrilling to multiple versions of "Ava Maria," but it's also hard to imagine them showing up for the information. I wonder if Trump rallies aren't like "be-ins" in the 1960s, where crowds assemble to associate with similar people and complain about the others. Trump defines who shows up, but after that, does it really matter what he says or does? This was a test case, but if you start thinking everything Trump does or says is stupid, your confirmation bias kicked in instantly, without raising the obvious next question, why do crowds flock to such inanity? Or are they as stupid as Trump?

• Chauncey DeVega:

  • [10-08] Trump's violent fantasies: Experts warn of "a terror that blinds us to what's coming next". "As much as Donald Trump crows about the need for 'law and order,' he is very much the embodiment of lawlessness and disorder."

  • [10-17] "Femiphobia" motivates MAGA males: Psychologist Stephen Ducat on the gendererd tribalism of Trumpism.

  • [10-18] "Thirst for the spectacle of Trump's cruelty": Exploring MAGA's unbreakable bond. Some time ago, I noted that there are two basic types of Christians in America: those whose understanding of their religion is to love their neighbors and seek to help them, and those who hate their neighbors, and see religion as a way to punish them for eternity -- it's no wonder that the latter group have come to define Christian Republicans.

    DaVega includes a long quote from Peter McLaren, then adds:

    McLaren notes "Trump is speaking to an audience that since 2016 has come to share Trump's worldview, his political intuition, his apprehension of the world, what the Germans call Weltanschauung and has created a visceral, almost savage bond with the aspiring dictator."

    As the next step in Trump's dictator and authoritarian-fascist plans, he is now embracing scientific racism and eugenics by telling his followers that nonwhite migrants, refugees and "illegal aliens" have bad genes, i.e. "a murder gene." Last Monday, Trump told right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt that, "You know now, a murderer -- I believe this -- it's in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now." Take Trump's obsessions with good genes and bad genes and couple them with his remarks about "purifying the blood" of the nation by removing the human poison and other human vermin. Historically, both in American society and other parts of the world, people with the "bad genes" that Trump is so obsessed with have been removed from normal society through imprisonment and other means. Such targeted populations have also been subjected to eliminationist violence and forced sterilization.

    Sometimes I wonder if Trump's team doesn't just plant this obvious Nazi shit to provoke recognition and reaction. They know that it just sails past their own people, while it turns their opponents into whiny hysterics droning on about stuff no one else understands.

• Griffin Eckstein: [10-11] "Fascist to the core": Former Trump official Milley warns against "dangerous" second term: "Trump appointee Mark Milley called the ex-prez the 'most dangerous person ever.'"

• Dan Froomkin: [10-20] If Trump wins, blame the New York Times: "America's paper of record refuses to sound the alarm about the threat Trump poses to democracy." Sure, the Times endorsed Harris -- see [09-30] The only patriotic choice for president -- but in such jingoistic terms you have to wonder. Their opinion columnists are, as always, artfully divided, but in day-to-day reporting, they do seem awfully dedicated to keeping the race competitive (presumably the ticket to selling more papers) and keeping their options open (as is so often the way of such self-conscious, power-sucking elites). I've never understood how many people actually take "the paper of record" all that seriously. At least I've never been one.

• Hadas Gold/Liam Reilly: [10-16] Fox News did not disclose its all-women town hall with Trump was packed with his supporters.

• Annie Gowen: [10-20] Trump repeats 'enemy from within' comment, targeting Pelosi and Schiff: And there I was, thinking he meant me.

• Evan Halper/Josh Dawsey: [10-18] Trump has vowed to guy climate rules. Oil lobbyists have a plan ready. "As companies fall short on methane emission reductions, a top grade group has crafted a road map for dismantling key Biden administration rules."

• Margaret Hartmann:

  • [10-17] Trump offered Stormy Daniels more hush money . . . this summer?

  • [10-19] Trump too "exhausted" to do interviews with unfriendly outlets: "Is he really too tired, or is he just avoiding the non-sycophantic press?"

• Greg Jaffe: [10-20] The CIA analyst who triggered Trump's first impeachment asks: Was it worth it? Long piece, and at this point probably not worth your time.

• Sarah Jones: [10-15] Donald Trump is deteriorating: "And as he does, the extremists around him move closer to power."

  Though braggadocio is a familiar Trump quality, much like his reluctance to stick to his prepared remarks, he is arguably getting weirder -- and more disturbing -- over time. Trump's speeches are so outlandish, so false, that they often pass without much comment, as the New York Times reported earlier this month in a story about his age. Yet a change is noticeable. "He rambles, he repeats himself, he roams from thought to thought -- some of them hard to understand, some of them unfinished, some of them factually fantastical," the Times noted, adding that his speeches have become much longer on average, and contain more negative words and examples of profanity than they previously did.

• Hassan Ali Kanu: [10-16] Conservatives use Trump assassination to target women in anti-diversity war: "It's a move to enshrine values into law, but it's not beyond the realm of possibility." What? "The claim is one of reverse discrimination: that the historically and presently male-dominated Secret Service discriminates against men." Say whaaat?

• Nicholas Liu:

  • [10-16] Trump bashes Detroit while addressing wealthy supporters in Detroit: "Speaking before the Detroit Economic Club, Trump said a Harris victory would turn America into Detroit."

  • [10-17] Trump libels Haitians and says January 6 was a "day of love" at Univision town hall.

  • [10-18] Campaign official admits Trump "refusing interviews because he's 'exhausted'": "Trump has cancelled at least 11 campaign events since August even as he accuses Kamala Harris of dodging media." On the other hand, as best I recall, Trump surged in the polls in 2016 after his staff took away his Twitter handle, reducing his exposure. So it's not clear to me that Trump gains much (other than merch sales) from his appearances. Still, "exhausted" may not be the message they want to convey.

• Carlos Lozada: [10-13] When Trump rants, this is what I hear: The author came to the US when he was three, so technically he's an immigrant, a person Trump makes rather gross generalizations about.

• Amanda Marcotte:

  • [10-10] Trump's hurricane of Milton lies: MAGA has a deadly addiction to disinformation.

  • [10-17] Trump's all-female Fox News town hall wasn't for women, but his male base: "Trump called himself 'the father of IVF,' but then admitted he asked Katie Britt to tell him what it is."

• Harold Meyerson: [10-10] Trump's Made-in-China Bibles: "The imperative of Trump's price-gouging (selling $3 Bibles for $59.99) meets the Holy Word."

• Connor O'Keeffe: [10-16] Beware of war hawks in "America First" clothing.

• Heather Digby Parton:

  • [10-11] Donald Trump's campaign stops give away the game: "California and New York are not battleground states so why is the campaign spending time there in the final weeks?" I don't see an answer here, but I also don't like the idea that one should only campaign in "battleground" states. (Not that I mind that both sides take Kansas for granted: this has been a remarkably quiet election here in Wichita, with only two political signs out as I walk the dog around the block -- both, fwiw, Harris/Walz.)

  • [10-16] The MAGA "weave": Donald Trump picks up steam as he dissembles on stage: "Listen to the laughter when Trump insults the Wall St. Journal at a meeting of an Economic Club in any major city. . . . That's not about their wallets. Their wallets are fine. That's about their ids."

  • [10-18] Donald Trump's town hall with Latino voters shows his campaign is clueless: "The Trump campaign is simultaneously courting Latino voters and pushing the Great Replacement theory."

• Russell Payne:

  • [10-18] Trump campaign's coordination with outside groups tests FEC "loopholel": "The FEC paved the way for campaigns to coordinate with outside groups in March -- and big money PACs rushed in."

  • [10-18] Jack Smith drops 2,000 pages of evidence that Trump tried to keep sealed until after the election: "Despite Republican outcry, ex-Trump lawyer says 'the real election interference' would've been delaying its release." The lawyer quoted here is the memorably named Ty Cobb. I'm surprise there's been so little comment on this so far -- this is the first piece I've noted, in closing on Sunday afternoon, although Elie Honig staged a pre-emptory attack on the release two weeks ago: [10-03] Jack Smith's October Surprise. I should search for a couple more:

    • Austin Sarat: [10-03] Jack Smith shows his cards just in time: January 6 case looks like a winning hand against Trump.

• Sabrina Rodriguez/Isaac Arnsdorf: [10-01] Trump mixes up words, swerves among subjects in off-topic speech: "The Republican nominee appeared tired and complained about his heightened campaign schedule."

• Marin Scotten:

  • [10-16] Musk and other billionaires keep Trump afloat, donating over $350 million to MAGA super PACs.

  • [10-16] "Increasingly unstable and unhinged": Trump's "enemy from within" comments worry Democrats.

Vance, and other Republicans:

Harris:

• Ryan Cooper: Black men deserve better pandering from the Harris campaign: "Crypto and weed are not how to advertise her ideas for this group."

• Chas Danner: [10-17] Who won Kamala Harris's Fox News interview with Bret Baier? What does "winning" even mean here? The more salient question is who survived with their reputation intact? This is really just a catalog of reactions, the final of which was "both sides got what they wanted." Which is to say, if you missed it, you didn't miss much.

• David Dayen/Luke Goldstein: Google's guardians donate to the Harris campaign: "Multiple Harris donors at an upcoming fundraiser are representing Google in its case against the Justice Department over monopolizing digital advertising." I have to ask, is digital advertising something we even want to exist? Competition makes most goods more plentiful, more innovative, and more affordable, but if the "good" in question is essentially bad, maybe that shouldn't be the goal. I'm not saying we should protect Google's monopoly. A better solution would be to deflate its profitability. For instance, and this is just off the top of my head, you could levy a substantial tax on digital advertising, collect most of it from Google, and then redistribute much of the income to support websites that won't have to depend on advertising.

• Elie Honig: [11-18] Kamala Harris has finally embraced being a cop: "The label hurt her in 2019. Today she wears it like a badge." Reminds me a bit of when Kerry embraced being a Vietnam War soldier. He didn't get very far with that.

• Robert Kuttner: [10-09] Notes for Harris: "It's good that Kamala Harris is doing more one-on-one interviews, because she's getting a lot better at it. Still, she occasionally misses an opportunity." E.g., "Harris could point out that the administration has made a difference by challenging collusion and price-gouging, in everything from prescription drugs to food wholesalers."

