+ Willie Pye was the third person executed in the US in 2024. There are 29 other scheduled executions for the remainder of the year, 13 in Oklahoma, 8 in Ohio, 3 in Texas, 2 in Missouri, and one each in Alabama, Georgia and Idaho. Of those, 14 have pending death warrants.
+ The morning of Pye’s execution the editorial board of Scientific American came out against the death penalty, saying capital punishment “does not deter crime, is not humane and has no moral or medical basis.”
+ In the last 12 months, police have shot and killed 1,137 people in the US. They’ve killed at least 10,000 people since Michael Brown was shot and killed in August 2014.
+ NYC judge to a public defender, prior to denying bail to his impoverished client: “No judge has ever lost their job setting bail on someone.”
+ In 2023, children unintentionally shot and killed 157 people in the US and injured another 270.
+ NYPD overtime pay budget $671 million 2022; cuts to NYC libraries budget $58.3 million
+ During his campaign for office, LA district attorney George Gascón promised to prosecute killer cops. But thus far his office has charged only 8, securing only one conviction, former LA Sheriff’s deputy Andrew Lyons, who served a mere 12 days in the LA county jail for killing Ryan Twyman, an unarmed father of 3.
+ More than 1000 people in Pennsylvania are serving life without parole sentences for murders they personally didn’t commit–60% of them are black.
+ A Mississippi cop named Michael Green forced a man to drink his own urine, according to a new federal lawsuit: “Green removed his duty vest and filmed B.E. while B.E. got on the ground and licked his urine. B.E. gagged when he made contact with the floor. In response to B.E.’s gagging, Green told B.E., ‘Don’t spit it out.’ B.E. gagged again. ‘Lick that shit up. Drink your fuckin’ piss.’”
+ More than 40% of U.S. exonerations involve cases in which no crime ever occurred. Child sexual assault cases have among the highest rates of false accusations and nearly 250 people have been wrongly convicted of child sex abuse that never happened.
+ Hate crimes committed in K-12 schools have quadrupled in states that have passed anti-LGBT legislation since 2020, according to a Washington Post analysis of FBI data.
+ Democrats in the New York General Assembly introduced a bill that would expand the definition of “domestic terrorism” to include blocking a public road or bridge. The “crime” would be punishable by a sentence of up to seven years in prison.
+ Rat fur, arsenic, copper, PFAS “forever” chemicals, DDT, coal ash, and radioactive radon are just some of the toxic substances detected in the drinking water of US prisons.
+ Here’s how San Bernardino County Sheriff Shannon Dicus defended the lethal shooting of Ryan Gainer, a 15-year-old black high school student, who deputies shot three times while he held a gardening tool: “Certainly juveniles can be dangerous. He’s large of stature. He is physically fit.”
+ On Tuesday, cops in El Cerrito, California pursued a burglary suspect onto the Bay Bridge. The suspect was driving into oncoming traffic, and crashed head-on into another car, killing the driver. San Francisco voters approved Prop. E, earlier this month, would give police even more leeway to engage in these kinds of chaotic chases.
+ The Legal Aid Society has released a list of NYPD officers with the most claims against them. One of the cops, Sergeant David Grieco, has had 48 cases filed against him since 2013, amassing a total of $1,134,825.35 in lawsuit payouts. Grieco remains on the force. In all, NYC taxpayers have paid out more than half a billion in settlements for lawsuits against the city’s police for misconduct.
+ Last February, an LA Sheriff’s deputy accosted Emmett Brock, after Brock had flipped him off when he saw the cop having a confrontation with a woman on the sidewalk. The deputy ordered Brock, who is transgendered, out of his car, then threw him to the pavement in the parking lot of a 7/11 and began punching him repeatedly in the head. The beating was captured on video. The ≠deputy, Joseph Benza, claimed that Brock, a 23-year-old school teacher, had bitten him. Brock was arrested and taken to jail, where he says deputies demanded to inspect his genitals. Brock was charged with felony resisting arrest, which soon caused him to lose his job as a teacher at Frontier High School. This week a judge ruled there was “no evidence” that Brock bit the deputy and declared him “factually innocent.” Brock is still unemployed. Benza is on the job and has faced no disciplinary action for the violent false arrest.
