Roaming Charges: America on Droogs

She had asked the older women: “What is that fire?”

And they had replied: “It is we who are burning.”

― Primo Levi, If This is Man

While contemplating the incipient collapse of our Republic from an inside job, I dipped back into the six-volume edition of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that Alexander Cockburn gave me as a Christmas present years ago. Gibbon’s prose style is ornate, featuring wide-ranging and winding sentences that often end abruptly, like a dagger plunging. It takes some pages–and there are entire mountain ranges of them–to get used to his baroque rhetorical rhythm. Still, once you do, the book really picks up steam and roars along through decade after decade of unrivaled imperial villainy, personal cupidity and political turpitude.

Like a historical geologist, Gibbon pinpoints the first major seismic fault triggering the fall of the Empire during the reign of Commodus, the sadistic son of the stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius, whose Mediations are much promoted (though little practiced) by today’s TechBros. Through much of Commodus’s reign, the man by his side was the conniving Cleander, who became chamberlain of the Empire and commander of Commodius personal death squad, the Praetorian Guard. Here’s Gibbon’s acute (and very timely for our own perilous predicament) assessment of how the Commodus/Cleander partnership worked: 

[Cleander] entered the palace, rendered himself useful to his master’s passions, and rapidly ascended to the most exalted station which a subject could enjoy. His influence over the mind of Commodus was much greater than that of his predecessor [Perennis, who Cleander had killed], for Cleander was devoid of any ability or virtue which could inspire the emperor with envy or distrust. Avarice was the reigning passion of his soul, and the great principle of his administration. The rank of consul, of patrician, of senator, was exposed to public sale, and it would have been considered as disaffection if anyone had refused to purchase these empty and disgraceful honors with the greatest part of his fortune. In the lucrative provincial employments the minister shared with the governor the spoils of the people. The execution of the laws was venal and arbitrary. A wealthy criminal might obtain not only the reversal of the sentence by which he was justly condemned, but might likewise inflict whatever punishment he pleased on the accuser, the witnesses and the judge.”

Sound familiar?

Cleander, like Elon Musk, was not a natural-born citizen of the Empire. He came to Rome from Phyrgia, orchestrated hundreds of killings to demonstrate his loyalty, and made a bundle as the hatchet man and chief extortionist for the Emperor until he briefly eclipsed Commodus’s glittering raiment and lost his head for this hubristic transgression. 

It was comforting to learn that I’m not the only former punk who found solace in Gibbon’s sprawling work. So did Iggy Pop, who wrote a piece for Classics Ireland about why he spent so many nights on the road reading the Decline and Fall:

In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin). The grandeur of the subject appealed to me, as did the cameo illustration of Edward Gibbon, the author, on the front cover. He looked like a heavy dude.

Being in a political business, I had long made a habit of reading biographies of wilful characters – Hitler, Churchill, MacArthur, Brando – with large profiles, and I also enjoyed books on war and political intrigue, as I could relate the action to my own situation in the music business, which is not about music at all, but is a kind of religion-rental. I would read with pleasure around 4 am, with my drugs and whisky in cheap motels, savouring the clash of beliefs, personalities, and values played out on antiquity’s stage by crowds of the vulgar, led by huge archetypal characters.

From “Caesar Lives,”’ Classics Ireland, Vol. 2 (1995)

+ Speaking of Caesar…

+ Is this the first time Trump has proclaimed himself as King? He waited a whole month into his reign. What patience he’s shown. How long before he deifies himself? Julius Caesar wasn’t deified until after his assassination. Augustus allowed temples to be built for his worship in Asia Minor, but not the capital, which would have induced a riot and perhaps a coup. His ingrate descendants Caligula and Nero both demanded to worshipped as gods during their abbreviated reigns (few did, except under threat of beheading) and the great imperial muckraker Suetonius quotes Vespasian, one of the better emperors, as saying, wryly on his deathbed: “Oh dear, it appears, I’m becoming a god.”

+ Sent out by the White House on your dime…

+ What is congestion pricing, your Royal Highness, but a tariff imposed on outsiders crossing the city line to exploit the services of NYC?