• Nicole Narea: [10-18] How tough would a President Kamala Harris be on immigrants?

• Christian Paz: [10-16] Kamala Harris and the problem with ceding the argument: "The vice president had a chance to defend immigrants on Fox News. She passed."

• Matthew Stevenson: [10-18] Harris: Speed dating Howard Stern: I was surprised last week to find the "shock jock and satellite-radio wit" endorsing Harris last week, probably because I have zero interest or curiosity in him, and may know even less.

Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:

• Avishay Artsy/Sean Rameswaram: [10-21] Why Wisconsin Democrats are campaigning in places where they can't win: "To win statewide, the party wants to "lose by less" in rural areas." That's good advice everywhere. Especially as Democrats actually have a better proposition for rural voters than Republicans have.

• Ed Kilgore: [10-19] Four good reasons Democrats are terrified about the 2024 election: I wasn't sure where to fire this, but the reasons turn out to mostly reside in Democrats' heads. Nothing here suggests that Democrats are more likely to lose. It's just that if they lose, the consequences will be far worse than whatever setbacks Republicans might suffer in another Trump loss:

  1. Democrats remember 2016 and 2020
  2. Democrats fear Trump 2.0 more than Republicans fear Harris
  3. Only one party is threatening to challenge the election results
  4. If Harris wins, she'll oversee a divided government; if Trump wins, he'll have a shot at total power

• Eric Levitz: [10-17] The Democrats' pro-union strategy has been a bust: "Despite Joe Biden's historically pro-union policies, the Democrats' share of the union vote is falling." First question is: is this true? (Actually, either "this": the falling vote share, or the "pro-union" policies.) Second question is would be anti-union (like Republicans) win or lose votes? Most of the people who are locked into Republican positions (e.g., guns, abortion) are so distrustful of Democrats no amount of pandering can move them, but giving up positions that are popular among Democrats can lose face and faith, and that can hurt you more than you can possibly gain, even if there is no meaningful alternative. Third point is who cares? If standing up for unions is the right thing to do, why equivocate with polling? We live in a country where the rich have exorbitant power, where unions are one of the few possible countervailing options. Extreme inequality is corroding everything, from democracy to the fabric of everyday life. More/stronger unions won't fix that, but they'll help, and that's good in itself, as well as something that resonates with other promising strategies. Fourth, if you're just polling union members, you're missing out on workers who would like to join a union if only they could. Are your "pro-union" policies losing them? Or are they offering hope, and a practical path to a better life?

  On some level, Democrats and Republicans are fated to be polarized opposites, each defined by the other and stuck in its identity. A couple more pieces on labor and politics this year:

  • Sharon Block/Benjamin Sachs: [10-16] The truth about the parties and labor: "You need only look at the state level to understand who supports workers and who doesn't."

  • Steven Greenhouse: [10-15] Sean O'Brien's tantrum against the Democrats: "He appears to be hoping for a Trump victory, which would be a disaster for the Teamsters, but just maybe good for him."

• Erik Loomis: [09-26] Preserving public lands: "Deb Haaland has been a remarkable secretary of the interior. But the future is about funding in Congress."

Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:

• Madiba K Dennie: [10-21] Republican Attorneys General to Court: We demand more pregnant teens: "The conservative effort to ban abortion marches on, and with some deeply unsettling legal claims."

• Hassan Ali Kanu: [10-15] America's judicial divisions: "Every major policy issue is now also a courtroom battle, decided in increasingly partisan settings. And there's no end in sight." This is a good overview of an effect Millhiser has been writing about case-by-case for years: right-wing plaintiffs and Red State attorneys general shopping for favorable judges willing to impose horrific rulings on the rest of the nation. Kacsmaryk's mifepristone ruling is just one glaring case example.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • [10-16] The nightmare facing Democrats, even if Harris wins: "If Harris wins, the Republican Party will almost certainly be able to veto anything she does, thanks to our broken Constitution." She'll also have to contend with thousands of lobbyists, including many with hooks deep into her own party -- and given her billion dollar campaign warchest, most likely into her as well -- as the Constitution isn't the only thing broken in American politics.

  • [10-17] The strange case that the Supreme Court keeps refusing to decide: "A mysterious Supreme Court case could change everything about criminal punishment."

  • [10-18] The entire Texas government is fighting over whether to save a man's life: "Robert Roberson was sentenced to die on a theory that's now widely viewed with skepticism by medical experts."

• Shaun Richman: [10-22] The right believes it has the Supreme Court votes to overturn labor law.

Climate and environment:

• Alex Abad-Santos: [10-11] For some evacuation defiers, Hurricane Milton is a social media goldmine: "They didn't listen to Hurricane Milton evacuation orders. Then they posted through it." This reminds me of the hype that "shock and awe" would win the war against Iraq, because all it would take is one awesome demonstration of force to get Iraqis to drop their arms and surrender. Problem was: the people who were truly shocked were dead, and the rest survived not just the bombs but the hype, making them think they were invincible.

• Matthew Cappucci/Kelsey Baker: [10-19] Hurricane Oscar forms in Caribbean, surprising storm watchers: "Oscar probably won't be around long. After making a run at Cuba, it will begin turning north into Monday and weakening into Tuesday."

• Benji Jones: [10-17] We need $700 billion to save nature: "Just a tiny fraction of the global GDP could help stave off ecological collapse."

• Robert Kuttner: [10-15] How hurricanes are a profit center for insurers: "To compensate for exaggerated expectations of claims, they jack up rates and hollow our coverage, giving themselves more profit than before." As long as the market will bear it, and up to the point when they really do go bankrupt. This is, of course, the kind of profiteering business schools teach their students to be shameless about.

Business, labor, and Economists:

• Dean Baker: Quite a bit to catch up with here, as he always has good points to make. In trying to figure out how far I needed to go back, I ran across this tweet I had noted: "Part of the job of a progressive government is to shift the public narrative towards the idea that the state can improve people's lives." I'll add that the point here is not to convince you that government is good or benign, but that it belongs to you and everyone else, and can be used to serve your interests, as far as they align with most other people (or, as the US Constitution put it, to "promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity"). While progressives initially do this by advancing reasoned argument, they also need to put it into practice whenever possible, and actually do things to "promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty." You hear much about "democracy" these days, but knows this: democracy makes good government possible, but only works if/when people realize they have the power to direct it. Also, make sure to check out Baker's free book, Rigged.

  • [09-16] Now that we all agree that 10 percent tariffs on imports are bad, how about 1000 percent tariffs on prescription drugs?

  • [09-17] The Washington Post is concerned about the budget deficit, again.

  • [09-22] Why is it silly to think it's the media's job to inform the public?

  • [09-23] My six favorite untruths about the Biden-Harris economy. These are the subheds:

    1. The New York Times picks an atypical worker to tell a story about a divided economy.
    2. It's hard for recent college grads to find jobs even when their unemployment rate is near a twenty-year low.
    3. The two-full time job measure of economic hardship
    4. The retirement crisis
    5. The collapsing saving rate
    6. Young people will never be able to afford a home

    He adds:

    Those are my six favorites, but I could come up with endless more pieces, like the CNN story on the family that drank massive amounts of milk who suffered horribly when milk prices rose, or the New York Times piece on a guy who used an incredible amount of gas and was being bankrupted by the record gas prices following the economy's reopening.

    There are also the stories that the media chose to ignore, like the record pace of new business starts, the people getting big pay increases in low-paying jobs, the record level of job satisfaction, the enormous savings in commuting costs and travel time for the additional 19 million people working from home (almost one eight of the workforce).

    The media decided that they wanted to tell a bad economy story, and they were not going to let reality get in the way.

  • [09-26] The economy after the GDP revisions: "Basically, they tell us a story of an economy that has performed substantially better since the pandemic than we had previously believed."

    The highlights are:

    • An economy that grew substantially more rapidly than previously believed and far faster than other wealthy countries
    • Substantially more rapid productivity growth, suggesting more rapid gains in wages and living standards and a smaller burden of the national debt;
    • Higher income growth than previously reported, with both more wages and more profits;
    • A higher saving rate, meaning that the stories about people having to spend down their savings were nonsense.

    There were also a couple of not-so-good items:

    • A higher profit share that is still near a post-pandemic peak;
    • A lower implicit corporate tax rate, although still well above the 2019 level.

  • [10-05] Automation is called "productivity growth". As he points out, productivity growth was long regarded as a universal good thing, until the 1980s, when businesses found they could keep all of the profits, instead of sharing with workers.

    Anyhow, this is a big topic (see Rigged, it's free), but the idea that productivity growth would ever be the enemy is a bizarre one. Automation and other technologies with labor displacing potential are hardly new and there is zero reason for workers as a group to fear them, even though they may put specific jobs at risk.

    The key issue is to structure the market to ensure that the benefits are broadly shared. We never have to worry about running out of jobs. We can always have people work shorter hours or just have the government send out checks to increase demand. It is unfortunate that many have sought to cultivate this phony fear.

  • [10-08] Tariffs and government-granted patent monopolies: bad and "good" forms of protectionism. Baker rarely misses an opportunity to bash patent monopolies -- an important issue that few others pay much attention to.

  • [10-09] Should Kamala Harris be celebrating the labor market? A sober evaluation of a recent column by Peter Coy: [10-07] Kamala Harris should think twice about touting this economy.

    I will say that by any historical standard the labor market is doing pretty damn good. It could be better, but a low unemployment rate and rapidly rising real wages is a better story than any incumbent administration could tell since -- 2000, oh well.

    I would put more stress here on "it could be better" than on the seemingly self-satisfied "pretty damn good." I'd also stress the options: that Republicans and business lobbyists have obstructed reforms that would help more (and in some cases virtually all) people, and that the key to better results is electing more Democrats -- who may still be too generous to the rich, but at least consider everyone else.

  • [10-14] CNN tells Harris not to talk about the economy. CNN is not the only "neutral news outlet" to have persistently trashed the economic success of the Biden-Harris administration, but they have been particularly egregious. It's almost as if they have their own agenda.

    The goal for Democrats in pushing their many economic successes (rapid job creation, extraordinarily low unemployment, real wage growth, especially at the lower end of the wage distribution, a record boom in factory construction) is to convince a small percentage of the electorate that this is a record to build on. By contrast, Donald Trump seems to push out a new whacked out proposal every day, with the only constants being a massive tax on imports and deporting a large portion of the workforce in agriculture and construction.

