It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power.

– Seamus Heaney, “Crediting Poetry, ” Nobel lecture

+ At least 74,396 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since October 7, 2023. With thousands more under the rubble and many others missing, this is almost certainly a vast underestimate. Another 175,450 Palestinians have been maimed and injured. The majority of these casualties are civilians: women, children and the elderly. Since the Trump-branded ceasefire of last October, another 1500 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces and 5,161 injured.

+ For the past three years, Israel has killed around 22,000 Palestinian children–that’s one child in Gaza every 71 minutes, including 5,444 children under five and 1,125 babies under one year old.

+ An investigation by CNN found that the deaths of at least 24 of the 40 Israelis who died in captivity in Gaza were deaths linked to Israeli military actions, including airstrikes and ground operations, or military operations that prompted their captors to kill them. At least 11 of the Israeli captives were killed directly by Israeli military operations. CNN also reported that Netanyahu scuttled a ceasefire deal in July 2024 that could have saved several of the captives’ lives.

+ The Palestinian Ministry of Education reports that at least 20,500 Palestinian students in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces in the last three years, including 19,189 school students and 1,386 university students. Another 32,668 students have been wounded, including 28,586 school students and 3,082 university students. Israeli forces have killed more than 1050 school teachers, staff and university professors since October 7, 2023.

+ At least 111 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces in September. The death toll included 10 women, four elderly residents and 23 children.

+ Epidemiological studies estimate that the death count in Gaza is much higher…

Two studies published in The Lancet, the Capture-Recapture Analysis (Oct 7, 2023–June 30, 2024) and Gaza Mortality Survey of deaths from Dec 30, 2024–Jan 5, 2025, suggest that the real death count may be between 34.7% and 41% higher than the official count.

The Max-Planck-Institut (MPIDR) and CED Modeling used a pseudo-Bayesian modeling accounting system for under-reporting to estimate 78,318 direct conflict fatalities through the end of 2024 and projected more than 100,000 total deaths.

The Lancet Global Health survey estimated 16,300 total non-violent deaths in Gaza since October 3, 2023, with 8,540 excess deaths higher than normal.

Another Lancet study on life expectancy and life-years lost estimates that 3 million life-years have been lost in Gaza. Individual losses average more than 51 years per recorded fatality.

+ During a debate this week, Rep. David Valadao, the Republican from California’s 22nd District in the San Joaquin Valley, defended US arms sales to Israel on the grounds that it was a useful way to test the effectiveness of US-made weapons.

Moderator: Rep. David Valadao, you’ve been a staunch supporter of Israel, signing off on numerous aid packages. What is your message to your constituents, including your opponent, who believe that money would be better spent here at home?

Rep. David Valadao: The money is spent here. When we spend those dollars, that money is spent on American weapons systems. And when we develop those, we work in partnership with Israel. And when those weapons are actually used there to defend Israel, which is our closest ally in the region, especially that very hostile region, that we have to watch carefully…but the fact that those weapons are used there and tested there, we are able to learn from that and use that experience to develop our own weapons systems to help us in a situation where we have to help others, like Ukraine. We have the ability to send weapons systems over there. We learn often from those opportunities and resources being spent, again on American weapons systems, made by American manufacturers, creating American jobs, so that we can learn from those systems and help an ally at the same time.

+ Under the Trump-brokered “ceasefire,” Israel was required to allow 600 humanitarian aid trucks into Gaza each day. But the average over the last year has been more on the order of 150 daily. This week Israel closed the only crossing into Gaza altogether, blocking aid into Gaza and medical evacuations of seriously ill Palestinians out of the Strip.

+ Palestinian farmers lost more than $157 million in olive crops since 2023, while some 286,000 olive trees in the occupied West Bank were damaged between 2023 and the end of September 2026 due to Israeli measures and settler attacks, according to the Palestinian Agriculture Ministry. The ministry said around 100,000 olive trees were damaged in the West Bank in the first nine months of 2026 alone, with crop losses exceeding $67 million. Farmers are currently unable to access roughly 30% of the West Bank’s olive-growing land due to Israeli restrictions, settler attacks, land seizures, and the theft of olive crops.

+ In Gaza, more than 90% of an estimated two million olive trees have been lost since the war began in 2023, alongside extensive destruction of infrastructure supporting the olive sector.

+ Around 201,290 buildings in Gaza, or an estimated 82% of all buildings in the Strip, were damaged by Israeli attacks between October 7, 2023, and June 16, 2026, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Of those, 134,422 buildings were completely destroyed and another 13,848 severely damaged. Most of Gaza’s roughly 2.1 million residents remain displaced and confined to less than 40% of the Strip due to Israeli access restrictions.

+ A new report from Forensic Architecture finds the Israeli military’s practices of demolition, compaction and removal of rubble are “desecrating the bodies of Palestinians” and making the recovery of Palestinian remains impossible in the 65% of Gaza under Israel’s control.

+ From Sarah Azizi’s Doomsday Diaries:

An image: a bulldozer rams into a fence cordoning off the Gaza Strip from Israel, and bodies rush through the aperture. Off camera, a hoarse man screams in Arabic, “Break it! God is great! Break it!” For an instant, Gaza no longer means unreachable, trapped, inert. All my life, that name has been an ache, beloved and impenetrable, intimate and out of reach. It is the land where my father was born as a refugee, a place he loved despite the larger tragedy that stranded his family there. Gaza, a place that was born in me the first time he told me stories of the sea. As a six-year-old, he’d sneak a swim in the Mediterranean on the way home from school, splashing naked in the water until his brother arrived to haul him back. I see Gaza return in his eyes each time he glimpses waves.

+ According to Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her dad, Mike, the US ambassador to Israel, the reason US support for Israel has fallen since 2023 is not that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians but that Mamani “says” Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians…

FOX: American sympathy for Israelis fell by 18 points…

Sanders: Those numbers should not be happening. It’s people like Mamdani who are causing a total shift. He should be ashamed.

+ “You think I’m your Santa Claus,” Biden to Netanyahu on US aid to Israel during the Israeli genocide in Gaza, according to Biden’s former Mideast envoy Brett McGurk’s self-serving memoir Brink. Was he wrong?

