“The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.”

– Roberto Bolaño

ICE has killed again. This time in Houston.

Once again, ICE shot and killed someone in their car.

Once again, ICE claims the shooting was justified. That ICE agents feared for their lives. That the person they shot had a weapon.

The weapon? A car. The car they were driving when they were pulled over for no reason other than how they looked.

But they looked like you or me or your neighbor.

They were stopped and shot for no other reason than suspicion. Suspicion that they didn’t belong here. Here where they lived. Here where their families lived.

Once again, ICE blamed the victim before the blood of the victim had even dried.

Once again, the FBI is on the case. Not to investigate the shooting or the shooters, but the victim’s alleged assault on the federal officials who killed him.

And once again, the Trump Justice Department blocked local law enforcement and prosecutors from investigating a homicide on their own streets. The streets of Houston, Texas, a city of 2.5 million people, the fourth largest in the United States.

We’ve seen it before. We’ll see it again. We’re not numb to it, exactly. But we’re not shocked, either. We’re no longer even surprised. Another civilian killed on the street by government agents. Another fishing boat blown out of the water in the Caribbean. Another school smart-bombed. Few even ask why anymore, as if the question answers itself.

But imagine if you recognized the person being shot. What if you knew the person being killed? Knew them well. What if you knew them so well that you could tell who they were by the sound of their dying voice? What if the person you saw and heard being killed by ICE was your father? Because that’s what happened in Houston.

“I saw a video posted on Facebook that he had been shot,” said Lorenzo Salgado Jr. “I recognized him immediately—not from his appearance, but from his voice crying for help as he lay on the street bleeding out.”

On Tuesday morning, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was on his way to work, much the same way he’d done every day for the last 35 years, in Magnolia Park, Houston’s historic Mexican-American neighborhood. The community where 52-year-old Lorenzo had lived since he came to the US at the age of 17. The community where Lorenzo raised his family and started and grew his own construction business. The community where Lorenzo had built his own house with his own hands. The community where Lorenzo still lived with his wife and his dog.

Lorenzo was following his daily routine. He got up before dawn. He ate his breakfast. He drank his coffee. And then he drove off to pick up his construction crew and take them to the day’s job site. On Tuesday morning, Lorenzo had three workers with him, including his brother. Then they were pulled over by ICE.

ICE had been making raids in Magnolia Park for the past few weeks, residents said. They had harassed day laborers and restaurant workers. They were pulling over people in their cars, hoping to meet their daily quotas and get their bonuses. It didn’t matter if the arrests stuck or even if they were legal. ICE operates beyond the law.

ICE hasn’t explained why it pulled over Lorenzo Salgado. They just said he was in the country illegally. But he wasn’t hiding out. He had gone through the legal process of applying for a work permit. If ICE wanted him, they knew where to find him.

By all accounts, Lorenzo wasn’t speeding. He hadn’t run a stop sign. His tags were up to date. His brake lights worked.

So why did ICE light him up?

Because he appeared to be easy pickings. Four Hispanic-looking men in one car. That ICE patrol could meet its daily quota by 7 AM.

Lorenzo Salgado was pulled over and shot in another case of racial profiling run amok. Racial profiling as federal policy, a policy that is allowed under the Kavanaugh Rule, which sanctions such stops as minor inconveniences, under the novel legal theory that no harm will be done if you’re wrongly detained and soon released.

A theory disproved in blood.

ICE claims that Lorenzo tried to evade arrest (for what isn’t clear) by “weaponizing” his car and ramming ICE vehicles, threatening the lives of ICE officers. This is a by-now familiar excuse for ICE shootings, one which has been discredited repeatedly in other shootings, including the murder of Renee Goode in Minneapolis.

ICE has offered no evidence to support this claim in the killing of Lorenzo Salgado. No bodycam footage or officer testimony. Only the word of ICE, a word that is disputed by videotape and witnesses, who say Lorenzo posed no threat to the officers who killed him.

Lorenzo Salgado was shot in the abdomen while sitting in his car. He was pulled from his seat, thrown to the pavement and cuffed. He was left there, groaning in pain, begging for help. His unanswered pleas were later heard by his son on videos posted to Facebook. Lorenzo was pronounced dead at a Houston hospital less than an hour later. He’d bled out on the pavement.