+ This sounds ominous…A new Trump executive order issued Wednesday night says the president “shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch.”

The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties.No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.

+ Where have we heard this before? (Though not in the fortune cookie syntax.)

+ Late Thursday afternoon, the Washington Post reported that Trump is preparing to dissolve the US Postal Service Board, an allegedly independent agency now under the leadership of  Louis DeJoy, who Trump appointed five years ago and Biden refused to remove, and seize control of the Postal Service inside the administration, “potentially throwing the mail provider and trillions of dollars of e-commerce transactions into turmoil.”

+ The check is in the mail. Honest, I sent it months ago! Please don’t turn off the electricity! No, I’m not lying! I posted it with the Andrew Jackson stamp, thinking it would speed the delivery! What do you mean he’s into McKinley now? Which one was he? Damn. There go the lights. Oh, no, Mom’s dialysis machine just went off….

+ In the relationship between Musk and Trump, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to ascertain which one’s Caligula and which one’s Incitatus…

+++

+ So what have Elon and the Droogs been up to this week?

+ Even though the FDIC is funded by banks, not the federal tax dollars, Musk’s team of droogs raided its employee databases and ordered the mass firings of federal bank examiners. What could go wrong that didn’t already go wrong to bring the FDIC into existence? A lot in the crypto/meme-coin late-capitalist economy.

+ Consider Argentina, where the anarcho-capitalist and Trump acolyte Javier Milei is now under investigation for encouraging his followers to buy the LIBRA crypto, which soon collapsed by 96%, wiping out $4.4 billion of its market cap in just a few hours.

+ Here’s Yanis Varoufakis on Milei’s crypto scam:

On Friday 14th, Argentina’s President Milei tweeted about the $LIBRA coin, encouraging his followers to buy it on the grounds that it would “help fund small businesses and start-ups”. As if that weren’t enough, he shared a link for people to buy it online. Naturally, within a few hours, $LIBRA’s price shot up. Many more people, trying to escape the poverty that Millei’s policies have subjected them to, rushed in to buy. Alas, soon after the price of $LIBRA crashed and they lost their money.

This is a standard tactic by crypto scammers. It is known as a ‘rug pull’: draw in naïve buyers only to stop trading and run with their money. But when the President of the country does it, it is more than a scam, a scandal. It is a crime.

More broadly, this incident confirms how dangerous the illusion of apolitical, non-state, money is. Money can never be anything other than state-based. That we need to democratise our public money is, of course, crucial. But any attempt to privatise money, however well-meaning its adherent might be, is bound to end in tears and to empower an oligarchic circle. End of story.

+ Danny Nelson reports for Coinbase that months before the memecoin scandal Hayden Davis, a co-creator Libra, bragged of sending money to Javier Milei’s sister saying of the Argentine president in a December text message: “We can also have Milie tweet and meet in person and do promo. I control that nigger. I send $$ to his sister and he signs whatever I say and does what I want. Craziest shit.”

+ In an interview on Argentine TV, Milei claimed it wasn’t his fault investors who saw his Tweets about Libra were scammed, “I didn’t promote it; I just shared it”.

+ Is the Libra hustle that much different than the Trump Family meme-coin pump and dump, where Trump and select insiders made off with more than $100 million trading fees and the small investors seduced by Trump’s pre-inauguration endorsement lost billions in the apparently legal swindle?

‘s

+ As part of its defense against Trump’s lawsuit against CBS News, the network’s lawyers have requested Trump’s personal finances, those of Truth Social, and his $TRUMP crypto project.

+ DOGE droogs also canceled the Security and Exchange Commission’s subscription to  Westlaw, the legal database, apparently because they believed WestLaw’s parent company, Thomas/Reuters, meant it was a sub to the Reuters news wire service.

+ This could lead to Ralph Nader’s long-sought goal of making access to court documents free to the public–although I think the real goal here is to conceal histories of financial crimes from the agency that occasionally takes enforcement actions against financial criminals.

+ Among the FDA employees purged by DOGE were staffers investigating possible abuses by Musk’s Neurolink implant company.