+ Biden provided around $18 billion in direct military aid to Israel following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks and during Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza. In addition, in December 2023, Biden approved emergency authorization to sell 14,000 tank shells ($106.5 million) and artillery shells/related weapons ($147.5 million) to replenish Israel’s stocks. In May 2024, Biden approved a $1 billion arms and ammunition package including tank ammunition ($700 million), tactical vehicles ($500 million, overlapping/part of reported tracking), and mortar rounds ($60 million). In August 2024, Biden okayed another $20 billion shipment to Israel including up to 50 F-15 fighter jets, Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAMs), tactical vehicles, and tank/mortar cartridges. And in November, Biden approved a $680 million arms sale to Israel, including Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kits and small-diameter bombs.

+ Santa Claus usually makes just one drop-shipment a year!

+ Megyn Kelly: “Americans can’t afford groceries and we’re giving $16.2 billion to Israel”

+ Last Tuesday, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir once again joined Israeli forces as they demolished a five-story residential building in the Al-Tur neighborhood of East Jerusalem. The building contained 10 apartments and housed more than 70 Palestinians, most of them mothers and their children.

+ In Ramallah, Israeli settlers set fire to the home of a Palestinian family of five. The house is owned by an American citizen. A month ago, the settlers terrorized the same family, vandalizing the man’s car and slashing down his olive tree grove.

+ Israeli settlers assaulted AFP photojournalist  Jaafar Ashityeh, 58, while he was reporting on settler attacks during the Palestinian olive harvest in the West Bank village of Aqraba. His attackers beat him repeatedly with the butts of their rifles and then stole his camera equipment. The assault occurred in front of Israeli soldiers, who refused to intervene. Ashityeh was the victim of a similar attack during the olive harvest last year as well…

+ In an interview with GQ, the actor Adam Brody, who plays a “hot” rabbi in the Netflix comedy Nobody Wants This, called the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza a genocide: “Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine. It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago. I’m hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”

Predictably, Brody was immediately denounced by Steve Leder, an LA rabbi who once served as a consultant on the TV series, who hissed that Brody’s comments were “flippant,” “disgusting” and “truly shocking.” Leder huffed that “there is no genocide in Gaza” and called Brody a “relatively ignorant Jew.”

+ Meanwhile, Ms. Rachel slammed the nameless celebrities who are “doing nothing” to help stop the genocide in Gaza…In an Instagram post, Ms. Rachel wrote…

+ Seymour Hersh on the Israelis freaking out over a potential deal between Trump and Iran over its nuclear program:

The Israeli view, according to the author of the paper on nuclear verification, is that the Trump administration, anxious for a nuclear agreement before the November elections, is being suckered by an Iranian regime that “will lie and cheat with a smile and double down when their backs are up against a wall.” The expert said he is convinced that the Iranian leadership is “buying time to improve” the economy and, with that accomplished, “will improve the defenses” around three of its major nuclear sites, at Natanz, Isfahan, and Fordow. All three sites have been heavily bombed in recent years by US and Israeli aircraft.

“Israel is “terrified,” the Israeli said, because “the Iranians believe that the only way to survive is to lash out.” He said the Iranian leadership has learned, like Mohammed Ali, the great American boxer, when to do “rope-a-dope” before lashing out.

+ David Milstein, a top aide to Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, suppressed and altered damaging information about Israel in US government reports since taking office in April 2025. According to a report in the NYT, Milstein buried a report from earlier this year documenting how Israel had secretly approved more illegal settlements in the West Bank in the early months of the Iran War, despite Trump’s public stance against the Israeli annexation of Palestinian land in the Occupied Territories. The Times report says that Milstein consistently slanted reports from the embassy to portray Benjamin Netanyahu in a more favorable light, especially when it came to Netanyahu’s failure to take action against rising violence by Israeli settlers and security forces against Palestinians in the West Bank. Milstein also repeatedly rebuffed members of Congress who were seeking more information and accountability over the killings of Palestinian-Americans by Israeli settlers, police and the military.

+ Just hours after the Nobel Peace Prize committee in Oslo announced that this year’s award will go to Navi Pillay–the South African lawyer who fought apartheid,  served for nine years as a judge on the International Criminal Court, worked as the top human rights official at the United Nations and who led the UN inquiry finding Israel committed genocide in Gaza–the Trump administration announced extreme sanctions against the court (ICC) she once served on.

+ Not surprisingly, Norman Finkelstein has a much more critical assessment of Pillay’s role on the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, where she tried to balance the Commission’s condemnation of Israeli atrocities by attempting to lend legitimacy to Israel’s disproven claims of widespread sexual violence and rape committed against Israeli women by Hamas. Finkelstein’s case against Pillay is set forth in his new book, Gaza’s Gravediggers.

+ Donald Trump on why he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize: “There’s never been anybody in the history of the Nobel Prize that deserves it more. I settled eight wars. I stopped the total obliteration of the world.”

+ On July 21, 2025, Dr. Marwan al-Hams, director of Gaza’s field hospitals, was shot in the leg, and taken into custody by armed Israeli men in civilian clothes, as he was being filmed for a documentary by photojournalist Tamer Al-Za’anin, who was killed by the Israelis during the raid. Dr. Al-Hams has been detained at Ganot prison ever since. On October 7, Gaza’s Health Ministry and the Prisoners’ Media Office reported that Dr. Al-Hams was dragged from his cell and severely beaten on the orders of Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. The beating, which took place in front of Ben-Gvir, was savage enough to fracture bones and leave Dr. Al-Hams with extreme back pain. The Prisoner’s Office called it the “harshest treatment recorded against Gaza detainees.”

+ Netanyahu wants the Israeli soldiers interviewed in Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s documentary NAZA, on the mass killings of Palestinians, identified and criminally prosecuted. demanded the Israeli attorney general, the military chief of staff, and the head of Shin Bet “act urgently to uncover the identity of all those who are involved or appear in the libel film” and called for “the opening of a criminal investigation and prosecution.” He also urged the Knesset to pass new laws that would strip Israeli citizenship from the filmmakers and others who  “smear Israeli soldiers.”

+ Israeli forces arrested four journalists covering settler attacks on Palestinian olive harvesters in the West Bank town of Idhna, while a few miles away, other Israeli forces uprooted an olive orchard, destroyed an agricultural building and water tank in the town of Khirbet Soba. 

+ Meanwhile, Israeli settlers, disguised as Israeli soldiers, broke into a Palestinian home outside of Nablus and assaulted the family, leaving several members injured before fleeing the scene. 