Lorenzo Salgado was the 21st person to be shot by federal immigration agents since Donald Trump recaptured the White House and unleashed a nationwide purge of immigrants, nearly all of whom are law-abiding residents of the US. He is the fifth person to be killed. None of the killers have been brought to justice. Few have even been investigated.

Loreno Salgado wasn’t a gang member. He wasn’t a criminal. He wasn’t leeching off the system. he was contributing to it. He was a family man who practiced the work ethic so many Americans claim to admire.

None of those character attributes shielded him from a racist government pogrom that saw only the color of his skin, a color that made him a target for an operation that shoots first and makes up answers later.

+++

+ “What a difference a day makes, 24 little hours….”

Q: Is the ceasefire over? Is the MOU dead?

Trump: I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore. They’re scum. Do you know what scum is? They’re led by sick people. They’re vicious, violent people. They’re liars. They’re cuckoo.

+ These are the same Iranians, I suppose, that only a day earlier Trump had exalted for being shrewder and more rational than “the first and second regimes” that he’d knocked off in airstrikes. They were even willing, Trump bragged, to let the US have some of their “dust, I call it dust.” He was referring to Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium…I think.

Then, only a couple of hours after calling the Iranian leadership “scum,” “liars,” “cuckoo,” and “sick,” “vicious, violent people,” he said they called him up (on his cell perhaps) to make up. They wanted to deal, Trump said. They wanted it “bad.” But maybe it wasn’t the Islamic Republic of Iran that had called. Perhaps it was the one in Japan.

Meanwhile, the missiles kept flying in both directions. Ships were set aflame in the Strait of Hormuz and the price of oil shot up again.

+ According to Stephen Semler, one of the few people who can penetrate the fog of Pentagon accounting, Hegseth’s War Department burned through $103 billion in the first 120 days of the Iran war. That’s $860 million per day. 

Trump: “The famous Strait of Hormuz—nobody ever heard of it.” Documentary evidence that almost everyone except Trump had heard of the Strait of Hormuz…

+ Pete Hegseth’s pastor, Doug Wilson, to NPR: “Under that [Christian nationalist] vision, Wilson told NPR that non-Christians wouldn’t hold public office. Asked whether non-Christians would be allowed to vote, Wilson said, “Yes, probably…” But even Wilson says he is opposed to “forever wars like Iran and Afghanistan,” believes that Congress should declare wars and that the Iran War has gone on and needs to end.

+ Tom Stevenson in the LRB on Trump’s Golden Dome missile defense system:

A week into his second presidential term, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14186: The Iron Dome for America, calling for “a next-generation missile defence shield”. By the time the US National Security Strategy was published last November, the name had changed, irresistibly, to “a Golden Dome for the American homeland”. Golden Dome is a perfect project for Trump. It looks good on a poster; the technology either doesn’t work or won’t be built, and it promises an illusion of security that in fact undermines it.

+ Trump, taking questions from reporters in Ankara while sitting next to  Zelensky, pointed toward the Ukrainian leader and asked reporters, “You have a question for President Putin, please?” A few minutes later, Trump told reporters that “We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan. They were shot at the aircraft carrier.” The remaining gray matter is eroding quickly now. Mitch McConnell’s EEG may show more brain activity than Trump’s at this point. 

+ Reporter: Are further troop drawdowns in Europe likely?

Trump: We’re going to see. I was very disappointed with NATO. Frankly, if it weren’t held in Turkey, where my friend happens to be a very strong leader, a very strong person [i.e, a ruthless dictator], it’s possible that I wouldn’t have attended…We are great friends. Just landing at the airport, to see such a beautiful airport, and to have a building named after me. I was very happy about that.”

+++

+ An Israeli soldier posted a photo of a Palestinian prisoner, stripped down to his briefs, and tied prone to a cot. He is blindfolded and his hands are cuffed behind him. A broomstick and a square metal pipe are lashed to his back. A caption to the photo in Hebrew reads: “Good morning!”