+ When asked by a federal judge whether thousands of federal employees were fired last week, a Trump administration lawyer replied: “I have not been able to look into that independently, or confirm that.”

+ Judge Tanya Chutkan responded with disbelief: “The firing of thousands of federal employees is not a small or common thing. You haven’t been able to confirm that?”

+ Chris Dols, Army Corps of Engineer worker:

“I’m part of a growing network of federal workers who are fighting back. How will they backfill our positions after we’re fired? I don’t think they have any intention of refilling our positions. I think they’re trying to deepen a crisis that already exists, which is a funding crisis, where our public services aren’t fully supported already, and federal workers are overworked as is. They’re trying to deepen the crisis to justify further privatization. You look at Elon Musk, who is, of course, both the architect and executioner here. He is already benefiting from more than $18 billion in federal contracts over the last ten years. And he calls recipients of federal aid parasites. Elon Musk is the parasite.”

+ Fired EPA worker: “I know I’ll bounce back and land another job. I’m grateful that I’m young and that I have support and I’ll be OK. The thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my fucking firing. I made $50k a year and worked to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer.”

+ This is the link to an affidavit filed by a USAID worker in an unnamed war-torn country whose pregnant wife was denied a medical evacuation flight by the Trump administration after suffering a life-threatening hemorrhage as part of the “freeze” on funding of AID. It’s an infuriating read.

+ Looks like the Washington Post and LA Times, both of which’s owners bent the knee to Trump, survived the media purge at Foggy Bottom, where State Department employees have been ordered to cancel subscriptions to all media outlets considered unfriendly to Trump…

+ This purge of the periodical stacks at State adds new meaning to (or subtracts meaning from, depending how you look at it) to JD Vance’s virulent scolding of EU leaders for engaging in “censorship” (he wasn’t talking about their censorship of pro-Palestinian voices)…

+ Every document and database Trump and Musk try to purge or erase from the federal government, some member of Congress should enter into the Congressional Record.

+ Don’t look up, don’t look down, but two more airplanes just hit the ground.

+ FAA staff fired over the weekend included personnel that worked radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance. Hundreds were fired just weeks after a mid-air collision near the airport formerly known as National in DC killed 67.  One employee said they were harassed on Facebook by DOGE droogs before being fired.

+ Mike Drucker: “Republicans may not have been able to bring down the price of food, but at least they’ve made it more terrifying to fly than it was after 9/11. That’s true leadership.”

+ My favorite firing by Elon’s DOGE Droogs so far: “At California’s Yosemite National Park, the Trump administration fired the only locksmith on staff on Friday. He was the sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms.”

+ In a court filing on Monday night, the White House insisted–despite Trump and Musk’s repeated assertions to the contrary–that Elon Musk is NOT the administrator of DOGE and is not even technically part of it.

+ So who is running DOGE? Only Elon’s ketamine supplier knows for sure…

+ All things considered, I’d rather have the Empire sacked and plundered by Alaric and the Visigoths than the Droogs from DOGE.

+++

+ The US continues to be a “rich” country–though fewer and fewer share in the wealth–but compared to other “wealthy” nations, the quality of life here (as measured by life expectancy, rate of depression, income inequality and life satisfaction) is in freefall…

+ Under Trump’s tax plan, people who make more than $950,000 a year will get a tax cut of over $45,000, while middle-class families that make less than $200,000 a year will get an average tax cut of less than $3 a day.

+ 271,500: The number of workers who went on strike in 2024, a 41 percent decline from 2023, but still higher than the average since 2000.

+ Trump’s candidate for Secretary of Labor Lori M. Chavez-DeRemer says, “The right-to-work is a fundamental tenet of labor laws, where states have a right to choose if they want to be a right-to-work state, and that should be protected.” What does the Teamsters’ Sean O’Brien have to say about this?

+ Apparently, there aren’t enough Americans sleeping in their cars, tents, or on the streets. So, Republicans have introduced a bill in Congress allowing landlords to evict tenants with three days’ notice or less, rolling back the 30-day notice they are currently required to give renters.

+  Unhoused people are six times as likely to die from overdose than those who are low-income and housed.

