“We live in an oligarchy, but with the humidity, it feels like a dictatorship.”

– Judah Friedlander

+ This was the week the worms turned. Some of them, anyway: A super majority of Americans now oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza; Bari Weiss and Donald Trump admitted Palestinians are starving (if not that they are being starved or pointing the finger at who is starving them);  France, the UK and Canada announced they are ready to endorse Palestinian statehood next month at the UN; a majority of Senate Democrats voted to halt (offensive) weapons shipments to Israel; Israel’s two leading human rights groups, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, finally concluded that Israel is committing genocide (Bernie Sanders still hasn’t); Zohran Mamdani is leading the polls among Jewish voters in the NYC mayoral race; Barack Obama finally said something, though exactly what isn’t quite clear; Obama’s former fixer and hatchet man Rahm Emanuel put the blame “on Israel’s doorstep…where it belongs;” and the New York Times printed a column by acclaimed Holocaust scholar Omar Bartov explaining why Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Impressive. Yet the killing and dying continues.

+ Despite the impression given by the rush of politicians and pundits this week expressing shock about photos of emaciated kids in Gaza, people do not begin to starve to death in a matter of days. Death by starvation usually occurs over a period of months. So it is in Gaza, where only two days after the attacks of October 13, 2023, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced Israel’s intention to impose a forced famine on Gaza. Gallant said what Israel was going to do, then Israel did it.

Since then, Israel has tightly restricted the flow of food and water into the Strip, before imposing a total embargo in March of this year. The consequences on the health of Palestinians in Gaza were immediate. By January 2024, UN famine researchers began to detect loss of weight and muscle density in Palestinians across Gaza. In December 2024, desperate to keep its weapons sales to Israel rolling, the Biden administration suppressed a report from its own State Department determining that conditions in northern Gaza exceeded the threshold for famine. Unfortunately for Biden, the report leaked and some of its authors resigned in protest. So people have known the awful truth for more than eight months, even as many continued to publicly deny it.

Then in March 2025, Israel imposed a total blockade on any food or water entering Gaza.  Again, this savage act was no secret. It was publicly announced by Bibi himself, who claimed that forcing Palestinians to go without food would make them more likely to “voluntarily” leave Gaza. In other words, ethnic cleansing, or genocide, if you will, either by migration or death.  As a consequence, the warnings from the UN, the World Food Program, the International Red Cross, humanitarian aid groups and medical workers on the ground about the entire population of Gaza–more than two million Palestinians–being in the grip of famine became more and more dire.

Yet only a couple of weeks ago, 14 US senators–half of them Democrats (Schumer, Schiff, Coons, Cantwell, Rosen, Klobochar, and Booker) feted and proudly stood for a photo-op with Benjamin Netanyahu. (Well, Booker tried to hide his face behind another senator, but that only served to emphasize his consciousness of guilt.) For months, these politicians and policy makers have stayed muted as Israel cut off food, water, and formula to infants, toddlers, and nursing mothers. Now, as their weakened systems shut down and they’ve started dying en masse, as predicted, no amount of performative ass-covering can exculpate them from their deep complicity in one of the most horrific crimes imaginable: children being forced to starve to death while huge stacks of aid pallets and trucks filled with food are only miles away. 

+ How long did it take the press to go from helping manufacture a case to invade Iraq into suddenly realizing there was no case for going to war in Iraq and that they needed to start covering their asses for their complicity in the making of a catastrophe? Was Abu Ghraib the turning point (April 2004)? The leaking of the first Torture Memo (June 2004)? The Sunni Awakening (2005)? Now, here we are again.

+ Maryam Alwan: “As a student protester who went viral for getting arrested at the Columbia encampment, I am seeing posts saying that we were right—and I don’t want to hear it. The only thing I want to see is everyone mobilizing in the streets right now. We do not have the privilege of despair.”

+ Adam Tooze on Israel’s manufactured famine in Gaza:

Q. Across the hot spots of the world in 2025, what is the percentage of the population that is at risk?

Adam Tooze: In Nigeria, mainly in the north, it is one-sixth of the population. In Myanmar and the DRC, it is roughly a quarter of the population. In Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan, and Haiti–the places most commonly cited in arguments about the application of “special standards” to Israel–the share of the population at risk is between 49 and 57 percent. In Gaza, the share is 100 percent. The risk of famine is total.

+ Of the Palestinians who have starved to death in Gaza since the beginning of the war, 80 percent are children.