+++
+ It’s been so long since the US has won a war, I’m surprised they haven’t made VG Day (Victory in Grenada) a national holiday…
+ At least, 5% of the US population now sees the US as the greatest threat to its own existence, only slightly behind Iran and more dangerous than North Korea.
Gallup.
+ Biden’s Axis of Evil: Pacific Command chief Adm. John Aquilino told the House Armed Services this week he’s worried by cooperation between Russia, China, and North Korea: ”We’re almost back the Axis of Evil when you plug Iran into this problem set.”
+ Gen. Mark Milley in testimony to Congress this week on the Afghan war and withdrawal: “We helped build an army, a state but we could not build a nation.” He called the war and occupation a “strategic failure.” Objectively true, but a lesson very slowly learned and probably quickly forgotten.
+ As 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza face starvation, the new congressional spending bill, which Biden has pledged to sign as soon as it hits his desk, includes a provision banning funding to UNRWA — a UN agency that provides aid to Palestinian refugees — through next year.
+ Playwright and screenwriter Tony Kushner on the hysterical backlash against Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Oscars: “What he’s saying is so simple. He’s saying: Jewishness, Jewish identity, Jewish history, the history of the Holocaust, the history of Jewish suffering must not be used in a campaign of — as an excuse for a project of dehumanizing or slaughtering other people. This is a misappropriation of what it means to be a Jew, what the Holocaust meant, and [Glazer] rejects that. Who doesn’t agree with that? What kind of person thinks that what’s going on now in Gaza is acceptable?” What kind of person? Well, from reading the NYT on Thursday, the kind of person Bret Stephens is, for starters…
+ If you want an idea of just how miserably the media has failed in its coverage of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, in a recent Pew survey only about half of American adults could correctly identify whether more Israelis (1,550) or Palestinians (33,000+) had been killed in the war.
+ What was it Hillary told those bank executive executives? “Hold one position in public and another in private.” It appears that Biden, like his old donor EF Hutton, was listening…
+ Hubert Védrine, France’s longtime Foreign Minister and National Security Advisor, who served under both Mitterrand and Chirac, told a story about Madeleine Albright accusing him of “betraying Lafayette” because he opposed her on the savage sanctions the US had imposed on Iraq. Védrine shot back: “Actually we didn’t intervene [in the Revolutionary War] at all to help America. We did it only to annoy Great Britain. It was a competition with Great Britain. Besides, if we had known what you were going to become, a kind of arrogant, dominating empire, all that, I think we wouldn’t have helped you!”
+ Trump when asked by FoxNews’ Howard Kurtz, whether Putin had a role in Alexey Navalny’s death: “I don’t know, but perhaps, I mean possibly, I could say probably. I don’t know. He’s a young man, so statistically, he’d be alive for a long time. If you go by the insurance numbers, he’d be alive for another 40 years. So something happened that was unusual.”
+ According to an analysis by the Cost of War project, British and Canadian troops have put their lives at risk at twice the rate of American troops in the U.S. post-9/11 wars.
+ During Haiti’s 2010 election, the Obama administration and the OAS intervened to fix the results, securing the election of Michel Martelly in the second round of voting. As the vote was taking place, Cheryl Mills, HRC’s chief of staff at the State Department, emailed her top staffers in DC and Port-au-Prince: “Nice job, all! You do great elections…We can discuss how the counting’s going. Just kidding. Kinda. :).”
+ In response to Emanuel Macron’s belligerent vow to send French troops into Ukraine, France’s chief of ground forces, General Pierre Schill, claims Paris could deploy 20,000 troops to Ukraine within 30 days, if called upon.
+ But the French public doesn’t seem to be behind their micro-Napoleon. In an Odoxa poll, 68 percent of French respondents said Macron’s vow to send European troops to Ukraine was “wrong.”
+ British journalist and politician Martin Daubney on what makes the English happy: “If you remember back, Britain was at its happiest – many say – when we were at war. We had a sense of purpose, of national identity.”
+ When it comes to happiness here on the homefront, however, there are apparently not enough Warm Guns to go around anymore…
+++
+ Trump on bringing unity to the GOP: “I hit him [Ron DeSantis] hard, I hit him low, just like we did to ISIS…We hit this guy so hard…He’s a shell of the man…We have to hit our enemies hard.”
+ CNN: Does Donald Trump’s former relationship with porn star Stormy Daniels actually play to his advantage with some voters?
