Music Week

Expanded blog post, September archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 35 albums, 4 A-list,

Music: Current count 40918 [40883] rated (+35), 30 [28] unrated (-2).

Seems like I had very little to show for the first half of the week. I finally resolved to deal with a couple major technical problems: why email from my server often fails to reach its intended destination, and why my printer/scanner rarely functions properly: jobs sent to print get held up in a blocked queue, which reblocks itself when you try to enable it; and Xsane shows you test scans, but craps out when you try to get the actual scan data (but for some reason Simplescan works -- you just lose all of the fancier Xsane controls).

I blame the latter on Hewlett-Packard, which has now eclipsed Apple as my most hated company in greater Silicon Valley (i.e., I'm not excluding Microsoft, which thanks to many years of total avoidance is now no worse than 3rd). The former problem is harder to assign blame for, but most of the problems have come with Gmail accounts, and Google has made getting help virtually impossible, so 4th (with a star)?

I can't report unequivocal success in either case, but I'm a bit more hopeful. Email delivery is tied up with the rather fluid notion of reputation. When the problem first appeared, I was forwarding a lot of server admin email to my Cox account, then throwing almost all of it away. Cox's email forwarders seem to have gotten tired of this, so they started blackballing me, and eventually I got nothing. That's when I noticed I was having trouble with Gmail, as well. I devised a workaround for the server admin email, so now I store it locally, and fetch it using POP (after which I filter the excess baggage out, as before). I set up a couple more email accounts like this for special purposes (such as the Q&A form).

When I retested things last week, I found that server mail is being delivered on Cox. Some further tests showed that most of the mail going to Gmail is also being delivered, but that some of it is going to users' spam folders. Of course, hardly any of us have the presence of mind to check whether anything worthwhile turns up flagged as spam. I still get a few spam-related bounce messages on the server, and don't really know what to do about them, other than to alert the people who were supposed to receive the mail, and hope they can persuade Google to fuck up less, but that's tough.

As for the printer, my next move is to crawl under the desk and hook up a USB cable, which HP doesn't like but seems to allow. I also spent most of a day working on a website I host. I converted the hand-coded version to WordPress a couple years ago, but never got the client's sign off, so both versions have been online but dormant. The intervening time left a bunch of digital cobwebs I needed to clean up, and I had to write up a guide to how it all works.

Then, midweek, I decided I wanted to push to get a Book Report post out ahead of the usual Sunday Speaking of Which. I managed to pull both off, but it was a huge amount of work -- during which I finally managed to give a cursory listen to a few recent records. Note that there are a couple music-related links in Speaking of Which: one on Sam Rivers, one on Nick Shoulders, plus something on Jann Wenner. I've been doing that for a bit: it's easier than trying to add a links section to Music Weekl, and I'm not that big on compartmentalization.

I do have a couple things to add on Wenner. Conservatives scream "cancel culture" any time anyone has the temerity to challenge them, but what really gets their goat is the exposure that they're not always the ones in charge -- you know, the ones doing the canceling. They have a lot of trouble understanding why anyone in a position of property and power could turn on them. After all, the whole point of conservatism is to protect the rich and powerful from the masses.

Wenner, as far as I can tell, has never been one of them politically, but he is a very rich guy, who achieved a power base by being the owner of a prominent publication, and he has a lot of practice (practically a whole lifetime) acting on his privileges. During his entire tenure, he has made thousands of decisions, big and small, often arbitrary according to his whims and prejudices. My very distant impression is that the magazine's success is largely due to more talented people managing to work around his idiosyncrasies, but I've heard various stories of him stepping in, and invariably they're turns for the worse. Since he's retired, he no longer has an organization dedicated to keeping him from exposing his ignorance and incompetence, and that's what you're seeing in this "scandal": the real Jann Wenner, a rich, tone-deaf boob.

As for his book, no one would care about him peddling a set of interviews with famous old (and in a couple cases now dead) white guys. He could even keep the title (The Masters). Even if you had a second thought on seeing the seven bold names on the cover, by the time you read "By Jann S. Wenner" you'd know: of course, those were just the kind of guys he'd love to hang with, and being the fount of free publicity, who would hang with him. His problem was in trying to pass this conceit off as some sort of meritocracy. And, needless to say, the really weak link was Wenner himself. His further dissembling about blacks and women -- things absolutely no reasonable person would think of much less utter -- just dug him deeper into the pit of his vanity project.

This week closes out the September Streamnotes archive. I'm not going to hold this up to do the usual indexing. (Oops, I still haven't done August Streamnotes. That probably doesn't matter to you, but it's fairly important for me when I can't remember whether or when I reviewed something already.)

Not much to say about this week's records. Three high HM pop records (Doja Cat, Underscores, Yeule) got at least two plays each. Doja Cat might benefit from more, but my irritation with glitch pop both means that I'm done with those and that some of you will probably love them much more than I can imagine. At some point I'll have to admit that I'm just too comfortable in my ears to keep up with all this cutting edge shit.

The Fujiwara album has some upside, too, but I took its thinness as a limit, even though it's a big part of the concept. The match up with Brennan and Reid is inspired, perhaps even by our Jazz Poll, where both won Debut Album recently. Billy Bang fans should know about the Jazz Doctors reissue, especially the previously unreleased second half. (Frank Lowe fans can pass.)

The Estes album was one of Clifford Ocheltree's daily picks. Nice to wake up to his posts, which very often make me want to search out something (or, if I'm lucky, pull it off my shelves). Brad Luen, by the way, has a good review of Olivia Rodrigo, and features three jazz albums after that.

I only found out about Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky's July 10, 2023 death this week. Much of his work remains hard to find, but the Zentralquartett albums on Intakt are all superb, as is The Salmon, with Michael Griener (drums). I'm playing another I just found, for next week.

The Zoh Amba record got me looking through my cache of download links from 577 Records. (I ignore most downloads links, but have been saving those, then forgetting them.) Two more records (so far) for next week. I've been meaning to trawl through this trove, so perhaps this will get me moving.

I'm starting to think about the Francis Davis Jazz Poll this year -- that's one thing I need working email lists for -- so I'm starting to get serious about whittling down my queue. Still, got a lot of mail last week, so the net effect was negative.

New records reviewed this week:

• Zoh Amba/Chris Corsano/Bill Orcutt: The Flower School (2023, Palilalia): [bc]: B+(*)
• Be Your Own Pet: Mommy (2023, Third Man): [sp]: B+(**)
• Johnathan Blake: Passage (2023, Blue Note): [sp]: B+(**)
• Benjamin Boone: Caught in the Rhythm (2019-21 [2023], Origin): [cd]: A-
• Doja Cat: Scarlet (2023, Kemosabe/RCA): [sp]: B+(***)
• Michael Echaniz: Seven Shades of Violet (Rebiralost) (2023, Ridgeway): [cd]: B+(*)
• Tomas Fujiwara: Pith (2023, Out of Your Head): [cd]: B+(***)
• Vince Gill & Paul Franklin: Sweet Memories: The Music of Ray Price & the Cherokee Cowboys (2023, MCA Nashville): [sp]: B+(*)
• Carlos Henriquez: A Nuyorican Tale (2023, self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Per Texas Johansson: Den Sämsta Lönningen Av Alla (2023, Moserobie): [cd]: B+(***)
• Per Texas Johansson: Orkester Omnitonal (2023, Moserobie): [cd]: B+(***)
• Low Cut Connie: Art Dealers (2023, Contender): [sp]: B
• Buddy & Julie Miller: In the Throes (2023, New West): [sp]: B+(**)
• Kylie Minogue: Tension (2023, BMG): [sp]: B+(**)
• Willie Nelson: Bluegrass (2023, Legacy): [sp]: B+(*)
• Octo Octa: Dreams of a Dancefloor (2023, T4T LUV NRG, EP): [sp]: B+(**)
• Joel Paterson: Wheelhouse Rag (2021 [2023], Jalopy): [sp]: B+(**)
• Ivo Perelman/Matt Moran: Tuning Forks (2023, Ibeji Music): [bc]: B+(***)
• Pink Monads: Multiple Visions of the Now (2022 [2023], 4DaRecord): [cd]: B+(**)
• Brandon Sanders: Compton's Finest (2023, Savant): [cd]: B+(**)
• Matthew Shipp: The Intrinsic Nature of Shipp (2023, Mahakala Music): [sp]: B+(**)
• Nick Shoulders: All Bad (2023, Gar Hole): [sp]: B+(**)
• Michael Jefry Stevens Quartet: Precipice (2022 [2023], ARC): [cd]: A-
• Underscores: Wallsocket (2023, Mom + Pop): [sp]: B+(***)
• Vin Venezia: The Venetian (2023, Innervision): [cd]: B+(**) [10-20]
• Yeule: Softscars (2023, Ninja Tune): [sp]: B+(***)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• François Carrier Ensemble: Openness (2006 [2023], Fundacja Sluchaj, 3CD): [dl]: A-
• Alan Goldsher: The Complete Pocket Sessions (2019 [2023], Gold Note): [sp]: B-
• The Jazz Doctors: Intensive Care: Prescriptions Filled [The Billy Bang Quartet Sessions 1983/1984] (1983-84 [2023], Cadillac): [sp]: B+(***)
• Roberto Magris & the JM Horns: High Quote (2012 [2023], JM): [cd]: B+(*)
• Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky: Luten at Jazzwerkstatt Peitz (2011 [2023], Jazzwerkstatt): [sp]: B+(***)
• Mark Reboul/Roberta Piket/Billy Mintz: Seven Pieces/About an Hour/Saxophone, Piano, Drums (2004 [2023], ESP-Disk): [cd]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Sleepy John Estes: The Legend of Sleepy John Estes (1962 [1963], Delmark): [sp]: A-
• Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky/Conny Bauer: Wanderung Durch Den Thüringer Wald (2011 [2019], Jazzwerkstatt): [sp]: B+(**)
• Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky: Ein Nachmittag in Peitz (1981 [2008], Jazzwerkstatt): [sp]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Flying Pooka! [Dani Oore & Florian Hoefner]: The Ecstasy of Becoming (Alma) [09-01]
• Carlos Henriquez: A Nuyorican Tale (self-released)
• Irreversible Entanglements: Protect Your Light (Impulse!)
• Per Texas Johansson: Orkester Omnitonal (Moserobie) [06-10]
• Per Texas Johansson: Den Sämsta Lönningen Av Alla (Moserobie) [06-10]
• Sunny Kim/Vardan Ovsepian/Ben Monder: Liminal Silence (Earshift Music) [11-10]
• Andrew Krasilnikov: Bloody Belly Comb Jelly (Rainy Days) [09-29]
• Jeff Lederer With Mary LaRose: Schoenberg on the Beach (Little (i) Music) [10-06]
• Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet: Hear the Light Singing (RogueArt) [11-03]
• Quinsin Nachoff: Stars and Constellations (Adyhâropa) [10-13]
• Pink Monads: Multiple Visions of the Now (4DaRecord) [07-24]
• Joe Santa Maria: Echo Deep (Orenda) [11-03]
• Michael Jefry Stevens Quartet: Precipice (ARC) [05-05]
• Yuhan Su: Liberated Gesture (Sunnyside) [11-10]
• Ben Winkelman: Heartbeat (OA2) [09-15]

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Got a late start, as I thought it was more important to get my oft-delayed Book Roundup post out first. Still, I didn't have much trouble finding pieces this week. Seems like there should be more here on the UAW strike, but I didn't land on much that I hadn't noted previously.

Top story threads:

Trump, DeSantis, and other Republicans: Trump did very little of note last week, so it's time to merge him back into the field.

• Mariana Alfaro/Marisa Iati: [09-22] As UAW strike expands, here's where the 2024 presidential candidates stand. They all blame Biden. Everything's Biden's fault, all the time, doesn't matter what. But also, Tim Scott wants to see all the striking workers fired. He didn't explain how they're going to hire replacement workers. Maybe by spending billions of dollars moving their plants to South Carolina, like Boeing did?

• Ryan Cooper: [09-19] The GOP is the party of corrupt oligarchy: "In Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton escaped conviction after being impeached."

• Gabriella Ferrigine: [09-19] Giuliani says it's a "shame" he's being sued by ex-lawyer: Robert Costello, whose firm claims they are still owed $1.35 million.

• Kelly Garrity: [09-20] DeSantis: Humans are 'safer than ever' from effects of climate change: "The comments come less than a year after Hurricane Ian left more than 100 people dead in Florida."

• Joan E Greve: [09-21] McCarthy says hard-right Republicans 'want to burn whole place down'. For the first time ever, McCarthy couldn't even pass a Defense spending bill.

• Carl Hulse: [09-23] The wrecking-ball caucus: How the far right brought Washington to its knees: "Right-wing Republicans who represent a minority in their party and in Congress have succeeded in sowing mass dysfunction, spoiling for a shutdown, an impeachment and a House coup." But in this they're just following the playbook of past Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, pressing every available lever for maximum impact.

• Spencer Kimball: [09-22] United Auto Workers files labor complaint against Sen. Tim Scott for saying striking workers should be fired.

• Jason Linkins: [09-22] The looming government shutdown is not the fault of dysfunction: "There's only one culprit for the chaos gripping Capitol Hill -- the Republican Party." Advice to Democrats: "There's no need to get involved. What Republicans are enduring can't be solved by rational people appealing to better natures that don't exist."

• Nicole Narea: [09-18] How Florida became the center of the Republican universe: "Why Florida went red -- and will probably stay that way." This is part of a series of pieces Vox is running on The United States of Florida.

• Naomi Nix/Cat Zakrzewski/Joseph Menn: [09-23] Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks: "An escalating campaign, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republicans, has cast a pall over programs that study political disinformation and the quality of medical information online."

• Norman J Ornstein/Donald F Retti: [09-22] GOP prez wannabes' plans for government: dangerous -- and really dumb: "Each wants to shrink government more than the last. And none of them knows a lick about how the federal government actually works."

• Matthew Petti: [09-22] Nikki Haley thinks China is coming for your brain.

• Emily Tamkin: [09-22] Why the GOP fell in love with Hungary: "The central European country isn't exactly the right-wing paradise many Republicans portrait it as." But it does provide practical examples in rigging a political system for perpetual one-party rule.

• Li Zhou: [09-21] The Republican vs. Republican feud behind the government shutdown fight, explained.

Biden and/or the Democrats: I was expecting more interest in the Franklin Foer book, but the bottom two articles are about it here. Biden's foreign policy issues are treated elsewhere, as is the breaking Menendez scandal.

• Kate Aronoff: [09-21] Biden takes a tiny step toward a Roosevelt-style climate revolution: He's creating a Civilian Climate Corps, almost a homage to Roosevelt's CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps). While the new group may also plant some trees, I suspect it will wind up mostly on the back side of climate change: not prevention, but clean up.

• Perry Bacon Jr: [09-19] There's a simple answer to questions about Biden's age. Why don't Democrats say it? "Yes, there's a chance Vice President Harris becomes president -- and that would be fine."

• Marin Cogan: [09-22] Why Biden's latest gun violence initiative has activists optimistic: By executive order, Biden is creating a new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which won't do much, but will surely talk about it more.

• Oshan Jarow: [09-21] We cut child poverty to historic lows, then let it rebound faster than ever before: "The expanded child tax credit was a well-tested solution to child poverty." Since it has expired, the case is clearer than ever.

• Robert Kuttner: [09-20] Winning the ideas, losing the politics: "Progressives have won the battle of ideas. And reality has been a useful ally. No serious person any longer thinks that deregulation, privatization, globalization, and tax-cutting serve economic growth or a defensible distribution of income and wealth." Biden has "surprisingly and mercifully" broke with the "self-annihilating consensus" of neoliberalism that gripped and hobbled the Democratic Party from Carter through Obama. Meanwhile, "Republicans have become the party of nihilism." So why do Republicans still win elections? Whatever it is -- some mix of ignorance and spite -- is what Democrats have to figure out a way to campaign against, before the desruction gets even worse.

  Kuttner recommends a piece by Caroline Fredrickson: [09-18] What I most regret about my decades of legal activism: "By focusing on civil liberties but ignoring economic issues, liberals like me got defeated on both." She recalls the opposition to Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. Liberals objected to Bork's views on race and abortion, but completely ignored his influential reframing of antitrust law. (For my part, I always understood that Sherman was written to protect businesses from monopolies. The idea that its intent existed for consumer protection was as far from "originalism" as possible.) She also points to Ted Kennedy's pivotal role providing liberal blessing for right-wing business initiatives, and Democratic Supreme Court appointments being "far more business-friendly than Democratic appointees of any other Court era." It should give us pause that ever since 1980, income and wealth inequality has grown even more when Democrats were in the White House. Republicans sat the table with tax cuts and deregulation, but also depressed wages and the economy. Democrats grew the economy, giving that much more to the rich. Biden shows signs of breaking with some, but not all, of this.

• Nathaniel Rakich: [09-20] Democrats have been winning big in special elections: "That could bode well for them in the 2024 elections."

• Amy Davidson Sorkin: [09-10] The challenges facing Joe Biden: "A new book praises the President's handling of the midterms, but the midterms are beginning to feel like a long time ago." The book, of course, is Franklin Foer's The Last Politician.

• David Weigel: [09-12] In books, Biden is an energetic leader. Too bad nobody reads them. This was occasioned by Franklin Foer's book because, what else is available? (Actually, he mentions two more books -- the same two in my latest Book Roundup.)

Legal matters and other crimes: The Supreme Court isn't back in session yet, but cases are piling up.

• Joshua Kaplan/Justin Elliott/Alex Mierjeski: [09-22] Clarence Thomas secretly participated in Koch network donor events. For more on this, see Dahlia Lithwick/Mark Joseph Stern: [09-23] Clarence Thomas' latest pay-to-play scandal finally connects all the dots.

• Robert Kuttner: [09-12] The stealth attack on the power to tax: "The Supreme Court could overturn a well-established form of federal taxation."

• Ian Millhiser:

  • [09-18] The Supreme Courrt's new term will be dominated by dangerous and incoherent lawsuits.

  • [09-20] The Supreme Court will decide if Alabama can openly defy its decisions: "Alabama's racially gerrymandered maps are back before the Supreme Court, this time with a dollop of massive resistance."

  • [09-22] The Supreme Court showdown over social media "censorship," explained: "A rogue federal court effectively put the Republican Party in charge of social media, and now the justices have to deal with this mess." In two separate cases, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled that the Biden administration cannot ask Facebook to remove content (e.g., that promotes terrorism, or spreads lies about public health), and also that the state of Texas can force Facebook (or any other social media company) to post things that violate the company's standards. "These two decisions obviously cannot be reconciled, unless you believe that the First Amendment applies differently to Democrats and Republicans."

  • [09-23] A new Supreme Court case could trigger a second Great Depression: "America's Trumpiest court handed down a shockingly dangerous decision. The Supreme Court is likely, but not certain, to fix it." The Fifth Circuit decided that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) shouldn't exist, due to a technicality that they're almost certainly wrong about.

Climate and environment:

• Avishay Artsy: [09-22] A climate scientist on how to recognize the new climate change denial: Interview with Michael [E.] Mann, who's written at least four books on climate change, most recently Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons From Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.

• Lenny Bernstein, et al: [09-23] Ophelia causes widespread flooding as storm marches up East Coast, and Matthew Cappucci: [09-21] Warnings issued ahead of storm set to batter the Mid-Atlantic, Northeast: This has been a very weird Atlantic hurricane season, with wind shear inhibiting the development of storms, but with ocean waters so abnormally hot that the few storms that manage to form intensify very rapidly Idalia is the prime example: it only formed off the coast of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, but reached 130 mph winds before crossing Florida. Ophelia formed north of the Bahamas, but had 70 mph winds when it hit North Carolina. Meanwhile, hurricanes like Don, Margot, and Nigel turned north well before reaching North America -- Lee came closer, landing in Nova Scotia.

• Scott Dance: [09-23] Why September's record-warm temperatuers have scientists so worried.

• Brady Dennis: [09-22] A saltwater wedge climbing the Mississippi River threatens drinking water. New Orleans' water supply is at risk. "The Corps has secured barges to bring in water [approximately 15 million gallons next week] to help treatment plants reduce salinity and ensure safe drinking supplies."

• Benji Jones: [09-21] I visited a beautiful coral reef in 2022. What I saw there this summer shocked me.

• Rebecca Leber: [09-21] What climate activists mean when they say "end fossil fuels".

• Ian Livingston: [09-22] Atmospheric river, early-season bomb cyclone to hit Pacific Northwest.

• Kasha Patel: [09-24] Scientists found the most intense heat wave ever recorded -- in Antarctica: In March 2022, temperatures spiked 70°F above normal.

• Veronica Penney/John Muyskens: [08-16] Here's where water is running out in the world -- and why.

Economic matters, including labor: The UAW strike is escalating. It looks like the Writers Guild has a tentative deal, after a lengthy strike, while the actors strike continues. Republicans blame all strikes on Biden, probably for raising the hopes of workers that they might get a fairer split of the record profits they never credit Biden for.

• Dean Baker:

  • [09-22] Do people really expect prices to fall back to pre-pandemic levels? No, unless you're a Republican, then you'll run by promising miracles after you win, then forget about them the next day.

  • [09-18] Quick thoughts on the UAW strike: "Low pay of autoworkers; Higher productivity can mean less work, not fewer workers; CEO pay is a rip-off; Auto industry profits provide some room for higher pay; Inflated stock prices for Tesla and other Wall Street favorites have a cost; It is not an issue of electric vs. gas-powered cars; The UAW and Big Three are still a really big deal."

• David Dayen: [09-21] Amazon's $185 billion pay-to-play system: "A new report shows that Amazon now takes 45 percent of all third-party sales on its website, part of the company's goal to become a monopoly gatekeeper for economic transactions."

• Paul Krugman:

  • [09-19] Inflation is down, disinflation denial is soaring: So, is the denial fueled by people who have a vested interest in blaming Biden for inflation? The same people who always root for economic disaster when a Democrat is president (and who often contribute to it)? You know, Republicans?

  • [09-22] Making manufacturing good again: "Industrial jobs aren't automatically high-paying." They do tend to have relatively high margins, but whether workers see any of that depends on leverage, especially unions.

• Harold Meyerson: [09-18] UAW strikes built the American middle class.

Ukraine War: Since Russia invaded in February 2022, I've always put Responsible Statecraft's "Diplomacy Watch" first in this section, but there doesn't seem to be one this week. They've redesigned the website to make it much harder to tell, especially what's new and what isn't.

• Thomas Gibbons-Neff/Lauren Leatherby: [09-20] Ukraine has gained ground. But it has much farther to go. I noted a short while back that the Times hadn't updated its war maps file since early June. They finally have, although the glitzy graphics make it hard to see just how little ground Ukraine has gained.

• Fred Kaplan:

  • [09-19] The specters looming over Biden's speech at the UN: "Biden was the only Big 5 leader to show up at the UN General Assembly" -- but he had by far the shortest trip, and several leaders who did show (notably Netanyahu and Zelensky) came just as well to meet Biden. The link from the index puts the title differently (which is something Slate often does): "Ukraine seems to be slipping off the agenda at the UN General Assembly." Still, the US exclusively regards the UN GA as a useful tool to ratify American policies, but otherwise as of no account at all.

  • [09-22] Zelensky had a bizarre and frustrating trip to the US.

• Jen Kirby: [09-21] Why Volodymyr Zelenskyy had to go to Washington.

• Blaise Malley: [09-21] Zelensky faces chilly GOP reception in Washington: "What a difference 10 months and a grinding war make, as Republicans vow no more 'blank checks' for Ukraine.

• Eve Ottenberg: [09-22] The insanity of NATO war exercises in the Black Sea.

• Robert Wright: [09-22] RAND report warns of nuclear escalation in Ukraine.

Israel:

• Mitchell Plitnick: [09-21] Netanyahu-Biden meeting illustrates the political madness of the US-Israeli relationship. Netanyahu got Biden blessings, which reassures folks back home that American approval won't be a problem as his government dismantles its quasi-democracy, reinforces its apartheid, and allows his settlers to escalate ethnic cleansing. And Biden gets, what? That he won't get primaried like Rashida Tlaib? Philip Weiss continues, sarcastically: [09-21] It's time for Biden to get Netanyahu the Nobel Peace Prize. He's specifically referring to Biden's statement: "I think without Israel, there's not a Jew in the world that's secure. I think Israel is essential."

• Alaa Tartir: [09-15] Oslo accords: Thirty years of peace distortion.

Around the world:

• Zack Beauchamp: [09-20] The wild allegations about India killing a Canadian citizen, explained: "The killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada has exposed a big problem for US foreign policy." There's a list here that limits foreign assassinations to "the world's most brutal regimes -- places like China, Russia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia," conveniently ignoring the US and Israel.

• Edward Hunt: [09-23] US flouts international law with Pacific military claims.

• Ellen Ioanes: [09-23] The conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, explained: This is one of a half-dozen (or maybe more) cases where the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union eventually resulted in border disputes: this one between Armenia and Azerbaijan, the latter including a region that is primarily Armenian. This developed almost immediately into a war, which has fluctuated and festered ever since. Several others revolted: in Georgia and Moldova, where Russia favored separatists, while brutally suppressing Chechen separatists. Crimea and Donbas in Ukraine also: they didn't detonate until the pro-west coup in 2014, but now are engulfed in what is effectively a world war. It would have been sensible to recognize these flaws at the time, and set up some processes for peaceful resolution, but the US has embraced every opportunity to degrade Russian power, while Russia has become increasingly belligerent as it's been backed into a corner.

• Daniel Larison: [09-22] Rahm Emmanuel in Japan, goes rogue on China: When Biden appointed him ambassador to Japan, I figured at least that would keep him from doing the sort of damage he did in the Obama White House. And here he is, trying to start WWIII. For more details, see [09-20] White House told US ambassador to Japan to stop taunting China on social media.

• Bryan Walsh: [09-22] Governments once imagined a future without extreme poverty. What happened?

Other stories:

Merrill Goozner: [09-12] As dementia cases soar, who will care for the caregivers?