+ More than 80% of the properties built in California between 2020 and 2022 were in high-fire-risk areas, compared with only 28% built between 1920 and 1929.

+ What plutocracy looks like: Elon Musk could fund the campaigns of every Republican candidate for state, local, and federal office in the next election cycle, and it would only cost him around 1.2% of his current net worth.

+ The latest Trump anti-worker bullshit: “Nobody’s going to work from home. They’re going to be going out. They’re going to play tennis, they’re going to play golf, they’re going to do a lot of things. They’re not working. It’s a rare person that’s going to work.” No federal worker spends more time on a golf course in a year than this guy does in a month. And when he gets off the course, he returns to public housing to “work” from home.

+ Why are so many bankers, like JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, pressing Trump to end work-from-home? Because many have significant exposures to Commercial Real Estate loans for office buildings…

Bank / CRE Loans / % of total loans

JP Morgan: $171 B / 12.6%
Wells Fargo: $145 B / 21.2%
Bank of America $76 B / 6.9%
Bankcorp: $56 B / 14.9%
Capitol One: $49 B / 15.6%
PNC: $49B / 15.5%
Truist $42 B / 13.3%
Citigroup: $37 B / 4.0%

+ Southwest airlines announced plans to cut 15% of its workforce, even though the company has made a profit every year, except 2020, during the Covid downturn. In 2022, Southwest made a profit of $6.1 billion; in 2023, Southwest made a profit of $5.74 billion, and last year, Southwest made a profit of $6.11 billion. These kinds of mass layoffs are called “cutting outside of a downturn,” a kind of predatory capitalism that Hal Singer says makes “workers bear downside risk when their employers experience success. It’s patently unfair… and a breach of the social compact. Workers should share in the upside when employers are profiting. Instead, they’re cut loose.”

+++

+ This Oregon White Oak out on the French Prairie has become one of my favorite winter trees. I often stop and have lunch beneath it, usually consisting of a Mexican beer and some slices of bratwurst from the German Sausage Co. in Mt Angel, down the road. The pattern of its limbs and branches becomes more and more complex each year, standing at odds against the homogenized culture of subdivisions and strip malls advancing inexorably toward it…

+New research shows that carbon capture technology is more costly (and less effective at reducing CO2 levels) than switching to renewables: “If you spend $1 on carbon capture instead of on wind, water, & solar, you are increasing CO2, air pollution, energy requirements, energy costs, pipelines, and total social costs.”

+ For the first time in 2024, China’s clean energy technologies contributed more than 10 percent of its GDP, with sales of $1.9 trillion. On the other hand, China constructed 94.5 gigawatts (GW) of new coal plants in 2024, the most in the last 10 years.

+ Peatlands store more carbon than all the world’s forest biomass combined. But they are rapidly being drained and developed around the world and, according to new research published in Conservation Letters, only 17% enjoy any legal protection.

+ A Carbon Brief analysis reveals that 182 of the 193 countries that signed the Paris Accords (nearly 95%) missed the  UN deadline to submit new climate pledges for 2035. Countries missing the deadline represent 83% of global emissions and nearly 80% of the world’s economy.

+ Bad Bunny on the privatization of Puerto Rico’s beaches: “And what if one day they have all the beaches?… The only thing that will be left is the forest, and they’ll want to take the forest and the mountain too”.

+ A Spanish expedition in Antarctica found bird flu “in all animal species detected at each site.”

+ NASA: The chance of an asteroid hitting Earth in 2032 is now 2.6%, up from 2.2% last week. The highest risk assessment an asteroid has ever received was 2.7% in 2004. So there’s hope.

+++

+ Trump continues to make the easily disprovable claim that Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if it had still been part of the G-8. But why is the G-8 now the G-7? Because it kicked Russia out after it invaded the Donbas and confiscated Crimea in 2014.

+ According to Trump, Zelensky ordered Ukraine to invade Ukraine, prompting a Russian intervention to save Ukraine from Ukraine.