Karen Finney: ”Basically, there is a manly vigor on display that Biden doesn’t have.”
+ A report in the Financial Times finds that in terms of ideology Democrats in the US are pretty much in synch with British conservatives, while US conservatives are far to the right of the Tories…
+ Elon Musk’s Twitter account has more followers (176.5 million) than the accounts of the New York Times (55.2 million), the Washington Post (20 million), and the Wall Street Journal (20.6 million) combined.
TikTok funder Jeffrey Yass is the top Republican donor in the 2024 campaign cycle. Yass is set to cash in on any forced sale of the company.
Emily Moin, epidemiologist and ethicist: “Born too early to write notes with AI, born too late to write notes by hand.”
The question that prompted Elon Musk to dump Don Lemon from Twitter:
“So you said if they kill the company it’s them, but doesn’t the buck stop with you?”
“I have to say, choose your questions carefully.”
“I am not trying to get… I am just surprised that you would blame other people for killing the company. Why does that question upset you? You seem upset by it, are you?”
“You are upsetting me.”
+ Who among us would prefer Musk to have access to our algorithmic data than TikTok?
+ Donald Trump: “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion.”
+ In the Florida GOP primary, Nikki Haley pulled in 114,000 more votes than homeboy Ron DeSantis. The Democrats canceled their primary, worried that almost anyone might rack up 10-20 percent against Biden. Meanwhile, in Arizona Haley won nearly 20% of the vote, even though she’d suspended her campaign. For the Democrats, where Uncommitted wasn’t on the ballot, Marianne Williamson garnered more than 15,000 votes, as the vehicle for the ceasefire vote. In the 2020 presidential election, Biden defeated Trump by only 11,000 votes.
+ In 2020, Michele Morrow, now the GOP’s candidate to supervise North Carolina’s public school system, called for the televised executions of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. “I prefer a Pay Per View of him in front of the firing squad,” Morrow wrote in reply to someone who suggested arresting Obama and detaining him at Guantanamo. “I do not want to waste another dime on supporting his life. We could make some money back from televising his death.”
+ Weird thing to brag about, given 1,000 a week are still dying with COVID infections.
+++
+ The world’s five biggest fossil fuel companies (Total, Chevron, Shell, BP and Exxon/Mobil) are expected to add 51 billion tonnes of C02 emissions to the atmosphere between now and 2050. A new study by Global Witness finds that the planned fossil fuel production from these “5 majors” will kill 11.5 million people by 2100.
+ The annual atmospheric increase in CO2 was a staggering 3.4 parts per million (ppm) in 2023.
+ A million tons: the amount of ice Greenland loses every two minutes.
+ Every day for the last 12 months, global sea surface temperatures have broken records.
+ Phoenix, the US’s hottest city, experienced a record 645 deaths related to high temperatures in 2023–50% higher than the number of heat-related deaths in 2022.
+ In 1993, the US Forest Service fought wildfires on 1.79 million acres. By 2021, the number of burned acres had more than quadrupled.
+ This week State Farm announced plans to not renew around 72,000 property and commercial apartment policies in California starting this summer, largely because of the increased risk of climate-driven wildfires. State Farm is California’s largest property insurer.
+ According to a report from the Royal Society, Giant Sequoias are now much more numerous and in better condition in the UK than they are across their native range in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California.
+ Desert ecosystems are much more sensitive to climate changes than previously believed. Research in the Sonoran desert has found a sharp decline in vegetation cover, especially in drier areas, mostly attributed to rising temperatures and less rain.
+ China, the world’s leading solar supplier, doubled production capacity last year and now produces nearly three times more panels than global demand. Global prices for panels have fallen 50% in the past year to as low as 10 cents a watt.
+ China’s global share of EV sales hit 48.2% last week and will pass 50% within 3 months predicted Wang Chuanfu, CEO of China’s leading EV-maker BYD.
+ In 2019, 149 million people worldwide were classified as ‘acutely food insecure’ – meaning they did not have enough food to meet their daily nutritional needs. Only four years later, that number has more than doubled to 333 million. One leading cause has been droughts and crop failures attributed to climate change.
+ In the first two-and-a-half months of 2024, more than 10,000 wildfires have burned across 11,000 square kilometers of the Amazon, according to real-time satellite monitoring, a record number for this early in the year.
+ In 2023, carbon emissions in the UK fell to their lowest level since 1897.