The Israeli government has confirmed the authenticity of the photo (though it did not identify the prisoner being tortured) and claimed it would launch an internal investigation into the circumstances of the photo. But it’s easy to predict the results. The investigation will write this off the way the US dismissed the repellent acts of torture at Abu Ghraib, as a mere incident, an isolated act by a few lowly, bored soldiers or guards, instead of yet more evidence of a systematic torture regime, which has been going on for decades at the direction of ranking Israeli politicians, and military and intelligence commanders.

+ The fanatical Zionist Rahm Emanuel, who volunteered twice to serve in the IDF,  delivered a speech in Tel Aviv on Wednesday slamming Benjamin Netanyahu and telling the Israelis that the US will be forced to reconsider its alliance with the Jewish state if it doesn’t change course: “The United States cannot continue to finance and support that cynicism in silence. You cannot fight indefinitely against a world that has stopped believing you have the right to fight. You must instead find a new sustainable path to peace, security, and economic prosperity.”

+ Emanuel followed his speech with an interview on Israeli TV, where he continued to bash Bibi: “Israel has become a pariah. Israel lost the US. It lost Europe. You picked up Somaliland. As my mom said: ‘Such a deal!’”

+ When you’ve lost Rahmbo…Before you know it, HRC is going to be re-posting those old photos of her kissing Suha Arafat that almost doomed her first Senate campaign in New York.

+ Right on cue…

+ Emanuel is reading the political tea leaves, which show that Zoran Mamdani’s poll numbers are 32 points higher than Netanyahu’s.

Jewish Americans polled
Favorables (net)

Josh Shapiro +20
Zohran Mamdani +5
Benjamin Netanyahu -27
Donald Trump -39

AP-NORC poll | 6/11-6/17

+ 3: the number of cancer patients who die each day in Gaza following Israel’s destruction of the Strip’s health care system, including its oncology wards. More than 11,000 Palestinians are living with cancer in Gaza, around 4,000 of whom require immediate medical evacuation for treatment.

+ About one-third of U.S. adults — including roughly half of Democrats — believe that Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians during the war in Gaza, an accusation that’s been leveled by some human rights organizations and vehemently denied by Israel and the U.S. government. About 2 in 10 Americans say Israel has not and the rest, about half, don’t know enough to say.

+ In the spring of 1968, a Palestinian Christian named Sirhan Sirhan, never a particularly political person, read a piece by the great Andy Kopkind describing Robert F. Kennedy’s courtship of American Jewish voters and donors, in which Kennedy disparaged his opponent, Eugene McCarthy, for being too indulgent toward the aspirations of the Palestinians. Kopkind also reported that Kennedy had pledged to push through the sale of US F-4 Phantom jets to the Israeli Defense Forces.  After reading Kopkind’s piece, Sirhan inscribed “RFK must die!” in his diary. On the night of June 5th, Sirhan took his Iver-Cadet 22 calibre pistol to the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and shot Kennedy three times as the senator was talking to a dishwasher. Sirhan later told David Frost: “My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians.”

+ Fast forward 58 years, RFK Jr. (who believes that Sirhan was a patsy and that his father was killed by a security guard named Thane Eugene Cesar) maintains his father’s devotion to Israel: “If Israel wanted to commit a genocide against Palestinians, they could do it in a minute. That’s doing the opposite. Palestinian population is growing enormously around Israel. The number of Christians in Gaza has dropped by about 80% over the past 10 years. If you want to see what a real genocide is happening, it’s not in Israel. It’s happening in all the nations around it.”

+ Netanyahu: I look for Argentina (where Eichmann and 5000 other Nazis fled for sanctuary) in the World Cup. You know why?

Reporter: Messi?

Netanyahu: No, before Messi—Milei. He’s a superstar.

+++

+ Welcome to the Golden Age!

+ The financial sector is losing 28,000 jobs a month to AI. Yet, according to Fortune, layoffs driven by AI automation are largely failing to generate expected financial returns.

+ First Trump loses the Iran war, then the Belgian war, and now the trade war, which was allegedly his entire economic focus (his real economic focus, of course, is the self-enrichment of the Trump family and their cronies): “The U.S. trade deficit swelled in May to $77.6 billion, its widest since March 2025 as the country imported more products like pharmaceuticals, vehicles and semiconductors for the artificial-intelligence boom, while the amount American-made exports fell.”