+ There’s nothing left to say…

+ Mark Brauner, an emergency room physician from Eugene, Oregon, who just returned from volunteering in Gaza: “A lot of children have passed the point of no return…The gut lining has started to auto-digest and will no longer [absorb] water or nutrition. Death is imminent for 1000s.”

+ Trump is mad because starving families in Gaza haven’t said thank-you for the pittance of food he’s sent to Gaza…

REPORTER: Should Israel be doing more to allow food into Gaza?

TRUMP: Say it, again?

REPORTER: Should Israel be doing more to allow food into Gaza?

TRUMP: What is she saying?

SOMEONE ELSE: Should Israel be doing more to allow food in Gaza?

TRUMP: We gave $60 million two weeks ago and no one even acknowledged it for food. And it’s terrible, you really at least want to have somebody say thank you. We gave $60 million two weeks ago for food for Gaza. And nobody acknowledged it. Nobody talks about it. It makes you feel bad when you do that and you have other countries not giving anything. None of the European countries, by the way, gave…nobody gave but us. And nobody said, Gee, thank you very much. It would be nice to have at least a thank you. And I took a lot of heat. You know, when I do that, a lot of people aren’t happy about that because they say, Well, why are we doing it and nobody else. But I think we had a, uh, humanitarian reason for doing it. What’s going to happen, I don’t know. I can tell you that Hamas, as I said, would happen at the end. You know we’ve gotten back a lot of hostages, a tremendous number of hostages. Most of them. Now we have dead hostages and the mothers want them back.”

+ Nick Maynard, a surgeon who volunteered at a hospital in southern Gaza, wrote in The Guardian:

I’ve just finished operating on another severely malnourished young teenager. A seven-month-old baby lies in our paediatric intensive care unit, so tiny and malnourished that I initially mistook her for a newborn. The phrase ‘skin and bones’ doesn’t do justice to the way her body has been ravaged. She is literally wasting away before our eyes and, despite our best efforts, we are powerless to save her.

+ Pope Leo from the Southside: “Starving people to death is a diabolical way of waging war. It must end.”

+ From the findings of a new study on the life expectancy of Palestinians in Gaza reported in The Lancet this week:

Life expectancy at birth reportedly declined by approximately 35 years in 2024. This represents a greater collapse in longevity than that recorded during the genocide in Rwanda, where life expectancy at birth declined from age 42·9 years in 1993 to age 12·2 years in 1994.

+ Now that it’s impossible to deny that Palestinians in Gaza are being starved to death, the genocide-deniers have blamed this atrocity not on Israel’s embargo but on Hamas (naturally) stealing the dribble of food that Israel allows into Gaza. Yet, even US AID could find no evidence this is the case, and they had a lot of incentive to find or even manufacture a case against Hamas. Even the Israeli military admitted the same this week. 

+ As a former contributor to the late, lamented Lies of Our Times (LOOT), not much shocks me about the New York Times anymore. But describing the daily massacres of starving Palestinians at food stations as a “crude form of crowd control” made me gasp in astonishment…

+ International Crisis Group: “Gaza is tipping from mass starvation toward mass death.”

+ The NYT has apparently recruited new editors from the ranks of the health insurance industry, who have used their vast experience deny claims to now minimize the import of Palestinian kids who’ve died of starvation by claiming they have “pre-existing conditions”–the same vile assertion made by Holocaust deniers about Anne Frank, that typhus, not the Nazis, killed her.

+ The NYT’s clarification is a more delicate way of saying what the German journalist Tobias Huch, in a full-frontal embrace of his nation’s Nazi “past,” said explicitly…

+ The Washington Post published the names and ages of more than 18,500 Palestinian children killed by Israeli forces in Gaza. Palestinian kids have been killed at the rate of one-an-hour since October 13, 2023. At least 900 Palestinian infants were killed before reaching their first birthday.

+ The BBC’s Jeremy Bowen reporting on an Israeli aid drop flight over Gaza: “Israelis don’t want us to film outside the window at the devastation in Gaza…communities in the north of Gaza are flat, there’s nothing left…Israel will not allow reporters, like myself, to enter Gaza to report the story and they don’t want us to see it.”

+ More than two-thirds of  Democratic primary voters in NYC  agree with Zohran Mamdani’s positions on Israel, including arresting Netanyahu. 57% say they might oppose Dems who don’t endorse Mamdani for mayor, including the party’s two Brooklyn-based leaders in Congress.