+ I was admittedly confused when his Royal Highness referred to Zelensky as a “dictator” the other day. I had wrongly believed that Trump disliked the Ukrainian president. But being proclaimed an autocrat by Trump is high praise indeed. Better watch your step Vlad, stand aside Kim.

+ James Meek writing in the LRB: “In a wiser and more competent – to say nothing of a better – world, the initial approach to Putin would have been followed by a consultation between the US, Ukraine and other European countries on their counter-proposals, and the pressure they could put on Putin if he refused to budge. Perhaps this will still happen. For the time being, Ukraine and the rest of Europe will be consulted in the way the residents of a village are consulted before it gets demolished to make way for a new airport.”

+ The German neo-Nazi AfD party that JD Vance embraced has whined that Germans were “the only people in the world who’ve planted a monument of shame at the heart of their capital” and promised to bring about “a 180-degree turnaround.” The monument of shame, the AfD wants to remove? A memorial to the Holocaust This is the same party that referred to the Third Reich as “just a speck of bird shit on over 1,000 years of Germany history.”

+ When Reagan made his infamous trip to the Waffen SS cemetery in Bitburg at least the Nazis he was honoring were dead and buried. My brain’s hanging upside too, Joey…

+ Yes, for better or worse, the US distributes the most foreign aid in total of any country in the world, but it’s actually quite miserly amount as a percent of the US’s total income.

World’s Biggest Foreign Aid Funders

Country / Total Aid / Share of GDP

USA  /$64.69 billion / 0.24%
Germany / $37.90 B /  0.82%
Japan / $19.60 B / 0.44%
UK / $19.07 B / 0.48%
France / $15.05 / 0.48%
Canada / $7.97 B / 0.38%
Netherlands / $7.36 B / 0.66%
Italy / $6.12 B / 0.27%
Sweden / $5.62 B / 0.93%
Norway / $5.55 B / 1.09%

Source: OECD

+ On Tuesday, Brazil’s prosecutor-general formally charged former President Jair Bolsonaro with attempting a coup to stay in office after his 2022 election defeat, in a plot that included a plan to poison his successor and current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and kill a Supreme Court judge.

+ The approval rate for Keir Starmer’s Labor Government has fallen to just 14%, even lower than the 15% who approved of the Tory government in the final polls before the 2024 election. There’s no way Jeremy Corbin would have allowed the party to sink to these miserable depths.

Approve: 14% (-2 from 8-10 Feb)
Disapprove: 68% (+4)
Net: -54 (-6)

+++

So, the entire MAGA right suffers from the same autistic auto-reflex disorder? Caused by a childhood vaccine, no doubt…

+ Trump’s Border Czar Tom “the Child Separator” Homan has asked the Justice Department to investigate AOC for advising migrants how to respond to an ICE raid, the kind of advice which used to be .protected by the Constitution…

+ The Trump administration insists that it is detaining and shipping off to Guantanamo Prison only the “worst of the worst,” undocumented migrants who’ve been swept up ICE’s dragnet. But this is far from what’s really going on. According to its own internal documents, revealed in a lawsuit filed this week by Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center on behalf of a detainee, many of those renditioned to Gitmo have committed no crimes at all and have entered the US with the government’s approval, awaiting decisions on their applications for refugee status. Most of those who ICE disappeared into the bowels of the prison camp weren’t gang members but carwashers, barbers, and landscapers. At least 39% percent of those imprisoned at Gitmo are considered “low-threat,” even by the Trump administration’s histrionic standards. Most of the detainees have been held incommunicado for two weeks and denied any contact with their families or lawyers.

+ Child Porn, Trump-style: ICE is now compiling an photographic archive and biometric database of all the migrant children it kidnapps during its raids.

+ Meanwhile, the Trump administration has pulled the plug on a program that provided lawyers to nearly 26,000 immigrant children, some too young to read or speak, who are or were under the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. The children face deportation, and many don’t have parents or legal guardians in the US.

+ Damon Hininger, CEO of private prison giant Core Civic, told investors this week: ” I’ve worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career … we’re anticipating .. the most significant growth in our company’s history.”