+ Lula has made lofty pledges to address climate change and protect the environment, goals that will prove very challenging to meet if Petrobras, Brazil’s state-run oil company, goes forward with its plans to significantly boost oil production, with the goal of becoming the world’s third-largest oil producer by 2030.
+ The scheduled delays in retiring South Africa’s remaining coal plants could cause 32,000 excess deaths from air pollution, according to a report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Crea).
+ According to a study out of MIT: “The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 TWh annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”
+ The Biden Administration isn’t just permitting the destruction of Thacker Pass, it’s subsidizing the massive lithium mine slated for the Oregon/Nevada border to the tune of $2.26 billion…
+ A study published in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood found that every new school being built in England is located in an area where the air quality is deemed unsafe.
+++
+ How communism finally came to America…
+ Last week, Trump’s Bedminster golf club in New Jersey paid $82,500 to settle a lawsuit alleging that it had gagged a sexually harassed waitress by tricking her into a hush money deal. Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, is specifically excluded from the settlement, meaning she could be sued for fraud in the inducement by a former Bedminster waitress.
+ Until 1880, Denver had the largest Chinatown in the Rockies. Then a mob of 3,000 white men attacked the city’s Chinese community of more than 1,400, destroying nearly all of their homes and businesses. Two years later, Congress enacted the Chinese Exclusion Act banning all Chinese immigration and preventing residents from applying for citizenship.
+ A new report from No More Deaths found that deaths of migrants in the El Paso sector (which includes New Mexico) have soared since 2019. Many of the deaths are concentrated around El Paso/Sunland Park. In 2018, there were 4 migrant deaths in the El Paso sector. Last year there were 149.
+ The government of Mexico announced that it will not permit Texas to deport people back to Mexico under the state’s new immigration law.
+ Negotiators from the Biden White House struck a behind-the-scenes deal with House Speaker Mike Johnson that would increase ICE’s funding for the detention of 41,500 migrants. If approved by the Senate, the funding package would be the most money ever appropriated in the history of ICE for the custody and surveillance of migrants.
+ How low can Limbo Joe go? As part of his frantic backroom deal-making with Republicans, Biden also agreed to a provision in the spending bill that will ban the display of the Pride flag at US embassies.
+ “Tricky Balance”… makes it sound like the CEO’s wing-walking instead of pushing planes off the assembly line whose doors explode, windshields crack and landing gear falls off to maximize company profits.
+ Boeing’s production process failed 33 of 89 audits during FAA probe after door plug incident…
+ As reported in the Lever, the Biden administration discretely issued an ethics waiver allowing Caroline Kennedy, a former Boeing board member, to become the U.S. Ambassador to Australia, and with the specific goal of working to help Boeing expand its international business.
Trevor Jackson, writing in the New York Review of Books, on how not to respond to an economic crisis: “Austerity was pushed as the only credible response to the public debt crises after 2008, but it wrought ruin and misery for millions of people over more than a decade. The reason is politics.”
A study of all 966 Democratic candidates who ran in the 2022 House and Senate primaries found that “candidates who used economic populist rhetoric won higher vote shares in general elections, especially in working-class, rural and small-town districts.”
+ The median union household has 1.7 times more wealth than the median nonunion household For households of color, union membership makes an even larger difference, increasing their median wealth between 167% & 228%.
+ 1 in 4 hospital emergency rooms are now staffed by private equity-owned firms.
According to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s financial disclosure forms, they reported between $172 million and $640 million in outside income while they were working in the White House.
+ Although his own company’s guidelines prohibit it, internal records obtained by Pro Publica show that on at least three occasions Warren Buffett has sold millions of dollars of shares in stocks that Berkshire was trading.
+ According to UNICEF, the UN’s children organization, the UK has experienced the largest increase in relative child poverty between 2014 and 2021 of any advanced economy.
+ The number of Brazilians suffering severe food insecurity -going 1 or more days per month without eating any food – dropped from 33 million to 20 million in Brazil in 2023, according to a study by Instituto Fome Zero.
+ One-quarter of all Paris residents now live in public housing, up from 13 percent in the late 1990s.
+ Don’t the French have better things to spend their money on, like aircraft carriers, Stealth bombers, SuperMax prisons and, maybe, health care? Oh, yeah, they do that, too.