    Given the track record of the Biden-Harris administration compared with the craziness being pushed by Donald Trump, it is understandable that backers of Donald Trump would not want Harris to talk about the economy. But why would a neutral news outlet hold that view?

• Emma Curchin: [10-17] 34 million seniors in Medicare advantage plans face rude awakening: "Insurers are dropping plans and slashing benefits" -- you know, like all private insurance companies everywhere.

• Sarah Jones: [Fall 2024] In the shadow of King Coal: "While the coal industry is in terminal decline, it still shapes the culture of central Appalachia."

• Paul Krugman: [10-17] How Trump's radical tariff plan could wreck our economy.

• Robert Kuttner: [10-18] Redeeming the Nobel in economics: "This year's prize went to three institutionalist critics of neoliberalism. The award is overdue." Daren Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A Robinson. The latter two were co-authors with Acemoglu of books like Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012), and Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (2023). Johnson was also co-author, with James Kwak, of one of the first notable books to come out of the 2008 financial meltdown: 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown (2010).

• Bethany McLean: [10-17] Senate report: How private equity 'gutted' dozens of US hospitals: Thanks to modern tricks of financial engineering, investors can prosper even when the underlying business is failing."

Ukraine and Russia:

• Aaron Sobczak: [10-17] Diplomacy Watch: Imminent Ukraine invitation to NATO unlikely: "Zelenskyy's 'victory plan' receiving cool reception so far."

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

• Philip Balboni: [10-14] Why US foreign policy today is a form of 'isolationism': "Those throwing around the epithet are the ones driving us to be more alone in the world."

• Van Jackson: I just ran across him today, but he has several books I should have noticed by now, and a Substack newsletter that I'll cite below. He describes himself as "a one-time 'defense intellectual' and a longtime creature of the national security state," but also "on the left," albeit only in a "vague cosmopolitanism and an antiwar sensibility, yet reflexively in support of the going concerns of the Democratic Partly, including (paradoxically) military primacy."

  • [10-19] Me, Dan Drezner, and the fate of the world: "I think foreign policy will tip the presidential election. Drezner thinks not. Everything hangs in the balance."

Other stories:

• Joshua Frank: [10-18] Pissing everyone off for 30 damn years: A memoir of writing for Counterpunch since 1998, tied on the publication's 30th anniversary to their annual funding campaign.

• Whizy Kim: [10-16] Is every car dealer trying to rip me off? "Why buying a car is the worst kind of shopping." Cited here because after 18 years I'm in the market for a new car, and because I've been for 2-3 years without ever managing to put the time and effort into it. I've only bought one used and four new cars in my life, and the new car I spent the least time shopping for was by far the worst -- the others were pretty good deals on pretty good cars. But I've seen a lot of crap like this, and it pays to beware.

Obituaries

• Kris Kristofferson:

  • Larry Long: [10-17] Remembering Kris Kristofferson: 1936-2024.

• Liam Payne: Former member of UK boy band One Direction, dead at 31.

  • Kyndall Cunningham/Aja Romano: [10-17] The chaos, conspiracy theories, and controversy surrounding Liam Payne's death: "Everything we (actually) know about Liam Payne's death."

Books

• Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Message

  • Sean Illing: [10-15] Ta-Nehisi Coates on complexity, clarity, and truth: "What the author saw in Palestine." Interview.

  • Rann Miller: [10-07] One year after October 7: A return to forever: "Ta-Nehisi Coates seeks to return America to moral clarity."

  • James North: [10-14] Critics charge Ta-Nehisi Coates didn't spend enough time in Palestine to learn the truth. They're wrong. "Pro-Israel critics are panicking at the success of Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book, The Message, and they have honed in on an argument to discredit him that doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny."

• Bob Woodward: War.

  • Fred Kaplan: [10-15] Bob Woodward's latest book tells the story of America's declining leverage in the world. Link title was "Bob Woodward's new book is about Biden, but the most urgent takeaways are about Trump." This is just more proof of the truly ridiculous extent to which Trump has dominated our minds since 2015. Nearly four years out of office, it still feels like he's the incumbent, to no small extent because most of our regrets and great fears of the moment are directly traceable back to him, but because of his amazing (and I'll use the word "ridiculous" again here) domination of the noosphere (apologies for using a word almost everyone will have to look up, so I can at least save you that trouble: per Merriam-Webster: "the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution"). In short, he's in our heads, as intractable as an earworm, and several orders of magnitude more disturbing. I've been struggling with trying to narrow down "the top ten reasons for voting for Harris against Trump," but number one has to be: MAKE IT STOP!

    Returning to the book, Kaplan writes a bit about Biden:

    Woodward's style of storytelling is more episodic than structural. Chapters tend to run for just a few pages. His mantra tends to be "And then . . . and then . . . and then . . . " as opposed to "And so . . . and so . . . and so . . ." Still, the stories here hang together, more than they usually do, because of their underlying thread -- as the title suggests, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and how Biden and his team dealt with them.

    For the most part, Woodward is impressed, concluding that they engaged in "genuine good faith efforts" to "wield the levers of executive power responsibly and in the national interest," adding, "I believe President Biden and this team will be largely studied in history as an example of steady and purposeful leadership."

    Needless to say at this point, I disagree with nearly everything that Biden has done in the foreign policy arena, but Woodward's wording here -- "good faith efforts," "steady and purposeful leadership" -- betrays the subtext, where the baseline for praise is "at least he's not Trump." So I can get the point, without having to agree with the particulars. Kaplan continues:

    This is an uncharacteristically bold assertion for any author, much less Woodward, who, throughout his 50-year career, has been the less judgmental half of the Woodward and Bernstein team that broke the Watergate scandal and brought down Richard Nixon. In a Playboy interview back in 1989, he admitted that analysis wasn't his strong point; it still isn't. But heading into his ninth decade, with nearly two dozen books under his belt, it seems he feels entitled -- properly so -- to render some verdicts from journalism's high bench.

    He dangled his new assertiveness in 2020, on the eve of that year's election, when he wrote, as the last line in Rage, "Donald Trump is the wrong man for the job." The next year, after Trump's defeat, he ended Peril by musing, "What is your country? What has it become under Trump?"

    And even in War, where Trump plays a cameo role as he mulls making another run for the White House, Woodward declares, just before touting Biden's legacy, "Donald Trump is not only the wrong man for the presidency, he is unfit to lead the country."

Music (and other arts?)

• The Paranoid Style: [10-13] "And if I start to cry, you come down from the sky on your wings": "A tribute to Nicky Hopkins."

• Ellen Wulfhorst/Katrina Sirotta: [10-17] The best album of the century so far, according to critics. Plus, see the rest of the top 50. Turns out this is compiled from Metacritic data, so you could say "according to algorithms," as no critic actually thinks this.

• Steve Lacy Memorial Scrapbook: A new website dedicated to the late soprano saxophone great.

Chatter

• Meme quote from Michelle Wolf: "You know in High School if you didn't believe in Science or History, it was just called failing." I got this from a Facebook thread, with several interesting comments, including this one from Clifford Ocheltree:

  I shall only point to an earlier remark, the failure of our educational system to teach critical thinking. To be skeptical in the absence of that learned skill is pure ignorance. I would add that perception plays a critical role in how an uneducated populace becomes 'skeptical,' 'credulous' and 'easily duped.' We are, we have become, the product of a failed educational system. One in which the vast majority of the population cannot read directions on a bottle of aspirin or name the three branches of the Federal Government. These failures allow both parties to play fast and loose with history and science knowing full well the audience isn't likely to 'get it.'

  Ocheltree also addressed history: "History is the interpretation of fact by 'experts' who bring their own bias." Someone else picked this up, noting "I can't help laugh at the notion of your feigning disdain for history" then asking "why do you lap up so many history books?" Ocheltree replied:

  Fact and history are not the same thing. Most 'experts' (historians) have a bias and view 'facts' through that lens. Nearly 50 years ago I read an excellent book by Frances Fitzgerald, "America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century" (1979). A discussion and analysis of how history teaching and texts had changed over the years. At times the result of new information coming to light and at others the outgrowth of changing social standards or political leanings. Some 20 years ago I discovered some 'facts' while researching. Trial testimony with supporting documentation (original records) in a Virginia court house basement. At a conference I had some time to speak with the author of the leading text(s) being used on the topic by any number of colleges. I shared my findings, privately, as they disproved a good chunk of his work. His response in short? Nobody will give a shit that I was wrong, my text is the accepted standard and will always be paramount because it makes my point.

  I would add, history and record reviews are much the same. The author collects 'facts,' the critic listens. Each applies his/her own bias. The idea that anyone would accept an authors' work(s) as 'unbiased' strikes me as a failure of our education system. Steven Pinker's recent work has focused on the utter lack of training students in the basics of critical thinking. I 'lap up' history books with a jaundiced eye. I love the topic but learned many years ago, just because a book has been issued isn't 'proof' that it is accurate.

  Hardin Smith, who started this thread, added:

  Who said fact and history are the same thing? I sure didn't. But that doesn't mean it's not worth studying and it doesn't mean that it doesn't behoove people to have a working knowledge of it. And certainly you'd agree that there are certain things that we can all agree on, or at least on the general outlines. Here's a question: if so much of what you read is biased, whose work are you using to make that judgment? Is there a higher unbiased source you go to? And, are there certain historical events that we can all agree to? The Holocaust, the Moon Landing, Trump's loss in '20? Or is everything in your world subjective opinion? Also, history is not like record reviews, sorry. Record reviews are totally based on opinion, but though there may be bias, history at least concerns itself with actual facts. It's a subjective interpretation of actual facts. There's never completely removing bias in anything produced by humans, but I'd submit to you that some are more biased than others. Some are relatively free of bias. None of it means that history isn't worth knowing.

  It's tempting to go all philosophical here, and argue that it's all biased, all subjective, at best assertions that are subject to independent verification -- same for record reviews, although the odds of being rejected by other subjectives there are much elevated compared to science, which has a longer history of refinement and consensus building (not that similar processes don't apply to record reviewing). Still, not much disagreement here. Smith seems to find it important to maintain a conceptual division between opinion and fact, between subjective and objective, which I find untenable and not even necessary (although it's easy to fall into when arguing with idiots -- which is why Wolf's joke is so cutting).