Anita Jain: [09-15] Should progressives see Sohrab Ahmari as friend or foe? He has a book, Tyrany, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty -- and What to Do About It, which I wrote something about but didn't make the cut in yesterday's Book Roundup. He's right about some things, wrong about others, a mix that gives him to obvious political leverage, so does it matter? The key question is whether he decides to be friend or foe, because if he aligns with the Democrats he can hope for a seat at the table, and he'll find people who agree with him on most of his issues (but probably not the same people all the time). But Republicans are never going to support his economic critique, not so much because they love capitalism (although about half of them do) as because they believe in hierarchical order, and rich capitalists are clustered at the top of that totem pole.

Peter Kafka: [09-21] Why is Rupert Murdoch leaving his empire now? At 92, he's turned control over to one of his sons, Lachlan Murdoch. More:

• Michelle Goldberg: [09-21] The ludicrous agony of Rupert Murdoch: Draws on Michael Wolff's "amusingly vicious and very well-timed book," The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.

  In his tortured enabling of Trump, Murdoch seems the ultimate symbol of a feckless and craven conservative establishment, overmatched by the jingoist forces it encouraged and either capitulating to the ex-president or shuffling pitifully off the public stage. "Murdoch was as passionate in his Trump revulsion as any helpless liberal," writes Wolff. The difference is that Murdoch's helplessness was a choice.

  Few people bear more responsibility for Trump than Murdoch. Fox News gave Trump a regular platform for his racist lies about Barack Obama's birthplace. It immersed its audience in a febrile fantasy world in which all mainstream sources of information are suspect, a precondition for Trump's rise.

• Alex Shephard: [09-21] Rupert Murdoch made the world worse: And he got very rich doing it.

Omid Memarian: [09-14] Lawrence Wright on why domestic terrorism is America's 'present enemy'. Interview with the author of The Looming Tower, one of the first important books on Al Qaeda after 9/11.

Osita Nwanevu: [09-20] The mass disappointment of a decade of mass protest: "The demonstrations of the last decade were vast and explosive -- and surprisingly ineffective." Review of Vincent Bevins: If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Mostly not about America, although I can't think of any protests here that have been notably successful. But the author starts with Tunisia and Arab Spring, where protests were often brutally repressed, turning into civil wars and attracting other nations for bad or worse. But despite many bad tastes, not all of them have been failures. And even those that failed leave you with the question: what else could one have tried?

Andrew Prokop: [09-22] The indictment of Sen. Bob Menendez, explained: "He and his wife were given gold bars, a car, and envelopes of cash, prosecutors say." How long before he joins Republicans in complaining about how the Justice Department has been politically weaponized? This isn't his first run in with the law. While he managed to dodge jail last time, and even got reëlected afterwards, Democrats should do whatever they can to get rid of him, especially as doing so wouldn't cost them a Senate seat. It would also get rid of the most dangerous foreign policy hawk on their side of Congress.

• Connor Echols: [09-22] Menendez took bribes to help Egypt get weapons: You mean they had to pay him to do that? Given his arms industry donors, that sounds like "double dipping."

• Matt Stieb/Benjamin Hart: [09-22] The 5 most jaw-dropping allegations in the Bob Menendez indictment.

Gabriela Riccardi: [09-21] Luddites saw the problem of AI coming from two centuries away: "A new book surfaces their forgotten story -- along with their prescience in a new machine age." The book is Brian Merchant: Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Ned Ludd's army has long been decried, becoming synonymous with the futile, kneejerk rejection of progress, but we shouldn't be so quick to insist that any new technology that can be created must be used. Indeed, we've already decided not to use a number of chemicals that have ill side effects, and that list is bound to grow. Certain weapons, like poison gas and biological agents, have been banned, and others like depleted uranium should be. There is growing reluctance to nuclear power. Biotech and AI raise deep concerns. Of course, it would be better to settle these disputes rationally rather than through breaking machines, but where no resolution seems possible -- the use of fossil fuels is most likely -- sabotage is a possibility.

Rich Scheinin: [09-22] How Sam Rivers and Studio Rivbea supercharged '70s jazz in New York: "On the saxophonist's centennial, Jason Moran and other artists celebrate his legacy." I'd put it more like: jazz (at least the free kind) nearly was effectively on life support in the 1970s. Rivers, both by example and patronage, revived it. Of course, he wasn't alone. There was Europe, where the most important labels of the 1980s were founded. But in New York, it re-started in the lofts, especially chez Rivers.

Dylan Scott: [09-22] Another Covid-19 winter is coming. Here's how to prepare. Also:

• Fenit Nirappil/Lena H Sun: [09-22] Americans trying to get new covid vaccine hit insurance snage, face bills: During the pandemic, Americans got a glimpse of what universal health care might look like, as the government picked up the tab for Covid tests, vaccines, and treatment. It wouldn't take much to extend that coverage indefinitely. I could even see expanding that coverage incrementally until it amounted to a real program. But the powers that be -- Republicans in the worst case, but also too many Democrats -- insist that we learn our lessons the hard way. In essence, this is capitalism's way of punishing the people for allowing it to run our lives.

• Nick French: [09-01] If Democrats want to win elections, they should bring back the Covid welfare state.

Nick Shoulders: [09-24] Country music doesn't deserve its conservative reputation: "the genre isn't inherently right-wing -- it can also broadcast the struggles and aspirations of the working class." Shoulders is a singer-songwriter from Fayetteville, interviewed here by Willie Jackson. I grew up with a lot of Porter Waggoner and Hee Haw, but didn't take country music seriously until I met George Lipsitz, who was a leftist who became a country music fan through organizing. I didn't need much persuasion: all you have to do is listen. Of course, that doesn't mean there isn't a market for jingoism in country music: any time someone cuts a right-wing fart, you can be sure it will go viral. Shoulders, by the way, wrote an In These Times piece in 2020: Fake twang: How white conservatism stole country music. I haven't heard his albums, but will check out All Bad, at least, for next Music Week.

Jeffrey St Clair: [09-22] Roaming Charges: Then they walked: Starts with more horror stories of what cops do and get away with. One story from Reuters "documented more than 1,000 deaths related to police use of tasers." Much more, of course. There's a chart of new Covid-19 hospitalizations by state. Number 1, by a large margin, is Florida, followed by Arkansas, Texas, Alabama, Louisiana. There's a fact check on a David Brooks tweet, complaining that a hamburger & fries meal at Newark Airport cost him $78: "This is why Americans think the economy is terrible." Same meal was found for $17, but that didn't factor in the bar tab. If you can stand more: Timothy Bella: [09-23] David Brooks and the $78 airport meal the internet is talking about.

I didn't bother reading any of the Jann Wenner scandal last week, but St Clair couldn't resist: "There's nothing more satisfying than to watch a pompous bigot, who has paraded his misogyny and racism for decades with a sense of royal impunity, suddenly implode with his own hand on the detonator." He then excerpts the interview, meant to promote The Masters: Conversations With Bono, Dylan, Garcia, Jagger, Lennon, Springsteen, Townshend. A couple days later, Wenner was kicked off his board seat at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and denounced by most of the staff at Rolling Stone. Most likely he'll wind up as an example in some future book about "cancel culture." Also on Wenner:

• Ben Sisario: [09-19] Jann Wenner's Rock Hall reign lasted years. It ended in 20 minutes.

Jia Tolentino: [09-10] Naomi Klein sees uncanny doubles in our politics: An interview with the author of Doppelganger.

After the Brooks flare up above, someone recommended a 2004 article by Sasha Issenberg: David Brooks: Boo-Boos in Paradise.

Book Roundup

Blog link.

Last Book Roundup was on April 28, 2023, following only two in 2022. My practice then was to only post once I've accumulated a batch of 40 book notes. They aren't really reviews, because they are almost all based on reading about the books (e.g., but not exclusively, on Amazon). However, in recent years, I've added lists of related books to many entries, plus I add on an unmetered "briefly noted" list, so the absolute number of books mention has grown, making the posts huge. Last time I speculated I might cut the main list in half, to 20 books. This time I had 23 when I decided I should push this out, and much more due diligence to do, so I settled on 30. Next time will be 20 -- and hopefully less than six months. Draft file still has 88 partial drafts, 202 noted books. I've included a few books that haven't been published yet (dates in brackets) in the supplemental lists, but not as main or secondary listings.

The books on the right are ones I have read (or in Clark's case, have started -- I'm about 100 pages in). Two of those are in the supplementary lists. The second Hope Jahren is more timely, but I read (and wrote up) the memoir first. The Ther book I hoped would offer more insights into Ukraine, but had more to say about politics in Germany, Italy, and Poland. Still, someone needs to write a book that lives up to the title.

Several other books noted below are in my queue, waiting for my limited attention:

• Cory Doctorow: The Internet Con
• Franklin Foer: The Last Politician
• Astra Taylor: The Age of Insecurity

I should also mention, in my queue, Samuel Moyn's previous book: Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. If I didn't have so much pending, I'd seriously consider adding Naomi Klein: Doppelganger. The title is a bit too clever, but the notion of finding perverse mirror images in the right-wing fever swamp is profound, maybe because it articulates something that's been smacking us upside the head for decades now. The long list of books I filed under Rufo is full of examples. These are books that cry out not for political debate but for psychological intervention.

As Klein notes, they often start with a kernel of truth -- often one that we on the left would at least partly agree with -- then twist it around, often blaming us for problems that their side actually caused, playing up their victimhood, less for sympathy from others than to stir up anger within their own identity cult. After all, it's not like they have any sympathy for suffering of victims outside their orbit. I've tracked quite some number of these right-wing tracts over the years, and they are clearly becoming more and more deranged.

The supplemental Iraq list is unusual here, in that it includes some books that are quite old, simply because I missed them at the time. (Christopher Hitchens is an example I don't have to scratch my head over missing. Victor Davis Hanson is one that was pretty ridiculous when it was written, but all the more so in hindsight. And Judith Miller was one held back until she thought the coast was clear.) The implicit backdrop to this list is the long list of books I've noted previously. These are collected in one huge file (6398 books, 350k words). At some point I should split this up into thematic guides. (A grep for "Iraq" finds 323 lines, which is probably close to 200 books. "Israel" finds 601 lines. "Trump" 780. "Biden" 56.)

Here are 30 more/less recent books of interest in politics, the social sciences, and history, with occasional side trips, and supplementary lists where appropriate:

Michael D Bess: Planet in Peril: Humanity's Four Greatest Challenges and How We Can Overcome Them (2022, Cambridge University Press): Fossil fuels and Climate Change; Nukes for War and Peacetime; Pandemics, Natural or Bioengineered; Artificial Intelligence. One thing that distinguishes all four is the need for international cooperation, which involves "taking the United Nations up a notch." He even tries to anticipate "rogues, cheaters, and fanatics," but only leaves six pages for the chapter on "What Could Go Wrong?"

Christopher Clark: Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 (2023, Crown): Major historical work (896 pp). I've moved on to it after reading EJ Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, which covered its six decades with remarkable concision, but didn't offer many details of the revolutionary events of 1848. People like to brag about how much wealth capitalism has bestowed on the world, but through 1848 only a very few had anything to show for it, and the new laboring class (including significant numbers of women and children) were mired in misery. Hobsbawm mentions various crop failures, famines, and crashes of the 1840s that did much to provoke revolt. But also, with nearly every nation in Europe gripped by absolute monarchy, the emerging business class had their own reasons, and ideology, for revolution. My thinking was that 1848 marked the end of an age of bourgeois revolution that started in America in 1775 and ended in 1848, after which the capitalists found they had more in common with aristocrats than with the newly militant proletariat, especially when the monarchies catered to the nouveaux riches they found themselves dependent on. One thing that Clark stresses is that even where the revolutions were successfully repressed, the victors were never able to restore their ancien regime.

NW Collins: Grey Wars: A Contemporary History of US Special Operations (2021, Yale University Press): Tries to present a broad picture of how elite military units have been used going back to 1980 (Desert One), without giving away too much, least of all anything that might damage reputations or question motives. More on special ops and clandestine war:

• Matthew A Cole: Code Over Country: The Tragedy & Corruption of SEAL Team Six (2022, Bold Type Books).
• Annie Jacobsen: Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins (2019, Little Brown; paperback, 2020, Back Bay Books).
• Sean Naylor: Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (2015, St Martin's Press; paperback, 2016, St Martin's Griffin).
• Ric Prado: Black Ops: The Life of a CIA Shadow Warrior (2022, St Martin's Press): Ex-CIA.
• Dan Schilling/Lori Chapman Longfritz: Alone at Dawn: Medal of Honor Recipient John Chapman and the Untold Story of the World's Deadliest Special Operations Force (2019, Grand Central).

Cory Doctorow: The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (2023, Verso): Science fiction writer, with Rebecca Giblin, co-wrote Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets, plus more listed below. First liine: "This is a book for people who want to destroy Big Tech." Unclear to me how you can do that (not that I don't understand the desire for interoperability), but his explanation of why is succinct and pretty compelling. Two parts: one about "seizing," the other answers to a bunch of "what about" questions.

• Cory Doctorow: Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age (paperback, 2015, McSweeney's).
• Cory Doctorow: Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment (paperback, 2020, Tor Books): Fiction, sort of.
• Cory Doctorow: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (paperback, 2021, Medium Editions).

Cara Fitzpatrick: The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America (2023, Basic Books): Looking back, the surprise may be that public schooling ever got to be so popular in America in the first place. Before 1800 (or possibly 1830), schooling was largely the province of churches, and even then only for the training of a select few. But with the scientific and industrial revolutions of the 19th century, building on the enlightened liberalism of the nation's founding, public education grew, even if it was sometimes sold as a means to naturalize and domesticate unruly immigrants. Some religions, especially Roman Catholics, continued to hold out for their own schools -- when I was growing up, I knew kids who went, and was aware their parents fretted over the costs -- and the rich had their own private schooling. The private school movement got a boost with the fight against desegregation, and Republicans found political opportunities on at several fronts: vouchers would appeal to the Catholic voters they started courting as part of Nixon's "emerging Republican majority," and charter schools would fit their privatization propaganda, and hurt teacher unions (who tended to support Democrats). Since then, the Republican Party has only gotten dumber, meaner, and more self-destructive. I doubt that means the battle is over, as the world itself has only become more complex and demanding of expert knowledge (as well as judicious politics), and that stuff has to be taught. Also:

• Justin Driver: The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind (2018, Pantheon; paperback, 2019, Vintage Books).
• Jack Schneider/Jennifer Berkshire: A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Public Education and the Future of School (2020, New Press).

Franklin Foer: The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future (2023, Penguin Press): Journalist, writes for Atlantic, has three previous books, none with obvious political subjects (e.g., How Soccer Explains the World), so this effort at doing insider reporting of Biden's first two years is possibly novel, and almost unique compared to hundreds of scandal seekers who have gone after Trump. I've never liked Biden, so it may be faint praise to admit that he's the first president in my lifetime who has surprised me in pleasing ways -- of course, not always, and often not as much as I would have liked -- and I'm curious about how that happened. Foer seems to credit Biden himself for political pragmatism, but the bigger question is why they decided to respond to big problems in serious ways, as opposed to the studied downplaying of everything under Obama, let alone the madcap fits of Trump. Also on Biden (not much):

• Gabriel Debendetti: The Long Alliance: The Imperfect Union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama (2022; paperback, 2023, Henry Holt).
• Chris Whipple: The Fight of His Life: Inside Joe Biden's White House (2023, Scribner).

Meanwhile, the right has been busy pumping out anti-Biden tracts:

• Nick Adams: The Most Dangerous President in History (2022, Post Hill Press): All you need to know about him is that he wrote Trump and Churchill: Defenders of Western Civilization (2020).
• Todd Bensman: Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in US History (paperback, 2023, Bombardier Books).
• Jason Chaffetz: The Puppeteers: The People Who Control the People Who Control America (2023, Broadside Books): Pictured as puppets on cover: Biden, Schumer, Harris, Warren, Schiff?
• Joe Concha: Come On, Man!: The Truth About Joe Biden's Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Presidency (2022, Broadside Books).
• Jerry Dunleavy/James Hasson: Kabul: The Untold Story of Biden's Fiasco and the American Warriors Who Fought to the End (2023, Center Street).
• Jamie Glazov: Obama's True Legacy: How He Transformed America (paperback, 2023, Republic Book Publishers).
• Alex Marlow: Breaking Biden: Exposing the Hidden Forces and Secret Money Machine Behind Joe Biden, His Family, and His Administration (2023, Threshold Editions). [10-03]
• Mark R Levin: The Democrat Party Hates America (2023, Threshold Editions).
• Kimberley Strassel: The Biden Malaise: How America Bounced Back From Joe Bidel's Dismal Repeat of the Jimmy Carter Years (2023, Twelve).

Joshua Frank: Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (2022, Haymarket Books): Hanford Nuclear Reservation, in Washington, initially built as part of the Manhattan Project, the site along the Columbia River where the plutonium used on Hiroshima was created from uranium and extracted, a process that extended long after the war. The site now contains some 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, with a cleanup price tag of $677 billion (and counting).

Thomas Gabor/Fred Guttenberg: American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence (paperback, 2023, Mango): They enumerate 37 myths, most of which you'll find dubious (many downright bonkers) even without the supporting documentation, in eleven chapters, each with its "bottom line" summary. We've been around this block several times before, so there's not much new to add, but:

• Thomas Gabor: Carnage: Preventing Mass Chootings in America (paperback, 2021, Booklocker.com).
• Mark Follman: Trigger Points: Inside the Mission to Stop Mass Shootings in America (2022, Dey Street Books).
• Cameron McWhirter/Zusha Elinson: American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15 (2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux).
• Katherine Schweit: Stop the Killing: How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis (2021, Rowman & Littlefield; 2nd ed, paperback, 2023, Colvos).
• Katherine Schweit: How to Talk About Guns With Anyone (paperback, 2023, 82 Stories).

Peter Heather/John Rapley: Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West (2023, Yale University Press): Heather a historian of the late- and post-Roman period, Rapley a political economist. Reminds me that Cullen Murphy wrote a similar book in 2007: Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. Unlikely that any of these authors asks the obvious question: what good are empires anyway? Sure, when Rome fell, it was promptly sacked by Germanic tribes (most famously the Vandals), because that's how the world worked then. But fates like that have been rare since 1945, unless you consider the IMF analogous. Most Americans might very well be better off without an empire. Same for the world.

Peter J Hotez: The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist's Warning (2023, Johns Hopkins University Press): Doctor, has written several books on public health, and has stepped up recently to counter the vast torrent of anti-vaccine nonsense coming from all (but mostly right-wing) quarters. Note that Amazon offered me a "similar items" list: virtually all of them were by anti-vax quacks (most notably RFK Jr.). [09-19]

• Peter J Hotez: Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel's Autism: My Journey as a Vaccine Scientist, Pediatrician, and Autism Dad (paperback, 2020, Johns Hopkins University Press).
• Peter J Hotez: Preventing the Next Pandemic: Vaccine Diplomacy in a Time of Anti-Science (2021, Johns Hopkins University Press).

Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk (2023, Simon & Schuster): Big biography (688 pp), by the "biographer of genius," or so the hype goes: his previous subjects include Leonardo Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Jennifer Doudna, and Steve Jobs. You may think you know enough about him already, but this seems to be another case where the father almost makes the son sympathetic (others include Charles Koch and Donald Trump, though at this point they should be recognized as evil in their own right). Also on Musk:

• Ben Mezrich: Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History (2023, Grand Central Publishing). [11-07]
• Jonathan Taplin: The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars, and Crypto (2023, Public Affairs): Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Marc Andreesen -- "the biggest wallets paying for the most blinding lights."

Hope Jahren: Lab Girl (2016, Knopf; paperback, 2017, Vintage): Memoir of growing up in a Norwegian-American household in Minnesota to become a paleobotanist, through grad school in California and teaching posts in Atlanta, Hawaii, and finally Norway, each with her main interest, a lab full of mass spectrometers and such. The most striking chapter is one on her pregnancy off the meds that kept her centered. Also chronicles Bill, her slightly more eccentric lab assistant who followed her from post to post. She also wrote:

• Hope Jahren: The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here (2021, Delacorte; paperback, 2020, Vintage): Carefully balanced, one of the best written books on the subject, a clearheadedness which recognizes that the real solution for the problem of more is simply less.

Siddharth Kara: Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives (2023, St Martin's Press): Investigation into cobalt mining in Congo -- a mineral increasingly in demand for the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries used by everything from smart phones to vehicles, which Congo supplies 75% of the world market for. If you've read Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost, you may think that the exploitation of this former Belgian colony couldn't get worse, but independence under Mobutu defined the word kleptocracy, and since his demise, Congo has been ravaged by the world's longest and most devastating wars. And as always, nothing adds to human suffering more quickly than a rush for treasure.

More recent books on Africa (actually very hard to search for on Amazon):

• JP Daughton: In the Forest of No Joy: The Congo-Océan Railroad the the Tragedy of French Colonialism (2021, WW Norton).
• Dipo Faloyin: Africa Is Not a Country: Notes on a Bright Continent (2022, WW Norton).
• Stuart A Reid: The Lumumba Plot: The Secret History of the CIA and a Cold War Assassination (2023, Knopf). [10-17]
• Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (paperback, 2018, Verso).
• Walter Rodney: Decolonial Marxism: Esays From the Pan-African Revolution (paperback, 2022, Verso).
• Henry Sanderson: Volt Rush: The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green (paperback, 2023, Oneworld): Congo and Chile.
• James H Smith: The Eyes of the World: Mining the Digital Age in Eastern DR Congo (paperback, 2017, University of Chicago Press).
• Jason K Stearns: The War That Doesn't Say Its Name: The Unending Conflict in the Congo (paperback, 2023, Princeton University Press).
• Susan Williams: White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonialization of Africa (2021; paperback, 2023, PublicAffairs).

Naomi Klein: Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World 2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Canadian left-political writer, one who has regularly shown a knack not just for understanding our world but for formulating that in politically meaningful ways -- perhaps most famously in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007). New book is more personal, based as it is on the public frequently getting her confused up with Naomi Wolf, who wrote the third-wave feminist classic The Beauty Trap (1991), and who, like Klein, was involved in Occupy Wall Street. Since then, Wolf has veered erratically toward the right, and especially promoting Covid misinformation. Odd, though, that the blurb info on this book doesn't mention Wolf by name. Not unrelated:

• Naomi Wolf: Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age (paperback, 2023, Chelsea Green). [11-09]

Melvyn P Leffler: Confronting Saddam Hussein: George W Bush and the Invasion of Iraq (2023, Oxford University Press): A "fair and balanced" reappraisal of the debates and process that led to Bush's decision to invade Iraq, based on new interviews with "dozens of top officials" and "declassified American and British documents." Leffler has a long history of supporting American war policy. Some of his previous books, plus other recent books on Iraq:

• Melvyn P Leffler: A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (1992; paperback, 1993, Stanford University Press).
• Melvyn P Leffler: The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953 (1994, paperback, Hill & Wang).
• Melvyn P Leffler: For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (2007; paperback, 2008, Hill & Wang).
• Melvyn P Leffler: Safeguarding Democratic Capitalism: US Foreign Policy and National Security, 1920-2015 (2017; paperback, 2019, Princeton University Press).
• Lisa Blaydes: State of Repression: Iraq Under Saddam Hussein (2018; paperback, 2020, Princeton University Press).
• Rolf Ekéus: Iraq Disarmed: The Story Behind the Story of the Fall of Saddam (2022, Lynne Rienner): Head of UNSCOM (Special Commission on Iraq): By one of the CIA operatives.
• Sam Faddis: The CIA War in Kurdistan: The Untold Story of the Northern Front in the Iraq War (2020, Casemate).
• Samuel Helfont: Iraq Against the World: Saddam, America, and the Post-Cold War Order (2023, Oxford University Press): Naval War College professor searches through Iraqi foreign policy documents to try to build a case that Saddam Hussein had it coming.
• Steven Simon: Grand Delusion: The Rise and Fall of American Ambition in the Middle East (2023, Penguin Press): Sounds a critical note, but credentials include NSC staff, State Department, RAND Corporation, and other "think tanks."

Back on the 20th anniversary, I also collected this list of older Iraq books that I hadn't otherwise cited. Most of these are old, some embarrassingly so:

• Thabit AJ Abdullah: Dictatorship, Imperialism and Chaos: Iraq Since 1989 (paperback, 2006, Zed Books).
• Zaid Al-Ali: The Struggle for Iraq's Future: How Corruption, Incompetence and Sectarianism Have Undermined Democracy (2014, Yale University Press).
• Nora Bensahel: After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq (paperback, 2008, RAND).
• Judith Betts/Mark Pythian: The Iraq War and Democratic Governance: Britain and Australia Go to War (paperback, 2020, Palgrave Macmillan).
• Hans Blix: Disarming Iraq: The Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction (2004, Pantheon; paperback, 2005, Bloomsbury): Head of UN weapons inspection team.
• Pratap Chatterjee: Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation (paperback, 2004, Seven Stories Press): Went on to write a 2009 book on Halliburton's Army.
• Don Eberly: Liberate and Leave: Fatal Flaws in the Early Strategy for Postwar Iraq (2009, Zenith Press).
• James Dobbins: Occupying Iraq: A History of the Coalition Provisional Authority (paperback, 2009, RAND).
• Jessica Goodell/John Hearn: Shade It Black: Death and After in Iraq (2011, Casemate): Marine Corps Mortuary Unit memoir.
• Peter L Hahn: Missions Accomplished? The United States and Iraq Since World War I (paperback, 2011, Oxford University Press).
• Victor Davis Hanson: Between War and Peace: Lessons From Afghanistan to Iraq (paperback, 2004, Random House): Like "don't count your chickens until the eggs are hatched"? The section on Iraq is called "The Three Week War." It includes a chapter: "Donald Rumsfeld, a Radical for Our Time."
• Christopher Hitchens: A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (paperback, 2003, Plume).
• Bill Katovsky/Timothy Carlson: Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq: An Oral History (2003; paperback, 2004, Lyons Press).
• John Keegan: The Iraq War: The Military Offensive, From Victory in 21 Days to the Insurgent Aftermath (2004, Knopf; paperback, 2005, Vintage).
• Dina Rizk Khoury: Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance (paperback, 2013, Cambridge University Press): Explores the near-constant culture of war in Iraq going back to the 1981-88 war with Iran.
• Judith Miller: The Story: A Reporter's Journey (paperback, 2016, Simon & Schuster).
• Ronan O'Callaghan: Walzer, Just War and Iraq: Ethics as Response (paperback, 2021, Routledge).
• David L Phillips: Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco (paperback, 2006, Basic Books).
• Lawrence Rothfield: The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum (2009, University of Chicago Press).
• Nadia Schadlow: War and the Art of Governance: Consolidating Combat Success Into Political Victory (paperback, 2017, Georgetown University Press): Case studies on 15 American wars, from Mexico (1848) to Iraq. There's a chapter on Afghanistan (before Iraq), but nothing on Vietnam.
• Gary Vogler: Iraq and the Politics of Oil: An Insider's Perspective (2017, University Press of Kansas): Former ExxonMobil exec, ORHA oil consultant.