+ According to Mohammed Abu Afash, director of Medical Relief in Gaza, at least 2,027 Palestinian patients in Gaza have died while awaiting treatment or medical evacuation abroad. Another 21,000 others need evacuation. The crossing out of Gaza has been closed for the last week. 

+ Former CNN reporter Oliver Darcy, now with Status, obtained audio of a combative meeting led by Bari Weiss’ handpicked foreign editor, Shayndi Raice, where she threatened to fire “insubordinate” journalists and clashed with senior correspondent Holly Williams over editorial meddling in reporting about Israel and the Occupied Territories…Tensions erupted at CBS News between veteran reporters and new editorial leaders under Bari Weiss, including a contentious editing process for Lesley Stahl’s 60 Minutes segment on extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank that aired October 11. Williams faced pushback on including Gaza’s nearly 75,000 death toll—mostly children, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry—in a report marking the third anniversary of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. Raice defended omitting details in a combative staff meeting on October 13, calling the Gaza mortality figure a “magic number.”

No other network or mainstream media outlet has questioned the 74,000 deaths figure as an absolute minimum…

+ Mirjana Spoljaric, head of ICRC: “We hear more and more leaders say that the rules of war don’t apply anymore, and that there can’t be rules because of the pursuit of total victory. But that is not possible. In history, there has never been total victory; there has only been death and destruction, over and above what was necessary.”

+ Khaled Elgindy on “The End of Gaza,” Foreign Affairs:

A year after the Trump administration negotiated an agreement to end the war in Gaza, Palestinians are still waiting for the “day after” to arrive. The October 2025 cease-fire plan freed the last remaining Israeli hostages and ostensibly ended hostilities, but Israel continues to constantly strike targets in Gaza, often killing civilians, including some 300 children in the past year.

The deal also envisioned a phased political process that would help reconstruct the devastated territory. Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and the point person for the Middle East, promised in January this year that restoration of core services and infrastructure—including water and sewage systems, electricity networks, hospitals, and bakeries—would begin within 100 days. And yet, nine months later, Gaza has seen no reconstruction, no restoration of basic services, or even an end to daily violence. Instead, the vast majority of its inhabitants remain packed into squalid and sprawling tent cities along a tiny—and ever-shrinking—strip of coastline, plagued by disease and rodent infestations, enduring extreme shortages of food, medicine, clean water, and access to basic sanitation.

Gazans may not be in the grip of famine as they were in prior years, but the humanitarian situation remains catastrophic—and it is not sustainable. The intolerable conditions could very well lead to a further explosion of violence. They are also enabling the endgame that many Israeli leaders want: the eventual eviction of Gaza’s over two million Palestinian residents.

+ Adam Johnson: “The Atlantic, supposed beacon of free speech and liberal principles, has published 30+ articles on Hasan Piker and zero about Israel’s unprecedented killing of 230+ journalists in Gaza. Some are saying it’s because it’s run by a former volunteer IDF prison guard, but who’s to say. The Atlantic employs about 900 variations of Jonathan Chait and I don’t think it’s because the market is organically demanding even more scoldy, bad-faith ideological disciplining of the left. I suspect this has more to do with their billionaire owner and her investment portfolio.”

FYI: The majority owner of The Atlantic is Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, through her group, the Emerson Collective.

+ There have been at least 13 attacks on mosques in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem this year, including one this week when Israeli settlers set fire to a mosque outside of Jerusalem. The Palestinian Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission has documented 23 incidents of arson or attempted arson targeting Palestinian mosques between January 2023 and October 11, 2026.

+ Irish novelist Sally Rooney said she will no longer allow her books to be sold in the UK because she has pledged to donate her royalties to Palestine Action, which is banned in Britain. Huda Ammori, a co-founder of Palestine Action, condemned the law that will keep Rooney’s books from being sold in the UK: “A world-renowned author fearing arrest and being forced to remove her books from our bookstores exposes the chilling consequences of this authoritarian law, which has been used to make over 3,700 arrests for simply holding seven-word signs.”

+ Has there ever been a time when the English haven’t tried to immiserate the Irish and the Irish haven’t told them to go fuck themselves?

+++

+ Capitalism was always heading inevitably toward this endpoint. But the bipartisan embrace of neoliberalism provided the accelerant…

+ The wealth of the world’s 500 richest people has more than doubled since 2020 — to $12.9 trillion. Here in the US, our tech billionaires have added $845 billion to their fortunes this year alone — at least three times more than gains of every other industry combined. 

+ Two companies alone, Micron Technologies and Nvidia, account for 33% of the entire S&P 500’s earnings growth…

This is how the market will end: not with a bang but with a bust, then a lot of whimpering for bailouts…

+ The latest Consumer Price Index data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show inflation continuing to rise inexorably, led by the surge in energy prices, which increased by 5.2% in September and climbed by 20.4% over the year. At the pump, gas prices spiked by 9.1% last month and are up by 34% for the year. The wages of Americans are barely keeping up with inflation, with both prices and average hourly pay having risen by about 5.4 percent since January 2025.

+ Bankruptcy filings in the US are up 11% this year. In the first nine months of 2026, 469,719 bankruptcies were filed, according to the bankruptcy analytics firm EPIQ ACCER. This is an increase from 423,168 last year.

+ It’s a Geezer-Eat-Youth world or country, at least. Change in median net worth by age since 2022…

75 and older: +37%
65–74: -4%
55–64: +3%
45–54: -6%
35–44: +5%
Under 35: -23%

(Federal Reserve)

+ On top of this, the US government spends 10 times more on seniors than it does on children.

+ Speaking of kids, the prices of chewing gum and candy rose 8.1% in August from a year earlier, according to the latest available data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.  That’s more than double the 3.4% increase in overall consumer prices during the same period.

+ Say it ain’t so!   According to the Federal Reserve, the inflation most American consumers see on everyday items is nearly 100% driven by Trump’s tariffs: “Shoppers saw a 2.9 percentage point increase in inflation on a sample of 67 types of goods as of February due to tariffs imposed in 2025 and early 2026.”

+ Hot off the Schadenfreude Newswire…

+ As the costs of college and homes escalate, the lifetime cost to live the American Dream, according to Investopedia: $5.3 million.