+ Trump deported 37,660 people during his first month in office, previously unpublished U.S. Department of Homeland Security data show, far below the monthly average of 57,000 removals and returns in the last full year of Biden’s administration. So, after all the huffing and puffing, Biden remains Deporter-in-Chief. Congratulations, Democrats…

+ Don and Elon are primed to drone El Salvador, Colombia and Mexico…

+ Are they unaware that the cartels have drones of their own and know how to use them? Or is that precisely the kind of provocation and retaliation they’re hoping for to justify a ground invasion?

+ Trump has signed an executive order to defund schools of federal dollars if they mandate COVID vaccines for students. Meanwhile, with a measles outbreak spreading across Texas, the new head of HHS, RFK Jr, says he wouldn’t vaccinate his kids against measles, claiming he’d had both measles and the mumps a kid and turned out fine. Note: Kennedy suffers from a neurological condition called spasmodic laryngeal dysphonia, which causes his voice to sound like someone straining at stool (as the coroner said of Elvis Presley’s death). The disorder is more prominent among those who had had measles or mumps (65%) than those who haven’t (15%)

+ Trump’s nominee to run the National Institutes of Health, vaccine-skeptic Jay Bhattacharya, made $11,995 from X’s revenue program, which Elon Musk set up to reward rightwing “content creators.” Bhattacharya attacked public health programs developed by the agency he’s now slated to head or dismantle.

+ I’m ancient enough to remember when Dukakis lost an election because first Al Gore and then George HW Bush smeared him about letting Willie Horton out on furlough…Of course, Willie was black.

+ Now the Trump administration is pressuring the Romanian government to ease travel restrictions for the self-described misogynist Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, who are facing human trafficking charges and a money laundering investigation. The Financial Times reported that Trump officials, including “envoy for special missions” Richard   Grennell, have put the squeeze on Romania on the pairs’ behalf. While Grenell told the FT he had had “no substantive conversation” with Romania’s foreign minister, he did admit his admiration for the bad boys of the Masculinity Movement: “I support the Tate brothers as evident by my publicly available tweets.”

+ On Tuesday at 8:40 in the morning, Leonard Peltier walked out of prison after nearly 50 years of wrongful incarceration. He won’t be entirely free due to the unnecessarily restrictive terms of Biden’s commutation, but he will be home at last.

+ Leonard Peltier:

We are not going to give up. We’re going to win. We’ve been winning. We’re going to continue to win. We’re going to — we’re going to stick together. We’re going to unite. As it is right now, we’ve been united all through Indigenous countries. And we’re going to — we’re going to fight back. We’re going to — we’re going to continue ’til we are a free nation. I gave 50 years for that. And I’m going to give the rest of my life. So, they haven’t broken — they have not broken me. I am not broken.

+ I thought MAGA had so thoroughly de-melanized and de-politicized Frederick Douglass that he was safe to celebrate…But I guess the whitewashing isn’t complete yet since Trump’s anti-DEI order has forced the cancellation of plans by the Maryland National Guard to honor its native son’s legacy.

+ Percentage of Americans who believe the charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams should be dropped: 13%

+ Adrienne Adams, speaker of the NYC Council, has called on Eric Adams to resign after he pledged his subservience to Trump in exchange for Trump ordering the Justice Department to drop its corruption case against him…

+ Four deputy mayors of NYC resigned this week, telling the NYT that they “felt that they were not merely working for an indicted mayor, but for someone whose personal interests risked outweighing the interests of New Yorkers..”

+ As the revolving door spins, despite (or perhaps because of) the genocidal horrors he abetted, Biden’s top Middle East adviser Brett McGurk has landed a new gig at the venture capital firm Lux, which has sprawling investments in weapons and intelligence firms with Pentagon and CIA contracts.

+ Before joining the Biden demolition team, McGurk served on the board of directors of the AI company Primer, which Lux invested in. Lux has deep links to defense and intelligence companies.

+ Benjamin Balthazer, author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism: “Biden’s attempt to ‘return to normal’ aided a genocide, increased oil production, & ended pandemic protections & spending. The era of liberal normalcy is over, if it ever existed. Liberal nostalgia for an unreal past is as deep a phantasy MAGA’s, & in its way, as dangerous.”