Jill Lepore: The Deadline: Essays (2023, Liveright): Harvard historian, has written books on a wide range of subjects, from King Phillip's War to the Simulmatics Corporation, and to round it all out, These Truths: A History of the United States, all the while knocking out a wide range of historically astute essays for The New Yorker. This collects 640 pp of them.

David Lipsky: The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial (2023, WW Norton): Seems like every batch has a hook on which I hang the most recent batch of climate change books. This is the latest "big idea must-read book," meant to finally batter down the door of resistance, even though he must know that the problem isn't resistance but diversion, all the sneaky little side-trips politicans can be enticed along rather than biting off a task that exceeds their patience and talent. His aim is to convince you through stories (he's mostly written fiction and memoir before this), and they're less about the underlying science, which you probably know (and are tired of) by now, and more about the arts of denial -- not that I doubt there's science behind it but I still insist it's mostly art.

Other recent books on climate:

• Neta C Crawford: The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of US Military Emissions (2022, The MIT Press).
• Geoff Dembicki: The Petroleum Papers: Inside the Far-Right Conspiracy to Cover Up Climate Change (2022, Greystone Books): Reveals that at least by 1959 top oil executives were aware that burning their products will cause catastrophic global warming.
• John Gertner: The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future (2019; paperback, 2020, Random House).
• Robert S Devine: The Sustainable Economy: The Hidden Costs of Climate Change and the Path to a Prosperous Future (paperback, 2020, Anchor).
• Jeff Goodell: The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet (2023, Little Brown): After several books that danced around the edges (Big Coal, How to Cool the Planet [on geoengineering], and The Water Will Come [rising seas, sinking cities]), he finally gets to the point. Kim Stanley Robinson, who led off with this very point in The Ministry for the Future, says: "you won't see the world the same way after reading it."
• Mike Hulme: Climate Change Isn't Everything: Liberating Climate Politics From Alarmism (paperback, 2023, Polity): But it is one thing, a big one, one with a lot of momentum, making it hard to change even without an alarming level of political resistance.
• Michael Mann: Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons From Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis (2023, PublicAffairs).
• George Marshall: Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change (2014; paperback, 2015, Bloomsbury).
• Anthony McMichael: Climate Change and the Health of Nations: Famines, Fevers, and the Fate of Populations (2017; paperback, 2019, Oxford University Press).
• David W Orr, ed: Democracy in a Hotter Time: Climate Change and Democratic Transformation (paperback, 2023, MIT Press): Foreword by Bill McKibben; afterword by Kim Stanley Robinson. [09-26]
• Friederike Otto: Angry Weather: Heat Waves, Floods, Storms, and the New Science of Climate Change (2020; paperback, 2023, Greystone Books).
• Geoffrey Parker: Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (2013; paperback, 2014, Yale University Press): 904 pp.
• Rosanna Xia: California Against the Sea: Visions of Our Vanishing Coastline (2023, Heyday).

Michael Mann: On Wars (2023, Yale University Press): British-American comparative historical sociologist, wrote a series of books on The Sources of Social Power, presents this as a career capstone, surveying the entire history of war, from ancient to modern, asking why and concluding: "it is a handful of political leaders -- people with emotions and ideologies, and constrained by inherited culture and institutions -- who undertake such decisions, usually irrationally choosing war and seldom achieving their desired results." While that's true enough of the past, when war was mostly fought for plunder, and as a contest for esteem among violent males, does any of that still make sense? Sure, we do still have would-be warriors, always with their minds stuck in past fantasies, but their track record over the last century (and perhaps much more) is so dismal they should be relegated to asylums (or professional sports?). An honest book, and I have no reason to think that this one isn't, would show as much, in endless detail, but the very question -- are wars rational? -- should be unthinkable, but lamentably is still here.

John J Mearsheimer/Sebastian Rosato: How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policy (2023, Yale University Press): In order for the realist foreign policy to work, one must start by assuming the underlying rationality in all actors: that they understand their interests, that they can anticipate how various strategies will work or fail, and that they can adjust their strategy to their best advantage. Given that none of those assumptions are sound, it's hard to imagine why they call the resulting policy "realism." The authors have been critical of US foreign policy of late for being too bound up in ideology, and seek to rein that in with reason, but even their examples come out cock-eyed: Putin's decision to invade Ukraine may have been rigorously rational, but it was based on a set of plainly wrong assumptions, making it clearly a bad decision, one that has hurt Russia more than Putin could ever have hoped to gain. Same can be said for Bush in 2003 Iraq, except that the authors discard that decision in the irrational bucket. The two cases are remarkably similar, starting with the imagined own interests, the unacknowledged desire for independence, and the belief that overwhelming power ("shock and awe") would result in immediate capitulation.

Samuel Moyn: Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023, Yale University Press): In the 1960s, I got very upset at liberals who supported the Vietnam War. Liberals were on top of the world in 1945, but by 1948 nearly all of them had been shamed, cajoled, and/or terrorized into turning on the left, both abroad, where the US converted failing European colonies into safe havens for further capitalist exploitation, and at home, where they allowed labor unions to be purged and curtailed. Liberalism's goal of freeing all individuals seemed revolutionary compared to the aristocracy, feudalism, and slavery that preceded it, but freedom was a two-edged sword, leaving losers far more numerous than winners. With the New Deal, some liberals started to bridge the gap with the left, offering a "safety net" to help tame the worst dysfunctions of capitalism. During the Cold War, liberals split into two camps: one turning neoconservative, the other still committed to the "safety net" but less so to labor unions, and not at all to solidarity with workers and the poor abroad. Moyn tackles this problem through six portraits of early post-WWII liberals: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt, and Lionel Trilling: not the first names I thought of, but suitable for purpose, which Moyn states clearly in his first line: "Cold War liberalism was a catastrophe -- for liberalism."

Other recent books on liberalism (philosophy and its limits):

• Russell Blackford: How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (paperback, 2023, Bloomsbury). [11-16]
• Patrick J Deneen: Why Liberalism Failed (2018; paperback, 2019, Yale University Press): Conservative critic: note blurbs by Rod Dreher, Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Barack Obama; also note that Obama's is the most conventionally conservative. Deneen followed up with:
• Patrick J Deneen: Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future (2023, Sentinel): Wherein he argues for replacing liberalism with a "pre-postmodern conservativism." I don't know which is more impossible: convincing the masses to give up on the promise of equality, or convincing the masters, having advanced through the "pursuit of happiness" (self-interest), to care responsibly for their charges.
• Wolfram Eilenberger: The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times (2023, Penguin Press): Another batch of thinkers from Moyn's era, intersecting with Arendt.
• Christopher William England: Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (2023, Johns Hopkins University Press).
• Edmund Fawcett: Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (2014; 2nd edition, paperback, 2018, Princeton University Press). Author also has a mirror volume:
• Edmund Fawcett: Conservatism: The Fight for a Tradition (2020; paperback, 2022, Princeton University Press).
• John Gray: The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism (2023, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Philosopher with a long list of titles -- two I've previously cited are Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern (2005) and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), but there are dozens more, including Isaiah Berlin: An Interpretation of His Thought (1996). [11-07]
• Kei Hiruta: Hannah Arendt & Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity (2021, Princeton University Press).
• Luke Savage: The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History (paperback, 2022, OR Books).
• Larry Siedentop: Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (2014; paperback, 2017, Belknap Press).
• Brad Snyder: The House of Truth: A Washington Salon and the Foundations of Liberalism (2017, Oxford University Press): From 1912, with Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippman, etc.
• Vikash Yadav: Liberalism's Last Man: Hayek in the Age of Political Capitalism (2023, University of Chicago Press).

Samir Puri: The Shadows of Empire: How Imperial History Shapes Our World (2021, Pegasus Books): British, of both Indian and African heritage, an international relations professor with a background in diplomacy, has a newer book on Ukraine (see Zygar, below). The cover blurb by neo-imperialist Robert D Kaplan isn't promising, but there can be little doubt that the centuries of European imperialism have left lasting marks both on the former rulers and on the formerly ruled. I've argued that the essential mission of American foreign policy after WWII was to salvage the former colonies for capitalism, which mostly involved keeping local leaders on retainer, often arming them to suppress local rebellions, sometimes sending American troops in to do the job (as in Vietnam), and sometimes failing at that (ditto). The conceit that Americans still have of leading the "free world" is a residue of the imperial mindset. So was Britain's wish in 2003 to fight another war in Iraq. So is France's desire to "help out" in Mali and Niger. So is Russia's notion that Ukraine should be grateful for their civilization. For most people, imperialism was revealed as disaster and tragedy by WWII, but these residues linger on. It's hard to change bad habits until you're conscious of them. That I take to be the point of this book. Also (his book on Ukraine is listed under Mikhail Zygar):

• Samir Puri: Pakistan's War on Terrorism: Strategies for Combatting Jihadist Armed Groups Since 9/11 (2011, Routledge).
• Samir Puri: Fighting and Negotiating With Armed Groups: The Difficulty of Securing Strategic Outcomes (paperback, 2019, Routledge).
• Samir Puri: The Great Imperial Hangover: How Empires Have Shaped the World (2020; paperback, 2021, Atlantic Books): Original edition of The Shadows of Empire.

James Risen: The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys -- and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy (2023, Little Brown): A biography of three-term Senator Frank Church, the last Democrat from Idaho, an early critic of the Vietnam War, and perhaps best known for his investigations exposing all sorts of malfeasance by the CIA and FBI -- the Kennedys and the Mafia factor into this through the CIA plots against Cuba. No figure in American politics saw his reputation disintegrate more totally than J Edgar Hoover, and that was largely due to Church's discoveries. As I recall, the War Powers Act, much ignored by presidents from Reagan on, was another of his legacies.

Christopher F Rufo: America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (2023, Broadside Books): That's news to me, but so claims the guy touted as "America's most effective conservative intellectual [as he] proves once and for all that Marxist radicals have taken over our nation's institutions." The "ultimate objective" of this sinister conspiracy? "replacing constitutional equality with a race-based redistribution system overseen by bureaucratic 'diversity and inclusion' officials." In other words, this book is too stupid to even make fun of. Such a vast incomprehension is only to be pitied. (By the way, if you do want to make any sense of this, consider that the Marx and later leftists as the true apostles of Enlightenment liberalism, the ones who truly aspired to liberty and justice for all, as opposed to the would-be elites who jumped off the revolutionary train as soon as they secured their rights. "Thinkers" like Rufo recall that red-baiting worked once, so they assume it will work again. Had they actually read some Marx, they'd recall the quip about history repeating first as tragedy, then as farce.) Of course, there is more right-wing paranoid delusion coming your way:

• Joe Allen: Dark Aeon: Transhumanism and the War Against Humanity (2023, War Room Books): Foreword by Stephen K Bannon claims the politics, although paranoia about globalists and cyborgs is not exclusively right-wing.
• Glenn Beck/Justin Haskins: Dark Future: Uncovering the Great Reset's Terrifying Next Phase (2023, Forefront Books): Amazon flags this as "Best Seller in Fascism."
• Jerome R Corsi: The Truth: About Neo-Marxism, Cultural Maoism, and Anarchy: Exposing Woke Insanity in an Age of Disinformation (2023, Post Hill Press): A list of subjects that nobody knows less about, starting with "truth."
• Ted Cruz: Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America (2023, Regnery): US Senator (R-TX). [11-07]
• Dinesh D'Souza: United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It. (2020, All Points Books).
• Frank Gaffney/Dede Laugesen: The Indictment: Prosecuting the Chinese Communist Party & Friends for Crimes Against America, China, and the World (2023, War Room Books): "thanks to the American elites they have captured in every sector of our society."
• Richard Hanania: The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics (2023, Broadside Books). [09-19]
• Alex Jones/Kent Heckenlively: The Great Awakening: Defeating the Globalists and Launching the Next Great Renaissance (2023, Skyhorse). [10-31]
• Jesse Kelly: The Anti-Communist Manifesto (2023, Threshold Editions).
• Ian Prior: Parents of the World, Unite!: How to Save Our Schools From the Left's Radical Agenda (2023, Center Street).
• Vivek Ramaswamy: Nation of Victims: Identity Politics, the Death of Merit, and the Path Back to Excellence (paperback, 2023, Center Street): Republican presidential candidate.
• Jason Rantz: What's Killing America: Inside the Radical Left's Tragic Destruction of Our Cities (2023, Center Street). Then why has living in them never seemed more desirable? (Or expensive?)
• Michael Savage: A Savage Republic: Inside the Plot to Destroy America (2023, Bombardier Books): Presumably he's talking about someone else's plot that he imagines he has some insight into, rather than his own -- but after three Trump books, wouldn't a mea culpa be in order? [11-14]
• Ben Shapiro: The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent (2021, Broadside Books).
• Liz Wheeler: Hide Your Children: Exposing the Marxists Behind the Attack on America's Kids (2023, Regnery): OANN host, a "titan of conservative media." [09-26] Previously wrote:
• Liz Wheeler: Tipping Points: How to Topple the Left's House of Cards (2019, Regnery).
• Xi Van Fleet: Mao's America: A Survivor's Warning (2023, Center Street). [10-31]
• Kenny Xu: School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools & Why We Must Reclaim Them (2023, Center Street).

It's worth noting that not everyone on this team right wants to seem insane. Some have written more sensible-sounding books, but they're usually based on the same paranoid assumptions. E.g.:

• Greg Lukianoff/Rikki Schlott: The Canceling of the American Mind: Cancel Culture Undermines Trust and Threatens Us All -- but There is a Solution (2023, Simon & Schuster). [10-17]
• Teresa Mull: Woke-Proof Your Life: A Handbook on Escaping Modern, Political Madness and Shielding Yourself and Your Family by Living a More Self-Sufficient, Fulfilling Life (paperback, 2023, Crisis Publications): Paranoia as self-help, including: learn to guard against "toxic empathy."
• Dave Rubin: Don't Burn This Country: Surviving and Thriving in Our Woke Dystopia (2022, Sentinel). Also wrote:
• Dave Rubin: Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason (2020, Sentinel).
• Will Witt: Do Not Comply: Taking Power Back From America's Corrupt Elite (2023, Center Street). Also wrote:
• Will Witt: How to Win Friends and Influence Enemies: Taking on Liberal Arguments With Logic and Humor (2021, Center Street).

Paul Sabin: Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (2021, WW Norton): The New Deal produced a broad consensus that government could work with business (especially big business) and labor unions to benefit everyone. This was attacked relentlessly by conservative business interests, especially after 1970 when productivity slowed, inflation increased, and businesses decided they should be more predatory in order to maintain their expected level of profits. Nicholas Lemann sums up this shift in his Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream (2019). Sabin's throwing another wrinkle into this story, arguing that the 1960-70s advent of "environmentalists, social critics, and consumer advocates like Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader" also contributed to the erosion of liberal faith in government. This strikes me as a bit far-fetched, as it's hard to imagine who they might expect other than a democratic government might stand up for public interests. It is true that the reputation of liberal politicians as public servants was damaged by various mistakes -- chief of which was the Vietnam War -- as well as a massive increase in corporate lobbying and media. But it is also true that "public citizens" accomplished much of what they had set out to before the political tide turned conservative. Where they failed was in not securing enough political power to protect the public's gains against the corporate lobbyists and political money.

Joanna Schwartz: Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable (2023, Viking): UCLA law professor, teaches courses on civil procedure, police accountability, and public interest lawyering. Police are very rarely held accountable for their prejudices, mistakes, judgment lapses, and unnecessary violence, as they are shielded by many layers, starting with their willingness to lie and cover for each other, their unions, administrators, lawyers (including prosecutors), judges, and enablers among the "law and order" politicians.

More on police violence:

• Justine Barron: They Killed Freddie Gray: The Anatomy of a Police Brutality Cover-Up (2023, Arcade).
• Devon W Carbado: Unreasonable: Black Lives, Police Power, and the Fourth Amendment (2022, New Press).
• Ben Cohen: Above the Law: How "Qualified Immunity" Protects Violent Police (paperback, 2021, OR Books).
• Keith Ellison: Break the Wheel: Ending the Cycle of Police Violence (2023, Twelve): Minnesota Attorney General, charged and convicted the police responsible for killing George Floyd.
• Jamie Thompson: Standoff: Race, Policing, and a Deadly Assault That Gripped a Nation (2020, Henry Holt).
• Ali Winston/Darwin BondGraham: The Riders Come Out at Night: Brutality, Corruption, and Cover-Up in Oakland (2023, Atria Books).

Richard Norton Smith: An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R Ford (2023, Harper): A massive production (832 pp) for the House minority leader from Michigan, who got drafted to be Vice President to help bury the tarnished Spiro Agnew, then elevated to President to pardon and escape Richard Nixon, who then managed to hold off Ronald Reagan and secure the Republican nomination in 1976, only to lose to Jimmy Carter -- which set Reagan up nicely for 1980, in what really was one of the most adversely consequential elections of our lifetime. In his time, Ford was a guy who no one really hated, because he never was that important. But Republicans managed to name an aircraft carrier for him, and now he gets a big biography, even though the title admits he wasn't up to it.

Norman Solomon: War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (2023, New Press): Author has several books on media, as well as two previous ones on war: War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2005), and his memoir, Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters With America's Warfare State. This starts the selling of the Global War on Terror after 9/11, with how it was exploited when it was popular, and how as enthusiasm faded it gradually got swept out of sight. Still, one needs to look further back to get the point: Vietnam was touted as the "living room war" as daily broadcasts showed the war degenerating into a hopeless quagmire as dissent grew. If the military learned anything from that war, it was the importance of better managing the press. That seemed to work in the 1990 Gulf War, and the many embedded journalists in the 2003 drive to Baghdad did as they were told, but Iraq fell apart even faster than Vietnam, so the press was virtually shut down after Bremer left, with very few reporters free to dispute press office claims, and diminishing interest in finding out more.

• Norman Solomon: False H ope: The Politics of Illusion in the Clinton Era (paperback, 1994, Common Courage Press).
• Norman Solomon: The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh (paperback, 1997, Common Courage Press).
• Martin A Lee/Norman Solomon: Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (1990; paperback, 1998, Lyle Stuart).
• Norman Solomon: The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media: Decoding Spin and Lies in the Mainstream News (paperback, 2002, Common Courage Press).
• Norman Solomon/Jeff Cohen: The Wizards of Media Oz: Behind the Curtain of Mainstream News (paperback, 2002, Common Courage Press).
• Norman Solomon/Reese Ehrlich: Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You (paperback, 2003, Context Books).

Astra Taylor: The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (paperback, 2023, House of Anansi Press): Author of important books on democracy and the internet, activist in Occupy Wall Street and the Debt Collective, as sharp and as broadly knowledgeable as anyone writing today. These essays were written for the CBC Massey Lectures, but sum up a world view, for a world where politicians pride themselves as guardians of our security, while plunging us into ever greater precarity.

Peter Turchin: End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (2023, Penguin Press): Attempts to work out a scientific framework for comparative history, or rather claims to have worked one out, with a vast range of data points ("CrisisDB"), and is now intent on applying it to the anomaly that is present-day America. Much of this hangs on his concept of the over-production of elites (themselves a slippery concept, given that one can be elite in something without having effective power over anything else). The ability to jump so widely makes for a heady mix, but you mostly wind up grasping at hints.

Mikhail Zygar: War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine (2023, Scribner): A year after the invasion comes the first wave of books trying to explain how and why it happened -- most mixed in with more than a dollop of self-serving propaganda. This is one of the more credible prospects (at least I've found interviews with him to be credible): Zygar, a Russian now based in Berlin, has many years as an independent journalist, which got him close enough to write and distant enough to publish All the Kremlin's Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir Putin. He starts here by going deep into history to show how Russians and Ukrainians came to hold very different views of each other -- a basic cognitive dissidence that American hawks, stuck with their own myths, show no interest in. Other recent books on the conflict (Matthews and Plokhy are most comparable, and Puri offers an interesting viewpoint; others are more specialized, running the range of views; none strike me as pro-Russian, but a couple are critical of the US):

• Gilbert Achcar: The New Cold War: The United States, Russia, and China From Kossovo to Ukraine (paperback, 2023, Haymarket Books).
• Dominique Arel/Jesse Driscoll: Ukraine's Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022 (paperback, 2023, Cambridge University Press): Noted as "new edition," but not clear when the old edition was published.
• Yevgenia Belorusets: War Diary (paperback, 2023, New Directions).
• Medea Benjamin/Nicolas JS Davies: War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict (paperback, 2022, OR Books): Co-founder of antiwar group Codepink.
• Mark Edele: Russia's War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (paperback, 2023, Melbourne University Press).
• Alexander Etkind: Russia Against Modernity (paperback, 2023, Polity): It's hard to disentangle Russia's war in Ukraine from the growth of a reactionary political philosophy (e.g., Alexsandr Dugin) that leads to such irredentism.
• Ian Garner: Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia's Fascist Youth (2023, Hurst): Think tank guy, "focuses on Soviet and Russian war propaganda," believes it is believed.
• Luke Harding: Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival (paperback, 2022, Vintage): Guardian journalist.
• Maximilian Hess: Economic War: Ukraine and the Global Conflict Between Russia and the West (2023, Hurst): Analyst for Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Key thing here is that the economic war has been going on since 2014. [10-15]
• Andrey Kurkov: Diary of an Invasion (2023, Deep Vellum): Novelist, based in Kyiv.
• Aaron Maté: Cold War, Hot War: How Russiagate Created Chaos From Washington to Ukraine (paperback, 2023, OR Books). Grayzone podcaster, works with Matt Taibbi. I think there's something to this, but Grayzone sells it so hard they come off as Russian propagandists. [12-05]
• Owen Matthews: Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin and Russia's War Against Ukraine (2023, Mudlark): British journalist, former Newsweek Moscow bureau chief.
• Jade McGlynn: Russia's War (2023, Polity): British "specialist in Russian media, memory, and foreign policy" at King's College, London.
• Sergei Medvedev: A War Made in Russia (paperback, 2023, Polity): Based in Helsinki, previously wrote:
• Sergei Medvedev: The Return of the Russian Leviathan (paperback, 2019, Polity): Putin and the "archaic forces of imperial revanchism."
• Iuliia Mendel: The Fight of Our Lives: My Time With Zelenskyy, Ukraine's Battle for Democracy, and What It Means for the World (2022, Atria/One Signal): Ukrainian journalist, Zelensky's former press secretary.
• Christopher Miller: The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine (2023, Bloomsbury): Financial Times journalist, based in Kyiv.
• David Petraeus/Andrew Roberts: Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare From 1945 to Ukraine (2023, Harper). [10-17]
• Serhii Plokhy: The Russo-Ukrainian War: The Return of History (2023, WW Norton): Historian, has written books on Russia, also The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine.
• Bartosz Popko: Stories From Ukraine: The True Price of War (paperback, 2022, self-published): Collects 18 first-person perspectives.
• Samir Puri: Russia's Road to War With Ukraine: Invasion Amidst the Ashes of Empires (2023, Biteback): British, of Indian heritage via Africa, was an international observer at five Ukrainian elections. Previously wrote: The Great Imperial Hangover: How Empires Have Shaped the World.
• Samuel Ramani: Putin's War on Ukraine: Russia's Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution (2023, Hurst): British "Russia expert."
• Serhii Rudenko: Zelensky: A Biography (paperback, 2023, Polity).
• Gwendolyn Sasse: Russia's War Against Ukraine (paperback, 2023, Polity): "Einstein Professor for the Comparative Study of Democracy and Authoritarianism" in Berlin. [11-20]
• Philipp Ther: How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War (paperback, 2023, Polity): Covers a wide swath of European politics after 1989, as does his earlier book:
• Philipp Ther: Europe Since 1989: A History (2016; paperback, 2018, Princeton University Press).
• Serhiy Zhadan: Sky Above Kharkiv: Dispatches From the Ukrainian Front (2023, Yale University Press).

Additional books, noted without comments other than for clarity. I reserve the right to return to some of these later (but probably won't; many are here because I don't want to think about them further).

Michele Alacevich: Albert O Hirschman: An Intellectual Biography (2021, Columbia University Press): Second biography I've seen, after Jeremy Adelman: Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O Hirschman (2013), reportedly stronger on Hirschman's economic theories.

Charles Camic: Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics (2020, Harvard University Press).

Rachel Chrastil: Bismarck's War: The Frano-Prussian War and the Making of Modern Europe (2023, Basic Books).

James C Cobb: C Vann Woodward: America's Historian (2022, The University of North Carolina Press).

Trae Crowder/Corey Ryan Forrester/Drew Morgan: The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin' Dixie Outta the Dark (paperback, 2017, Atria).

Trae Crowder/Corey Ryan Forrester: Round Here and Over Yonder: A Front Porch Travel Guide by Two Progressive Hillbillies (Yes, That's a Thing) (2023, Harper Horizon).

Sandrine Dixson-Declève/Owen Gaffney/Jayati Ghosh/Jorgen Randers/Johan Rockström/Per Espen Stoknes: Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity (paperback, 2022, New Society): "A Report to the Club of Rome (2022) Fifty Years After The Limits to Growth (1972)."

Robert Elder: Calhoun: American Heretic (2021, Basic Books).

Roland Ennos: The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization (2020, Scribner).

Samuel G Freedman: Into the Bright Sunshine: Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights (2023, Oxford University Press).