  This leads us back to the importance of critical thinking, which is ultimately a process of understanding one's own biases -- starting, of course, with exposing the biases of others. (Much like crazy people developed psychoanalysis to understand, and ultimately to master, their own neuroses.)

• Ali Abunimah: [10-21] In April, under pressure from "Israel," @amazon banned the sale of The Thorn and the Carnation, the novel by Palestinian resistance leader Yahya Sinwar.

  You can still buy copies of Hitler's Mein Kampf from Amazon, in multiple languages.

  [Link to: Amazon pulls book by Hamas leader Sinwar. By the way, you can also still buy copies of Herzl's The Jewish State, in many editions, as well as his utopian novel, Altneuland (The Old New-Land) -- you know, the one about how happy Arabs will be once Jews are running the state.]

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

Original count: 212 links, 12063 words (15688 total)

Current count: 224 links, 13319 words (17265 total)

Daily Log

I posted this on Facebook:

Several updates of note. Birthday coming up next week, so I've been thinking about another kaleidoscopic dinner feast. We haven't had many of late, which has more to do with my isolation than with the 80 lbs. I've dropped over the last year. (The weight has always had more to do with junk food comforts than with my more ambitious cooking -- not that I didn't get a bump last birthday [2 lbs] or when my brother visited a few weeks back [3 lbs].) But cooking seems to be one of the few things I still have reasonable skills for, so I could benefit from the exercise. But what was the question I've been mulling over. Early on, I explored other-world cuisines -- started with Chinese, Indian, Turkish -- then wandered all around (Spanish, Greek, Thai, Moroccan, Hungarian, Mexican, Korean, Russian, Cuban) before finally tackling French a few years ago, but lately I've mostly been doing trad American fare (one was classic fried chicken, another was just burgers on homemade buns). I've never done a proper Italian, but I've done enough there that the element of discovery is past; also I despair of finding the veal I crave, and I've never got the hang of making my own pasta. One idea was to just pick a book from my shelf that I've never really used, and see what I can make of it. Duguid's "Burma" jumped out at me. I bought it in 2012, after my only experience with a Burmese restaurant (in NYC, actually just take-out): I got an extraordinary mango pickle curry, but it turned out that my purchase didn't provide the recipe, so I let the book languish. I presented this (and several other ideas) to Laura. She endorsed Burma, so that's what we'll be doing. I've ordered a second Burmese cookbook for the occasion ("Burmese Superstar") which does have the recipe, and another on Indonesia ("Cradle of Flavor") for good measure. (Maybe Indonesian, which I've dabbled in, will be next -- I've long dreamed of duplicating the amazing rijsttafel spread we've enjoyed several times.) But before I can cook I still need to wrap up the upstairs bedroom/closet project. I'm finally ready to start painting the room today, and also to start putting the paneling up in the closet. So I'm hoping to see some rapid progress, after several miserable weeks of patching plaster and sanding. More on that later.

I originally wrote "social atrophy" where you now see "my isolation." Edit was after Laura objected about me complaining that "we have no friends." Of course, we do still have friends, some very dear, but that's mostly due to Laura's efforts, which certainly I benefit from, and I fear contribute little to, other than the occasional dinner. Looking back through my Facebook record, which isn't complete but hits the high points, I noted the following dinners, starting with last birthday:

1. October 27, 2023: Birthday dinner, Spanish-themed, mariscada in green sauce.
2. November 3, 2023: Post-birthday leftovers, including a couple new dishes that had been cut from the original.
3. April 4: Steve visit, mostly Ottolenghi.
4. June 4: Chinese: ants climbing tree.
5. June 9: Chicken marbella, mostly Italian sides.
6. July 3: Indian: butter chicken, cabbage, eggplant, potatoes, raita.
7. August 19: Jambalaya.
8. September 7: Clearance special tapas.
9. September 24: Another clearance special, mostly Greek (shrimp with feta) and Italian.
10. October 7: Steve visit, comfort food.

So, ten dinners in the past year, although the big gap was last winter, November to April, and the pace has picked up of late, especially with the "inventory reduction" concept. So the first half of the year may have had something to do with the diet. Attendance was usually 4-6, although we had more for last birthday (10 is about our practical limit). Once in a while, I cook for just the two of us, but those times didn't get registered. Also possible that there were a couple more occasions without photos (two of the above were "leftover" plates), but nothing major.

I finally added this comment:

I went through my Facebook posts and counted out 10 dinners starting from last year's birthday, which was mostly Spanish, starting with the mariscada in green sauce, and counting a leftover tapas dinner a week later. After that, there is a gap until Steven Hull came to visit in April, with the pace picking up recently due to my "inventory reduction" campaign. All, by the way, were well-attended, and everyone seemed to leave pleased.

Daily Log

Finally making what feels like progress on the upstairs bedroom and closet project. Last night, I finished masking around the trim and baseboards, so I'm almost ready to paint primer. The "almost" is because I left a couple of rough spots for further sanding, and added a bit of spackle that will also need a brief sand. I've been unhappy with my random orbital sander, which no longer reliably holds the hook-and-loop discs. I ordered a new pad from Amazon, and I'm waiting on delivery today. But mostly I've been getting by with hand sanding. I figure there's less than an hour of prep work. I haven't masked the ceiling off, as it's new, and the guy who put it up and painted it primed the walls down a few inches, so I should just blend into his work. Not sure whether I'll mask the ceiling off for the finish paint, or just use an edge guide. In any case, we still have to buy wall and trim paint.

Also did most of my sanding in the closet. As I write this, I still need to make one pass around the bottom walls, and take a look for anything else. Lots of things are still rather ugly there, but it won't show through paneling like it would with paint. I'm also reconciled to the walls being curved. They just have to be flat enough for the panels to stick. Also, only one wall has an edge to match, plus one piece of ceiling. I'm going to add 1x2 trim boards to cover up the seams, so I have a lot of leeway to work with. Only possible problem is that I have a 50-inch wall, which I could center a 48-inch panel on (trimming both ends), or offset and cut a thin strip for filler (which would be covered by trim).

Biggest problem will be maneuvering the panels into place, especially the big ones. All have to be contorted to get through the door. One has to be slid behind some existing wires (previously in a piece of blue plastic conduit, which I've ripped out, giving me some maneuver room, but I'm not sure it's enough. In that one case, I'll probably have to glue the wall instead of the board. One idea I have is to press the glue down then secure the edges with screws in drilled holes (we're going into plaster on lath). Once the glue is set, I can remove the screws, add the trim boards (which will cover the holes), and screw them on securely. The trim boards will not only secure the paneling, but will give me a frame for adding shelves, drawers, etc.

I'm sitting the panels on top of the baseboards, so I'm not really doing anything to the latter. (Repainting them will be a later option.) I'll caulk around the bottom edges, and/or cover the edges up with molding. I'm going to need to do something like that around the big bookcase, which stops two inches below the ceiling. It wasn't a problem before, but looks bad now.

Saw this link: The best album of the century so far, according to critics. Plus, see the rest of the top 50. "Story by Ellen Wulfhorst, Katrina Sirotta." Critics? Ranking is derived from Metacritic's metascores, so would be more accurate to say "according to algorithms." Labels mostly came from picture credits, but I've corrected a few. I'm not feeling a huge urge to bracket my grades, as I often do. Probably a dozen albums I haven't heard yet.

Still, good enough for a checklist:

1. Wadada Leo Smith: Ten Freedom Summers (2012, Cuneiform)
2. Fiona Apple: Fetch the Bolt Cutters (2020, Epic)
3. Muncie Girls: From Caplan to Belsize (2016, Specialist Subject)
4. Brian Wilson: Smile (2004, Nonesuch)
5. Loretta Lynn: Van Lear Rose (2004, Interscope)
6. The Wonder Years: The Greatest Generation (2013, Hopeless)
7. Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly (2015, Top Dawg/Aftermath)
8. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Ghosteen (2019, Bad Seed)
9. David Lang: The Little Match Girl Passion (2009, Harmonia Mundi)
10. Machine Head: Bloodstone & Diamonds (2014, Nuclear Blast)
11. Amaarae: Fountain Baby (2023, Interscope)
12. Cindy Lee: Diamond Jubilee (2024, self-released)
13. OutKast: Stankonia (2000, LaFace)
14. Kendrick Lamar: Damn. (2017, Top Dawg/Aftermath)
15. Bob Dylan: Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020, Columbia)
16. D'Angelo: Black Messiah (2014, RCA)
17. Joyce Manor: Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired (2012, Asian Man)
18. Jamie Branch: Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die (World War) (2023, International Anthem)
19. Rose City Band: Summerlong (Thrill Jockey)
20. Serve: Eternal Forward Motion (2019, Spinefarm)
21. Berwyn: Who Am I (2024, Columbia)
22. Doe: Some Things Last Longer Than You (2016, Specialist Subject)
23. Ghetts: Conflict of Interest (2021, Warner Bros. UK)
24. Charles Lloyd: The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow (2024, Blue Note)
25. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Skeleton Tree (2016, Bad Seed)
26. Charli XCX: Brat (2024, Atlantic)
27. Ali Farka Toure: Savane (2006, World Circuit)
28. Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010, Roc A Fella)
29. The Chariot: One Wing (2012, Entertainment One)
30. Lankum: The Livelong Day (2019, Rough Trade)
31. Rosalia: Motomami (2022, Columbia)
32. Caroline Polachek: Desire, I Want to Turn Into You (Perpetual Notice)
33. Madvillain: Madvillainy (2004, Stones Throw)
34. Sault: Untitled (Rise) (2020, Forever Living Originals)
35. Mount Eerie: A Crow Looked at Me (2017, Bridge)
36. Noname: Room 25 (2018, Noname)
37. Bob Dylan: Love and Theft (2001, Columbia)
38. Billy Strings: Renewal (2021, Rounder)
39. Allison Russell: The Returner (2023, Fantasy)
40. Saba: Care for Me (2018, Saba Pivot)
41. The Menzingers: On the Impossible Past (2012, Epitaph)
42. Dave Stapleton: Flight (2012, Edition)
43. Marius Neset: Golden Xplosion (2011, Edition)
44. Nova Twins: Supernova (2022, Marshall)
45. Self Esteem: Prioritise Pleasure (2021, Fiction)
46. Beyoncé: Lemonade (2016, Columbia)
47. Black Country, New Road: Ants From Up There (2022, Ninja Tune)
48. Ry Cooder: Pull Up Some Dust and Sit (2011, Nonesuch)
49. Deafheaven: Sunbather (2013, Deathwish)
50. N.E.R.D.: In Search Of . . . (2001, Virgin)