+ Trump on the Israeli (no one ever mentions the 3350 Palestinian hostages held by Israel) hostages: “Not one person said there was any love from anybody. In other words, you have hundreds of people, and you see it in the movies where somebody is a prisoner and somebody is helping. You even see it with Germany, where people would be led into a house and live in an attic in secret. I said Did you see anything like did they wink at you, say Don’t worry, you’ll be okay?”

+ Jonathon Sumpton, a historian and former senior judge who sat on the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom from 2012 to 2018, has written an important legal essay on whether Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza constitutes the ultimate war crimes, concluding:

I sometimes wonder what Israel’s defenders would regard as unacceptable, if the current level of Israeli violence in Gaza is not enough. It is impossible for any decent person to be unmoved by the scale of arbitrarily imposed human suffering, or the spectacle of a powerful army brutally assaulting a population already on its knees. This is not self-defence. It is not even the kind of collateral damage which can be unavoidable in war. It is collective punishment, in other words, revenge, visited not just on Hamas but on an entire population. It is, in short, a war crime.

+ Note the date on this article in JEWISH CURRENTS by the JEWISH-ISRAELI genocide scholar and historian Raz Segal…The intent (mens rea) to commit genocide was clear a week into the war and no one–not the UN, the US, the UK, France, Russia, or China–has stopped them in the 665 days since.

+ An Israeli soldier told the leading Israeli newspaper, YNet, about forces shooting civilians near a hospital and abducting children:

I was stationed in front of a hospital in Gaza and it took a few days until the company commander ordered not to shoot the elderly and children. For a few days, that’s what happened. It was clear that it was bad. But you are under the influence–some acted out of a sense of revenge, some were very afraid and some were simply tired and when you are tired you don’t think. There was an incident that stuck with me. We took teenagers and used them as human shields. They walked in front of the force, opened doors in case there was an explosive device or terrorists. We just took people from the humanitarian axis. The whole time they were with us, they were blindfolded and handcuffed. You have to take them to the bathroom and open their underwear and you see them shaking.

+ Emnan Abdelhadi: “Every editor who canceled a story about Palestine brought us here. Every boss who censored an employee. Everyone who said “not this way” to protesters. Every university admin calling the cops. Bloody. All your hands are bloody, and we will never forget.”

+ After two years of silence in the face of a genocide, Obama finally offers his version of “thoughts and prayers”…

+ Mouin Rabbani: “Samantha Power, who has built her career and reputation as a fearless and determined opponent of genocide, has, after almost two years, put out a statement about the Gaza Genocide:

End of statement.”

+ Maine Senator Angus King: “I cannot defend the indefensible…I am through supporting the actions of the current Israeli government and will advocate—and vote—for an end to any United States support whatsoever until there is a demonstrable change in the direction of Israeli policy.”

+ Support for Israel’s genocidal military actions in Gaza has collapsed among U.S. adults, with only about one-third approving, according to Gallup.— a drop of 20% from the beginning of the Israeli invasion of Gaza, when about half of Americans approved of Israel’s operation.

+ In the latest Gallup poll, only 8% of Democratic Party voters support Israel’s actions in Gaza. Meanwhile, 88% of Democratic Party elected officials support Israel’s actions in Gaza.

+ He just can’t say the word…Sen. Bernie Sanders on Gaza: “Genocide is a legal term. What is going on now clearly is absolutely horrific…But the important point is not what you call it — it is horror — the answer is what the hell do we do about it? Should the United States taxpayer should your taxpayer dollars go to support a government that is doing it? That is the most important issue.”

+ Sanders was able to force the Senate to vote on a new bill that would halt US “offensive” weapons sales to Israel. The bill failed, with all Republicans voting against it, but for the first time, garnered a majority of Democrats, including three top recipients of AIPAC largesse: Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Tammy Baldwin, all of whom received over $265,000 in 2024. So, there’s a sliver of hope.

+ Here are the 14 Democratic senators who voted to continue sending weapons to Israel for use in a genocide:

+ Bob Vylan: “Watching politicians and mainstream media suddenly change their rhetoric on the genocide makes me feel like I’ve truly gone crazy. Can someone please confirm that a few weeks ago they villainized us on the front pages for being against this while they were very much pro-genocide?”

On Monday, Yuval Abraham, co-director of No Other Land: “An Israeli settler just shot Odeh Hadalin in the lungs, a remarkable activist who helped us film No Other Land in Masafer Yatta. Residents identified Yinon Levi, sanctioned by the EU and US, as the shooter. This is him in the video firing like crazy.” A few hours later, Yuval posted that “Odeh died. Murdered.” On Tuesday, Yuval said, “After killing Odeh [Hadalin], Yinon [Levi] pointed at his family and instructed soldiers to arrest 4 of them. They are still jailed while he was just released on house arrest. A system which punishes the victims (who are under military law) and rewards the shooter (who is under civilian law).”