+  Over the past year, nearly all net job growth in the US has come from the Healthcare and Social Assistance sector of the economy, which added 855,000 jobs.

+ Financial Times: Corporate earnings,  not just valuations, indicate that the market bubble is about to burst. A study by the Gartner Report found that “while 80% of those surveyed who have piloted an AI or autonomous technology reported workforce reductions, the businesses cut jobs due to automation regardless of whether the technology was actually generating returns.”

+ One-third of Americans’ wealth is now tied to the stock market, a record high. Direct and indirect stock holdings, including in mutual funds or retirement plans, accounted for an all-time high of 45% of households’ financial assets in the second quarter, according to Federal Reserve data.

+ WSJ: Since the pandemic, fathers with degrees and young children have cut their time at the job by 6 hours per week, and increased time spent on housework by four hours per week.

+ Household debt in the US has increased by 4 percent over the last year. But credit card debt has climbed by more than 11 percent, hitting a staggering $1.25 trillion. Delinquencies have reached near-record highs.

+ Steve Cahillane, CEO of Kraft Heinz: Lower-income Americans are literally running out of money at the end of the month. We’re seeing negative cash flows in the lower-income brackets where they’re dipping into savings.” 

+ Tough guy Rep. Troy Nehls, the Texas Republican and former sheriff, after being asked about 60% of Americans struggling with affordability, barked: “Affordability? What are you talking about?… I’m gonna get me a couple of big lobster tails. I’m gonna get me some nice rib eyes… Maybe the 60% of Americans don’t work as hard as I do.”

+ Long-term unemployment is surging in the US, reported CNBC, with job openings dropping to 7.18 million in July, a level rarely seen since the pandemic began.

+ Michael Burry, the hedge fund manager profiled in The Big Short: “Donald Trump could not in a million years understand or make his way through any of my Substack essays. But he can shoot from the hip and make money for himself and his cronies better than anyone.”

+ The median wealth in the US, according to the latest USB Global Wealth report, is $68,000, ranking it 28th in the world. It ranks 2nd in average wealth, demonstrating the gaping inequality that’s dividing the country. (The average wealth in the US is ten times the median!)

+ The US is now home to more than 40% of the world’s millionaires.

+ Oracle’s stock is down 58% from its peak and 40 % for the year.

+ House foreclosures have hit a 7-year high and are rising. The real estate president is about to displace Obama as the foreclosure president. 

+ Bank of America analysts: “Our bear market signposts suggest speculation is hitting extreme levels as high multiple stocks have gapped up demonstrably, an event that has historically preceded a valuation ‘snapback.’” Snapback is Greenspan-speak for collapse.

+ According to Notus: “A draft report inside the Treasury Department is set to warn of the risks posed by the artificial intelligence market, likening key aspects of it to the dotcom bubble that upended the U.S. economy when it burst in the early 2000s…Career Treasury analysts found that AI firms are more deeply entrenched in the U.S. economy than their dotcom predecessors and pose significant risk to the entire system if financial conditions change, productivity goals are missed or various choke points stymie growth.”

+ The Telegraph on the AI bubble: The overvaluation of US stocks has now surpassed the level that brought the stock market crashing down in 1929. At a rating more than double that of their British and European counterparts, and the highest since the peak of the dotcom bubble, US equities are in for a hairy decade.”

+ Mamdani’s city-owned grocery stores: commie plot!

Trump’s fed-owned gas stations: populist genius!

+ Trump made $2 billion on his crypto swindle and more than a million of his investors lost $3.8 billion…Even PT Barnum didn’t dream of this many suckers. Of course, many of them were probably sycophants or billionaires seeking to curry favor with the Krypto King and had a few million to burn…

+ The Wall Street Journal on Trump’s crypto-scam:

“The president raked in cash by issuing new assets—World Liberty tokens and memecoins. But those who bought them at high prices had to suffer as their value went belly up, part of a wider crash in crypto. Political followers and crypto true believers who bought into the Trump brand were left holding the bag. A crypto summer for the president was a crypto winter for them.

“Roughly two-thirds of investors in Trump’s memecoin are currently in the red, according to crypto data provider Nansen, which tracks 1.48 million crypto wallets that bought the token since its January 2025 launch. Many fans spent a few thousand dollars on Trump coins while the biggest spenders shelled out millions for the token. Nansen’s analysis of 26,663 wallets shows that 85% of World Liberty’s $WLFI token buyers in the secondary market are underwater.

+ Unusual for us, SOP for Trump…

+ Trump, admitting the obvious: “Almost anything my kids do–if they buy a truck–they have inside information.” Trump told the NYT that he learned from his first term that “nobody cared” about how much $$ he made while serving as president or whether he used inside info to make it. The emoluments clause is another expired section of the Constitution.

+ Trump fantasizing about a threesome…with, uhm, his sons:

I see my two beautiful sons sitting there. I think I’m going to give one to myself, one to them, and we’ll have a threesome. I’ll pick out one of the two and give them the Congressional Medal of Honor for something, for their genius at hunting and I’ll get one for taking on ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ or something.

+ This is the third or fourth time Trump (who received five draft deferments to avoid military service during the Vietnam War) has mused about awarding himself the Medal of Honor.  He says he’s joking. But if you have to say you’re joking, you probably aren’t.

+ There have been Trumps living in the US since 1895. Yet, through WW I, WW II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, Iraq and now, Iran, none of them has ever served in the military.

+ Orson Welles, “Living in the lap of luxury isn’t bad except that you never know when luxury is going to stand up.”

+ Johnnie Taylor’s “Last Two Dollars” should be our National Economic Anthem…

 

+++

+ Aaren Ruigenburg, writing in the Boston Review, on “climate hushing”: “Big oil understood decades ago that the unchecked burning of fossil fuels would, in the words of their own senior employees’ internal communications, be ‘globally catastrophic,’ do ‘great irreversible harm to our planet,’..have ‘serious consequences for man’s comfort and survival,’ and cause such destabilization that ‘civilization could prove a fragile thing.’”

+ A single extremely hot day in India can kill 3,400 people and  heatwaves that last for five days kill 30,000, according to a new study in Frontiers in Environmental Health. The study calls that a conservative estimate, saying that most of the deaths of the poor aren’t even counted. 

+ A new study by scientists at UC-Merced found that 42% of all the area burned by Western fires had occurred during or right after a heat wave.

+ Early summer fires are blazing across Europe: Spain, France, Portugal and Greece. One fire in southwest France has forced the evacuations of more than 10,000 people. French climate researcher Julien Ruffault told Le Monde: “Never before have 11,000 hectares burned this early in the summer in southern France in at least the past 20 years”.

+ EV car sales have now surpassed gas-only powered cars in Great Britain. Sales of EVs have increased by more than 6 percent over last year and by 35 percent in June, as gas prices neared record highs.

+ A report in the Guardian said that the week of extreme temperatures in Britain “left 86% of homes ‘too hot’ and many people feeling unwell.” 

+ British school children have already missed over seven million school days due to heatwaves causing schools to close.

+ According to E&E News, the US Energy Information Administration has tripled its prediction for new gas power plant capacity by 2030, due to Donald Trump’s energy policy and the rise of AI.

+ Measles had largely been eliminated from the US. Trump and RFK, Jr. have brought the disease back, with a vengeance, as cases reach a near record high…

+++

+ Trump: “They say now progressive. Liberal became so tarnished, but now it’s communists, you know, they say social democrats, no, social Democrat is a communist.” The social democrats (basically a European version of the Clinton democrats) will be surprised to hear this. He means democratic socialists, but it’s a Trump tic that when he gets something wrong and realizes it, he doubles down and repeats it with emphasis.

+ Rep. Lisa McClain: “For the people in our country who want to turn this country into a communist country–leave. Go to Europe, where they are experiencing this heat wave and they don’t have air conditioning. See how well that works for you. I’m proud to be an American.” There’s a reason Henry Miller called the US, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare…Imagine being stuck in an elevator with this genius.

+ The US has a population of unhoused people about the size of Arkansas, who will be sleeping on the streets or in tents…

+ Brian Kilmeade, Fox: Sixty-two percent of Democrats say they prefer socialism over capitalism.

Joe Manchin, the “blue-collar” Democrat who lived on a yacht in DC: If they do, there isn’t a Democratic Party left. That’s another reason why I’m not registered as a Democrat. I can’t put up with that crazy shit. That’s nuts!

+ Bill Maher invited JD Vance, one of the most shameless religious hucksters of our time, on his show for a joint bitch session about Democratic Socialists, where Maher told Vance he was ready to quit the Democratic Party:  “If this is where the Democratic Party is going with the Democratic Socialists. This obsession with Israel, the Jew-hating, they don’t believe in capitalism. No prisons. If this is where they’re going, then my vote is in play.”

JD Vance: “Ok, I like to hear that!”

Hey, Bill? Mark Twain wants his prize back…

+ JD Vance, VP from Opus Dei: “People hang out those hideous signs in their yard that say, ‘ In this house we believe blah blah blah blah blah. You know, love is love, science is science, whatever. No person is illegal.” That sign is such a disgusting butchering of the Nicene Creed.”

Over to you, Pope Leo…

+++

+ Here’s Karoline Leavitt, the 27-year-old White House press secretary for a president who was gifted $413 million by his father to start and keep his failing businesses afloat, on Fox News smearing American youth for being too lazy to contribute to society:

“My generation–I hate to say it [she loves saying it]–have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths, just getting everything handed to them.”

Leavitt claimed that American youths suffer from “laziness and liberal indoctrination.” When Fox’s Jesse Watters, who once punctured the tires of a female coworker at Fox, with whom he was sexually obsessed, said that teens who misbehave should be forced to join the military. Leavitt agreed and said, “Or sent to Cuba or Iran.” Why do the MAGAns hate the future of America?

+ The Trump political (and commercial) enterprise and FIFA are two of the world’s most corrupt organizations. Thus, it was no surprise that Trump called upon his sycophantic pal Gianni Infantino to overturn the red card awarded to US men’s soccer star Folarin Balagun after he stomped on the ankle of an opposing player on the Bosnia-Herzegovina squad in a dangerous challenge. Rules don’t apply to Trump in politics, law or sport. He’s a notorious cheater in golf and has repeatedly awarded himself championships at his own clubs. Former PGA pro Brad Faxon said Trump even cheated in a round with Tiger Woods, saying Trump “put down a score that didn’t account for two balls he hit into the water on one hole.”He probably didn’t need to intimidate Infantino, but he did anyway, threatening FIFA with investigations and lawsuits. Most, despicably, however, Trump and his World Cut hatchet man, Anthony Giuliani, slandered the Brazilian ref in the match, baselessly accusing Raphael Claus of corruption and handing out red cards to fix matches. But justice was done on the pitch, as Belgium demolished a listless and sloppy US squad playing in the US’s most soccer-crazed sanctuary city, Seattle. Trump’s intervention inspired the Belgians and deflated an already questionable US side.

+ Folarin Balogun, the star player for the US men’s soccer team whom Trump forced FIFA to violate its own rules to reinstate for tonight’s elimination game against Belgium, is a birthright US citizen. His Nigerian mother was pregnant when the family was visiting New York. She wasn’t allowed to board a plane back home and gave birth to Folarin in Brooklyn. Trump’s policies would have revoked his citizenship.

+ Whatever event Polymarket predicts (soccer, politics, the Emmys or the market), bet the opposite…

+ Thomas Massie on the rumors that Mitch McConnell is brain dead…

 

+ NYTimes Pitchbot” “Graham Platner’s history of sexual assault proves he does not belong in the US Senate. He belongs on the Supreme Court.” by Susan Collins.

+ Trump on the allegations against Platner:

+ Texas AG Ken Paxton is one of the biggest purveyors of the myth of mass voting fraud and illegal voting by undocumented residents. But Paxton himself appears to have committed voter fraud by using an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years. Paxton, who is now running for the U.S. Senate with Trump’s blessing, has repeatedly warned voters that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records.” 

+ Paxton has been spending the early weeks of the summer jaunting across Europe with his girlfriend Tracy Duhon, a “Christian influencer.” Paxton first hooked up with Duhon while he was still married to his wife, Angela, a state senator. Angela later filed for divorce on “Biblical grounds.” It’s unclear whether Angela meant adultery per se or Paxton’s specific choice of influencers for the teaching of the Holy Scriptures.

+ Who killed the Gods? According to Hegel, Aristophanes. Once you start laughing at them, their gig is up. That’s why satire and ridicule often prove the best weapons against tyrants. They thrive on your hatred, but squirm and writhe at your laughter.

+++

+ C’mon. They celebrated the fact that America is once again a place where congressional maps can be redrawn to ensure that a white candidate will win but not a black one, that swimmers will no longer finish fifth because a trans person finished fourth in a race and that bakeries can refuse to serve cupcakes to gay couples. Plus, this is the place where we can eat our Chick-fil-A sandwiches while talking on our phones inside of our cars (where many of us also live)… 

+ Dr. Samuel Johnson, a fierce abolitionist, on the hypocrisy of the American revolutionaries: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?” (1775, Taxation No Tyranny)

+ Consider the father of the country, who owned 100 enslaved people and kept buying them into his dotage to work at his new distillery. When George Washington inspected enslaved Africans to purchase–often right off the docks to avoid bidding wars at auction–he looked for females who were “fat and lusty.”

+ James Madison Sr., the father of the diminutive Jimmy (he maxxed out at 5’4”), was a Virginia planter and judge who once sentenced to death an enslaved boy who had stolen 25 cents’ worth of goods from a warehouse. Judge Madison sent his son off to college with his personal slave, Sawney. Jimmy, the man who would become the principal architect of the US Constitution and author of the Bill of Rights, didn’t attend either of the preeminent southern universities, Virginia or William and Mary, but Princeton, the favored Ivy League school of the southern gentry. The southern boys felt at home up there in Yankee New Jersey, in large measure because the president of the college during the Revolutionary period was John Witherspoon, himself a slave-owner.

+ I’ve always been a little dubious about Patrick Henry’s made-for-meme cry of “Give me liberty or give me death!” After all, when Henry read the Constitution, he said that he “smelled a rat” because the document failed to include, in the historian Sean Wilentz’s words, “any categorical guarantee to the slaveholders of their rights to property in man.” Still, as cagily drafted as it was, the Constitution had enough “subcategorical guarantees” to keep the peculiar institution thriving for the next 70 years, as the enslaved population in the Deep South swelled. In 1790, the enslaved population of the US was around 695,000. By 1860, the population had exploded to more than 4 million, most in the cotton states of South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana.

+ Speaking of the Constitution, birthright citizenship is protected for now. But four of the literalist justices on the Court(Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) were willing to strike down a provision that is literally in the Constitution. (Kavanaugh voted against the Trump administration in this case, but his decision was not based on Constitutional grounds.)

+ Matt Walsh: “Now that [the Supreme Court] has opened the floodgates for foreign invaders to flock across our borders and spawn, the only choice we have is to triple down on immigration enforcement. Militarize the border. Mass deportations. Round up every illegal. Don’t pull back when the lesbian activists start screeching about it. Use whatever force is necessary. There is no other option.” Screeching Lesbian Activists, Unite! (The ruling didn’t open any floodgates. The Constitution remains as it was.)

+ Pastor Loran Livingstone dropping a truth bomb on Independence Day from his Central Church pulpit in North Carolina: “There has never been a Christian nation, and never will be. You don’t live in one now. A Christian nation wouldn’t have killed and displaced 20 million Native Americans, or thought owning slaves was pleasing to God.” 

+ Trump on Independence Day: “And as our Declaration of Independence tells us, we are all made in the image of one almighty god. And a communist will never say that.” No one who has actually read the Declaration would say that, since the Declaration doesn’t say that… “Our American ancestors did not shed their blood just so that a band of thieves, radicals, and lunatics could come in and loot and pillage our nation.” This is a pretty accurate echo of how the British government viewed the American Revolutionaries or how many Americans viewed the J6 rioters. By the way, Trump’s oldest “American ancestor”, his grandfather Frederich, arrived in the US in 1895.