+ Elon Musk’s goal was to sell 250,000 Cybertrucks last year. Instead, he was only able to unload about 30,000 of them, roughly 13%. The Edsel and the Volkswagen Thing sold, looked and performed better than this hideous contraption…

+ Heh, heh, heh…The idea that poor people are poor because they are lazy, and its corollary, rich people are rich because of their incredible work ethic, is one of the most pernicious cons in American culture, especially when applied to blacks and Hispanics. When it’s used against poor whites, look out…

+ Keeping up with the Joneses ain’t what it once was: 40% of workers earning over $300,000 say they’re living paycheck to paycheck, according to Goldman Sachs…

+ San Francisco home prices rose 12% from last year, the largest gain of any major U.S. metro. Meanwhile, Dallas posted the sharpest decline, down 1.4%.

+ Home sales have fallen by 15.1 percent across the state of Colorado and by 18.7 percent in the Denver metro area.

+ The median household income in the US: $87,460.

+ Minimum annual income needed to buy a median-priced home: $120,000.

+ A $100,000 salary in 2000 has the same purchasing power as $194,530 in 2026.

+ According to the Energy Information Administration, Trump’s Russian diesel deal will only cover nine days of US diesel demand.

+ What winning looks like…if you’re Iran, I mean.

+ After Trump lifted sanctions on Russian oil so that, in his words, Russia could “sell diesel to the world,” US diesel futures increased by more than 2%. Meanwhile, as the price of diesel soars, the trucking industry has been hit with a wave of bankruptcies.

+Ave price of diesel in San Francisco today…$8.87 a gallon

Ave price of diesel in San Francisco a year ago today ..$5.34 a gallon

+  How JD Vance defines “socialism”:

Reporter: How do you define socialism personally?

JD Vance: I think in reality what it actually means in the American context is you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports.

Even Vance knows there’s only one way out of this mess for the poor people he once elegized and now gaslights, even if he can’t define it….

+++

+ CNN poll on American attitudes about AI: 75% are fearful for their future under AI

Democrats: 85%
Independents: 77%
Republicans: 62%

Percent who are hopeful: 25%

+ Anthropic announced this week that rogue AI agents may be able to “self-replicate” in order to hijack smart devices such as ovens and TVs. I’m all for it, if the self-replicating bots that will control our TV can just bring back The Americans.

+ Bloomberg: “The AI boom is minting money for tech billionaires. The world’s 100 tech billionaires added a record $845 billion through September.  Their combined fortune now stands at $4.6 trillion. Billionaires outside tech? Down $62 billion. Elon Musk alone gained $310 billion, about 40% of the entire index’s increase.”

+ AI staff are complaining of the mental toll exacted by fears of threats to society caused by the programs they’re developing, according to the Financial Times. Do Raytheon and Lockheed workers experience the same anxieties?

+ Here’s one way AI will begin to exterminate humanity…

+ More Perfect Union reports that the Trump admin is using AI to analyze prior authorizations under Medicare and companies, including the private equity outfits Carlyle Group and Patient Square Capital, get 25% of the “savings” the system generates.

+ According to Heatmap, at least $260 billion in data center projects have been cancelled so far this year as a result of local organizing and opposition.

+++

+ Shooting a dad, while his five-year-old son is in the car with him, is the Trumpiest method of child separation yet…

+ Markfortwayne Mullin: “We wasn’t aware the child was in the car, but do you know was? Oscar. Oscar knew he had a child in his car. Oscar chose to accelerate at a high rate of speed … the public outcry should be also toward this criminal, this thug, this gang-banger, this possible murderer…”

Possible murderer? Oscar Belgal’s arrest was for 4th degree larceny. He was given probation. The ICE officer on the scene, however, Brenden Cuni, has been accused of excessive force and tackling a pregnant woman to the ground. Several of his ICE arrests have been later found to be unlawful in federal court.

+ Target, which allows ICE to stage its operations in its parking lots, is the Hobby Lobby/Chick-fil-A of department stores. Its complicity with ICE is making Walmart look like Catholic Charities…

+ A post-ICE-raid message from Ilhan Omar, after the punitive raid on her house by Trump’s DoJ looking for her immigration documents: “I’m ok. Make no mistake: this is an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement. For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation. I will not be silenced.”

+ The pre-election ride comes after Trump officials investigated Omar’s immigration file in 2019 and found no issues with her citizenship.

+ As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out, if there was any fraud in Ilhan’s application, it was done not by her, but by her relatives, a fact she is legally protected from, at least in theory…

+ Trump’s Justice Department has filed at least 163 denaturalization cases since January 2025, including 40 since August. From 1990 to 2017, the DoJ averaged about 11 such cases a year.

+ ProPublica tallied more than 500 U.S. citizens detained by immigration agents during the Trump administration, including at least 70 children and teens, some of whom were handcuffed or held at gunpoint. This figure, which is drawn from videos, documents, and government reports, is likely an undercount. Nearly all those questioned by ICE or CBP about their citizenship were people of color. Many seemed to be targeted solely based on their looks, accents, or jobs.

+ Federal Judge Gary Brown, a Trump appointee in New York, lacerated ICE for using racial profiling (and bad profiling at that) to  erroneously arrest two people  — including a U.S.  citizen — and later write it off to a case of “mistaken identity.”

+ Given the number of similar lacerating opinions from federal judges, none of which seem to alter ICE’s tactics, one has to suspect that not only do Trump’s immigration agents get sadistic thrills from their jobs, they’re also getting in tune with their masochistic impulses…

+ I’m beginning to think that the new DHS secretary is just as insensate as the previous DHS secretary…

Margaret Brennan: Nidal Hasan is in a wheelchair. Doesn’t the administration risk livestreaming this and making him a martyr? Couldn’t this be a risk to the homeland?

MarkFortWayne Mullin: No one has to watch it

Brennan: Well then why are you livestreaming it?

Mullin: The president is restoring American values.

+ The shock gloves bought by ICE and distributed to its agents inflict excruciating pain. “The military assessment in ICE’s own files shows that these gloves can cause ‘intense pain’ and force compliance. It does not establish that they are safe,” said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, told CBS News. “Everyone should be alarmed that ICE is preparing to deploy a tool designed to inflict, at best, intense pain, without showing that it is safe for the people who will be subjected to it.”

+ CBS has produced an interactive map showing the location of ICE shootings since Trump’s reelection.

+ SC Cornell writing in The Baffler on the case of Marisol García Alcántara, who was shot in the face by a Border Patrol agent during the Biden administration:

[B]ack on that day in 2021, after the bullet hit Marisol in the face, she didn’t even realize she’d been shot. Blinded and sitting mannequin-still in the backseat as blood gushed down her nose, she thought she’d been pistol-whipped. Around her, the other women in the car screamed.