Newt Gingrich: March to the Majority: The Real Story of the Republican Revolution (2023, Center Street): Memoir of the 1994 election that made Gingrich Speaker of the House.

Josh Hawley: The Masculine Virtues America Needs (2023, Regnery): US Senator (R-MO), famous Jan. 6 track star.

David Horowitz: I Can't Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America (2021, Regnery).

Robert Kagan: The Ghost at the Feast: America and the Collapse of World Order, 1900-1941 (2023, Knopf): Carries on from his 2006 book, Dangerous Nation: America's Foreign Policy From Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century.

Patrick Radden Keefe: Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (2021, Doubleday).

Cody Keenan: Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America (2022, Mariner Books): Obama speechwriter, focuses on the speeches of 10 days in June 2015.

Keith Kellogg: War by Other Means: A General in the Trump White House (2021, Regnery).

Michael G Laramie: Queen Anne's War: The Second Contest for North America, 1702-1713 (2021, Westholme).

Marc Levinson: The Box: How a Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (2nd edition paperback, 2016, Princeton University Press).

Marc Levinson: Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed From Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas (2020, Princeton University Press).

Robert Lighthizer: No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America's Workers (2023, Broadside Books): Trump's US Trade Representative.

Stephen A Marglin: Raising Keynes: A Twenty-First-Century General Theory (2021, Harvard University Press): 928 pp.

Ben Mezrich: The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees (2021, Grand Central).

Walter Benn Michaels/Adolph Reed Jr: No Politics but Class Politics (paperback, 2023, Eris).

Adolph L Reed Jr: The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives (2022, Verso).

James Rickards: Sold Out: How Broken Supply Chains, Surging Inflation, and Political Instability Will Sink the Global Economy (2022, Portfolio).

Peter Robison: Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing (2021, Doubleday; paperback, 2022, Anchor).

Kermit Roosevelt III: The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story (2022, University of Chicago Press).

Julio Rosas: Fiery (But Mostly Peaceful): The 2020 Riots and the Gaslighting of America (2022, DW Books): Sees ANTIFA under every rock.

Mike Rothschild: The Storm Is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything (2021, Melville House).

Marco Rubio: Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America's Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity (2023, Broadside Books).

Kohei Saito: Karl Marx's Ecosocialism: Capital, Nature, and the Unfinished Critique of Political Economy (paperback, 2017, Monthly Review Press).

Kohei Saito: Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degworth Communism (paperback, Cambridge University Press): Argues that Marx had a long-suppressed ecological critique of capitalism.

Craig Shirley: April 1945: The Hinge of History (2022, Thomas Nelson): Wrote Newt Gingrich's authorized biography.

Thomas Sowell: Social Justice Fallacies (2023, Basic Books).

David Stasavage: The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History From Antiquity to Today (2020, Princeton University Press).

Greg Steinmetz: American Rascal: How Jay Gould Built Wall Street's Biggest Fortune (2022, Simon & Schuster).

James B Stewart/Rachel Abrams: Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy (2023, Penguin Press): The struggle for succession at Paramount Global.

Cass R Sunstein: How to Interpret the Constitution (2023, Princeton University Press).

Owen Ullmann: Empathy Economics: Janet Yellen's Remarkable Rise to Power and Her Drive to Spread Prosperity to All (2022, Public Affairs).

Volker Ullrich: Germany 1923: Hyperinflation, Hitler's Putsch, and Democracy in Crisis (2023, Liveright).

Nikki Usher: News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism (2021, Columbia University Press). Studying recent trends in newspapers, including the New York Times.

Maurizio Valsania: First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity (2022, Johns Hopkins University Press).

Thomas D Williams: The Coming Christian Persecution: Why Times Are Getting Worse and How to Prepare for What Is to Come (2023, Crisis Publications): Catholic theologian.

Book Roundup

Blog link.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, September archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 36 albums, 7 A-list,

Music: Current count 40883 [40847] rated (+36), 28 [27] unrated (+1).

New releases have started to pick up after the late-summer doldrums, so it's been easier to find things to listen to. One help was Robert Christgau's September Consumer Guide. Four full-A albums, three of them hyped enough I got to them previously: Olivia Rodrigo (A last week), Ashley McBryde and Speedy Ortiz (below, but written up, and commented on in Facebook, before the CG appeared). Both got multiple plays, with diminishing returns. Not that I can't hear why other people like them so much, but my own pleasure wore thin fast. I'm hardly the only guy to get cranky as he gets old, but felt it here.

Nothing wrong with the Bobbie Nelson/Amanda Shires album, but doesn't strike me as a big deal either. Nor do I find comparisons to brother Willie's Stardust or Lady Gaga's Bennetts very helpful. As a jazz critic, I listen interpretations of standards all the time, so I need to be more discerning (or maybe again I'm just being cranky). On the other hand, I thought the Muldaur/Thompson record added something significant, albeit not revolutionary, to the original duets.

The rest are below, aside from the ones I had previously dealt with: Rodney Crowell (**), Gloss Up (**), Killer Mike (***), Janelle Monae (A-), Thelonious Monk (B+), and Noname (A-, though I found several places where I hadn't updated the original *** grade). I might have given up too fast on the first two, but haven't rechecked. Discogs doesn't give a release date for my Monk box (3-CD), and the outside of the box doesn't help, but inside there's a hint that it came out in 1988. I can't find anything I wrote on it, so it was probably pre-2003. I also didn't grade the individual discs, as I sometimes did later -- but there's little to differentiate this set.

I also picked up some suggestions from Brad Luen's Countrypop Life: Love and Theft. I still haven't tackled Morgan Wallen (or Bailey Zimmerman), and everyone else I'm either up or down on, but it's a good guide. I'll also note that I have tabs open for Christian Iszchak, Sidney Carpenter-Wilson, and Steve Pick -- none of which I've exhausted.

I also took a look at Magnet's "30 for 30" lists by Dan Weiss and Thomas Reimel. Not very useful as checklists, as I've heard everything on the Weiss list, and I've only missed 2 items on Reimel's (although I had to look more up, as who remembers bands like Guided by Voices and Interpol?). I tried jotting down a list myself (or two, one comparable for non-jazz, one with zero overlap for jazz): in the notebook. I spent less than an hour on each, so they're pretty iffy -- especially the jazz one. I'd be delighted if Magnet had any interest in running my list. (I was assuming they had no interest in jazz, but I now see a review of Rempis Percussion Quartet's Harvesters in their Essential New Music section -- as well as another Guided by Voices album I haven't heard.)

The new Lehman album is in a tight race with James Brandon Lewis's For Mahalia, With Love for jazz album of the year. It took me longer to get comfortable with, but that's the kind of prickly record it is. The other Lehman thing is one of the first things I noted in my infrequent "Limited Sampling" section, panned with a U-, so I was very surprised when it came through. By the way, the aforementioned Harvesters is currently a top-five jazz album this year.

The Mike Clark album was another surprise -- not the first time he's surprised me, but he's got one of those names that gets easily mixed up with many others. Before I played Clark, I came within a hair of giving his long-time collaborator Eddie Henderson an A-, but afterwards this is the place to hear him.

Still starting each day off with something old from the stacks. This morning: Tampa Red. Playing a new-old François Carrier/Tomasz Stanko box at the moment, which is sublime background.

New records reviewed this week:

• The Chemical Brothers: For That Beautiful Feeling (2023, Virgin EMI): [sp]: B+(*)
• Mike Clark: Kosen Rufu (2022 [2023], Wide Hive): [cd]: A-
• Dave and Central Cee: Split Decision (2023, Neighbourhood, EP): [sp]: B+(**)
• The Handsome Family: Hollow (2023, Loose): [sp]: A-
• Eddie Henderson: Witness to History (2022 [2023], Smoke Sessions): [sp]: B+(***)
• Irreversible Entanglements: Protect Your Light (2023, Impulse!): [sp]: A-
• Laufey: Bewitched (2023, AWAL): [sp]: B+(*)
• Steve Lehman/Orchestre National de Jazz: Ex Machina (2023, Pi): [cd]: A-
• Ashley McBryde: The Devil I Know (2023, Warner Music Nashville): [sp]: B+(**)
• Mitski: The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We (2023, Dead Oceans): [sp]: B+(*)
• Victoria Monét: Jaguar II (2023, RCA): [sp]: B+(**)
• Megan Moroney: Lucky (2023, Sony Music Nashville): [sp]: B+(***)
• Jenni Muldaur/Teddy Thompson: Once More: Jenni Muldaur & Teddy Thompson Sing the Great Country Duets (2021-23 [2023], Sun): [sp]: A-
• Bobbie Nelson and Amanda Shires: Loving You (2023, ATO): [sp]: B+(***)
• Pretenders: Relentless (2023, Rhino): [sp]: B+(*)
• Joshua Redman: Where Are We (2023, Blue Note): [sp]: B+(**)
• Doug Richards Orchestra: Through a Sonic Prism: The Music of Antonio Carlos Jobim (2022 [2023], self-released): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jeff Rosenstock: Hellmode (2023, Polyvinyl): [sp]: B+(*)
• Speedy Ortiz: Rabbit Rabbit (2023, Wax Nine): [sp]: B+(*)
• Chris Stamey: The Great Escape (2023, Car): [sp]: B+(*)
• Teddy Thompson: My Love of Country (2023, self-released): [sp]: B+(**)
• Tirzah: Trip9love (2023, Domino): [sp]: B+(*)
• Alex Ventling/Hein Westgaard: In Orbit (2021 [2023], Nice Things): [bc]: B+(**)
• Maddie Vogler: While We Have Time (2022 [2023], Origin): [cd]: B+(**)
• Morgan Wade: Psychopath (2023, Ladylike/RCA): [sp]: A-

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Atmosphere: Sad Clown Bad Dub II (2000, Rhymesayers Entertainment): [bc]: B+(**)
• John Blum: Nine Rivers (2013 [2023], ESP-Disk): [cd]: B+(**)
• Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah (1976 [1977], India Navigation): [sp]: B+(***)
• Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah [Expanded Edition] (1976-77 [2023], Luaka Bop): [bc]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Steve Lehman: Xenakis and the Valedictorian (2020, Pi): [dl]: A-
• Jenni Muldaur: Jenni Muldaur (1992, Reprise): [sp]: B

Grade (or other) changes:

• Otis Spann: Otis Spann Is the Blues (1960, Candid): [cd]: B+(**)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Jeff Coffin/Jordan Perlson/Viktor Krauss: Coffin/Perlson/Krauss (Ear Up) [09-15]
• Caroline Davis' Alula: Captivity (Ropeadope) [10-13]
• Tomas Fujiwara: Pith (Out of Your Head) [09-15]
• Carlos Henriquez: A Nuyorican Tale (self-released) [09-15]
• Elsa Nilsson's Band of Pulses: Pulses (Ears & Eyes) [10-06]
• Brad Turner Quintet: The Magnificent (Cellar) [09-22]
• Peter Xifaras: Fusion (Music With No Expiration) [10-01]

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

Started this on Friday, not with much enthusiasm, so many of the early links I collected are just that. The comment on Levitz under "Legal matters" is probably where I got started, after which I found the Current Affairs interview.

I've tried of late to articulate moderate positions that one might build a viable political consensus around, but lately I'm despairing, not so much of the popular political potential as of the probability that nothing possible will come close to what is actually needed.

Back when I was a teenage schizophrenic, I was able to pursue the two paths -- on the one hand I poured over political stats as nerdishly as Kevin Phillips, on the other I immersed myself in utopian fantasy writing -- without ever trying to reconcile them. As an old man, I find once boundless time closing in, and shutting down.

Just a few years ago, I was thinking that the worst failures in American politics were opportunity costs: wasting time and resources that could be used on big problems while doing stupid things instead (like $800B/year on useless "defense" spending). But it's looking more and more like the problem is one of cognitive dysfunction, where there is little to no hope of convincing enough of a majority that problems are problems, and that their fantasies aren't.

Top story threads:

Trump: He was having a slow week, until NBC offered him a free infomercial (see Berman, below). He is now virtually assured of the Republican nomination, but also of a margin of free publicity even exceeding his bounty in 2016 and 2020.

• Ari Berman: [09-17] The mainstream media still hasn't learned anything about covering Donald Trump: Trump appeared on NBC's Meet the Press in what was billed as "his first broadcast network interview since leaving office," with Kristen Welker, nd, well, you can guess the rest. NBC did a "fact check" after the fact, without attempting to challenge the myriad lies it went ahead and broadcast.

  • Jane C Timm: [09-17] Fact checking Trump's 'Meet the Press' interview.

  • Ellen Ioanes: [09-17] Trump, on Meet the Press, shows he still has no policy plans: "Trump went with his classic playbook of vague answers and conspiracy theories."

• Frank Bruni: [09-11] Trump is really old, too. I don't follow Bruni's columns, but fyi, I found links to these more/less recent ones:

  • [07-13] Democrats, it's OK to talk about Hunter Biden.

  • [08-24] What I saw on that G.O.P. debate stage was complete and utter moral cowardice.

  • [08-29] When I tell you Nikki Haley is pathetic, that's an understatement.

• Margaret Hartmann:

  • [09-13] Trump defends mental acuity in incoherent Truth Social posts: "Figuring out what the heck he's talking about is its own mental fitness test."

  • [09-15] Donald Trump reveals he and Melania 'actually get along': "Contrary to what Trump's GOP rivals are saying, his wife of 18 years likes him, and he doesn't care if she doesn't show it."

• Kelly McClure: [09-15] Prosecutors seek limited gag order after Trump's election case statements lead to harassment.

• Benjamin Wallace-Wells: [09-16] The futility of the Never Trump billionaires. Paul Woodward titled his excerpt People are drastically underestimating the prospect of a second Trump presidency, which sounds like something very different. The Never Trump billionaires, like Charles Koch, are trying to deny Trump the Republican nomination, which is going to be tough, partly because their libertarian economics has near-zero support even in the Republican Party, and partly because Trump is really good at appealing to the base's prejudices and vanities. But the chances of Trump getting elected is distinctly less than his odds of getting the nomination of a Party that works 24/7 to make most Americans fear and despise them. For Trump to win, there has to be a fairly major meltdown on the Democratic ticket, which with Biden and Harris already slotted is something hard to rule out. As for the Never Trumpers, don't expect them to help defeat Trump if/when he's nominated. Koch will continue to bankroll Republicans down ballot, and every Republican on the ballot will dutifully support the ticket. Division with in the Party is a chimera, because what binds the Party together, especially the cruelty, the graft, and the contempt for democracy, is far stronger than the quibbles of a few elites over Trump.

DeSantis, and other Republicans: The Florida governor has done little to justify being singled out, but Steve M [09-17] assures us: Ron DeSantis is still first runner-up, based on a recent straw poll. He also argues, "I'd like DeSantis to be the nominee, because he appears to be a much weaker general election candidate than Trump," and has some charts that seem to support his case.

• Olivia Alafriz: [09-16] Texas Senate acquits AG Ken Paxton on all corruption charges: His impeachment moved me to ask the question, "when was the last time an office holder was deemed too corrupt for the Texas lege?" Since I never got an answer, I don't know whether they lowered the bar, or never had one in the first place. But this was the only opportunity since Nixon for Republicans to discipline one of their own, and they've failed spectacularly.

• Jonathan Chait: [09-13] Mitt Romney and the doomed nobility of Republican moderation: "The party's last antiauthoritarian walks away." It's silly to get all bleary-eyed here. He isn't that moderate, noble, and/or antiauthoritarian. Chait quotes Geoffrey Kabaservice, totally ignoring the face that Romney ran hard right from day one of his 2012 (or for that matter his 2008) campaign, going so far as to pick Koch favorite Paul Ryan as his VP. And he's old enough to make his age concerns credible. And he's rich enough he doesn't need the usual post-Senate sinecure on K Street. That he also took the opportunity to chide Biden and Trump is also typical of his considerable self-esteem. But it also saves him the trouble of having to run not on his name but on his record -- much as he did after one term as governor of Massachusetts. Also on Romney:

  • Jamelle Bouie: [09-16] What to keep in mind about Mitt Romney.

• Sarah Jones: [09-13] The enemies of America's children. This could be more partisan, not that Joe Manchin doesn't deserve to be called out, but he's only effective as a right-wing jerk because he's backed up by a solid block of 49-50 Republicans. Relevant here:

  • Paul Krugman: [09-14] America betrays its children again: "child poverty more than doubled between 2021 and 2022." That's almost exclusively because "Republicans and a handful of conservative Democrats blocked the extension of federal programs that had drastically reduced child poverty over the previous two years." "Handful" seems a generous counting of two Senators.

• Nikki McCann Ramirez: [09-14] DeSantis lived large on undisclosed private flights and lavish trips: What is it about Republican politicians that makes them think that just because they cater to every whim of their billionaire masters, they're entitled to live like them?

• Bill Scher: [09-14] A shutdown will be the GOP's fault, and everyone in Washington knows it.

• Matt Stieb: [09-15] New, gentler Lauren Boebert booted from Beetlejuice musical: Another reminder that the most clueless thing a politician can say to a cop is: "do you know who I am?" [PS: Later updated: "New, gentler Lauren Boebert apologizes for Beetlejuice fracas."]

• Tessa Stuart: [09-16] The GOP is coming after your birth control (even if they won't admit it).

• Li Zhou: [09-13] Republicans' unfounded impeachment inquiry of Biden, explained: "House Speaker Kevin McCarthy backed an inquiry despite no evidence of Biden's wrongdoing." More on impeachment:

  • Jonathan Chait: [09-13] Republicans already told us impeachment is revenge for Trump: "They did it to us!"

  • Peter Baker: [09-14] White House strategy on impeachment: Fight politics with politics. Steve M comments: "Are House Republicans really trying to impeach President Biden, or do they just want him under a cloud of suspicion?" The only way impeachment succeeds is if the other party break ranks. For a brief moment, Clinton seemed to consider the possibility of resigning, then decided to rally his supporters, and came out ahead. (In American Crime Story, Hillary was the one who straightened out his spine.) That was never a possibility with Trump, but at least the Democrats had pretty compelling stories to tell -- whether that did them any good is an open question. Now, not only is there no chance that Biden and the Democrats will break, the only story Republicans have is one their sucker base is already convinced of. So "cloud of suspicion" seems to be about all they can hope for.

Biden and/or the Democrats: Big week for Democratic Party back-biting. I find this focus at the top of the ticket silly and distracting. True, Trump decided that "America is Great Again" the moment he took office, but Democrats surely know that inaugurating Biden was just the first step, and that lots of big problems were left over, things that couldn't be solved quickly, especially as Republicans still held significant levers of power and press, and were doing everything possible to cripple Democratic initiatives. So why do Democrats have to run on defending their economy, their immigration, their crime, their climate, etc.? They can point to good things they've done, better things they've wanted to do, and above all to the disastrous right shift in politics since 1980. Is that so hard to understand?

• Liza Featherstone: [09-15] We need bigger feelings about Biden's biggest policies: "Anyone who doesn't want Trump to serve another term must learn to love the Inflation Reduction Act, and despise those who seek its destruction." This sentiment runs against every instinct I have, as I've spent all my life learning to deconstruct policies to find their intrinsic flaws and their secret (or more often not-so-secret) beneficiaries. IRA has a lot of tax credits and business subsidies for doing things that are only marginally better than what would happen without them. Even if I'm willing to acknowledge that's the way you have to operate in Washington to get anything done, I hate being told I need to be happy about it. But as a practical matter, none of these things -- and same is true of the two other big bills and dozens or hundreds of smaller things, many executive orders -- would have been done under any Republican administration, Trump or no Trump. And while what Biden and the Democrats have accomplished is still far short of what's needed, sure, they deserve some credit.

• Eric Levitz: [09-13] The case for Biden to drop Kamala Harris: "The 80-year-old president probably shouldn't have an exceptionally unpopular heir apparent." What's unclear here is why she's so unpopular. The whole identity token thing may have helped her get picked, works against her being taken seriously, but probably makes her even harder than usual to dump. But before becoming Biden's VP pick, she was a pretty skilled politician, so why not put her out in public more, get her doing the "bully pulpit" thing Biden's not much good at anyway, give her a chance?

• Andrew Prokop: [09-12] Why Biden isn't getting a credible primary challenger: "Many Democrats fear a challenge would pave the way to Trump's victory." Responds to a question raised by Jonathan Chait with my default answer, and pointing to four cases where incumbent presidents were challenged (Johnson in 1968, Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980, and Bush in 1992) that resulted in the other party winning. Chait, by the way, replies here: [09-15] Challenging Biden is risky. So is nominating him. Steve M comments here: [09-15] Do we really want to endure the 2028 Democratic primary campaign in 2024? Evidently, there's also a David Ignatius piece, but wrong about pretty much everything, so I haven't bothered.

• Katie Rogers: [09-11] 'It is evening, isn't it?' An 80-year-old President's whirlwind trip: Raises the question, will the New York Times ever again publish an article on Biden that doesn't mention his age? I don't know whether his trip to India and Vietnam was worthwhile, either for diplomatic or political reasons. I am not a fan of his efforts to reinvigorate American leadership after the chaotic nonsense of the Trump years: somehow, I rather doubt that "America's back" is the message the world has been clamoring for.

  I was taken aback by Heather Cox Richardson's tweet on this article (my comment here), but her write up on September 11, 2023 is exceptionally clear and straightforward, much better reporting than the NY Times seems capable of.

Legal matters and other crimes:

• Josh Gerstein/Rebecca Kern: [09-14] Alito pauses order banning Biden officials from contacting tech platforms. The case has to do with whether the government can complain to social media companies about their dissemination of false information about the pandemic. One cherry-picked judge thinks doing so violated the free speech rights of the liars whose posts were challenged, so he issued a sweeping ban against the government. (That's what Alito paused, probably because the case is so shoddy he knows it won't stand.)

  For a laugh, see Jason Willick: [09-15] Worried about Trump? You should welcome these rulings against Biden. This is bullshit for two reasons. One is that rulings like this are deeply partisan, so there's no reason to expect that a restriction on a Democratically-run government would also be applied to a Republican-run one. And secondly, Republicans (especially Trump) would be promoting falsehoods, not trying to correct them. We already saw a perfect example of this in Trump's efforts to gag government officials to keep them from so much as mentioning climate change.

• Eric Levitz: [09-12] Prisons and policing need to be radically reformed, not abolished. This is not a subject I want to dive into, especially as I pretty much agree with all nine of the issues he talks about (6 where abolitionists are right, 3 where they are wrong). One more point I want to emphasize: we use an adversarial system of prosecutors and defenders, each side strongly motivated to win, regardless of the truth. More often than not, what is decisive is the relative power of the adversaries (which is to say, the state beats individuals, but also the rich beat the poor, which gives rich defendants better chances than poor defendants). Some of this is so deeply embedded it's hard to imagine changing it, but we need a system that seeks the truth, and to understand it in its complexity (or simple messiness).

  Levitz properly questions the desire for retribution driving long sentences, but I also have to question the belief that long sentences and harsh punishments (which is part of the reason why jails are so cruel) deter others from committing crimes. Sure, they do, except when they don't (e.g., mass murder as a recipe for suicide by cop), but the higher the stakes, the less motive people have to admit the truth. Also, as in foreign policy, an emphasis on deterrence tends to make one too arrogant to seek mutually-beneficial alternatives. A lot of crimes are driven by conditions that can be avoided or treated.

  Finally, we need to recognize that excessive punishment is (or should be) itself criminal, that it turns us into the people we initially abhor, a point rarely lost on the punished. And one which only makes the punishers more callous. The big problem with capital punishment isn't that it's cruel or that it's so hard to apply it uniformly or that some people don't deserve it. The problem is that such deliberate killing is murder, and as done by the state is even colder and more deliberate than the murders being avenged.

• Ian Millhiser:

  • [09-12] The unconstitutional plan to stop women from traveling out of state for an abortion, explained.

  • [09-14] Planned Parenthood's risky plan to bring abortions back to Wisconsin.

• Andrew Prokop: [09-14] The indictment of Hunter Biden isn't really about gun charges: "Prosecutors are moving aggressively because the plea deal fell apart. But why did it fall apart?" Also:

  • David French: [09-17] The most interesting element of the Hunter Biden indictment: What about the constitutionality of the law Biden allegedly broke?

  • Meryl Kornfield: [09-17] The scorched-earth activist trying to take down Hunter Biden: Meet former Trump staffer Garrett Ziegler.

  By the way, no one's answered what seems to me the obvious question: has anyone else ever been prosecuted for these "crimes" before (standalone, as opposed to being extra charges tacked onto something else)? Also, doesn't the Fifth Amendment provide some degree of protection even if you don't explicitly invoke it?

• Li Zhou: [09-15] The fate of hundreds of thousands of immigrants is caught in an endless court fight: "The high stakes of the latest DACA decision, explained."

• Current Affairs: [09-15] Exposing the many layers of injustice in the US criminal punishment system: Interview with Stephen B Bright and James Kwak, authors of The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts. Particularly check out the section on privatized probation companies, which have come about due to the belief that "the private sector can do things better than the government," and that "there is a lot of legal corruption at all levels of government."

Climate and environment:

• Scott Dance: [09-15] Odds that 2023 will be Earth's hottest year have doubled, NOAA reports.

• Nadeen Ebrahim/Laura Paddison: [09-15] Aging dams and missed warnings: A lethal mix of factors caused Africa's deadliest flood disaster: The weather is known as Storm Daniel, "the deadliest and costliest Mediterranean tropical-like cyclone ever recorded, which affected Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey as well as Libya, where heavy rains (more than 16 inches in Al-Bayda) caused two dams to fail, resulting in flooding that killed over 11,000 people in Derna. Also on Libya:

  • Jonathan Guyer: [09-13] The political failures behind Libyr'a deadly flooding: "The death toll is a tragedy decades in the making."

  • Sansom Milton/Abdulrauf Elgeroshi: [09-13] Libya floods highlight need for national unity. It's even harder to prepare for disasters when you don't have a functional government, which Libya hasn't had since Gaddafi fought back against the Arab Spring revolt, and NATO and others intervened, bombing first and rebuilding never.

• Rebecca Leber: [09-13] Climate disasters will happen everywhere, anytime. I must say, I wasn't expecting fires in Maui and Louisiana, or storm flooding in Death Valley and Libya, just to pick several of the more outlandish examples.