+ Two months ago, Odeh Hadalin was invited to the US at the invitation of Jewish groups—he was detained at San Francisco International Airport and deported without explanation.

Odeh’s killer, Yimon Levy, had been removed from the sanctions list by Trump.

+ US labor leader Christian Smalls, co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union, was seized by the IDF while trying to bring food into Gaza on the latest Freedom Flotilla. After he was taken into Israeli custody, Smalls was beaten by seven uniformed Israelis, who also choked him and kicked him in the legs.

+ Rep. Summer Lee: “Chris Smalls—a Black American labor leader—was trying to feed Palestinians being starved in Gaza. The IDF detained and beat him for it. This assault must not go unnoticed and he must be freed immediately. Israel must be held to account. Let aid through. End the genocide.” (Smalls was finally released by the Israelis on Thursday and is now in Jordan.)

+ “Wow!” 147 out of 193 nations have (or soon plan to) recognized Palestinian statehood, including  India, Vietnam, the UK, and half the EU nations you just boasted about cutting a trade deal with…

+ The countries that haven’t endorsed Palestinian statehood or cut off arms supplies and trade with Israel by this point are the countries most likely to put their own and neighboring populations under military occupation.

+ Jeff Shuhrke: “For the crime of being right *all along*, countless young people in the US have been physically attacked, doxxed, smeared, detained, suspended, expelled & denied their diplomas. They’ve more than earned the right to decide who is & isn’t welcome in the anti-genocide ‘coalition.’”

+ Everyone opposed the death camps after the Soviets liberated them…

+ In the latest Gallup poll, only 8% of Democratic Party voters support Israel’s actions in Gaza. Meanwhile, 88% of Democratic Party elected officials support Israel’s actions in Gaza.

+++

+ The ICE agents who abducted her husband, Darwin Contreras, in a courthouse in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, wore “something you can get from Walmart,” said Elizabeth DeJesus. They didn’t say who they were or where they were taking him.

Darwin came to the US from El Salvador 20 years ago in search of his mother when he was seven years old. He was detained at the border instead and spent several years in foster care. Eventually, he was reunited with his mother and they moved to Bethlehem. He was a track star in high school and won a presidential fitness award from Barack Obama.

Since graduating, he has kept steady work and married an American citizen. He was nabbed by ICE after a routine court appearance. DeJesus says that Darwin is suffering mentally and physically while in ICE custody, awaiting a hearing: “When he got there, he was not adjusting well. He was not ok. His mental health was not good.”

+ Miguel Angel Ponce, a 33-year-old U.S. citizen born in College Station, Texas, was grabbed by ICE, handcuffed and detained for more than 2 hours. “I felt kidnapped,” he said. “They just put me in handcuffs and took me to another location.” The ICE agents said he “looked like” someone they were looking for—told him to “shave your beard” to avoid future arrest.

+ Will Kim came to the US from South Korea when he was five years old. He’s had a Green Card as a lawful permanent resident of the US for many years. Currently, Kim is a PhD student at Texas A&M, where he’s researching a vaccine for Lyme disease. Last week, he was detained at San Francisco International Airport. The feds have offered no reason for his arrest and have denied Kim access to his attorney, Eric Lee. Kim was allowed only a single brief call to his mother. The only blemish on his record is a minor marijuana possession charge, which was settled in a diversion program and should have been expunged. “My client Will Kim has a green card, grew up in the US, became a scientist & is researching Lyme disease vaccines,” Eric Lee wrote on Twitter.  “He has spent more than 7 days in a CBP airport detention ctr w/ no daylight, sleeping in a chair, no access to a lawyer. Another brutal attack on immigrants & science. Free Will!”

+ Jon Luke Evans, the only black police officer in the town of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, was detained by ICE after he attempted to purchase a gun for his job. After Evans’s arrest, Patricia Hyde, a spokesperson for ICE’s Boston office, smugly quipped: “The fact that a police department would hire an illegal alien and unlawfully issue him a firearm while on duty would be comical if it weren’t so tragic.” But Evans isn’t an illegal alien. He has a valid work permit that doesn’t expire until March 2030 and Maine is one of the states that allows immigrants to work as police officers. “We rely on the Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify program to ensure we are meeting our obligations,” said the town’s Police Chief Elise Chard. “We are distressed and deeply concerned about this apparent error on the part of the federal government.”