+ Creepy white incel dudes, who no one would trust getting their Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccinos just right, failed their barista exams and appealed for a reverse-DEI intervention from the Missouri AG…

+ Rebecca Traitser: “The walkbacks of a party scared of its own woke shadow create silence that the right is happy to fill with grotesque fairy tales.”

+ LSU law professor and CounterPunch contributor Ken Levy has been banned from the classroom for expressing his opinion in fragrant terms about the threats posed by Trump and ultra-right Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry to our civil liberties. Levy’s attorney Jill Craft: “Landry’s attacks against Levy’s speech seemingly runs contrary to the notions of upholding the Constitutions of the State of Louisiana and the United States and have resulted in harassment, including a death threat.” Barring Levy from the classroom at the governor’s behest definitively proves his point about what’s at stake. He has a gifted attorney, but gifted attorneys charge $500 an hour. Ken told me he’s set up a Go Fund Me page to help defray the costs of providing this real-time lesson in constitutional law for the rest of us.

+++

+ Pankaj Mishra: “Eric Hobsbawm’s books first alerted me to the ways in which the history of the modern world was one and indivisible, and that anyone writing it was required to demonstrate the degree and density of its interconnectedness.”

+ Adults who say they trust AI technology, by country

India: 77%
China: 72%
Mexico: 55%
Brazil: 52%
South Korea: 50%
Japan: 38%
United States: 32%
Germany: 29%

Source: Edelman Trust Barometer.

+ Maybe there’s hope for the US, after all…Then again: The New York Times is inserting AI tools in the newsroom and encouraging staff to use AI to suggest edits, headlines, and questions to ask during interviews…

+ Ludwig Wittgenstein’s two-sentence review of Sartre’s No Exit and perhaps existentialism itself: “Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.”

+ JD Vance at CPAC: “When I think about what is the essence of masculinity, we could answer this in so many different ways. When I think about me and my guy friends, we really like to tell jokes to one another.” He’s a guy’s guy. Fortunately, he doesn’t have to tell jokes; he can just continue being one…

+ The idea that rock music is an all-white genre is like saying plantation owners picked their own cotton. Chuck Berry had a band, Little Richard was his own band, Bo Diddley had a band, Ike & Tina had a band–hell, the Ikettes taught Jagger how to dance & many other things too, that we can’t mention in polite company…The Miracles, the Impressions, the Shirelles (who the Beatles modeled their harmonies on), the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Supremes were bands, Sly AND the Family Stone were a band (perhaps the greatest band of any era or genre), Bob Marley AND the Wailers were a band, Prince AND the Revolution were a band, Booker T. AND the MGs were a band (and almost every rock singer would’ve sold their soul at the crossroads to have Booker, Duck Dunn and Steve Cropper backing them), Earth, Wind AND Fire were a band, and a band called Funkadelic rocked harder than almost any of them. Just check out the opening track on Maggot Brain.

+ At 100, Marshall Allen, one of the stalwarts of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, has released his first solo album, New Dawn. And it’s really, really good. Strike that. It’s great. Take a listen here on Bandcamp, then drop the centenarian genius a dime by downloading it.

+ I was distressed to learn that our friend David Martinez, the activist, artist, filmmaker, and CounterPunch contributor, has been very ill and in San Francisco General Health for the last month. His friends have set up a GoFundMe to relieve some financial stress and help speed up his recovery. Please pitch in a few bucks if you can.

We are What We’re Waiting For

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Controlling Contagion: Epidemics and Institutions From the Black Death to Covid
Sheilagh Ogilvie
(Princeton)

The Jail is Everywhere: Fighting the New Geography of Mass Incarceration
Jack Norton, Lydia Pellet Hobbs and Judah Schept
(Verso)

The Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Science
Henry Giroux
(Bloomsbury)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

New Dawn
Marshall Allen
(Mexican Summer)

The Breeze Grew a Fire
Mereba
(Secretly Canadian)

Phonetics On and On
Horsegirl
(Matador)

Born to Reign

“Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interest, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.” 

–Thomas Paine, Common Sense