• Kylie Mohr: [09-12] Wildfires are coming . . . for New Jersey?

• Paul Street: [09-15] Too bourgeois: Jeff Goodell's The Heat Will Kill You First: Book review, compliments Goodell's research and storytelling skills, then unloads on him for not putting the blame squarely on capitalism, and concluding with a list of books that make his very point.

• A Camden Walker/Justine McDaniel/Matthew Cappucci: 09-16] Lee makes landfall in Nova Scotia with sustained winds of 70 mph. Down from Category 5, but still an extremely rare hurricane to hit Canada, after doing damage to the coasts from Rhode Island to Maine. The trajectory calls for it to pass over the Gulf of St. Lawrence and northern Newfoundland.

The UAW strike:

• Emily Stewart/Ellen Ioanes: [09-15] The UAW's big asks, unusual strike strategy, and what this all means for you.

• Kate Aronoff: [09-14] JD Vance doesn't care about autoworkers: "Neither the American auto industry's endless quest for profits nor the global economic forces shaping supply chains fit neatly into the box of standard GOP talking points."

• Matthew Cunningham-Cook/Lucy Dean Stockton: [09-12] Automakers hand billions to shareholders while stiffing workers: "The Big Three car companies have authorized $5 billion in stock buybacks over the past year."

• Shawn Fain: [09-16] UAW President Shawn Fain: "It is long past time to stand up for the working class".

• Sarah Jones: [09-15] The UAW takes on the billionaire class.

• Timothy Noah: [09-15] Can the UAW transform America again?

• Alex N Press: [09-14] The UAW strike matters for the entire US working class.

Ukraine War: I find it curious that despite all the "notable progress" the New York Times has claimed for Ukraine's counteroffensive (most recently, retaking the village of Andriivka), they haven't updated their maps page since June 9. Zelensky is coming to America next next week, to speak at the UN and to meet Biden in Washington.

• Blaise Malley: [09-15] Diplomacy Watch: West push for Ukraine War consensus flagging: "According to Wall Street Journal report, Kyiv's efforts are making only 'incremental progress.'"

• James Carden: [09-15] Anthony Blinken and the diplomacy deficit: "His remarks to students this week shows how much American exceptionalism and Great Power competition have taken over the craft." Or killed it.

• Mark Episkopos: [09-10] US closer to crossing another red line for Ukraine: ATACM missiles: "Report indicates that the long-range weapons may be in the next security package for Zelensky." They have a range of 190 miles (300 km).

• Anatol Lieven: [09-08] White House howling over Putin-Kim Jong Un hug rings hollow: Lieven asks: "what did Biden expect after pressuring South Korea to transfer weapons to Ukraine?" But more directly, US sanctions are forcing North Korea and Russia into each others' arms. It should be fairly trivial to split them apart, but Washington can't bear to end a grudge, and keeping North Korea as a threat seems to help keep Japan and South Korea aligned with the US. More:

  • Ellen Ioanes: [09-12] What Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un's meeting might bring.

  • Josh Rogin: [09-15] The Kim-Putin summit highlights Biden's failed North Korea policy: On one level, the policy is simply do nothing. After all, how is it a threat to the US for North Korea to just go on developing missiles and rattling them a bit. On the other hand, stoking the fears of South Korea and Japan just makes them more dependent on the US for security, which means more arms sales. Same thing with China and Taiwan. And it's not like the Republicans are going to criticize Biden for doing nothing. (Same thing with Iran: every hint at a diplomatic gesture gets smacked down hard, not just by Republicans but the full Israel lobby.)

  • Defense Post: [09-14] US approves $5B sale of 'top-of-the-line' F-35 jets to S. Korea.

• Branko Marcetic: [09-13] Strident hawks who have Russians in their closet: "These former world leaders and others are publicly maximalist, but now have financial connections to Kremlin-linked oligarchs, and even Putin."

Israel: This is 30 years after the Oslo Accords, which promised to implement a separate Palestinian state in (most of) the Occupied Territories, after an interval of "confidence building" which Israel repeatedly sabotaged, especially by continuing to cater to the settler movement. The agreements put the Intifada behind, while seeding the ground for the more violent second Intifada in 2000, brutally suppressed by a Sharon government which greatly expanded settlement activity. The PLO was partly legitimized by Oslo, then reduced to acting as Israeli agents, and finally discredited, but was kept in nominal power after being voted out by Hamas, ending democracy in Palestine. Middle East Eye has a whole series of articles on this anniversary, including Joseph Massad: From Oslo to the end of Israeli settler-colonialism.

• Zack Beauchamp: [09-14] How Israel's court became so controversial.

• Amira Hass: [09-12] For Israel, the Oslo Accords were a resounding success: "The creation of Palestinian enclaves is an internal Israeli compromise: making the Palestinians disappear without expelling them. In the meantime, Israel reaps great profits, in part by turning the West Bank and Gaza into a human laboratory." Article is paywalled, but you can guess the rest. Oddly enough, they show you a bunch of comments, many by right-wingers repeating the old party line.

• James North: [08-17] 'NY Times' can't ignore growing threat to (Jewish) women's rights in Israel.

• Richard Silverstein: [09-12] Bibi to meet Musk, Biden: "Amidst controversy over Musk's attacks on the ADL Netanyahu, who has praised Musk lavishly, will give him kosher seal of approval."

Iran: One step forward (prisoner swap), one step back (more sanctions as the US tries to claim Iranian protests against police brutality and repression of women -- issues the US is not exactly a paragon of virtue on).

• James North: [08-09] Biden is risking war with Iran -- and the media is ignoring the danger.

• Ellen Ioanes: [09-11] The US-Iran prisoner swap, briefly explained. Needless to say, the war party is livid over any concession to decency. The funds released seem like a lot, but they were stolen.

• Alex Shams: [09-16] 'We have to know when to hope and when to be hopeless': "How six Iranians feel about the Woman Life Freedom movement, one year later."

• Kim Hjelmgaard: [09-15] Britain, US impose new sanctions on Iran officials to mark year since Mahsa Amini death: How can anyone think this is a good idea? The prisoner swap deal was deliberately extremely tiny, but it was some kind of step toward reminding each other that negotiation is possible. The US has literally no business judging the death of a prisoner in Iran, any more than Iran would have in punishing the US for the death of George Floyd (or fill in the blank with hundreds of other names). Moreover, even if we must express our shock and regret, just say so. Sanctions are not the answer. They are a big part of the problem in the first place.

Around the world:

• Joshua Frank: [09-12] The South China Sea's resource wars.

• Jonathan Guyer: [09-15] Washington and Wall Street are split over China. What now?

• Ellen Ioanes: [09-16] What's up with China's disappearing senior military officers? "Li Shangfu is the latest officer to fall victim to Xi Jinping's anti-corruption drive." He was formerly head of Equipment Development Procurement. Imagine someone in a post like that being accused of corruption. Then imagine how many generals would get the axe or worse if the US ever got serious about corruption. It wasn't long ago when Ukraine decided to crack down on military corruption and wound up dismissing "all the directors of regional military recruitment centers."

Other stories:

Ana Marie Cox: [09-14] We are not just polarized. We are traumatized.

Constance Grady: [09-13] The big Elon Musk biography asks all the wrong questions: "In Walter Isaacson's buzzy new biography, Elon Musk emerges as a callous, chaos-loving man without empathy." Proof positive that no one should be as rich and powerful as he is, and not just because he is who he is.

• Shawn McCreesh: [09-11] The journalist and the billionaire: "What did an old Establishment guy like Walter Isaacson learn writing Elon Musk's biography?"

Sean Illing: [09-12] Democracy is the antidote to capitalism: Interview with Astra Taylor, who has a new book: The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart.

Noel King: [09-15] 5 new books (and one very old one) to read in order to understand capitalism: A podcast discussion. The old one is The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, which is somewhat more nuanced and sophisticated than is commonly remembered. (For one thing, the "invisible hand" is basically a joke.) The new ones:

• Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (Nov. 2023)
• David Gelles: The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America -- and How to Undo His Legacy (2022)
• Martin Wolf: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (2023)
• Jason Hickel: Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2020)

I'm not sure what I'd recommend instead, but here are a couple ideas: George P Brockway's The End of Economic Man: Principles of Any Future Economics is my bible on economics, so I'd gladly swap it for Smith. Zachary D Carter's The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes is all you need on Friedman, plus a lot more. There are lots of books on recent economic plunder. I'm not sure which one(s) to recommend, but Jeff Madrick's Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970s to the Present is good on the bankers, and the Jacob Hacker/Paul Pierson books, from The Great Risk Shift to Let Them Eat Tweets, are good on the politics (also Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew). Hope Jahren's The Story of More is an elegant if somewhat less political alternative to Hickel.

Dylan Matthews: [09-14] Lead poisoning could be killing more people than HIV, malaria, and car accidents combined.

Kim Messick: [09-09] The American crack-up: Why liberalism drives some people crazy.

Andrew O'Hehir: [09-14] Naomi Klein on her "Doppelganger" -- the "other Naomi" -- and navigating the far-right mirror universe. Klein's new book is Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, which starts by noting the tendency people have of confusing her with Naomi Wolf, then goes beyond that to show how much propaganda from the right picks up memes from the left and twists them for the opposite effect. Also:

• Jacob Bacharach: [09-06] Is Naomi Klein's Doppelganger weird enough? Criticism that promises more than it delivers, perhaps tipped off by the by far most unflattering pics of the Naomis I've seen.

• Laura Wagner: [09-11] In Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, Naomi Wolf is more than a gimmick.

• Adrienne Westenfeld: [09-12] Naomi Klein's double trouble: An interview with the author.

• Democracy Now: [09-14] Naomi Klein on her new book Doppelganger & how conspiracy culture benefits ruling elite: I watched this, which is a good but not great interview, but the reason I looked it up was a turn of phrase that struck me as peculiar. Klein notes that:

  When I would confess to people I knew that I was working on this book, sometimes I would get this strange reaction like, "Why would you give her attention?" There was this sense that because she was no longer visible in the pages of The New York Times or on MSNBC or wherever, and because she had been deplatformed on social media -- or on the social media that we're on -- that she just didn't exist. And there was this assumption that "we," whoever we are, are in control of the attention, and so if this bigot gets turned off then there's no more attention.

  Of course, the New York Times reference is the one that sticks in my craw, because I've never viewed them as "we," or even bothered to read the thing on my own dime (or whatever it costs these days, which is surely lots more). Klein's point is that there is a lucrative right-wing media universe that welcomes and supports people who lose their perch among the moderate elites. My complaint is that the Times excludes more viewpoints from the left than it does from the right, and those from the left are essential to understanding our world (whereas those from the right are mostly promoting misunderstanding).

Jeffrey St Clair: [09-15] Roaming Charges: Just write a check. First fourth of the column is devoted to outrageous police behavior: example after example, impossible to summarize more briefly. Then he moves on to the War on Terror.

Scott Wilson: [09-15] Outflanked by liberals, Oregon conservatives aim to become part of Idaho. There are several such secessionist movements, including rural parts of Washington and California, where the population is so sparse their reactionary leanings have little effect at the state level. I only mention this because Greg Magarian did, adding: "Huh -- living in a state where your political opponents get to impose their values on you. I wonder what the &@%$# that's like." Magarian lives in St. Louis, so he very well knows what that's like. One could imagine St. Louisans opting to join Illinois. If that happened, and especially if Kansas City also defected to Kansas (which is closer to tipping Democratic than Missouri would be without its two big cities, and would also save Kansas from trying to poach their teams), the rest of Missouri might as well be part of Arkansas. In states where Republicans hold power, they're constantly passing state laws to disempower local governments that may elect Democrats. Florida and Texas have gotten the most press on that front lately, but they've done that all over the map, a bunch of times even here in Kansas. I'm not aware of Democrats behaving like that.

I finished reading EJ Hobsbawm's brilliant and encyclopedic The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. Only disappointment was that I expected more details on the 1848 revolutions, but Hobsbawm just tiptoes up to the brink, satisfied as he is with the "two revolutions" of his period (French and Industrial, or British). I still have Christopher Clark's Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849 on the proverbial bedstand, but I also have several more books I'd like to get to. I need to make a decision tonight.

Books post is still in progress, with 23 (of a typical 40) books in the draft main section, and 62 partials and 229 noted books. Looking back at the April 28, 2023 Book Roundup, I see that I was thinking of cutting the chunk size down, perhaps to 20, to get shorter and more posts, but also because the length of 40 has grown significantly with supplemental lists. I need to think about that. I certainly have much more research I can (and should) do. The current draft file runs 15,531 words, of which about 1/3 is in the finished section.

Magnet is celebrating their 30th anniversary by publishing top 30 album (of 1993-2022) lists by their writers. I often take such lists as suggestions of things to check out, but I didn't expect Dan Weiss to name anything I hadn't heard, and that's true -- didn't even have to check. I was less certain of Thomas Reimel, where I hadn't heard two: The Decemberists: Picaresque; Death Cab for Cutie: Transatlanticism; the Johnny Cash record I caught up to just last week. Other I had to look up: Guided by Voices: Alien Lanes [B]; Built to Spill: Keep It Like a Secret [A-]; Interpol: Turn on the Bright Lights [C+]

I took a couple minutes to put my a list of my own together. Started by grepping the 1000 records file for the appropriate years, which gave me a list of 498. Also decided to exclude jazz (normally about half of my EOY lists), so as to have something comparable. Also no compilations or EPs, and only one pick per artist, per their rules.

1. Lily Allen: It's Not Me, It's You (2009, Capitol)
2. Pet Shop Boys: Very (1993, Capitol)
3. Leonard Cohen: Live in London (2009, Columbia)
4. Manu Chao: Clandestino (1998, Ark 21)
5. Lyrics Born: Later That Day . . . (2003, Quannum Projects)
6. Cornershop: Handcream for a Generation (2002, Beggars Banquet)
7. Iris Dement: My Life (1994, Warner Bros.)
8. Buck 65: Talkin' Honky Blues (2003, Warner Music Canada)
9. Dave Alvin: King of California (1994, Hightone)
10. Mavis Staples: We'll Never Turn Back (2007, Anti-)
11. K'Naan: The Dusty Foot Philosopher (2008, IM Culture)
12. Pavement: Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994, Matador)
13. Jimmie Dale Gilmore: Spinning Around the Sun (1993, Elektra)
14. DJ Shadow: The Private Press (2002, MCA)
15. Todd Snider: The Devil You Know (2006, New Door)
16. Liz Phair: Exile in Guyville (1993, Matador)
17. The Coup: Party Music (2001, 75 Ark)
18. Amy Rigby: Diary of a Mod Housewife (1996, Koch)
19. Beck: Odelay (1996, DGC)
20. The Roots: Rising Down (2008, Def Jam)
21. L7: Hungry for Stink (1994, Slash/Reprise)
22. Los Lobos: Colossal Head (1996, Warner Bros.)
23. NERD: In Search of . . . (2002, Virgin)
24. Hayes Carll: Trouble in Mind (2008, Lost Highway)
25. John Prine: Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings (1995, Oh Boy)
26. Maria Muldaur and Her Garden of Joy: Good Time Music for Hard Times (2009, Stony Plain)
27. The Ex: 27 Passports (2018, Ex)
28. Randy Newman: Harps and Angels (2008, Nonesuch)
29. Bruno Mars: Doo-Wops and Hooligans (2010, Elektra)
30. Chris Knight: Little Victories (2012, Drifter's Church)

Easy to do a jazz list at the same time, so why not?

1. Ornette Coleman: Sound Grammar (2006, Sound Grammar)
2. David Murray: Long Goodbye: A Tribute to Don Pullen (1997, DIW)
3. Billy Bang: Vietnam: The Aftermath (2001, Justin Time)
4. Mark Lomax II & the Urban Art Ensemble: 400 Years Suite (2020, CFG Multimedia)
5. Sonny Rollins: This Is What I Do (2000, Milestone)
6. William Parker: Sound Unity (2005, AUM Fidelity)
7. James Carter: The Real Quietstorm (1995, Atlantic)
8. Don Pullen: Ode to Life (1993, Blue Note)
9. Mostly Other People Do the Killing: Shamokin!!! (2007, Hot Cup)
10. Billy Jenkins: True Love Collection (1998, Babel)
11. Alex Von Schlippenbach/Axel Dörner/Rudi Mahall/Jan Roder/Uli Jennessen: Monk's Casino: The Complete Works of Thelonious Monk (2005, Intakt)
12. Sonic Liberation Front: Ashé a Go-Go (2004, High Two)
13. Doc Cheatham and Nicholas Payton (1996, Verve)
14. Jon Faddis: Teranga (2006, Koch)
15. Aly Keïta/Jan Galega Brönnimann/Lucas Niggli: Kalo-Yele (2016, Intakt)
16. Heroes Are Gang Leaders: The Amiri Baraka Sessions (2019, Flat Langston's Arkeyes)
17. Roswell Rudd: Trombone for Lovers (2013, Sunnyside)
18. Vandermark Five: Target or Flag (1998, Atavistic)
19. David Sanchez: Obsesion (1998, Columbia)
20. Adam Lane: New Magical Kingdom (2006, Clean Feed)
21. Tyshawn Sorey Trio + 1 With Greg Osby: The Off-Off Broadway Guide to Synergism (2022, Pi)
22. Steve Lehman: Mise en Abîme (2014, Pi)
23. Rich Halley/Dan Raphael/Carson Halley: Children of the Blue Supermarket (2009, Pine Eagle)
24. Paraphrase [Tim Berne/Drew Gress/Tom Rainey]: Pre-Emptive Denial (2005, Screwgun)
25. Anthony Braxton: 20 Standards (Quartet) 2003 (2005, Leo)
26. Sheila Jordan/Cameron Brown: Celebration (2005, High Note)
27. Nils Petter Molvaer: Solid Ether (2000, ECM)
28. East Axis [Matthew Shipp/Allen Lowe/Gerald Cleaver/Kevin Ray]: Cool With That (2021, ESP-Disk)
29. Houston Person/Ron Carter: Chemistry (2016, HighNote)
30. Jewels and Binoculars: Ships With Tattooed Sails (2007, Upshot)

Daily Log

Christgau Consumer Guide came out, with full A for Olivia Rodrigo, Ashley McBryde, and Speedy Ortiz, and a *** for Noname. Alfred Soto commented on the latter:

I'm surprised he didn't mention Jay Electronica's anti-Semitic verse. Well -- we agree on Speedy Ortiz, Ashley McBryde (I think), and Olivia Rodrigo.

I responded:

In retrospect, I think I wrote too much about it, probably because it was flagged so prominently here. I don't doubt that Farrakhan is an anti-semite, and I don't have any interest in promoting him, but reacting that way to the mere mention of his name isn't necessary and could just as easily be construed as racist (which it may or may not be). Pouncing on one red flag line among 9-10 songs makes it look like you're putting your own agenda above anything else the artist has to say (and in this case it's not even the artist saying it). As for the big three, agree to disagree: I love the Rodrigo, detest the McBryde, and couldn't be more indifferent to Speedy Ortiz. Probably my problem: I don't think I've been so turned off by MOR since the early 1990s.

I should have said "dislike" instead of "detest," which at the moment I substituted for "hate." "MOR" stands for "middle of the road," which is an older term for lame FM rock, but these days suffices for "alt/indie," roughly anything between folk/pop and metal.

Daily Log

I tweeted (somehow, "X-ed" doesn't strike me as a word):

In my local paper today: George F Will: "Economically ailing China suffers from a case of Leninism." I don't think I've ever seen an article where an author knows less about his subject, or draws more ridiculous conclusions from his ignorance.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, September archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 36 albums, 5 A-list,

Music: Current count 40847 [40811] rated (+36), 27 [34] unrated (-7).

I rushed through another Speaking of Which Sunday (5873 words, 91 links). As I noted there, I started working on a books post, so got a late start, but still managed to write quite a bit. One item of possible interest here is that I collected several links on the Olivia Rodrigo album, reviewed below. It's currently rated 86/17 at AOTY, which puts it as 25 on the year, so behind Boygenius, Caroline Polachek, Foo Fighters, and Young Fathers among albums with 17+ reviews.

I added a link to Molly Jong-Fast: [09-05] Can Joe Biden ride "boring" to reelection?. I had included several links about Biden's weak polling numbers, even though I regard such stories are generally worthless. But they reflect a severe misunderstanding of politics (cliché: "the art of the possible") and government (which should be boring to all but the most dedicated wonks). While it's always easy to blame the American people for their ignorance, shouldn't we start with the media, who are actually paid to report on things they show little evidence of (or interest in) understanding? Biden's fate in 2024 is going to depend on people getting better informed (and smarter) than they evidently are now.

I've also added a postscript on Biden's diplomatic trip: more specifically on how it's misreported and misunderstood. As much as I've been pleasantly surprised by Biden's domestic policy accomplishments, I've been alarmed by his foreign policy (his "reworking of global relationships"), especially how completely most of the Democratic Party has fallen into line behind Ukraine as America's war party (a reputation they earned in WWII, which then tricked them into taking the lead in the Cold War).

You might also want to take a look at this picture of Trump and his fans.

My listening scheme is mostly an extension of last week's checklists, picking up stragglers, and moving on. I did get to the end of DownBeat's jazz albums ballot, with only a John Zorn album unheard. Reissues/historical were harder to find, but I picked up a few of those, too. But also, new releases get an uptick in September.

Bassist Richard Davis died last week, so I took a look there, which led me to Elvin Jones, and then to Bennie Wallace.

Sometime last week, I commented on a Chris Monsen Facebook post, regarding James Brandon Lewis's For Mahalia, With Love (reviewed here, a couple weeks back). I figured the comment was lost, but it popped up again, so let's preserve it here:

By the way, "These Are Soulful Days," the bonus disc in the 2CD set but only a download code with the 2LP, is one of the best sax-with-strings things ever. On the other hand, the gospel pieces, fine as they are, sent me searching back for David Murray's "Spirituals" and "Deep River."

New records reviewed this week:

• Jon Batiste: World Music Radio (2023, Verve): [sp]: B+(**)
Billy Childs: The Winds of Change (2023, Mack Avenue): [sp]: B+(**)
• Theo Croker: By the Way (2023, Masterworks, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
• Open Mike Eagle: Another Triumph of Ghetto Engineering (2023, Auto Reverse): [sp]: B+(***)
• Darrell Grant's MJ New: Our Mr. Jackson (2018 [2023], Lair Hill): [cd]: B+(**) [10-06]
• José James: On & On (2023, Rainbow Blonde): [sp]: B+(*)
• Bobby Kapp: Synergy: Bobby Kapp Plays the Music of Richard Sussman (2023, Tweed Boulevard): [cd]: B+(**)
• Pascal Le Boeuf: Ritual Being (2016-19 [2023], SoundSpore): [cd]: B+(***)
• Vince Mendoza/Metropole Orkest: Olympians (2023, Modern): [sp]: B-
• Joni Mitchell: Joni Mitchell at Newport (2022 [2023], Rhino): [r]: B
• Todd Mosby: Land of Enchantment (2022 [2023], MMG): [cd]: B
• Jean-Michel Pilc: Symphony (2021 [2023], Justin Time): [sp]: B+(*)
• Darden Purcell: Love's Got Me in a Lazy Mood (2023, Origin): [cd]: B+(**) [09-15]
• Olivia Rodrigo: Guts (2023, Geffen): [sp]: A
• Romy: Mid Air (2023, Young): [sp]: A-
• SLUGish Ensemble: In Solitude (2023, Slow & Steady): [cd]: B+(**) [09-15]
• Smoke DZA & Flying Lotus: Flying Objects (2023, The Smoker's Club, EP): [sp]: B+(*)
• Speaker Music: Techxodus (2023, Planet Mu): [sp]: B+(**)
• Melissa Stylianou: Dream Dancing (2018 [2022], Anzic): [sp]: B+(**)
• Ulaan Passerine: Sun Spar (2021 [2022], Worstward): [sp]: B
• Sachal Vasandani & Romain Collin: Still Life (2022, Edition): [sp]: B-
• Claudia Villela: Cartas Ao Vento (2023, Taina Music): [cd]: B+(***)
• Hein Westgaard Trio: First as Farce (2022 [2023], Nice Things): [cd]: A-
• Ben Wolfe: Unjust (2021 [2023], Resident Arts): [sp]: B+(***)
• Lizz Wright: Holding Space: Live in Berlin (2022, Blues & Greens): [sp]: B+(**)
• Bobby Zankel/Wonderful Sound 8: A Change of Destiny (2022 [2023], Mahakala Music): [cd]: B+(***) [09-22]

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Brian Blade Fellowship: Live From the Archives: Bootleg June 15, 2000 (2000 [2022], Stoner Hill): [r]: B
• Charlie Parker: The Long Lost Bird Live Afro-Cubop Recordings (1945-54 [2023], RockBeat): [r]: B+(***)

Old music:

• Johnny Cash: American V: A Hundred Highways (2003 [2006], American): [r]: B+(***)
• Richard Davis: One for Frederick (1989 [1990], Hep): [sp]: B+(***)
• The Fugs: The Fugs' Second Album (1966 [1994], Fantasy): [sp]: B+(**)
• Elvin Jones and Richard Davis: Heavy Sounds (1968, Impulse!): [sp]: A-
• Elvin Jones: Poly-Currents (1969 [1970], Blue Note): [sp]: B+(***)
• Richard Thompson: (Guitar, Vocal): A Collection of Unreleased and Rare Material 1967-1976 (1967-76 [1976], Island): [sp]: B
• Richard Thompson: Mirror Blue (1994, Capitol): [sp]: B+(**)
• Richard Thompson: Mock Tudor (1999, Capitol): [sp]: B+(**)
• Bennie Wallace: Big Jim's Tango (1982 [1983], Enja): [sp]: A-

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Sara Serpa & André Matos: Night Birds (Robalo Music) [09-29]
• Hein Westgaard Trio: First as Farce (Nice Things) [09-01]

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

I started to work on a books post this week, which caused some confusion when I ran across reviews of books I had recently written something about. I'm guessing I have about half of my usual batch, so a post is possible later this week, but not guaranteed. I'm still reading Eric Hobsbawm's brilliant The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848, which is absolutely jam-packed with insights -- probably why I drone on at such length below on liberalism and its discontents. I got deep enough into it to order three books:

• Franklin Foer: The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future (2023, Penguin Press)
• Cory Doctorow: The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (2023, Verso)
• Astra Taylor: The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart (paperback, 2023, House of Anansi Press)

I didn't bother with any reviews of Foer this week (there are several), although I mentioned the book last week. I figured I'd wait until I at least get a chance to poke around a bit. I have a lot of questions about how Biden's White House actually works. I'm not big on these insider books, but usually the outside view suffices -- especially on someone as transparent as Trump. Two I read on Obama that were useful were:

• Ron Suskind: Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President (2011, Harper).
• Reed Hundt: A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining Decisions (2019, Rosetta Books).