+ According to the Migration Policy Institute, around 41% of the US population now lives in a jurisdiction where local officers have been deputized by ICE to carry out immigration enforcement.

+ After Trump and Kristi Noem made a huge deal about Alligator Auschwitz, both ICE and the federal immigration courts are distancing themselves from the unfortunate people being held in these brutal, inhumane conditions, saying their detention is purely up to Florida and the feds don’t have jurisdiction, so no one being held there can seek bond. “‘This is an unprecedented situation where hundreds of detainees are held incommunicado, with no ability to access the courts, under legal authority that has never been explained and may not exist,’ argued attorneys for the American Civil Rights Union Foundation and Americans for Immigrant Justice in federal court.

+ Rep. Nancy Mace: “One of my favorite things to watch on YouTube these days are the court hearings where illegals are in court and ICE shows up to drag them out of court and deport them. I can think of nothing more American…” 

+ A GAO study found that ICE deported at least 70 American citizens from 2016 to 2021.

+ ICE’s targeting of foreign students is having its predictable effect: talented foreign students are avoiding the US. A report by the National Association of International Educators estimates that the US will see a 30-40% decline in new enrollment, at a cost of a loss of $7 billion in revenue and 60,000 lost jobs in higher education. 

+ ICE has exploited a legal loophole in HIPAA to spy on your medical records…

+ Andry Hernández entered the US legally. He waited in Mexico, then went to a port of entry. While there, a cretinous CBP officer thought his “mom” and “dad” tattoos were gang signs and sent him to ICE detention. Then Trump had him deported to El Salvador’s torture camp prison, where he was regularly beaten and forced to perform oral sex on a guard. Hernández, who is finally out to tell his horrifying story, says prisoners at CECOT were routinely dragged to a small windowless cell called the Island for complaining about conditions at the prison, where they were beaten with police batons. He called CECOT “hell on Earth.” 

+ According to interviews by Pro Publica, Venezuelans deported by Trump to El Salvador’s notorious torture-prison were subjected to months of physical and psychological abuse and torture that began the day they arrived and continued until the day they were sent to Venezuela in a prisoner swap. They said that the Salvador guards beat them with their fists, boots and batons, shot them with rubber pellets, and forced them to lick other men’s backs.

+ Spencer Chretien, the highest-ranking official in the State Department’s refugee and migration bureau, admitted last week that the Trump administration’s refugee program for South Africa is intended exclusively for white people. Will they all be relocated to the two “all white communities” in the Ozarks (one in Arkansas and one in Missouri) established by the ethno-nationalist group, Return to the Land.

+ Speaking of South Africa, the world’s richest person, who was allowed to ransack the US government from the inside-out for five months, retweeted and endorsed this racist bilge…

+ According to the energy statistics group Ageb, German hard coal-fired power generation increased by 23.3% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period last year.

+ A new study from the UK finds that being hit by an SUV (as compared to a regular car) “considerably” increases the risk of death for children, and even more so for young children.

+ Marine heat waves in 2023 covered at least 96% of the Earth’s oceans and lasted four times longer than normal. The heat waves of 2024 were just as bad.

+ The 2025 fire season in Canada is already the third worst in history and will almost certainly become the second worst. A study from 2018 found that over the last six decades, the fire season in Canada is starting one week earlier and ending one week later. The fire season is likely even longer now.

+ India is on track to meet its 2030 renewable targets and will exceed the US in the deployment of new wind and solar generators this year.

+ Trump in Scotland this week: “And the other thing I say to Europe: we will not allow a windmill to be built in the United States. They’re killing us. They’re killing the beauty of our scenery. Our beautiful plains. I’m not talking about airplanes… they won’t let you bury the propellers.”

+ Under its most conservative estimates, the Department of Energy says the US needs to build 5,000 miles of new transmission lines a year to transport renewable power across state lines.  In 2024, the entire US built 322 miles of them.

+ Only 474 out of more than 90,000 oil slicks from ships around the world were reported to authorities over a five-year period–that’s less than 0.5 percent. Carrie O’Reilly, marine ecologist at Florida State: “Even trace quantities of oil are damaging to planktonic organisms, which form the base of the marine food web”.

+ Bruno Maçães: “Stunning to look at Europe today: if China sells us ultra cheap solar panels, effectively subsiding our energy transition, that’s the threat of autocracy. If the US uses coercion and blackmail to sink our economies, that’s working together.”