Daily Log

William Boyd asked "How often do you update Xgau's website?" I answered:

There are two pieces to the website, therefore two answers. There are a bunch of flat files, hand-coded in PHP (a scripting language for web pages, so mostly HTML and CSS, plus a few functions for common things, like page layout, headers, and footers). I update those files whenever I add a new notice to the news and RSS rolls, usually 8-24 hours after Christgau posts something on Substack, sometimes (if I'm really distracted) up to 3 days. The Substack files are included in the update, but have time locks -- 9 months for CG files, 30 days for everything else, but since the files are always there, the locks will open on schedule. But there is also a MySQL database, which has all of the consumer guide reviews and their indexing, a table of (almost) all of the flat files, and cross-referencing links between them. I update this much less frequently, and at the moment this database is pretty old. I've been maintaining my local copy, which at the moment lacks the October CG and maybe 6-9 months of page links and cross references. A few weeks ago, I was thinking I was real close to doing an update, but then I got swamped in other work. It shouldn't be much longer, but I'm still very much swamped. The database update is much trickier than the flat files, and because I do it much less often, I have to consult notes to make sure I'm doing all the right things in just the right order, so I need to find a couple hours where I'm clear-headed enough to do things like that. I'll also note that Christgau almost never complains about my chronic tardiness, and therefore inadvertently encourages it. I do much better responding to pressure/events than self-directing (where this is one of dozens of things I seemingly never get to). For instance, I took the time to respond here, because you asked. I usually make corrections to the website within a day or two after being asked -- although it may, as you've seen, take months before the website piece gets updated. (Actually, sometimes I do go ahead and patch the database without doing a full update. Depends on how simple the change is.)

I also added this:

By the way, I have an email list for technical discussions about my websites (mostly Christgau's, but also occasionally about my other ones). I've been using it very infrequently when I have something more techy that I want to explain and/or elicit some commentary on, but if you'd like to lurk, or maybe even comment, send me email (don't reply here; if you can't find my email you're unlikely to be of much help), and we'll discuss it further. I've long had plans for a fairly major revision of the website, which right now seems unlikely anytime soon, but it was originally written in HTML 3.1 (with whatever CSS was then current; HTML seems to have stabilized at 5, with DOM and much-changed CSS), PHP 3 (now 8), MySQL 3 (now 8), using ISO-8859-1 (now should be UTF-8), with no Javascript (which I still regard as yucky but supposedly has its uses), no cookies, no lots of other things. Lots of things have been patched to keep it working, and new pages are all HTML 5 compliant, but the foundations need rethinking, even if the basic model and design seems sound. In the meantime, I may use the mail list for some discussions of a possible Francis Davis site, although if that develops it will probably merit its own list.

Rather bizarrely, Facebook converted "8" (as in "PHP 8") to a happy-face emoji, so I had to edit the text. It now occurs to me that the conversion was for "8)," which I broke up by changing it to "8.?)." Had I realized that at the time, I could have just put a space after the "8" and made it look like a dumb typo. I wouldn't say I'm emojiphobic, but I've never integrated emojis into my thinking, let alone my vocabulary.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, October archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 24 albums, 5 A-list

Music: Current count 43039 [43015] rated (+24), 41 [42] unrated (-1).

New records reviewed this week:

• Jessica Ackerley: All of the Colours Are Singing (2022 [2024], AKP): [sp]: B+(*)
• Adekunle Gold: Tequila Ever After (2023, Def Jam): [sp]: B+(**)
• Bad Moves: Wearing Out the Refrain (2024, Don Giovanni): [sp]: B+(***)
• John Chin/Jeong Lim Yang/Jon Gruk Kim: Journey of Han (2024, Jinsy Music): [sp]: B+(*)
• Guy Davis: The Legend of Sugarbelly (2024, M.C.): [sp]: B+(***)
• The Kris Davis Trio: Run the Gauntlet (2024, Pyroclastic): [cd]: B+(***)
• Wendy Eisenberg: Viewfinder (2022-23 [2024], American Dreams): [sp]: B+(**)
• Frode Gjerstad Trio: Unknown Purposes (2023 [2024], Circulasione Totale): [bc]: B+(***)
• Frode Gjerstad/Margaux Oswald/Ivar Myrset Asheim: Another Step (2024, Circulasione Totale): [bc]: B+(*)
• Joel and the Neverending Sextet: Marbled (2023 [2024], Motvind): [sp]: B+(***)
• Ka: The Thief Next to Jesus (2024, Iron Works): [sp]: B+(**)
• Omer Leshem: Play Space (2024, Ubuntu Music): [cd]: B+(**)
• Terence McManus: Music for Chamber Trio (2024, Rowhouse Music): [cd]: B+(***)
• Kate Pierson: Radios & Rainbows (2024, Lazy Meadow Music): [sp]: B+(**)
• Dafnis Prieto Sí o Sï Quartet: 3 Sides of the Coin (2024, Dafnison Music): [cd]: A-
• Dave Rempis/Jason Adasiewicz/Joshua Abrams/Tyler Damon: Propulsion (2023 [2024], Aerophonic): [cd]: A-
• Dred Scott/Moses Patrou/Tom Beckham/Matt Pavolka: Cali Mambo (2023 [2024], Ropeadope): [cd]: B+(**)
• M Slago/Homeboy Sandman: And We Are Here (2024, Fly 7 Music): [sp]: B+(***)
• Walter Smith III: Three of Us Are From Houston and Reuben Is Not (2024, Blue Note): [sp]: A-
• Sulida: Utos (2023 [2024], Clean Feed): [sp]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola ([2024], Strut): [sp]: A-
• Miami Sound: Rare Funk & Soul From Miami, Florida 1967-1974 (1967-74 [2023], Soul Jazz): [r]: B+(**)
• Miami Sound: More Funk & Soul From Miami, Florida 1967-1974 (1967-74 [2024], Soul Jazz): [r]: B+(**)

Old music:

• Ka: Languish Arts (2022, Iron Works): [sp]: B+(**)
• Ka: Woeful Studies (2022, Iron Works): [sp]: B+(***)
• Don Walser: Rolling Stone From Texas (1994, Watermelon): [sp]: A-
• Don Walser: Texas Top Hand (1996, Watermelon): [sp]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Caleb Wheeler Curtis: The True Story of Bears and the Invention of the Battery (Imani, 2CD) [11-01]
• Andy Haas: For the Time, Being (Resonant Music) []
• Shawneci Icecold/Vernon Reid/Matthew Garrison & Grant Calvin Weston: Future Prime (Underground45) [09-01]
• Laird Jackson: Life (self-released) []
• Pony Boy All-Star Big Band: This Is Now: Live at Boxley's (Pony Boy) [08-09]

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top story threads:

Israel's year of infamy:

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

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

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

    1. It has exposed the enduring colonial nature of international law
    2. This is a U.S. genocide of Palestinians
    3. Universities are an extension of the state's coercive apparatus
    4. Zionism has no moral legs to stand on
    5. Racism and power -- the invisibility and power of Palestinians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel:

• Mondoweiss:

  • [10-07] Day 367: Israel orders new evacuations in Gaza, expands bombing in Lebanon: "The Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon continues to face stiff resistance along the border one week on, while the Israeli army has renewed its assault on northern Gaza, laying siege to Jabalia refugee camp for the sixth time since October 7."

  • [10-10] Day 370: Israel strangles northern Gaza in apparent implementation of the 'Generals' Plan': "Israeli strikes target the last functioning bakery in northern Gaza while Israeli troops continue to besiege and invade Jabalia for the sixth day in a row. Meanwhile, Israeli forces encounter heavy resistance in southern Lebanon."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lebanon:

• Elia Ayoub: [10-04] Killing Hezbollah leaders failed 30 years ago. It won't work now: "Instead of debilitating Hezbollah, Israel's assassination of Hassan Nasrallah may prove to be a major PR boost for the embattled organization." Useful mostly for background, especially Israel's 1992 assassination of Hezbollah co-founder Abbas al-Musawi, which only intensified the struggle against Israel's occupation of south Lebanon, as new leaders like Nasrallah took over.

• Jason Ditz: [10-13] Israeli tanks smash into UN peacekeeper base in Southern Lebanon: "Netanyahu demands UN withdraw all peacekeepers from the 'danger zone'.

• Séamus Malekafzali:

  • [10-09] Israel invaded Lebanon because the United States let it: "The leveling of Lebanese border towns is the continuation of Israel's Gaza policy: total destruction and ill-defined objectives." I also found an earlier article I had meant to mention:

  • [09-23] Israel's terrorist attacks have unleashed hell in Lebanon: "With air strikes now increasing the bloodshed, there's no telling how much worse things could get."

• MERIP: [10-04] A primer on Lebanon -- history, Palestine and resistance to Israeli violence.

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

• Michael Arria:

  • [10-10] The Shift: Recent reports reveal how deeply implicated the US is in the Gaza genocide: "In recent weeks a number of stories have broken revealing key details about the Biden administration's foreign policy support for Israel's genocide in Palestine."

  • [10-08] The Shift: Trump says Palestinians never took advantage of Gaza's 'beautiful' location, Harris says Iran is enemy #1.

  • [10-06] 'A disastrous, incompetent president who plunged the world into chaos': how Biden's foreign policy will be remembered: Interview with Branko Marcetic, who was just about the only journalist to write a critical book (or any book at all) on Biden going into the 2020 campaign: Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Nick Turse: [2023-11-12] For a century, the American way of war has meant killing civilians: "Indiscriminate airstrikes have been a U.S. hallmark from the "banana wars" to the forever wars."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Rashid Khalidi:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Nick Turse:

  • US Army is upgrading an Israeli base to make room for new Boeing jets.

  • How much does Israel's war cost the US? Don't ask the State Department.