Suskind was a reporter who had written an important book on the GW Bush administration (The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11). Hundt was a participant, but not an important nor a particularly successful one, so he took his time before weighing in.

Top story threads:

Trump:

• Holly Bailey: [09-08] Georgia special grand jury recommended charging Lindsey Graham in Trump case. We now know that the Grand Jury actually recommended prosecution of 38 people, but the prosecutor streamlined the case to just 19 defendants. It's easy to imagine the case against Graham, who was especially aggressive in trying to bully Georgia officials into throwing the election to Trump. But it's also easy to see how prosecuting Graham, and for that matter Georgia Senators (at the time) Loeffler and Perdue, could distract from focusing on the ringleader.

• Amy Gardner: [09-08] Judge denies Mark Meadows's effort to move Georgia case to federal court: This was the first, and probably the most credible, such appeal, so it doesn't look good for the other defendants.

• Alex Guillén: [09-07] Trump's border wall caused 'significant' cultural, environmental damage, watchdog finds. Rep. Raúl Grijalva put it more bluntly: "This racist political stunt has been an ineffective waste of billions of American taxpayers' dollars."

• Nicole Narea: [09-06] January 6 rioters are facing hundreds of years in prison combined. What does it mean for Trump? Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy, the longest individual sentence yet. Jeffrey St Clair notes (link below) that Tarrio was initially offered a plea deal of 9-11 years, in "a textbook case of how prosecutors use plea deals to coerce guilty pleas and punish those who insist on their constitutional right to a trial." He lists four more Proud Boys who received sentences approximately double of what they were offered to plea out.

• Tori Otten: [09-07] Guilty! Trumpiest Peter Navarro convicted of contempt of Congress.

• Charles P Pierce: [09-08] Get a load of the letter Fulton County DA Fani Willis sent Jim Jordan: "I didn't think there were this many ways to tell somebody to fck off."

• Jack Shafer: [09-08] Donald Trump destroyed horse race journalism: "At least for now." I guess it's hard to enjoy a good horse race when something more than your own bet depends on it. Like whether there'll ever be another race. Especially when you have to spend so much time scanning the grounds for snipers and ambulances, which are the only things about this race you haven't seen before.

• Li Zhou: [09-07] Trump faces another big legal loss in the E. Jean Carroll case.

• No More Mister Nice Blog: [09-08] So why wasn't Trump impeached for emoluments?:

  It's a shame, because much of America struggled to understand the point of the first impeachment, whereas an emoluments impeachment would have been extremely easy for ordinary citizens to grasp: If you use your status as president to cash in, that's illegal. Simple. Relatable. It's like stealing from the cash register. And he was allowed to get away with it.

  The question is probably rhetorical, but the obvious answer is that there was a faction of Democrats who thought that national security was the only unassailable moral high ground that exists, therefore everyone would get behind it. In the end, it persuaded no one who wasn't going to vote to impeach Trump for any of dozens of things anyway. Ironically, the key witnesses against Trump at the time have become the Washington's biggest Ukraine hawks, with the same "security Democrats" cheering them the loudest. And still Republicans are trying to get Hunter Biden prosecuted, so you didn't even win the battle, much less the war.

DeSantis, and other Republicans:

• Fabiola Cineas: [09-08] Republicans in Alabama still want to dilute the Black vote: "Here's why the state's congressional maps were just struck down -- again." Interview with Michael Li.

• Prachi Gupta: [09-05] Vivek Ramaswamy and the lie of the "model minority": "The Asian American candidate is peddling a dangerous message."

• Ben Jacobs: [09-07] RFK Jr.'s Republican-friendly Democratic presidential campaign, explained. One revealing stat here is that his approval rate is 28% among Democrats, 55% among Republicans.

Sarah Jones: [09-08] 'Pro-Life' or 'Pro-Baby,' Republicans can't outrun abortion.

• Robert Kuttner: [09-06] US Steel and the Fake Populism of JD Vance: I don't doubt that Kuttner is right, but when I read Vance's op-ed, America cannot afford to auction off its industrial base, I was surprised how persuasive he was. Not that I buy the "national defense" crap, but there is something to be said for local rather than foreign owners. Of course, my preferred local owners would be the employees themselves, whose stake would indeed be local.

• Nicole Narea: [09-05] The impeachment trial of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, explained: Or how evil do you have to be to get your fellow Republicans to turn against you?

• Will Norris: [09-06] DeSantis loves stepping on Florida municipalities, thwarting the popular will.

• Michael Tomasky: [09-08] Jim Jordan and Wisconsin Republicans know the law -- they just don't care: "Conservatism is no longer defined by resistance to liberal progress -- it's all about destroying the pillars of our democracy."

• Maegan Vazquez/Amy B Wang: [09-10] GOP presidential hopefuls take renewed aim at efforts to combat covid. It's probably unfair to say that they want you to die, but it's not inaccurate to say they don't care. And they really hate the idea that government might respond to a pandemic by trying to keep you well.

Biden and/or the Democrats:

• Peter Baker/Katie Rogers: [09-10] Biden forges deeper ties with Vietnam as China's ambition mounts: Further proof that the only thing that can get American foreign policy past a grudge is to spite another supposed foe.

• Jonathan Chait: [09-09] Biden or Bust: Why isn't a mainstream Democrat challenging the president? The simple answer is that no one wants to risk losing, not so much to Biden as to a Republican who should be unelectable but still scares pretty much everyone shitless. The greater left of the party isn't that unhappy with Biden, at least as long as they don't have to think much about foreign policy (which, frankly, is pretty awful, but so were Obama and Clinton). The neolibs aren't that unhappy either, and they're the ones most likely to sandbag anyone to Biden's left. Second answer is money. Nobody's got any (unless Bloomberg wants to run again, and that would really be stupid). But if Biden did drop out, ten names would pop up within a month.

• Lisa Friedman: [09-06] Biden administration to bar drilling on millions of acres in Alaska: This reverses leases granted in the late days of the Trump administration, but only after [04-23] Many young voters bitter over Biden's support of Willow oil drilling, also on Alaska's north slope.

• Molly Jong-Fast: [09-05] Can Joe Biden ride "boring" to reelection? "His administration is getting a lot done for the American people, yet its accomplishments don't get the same media attention as Trumpian chaos."

• Andrew Prokop: [09-08] Should we trust the polls showing Trump and Biden nearly tied? You have much more serious things to worry about than polls, but what I take from this is that Democrats haven't really figured out how to talk about their political differences, and the mainstream media isn't very adept at talking about politics at all. There are obvious, and in some ways intractable, reasons for this. The idea of merely reporting the news gives equal credence to both sides regardless of truth, value, or intent. Republicans are masters at blaming everything bad on Democrats, while crediting them nothing. Democrats are reluctant to reciprocate, especially as we've been conditioned to dismiss their infrequent counterattacks as shrill and snotty. The double standards are maddening, but somehow we have to figure out ways to get past that. The differences between Trump and Biden, or between any generic Republican and Democrat you might fancy, are huge and important. At some level you have to believe that it's possible to explain that clearly. But until then, you get stupid poll results.

  • Matt Stieb: [09-07] Americans really don't like Joe Biden right now: This poll report is even grimmer. Still, the bottom line is that the 49% who view Biden very unfavorably is still less than Trump's 52%.

  • Timothy Noah: [09-07] How on Earth can voters think Trump accomplished more than Biden? "I have a few hypotheses, including an insurance-premium crisis brought on by climate change."

Legal matters and other crimes:

• Ethan Corey: [2022-09-20] DOJ admits it has no idea how many people die in law enforcement custody: "Thousands of deaths in jails, prisons, and police custody have gone uncounted in recent years."

• Ian Millhiser:

  • [09-07] The lawsuits seeking to keep drag queens legal, explained.

  • [09-07] The Republican Party's plan to rule the state of Wisconsin forever, explained. There's no trick Republicans won't stoop to when clinging onto ill-gotten power. Also on this:

    • Denis Aftergut/Austin Sarat: [09-08] Wisconsin GOP's impeachment plan: Another MAGA coup against democracy: Another case of Republicans spiting the voters for electing the wrong candidate.

• Tori Otten: [09-08] Alito: Recusing from cases involving friends would "disrupt" Supreme Court's work. It might also negatively affect the flow of favors.

• Jozsef Papp/Shaddi Abusaid: [09-05] More than 60 Atlanta training center activists named in RICO indictment: Charges were brought to the state attorney general, but were handed down by the same grand jury that indicted Trump et al. on RICO charges. The state took over the case after the DeKalb County district attorney decided not to prosecute it. It seems probable to me that the state stepped in not because the case is solid but simply to cast doubt over the other Georgia RICO case in the news, and with that doubt to imagine some sort of payback. If you want to talk about "politicizing justice," this is as good an example as you're going to find. And unlike the Trump case, this sort of thing isn't unprecedented.

  • Sarah Jones: [09-07] The Cop City indictment prosecutes dissent.

  • Nathan J Robinson: [09-07] The "Cop City" indictment is preposterous and terrifying.

• Heidi Przybyla: [09-10] What Ginni Thomas and Leonard Leo wrought: How a justice's wife and a key activist started a movement: Cashing in on the trove of "dark money" that followed the Court's Citizens United ruling.

• Erika Sasson: [09-06] The criminal justice system is broken. Restorative justice can help fill the gap. I'm not so sure about this, but they do ask one good question: "What do we need to move forward in a good way?"

• Li Zhou: [09-08] Police fatally shot a pregnant Black woman in Ohio. The calls for accountability are growing.

Climate and environment:

• Kate Aronoff: [09-08] World's wealthiest countries gather to admit continued failure to address climate change: The G20.

• Umair Irfan: [09-09] The Southern Hemisphere, where it's winter, has been really hot too.

• Rebecca Leber: [09-08] The oil industry's cynical gamble on Arctic drilling: "Companies like ConocoPhillips are banking on a future filled with oil."

• Rebecca Leber/Umair Irfan: [09-09] The world's brutal climate change report card, explained: In subheds: Coil, oil, and natural gas need to go; Everyone is doing something, but everyone needs to do more.

• Ian Livingston/Jason Samenow: [09-08] A first: Category 5 storm have formed in every ocean basin this year. One of them, Hurricane Lee, is still well out in the Atlantic, and expected to turn north before it gets to Florida and the Carolinas, but could affect New England or (more likely) the Canadian Maritimes (Nova Scotia and the Gulf of St. Lawrence).

• Aja Romano: [09-06] The Burning Man flameout, explained: "Climate change -- and schadenfreude -- finally caught up to the survivalist cosplayers."

Ukraine War:

• Connor Echols: [09-08] Diplomacy Watch: Inquiry finds 'no evidence' South Africa armed Russia. No meaningful diplomacy to report. The website has a new design, which I don't like, mostly because it makes it much harder to find new pieces on the front page.

• Ben Armbruster: [09-05] Why blind optimism leads us astray on Ukraine: "The pre-counteroffensive debate in the US was dominated by claims of 'victory' and 'success' despite available evidence predicting it wouldn't meet key goals." This is similar to the Confidence Fairy, where Obama and his people seemed to think that the key to recovery from the 2008 meltdown was projecting confidence that the economy was really just fine. The effect of such thinking on war strategy is even worse: any doubt that war aims will succeed is scorned as giving comfort to the enemy, so everyone parrots the official line. The final withdrawal from Afghanistan was hampered by just this kind of thinking. The article includes a wide sampling of such yes men cheering each other on into thinking it would all work out. I've tried to take a different position, which is that it doesn't matter whether the counteroffensive gains ground or not. In either case, the war only ends when Russia and the US -- with Ukraine's agreement, to be sure, but let's not kid ourselves about who Putin's real opponent is -- decide to negotiate something that allows both sides to back down. And the key to that isn't who controls how many acres, but when negotiators find common ground. Until then, the only point to the war is to disillusion hawks on both sides.

• Ben Freeman: [06-01] Defense contractor funded think tanks dominate Ukraine debate: A lengthy report, finding that "media outlets have cited think tanks with financial backing from the defense industry 85 percent of the time."

• Jen Kirby: [09-07] Are the US and Ukraine at odds over the counteroffensive?

• Daniel Larison: [09-07] Hawks want Biden to take the fight with Russia global: "Walter Russell Mead thinks the West can wear down Russia by attacking it everywhere." The first question I have is: isn't it global already, or is he really arguing for escalating with military action? (Syria and Mali are mentioned.) The bigger question is why do you want to fight Russia in the first place? I can see defending Ukraine, but the hawks seem to be starting from the assumption the US should wage war against Russia, and Ukraine is just an excuse and tool for that purpose.

• Anatol Lieven: [09-06] Afghanistan delusions blind US on Russia-Ukraine: "If Washington forgets the war's lessons, its mistakes are likely to be repeated."

• Robert Wright: [09-08] Logic behind Ukraine peace talks grows: This is a pretty good summary of an argument that I think has been obvious if not from day one, at least since Russia retreated from its initial thrust at Kyiv: that neither side can win, nor can either side afford to lose.

• Common Dreams: [09-02] US to begin sending controversial depleted uranium shells to Ukraine: The shells are effective at piercing tank armor, but they ultimately disintegrate, leaving toxic and radioactive uranium in the air, water, and soil. They were used extensively in Iraq, and the results have been tragic; e.g., Sydney Young: [2021-09-22] Depleted Uranium, Devastated Health: Military Operations and Environmental Injustice in the Middle East; and Dahr Jamail: [2013-03-15] Iraq: War's legacy of cancer.

Israel:

• Sam Bahour: [09-07] Israel's 'slay-for-play' practice must be stopped: "For many Israelis, killing Palestinians with impunity is a state-sponsored sport." E.g., Jonathan Ofir: [09-06] The Israeli legal system is conspiring to acquit Eyad Hallaq's murderer.

• Juan Cole: [09-07] Former head of Israeli Mossad: Israel is an apartheid state with the 'KKK' in government and "antisemitic" policies towards Palestinians: Tamir Pardo, head of Mossad 2011-16. Jonathan Ofir also writes about this: [09-07] Former Mossad chief says Israel is an 'apartheid state'.

• Mitchell Plitnick: [09-09] How Democrats learned to defend Israel's ethnocracy: "Israel didn't always demand recognition as a Jewish state, but increasingly rightwing Israeli governments have gradually demanded unique recognition of the state's ethnic character. Dems have only obliged." E.g.: Philip Weiss: [09-08] Why Biden will meet Netanyahu when the extremist visits the US. I wouldn't normally complain about a US president meeting a rather disreputable foreign leader -- part of the job is to respect other leaders -- but you know that Netanyahu is just doing this to show off to folks back home how he has Biden wrapped around his little finger. (Weiss quotes Netanyahu as bragging, "The U.S. is a thing you can move very easily."

Around the world:

• Daniel Handel: [09-05] We're finally figuring out if foreign aid is any better than handing out cash: "The rise of cash benchmarking at USAID, explained."

• Ellen Ioanes:

  • [09-10] What we know about Morocco's deadly earthquake: "A massive quake near Marrakesh on Friday night has killed more than 2,000."

  • [09-10] What's behind Africa's recent coups: Gabon, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali. And not just recent: worldwide, "from 1950 through January 2022, there had been 486 coup attempts, 242 of which were successful." For Africa, the numbers were 214 and 106, ahead of 146 and 70 for Latin America.

• Nicole Narea: [09-07] Latin American abortion rights activists just notched another win in Mexico: "The Mexican Supreme Court decriminalized abortion nationwide. It's a big deal for the whole region."

• Haris Zargar: [09-04] India: Why Modi is fueling anti-Muslim riots ahead of 2024 elections.

Other stories:

Dan Balz: [09-09] What divides political parties? More than ever, it's race and ethnicity. That's what a report from the American Political Science Association (APSA) says. My first reaction was: that's a shame. My second was the suspicion that they got that result because that's all they could think of to measure. It's always possible to think of other questions that could scatter the results in various directions. And my third is that this is mostly an indictment of the news media, which seems completely incapable of explaining issues in ways that people can relate to.

Zack Beauchamp:

• [09-06] Elon Musk's strange new feud with a Jewish anti-hate group, explained: So Musk is suing the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) . . . for defamation? He blames them for a 60% loss of advertising revenue, which couldn't possibly have been caused by anything he did?

• [09-10] Chris Rufo's dangerous fictions: "The right's leading culture warrior has invented a leftist takeover of America to justify his very real power grabs." Rufo's book is America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything. Rufo is the guy whose rant on Critical Race Theory launched recent efforts by DeSantis and others to ban its teaching, even though it never had been taught, and thereby censoring the very real history of racial discrimination in America, lest white people be made to feel bad about what their ancestors did. CRT was developed by legal scholars to show that some laws which were framed to appear race-neutral had racist intent. This refers to the Critical Theory developed by mid-20th century Marxists like Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse, which was very useful in detecting how capitalism and authoritarianism permeated and refracted in popular culture.

  I spent a lot of time studying Critical Theory when I was young. (I recently cracked open my copy of Dialectic of Enlightenment and was surprised to find about 80% of it was underlined.) It really opens your eyes to, and goes a long way toward explaining, a lot of the features of the modern world. But having learned much, I lost interest, at least in repeating the same analyses ad nauseum. (To take a classic example, I was blown away when I read How to Read Donald Duck, but then it occurred to me that one could write the same brilliant essay about Huckleberry Hound, Woody Woodpecker, and literally every other cartoon or fictional character you ran into.) But while Critical Theory appealed to people who wanted to change the world, it was never a plan of action, much less the plot to take over the world that Rufo claims to have uncovered.

  Beauchamp does a nice job of showing up Rufo's paranoia:

  Rufo cites, as evidence of the influence of "critical theory" across America, diversity trainings at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon that used the term "white privilege" and similar concepts in their documents. This, he argues, is proof that "even federal defense contractors have submitted to the new ideology."

  But the notion that American arms manufacturers have been taken over by radicals is ridiculous. Lockheed Martin builds weapons to maintain the American war machine. It is not owned or controlled in any way by sincere believers in the Third Worldist anti-imperialism of the 1960s radicals; it is using the now-popular terms those radicals once embraced to burnish its own image.

  Rufo is getting the direction of influence backward. Radicals are not taking over Lockheed Martin; Lockheed Martin is co-opting radicalism.

  So Rufo is not wrong that some radical ideas are penetrating into the institutions of power, including corporations. Where he is bonkers is in thinking that the ideas are power, plotted by some malign adversary bent on total control, trying to force us to think (gasp!) nice thoughts. What's scary is the mentality that views any hint of civility or accommodation as a mortal threat. Beauchamp continues, in terms that will probably drive Rufo even crazier:

  Historically, liberalism has proven quite capable of assimilating leftist critiques into its own politics. In the 19th and 20th centuries, liberal governments faced significant challenges from socialists who argued that capitalism and private property led to inequality and mass suffering. In response, liberals embraced the welfare state and social democracy: progressive income taxation, redistribution, antitrust regulations, and social services.

  Reformist liberals worked to address the concerns raised by socialists within the system. Their goal was to offer the immiserated proletariat alternative hope for a better life within the confines of the liberal democratic capitalist order -- simultaneously improving their lives and staving off revolution.

  Meanwhile, conservatives like Rufo resisted every such reform, often histrionically, even ones they eventually came to accept as necessary.

Jonathan Chait: [09-07] Samuel Moyn can't stop blaming Trumpism on liberals. I only mention this because I recently spent a lot of time writing up a book blurb on Moyn's Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times. I'll save the details, but note that Chait is upset because his heroes and his muddle-of-the-road philosophy were critiqued -- he says, incoherently. What happened was that after 1945, the New Deal coalition was deliberately split as most traditional liberals (like Chait, but he came much later) turned against the left, both abroad and at home, as part of a bipartisan Cold War consensus. They were pretty successful for a while, and with Lyndon Johnson even did some worthwhile things (civil rights and Medicare were big ones), but they neglected the working class base of the party, while throwing America into nasty (and in the case of Vietnam, hopeless) wars. So instead of building on the significant progress of the New Deal, the Democratic Party fell apart, losing not just to Republicans but to its own neoliberal aspirants. How that brought us to Trump is a longer and messier story, but it certainly got us Reagan, and the rot that followed.

PS: I wrote this paragraph before the one above on Beauchamp, so there's a bit of disconnect. Beauchamp talks about "reformist liberals," which diverge somewhat from Moyn's "cold war liberals." Chait thinks of himself as one of the former, but shares the latter's aversion to the left. Classical liberalism contained the seeds for both: first by individualizing society, breaking down the traditional hierarchy, then by declaring that every individual should have the right to "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." It turns out that in order for any substantial number of people to enjoy liberty, they need to have support of government. Some liberals understood, and others (including Hayek and Friedman) simply didn't care. Cold War liberals wound up on both sides, but even those who still supported reforms undercut them by fighting the left as much or more than the right.

Rachel M Cohen: [09-05] Is public school as we know it ending? Interview with Cara Fitzpatrick, who thinks so, as in her book title: The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America.

Richard Drake: [09-08] Gabriel Kolko on the foreign policy consequences of conservatism's triumph: I occasionally still crack open Kolko's brilliant books on US foreign policy (both subtitled The World and United States Foreign Policy, The Politics of War: 1943-1945, and The Limits of Power: 1945-1954), but it's been some time since I thought of his earlier The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (1963). The point there is that while the progressive movement sought to limit the manifest evils of capitalism, the actual reforms left big business and finance in pretty good shape -- as was evident in the post-WWI period, all the way to the crash in 1929.

Drake goes into the later books, but this piece doesn't do much to clarify how the "triumph of conservatism" in 1916 led to the "politics of war" in 1943. In this, I must admit I'm a little rusty on my William Appleman Williams, but "democracy" in Wilson's "making the world safe" slogan could just as easily been replaced with "capitalism." That was exactly what happened in the later 1943-54 period, when Roosevelt did so much to revive Wilson's reputation, while forever banishing opponents, including remnants of the anti-imperialist movement from 1898, to obscurity as "isolationists."

Kolko's formulation also does a neat job of solving the debate about whether Wilson was a progressive or a conservative: he was the former to the ends of the latter. Nowadays we dwell more on Wilson's racism, which we associate with the right, but in his day the two weren't strangers, even if what we still admire about the progressive idea suggests they should have known better.

Zeke Faux: [09-06] That's what I call ponzinomics: "With Sam Brinkman-Fried, Gisele, and a credulous Michael Lewis at the zenith of crypto hype." On first glance, I thought this might be a review of Lewis's forthcoming book on Bankman-Fried (coming Oct. 3: Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon), but it's actually an excerpt from Faux's new book, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall, about a conference in 2022 where Lewis was talking about Bankman-Fried "as if he were presenting a prize to his star pupil."

Constance Grady: [09-08] The sincerity and rage of Olivia Rodrigo: One class of story I invariably skip past is "most anticipated," especially with albums, because interesting albums rarely get the advanced hype to make such lists. (TV and movies fare a bit better, because there are many fewer of them, at least that you'll ever hear about.) But I gave this one a spin as soon as the banner popped up on Spotify, and then I gave it a second. If you don't know, she's a 20-year-old singer-songwriter from Los Angeles, whose 2021 debut Sour won me and practically everyone else over immediately (RIAA has certified it 4x Platinum). Her new one, Guts is her second, and I'll review it (sort of) next Music Week. For now I just want to note that she's getting newsworthy press:

• Jon Caramanica: [09-08] Olivia Rodrigo has seen the world now, and she's livid.

• Quinn Moreland: [09-08] 5 takeaways from Olivia Rodrigo's new album Guts.

• Alexis Petridis: [09-08] Dramatic dispatches from the dark side of youth.

• Robb Sheffield: [09-08] Olivia Rodrigo Crushes the expectations and delivers another witty, pissed-off classic.

• Lindsay Zoladz: [09-08] A deep dive into Olivia Rodrigo's triumphant 'Guts'.

Adam Hochschild: [09-05] The Senator who took on the CIA: Frank Church. Review of James Risen/Thomas Risen: The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys -- and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy.

Whizy Kim: [09-08] The era of easy flying is over: "Lessons from a summer of hellish flights." As far as I'm concerned, it's been over for at least 20 years, about the time when it became obvious that deregulation and predatory profit seeking were going to devour the last shreds of decency in customer service.

Karen Landman: [09-07] Covid is on the rise again, but it's different now: "Covid transmission continues to ebb and flow -- but at least the latest Pirola variant isn't too menacing."

Prabir Purkayastha: [09-08] Is intellectual property turning into a knowledge monopoly? The question almost answers itself, given that the current laws defining intellectual property include grants of monopoly (with minor exceptions, like mechanical royalties for broadcast use of songs). The question of "knowledge" is a bit fuzzier, but there is real desire to claim things like "know how" as property (read the fine print on employee contracts). A patent can keep others making the same discovery independently from their own work, and the tendency to chain patents can keep competition away almost indefinitely. Copyrights, as the word makes clear, are more limited, but once you start talking derivative works, the line gets harder to draw. Moreover, the smaller granularity of fair use gets, the more likely accidental reuse becomes. How serious this is depends a lot on how litigious "owners" are, but in America, where so much seems to depend on wealth, we are very litigious indeed. This piece is excerpted from the author's book: Knowledge as Commons: Towards Inclusive Science and Technology (LeftWord, 2023).

Ingríd Robeyns: [08-28] Limitarianism: academic essays: Author has edited a book, Having Too Much: Philosophical Essays on Limitarianism, with various academic papers on the problem of having too much stuff. Fortunately, they read their own book and decided to make it available through Open Book Publishers, so it doesn't add to your surplus of stuff.

Dylan Scott: [08-07] The NFL season opener is also the kickoff for the biggest gambling season ever: "How America became a nation of gamblers -- and what might happen next." Few things make me more pessimistic for the future of the nation.

Norman Solomon: [09-07] Venture militarism on autopilot, or "How 9/11 bred a 'War on Terror' from Hell: America's response to 9/11 in the lens of history." Seems like every week brings enough new stories about America's bloated, wasteful, stupid, ineffective, but still really dangerous war culture, even beyond the ones that fit securely under "Ukraine" and "World." This gets to the big picture, being adapted from the introduction to Solomon's new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. The focus here is less on what war is and does than on how it is talked about, to make it seem more valorous and/or less cruel than it is, or just as often, how it's not talked about at all, allowing most of us to go about our daily lives with no sense of what the US government is actually doing, let alone why.

• Melissa Garriga/Tim Biondo: [09-08] The Pentagon is the elephant in the climate activist room: "The US military is the world's largest institutional oil consumer. It causes more greenhouse gas emissions than 140 nations combined and accounts for about one-third of America's total fossil fuel consumption."

• Maha Hilal: [09-05] 22 years of drone warfare and no end in sight: "Biden's rules on drone warfare mask continued violent islamophobia." Author wrote the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim: Islamophobia, the War on Terror, and the Muslim Experience Since 9/11, so that's her focus, but one could write much more about the seductiveness of drone warfare for the gamers who increasingly run the military, with their huge budgets to waste while risking none of their own lives.

Jeffrey St Clair: [09-08] Roaming Charges: The pitch of frenzy. Lots here, as usual, including some links I've cited elsewhere. One I'll mention here is a tweet by anti-woke pundit Richard Hanania: "Jimmy Buffett taught Americans to hate their jobs and live for nights and weekends so they could stuff themselves with food and alcohol." Actually, he picked that trope up from country music, where he sold most of his records before being reclassified as Adult Contemporary. The classic formula was to transpose Saturday night and Sunday morning, but many singers never got to the latter (or only did so in niche albums).

PS: I mentioned Biden's stop in Vietnam above, but hadn't seen this article: Katie Rogers: [09-11] 'It is evening, isn't it?' An 80-year-old president's whirlwind trip. Which focuses more on his age and foibles than on the diplomatic mission, showing once again that the mainstream press would rather focus on appearance than substance. Why does "the rigors of globe-trotting statesmanship" even matter? I'd rather prefer to have fewer photo-ops and more actual communication. But the reason I bring this piece up isn't to rag on the sorely atrophied art of journalism yet again. I found this tweet by Heather Cox Richardson, which pointed me to the article, even more disturbing:

Here's what I don't get: this administration's reworking of global relationships is the biggest story in at least a generation in foreign affairs -- probably more. Why on earth would you downplay that major story to focus on Biden's well-earned weariness after an epic all-nighter?

No doubt Biden has been very busy on that front, but it's hard to tell what it all means, which makes it hard to agree that it's big, harder still that it's good. GW Bush did at least as much "reworking," but his assertion of imperial prerogatives wound up undermining any possibility of international cooperation, and more often than not backfired. Obama tried to unwind some of Bush's overreach, and negotiated openings with Iran and Cuba, but left the basic unilateral posture in place. Trump did more in less time, but was too erratic, greedy, and confused to set a clear direction.

Biden, on the other hand, is mostly intent on patching up the mess Trump made, without addressing any of the underlying problems. And because he's left the imperial hubris unchecked, he's actually worsened relations with many countries, of which Russia and China are the most dangerous. On the other hand, even though Ukraine has brought us near a precipice, he hasn't actually plunged into disaster yet, as Bush did. It's still possible that, having reëngaged, he could move toward a more cooperative relationship with an increasingly multipolar world. But you can't call this a "story" without some sense of how it ends, and that's far from clear at the moment.

Music Week

Expanded blog post, September archive (in progress).

Tweet: Music Week: 44 albums, 6 A-list,

Music: Current count 40811 [40767] rated (+44), 34 [27] unrated (+7).

Huge Speaking of Which last night: 135 links, 8610 words. Started Thursday, and let some things like the baseball memoir, the note on Golda Meir, and the Hobsbawm introduction just flow. Also added the Jimmy Buffett obituary late, after I found the note on his politics. By then I had gone back for a few of his records, below.

Looking back over it, I see a dozen spots where I should (or at least could) write much more. I've made some minor edits, but it certainly needs much more.

The only thing that kept the rated count from cratering was working off a checklist, in this case the unheard records from Brad Luen's 2003 poll results (in the notebook), hence a lot of 2003 releases under Old Music. I've hit everything that got ranked, but very few of the single-vote records. The records rarely got more than one play, so they piled up pretty fast. Aside from the Pet Shop Boys, which a second play would most likely lift to full A, Marcelo D2 made the grade the fastest.

I got another food plate, if you're into that. The diet is going fitfully, but I believe I'm entitled to clean up leftovers and dated pantry items. It was orders of magnitude better than the microwave fish from the night before, or whatever I had last night and have already blotted from memory.

After taking it apart and reassembling it, the upstairs CD player finally decided to start working, but only after I ordered a replacement -- something I found pretty embarrassing. But it is the last such model still available (an Onkyo), and the last unit Amazon had in stock, so I figure I'll keep it as a collector's item. Next day, the downstairs CD player reverted to its bad habit of instantly withdrawing the tray before I could put a new disc in, so if I shoot it, I'll already have a replacement.

After much nagging, I filled out a ballot for the DownBeat Readers Poll. My notes are here. Note that I'm only picking from the ballot choices they offer, which miss a lot of worthy albums (at least 80% of my A-lists: 2022 and 2023) and a great many notable musicians (especially from Europe, but also more avant or more retro than their MOR niche).

The demo queue continues to grow, and I'm probably farther behind than I've been a decade (give or take). One reason I've let it slide is that only 5 (of 35) are out yet, and most won't be released until October. The pending list is sorted by release date, but my basket isn't, so sometimes I slip up and jump the gun (as with Birnbaum, below; future dates noted at the end of the review).

Still no indexing on last month's Streamnotes. Expecting more 100°F weather this week. It's often hot here until the last week of September.

New records reviewed this week:

• Adam Birnbaum: Preludes (2023, Chelsea Music Festival): [cd]: B+(**)
• Jaimie Branch: Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((World War)) (2022 [2023], International Anthem): [sp]: B+(***)
• Scott Clark: Dawn & Dusk (2021-22 [2023], Out of Your Head): [cd]: B+(**)
• Kris Davis Diatom Ribbons: Live at the Village Vanguard (2022 [2023], Pyroclastic, 2CD): [cd]: A-
• Homeboy Sandman: Rich (2023, Dirty Looks): [sp]: B+(**)
• Superposition: Glaciers (2019-22 [2023], Kettle Hole): [cd]: B+(**)

Recent reissues, compilations, and vault discoveries:

• Sonny Stitt: Boppin' in Baltimore: Live at the Left Bank (1973 [2023], Jazz Detective): [sp]: A-

Old music:

• Art Ensemble of Chicago: The Meeting (2003, Pi): [sp]: B+(*)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago: Sirius Calling (2003 [2004], Pi): [sp]: B+(*)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago: Chi Congo (1972, Decca): [sp]: B+(**)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago: Live in Paris (1969 [2003], Charly, 2CD): [sp]: B+(**)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago: Live Part 1 (1969 [1975], BYG): [sp]: B+(**)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago: Live Part 2 (1969 [1975], BYG): [sp]: B+(**)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago: Live in Berlin (1979 [1998], West Wind, 2CD): [sp]: B+(*)
• Baba Zula/Mad Professor: Ruhani Oyun Havalan (Psychebelly Dance Music) (2003, Doublemoon): [sp]: B+(***)
• Bobby Blue Bland: Blues at Midnight (2003, Malaco): [sp]: B+(**)
• Brooks & Dunn: Red Dirt Road (2003, Arista Nashville): [sp]: B
• Jimmy Buffett: A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean (1973, ABC): [sp]: B+(***)
• Jimmy Buffett: Living and Dying in 3/4 Time (1974, ABC): [sp]: B
• Jimmy Buffett: Havana Daydreamin' (1976, ABC): [sp]: B+(*)
• Jimmy Buffett: Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes (1977, ABC): [sp]: B+(**)
• Jimmy Buffett: Son of a Son of a Sailor (1978, ABC): [sp]: B+(*)
• John Cale: Hobo Sapiens (2003, EMI): [sp]: B+(***)
• The Constantines: Shine a Light (2003, Sub Pop): [sp]: B+(*)
• Rodney Crowell: Fate's Right Hand (2003, DMZ/Epic): [sp]: B+(***)
• The Darkness: Permission to Land (2003, Atlantic): [sp]: B
• DonaZica: Composição (2003, Tratore): [sp]: A-
• Kathleen Edwards: Failer (2003, Zoë): [sp]: B+(*)
• Entropic Advance: Monkey With a Gun (2003, Symbolic Insight): [sp]: B+(**)
• Barry Guy/Evan Parker: Studio/Live: Birds & Blades (2001 [2003], Intakt, 2CD): [sp]: A-
• Corey Harris: Mississippi to Mali (2003, Rounder): [sp]: B+(*)
• King Geedorah: Take Me to Your Leader (2003, Big Dada): [sp]: B+(***)
• The Knife: Deep Cuts (2003, V2): [sp]: B+(**)
• Linkin Park: Hybrid Theory (2000, Warner Bros.): [r]: B+(*)
• Linkin Park: Meteora (2003, Warner Bros.): [r]: B+(*)
• Patty Loveless: On Your Way Home (2003, Epic): [sp]: B+(**)
• Marcelo D2: Looking for the Perfect Beat [A Procura Da Batgida Perfeita] (2003, Mr. Bongo): [sp]: A-
• Metric: Old World Underground, Where Are You Now? (2003, Last Gang): [sp]: B+(**)
• My Morning Jacket: It Still Moves (2003, ATO): [sp]: B
• The New Pornographers: Electric Version (2003, Matador): [sp]: B
• Pernice Brothers: Yours, Mine & Ours (2003, Ashmont): [sp]: B+(*)
• Pet Shop Boys: Pop Art: The Hits (1985-2003 [2003], Parlophone, 2CD): [sp]: A-
• Steely Dan: Everything Must Go (2003, Warner Bros.): [sp]: B+(*)
• T.I.: Trap Muzik (2003, Atlantic/Grand Hustle): [sp]: B+(**)
• TV on the Radio: Young Liars (2003, Touch & Go, EP): [sp]: B
• Ying Yang Twins: Me & My Brother (2003, TVT): [sp]: B+(***)

Unpacking: Found in the mail last week:

• Afro Peruvian New Trends Orchestra: Cosmic Synchronicities (Blue Spiral) [10-01]
• Ron Blake: Mistaken Identity (7ten33 Productions) [10-13]
• John Blum: Nine Rivers (ESP-Disk) [09-01]
• Bowmanville: Bowmanville (StonEagleMusic) [10-01]
• Arina Fujiwara: Neon (self-released) [10-02]
• George Gee Swing Orchestra: Winter Wonderland (self-released) [11-01]
• Ivan Lins: My Heart Speaks (Resonance) [09-15]
• Todd Mosby: Land of Enchantment (MMG)
• Madre Vaca: Knights of the Round Table (Madre Vaca) [11-21]
• Colette Michaan: Earth Rebirth (Creatrix Music) [10-15]
• Mark Reboul/Roberta Piket/Billy Mintz: Seven Pieces/About an Hour/Saxophone, Piano, Drums (2004, ESP-Disk): [09-01]

Speaking of Which

Blog link.

I've been reading my old paperback copy of Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848 (1962, my paperback is a New American Library pocket edition I've had for 50+ years -- retail $1.25, so it's bound as densely as it was written. I've always been reluctant to read old books, but this one may get me to change my mind, or at least continue to his sequels. The first chapter, in particular, describes the European world so compactly yet completely that you approach the French Revolution thinking you know all the background you need. The next three chapters -- one on the industrial revolution in Britain, the next on France, and a third on the Napoleonic wars -- are every bit as compact and comprehensive.

Much of the book is quotable, but I was especially struck by the line at the bottom of this paragraph, from Part II, where he goes back and surveys how ownership and use of land changed during those revolutions (p. 191, several previous lines added for context):

For the poor peasant it seemed a distinctly hard bargain. Church property might have been inefficient, but this very fact recommended it to the peasants, for on it their custom tended to become prescriptive right. The division and enclosure of common field, pasture, and forest merely withdrew from the poor peasant or cottager resources and reserves to which he felt he (or he as a part of the community) had a right. The free land market meant that he probably had to sell his land; the creation of a rural class of entrepreneurs, that the most hard-hearted and hard-headed exploited him, instead or, of in addition to, the old lords. Altogether the introduction of liberalism on the land was like some sort of silent bombardment which shattered the social structures he had always inhabited and left nothing in its place but the rich: a solitude called freedom.

The significance and relevance here has to do with the phenomenon where former peasants leaned to the right politically, taking more comfort in the memory of feudal bonds to lord and church. Liberalism here means proto-capitalism, or what CB MacPherson more descriptively called "possessive individualism." The later Luddite revolt grew from a similar impulse, as does Trumpism today. In all these cases, the satisfaction of joining the right is purely emotional, as the right is every bit as controlled by people who saw in capitalism a path to ever greater exploitation.

The difference between conservatism and liberalism today is that one offers a better afterlife for their deference, and the other offers a rarely achieved hope for better in this life. The difference between liberals and the left is that one idealizes individuals each responsible only to themselves, and the other emphasizes solidarity, arguing that our fates are shared, and therefore our responsibility is to each other. Liberals like to call Trumpists, and their antecedents back to the Dark Ages, populists, because they look down on common people as ignorant and prejudiced (or as one put it memorably, "deplorable"). Leftists hate that designation, because they feel kinship with all people, not just because that's how solidarity works, but because they see many of those people being critical of capitalism, even when they aren't very articulate about why.

Top story threads:

Trump:

• Jeff Amy: [08-31] Efforts to punish Fani Willis over Trump prosecution are 'political theater,' Georgia Gov. Kemp says. It seems unlikely that the Republican threats to remove Willis will go anywhere without Kemp's support, but this whole episode only underscores the point that the party that wants to use the justice system as a political weapon is the Republican. Such politicization is a two-edged sword. Sure, it can involve prosecuting your opponents, but it also means protecting your partisans from paying for their crimes. Trump's pardons were often for political allies, like Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Joe Arpaio, Dinesh D'Souza, and seven former Republican congressmen, including Duke Cunningham. Nor was Trump the first Republican to excuse and shelter their own criminals. Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, but let the rest of the Watergate criminals serve their sentences. GHW Bush pardoned the Republican Iran-Contra felons. GW Bush commuted Scooter Libby's prison sentence (later Trump pardoned Libby). But that's just one aspect of how politics determines Republican attitudes to law enforcement. Republicans have pushed for draconian enforcement of borders, drugs, and "fraud" in voting and welfare, but are extremely lax when it comes to antitrust cases, environmental disasters, and tax evasion. They've created a culture of corruption where they've lost all sense of right and wrong.

• Maggie Astor: [08-31] Offering few details, Trump says he knows how Republicans should approach abortion.

• Andrew Jeong: [09-02] Trump lawyers evoke 1931 trial of 'Scottsboro boys' in election case. The reference is described by one law professor as "unbelievably juvenile."

• Nicole Narea: [08-31] Trump could soon be in big legal trouble for inflating his net worth. This is New York's civil case against his business, so no jail jeopardy, but it cost him up to $250 million and result in him and his family being banned from doing business in New York.

• Heather Digby Parton: [08-30] Republicans demand a ransom: Defund the prosecution of Donald Trump or else: Or else they'll force a government shutdown.

• Nia Prater: [08-31] It turns out Trump probably didn't get $2.2 billion richer in 2014: You mean, he lied?

• Ben Protess/Jonah E Bromwich/William K Rashbaum: [08-30] Trump, under oath, says he averted 'nuclear holocaust': I'll leave this to Dean Baker, who tweeted: "It's pretty funny that Donald Trump apparently thinks he prevented a nuclear holocaust and we're supposed to worry that Joe Biden is senile."

• Jennifer Rubin: [09-01] What responsible media coverage in the Trump era would look like: I.e., "if the media stopped normalizing the MAGA GOP."

• Myah Ward: [09-03] Meet the white Trump official behind the launch of Black Americans for Immigration Reform.

DeSantis, and other Republicans:

• Dan Balz: [09-02] Is America ready for another impeachment? McCarthy thinks maybe so. Hard part is figuring out what for. [PS: Also see Peter Baker: [09-02] Biden team isn't waiting for impeachment to go on the offensive.]

• Michael Barajas: [09-01] The "chief lawbreaking officer" of Texas finally faces trial: "Ken Paxton evaded scandal -- criminal indictments, a staff revolt, a whistleblower lawsuit -- for years. But his impeachment trial starts in the Texas Senate on Tuesday." Which raises the question, when was the last time an office holder was deemed too corrupt for the Texas Lege? (As Molly Ivins liked to call it. She, of course, would know.)

• Emma Brown/Peter Jamison: [08-29] The Christian home-schooler who made 'parental rights' a GOP rallying cry: "On a private call with Christian millionaires, home-schooling pioneer Michael Farris pushed for a strategy aimed at siphoning billions of tax dollars from public schools." I have mixed feelings about this, in large part because I have bitter memories of my own public schooling, but also I think most parents are incompetent at teaching children (mine sure were, even if they had the time, which they didn't), and also because I really hate the idea that children "are given by God to the parents," who can tyrannize them at will -- I'd say there's much more need for a children's bill of rights than one for parents. I also have this view, based on personal experience, that while adults should be free to adopt any religion they fancy, imposing one on children is cruel. More generally, I think all this indoctrination focus (either for or against, and those who claim to be against public school indoctrination are usually the strongest advocates of imposing it themselves) simply misses the point, which is that people will react or rebel as they see fit. One of the few pieces that seems to understand this is Sarah Jones: [04-08] Children are not property. I'm so impressed by that piece, I've kept it open ever since it appeared.

• Chauncey DeVega: [09-01] From RICO charges to loyalty pledges: Trump's transformation of the GOP into a crime mob is complete. The article quotes Shawn Rosenberg saying something which is the core point of chapter two of my political book (except that I drew the conclusion from Richard Nixon):

  Donald Trump and other Republican leaders have weaponized the idea that the rule of law, democracy and democratic norms and institutions do not matter, because all that matters is the end result. Winning at any cost. You go for what you believe is right, and you get it in whatever way you can.

  DeVega also cites a new poll from the Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight showing "evidence of how a significant percentage of Republican voters support candidates who break the law if it helps them to win elections and get power."

• Ed Kilgore:

  • [08-29] Francis Suarez drops out. Will the other 2024 duds follow? I don't see why they're calling him a "dud": he got his name in the press when he became the last to announce, and he got his name in again when he became the first to quit. That's two more times than Perry Johnson.

  • [09-01] If Mitch McConnell goes, the Senate could get very scary. I don't see any reason to get sentimental over that old coot. It's not like he hasn't done immense damage over his long term as Senate party leader. Even if the leadership goes to someone much worse (like Rick Scott), as opposed to just a little worse (like John Thune/Cornyn/Barrasso), it's hard to run the Senate as tightly as the House, especially when the margins are so slim.

• Lisa Mascaro: [08-29] Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump's vision.

• Nicole Narea: [08-30] A Florida hurricane and shooting are testing Ron DeSantis: I've always thought that DeSantis's slogan Make America Florida was a threat that would turn people away, not something the rest of America would be attracted to. So this week's brought more proof. On the other hand, faced with disaster, even DeSantis recognizes he needs to tone it down a bit. One thing you have to admit about Florida Republicans is that no matter how much they complain about the federal government's spending, they never take their hands back from a handout after a hurricane.

• Andrew Prokop: [08-29] The "I would simply . . ." candidate: Vivek Ramaswamy, who has an easy answer for everything, because he doesn't understand much of anything -- just how to con gullible people.

• Greg Sargent: [08-30] Nikki Haley's emotional plea about racist 'hate' takes a wrong turn. "Why can't Haley just decry a horrifying white-supremacist attack and leave it at that?" No, she also has to remind us not to "fall into the narrative that this is a racist country." So when an obvious racist kills someone, she feels the need to defend everyone else -- really her fellow Republicans, who have so often exploited racism for political gain, at least since 1964 -- from being tarred as racists. Very few people actually believe that this has to be a racist country, but most do get suspicious when you start denying that it ever was: that's a lot of history to sweep under the rug, all the way up to yesterday's newspaper.

• Emily Stewart: [08-31] The conservative boycott playbook is kind of working: "From Bud Light to Target, right-wing anger at 'woke capitalism' is scaring corporate America."

• Kirk Swearingen: [08-20] Guns, Republicans and "manliness": We all suffer from the right's mental health crisis. Author also wrote: [09-03] Can't we all get along? Actually, no -- not when the other side behaves like that, rather belatedly in response to pretty dumb [08-02] David Brooks column.

• Li Zhou: [08-28] White supremacy is at the heart of the Jacksonville shooting.

Biden and/or the Democrats:

• EJ Antoni: [08-31] Bidenomics robs from the poor, gives to donor class: This piece of hackwork showed up in my local paper, along with Ryan Young: [09-01] Don't let politicians take credit for economic recovery. Together they give you a sense of how flailing and incoherent right-wing attacks on Bidenomics have become: on the one hand, don't credit Biden for any recovery, because that's just good old capitalism at work (an article that none of them wrote when Trump or Reagan were president, but became a staple during the much stronger recoveries under Clinton and Obama); on the other blame everything bad on Biden, and imply that corruption is the root of everything Democrats do (talk about projection). Antoni is particularly ripe for his concern over "the radical disconnect between Washington's ruling elites and working-class folks." It may be true that much of the extra spending Biden accomplished -- the first recovery act, the barely-bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the big Inflation Recovery Act -- has passed through the hands of companies that donated to Democrats (and usually Republicans, who get even more of their money from rich donors), but most of that money has trickled down, creating jobs that wouldn't have existed otherwise, and raising wages in the process.

  Both parties do most of their public spending through companies, but Biden has done a much better job than previous Democrats at seeing that spending benefit workers -- and indeed in improving the leverage of workers throughout the labor market. Maybe you can criticize him for not doing enough, but he clearly would have done more if he had more Democrats in Congress (and better ones than Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema). As for "robbing the poor," the only evidence he has is inflation, which is simply the result of companies actively taking advantage of supply shortages and growing demand -- lots of reasons for both, and I suppose you could blame Biden for adding to the demand side, by giving jobs and raising wages. These are, after all, complex issues, with many factors, but to the extent you can isolate Biden's contribution, it clearly has helped large segments of the economy.

  [PS: Both links include author pics. I hate it when people make assumptions about character based on looks, but I must admit I was taken aback by this pair -- perhaps by how young they appear, and how smiley when their messages are so disingenuous.]

• Jessica Corbett: [08-30] Biden admin proposes 'much-needed' overtime protections for 3.6 million workers.

• Lee Harris: [08-07] Biden Admin to restore labor rule gutted in 1980s.

• Ben Jacobs: [09-01] Sidelined and self-sabotaged: What The Last Politician says about Kamala Harris. Franklin Foer's book, subtitled Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future, is coming out this week (Sept. 5). I've never been much of a Harris fan, but I've also thought they should be using her more, and trying to build her up, to make the 2024 campaign more of a team effort, reassuring voters of continuity, should Biden's age get the better of him. Republicans are going after her anyway, so why not lean into it and feature her more?. For a bit more on the book, see this Playbook column. There is also an excerpt on Afghanistan in The Atlantic.

• Harold Meyerson: [08-07] Buybacks are down, production is up: "Bidenomics has begun to de-financialize the economy."

• Toluse Olorunnipa: [09-02] Biden surveys Hurricane Idalia's damage in Florida, without DeSantis: There is a photo of DeSantis (looking annoyed) with Biden after Hurricane Ian a couple years ago. Such photo ops are normal, but Republicans often take flak for mingling with the enemy, much as Trump did for posing with Kim Jong Un. I wonder how much of this is because the White House Press has nothing useful to do, but maybe if they were given fewer useless ops they might think of something?

  [PS: I see a tweet with a New York Times: "Biden Won't Meet DeSantis in Florida During Tour of Hurricane Damage"; but wasn't it DeSantis refusing to meet Biden, not the other way? On the other hand, Rick Scott wasn't afraid of having his picture taken with Biden. DeSantis is such a wuss!]

• Dylan Scott: [08-30] Medicare's first-ever drug price negotiations, briefly explained: Seems like a very modest first step, but looking at the list prices, you can see how "serious money" adds up. (For you youngsters, back in the 1970s, Sen. Everett Dirksen quipped: "a billion here, a billion there, before long you're talking serious money"). After this ten, another batch of fifteen are to follow. There is much more that should be done. Such high prices are purely the result of government-granted patent monopolies. The law could change the terms of patent use from monopolies to some form of arbitration. Or (my preference) we could end patents all together. And yes, I filed this under Biden/Democrats because there is zero change of getting even this much relief when Republicans are in power. Also see:

  • Jake Johnson: [08-29] Sanders says 'much more has to be done' to cut prescription drug prices.

  • Ananya Kalahasti/Will Royce: [08-29] Who's running Big Pharma's last stand against sligthly fairer drug pricing.

  • Andrew Perez/Matthew Cunningham-Cook: [09-01] Big Pharma's American con: "Drugmakers are charging foreigners far lower prices for medicines they want shielded from new Medicare price cuts." That's why the option to import drugs has long been recognized as the simplest route to lower prices. Having that right would be useful leverage for negotiations.

Legal matters: Ok, sometimes I mean illegal matters. Obviously, Trump's crimes are filed elsewhere.

• Adam Gabbatt: [08-30] Kyle Rittenhouse sued by estate of man he killed at Kenosha anti-racism protest: Also being sued, law enforcement departments: "They did not disarm him. They did not limit his movement in any way. They did not question him. They did not stop him from shooting individuals after he started. They did not arrest him, detain him, or question him even after he had killed two people." He is also facing two other suits, by other people he shot (or their estates).

• Caroline Kitchener: [09-01] Highways are the next antiabortion target. One Texas town is resisting. This sounds ridiculous, but it allows anyone to sue anyone they suspect of "abortion trafficking," and is just a localization of a more general trend of criminalizing assistance from friends and concerned citizens. Conservatives think that such laws will only be used by their people to harass others, but it's hard to imagine limits to such a potential expanse of litigation.

• Judd Legum: [08-31] Top North Carolina judge faces potential sanctions for talking about racial discrimination. Anita Earls, "the only Black woman on the court, is under investigation by the state's Judicial Standards Commission, a body largely comprised of conservative judges appointed by North Carolina Chief Justice Paul Newby."

• Amber Ferguson: [09-01] Ohio police release video of officer fatally shooting pregnant woman.

• Alan Feuer/Zach Montague: [08-31] Proud Boys lieutenant sentenced to 17 years in Jan. 6 sedition case: Joseph Biggs. Prosecutors had asked for 33 years. Another Proud Boy leader, Zachary Rehl, was sentenced to 15 years. Biggs' sentence was the second-longest handed down, following the 18 years given to Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes.

• Tom Jackman: [09-01] Proud Boys leader gets 18 years, matching longest Jan. 6 punishment to date: Ethan Nordean. Dominic Pezzola also received a 10-year term..

• Ian Millhiser: [08-29] America's Trumpiest court just put itself in charge of nuclear safety: Judge James Ho strikes again. "Much of the Fifth Circuit appears to be intentionally trying to sow chaos throughout the federal government, without any regard to consequences."

Climate and Environment: Hard to find anything about it in the US press, but they're having a rip-roaring typhoon season in East Asia this year; e.g.: Typhoon Saola makes landfall in China's coast after slamming Hong Kong; and As Typhoon Haikui barrels into Taiwan, thousands are evacuated. These are big storms hitting heavily populated areas. Back in early August, there was this: [08-02] Heaviest rainfall in 140 years drenches Beijing while Typhoon Khanun hits Japan's Okinawa. You may recall that in 2022 they held the Winter Olympics in Beijing, so it's not exactly a place you expect to be ravaged by tropical storms.

• Jacob Bogage: [09-03] Home insurers cut natural disasters from policies as climate risks grow. So what happens when you can't buy (or can't afford) insurance against actual risks? At some point, I predict that the insurance industry will be taken over by the federal government, because no one else can afford to underwrite it.

• Matthew Cappucci: [09-01] Idalia is gone, but peak hurricane season is looming. What's next? There are four named storms in the middle of the Atlantic (Franklin, Gert, Idalia, and José), where the only thing they're likely to hit is Bermuda. Another one, Katia, is likely to appear this week, but not much is expected of it. Beyond that, each tropical wave coming off Africa could develop into something big.

• Umair Irfan/Benji Jones: [08-30] Why Hurricane Idalia is so dangerous, explained in 7 maps. On the other hand: Dan Stillman: [08-31] Hurricane Idalia wasn't as bad as feared. Here are 5 reasons. Hit at low tide; weakened just before landfall; hit an area with lower population; moved relatively fast; the forecast was extremely accurate. The day difference is explains the tone shift. It's normal to try to scare people before the fact, then to soothe them after. Still, with sources like these, it's hard to calibrate the right level of hysteria.

• Taylor Lane: [09-03] Monsoon rain leaves Las Vegas roads flooded.

• Rebecca Leber: [08-31] There's been a shift in how we think about climate change: Interview with "environmental psychologist" Lorraine Whitmarsh. My quotes, because it seems to me like less a subspecialty than a subject of investigation, but in a world with a shortfall of answers there's always a market for "experts" (again, my quotes).

• Ian Livingston:

  • [09-01] Hottest August on record caps scorching summer for the southern US. Also note that "abnormally warm weather may continue," especially for an oval area from roughly Waco to Wichita. For more on that, see Dan Stillman: [09-02] September heat wave to invade central US before scorching the Mid-Atlantic.

  • [09-02] These places baked the most during Earth's hottest month on record.

• Sophia Tesfaye: [09-03] Thousands trapped at Burning Man after historic flooding.

• Li Zhou: [08-30] How Louisiana -- one of the nation's wettest states -- caught on fire.

Ukraine War: The New York Times insists Ukraine's offensive makes progress. Elsewhere, we are warned: Ukraine tells counteroffensive critics to 'shut up'. Meanwhile, Sen. Richard Blumenthal says US is getting its 'money's worth' in Ukraine because Americans aren't dying, which suggests ulterior motives and double standards. More stories follow, but plus ça change, etc. Even if the counteroffensive breaks the Russian line, doing things in the next month or two (before winter) they haven't even hinted at in the last three months, Ukraine will remain far short of their goal of expelling Russia from their pre-2014 borders, and will have no real leverage to force Russia to capitulate to their terms. And even if they could expel Russia, they'd still be locked in a state of war until a truce was negotiated. The only way out is to find a combination of tradeoffs that is agreeable both to Russia and to Ukraine, and (not that they have any business dictating terms to Ukraine) to Biden, who is engaged in his own shadow war with Putin, and has possibly decisive chips to play (sanctions, trade, security assurances).

• Blaise Malley:

  • [09-01] Diplomacy Watch: The search for an endgame in Ukraine.

  • [08-29] Can sanctions help win peace? According to this report, not likely: "Not only does economic warfare not work because it ends up hurting the people it claims to help, but it can stand in the way of diplomacy." I don't think that is quite right. Sanctions can, and should, be considered a chit for negotiation, but that only works if one is willing to relinquish them as part of an agreement. The problem is when sanctions are seen as permanent, foreclosing negotiation. For instance, sanctions against Saddam Hussein's Iraq demanded regime change, not something Hussein could reasonably negotiate. Under such conditions, sanctions are acts of kabuki warfare, symbolic yet reflecting hostility and a desire to harm -- a meaning that targets cannot fail to detect, but which, due to the arbitrariness and overreaching hubris of American foreign policy, especially the belief that enemies can only respond to a show of force, makes it nearly impossible to defuse. US sanctions against Russia started way before Putin's invasion of Ukraine, and have only escalated with each offense, paving the way to the present war, and possibly to much worse.

    The report is from International Crisis Group: [08-28] Sanctions, Peacemaking and Reform: Recommendations for US Policymakers. One key quote there is: "Sanctions can only help bring parties to the table for peace talks, and provide leverage when they get there, if negotiators can credibly promise meaningful and enduring sanctions relief." Moreover:

    The U.S. does not always make clear what parties can do that will lead to sanctions relief. In some cases, Washington has not laid out any such steps or it has outlined steps that are unrealistic. In others, the U.S. was never willing to lift sanctions in the first place. Elsewhere, Washington's communication on sanctions has been vague, leaving targets in the dark about what might lead to reversal. Targets can be unsure why they were sanctioned, as members of Venezuela's electoral authority reported in 2020, or have learned about the designations second- or thirdhand (a former Congolese official found out about his listing from the newspaper and some FARC members learned from listening to the radio). Some never see the full evidence underpinning the designations -- even if they lobby the Treasury Department. Without clarity on why they were sanctioned and what they can do to be delisted, targets have little incentive to make concessions in exchange for relief.

    A big part of the problem is that the neocon view that talking is a sign of weakness, and liberal-interventionist conviction that America's unique moral legitimacy makes it a fair and necessary judge of everyone else, has driven diplomacy from Washington, leaving American foreign policy as little more than "irritable mental gestures."

• David Bromwich: [08-29] Living on a war planet (and managing not to notice): Raises the question (at least to me): if the war in Ukraine hadn't come along, would America have invented it? ,Leaving aside the second question (did it?), the withdrawal from Afghanistan left some kind of void in the minds of that class of people whose sole concern is America's military position in the world? Wars give them meaning in life, and after twenty years of frustration in Afghanistan and Iraq, Ukraine is some kind of dream: industry is stoked delivering arms and explosives, while it's someone else doing the fighting and bleeding, someone else having their lives upended. The plotters in America haven't had so much fun since Afghanistan in the 1980s -- another time when every dead Russian was counted as a blow for freedom. But mostly it just helped perpetuate the conflict, with no domestic political cost. So of course they refuse to negotiate. Why spoil such a good thing?

  After citing Roger Cohen's recent propaganda piece (Putin's Forever War), he notes that "Mikhail Gorbachev finally emerges as the hero of this story," then adds:

  Nowhere quoted, however, is the Gorbachev who, between 2004 and 2018, contributed eight op-eds to the New York Times, the sixth of which focused on climate change and the eighth on the perilous renewal of a nuclear arms race. Gorbachev was deeply troubled by George W. Bush's decision to withdraw from the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (which Putin called a "mistake") and Donald Trump's similar decision to pull out of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Does anyone doubt that Gorbachev would have been equally disturbed by the Biden administration's virtual severance of diplomatic relations with Russia?

• Daniel Brumberg: [08-30] The Russia-Ukraine Jeddah meeting reflects a changing global order.

• Stephen F Eisenman: [09-01] Some people will hate me for writing this: End the war! Sounds like some people already do. Every war starts with efforts to suppress doubters and dissenters in one's own ranks, which no one doubts happened in Russia this time, but has been relentless here as well (albeit stopping short of arrests, unlike the World Wars and, in some cases, Vietnam). Lately we've been warned that casting doubt on the counteroffensive's prospects is catering to Russia, and that even suggesting talks should begin before Ukraine is ready implies we're eager to sell them out. My counter is that the war will never end until negotiators on all sides decide to end it, and that you'll never know whether that is even possible until you've set up a forum for negotiation.

• Ellen Francis: [09-02] Nobel Prize foundation scraps plan to invite Russia, Belarus after criticism: Ukraine may be having trouble with their counteroffensive, but they're winning regularly at shaming international bodies into petty slighting of Russia.

• Keith Gessen: [08-29] The case for negotiating with Russia: Draws on RAND analyst Samuel Charap, co-author of the 2016 book, Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Russia. Since then, everyone has continued to lose, the pace accelerating with the February, 2023 invasion. I'd argue that all wars are, as he puts it, "negative-sum games," but the case here is especially easy.

  But among "defense intellectuals," that's a minority view -- in my formulation, it would probably disqualify you permanently from employment. Gessen quotes Eliot A. Cohen as saying:

  Ukraine must not only achieve battlefield success in its upcoming counteroffensives; it must secure more than orderly Russian withdrawals following cease-fire negotiations. To be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles.

  The implicit assumption is that it's possible to inflict such a defeat on Russia without further escalation or recourse: that Putin (or some other Russian who might ascend to power) will take such a catastrophic defeat gracefully, as opposed to, say, blowing the world up. Note that if Putin is really as irreconcilable as people like Cohen make him out to be, that's exactly what he would do in that circumstance.

• Joe Lauria: [08-29] US victim of own propaganda in Ukraine War.

• Anatol Lieven:

  • [08-30] Few Russians wanted the war in Ukraine -- but they won't accept a Russian defeat either. As bad as Putin has been -- for America, for Europe, even (especially?) for Russia -- replacing him could get a lot worse. The kind of embarrassing, punishing defeat that Cohen (above) demands has been tried before, especially at Versailles after WWI, and tends to backfire spectacularly.

  • [08-31] Sarkozy vilified for speaking uncomfortable truths about Ukraine: The quorted sections from Sarkozy's book seem pretty reasonable to me. I've said all along that we should allow for internationally-supervised referenda in the disputed territories. If Crimea, say, wants to be part of Russia, it should be. Granted, it's harder to do now than it was before the invasion, but it should be possible. I think that a similar procedure should also be used to resolve disputes in Georgia, Serbia, and elsewhere. If Scotland wishes to avail itself of a referendum, we should allow it. It's easy enough to propose solutions on other issues as well. But at some point Russia has to see NATO as a purely defensive pact -- which NATO could help make more plausible with less war-gaming, something that should be but doesn't have to be reciprocal -- and the EU as simply an economic club, which Russia could conceivably join. On the other hand, the US and allies need to see a path to dropping the sanctions against Russia, and reintegrating Russia into the world economy. Granted, there are problems with the way Russia runs itself, but that's really their own business. One thing that would help would be an international treaty providing a right to exile, so real or potential political prisoners in any country could appeal to go to some other country. It's hard to get a country like Russia to agree to peaceful coexistence, but a necessary first step would be to tone down the criticism, the meddling, the menace, and the isolation. In the long run, none of us can afford this level of hostility.

Alice Speri: [] Prigozhin's legacy is the global rise of private armies for hire.

Israel:

• Al Jazeera: [09-03] Israel's Netanyahu calls for deportation of Etitrean refugee 'rioters'.

• Jonathan Coulter: [09-03] A seditious project: "Asa Winstanley's book shows how the Israel lobby facilitated the influence of a foreign government's interests in dictating who gets to lead the Labour Party, causing the downfall of Jeremy Corbyn." The book is Weaponizing Anti-Semitism: How the Israel Lobby Brought Down Jeremy Corbyn. Of course, the Lobby is also active trying to purge any whiff of criticism from the Democratic Party, but Corbyn was their biggest victim, all the more critical as the Labour Party replaced him with the second coming of Tony Blair ("Bush's poodle").

• Nada Elia: [08-30] Golda: A failed attempt to boost Israel's propaganda: There is a new movie about the Israeli Prime Minister (1969-74), with Helen Mirren in the title role. Looking at the film's plot on Wikipedia, I see that it focuses on the 1973 war, when initial setbacks led Meir to prepare to use nuclear weapons, and the immediate aftermath, which led to recriminations over allowing those setbacks. But it also notes: "Anwar Sadat, who like Golda Meir publicly speaks English, agrees to establish diplomatic relations to Israel in exchange for the return of the Sinai Peninsula." Sadat offered that shortly after the war, but Meir didn't agree to any such deal. That was Menachim Begin in 1979, under heavy pressure from Jimmy Carter. By the way, one of the few stories I like about Meir is how she casually referred to Begin, when he joined the war cabinet in 1967, as "the fascist." (Begin doesn't appear in the film's cast, although there are a bunch of generals, and Liev Schreiber playing Henry Kissinger.)

  Although the 1973 war occurred at the pinnacle of Meir's political career, I doubt her leadership was any more decisive than Levi Eshkol's was in 1967. In both wars, the key character was Moshe Dayan, and the difference was that he was the aggressor in 1967, but in 1973 he had to play defense, which wasn't as much fun, especially as it punctured the air of invincibility he had built up through 1967. The key lesson of 1973 is that if you refuse to negotiate with your enemies, as Meir had done, they may eventually decide that their only option is war, and at that point all sorts of bad things can happen. But to make sense out of 1973, you need a lot more context than they're likely to provide, especially given the usual propaganda mission.

  I imagine that a more interesting film could be made about Meir when she was younger, about how she became the only woman in the Histadrut and Mapai inner circles, where she probably overcome the default sexism by becoming the toughest character in the room -- not unlike Mirren's character in Prime Suspect. That would have been a tougher movie to sell, especially without Mirren, and it would be hard to present those times accurately, and easy to wallow in post-facto mythmaking.

  Having gone on at this length about Meir, I should close with a quote of hers, which in my mind is possibly the most obnoxiously self-flattering thing any political figure ever said:

  When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.

  But peace hasn't happened, and this attitude goes a long way to explaining why. More on Golda:

  • Sonja Anderson: [] The real history behind the 'Golda' movie: A fairly detailed biographic sketch of Meir's life, but very little to explain the conflict leading to the 1973 war.

  • David Klion: [09-01] The strange feminism of Golda. Regarding director Nattiv's motives: "The answer seems to be that he is more interested in rescuing the dignity of Israel's founding generation in the context of its current political crisis." Still, that generation was at the root and heart of Israel's later militarism and apartheid. To hold them up as models barely rebukes Netanyahu and Ben Gvir for bad manners.

• Joseph Massad: [08-31] Ben Gvir's racist comments are no different from those if Israel's founders. Quotes from Theodor Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Vladimir Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, even the usually circumspect Abba Eban.

• Peter Shambrook: [08-25] Policy of Deceit: Britain and Palestine, 1914-1939: An extract from a new book of that title. One of the first books I read on the subject was Tom Segev: One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, which I recommend, although there is certainly more detail that can be added.

• Richard Silverstein: [08-29] Why the US must not add Israel to its visa waiver programme.

Around the world:

• Sarah Dadouch: [08-23] Saudi forces killed hundreds of Ethiopians at Yemen border, report says.

  • Missy Ryan/Sarah Dadouch/John Hudson/Karen DeYoung: [08-31] US presses Saudi Arabia on reported migrant massacres.

• Brian Finucane: [07-17] Dangerous words: The risky rhetoric of US war on Mexican cartels: "War talk will only serve to strain US-Mexico ties." This has mostly come from Republicans, including Trump, DeSantis, and Lindsey Graham, who want to outdo each other in declaring the cartels to be "foreign terrorist organisations" and bombing them as indiscriminately like the US bombs Somalia. More:

  • Heather Digby Parton: [09-01] "War on Mexico": Republicans ramp up calls for military action as they blast Democrats as warmongers.

• Ellen Ioanes: [08-27] Zimbabwe's elections herald more of the same.

• Jen Kirby: [08-29] China's economy is slowing down. What gives? Interview with Stephen Morgan. I'm not making much sense out of it. China's GDP growth forecast for 2023 is 5 percent. That's less than the ten-percent growth of recent years, but it's still double the worldwide growth rate. It's like he's trying to measure China with rules they've never been held to.

• Paul Krugman: [08-21] How scary is China's crisis?; and [08-31] Why is China in so much trouble? I've come to be pretty skeptical of the China doomsayers, because, well, they've always been wrong. So I take these pieces with the usual measure of salt, but at least there's a plausible kernel of substance here: it seems that a big slice of the wealth China has accumulated has been channeled into a huge real estate bubble, which is a surefire recipe for panic and recession. That happened here in 2008, and Washington went into a tizzy, trying at least to save the banking class, while leaving the rest of us to adjust on our own. So if China does reach its own "Minsky moment," as Krugman notes: "the next few years may be quite ugly." But does it have to be? China managed its way through 2008 better than most, and same for 2020, especially compared to the armchair quarterbacks in the US financial press.

  Krugman, by the way, also wrote: [08-28] The paranoid style in American plutocrats, about the not-so-curious vortex of "the three C's: climate denial, Covid vaccine denial, and cryptocurrency cultism," especially common among tech moguls.

• Branko Marcetic: [08-31] The BRICS expansion isn't the end of the world order -- or the end of the world.

Other stories:

Rachel DuRose: [08-30] The US has new Covid-19 variants on the rise. Meet Eris and Fornax.

Bill Friskics-Warren: [09-02] Jimmy Buffett, roguish bard of island escapism, is dead at 76: I wasn't going to mention this here, but No More Mister Nice Blog picked out a selection of rabid hate comments from Breitbart on how awful his politics were (see Jimmy Buffett, Stalinist Nazi). Warms my heart more than his music ever did (and let's face it, I'd never turn down a "Cheeseburger in Paradise," although I must admit I've never gone to one of his restaurants for one). Few things drive right-wingers crazier than finding out a rich guy identifies with Democrats. By the way, this blog is almost always worth reading, but his piece Public Options is especially striking, as one that gets personal -- unusual for an author whose last name is M.

Sean Illing: [08-30] Is the populist right's future . . . democratic socialism? Interview with Sohrab Ahmari, explaining "why precarity is breaking our politics." You see some of this happening in multiparty systems in Europe, where it's possible to combine safety net support with conservative social concerns, resulting in a party that could ally with either right or left, but at least this two-party system has little choice to offer: you can get a better break on economics with the Democrats, but you have to accept living in a diverse and predominantly urban country; on the other hand, if you insist on the old "family values," you can get some lip-service from Republicans, but in the end their embrace of oligarchy will hurt you. I think such people should be more approachable by Democrats, but I'm even more certain that as long as they back Republicans, they will be screwed.

Eric Levitz: [08-31] Was American slavery uniquely evil? Not sure why this came up, other than that some right-wingers are irate about the tendency to view all (or at least many) things American as evil. As Levitz points out, all slave systems shared many of the same evils. One could argue that America was more exploitative because American slaveholders were more deeply enmeshed in capitalism, but it's hard to say that the French in Haiti and the British elsewhere in the Caribbean were less greedy. You can argue that America was more benign, because after the import of slaves ended, the numbers increased substantially, while elsewhere, like in Brazil, imports barely kept up with deaths. Plus there were many more slave revolts in Brazil and the Caribbean than in the US -- but still enough in the US to keep the masters nervous. As for reparations, which comes up tangentially here, I don't see how you can fix the past. But it would be possible to end poverty in the near future, and to make sure everyone has the rights they need going forward. History neither precludes nor promises that. It just gives you lots of examples of what not to do again.

By the way, Levitz cites a piece he wrote in 2021 about Israel and Palestinian rights: Why is this geopolitical fight different from all other fights? He offers three reasons, and admits one more ("Israel's role in the Christian right's eschatology is also surely a factor"). He omits one or two that have become even more salient since then: Israel is an intensely militarist nation, which makes it a role model for Americans (and some Europeans) who want an even larger and more aggressive military front. Israel is also the most racially and religiously stratified nation, with discriminatory laws, intense domestic surveillance, and strong public support for establishment religion, and some Americans would like to see some or all of that here, as well. I only quibble on the count because the prejudices seem to go hand-in-hand. On the other hand, many of the moderate and left people who have begun to doubt the blind support given Israel by nearly all politicians started with alarm at what Israel's biggest right-wing boosters want to also do to America.

Amanda Moore: [08-22] Undercover with the new alt-right: "For 11 months, I pretended to be a far-right extremist. I discovered a radical youth movement trying to infiltrate the Republican Party." But they're pretty obvious about that.

Jason Resnikoff: [08-31] How Bill Clinton became a neoliberal: Review of a book by Nelson Lichtenstein and the late Judith Stein (who started work on the book that Lichtenstein picked up): A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism. First I have to question whether the notion that Clinton wasn't any kind of neoliberal before he became president. The premise of the New Democrat movement was the promise to be better for business than the Republicans were, and Clinton's long tenure as governor of Arkansas, as WalMart and Tyson grew from regional to national businesses, suggests that he was good at it. Clinton certainly wasted no time throwing labor under the bus to pass NAFTA.

Sam Roberts: [09-02] Bill Richardson, champion of Americans held overseas, dies at 75: Former governor of New Mexico, served 14 years in Congress, was Secretary of Energy, held various diplomatic posts, including US Ambassador to the United Nations, ran for president in 2008, and engaged in more freelance diplomacy than anyone but Jimmy Carter. Curiously, there is only one line here about North Korea ("he went to North Korea to recover the remains of American soldiers killed in the Korean War," as if he had nothing more to talk to them about).

Nathan J Robinson:

• [08-31] "Conservatism" conserves nothing: "Whatever 'conservatism' is, it does not involve the conservation of a stable climate, or the polar ice caps, or the coral reefs, or the global food supply." The rejoinder is that the nation and the world are too far gone to be satisfied with just preserving the status quo, which is why others are more likely to call them reactionaries: they see change they don't like, and react fitfully, contemptuously, often violently. But not all change bothers them: what they hate above all is any challenge to the privileges of wealth, or any limit to their ability to accumulate more. Given that one of the easiest ways to get rich is to suck wealth from the earth, conservation is not only not in their portfolio, it's something they dread -- etymology be damned.

• [08-29] As cruel as it's possible to be: This week's example is Fox host Jesse Waters, who wants to make homeless people feel more ashamed for their misfortune, and argues that "the deaths of homeless people are a form of cosmic justice."

Kenny Torrella: [08-31] The myths we tell ourselves about American farming. One I should write more about, one of these days.

Bryan Walsh: [09-01] What America can learn from baseball (yes, baseball): "Baseball fixed itself by changing its rules. The country should pay attention." I used to know a lot about baseball. I could recall back to the 1957 all-star game lineups. (You know, the one where the Reds stuffed the ballot box so Gus Bell and Wally Post got more votes than Hank Aaron and Willie Mays.) And I looked up the rest. I was part of a club a friend started called Baseball Maniacs, out of which Don Malcolm started publishing his Big Bad Baseball annuals. (Malcolm was my co-founder on Terminal Zone, and he published my Hall of Fame study, I think in the 1998 Annual.) Then with the 1994 lockout, I lost all interest, and never returned, although I'm slightly more aware this year than I have been since 1994.

The difference is getting the "electronic edition" of the local paper, which is padded out with a ridiculously large sports section. While I speed click through everything else, that got me to following basketball more closely, so I wondered if I might pick up a bit of baseball while waiting for the season to change. A little bit is about right: I land on the standings page, so I know who's leading and who's beat, and sometimes look at the stats, but that's about all. I do know a bit about the rules changes, because I've read a couple pieces on them.

Walsh's point is that when people get too good at cornering the rules, it helps to change them up a bit. In baseball, that mostly means shorter games (not that they've gotten much shorter: Walsh says they've been dialed back to the 1980s, but I remember games that barely exceeded two hours). Walsh has plenty of other examples of "operating under a rule book that is out of date," many involving the gridlock in Congress. But baseball at least has incentive to change (although it took an insanely long time for the NL to accept the DH, even though watching pitchers try to hit was embarrassing even back in the 1950s).

Li Zhou: [08-31] Marijuana could be classified as a lower-risk drug. Here's what that means. Well, for starters it would reduce the quantity of complete nonsense the government swears on, which might make them more credible about drugs that pose real dangers beyond mere bad habits.

There's a meme titled "When the actual dictionary completely nails it." The text offers a dictionary definition:

trumpery, n.; pl. trumperies, [Fr. tromperie, from tromper, to deceive, cheat.]

1. deceit, fraud. [Obs.]
2. anything calculated to deceive by false show; anything externally splendid but intrinsically of little value; worthless finery.
3. things worn out and of no value; useless matter; trifles; rubbish; nonsense.
   This idolatrous trumpery and superstition.

Trump's German family name used to be Drumpf. After a brief search, I'm unclear as to exactly when, where, and why the name change occurred, but it does seem like a deliberate choice, if not necessarily a fully knowing one.

Aug 2023