+ In terminal decline since 1969, when it fired my mentor David Brower over his opposition to nuclear power, the Sierra Club is now on life support. Earlier this month, it placed its executive director, Ben Jealous, on leave after a vote of no confidence by the staff. This comes after the Club’s chief political strategist was chased out of the organization after staffers learned he’d been moonlighting as a lobbyist for the energy-devouring crypto industry.

+ A new study in the journal Science Advances finds that the unregulated pumping of groundwater by farmers, cities and corporations around the world now accounts for 68% of the total loss of fresh water at the latitudes where most people live.

+ Air pollution is a major risk factor for dementia. For every 10 micrograms per cubic meter (μg/m³) increase in PM2.5, the relative risk of developing dementia rose by 17 percent.

+ Dr. Solomon Hsiang and Dr. Marshall Burke: “Humans are highly adaptable and Americans are particularly so, but the data and evidence indicate that climate change will cause many Americans to die earlier than they otherwise would.”

+ This month Trump’s EPA proposed gutting two major clean air rules that will cost thousands of lives, emission limits on hazardous air pollutants like mercury and other toxic metals from coal- and oil-fired power plants and limits greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from new and existing fossil fuel-fired power plants, arguing against all evidence to the contrary that that power plants do not “contribute significantly” to dangerous pollution under the Clean Air Act.

+ MAHA-Ha-ha-ha!

+++

+ Sen. Mike Lee (2018): “Ultimately, this will come down to a binary choice: Federalism, or violence.”

+ Charles Gasparino, Fox Business on Trump’s EU trade deal: Gasparino: “The stuff they are buying from us, they probably would have bought anyway. And when you say we get 15%. True. But that means U.S. Consumers are paying 15% more too. It’s kind of like a tax increase on U.S. Consumers.”

+ Cameron Johnson: “It depends on who you talk to, but my personal belief is that China is ahead on AI and it’s not even close.”

GOP: You must work for your Medicaid and SNAP benefits.

CEOs: Don’t knock on our door, we’ve got a software program that does that job.

+ Elijah Clark: “CEOs are extremely excited about the opportunities that AI brings. As a CEO myself, I can tell you I’m extremely excited about it. I’ve laid off employees because of AI…AI doesn’t go on strike. It doesn’t demand a pay raise. These things that you don’t have to deal with as a CEO.”

+ San Jose State University study: 9 households control 15% of all wealth in Silicon Valley, with just 0.1% of residents owning 71% percent of all Silicon Valley wealth.

+ Peter Ryan, writing in Compact: “The top 1.86 percent of Bitcoin addresses controlled more than 90 percent of Bitcoin’s supply. By comparison, the top 1 percent of America controls just 31 percent of wealth. How is Bitcoin decentralized, again?”

+ According to Fortune, bots now account for more than half of all internet traffic.

+ In his meeting with Keir Starmer and other leaders of the Labour government today, Trump, the guy who redecorated the Oval Office furniture in gold lamé, went off on the Fed: “The new ceiling had no opulence to it, or they fixed the ceiling. But I would say that all I need is a good plaster and a can of paint, and they spent 3.9 billion, and I spent a lot of money, too. I would say 3.8 billion less, you know?”

+ In Trump’s great trade deal with the EU, consumers in the EU will pay a 1 percent tax on most US goods, while consumers in the US will pay a 15% tax on goods made in the EU. Strange victory…

+ Under Jair Bolsonaro, the proportion of Brazil’s population suffering from food insecurity reached 23%. Today, 19 months into the 3rd Lula administration, the UN has announced this proportion has dropped below 2.5%. Brazil has been removed from the FAO UN World Hunger Map.

+ In his meeting with Keir Starmer and other leaders of the Labour government today, Trump, the guy who redecorated the Oval Office furniture in gold lamé, went off on the Fed: “The new ceiling had no opulence to it, or they fixed the ceiling. But I would say that all I need is a good plaster and a can of paint, and they spent 3.9 billion, and I spent a lot of money, too. I would say 3.8 billion less, you know?”

+ Dr. Danielle Ofri, author “When We Do Harm”: “Medical professionals can no longer fully trust federal health guidance, and our patients are the ones who will suffer the most.”

+ In a huge gift to the insurance cartels, RFK Jr plans to remove all members of an expert task force that decides which preventive health measures insurance must cover for cancer screenings and HIV medication because he believes they’re too “woke.”