+ China’s rising agricultural subsidies now top $300 billion a year, nearly double that of the US and EU combined.
+ Michael Hudson: “Economists are taught not to understand how reality works. They’re taught science fiction. They rightly should be a literature department in the humanities section for science fiction because they talk about a parallel universe… Parasitism is not only taking more money, it’s taking over the brain so that people think that the financial sector is actually helping them.”
+ Canada should…
Have an elected head of state: 46%
Remain a monarchy: 23%
Don’t care: 21%
Research Co. Poll / March 10, 2024 /
+++
+ What’s your demonic name? Mine’s Astaroth, who temps humans with the virtues of sloth and indolence…
MAGA cultist Lance Wallnau says "the left is loaded with demons" just like in Nazi Germany: "I don't think it's people anymore; I think you're dealing with demons talking through people." pic.twitter.com/oreD6bffbR
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 21, 2024
+ In a study on the prevalence of incest, the geneticist Jim Wilson found that one in 7,000 people whose DNA was stored in the U.K. Biobank was born to parents who were first-degree relatives, either a brother and a sister or a parent and a child.
+ Fran Lebowitz: “I write so slowly that I could write in my own blood without hurting myself.”
+ Andrei Tarkovsky’s diary entry for 17th March, 1974, on the making of his film Mirror: “Mirror is going really badly. Nobody has any idea of what it’s about. All hopeless. Sizov saw it in order to decide the question of the two parts, & he had no idea what it was about either. The material keeps falling apart, it doesn’t make a whole. Altogether it is all hopeless.”
+ Lola Glaudini, who co-starred with Johnny Depp in the film Blow, told Variety that Depp berated her on set during her first day of filming: “Johnny Depp, when they say cut, walks over to me, comes up to me, sticks his finger in my face and he goes, ‘Who the fuck do you think you are? Who the fuck do you think you are? Shut the fuck up. I’m out here, and I’m trying to fucking say my lines and you’re fucking pulling focus. You fucking idiot. Oh, now, oh now it’s not so funny? Now you can shut up? Now you can fucking shut the fuck up? The quiet that you are right now, that’s how you fucking stay.’”
+ Sonny Rollins on working with the Rolling Stones during the recording of “Waiting on a Friend” for the Tattoo You album: “I do like a lot of white artists. I like the Beatles. Paul McCartney is a good tunesmith. But the Rolling Stones? I didn’t relate to them because I thought they were just derivative of black blues. I do remember once I was in the supermarket up in Hudson, New York, and they were playing Top 40 records. I heard this song and thought, Who’s that guy? His playing struck a chord in me. Then I said, ‘Wait a minute, that’s me!’ It was my playing on one of those Rolling Stones records.”
+ The idea of Christopher Nolan as a cutting-edge director is absurd. He is the most antiquated of filmmakers, making the kind of cinema Godard pronounced dead in 1970. He only makes movies on “film” to be projected at certain aspect ratios inside cinemas with particular screens. When Godard saw the 1st cellphone camera, the old man embraced it as the future of film-making, where movies could be made for almost nothing: shot, edited & distributed worldwide on the web by themselves, freed from the studios & confining walls of theaters. Nolan is a relic.
+ In 1954 Albert Einstein wrote that if he could relive his life he would not become a scientist: “I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances.”
+ An important message from the Lansing-based band, Grey Matter: “I am once again begging you to pirate our records rather than listen to them on Spotify.”
It’s not my fault, I’m a man. It’s good enough for Nancy…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans and the Lost Empire of Cool
James Kaplan
(Penguin/Random House)
The Last of Its Kind: the Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction
Gísli Pálsson
(Princeton)
Chaos in the Heavens: the Forgotten History of Climate Change
Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher
(Verso)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
The Collective
Kim Gordon
(Matador)
Where’s My Utopia?
Yard Act
(Island/Republic)
The Great Bailout
Moor Mother
(Anti-)
A Clean War
“The idea of a clean war, like that of a clean bomb or an intelligent missile, this whole war conceived as a technological extrapolation of the brain is a sure sign of madness. It is like those characters in Hieronymus Bosch with a glass bell or a soap bubble around their head as a sign of their mental debility. A war enclosed in a glass coffin, like Snow White, purged of any carnal contamination or warrior’s passion. A clean war which ends up in an oil slick.”
– Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Never Happened