+ There was a reason the Democrats didn’t want to defund ICE when they had the chance.

+ Clearly, we all need to listen to more Paramore…

+++

+ Tohono O’odham Nation Chairman Verlon Jose on Trump’s plans to invade Tohono O’odham lands, slash down giant saguaros and build a border wall:

Trespassing on our land to remove the sacred saguaros is like having masked men break into your house and take away your children. The ha:sañ are our family, as much a part of us as any blood relative. To destroy them by the thousands carves a wound in our hearts that will not heal.

+ From 2011-2025, the rate of global warming increased twice as fast as during 1971-2025. This means that the 1.5C warming threshold likely will be crossed by 2028,  almost a decade earlier than previously estimated.

+ According to a study published in Science, the number of terrestrial species exposed to sea level rise will increase from around 13,700 in 2050 to 15,300 by 2100.

+ Last summer’s drought may leave more than 200,000 Britons without water this winter.

+ According to the Energy Information Administration, Trump’s Russia diesel deal will only cover nine days of US diesel demand.

+ The UK is going to slash subsidies for heat pumps and give the money to the military.

+ MAHA-HA-HA…Under RFK Jr., the former environmental lawyer, the FDA is proposing to expand a controversial loophole to allow some of the world’s most toxic chemicals to be added directly to food without a safety review.

+ Our water bill here in once-moist, now semi-arid Oregon is insane and getting more insane each month…

US households are paying 62% more for drinking water than they did a decade ago – outpacing inflation, grocery prices and household incomes, according to a new study by Food & Water Watch, which analyzed 2025 billing data from the 500 largest community water systems in the US, which together serve about 155 million people, or 45% of the country’s population. In 2025, the average household using 60,000 gallons of water paid $531 for drinking water service, according to the study. However, costs varied widely, with annual bills ranging from $133 at the cheapest system to $1,416 at the most expensive.

+ Tom Power, a fixture at the University of Montana for decades (and an occasional contributor to CounterPunch), died last week. He was one of the great environmental economists in a region where those who most needed to hear what he said refused to listen…

+ Paul Edwards, Montana filmmaker and journalist:

Tom Power was a heroic man of great integrity who fought all his teaching life against the stupid, knuckle-dragging idiocy of redneck politics that dominates Montana.  He spoke out often when he might have ducked and stayed silent and out of the fray. I don’t know of one academic in this pathetic state of retro imbeciles who has the guts and vision to take stands as he did, and not compromise with the odious, anti-life Big Money of extractive industries and their wimpy, cowardly whores in our legislature. Ave atque vale, Tom.  You were the best.

+ Amin Nasser, CEO of Aramco, told the WPC Energy Congress in Riyadh that diesel is currently around $200 a barrel and commercial onshore inventories are well below 6 billion barrels, most of them locked up. Refilling them while meeting demand could take up to two years…

+ Your EV may be spying on you: Chinese-owned rental cars used by the Norwegian Armed Forces reportedly recorded soldiers, their movements and security codes during a major military exercise in Oslo…

+ Trump: “You need to be a student at the top of your class at MIT to turn on a lawnmower nowadays, you know? But I got rid of all that stuff. Now you can have a lawnmower.” You’re going to need a lawnmower because he got rid of the people you used to pay to mow it…

+ The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve fell to just  283 million barrels, its lowest level since 1982. It dropped about 767,000 barrels last week. The reserve has lost about 132 million barrels since March, when Trump authorized a 172 million-barrel release as part of a 32-country emergency drawdown. It’s now at just 40% of its 714 million-barrel capacity, and well under half its 2010 peak of 727 million. It’s nearing the 250 million barrel level considered the minimum for “safe” operation.

+ Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, during a week when it’s been 100+ in LA:

You don’t hear the word ‘climate change’ as much as you did two years ago, because the legs have been knocked out from under that movement.

According to the World Health Organization, there is likely to be more than 480,000 heat-related deaths this year.

+ This is the most convoluted and inscrutable MAGA koan by Trump yet, which will keep MAGA Masters in deep contemplation for months, decoding its hidden meanings …

“And you know what they’re doing? They go straight down, you know, you can make those drill bits talk. You can make ’em sing, you can make them go, they go down. New York’s over here, Pennsylvania– they go down and they take a sharp left. And they suck our oil out. Can you believe it? Lines of different states, and you’ll see one has Cadillacs, because they like Cadillacs better than they like Mercedes, but one has an Escalade, and one has a 50-year-old Chevy. And you’re talking about 3 ft. It’s a line that goes right up. One has some beautiful drilling plants, and one has no drilling plants; it’s got no money, it’s got poverty.”

+ 11% of U.S. adults now take a GLP-1 for weight loss, roughly 28 million people, up from 3% in 2024. Many of these people are regular McDonald’s customers, which has prompted the company to add more protein to its menu. Still, McDonald’s sales are stagnant, rising only 0.8% last quarter. McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski has said weak traffic and persistent inflation are the new normal for restaurants.

+ On Monday, the state of Pennsylvania reported its sixth death associated with a measles outbreak in the state, a 39-year-old unvaccinated woman living in Franklin County. The US has now recorded 4,080 confirmed measles cases in 2026, marking the highest annual case count since measles was declared eliminated in the US back in 2000, a status the US looks likely to lose by the end of the year.

+ The United Nations adopted a new global pandemic preparedness declaration in a 153–3 vote. The only countries that voted against it: the United States, Israel and Argentina.

+ Lola and I were taking our early morning walk in a foggy field along the Willamette River last week and nearly interrupted this coyote’s gleeful hunt for a breakfast of pocket gophers…

+ Ivan Turgenev in Fathers and Sons: “He has no faith in principles, only in frogs.” I completely agree with the nihilistic young doctor, Yevgeny Bazarov on this one.

+++

+ Meet Kaylub Giamanco, the Oregon carpenter who took down the elementary school shooter in Bend, as he prepared to open fire on kids in the Special Education room…You can’t get a more classic Oregonian look than that. Kaylub didn’t hesitate. He went where all the cowering Ulvade cops refused to go and he saved the lives of a lot of kids and teachers. Don’t believe the macho crap about Texas.