If men and women were made in the image of ONE Almighty God, why are the Republicans so hung up on trans people? They would seem, almost by definition, closer to the image of one God who was both male and female…

+ Trump, standing in front of a group of cosplaying Roughriders: “I even had a conversation with Theodore Roosevelt. I asked, ‘How do you feel about the fact that the Democrats gave the Panama Canal away to Panama for one dollar?'” He didn’t say how TR responded because he got sidetracked talking about the Democrats removing the name of the “Tariff King” from Mount Denali.

+ Apparently, Trump (or his devoted human printer, Natalie Harp, who claims her boss saved her from cancer) doesn’t even know his own age. He was 17 in this photo, which doesn’t depict him at West Point or Annapolis, as it’s meant to suggest, but at the New York Military Academy boarding [ie., reform] school, where Fred Trump sent Donald the Delinquent, after he was caught repeatedly sneaking off from Queens to Manhattan to…”buy knives.” I know whom I’d rather hang out with, then, at least… (Obama looks like a wannabe street hustler in one of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins novels but is not tough enough to pull it off.)

+ Trump has a knife fetish. As I noted, one of the reasons Fred sent young Don away to military school was that he kept sneaking off to Manhattan to buy knives. When his Reflecting Pool renovation was completed, he boasted: “This will last for at least 50 years. You’ll never have a leak. It’s very strong. You couldn’t, if you had a knife — I don’t want to give anybody ideas. If you had a knife, you can’t even cut it. So strong, so powerful, it’s like powerful rubber. It is beautiful. Sealed.” Then when the pool turned into something resembling Linda Blair’s puke in the Exorcist and chunks of American Flag Blue rubber started sloughing off, Trump blamed it on knife-wielding pool saboteurs: “Somebody went in with a knife and cut it. They cut it up good. And then they cut it 200, 350-foot slips in the form of lots of little slips, a real horrible stuff.” Over to you, Herr Professor Doktor Freud…

+ The Atlantic has pronounced that the age of reading is over in the US:

Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than they used to. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.) Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

Why go to college?
Why go to night school?
Nobody reads that shit now…
Burned all my notebooks
What good are notebooks?
I can’t even spell my own name…

+ Here’s yet another reason to celebrate the centenary of John Berger’s birth: When Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel, G., he split the prize money with the British Black Panther Party, saying he wanted to share the prize “with those West Indians in and from the Caribbean who are fighting to put an end to their exploitation.”

+ Trump appeared on Usha Vance’s “Storytime” podcast for kids, which is meant to encourage children to read books. When Usha asked Trump about what books he likes to read, he replied: “I end up reading mostly newspapers. I usually read stories about myself.” Isn’t he special, “so, fucking, special,” as Chrissie H. sang. [Yes, I know that “Creep” is a Radiohead song. But Chrissie’s version is better because: a. She’s a better singer than Thom Yorke. b. She’s not a genocide denier.]

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

The Secret World of Twilight: A Natural History of Dusk and Dawn
Sally Coulthard
(Bloomsbury)

Everything is Now: the 1960s New York Avant-Garde–Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop
J. Hoberman
(Verso)

The Dreaded Pox: Sex and Disease in Early Modern London
Olivia Weisser
(Cambridge)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Somewhere Over the Rainbow
Sun Ra
(Strut)

Public Luxury
Downtown Boys
(Sub Pop)

Armagideon Time: When Punk Met Dub (1978-1984)
Various Artists
(Cherry Red)

We’re a Sort of Maddening Luxury

“No matter what the Bible says—and I’m not a fundamentalist—I just don’t think that men were the first. I don’t think that Eve was made out of Adam’s rib. I think the first sex, biologically, is the female sex, and there are many creatures in our world who are female and only become male as long as is necessary and then revert to the original and superior condition. I think we’re a kind of decoration. We’re sort of a maddening luxury. The basic and essential human is the woman, and all that we’re doing is trying to brighten up the place. That’s why all the birds who belong to our sex have prettier feathers—because we have got to try and justify our existence. Look how little we do to keep the race going.” –Orson Welles