+ We have entered the age of the Health Care shooters. First Luigi Mangione, now Shane Tamura, a former football player and “surveillance professional” in Las Vegas with probable brain damage who walked into a Park Avenue skyscraper in NYC intent on shooting up NFL HQ but instead, perhaps because of his mental deterioration, got on the wrong elevator and opened fire with an AR-15 on a real estate management company, gunning down four people. Before killing himself, Tamura left a note explaining his actions:

“Please study the brain for CTE. I’m sorry. The league knowingly concealed the dangers to our brains to maximize profits. They failed us.”

+ A rational society would respond to the falling fertility rate in the US (1.6 kids per woman) by encouraging immigration instead of orchestrating a pogrom against it…

+ From the Minnesota Tribune’s investigation into the shootings of the Minnesota legislators and their spouses, it appears as if cops did a Uvalde by waiting outside the Hortmans’ door for more than an hour after Mark Hortman had been shot.

+++

+ A Wall Street Journal poll finds the Democratic Party’s approval rating has cratered to merely 33%, the lowest in decades and below the Republicans.

They’ll blame it on, Mamdani, Sanders and Sarandon, of course, then tell the troops (ie., anxious funders) not to worry: Help is on the way. Trickle-down for Hipsters (Abundance theory) will save them!

+ Uh, well, perhaps not…

+ Reporter: “Is every member of the Democratic caucus fit mentally and physically to serve another term in Congress?”

Hakeem Jeffries: “That’s not a discussion that we have had at the moment…”

+ Chuck Schumer’s pick to run against Susan Collins next year is the current governor of Maine, Janet Mills. Mills will soon turn 78.

+ Ravi Mangla: “Democratic Party leaders who are polling lower than the Antichrist telling Zohran how he should govern.”

+ CNN reporting on Andrew Cuomo’s man of the streets campaign strategy:

A man who pulled Cuomo in for a handshake, took out his phone for a selfie, and as the former three-term governor of New York smiled for the camera, he told him, “I can’t wait to watch you lose again.

+ An analysis of election data found that 70 percent of voters who filled out their ballots in full left Andrew Cuomo off entirely.

+ Meanwhile, Mamdani is stretching his lead with Jewish voters in NYC, despite weeks of sliming from the press and the Democratic Party elites, another demonstration of their political impotence

+++

+ The Trump White House has been saying for two weeks that Trump cut off relations with the pedophile and sex-ring trafficker Epstein because he was a “creep.” But for two days in a row now, Trump has said that he sent Epstein into exile because he poached young women workers from Mar-a-Lago by offering them more money. I guess that’s what he means by “creep,” not the rape stuff. That’s some sick shit, all around…

+ Here’s Trump in Scotland on Monday:

“For years, I wouldn’t talk to Jeffrey Epstein. Because he did something that was inappropriate. He hired help. And I said, Don’t ever do that again. He stole people that worked for me. I said, Don’t ever do that again. He did it again and I threw him out of the place. Persona non grata. I threw him out. And that was it. I’m glad I did, if you want to know the truth.”

+ Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter whose dispatches did the most to expose Epstein’s crimes: “First time I ever heard that their falling out was over Epstein hiring Trump’s employees. One learns something new every day!”

+ Then, not knowing when to stop digging, Trump was back at it on Air Force One on Tuesday, babbling to reporters:

Reporter: I was just curious. Were some of the workers taken from you? Were some of them young women? 

Trump: Were some of them?

Reporter: Were some of them young women?

Trump: Uh, well, I don’t want to say, but, uh, everyone knows the people that were taken and, uh, it was the concept of taking people that work for me is bad. But that story’s been pretty well out there, and the answer is yes. Yes, they were young women.

Reporter: What did they do in the spa?  Jobs?

Trump: Yeah. And, uh, other people would come and complain, “This guy is taking people from the spa.” I didn’t know that. And then when I heard about it, I told him, I said, “Listen, we don’t want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa….And he was fine. And not too long after, he did it again. And I said outta here.”

Reporter: “Was one of the stolen people Virginia Giuffre?”

Trump: “I don’t know. I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people. Yeah, he stole her.”

+ Giuffre died by suicide in April. She was 16 when Epstein “stole” her from Trump.

+ Trump on a potential pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell: “I’m allowed to do it.” (The right is calling her a “victim” now, a scapegoat, someone whose virulent reputation can be redeemed solely for the service of clearing Trump. She was convicted of sex trafficking and there was testimony that she’d participated in the sexual abuse.)