+ In the wake of the botched attempts to kill Christa Pike and Hegseth’s plan to livestream the firing squad execution of the wheelchair-bound Nidal Hassan, Pope Leo from the Southside reiterated the Catholic Church’s position on the death penalty:

The death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. The common good can be safeguarded and the requirements of justice can be met without recourse to capital punishment: effective systems of detention have been developed that protect citizens while at the same time do not completely deprive those who are guilty of the possibility of redemption.

+ The first 9/11 call after the State of Tennessee tried and failed to kill Christa Pike was made from Riverbend Maximum Security Prison at 8:40, an hour after the execution team first started pumping poison into her body. It took multiple calls over another half an hour for emergency services in Nashville to verify the call and send an ambulance to the prison.

A 911 operator called the prison asking, “We are trying to find out if that is an actual thing that is happening and we need to send an ambulance…or if this is someone that is just basically prank-calling.”

A prison official responded, “We would have been the one to call you guys — we didn’t call anyone.”

A few minutes later, another prison official tells an emergency services operator,  “It is a false call …there is no medical assistance needed.”

On one of the calls, someone says, “Is nobody there that knows the process?”

Another voice replies, “I have no idea. I guess because this is a special case, they may not know.”

Four minutes later, emergency services call the prison again: “Some sort of state official [is] outside the gate at the prison telling us that it’s real and demanding us to go in.”

In effect, they tried and failed to kill Christa three times: twice with poison, once with denial of emergency care.

+ The last official public execution in the US was in 1936, when Rainey Bethea, a young black man (naturally), who was just 5’3″, was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky, before a crowd of 20,000 people. The sheriff of the county, who was charged with killing Bethea,  was a woman named Florence Thompson. Florence was concerned that the planned site for the execution, the landscaping on the front lawn of the courthouse, would be marred by the scaffolding and the large crowd, so it was moved to a lot in front of the county garage. The hangman arrived drunk and was so intoxicated that he staggered around the scaffolding, barely able to stand up and a deputy had to pull the trigger, releasing the trap door. A professional hangman who witnessed the execution later said it was the worst display in the 70 hangings he’d watched. Bethea’s only request was that his body be shipped home to South Carolina so he could be buried next to his dad. The lady sheriff refused and dumped his corpse in an unmarked pauper’s grave.

Unofficially, of course, the government executes people in public all of the time, before they’ve been convicted or even charged with a crime. Last year, police killed 1,201 people on their streets, in their houses, in parks or in their cars. Through September of this year, police have already killed 964 people. As for the federal government, Hegseth and Trump have been showing snuff film-like videos of their extrajudicial airstrikes on suspected “drug boats” in the Caribbean and Pacific that have killed at least 238 people. Add to these the recent killings by Trump immigration officers, most of which have been captured on video and repeated endlessly on social media:

Johan Sebastian Duran Guerrero,  July 2026, killed by ICE
Alex Jeffrey Pretti, January 2026, killed by CBP
Renee Good, January 2026, killed by ICE
Joan Sebastian Guerrero, July 2026,  killed by ICE
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, July 2026, killed by ICE
Keith Porter, December 2025, killed by ICE
Silverio Villegas González, Sept. 2025, killed by ICE
Rocky the Rottweiler, Sept. 2025, killed by ICE
Rueben Ray Martinez, March 2025, killed by ICE

+ Shortly after Hegseth announced his plans to livestream the execution by firing squad of Hassan, Trump, standing next to the ear-chomping, convicted rapist Mike Tyson, was asked if he approved the live-streaming of an execution: “Did I approve? Absolutely.”

+ Trump reiterated his support for killing Hassan on TV the next morning, saying: “By showing it, maybe other people won’t be doing what he did.” Likely, he thought the grotesque spectacle might give a boost to the GOP’s sagging fortunes in the midterms. But, as with AI, data centers and the Iran war, Trump once again badly misread the mood of the country, which responded with almost universal revulsion at the plan. An ABC News/ Washington Post poll found that 80 percent of the American public opposed the live-streaming of Hassan’s execution, including 83 percent of independents (crucial to Republican fortunes in November) and 65 percent of self-identified Trump voters from 2024!

+ Two days later, Trump wimped out and did an about-face.

+ Then, apparently worried he might appear to be soft on executions, Trump called for the killing of leakers (Trump’s CIA plotted to kill Julian Assange in 2017): “In my opinion, leakers should be shot.” Just not on live TV?

+ After Trump pulled the plug on live-streaming the execution of Nidal Hassan, Hegseth will probably increase the airstrikes on fishing boats in the Caribbean so he can get his weekly fix of snuff film action.

+ Politico Playbook reports that Trump is considering replacing his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, with Randy Levine, the president of the New York Yankees, who finished behind the Tampa Bay Rays in the AL East, and then bounced NY out of the playoffs without losing a game. The Yankees do have the third-highest payroll in the league, so that kind of spending in a losing effort likely appealed to the Commander-in-Chief of the war on Iran.

+ According to the new Democracy Perception Report, the world’s five most despised countries in the world are:

5) USA

4) Iran

3) Afghanistan

2) North Korea

1) Israel

+ This week, masked agents of Russia’s FSB broke into the hotel room of Japanese journalist Yuki Imai, a reporter for Hokkaido Shimbun newspaper based on the island of Sakhalin, arrested him and flew him to a prison in Moscow, a day before he was meant to return to Japan. In a case resembling that of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, the Russian foreign ministry accused the 27-year-old Imai of “conducting espionage activities on Russian territory.” A Russian court ordered Imai held in pre-trial detention for at least two months.

+ According to The Maple, George McManus, the CIA man running the Nazi ratline to Canada, worked with the Agency from its creation in 1947 until 1970, when he retired and moved to apartheid South Africa for three years. While working in Ottawa in the 1950s, McManus resettled at least 40 Germans into Canada in 1953 alone, many of them known to be Nazi collaborators.  In the early 1960s, McManus was involved in Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s attempt to overthrow the Castro government in Cuba.  In the most essential ways, Canada has always been the 51st state.

+ Trump on “our Greenland”…

 I thought “any future attack” was going to come through offshore wind power stations?

+ Marjorie Taylor Greene has turned into one of the most effective online counterpunchers against Trump…

+ What kind of party is this? In 2005, only 50% of Democrats thought gay sex was “morally acceptable.” Even today, nearly 20% of Democrats find it morally objectionable.