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

• Sharon Zhang:

  • [10-07] US has sent record $18B in military aid to Israel in past year -- at a minimum: "This staggering figure represents only part of the total amount of military assistance sent to Israel for its genocide." AP reports a similar figure of at least $17.9 billion.

  • [10-08] Biden officials say ceasefire talks are suspended as Harris names Iran top enemy.

  • [10-07] Israel has killed, wounded or rendered missing 10 percent of Gaza population: "Israel has killed 42,000 Palestinians and injured over 100,000 in a year -- according to the most conservative counts." But there are other estimates, as she has previously reported:

  • [10-04] US health workers back from Gaza estimate death toll is at least 119,000.

  • [09-06] UN expert warns Israel on track to exterminate nearly entire Gaza population.

    "Reading the health experts, I am starting to think with horror that if it's not stopped, Israel's assault could end up exterminating almost the entire population in Gaza over the next couple of years," Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for Palestine, wrote on Friday on social media.

    Albanese cited a recent report from University of Edinburgh global public health chair Devi Sridhar finding that the true death toll from Israel's genocide could be estimated at 335,500 as of September.

    Sridhar based this rough calculation off of an estimate by public health researchers published in The Lancet in July regarding typical indirect death counts from previous conflicts, citing research hailed as the gold standard in the field. At that time, the researchers estimated that the true death toll could be roughly 186,000, stemming from direct killings like bombings as well as Israel's destruction of the health, food and sanitation systems in Gaza.

    The death toll, then, could be between 15 and 20 percent of the population by the end of this year, Albanese said, in just over a year of Israel's genocide. And, as Sridhar writes in her Guardian report, the calculation that she borrows from The Lancet editorial is highly conservative -- meaning the death toll could be even higher than her 335,500 estimate.

  • [10-10] Israel has created "extermination zone" in north Gaza, advocates warn: "Israel is effectively trapping hundreds of thousands in north Gaza and is systematically killin them all."

  • [10-08] Netanyahu openly threatens Lebanese civilians with violence "like Gaza.

Israel vs. world opinion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Ilan Pappé: [06-21] The collapse of Zionism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Election notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Rick Perlstein:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Harris endorsements:

  • Joe Klein: [10-11] I've covered politics for 50 years. Here's why so much hinges on electing Kamala Harris.

  • The Nation: [09-23] The Nation endorses Kamala Harris: "In her own right, and because we oppose Donald Trump's reactionary agenda." I imagine Joan Walsh is responsible for the first clause, although in the fine print, they admit "on foreign policy, however, the positive case is harder to make" -- in what Billmon liked to call a "Hirohito moment" (which I recalled as severe understatement, expressed as innocuously as possible; his definition: "a political statement so painfully cautious and/or ridiculously understated that it's hard not to laugh at it").

Trump:

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

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

  • Marin Scotten: [10-07] "Bad genes": In latest racist attack, Trump says immigrants are genetically inferior.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Nicholas Liu:

  • [10-09] New documentary details Trump's child-separation policy, but NBC won't air it until December: "The filmmaker of Separated, a likely Oscar contender, urged his followers on X to 'make their own inferences.'" Errol Morris directed the film, based on Jacob Soboroff: Separated: Inside an American Tragedy.

  • [10-09] Trump, triggered by Harris interview, rages against "degenerates" on The View: "The former president bashed the 'dumb women' on the show following Kamala Harris' appearance on Tuesday."

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

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

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

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

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

  Also:

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Also on The Apprentice:

  • Brian Karem: [10-02] The Apprentice gets honest about the making of Donald Trump: "There's a reason Trump doesn't want you to see this movie -- which is why you should."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vance, and other Republicans:

• Branden Adams: [10-13] Jim Justice tied West Virginia coal to global financial capital: "While running his coal company Bluestone, Governor Jim Justice ushered the mines of West Virginia deep into the grasp of global financial capital -- at the expense of West Virginians. Why should Swiss bankers get paid before West Virginia teachers?"

• Gaby Del Valle: [09-25] How immigration became a lightning rod in American politics: "Anti-immigrant think tanks and advocacy groups operated on the margins until Trump became president. Now they have molded not only the GOP but also Democrats in their image."

• Ed Kilgore: [10-09] Why Republicans may join Trump's coup this time: "The GOP will be an unmanageable mess if he loses, which means the party may go far to help him deny defeat."

• Chris Lehmann: [10-10] The MAGA maniacs are going all in on deranged hurricane conspiracies: "It's the Jews! It's the deep state! It's anything but a natural weather occurrence made much worse by climate change!" Related here:

  • Kelly Hayes: [10-11] Hurricane season has revealed the right's new climate denial playbook.

• Mark Lawrence Schrad: [10-12] How the Republicans turned disaster relief into political warfare: "Republicans want to use government to punish people, not help them -- and their disaster policy makes that clear."

Harris:

• Jonathan Chait:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:

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

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

  • Thomas B Edsall:

    • [05-29] The gender gap is now a gender gulf. Which also leads back to:

    • [05-01] A huge gender gap is emerging among young voters.

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

Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:

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

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

• Ian Millhiser:

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

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

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

Climate and environment:

• Hurricane Milton:

  • Intelligencer: [10-10] Florida assessing damage from Hurricane Milton: Live updates, at least through 10-10. My impression is that it was not as bad as predicted: it was down to category 3 when it made landfall, which was significantly south of the feared direct Tampa Bay hit, and it moved across Florida and out into the Atlantic rather quickly. Still a lot of rain and wind in a fairly narrow band, and a lot of local damage.

  • Benji Jones: [10-08] How Hurricane Milton exploded into a terrifying Category 5 storm in just hours.

  • Kaksha Patel/Harry Stevens/Niko Kommenda: [10-08] What is making Hurricane Milton so ferocious.

• Hurricane Helene:

  • Dan Stillman: [10-04] Helene has become one of the deadliest hurricanes of the modern era: "the deadliest hurricane to make landfall on the US mainland since Katrina" (1392 deaths in 2005; many more since 1954 are listed, as is Maria's 2975 deaths in 2017, but evidently Puerto Rico doesn't count).

• Michael Cappucci: [10-14] What to know about the latest potential storm brewing in the Atlantic: "The National Hurricane Center is monitoring a disturbance, and meteorologists say it has a 50 percent chance of eventually being named Nadine."

• Umair Irfan:

  • [10-09] Just how doomed is home insurance? "Hurricanes like Milton and Helene are making it harder than ever to insure your home." Aside from the big storms, he spends a lot of time on other factors that are driving insurance into an unaffordable spiral. Then he asks the big question: "is the future insurable?" He throws cold water on the idea of government reinsurance ("would only entrench the current flaws of the insurance market," which sounds to me like a call for better design than a blanket rejection).

  • [10-08] Is FEMA messing up? An expert weighs in. Interview with Claire Connolly Knox.

• Bill McKibben: [10-09] Our dystopian climate isn't just about fires and floods. It's about society fracturing: "Climate disasters risk pulling society apart. To survive we need solidarity -- and only one ticket in the US election offers that."

p>Craig Pittman: Florida lawmakers' climate denialism is pure, unadulterated lunacy: "Climate change will only make future hurricane seasons worse. So why are Florida legislators pretending like nothing's amiss?"

• Jeffrey St Clair: [10-11] Roaming Charges: The call of the wind: Starts off with Hurricane Milton, then Helene, but eventually moves back to the election, and other topics. The Gideon Levy book I quoted in the introduction was in his "Booked Up" section, followed by Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Message, and Rosemary Grant: One Step Sideways, Three Steps Forwards: One Woman's Path to Becoming a Biologist. I'll be checking out his "Sound Grammar," too.

Business, labor, and economists:

• Sarah Jones: [10-10] In college at 40, in debt for a lifetime: "Millions of older Americans owe student loans. Is relief possible?"

• Paul Krugman:

  • [10-07] All the good economic news vindicates Bidenomics: "But not quite in the way you may think."

  • [10-14] Trump has become unmoored in time.

• Maureen Tkacik/Luke Goldstein: [10-02] A toxic explosion in private equity payouts: "Private equity barons just pocketed as much as $850 million from the company behind this week's massive chemical blast in Georgia."

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

• Daniel R Depetris: [09-26] The claim that Russia doesn't possess any solid red lines -- or won't enforce them -- isn't supported by evidence: "Any policy debate on war must reckon with escalatory dynamics."

• Benjamin Hart: [10-08] Why Russia is in more trouble than it looks: Interview with Michael Kofman ("a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace" [sic]).

• Ted Snider: [10-08] How Blinken turned the diplomatic corps into a wing of the military: "In 2021 the administration said it would pursue 'relentless diplomacy.' They call it something else today in Ukraine." Starts with a Henry Kissinger saying (not a direct quote) that is even dumber than I'd expect ("little can be won at the negotiating table that isn't earned on the battlefield") before he quotes Blinken saying the same thing ("all that we can to strengthen Ukraine's position on the battlefield so it has the strongest possible position at the negotiating table"). Also cites a paywalled FT article claiming "it is the diplomats who have pushed for escalation, and the Pentagon and intelligence community who have argued for caution."

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

• Anushka Asthana: [09-14] 'Corbyn had flown too close to the sun': how Labour insiders battled the left and plotted the party's path back to power: "Exclusive extract from new book says Corbyn's appearance at Glastonbury was a key moment in the party's long way back to power. And as one anti-Corbyn group tried to build a moderate coalition, it also needed a credible leader . . ." The book is Taken as Red: How the Election Was Won and Lost.

Other stories:

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

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

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

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

Obituaries

• Donald L Bartlett

  • Glenn Rifkin: [10-09] Donald L Bartlett, 88 dies: prizewinning reporter bared corruption: "Over four decades, he and his colleague James B Steele gained renown for resourceful, often explosive investigative journalism at The Philadelphia Inquirer. I've read several of their books.

• Robert Coover:

  • John Williams: [10-06] Robert Coover, inventive novelist in iconoclastic era, dies at 92: "Once called 'probably the funniest and most malicious' of the postmodernists, his books reflected a career-long interest in reimagining folk stories, fairy tales and political myths."

• More names I noticed:

  • Cissy Houston.
  • Tim Johnson.
  • Ka.
  • Ethel Kennedy.
  • Lily Ledbetter. Also see Susan Moir's post.
  • Robert Mayhew.
  • Marvin Schlachter.
  • Luis Tiant.
  • Ozzie Virgil.

Books

• Steve Benen: Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past

  • Matthew Cooper: [09-04] Would George Orwell recognize today's Republican Party? "Steve Benen's new book grimly and wisely dissects the 'Republican war on the recent past.'"

• Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Message

  • Ezra Klein: [10-11] Ta-Nehisi Coates on Israel: 'I felt lied to': "The journalist discusses his experience visiting Israel and the West Bank."

  • Branko Marcetic: [10-09] Ta-Nehisi Coates is bucking the media's Palestine consensus: "The problem with Ta-Nehisi Coates's recent grilling on Palestine by CBS News's Tony Dokoupil isn't that it was rude. It's that Dokoupil's questioning betrays a fundamental lack of concern for Palestinians' basic humanity, shared across mainstream media."

• Arlie Russell Hochschild: Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right

  • Rhoda Feng: [10-04] Cascading shame: "Arlie Russell Hochschild returns to study the motivations of the left-behind right."

• Bob Woodward: War: Note cover pics of Putin, Zelensky, Biden, Harris, Trump, and Netanyahu.

  • Isaac Stanley-Becker: [10-08] 5 key revelations from Bob Woodward's new book. The author broke out his number one for a longer separate article: [10-08] Trump secretly sent covid tests to Putin during 2020 shortage, new book says.

• Emily Zackin & Chloe N Thurston: The Political Development of American Debt Relief

  • Astra Taylor: [09-25] A means to live: "The past and future of debt resistance."

Music (and other arts?)

• Christian Iszchak: [10-04] An acute case: 4 October 2024.

• Allen Lowe: [10-11] The new Archeophone King Oliver: Just a Facebook note, but longer and much deeper than most reviews. Remind me that I got some press (but no CD) from Archeophone -- first I've heard from them in many years.

• Chris Monsen: [10-09] Quarterly picks: 20 fave album releases circa July through September (and a bit), 2024.

Chatter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music Week

Expanded blog post, September archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 8 albums, 0 A-list

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

New records reviewed this week:

• El Khat: Mute (2024, Glitterbeat): [sp]: B+(*)
• Forq: Big Party (2024, GroundUP): [cd]: B+(*)
• Satoko Fujii Quartet: Dog Days of Summer (2024, Libra): [cd]: B+(***)
• Alden Hellmuth: Good Intentions (2023 [2024], Fresh Sound New Talent): [cd]: B+(***)
• Keefe Jackson/Raoul van der Weide/Frank Rosaly: Live at de Tanker (2022 [2024], Kettle Hole): [cd]: B+(***)
• Simon Moullier: Elements of Light (2023-24 [2024], Candid): [cd]: B+(*)
• Patrick Shiroishi: Glass House (2023-24 [2024], Otherly Love): [sp]: B+(*)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Raphael Roginski: Plays John Coltrane and Langston Hughes (2013 [2024], Unsound): [sp]: B+(**)

Old music:

None

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

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

Daily Log

I posted this on Facebook:

My brother, his wife, and their daughter were in town yesterday, so I threw together this dinner of old (and widely scattered) favorites: fried round steak with mushroom gravy; maque choux (cajun creamed corn); horitiki (greek chopped salad); greek beans with bacon and onion; baked beans with more bacon; dauphonois (potatoes in cream with gruyere). Strawberry shortcake for dessert. Trop de leftovers.

Steve and Josi drove off this morning, expecting a three-day drive with few stops back to Washington. Rachel will still be in town a few more days. Big project was to go through the attic at 2228 S. Main, collect memorabilia, dispose of trash, recycle items of possible interest to others. I grabbed an old coffee table, a few books, and a couple boxes of scattered papers that I'll need more time to sort out (and mostly discard). Rachel has a pickup that's pretty fully packed. She has people coming over th pick up the trash and recyclables today. Still quite a bit of stuff in the attic, but Ram and I agreed we could make another pass through that later.

I took off yesterday to cook. I had little time to prepare, so wasn't able to shop ahead, and got a late start. My mother probably got the steak recipe off a Campbell's soup can. Before she came up with it, she often fried round steak, then made gravy, to be served on the side (as with fried chicken, pork chops, etc.). After chicken and dumplings, this is probably my favorite comfort food. I add some sauteed mushrooms to fortify the canned soup. I figured the potatoes would pair well with it. The salad offers a nice contrast, and can be assembled in spare moments without any logistic concerns.

The rest of the meal was "inventory reduction": the green beans and corn came from the freezer; I had an unopened package of bacon -- something I always used to keep in stock, but have rarely touched in the past year -- plus cans of beans. The steak, potatoes, and baked beans could share the same 350°F oven for an hour, so that part could hardly have been simpler. The excess bacon went into the green beans, and I split a package of pancetta between the bean dishes.

Only things I had to buy for the dinner were: round steak, gold potatoes, cream, cucumber, grape tomatoes, green bell pepper, some herbs (I could have used dried) and strawberries. I bought a couple more things just in case, but wound up using old stock instead (soup, cheese, etc.). Major snafu was that I didn't get the shortcakes mixed let alone baked before dinner, so dessert was delayed. Normally I try to get dessert wrapped up early, often the evening before.

My cell phone is a Samsung Galaxy S9, which was produced from March 2018 to March 2019, so it is 5+ years old. Back cover has disconnected itself, probably due to battery expansion, so the obvious fix is to replace the battery, which I have a $55 quote to do (Fixit Wireless, 1526 W 21st St, 316-347-6974). However, alternative (preferred by Laura) is to buy a new phone. So would a new phone be worth it?

Samsung Galaxy S9 has 4GB RAM, 64G, 3000mAh battery, 5.8 in 2960x1440 super AMOLED screen, Wi-Fi 802.11, Bluetooth 5.0, 5.81x2.70x0.33 in, 163g. Galaxy numbering went from S9 to S10 to S20, S21, S22, S23, S24.

CNet best phones of 2024:

• Apple iPhone16
• Samsung Galaxy S24: $800, 6.2-inch AMOLED (5.79x2.78x0.3, 168g), 8G RAM + 128/256GB, 4000mAh battery, Wi-Fi 6E 802.11, Bluetooth 5.3
• Motorola Razr Plus (flip phone)
• Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 6
• Google Pixel 9

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Draft file opened 2024-10-02 12:17 PM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Top story threads:

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

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

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

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

• Mondoweiss:

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

  • [10-03] Day 363: Israel admits to military losses in South Lebanon fighting against Hezbollah: "Israel has killed 150 people across Gaza since Iran launched its retaliatory ballistic missile attack against Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli airstrikes continue across Lebanon, with the death toll reaching into the thousands."

  • [10-07] Day 367: Israel orders new evacuations in Gaza, expands bombing in Lebanon: "The Israeli ground invasion of southern Lebanon continues to face stiff resistance along the border one week on, while the Israeli army has renewed its assault on northern Gaza, laying siege to Jabalia refugee camp for the sixth time since October 7."

  • [10-02] Iran launches hundreds of ballistic missiles at Israel in retaliation for Haniyeh and Nasrallah assassinations.

  • [10-06] 'A time of painful birth and major transformation': a senior Hamas leader reflects on October 7 and its aftermath: "In an exclusive interview with Mondoweiss, senior Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzouk discusses Operation Al-Aqsa Flood's goals and accomplishments, international Palestine solidarity, and what comes next after a year of Israeli genocide in Gaza."

  • [10-07] Mustafa Barghouti reflects on the future of the Palestinian struggle in a time of genocide and ethnic cleansing: "In an interview with Mondoweiss, General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative Dr. Mustafa Barghouti reflects on the importance of Palestinian national unity, the challenges facing the Palestinian struggle, and the right to resist."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Qassam Muaddi:

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

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

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

Lebanon:

• Peter Beaumont:

  • [10-06] Israel's lack of vision in multi-fronted war may be fatally exposed: "After Iranian strikes damage bases and IDF takes casualties in Lebanon, experts say Israel's military doctrine could be found wanting."

  • [10-07] Israel launches intense wave of airstrikes on 120 sites in Lebanon: "Military says 100 aircraft used in attack on targets in south of country as Israeli operations expand on multiple fronts."

• Joseph Daher: [10-05] Why Hezbollah's still standing despite Israel assassinating Hassan Nasrallah.

• Sophia Goodfriend: For Israel's weary army, Lebanon war is attempt to salvage its image: "Dystopian displays of technological prowess serve to distract the Israeli public from the military's failure to achieve its war aims."

• William Hartung: [10-02] Weapons stocks blast off as bombs drop, troops invade Lebanon: "CEOs hide behind 'defense' to justify soaring profits and rarely account for how their products are used."

• Ellen Ioanes/Nicole Narea: [10-02] Israel has invaded Lebanon. Here's what could come next: "With Israel's Lebanon invasion, the Middle East is on the verge of chaos."

• Abdaljawad Omar: [10-03] Israel's forever war and what comes next: "In Gaza and Lebanon, Israel is projecting its force while burrowing itself deeper into a quagmire. While it may achieve brief operational successes, it fails to extinguish the spirit of the resistance or coerce it into submission."

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

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

• Michael Arria:

  • [10-01] The Shift: Biden, Harris rally around Israel after Lebanon attacks.

  • [10-03] The Shift: US preemptively backs Israel after Iran attack: "Joe Biden said he opposes Netanyahu hitting Iran's nuclear sites, but why should anyone trust him? The administration backed Israel's invasion of Lebanon while he was publicly calling for a ceasefire. Will we see a similar contradiction on Iran?"

  • [10-04] What are the Biden administration's motivations in the Middle East? "Mondoweiss spoke to analyst Mouin Rabbani about U.S. motivations in the Middle East and why the Biden administration fully supports Israel's escalations against Lebanon and Iran."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Dave Reed:

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

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

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

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

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

Israel vs. world opinion:

• October 7 memorials and reappraisals: Yet another "never forget" date, a rare chance for Israelis to recapture the magic of victimhood.

  • Guardian staff: [10-07] Israel marks 7 October with memorials and protests, as attacks on Lebanon and Gaza continue.

  • Benjamin Hart: [10-07] How Israelis are feeling one year after October 7: Interview with Dahlia Sheindlin.

  • Jon Henley: [10-07] World leaders mark first anniversary of 7 October attack on Israel. It's also an opportunity to pile on Hamas, as if Israel had no agency in the 364 days that followed.

  • Noga Tarnopolsky: [10-07] A year after October 7, Israelis ask, 'where is the state?' "An anniversary of grief and disbelief."

• Zack Beauchamp: [10-04] A year after October 7: How Hamas's attack and Israel's response broke the world: "The past year of war has been a nightmare for Palestinians, Israelis, and much of the planet."

• Shane Burley: [10-01] US Jewish institutions are purging their staffs of anti-Zionists.

• Ana Gebrim/Marie-Caroline Saglio-Yatzimirsky: [10-05] Seeing and not seeing the catastrophe: Notes on fragmentation: "What prevents us from seeing and comprehending the catastrophe in Gaza? And why is there silence?"

• Jacob Goldberg: [10-03] American Bar Association endorses bill to codify controversial IHRA antisemitism definition after refusing to adopt it itself.

• Jonathan Guyer: [10-04] The price of power: "America's chief humanitarian official rose to fame by speaking out against atrocities. Now she's trapped by one." Welcome to hell, Samantha Power.

• Jamal Kanj: [10-07] Netanyahu's intoxicated euphoria will turn into a prolonged hangover.

• Nesrine Malik: [10-07] I wish you could see the living nightmare in Palestine. But how much more must we see before something is tone? "This won't end until those in power understand that you can't have peace and stability while denying Palestinians their rights."

• Jeffrey D Sachs: [09-30] Israel's ideology of genocide must be confronted and stopped: "Israel's violent extremists now in control of its government believe that Israel has a Biblical license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people."

VP Debate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  On the moderators:

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

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

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

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

Election notes:

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

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

Trump:

• Jonathan Chait: [10-04] Why a second Trump term might go full social darwinist: "Tax the poor, slash the welfare state, tax cuts for the rich . . ."

• Chas Danner: [10-05] Elon Musk jumped for Trump at Butler rally.

• Kevin T Dugan: [10-04] Trump Media has major new problems: "A whistleblower alleges that CEO Devin Nunes is running the struggling Donald Trump-owned company into the ground."

• Alex Galbraith:

  • [10-06] Trump describes assassination attempt during return to Butler.

  • [10-05] Vance says Trump shooting inevitable: "Speaking in the town where Trump was nearly assassinated, Vance laid blame for the shooting on Democrats."

• Margaret Hartmann: [10-07] What we learned from Melania's Maria Bartiromo interview.

• Ed Kilgore:

  • [10-06] A list of everything Trump claims is 'election interference'.

  • [10-07] Trump's politicization of Hurricane Helene is scandalous, even for him.

Vance, and other Republicans:

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

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

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

• No More Mister Nice Blog:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harris:

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

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

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

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

Walz, Biden, and other Democrats:

• Jonathan Martin: [10-05] Mapping the Carville era, from Bill Clinton's alter ego to Joe Biden's bete noire: "The legendary political consultant had just completed a documentary on his career. Then came its most consequential chapter in 30 years."

Supreme Court, legal matters, and other crimes:

• Elie Honig: [10-03] Jack Smith's October Surprise: That's the title on the index page. The title on the page itself is "Jack Smith's October cheap shot." Honig's complaining that Smith's "proactive filing" was too long, disclosing many more details of his case than was necessary, and that filing it ahead of the election was "prejudicial." Honig goes to great lengths here to parade his disapproval. In charging Smith with playing politics to get at Trump, he never considers the possibility that politics is what has kept this case from going to trial, and that the only way to break that logjam might be to do what Smith has done, and remind the public what evidence says, and why it is all the more relevant before the election. The way the court system is rigged, it's unlikely that Trump will ever "face justice," at least on federal charges, but the people deserve to know what he did, before they risk giving him the chance to do it again.

  • Jamelle Bouie: [10-05] Trump did nothing to stop the mob.

  • Kyle Cheney/Josh Gerstein: 11 damning details in Jack Smith's new brief in the Trump election case.

  • Nia Prater: [10-03] What's in Jack Smith's unsealed January 6 motion?

• Ian Millhiser: [10-03] The Supreme Court will decide if Oklahoma must execute a man it doesn't want to kill: "The state's Republican attorney general took the rare step of asking the Supreme Court to set aside Richard Glossip's capital conviction."

• Li Zhou: [09-26] The Eric Adams indictment, explained: "Fancy plane tickets, donations, and political favors: what to know about the charges." I hadn't noted the New York City mayor, which seems like the sort of run-of-the-mill corruption that occasionally traps unwary Democrats, yet Republicans -- despite being ideologically committed to furthering corruption -- are rarely held accountable for. That plus it's a local issue, but in a locale that generates a lot of political media, so we're getting a cluster of stories.

  • Jeffery C Mays/Stefanos Chen: [10-05] Big business saw an ally in Eric Adams, and overlooked his issues: "New York's business community threw its support behind Adams, and continued backing him even as his legal problems began to threaten the governance of the city."

  • Nia Prater:

    • [10-04] New poll paints extremely bleak picture for Eric Adams.

    • [10-04] The key people caught up in the Eric Adams investigations.

Climate and environment:

• Rachel M Cohen: [10-07] Florida criminalized homelessness. Then came hurricanes Helene and Milton. "Around the country, anti-camping policies are complicating disaster recovery."

• Sean Illing: [09-29] The climate crisis is here. We can still have a better world. "Our hotter planet doesn't have to be a hopeless planet." Interview with Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, recent author of What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures.

• Intelligencer Staff: [10-07] Hurricane Milton intensifies to category 5, Florida prepares: live updates. The storm formed in a hot spot in the Gulf of Mexico, heading northeast. Projection is that it will hit Tampa, with 175 mph winds and a 15-foot storm surge, on Wednesday, cross Florida, and continue heading east into the Atlantic. More Milton:

  • Benji Jones: [10-07] How Hurricane Milton exploded into a terrifying Category 5 storm in just hours.

• Anatol Lieven: [10-04] Hurricane response: This is 'national defense': "The federal government is missing sight of real US priorities."

• Rebecca Solnit: [10-04] Hurricane Helene is a humanitarian crisis -- and a climate disaster: "Behind the violence of extreme weather is that of the fossil fuel industry, and Americans are suffering for it." And now Milton is coming.

• Li Zhou: [10-03] Get used to more absurdly hot Octobers: "This year's unrelenting heat, explained." Last few days here in Wichita have been in the mid-90s, which is what I expect for first two weeks of September, but hard to remember anything this hot this late in the year.

Business, labor, and economists:

• Peter Coy: [10-04] The dollar is too strong for America's own good.

• Ellen Ioanes: [10-01] The massive dock workers' strike, explained.

• Karen Landman: [10-03] The profit-obsessed monster destroying American emergency rooms: "Private equity decimated emergency care in the United States -- without you even noticing."

• Dylan Scott: [10-02] Why is US health care like this? "America unintentionally built a health care system that is hard to fix." Short article, but covers the basics. It's not a system. It wasn't designed. It was created as opportunities to profit were relentlessly exploited, resulting in various gaps and inequities, which have been partly compensated for with a patchwork of fixes designed mostly to preserve previous profit centers. And each of those profit centers has its own lobby, which is to say clout within the American political "system."

Ukraine and Russia:

• Aaron Sobczak: [10-03] Diplomacy Watch: Russia capitalizing on battlefield surge: "As Moscow mulls biggest war budget ever, Ukrainians appear increasingly open to negotiations."

• Mark Mazzetti/Adam Entous: [10-05] Behind Trump's views on Ukraine: Putin's gambit and a political grudge: "The roots of Donald Trump's animus toward Ukraine -- an issue with profound consequences should he be elected again -- can be found in a yearlong series of events spanning 2016 and 2017."

• Constant Méheut: [10-05] Ukraine's Donbas strategy: Retreat slowly and maximize Russia's losses: "The idea is to use rope-a-dope tactics, letting Russian forces pound away until they have exhausted themselves. It's far from clear if the Ukrainian strategy will succeed." Maybe that's because "rope-a-dope" is a strategy that favors the one with the greater reserves of strength, which isn't Ukraine.

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

Other stories:

• Jimmy Carter at 100:

  • John Nichols: [10-01] Jimmy Carter, at 100, is best honored by listening to his advice about the Middle East: "In interviews with The Nation over the years, the former president outlined an approach to foreign policy that respects Palestinian rights and charts a course toward peace."

• Annie Aguiar: [10-01] MacArthur foundation announces 2024 'genius' grant winners.

• Jonathan Reisman: [10-05] I'm a doctor. ChatGPT's bedside manner is better than mine.

Obituaries

Books

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

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

  • Perry Bacon Jr.: [10-03] Why you should read Ta-Nehisi Coates's new book: "The Message, his first major examination of politics in the Biden era, lives up to the hype."

  • Jay Caspian Kang: [10-04] Why Ta-Nehisi Coates writes: "In The Message, Coates urges young writers to aspire to 'nothing less than doing their part to save the world,' but his latest work reveals the limits of his own advice."

  • Becca Rothfeld: [10-05] In The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about the stories that fuel bigotry: "Coates's latest, a travelogue and a meditation on aesthetics and politics, is not dramatic enough to be as provocative as its loudest critics have claimed."

Music (and other arts?)

Chatter

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

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

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

Current count: same

Tuesday, October 01, 2024

Daily Log

I posted my Expert Witness notice for Music Week. When I'm writing the post, Facebook initially shows me a preview for the link, picking the first image (album cover) from the page, but that image disappears when the notice actually posts. I was just curious, so I clicked on the "i" icon ("Show more information on this link"), which popped up the following dialog box:

About this content
Link unavailable
Could not find a Facebook Page for tomhull.com

So wtf does this mean? Does it mean that my blog should have its own Facebook page? How would I set that up? If it did, would that fix the problem with disappearing previews?

When I go into my Facebook account and edit profile, I see:

• Profile picture: me as baby in arms of Uncle Allen.
• Cover photo: none.
• Avatar: none.
• Bio: none. ["Describe yourself . . ."]
• Customize your intro: tomhull.com
• Featured: none.

Sep 2024