+ Trump on Epstein Island: “I never had the privilege of going to his island.” Over to you, Dr. Freud…

+ Statement from the family of Virginia Giuffre on Trump saying he knew Epstein “stole” Virginia from Mar-a-Lago and that he might consider pardoning Maxwell:

.. It was shocking to hear President Trump invoke our sister and say that he was aware that Virginia had been ‘stolen’ from Mar-a-Lago. It makes us ask if he was aware of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s criminal actions, especially given his statement two years later that his good friend Jeffrey ‘likes women on the younger side… no doubt about it.’ We and the public are asking for answers; survivors deserve this..If our sister could speak today, she would be most angered by the fact that the government is listening to a known perjurer. A woman who repeatedly lied under oath and will continue to do so as long as it benefits her position. Ghislaine Maxwell is a monster who deserves to rot in prison for the rest of her life for the extraordinary violence and abuse she put not just our sister Virginia through, but many other survivors, who may number in the thousands. A predator who thought only of herself, she destroyed the lives of girls and young women without conscience.

The MAGA manosphere loves Trump not in spite of the fact that he cheats at golf but because of it–as they all would like to do, if they could get away with it…

+ Jesse Watters: “Trump golfs. He has dad strength. You know “Dad strength?” He doesn’t look like he’s in shape, but when he grabs you—One time my father grabbed me and I was like, oh, my god, this guy is stronger than I am.”

+ The Smithsonian caved to pressure from the White House and removed any mention of Trump from the impeachment exhibit at the American History Museum. The exhibit now says that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal:” Johnson, Nixon, and Clinton and appears the same way it did back in 2008, despite two subsequent impeachments and trials. Over to you, Mr. Orwell…

+ Like most of Trump’s appointees, Linda McMahon’s lack of qualifications for her position is her primary qualification for her position.

+ Senator–and presidential aspirant–Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) skipped the Senate vote on de-arming Israel– which she previously said she supported–in order to boost her profile by appearing on Colbert, where she used her time to humanize her former colleagues at the CIA: “A lot of the guys are wearing mom jeans and white sneakers on the weekend. These are good, corn-fed people who just want to help their country.” Mom jeans are different, I assume, than the “good jeans” Sydney Sweeney slips in and out of so evocatively?

+ The great Tom Lehrer, who died this week at 97, on George W. Bush: “I’m not tempted to write a song about George W. Bush. I couldn’t figure out what sort of song I would write. That’s the problem. I don’t want to satirize George Bush and his puppeteers, I want to vaporize them.”

+ I watched Clarence Brown’s film of Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust on Criterion last night and it’s excellent. For its time (1949), a serious, unsentimental and faithful depiction of race relations in the Jim Crow South. Filmed in and around Oxford, Mississippi by the great Robert Surtees (Ben-Hur), it has an authenticity absent in most Hollywood films of the time (or any time). Juano Hernandez’s portrayal of Lucas Beauchamp, the stoic black farmer who local whites want to lynch after he’s wrongly accused of killing one of the town’s redneck thugs, is a revelation–a revelation totally erased for some reason from the cover of the DVD. Remarkably, the film exposes the pernicious racism of the well-intentioned liberals. Even Lucas’s own lawyer, Gavin Stephens (normally one of Faulkner’s most admirable characters), doesn’t believe his story because it contradicts every stereotype embedded in his mind about blacks. Of Hernandez, Faulkner said: “Juano Hernandez is a fine actor and man, too.” He sure was.

Reporter: Was Malcolm X preaching hate and violence?

Denzel Washington: Is the sheep preaching hate and violence when he says I’m not going to let a wolf eat me anymore?

Nothing Ever Happens to People Like Us, ‘Cept We Miss the Bus…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

American Imperatives: The Cold War and Other Matters
Anders Stephenson
(Verso)

The Urban Naturalist
Men Schilthuizen
(MIT)

Pretend We’re Dead: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of Women in Rock in the ’90s
Tanya Pearson
(DaCapo)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Find El Dorado
Paul Weller
(Parlophone)

I Love People
Cory Hanson
(Wand)

The First Family: Live at Winchester Cathedral, 1967
Sly and the Family Stone
(High Moon)

There is No Revenge of the Nerds

“Is no revenge of the nerds, you know what, last year when everything collapsed, all it meant was the nerds lost out once again and the jocks won. Same as always … Some of the quants are smart, but quants come, quants go, they’re just nerds for hire with a different fashion sense. The jocks may not know a stochastic crossover if it bites them on the ass, but they have that drive to thrive, they’re synced into them deep market rhythms, and that’ll always beat out nerditude no matter how smart it gets.”

– Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

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