+ Oregon voters are pissed off and they should be. Only 21% think the state is heading in the right direction, despite the flood of former Californians and Brooklynites leaving the state. Not an auspicious sign for Oregon’s do-nothing incumbent Democratic governor, Tina Kotek, who seems to think she’s running against Trump, even though she’s spent the last two years letting him run all over the state with little resistance from the statehouse in Salem.

+ Trump is vowing to rename one of the oceans and a major river:

We’ve got the Gulf. We’ve got a beautiful lake. Now, somebody said, you need a river. … We need a river. We need an ocean. We call it ‘Trump Ocean’ or ‘Ocean of the Americas,’ something like that. Before I get out, I think we should have an ocean. And we need a great river.

Why not rename the Earth Planet America or Trump? We’ve got 850 military bases covering it….?

+ Kid Rock on Fox News: “The Devil lives in Hollywood. I’ve seen him.” I’m pretty sure Old Scratch directed The Hottie and the Nottie. No, that was Tom Putnam. My bad.

+ More Kid Rock, because, you know, he makes everyone feel smarter:

We are not, and we never will be, one nation under Muhammad. Because we are, and we always will be, one nation under God!

You could say the same about Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, Elijah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel and, of course, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker…

+ New White House Press Sec Katie Zacharia: “The abortion pill has the same chemicals that they used in the extermination camps in Nazi Germany.” Nazis wannabes know these things, I guess? (Well, apparently they don’t. Mifepristone, which was developed by French chemists in 1980, doesn’t share any chemical legacy with Zyklon B. Although Zyklon B was sprayed on Mexican immigrants, most recruited as farmworkers, by US immigration agents after crossing the border, as Alexander Cockburn and I reported two decades ago.)

+ Katie Zacharia, Day One: “My president — ah, excuse me, my husband. That’s a good one.” Dr. Freud’s line went right to voicemail on this one…

+ I remember when Condoleezza Rice referred to Shrub as “my husband…” Laura Bush was reportedly jealous of the time W. Spent with Rice. I doubt Melania is at all ruffled by the hours Trump spends alone with Natalie, Chamberlain and Katie…

+ Maybe Zacharias’s husband likes to role-play as My President, the way Kristi Noem’s ex- liked to dress up as Bimbo Barbie.

+ Besides being a blonde with an unwavering devotion to Trump, the best thing that Katie Zacharia has going for her is that she lied on her very first day on the job, not very well, but she’ll get better at it. And lying on the job is the primary job of any White House press secretary. 

+ Also, Katie does have gleaming American teeth…

+ Roberto Bolaño on American teeth:

Still, American television is full of smiles and more and more perfect-looking teeth. Do these people want us to trust them? No. Do they want us to think they’re good people? No again. The truth is they don’t want anything from us. They just want to show us their teeth, their smiles, and admiration is all they want in return. Admiration. They want us to look at them, that’s all. Their perfect teeth, their perfect bodies, their perfect manners, as if they were constantly breaking away from the sun and they were little pieces of fire, little pieces of blazing hell, here on this planet simply to be worshipped.

+ Both Katie Zacharia and Trump have referred to her as “an attorney.” She listed herself as “general counsel” to a pro-Trump outfit in California run by Richard Grenell, who is currently Trump’s “Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions.” A very special guy, in other words. But an investigation by Popular Information found no evidence that she has ever been admitted to the bar in any US state. Today, Zacharias claimed that she passed the bar exam in China:  ‘I practiced international transaction law, with all the appropriate credentials.’ What those credentials are has not been revealed…The Wall Street Journal reported that she did take the California bar exam. And failed.

+ Translation: I graduated from Ken Starr’s law school. So it’s perfectly fine to call myself a lawyer, even if I flunked the exam I needed to pass to become a lawyer.

+ Trump on Kamala Harris’s struggles with the bar exam:

She gives an answer that only a moron would give. You can give bad answers, but this was an answer that a person who was not a smart person, a person who got the lowest score, perhaps in the history of the bar exams, [would give], okay? You know, she failed the bar exam, okay? But this is a person; this is a very low-IQ individual.

+ In the end, Katie lasted only five days, before she was executed live on Fox News by Sean Hannity. Take that, Pete!

+++

+ A report by CBS News found that at least 52 of the 100 top holders on the public “leaderboard” for President Trump’s next $TRUMP meme coin gala to be held November 22 dinner at Trump National Golf Club outside Washington are likely foreigners. At least 44 of the top buyers used Binance before buying $TRUMP meme coins. Binance and several other crypto exchanges, such as Bybit and MEXC, ban US customers. Trump pocketed at least $635 million in royalties from the $TRUMP coin last year. The top 29 buyers get front seating and a VIP reception at the gala, which will feature a speech by Trump and three, as yet, unnamed “legends.”

+ Of course, while Trump and his cronies made nearly $2 billion on his crypto scam, millions of gullible buyers have lost about $4 billion on the $TRUMP meme coin.

+ 21%: number of registered voters who think that Trump would “definitely or probably” issue a $5,000 check to every American, even if Republicans maintain control of Congress.

+ Great moments in political grifting with Kimberly Guilfoyle…

In an exchange with a Greek tycoon: “You know, I can deliver the world to you, which you deserve. I’m going to make you a lot of fucking money.”

Guilfolyle expressed fury at not being on the list for a dinner being organized by Greek House Davos. “You don’t have the fucking U.S., you know, ambassador to Greece not come. She should be kissing my fucking ass.” It’s probably still an open question whether they’d rather kiss her ass or those lips that have launched a thousand quips…

To GOP donor Eric Dieters, in a Signal message asking him for 100,000 to pay off her Amex card: “Honey, please I need you to get this done for me today.”

+ Is there any question that Kimberly Guilfoyle’s fatal mistake was that she asked for too little instead of too much? Trump surely considered her demand for $100,000 to pay off her AMEX as pretty low-rent. But she has the makings of the best Trump tell-all yet. She should demand a lot more than $100K before she signs that NDA.

+ Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, author of some of the worst Supreme Court decisions since Dred Scott, says that he’s worried about the future of the court.  Yet, according to Alito’s own made-up “theory” of jurisprudence, the Supreme Court has no future; it lives in the past.  In his view, the Constitution, which it exists to interpret, is a dead document that only relates to social, political and economic conditions from two centuries ago. An AI Supreme Court would be a vast improvement over this one and much less petulant and hypocritical…

+ An Ohio blogger was jailed for texting an image of Shrek’s penis to a state senator. Aren’t these the same people who repeatedly mewl that the Left can’t take a joke?

+ This is really something from Megyn Kelly, essentially saying the Cornell rape victim felt lucky to have had “sex” with such elite young gentlemen… she’s probably thrilled to be admired because she clearly didn’t grow up the incredibly beautiful one…she counted this as a win and liked the feeling of being sexy and desired and wanted. (The woman Megyn Kelly thought was “Jane Doe”, whose physique she described in such unflattering terms, wasn’t the “Jane Doe.”)

+ In Fox’s interview with Gabe Poirot, a man who spent 18 days in Heaven while in a coma on Earth, and met Jesus in the flesh, he described the Price of Peace as about 5’11 with eyes that “burned red and white at the same time” and “talk about testosterone. Like a mustang.” Maybe Jesus will become a sniper in Piña Colada Pete’s Army!

+++

The full quote of Trump admiring the body of Ohio Senate candidate Jon Husted, who was a defensive back at the University of Dayton:

I’m standing over here, and I don’t do this with men very often. I started examining his body because I didn’t know he was a great athlete. And I looked, and I watched up and down. I looked at his ass… and then I looked at his hands. Look at his hands! He’s got these, like, CLAWS!

 + In fact, as I’ve catalogued for the past year or so, Trump does this all the time…

+ New meaning to “Trump Unhinged”: the closet door just won’t stay shut anymore…

+ Speaking of “gay”…Trump:

My wife says, you shouldn’t be dancing on the stage, by the way. You should walk off with a gentle wave. Goodbye. When the gay national anthem plays, you know, it’s called the gay national anthem, actually. I got the highest gay vote of any Republican in history. Probably because of the song. She said, ‘You should not dance off the stage, my darling.’

Surely, he picked YMCA originally because he thought it was the theme song for the Young Men’s Christian-nationalist Association… aka, Proud Boys, right? (And it was a song about men, young men, who work out.)

+ Fox News’ Jesse Watters:

We’re talking about guys’ asses. Trump says a lot of stuff we all think and we don’t say. Sometimes it sounds a little gay. He can get away with it because he’s straight….I saw John Thune in the locker room once and he looked like an Olympic swimmer.

If you have to say Trump’s “straight”, just maybe…

+ Most Christian Nationalists are not church-going, Bible-reading Christians: “Although 81% of Christian Nationalists identified as Christian, just 13% attended church weekly, only slightly above the 11% average across the population surveyed. Less than a third (31%) prayed weekly, while 47% expressed an interest in the Bible.”

+ Katie Miller: “If more women put the same energy into their marriages and into finding a spouse than they do into their careers, you would see society have a lot more babies. That’s what led to the downfall of Rome.” Over to you, Mister Gibbon…

+ While we’re on the matter of Ancient Rome, here’s Alexander Belivaqua on Seneca the abolitionist:

It can be hard to imagine a world in which people justified slavery, yet for most of recorded history enslavement met with little intellectual opposition. Aristotle made an especially influential argument in its favour, positing the existence of ‘natural’ slaves. Seneca was a rare dissenter. In his 47th letter to Lucilius, he wrote: “Remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled on by the same skies and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives and dies.”

+++

+ Some of the sagest advice comes on T-shirts these days…

+ Roger Waters on James Hetfield, the sclerotic frontman for Metallica, who whined about rock bands taking political stands this week, while performing at the Sphere, the overpriced venue for decrepit has-beens in Vegas:

“Can we stop talking about this prick? I’m so bored with him. He’s just showing that he’s a complete prick. He’s got an IQ of about three and why we’re talking about him, I honestly don’t know, because he’s a nobody. He may have a few hundred million dollars or whatever, but he’s a prick, and he’s no musician. I heard them playing acoustic instruments, and they couldn’t. It was appalling.”

+ David McClure: “Metallica is the Tesla Cybertruck of Silicon Valley Metal.”

+ Trump at a gathering of Italian-American donors at a White House celebration of the Genoan (or perhaps, Portuguese?) genocider, Christopher Columbus:

“I remember about 25 years ago, Italian movies, you know, mob movies–they didn’t want you to use the name like Alphonse Capone. You weren’t allowed to use Italian names.”

Did someone forget to tell Coppola (at least 3), Scorsese (you know them), De Palma (Untouchables with a character called Alphonse Capone), De Niro (Bronx Tale), DeVito (Get Shorty), Demme (Married to the Mob), Heckerling (Johnny Dangerously), and David Chase (The Sopranos)?

All books I first read in my teens. Not the best or even my favorites necessarily, but the ones that left deep impressions on a mind just beginning to know what turned it on…

+ After reading Ulysses multiple times over a three-year period, Carl Jung wrote a letter to James Joyce:

+ From the introduction to Robert Faggen’s Art of Fiction interview in the Paris Review with the late novelist & poet Russell Banks (I’m re-reading Cloudsplitter): “An excellent student, winning a full scholarship to Colgate University, Banks dropped out in his first year with the intention of joining Fidel Castro’s insurgent army in Cuba, but wound up working in a department store in Lakeland, Florida.”

+ The greatest couplet in Dub?

When I shit, my enemies cry.
When I speak, they die…

-Scratch Perry, Ashes & Dust

+ Frederic Jameson on Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood: ‘The colours of Atwood’s dystopia have a loathsome pastel quality, like drugstores; its bunny suits and fluffy fabrics reflect the bad taste of infantile mass production; the bloody physical violence is that of cartoons rather than Hitler. If there is aesthetic pleasure here, it is that of a syrupy nausea that repeats on you; so that the end of the world has some of the cleansing, bracing effect of sand and waste landscape, of the seashore.’

+ I will stand by this until the day I die: Mono is superior to Stereo. Hit it, Sonny!

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Arrows of Desire: Selected Writings. 1963-2002
PeterWollen
(Verso)

Hotel Casanova and Other Brief Texts
Annie Arnaux
(Seven Stories)

Musical Elaborations
Edward Said
(Vintage)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

The Age of Everything
Johnny Marrs
(BMG)

A Simple Man
Boney James
(Concord)

I Should Have Stayed Dead
Allen Lowe
(ESP)

No Penalty Whatsoever

“We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world…but I am more and more puzzled about it in the moral world. There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatsoever.”

― William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham