Roaming Charges: Heckuva Job, Puppy Slayer!
Central Texas floods. Still from video posted to X.
“Ignorance might be bliss for the ignorant, but for the rest of us it’s a right fucking pain in the arse.”
– Ricky Gervais
While offering his “thoughts and prayers” for the families of those drowned in the Texas floods, JD Vance referred to the killer torrents that swept away more than 100 people, including dozens of children, as “an incomprehensible tragedy.”
“Incomprehensible?”
Only if you ignore the fact that the Girls Camp was allowed to be built and continue operating in one of the most flood-prone valleys in the US, that the climate crisis is making these floods much more frequent and then in order to give more tax breaks to billionaires you gutted the staff of the National Weather Service that could have given these vulnerable children warning of the imminent danger that would claim their lives …If you don’t ignore these facts, this tragedy was both entirely predictable and avoidable.
Trump put his own self-exculpating spin on the floods, saying they were impossible to foresee: “Nobody expected it. Nobody saw it.” In fact, almost anyone who knew the slightest thing about the area known as “Flood Alley” saw it coming. Because it had already come, more than once. Previous recent floods had killed 10 people in 1987, 31 people in 1998 and 26 people in 2015.
The hill country of central Texas contains some of the most flood-prone valleys in the United States. The Guadeloupe River was so flood-prone that the Kerr County sheriff had recommended installing a flash flood warning system back in 2016. And the Obama administration agreed to the request, only to have the Texas Division of Environmental Management.
Climate change has made the extreme rainfall episodes that have plagued this region of Texas for decades even more frequent and more lethal. In central Texas, the intensity of extreme rainfall events has increased by 19% since 1985.
On July 3, remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, which had whacked the gulf coast of Mexico earlier in the week, settled over central Texas, eventually dumping four months of rainfall on the Texas Hill Country (about 1.8 trillion gallon) in the next three days. That afternoon, the depleted ranks of the National Weather Service issued its first alert, warning of flash floods in the Guadalupe River valley, predicting rainfall totals of more than 6 inches in 12 hours. The predictions were made by a seriously understaffed NWS office in San Antonio, which lacked both a chief meteorologist and a warning coordination meteorologist.
It’s not just the NWS that finds itself overworked and understaff as the warming climate unleashes stronger and stronger storms. The slashes to NOAA’s budget and staffing are going to dangerously degrade accurate and timely predictions of the threats posed by tropical storms, cyclones and hurricanes. According to Dr. Frank Marks, a 45-year hurricane veteran, the staff needed to fly NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft is down by 50% this year.
This initial forecast proved to be a fatal underestimation and the emergency alert, urging residents to evacuate to higher ground (though how high that ground was and whether it was high enough remains unclear) didn’t come out until 4:30 in the morning. By 6:AM, it was too late, the river was already flowing at record flood levels. More than 20 inches of rain would fall on the Guadalupe Valley watershed in the next three days, causing the river to surge from 3.5 feet to 34.29 feet in less than an hour and a half, sweeping away houses, bridges, barns, roads, farm animals and at least 120 people (173 remain missing), including as many as 27 young girls and counselors at Camp Mystic, the summer camp for evangelical girls. Most of the cabins at the camp, run for years by Conservative Christians, were located in flood zones, some in areas label “extreme risk.”
In 2019, the owners of the camp completed a multi-million dollar renovation. But instead of moving the most vulnerable cabins out of the flood zone, it built more cabins inside it. Anna Serra-Lobet, a flood risk researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told the New York Times that allowing these cabins to be built in extreme risk “floodways” was “like pitching a tent in a highway. It’s going to happen, sooner or later. A car is going to come or a flood is going to come.”Anna Serra-Lobet, a flood risk researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told the New York Times that allowing these cabins to be built in extreme risk “floodways” was “like pitching a tent in a highway. It’s going to happen, sooner or later. A car is going to come or a flood is going to come.”
Texas Governor Gregg Abbott didn’t waste much time in urging a socialist response to the disaster, as he begged Trump for immediate help. The emergency aid wasn’t quick in coming, however. Indeed, FEMA’s response to the Texas floods was crippled by cost controls imposed on the agency by DHS head Kristi Noem, who didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue teams until Monday, more than 72 hours after the flooding began. Still Abbott rejected calls for an investigation into the lack of warnings and the bungled rescue operations, calling it “words of losers.” He presumably wasn’t talking about those who “lost” their lives and loved ones, though who knows given the hair-chested rhetoric he customarily deploys.
Days went by, as the death toll continued to mount, without a single word from Trump and Noem’s pick to head FEMA, David Richardson, prompting a FEMA staffer to denounce Richardson for showing “a lack of regard in disaster response, and a lack of care for communities that suffer through these disasters.”
Heckuva job, Puppy Slayer!
+++
+ Five years from now, we’ll long for the cool June of 2025…
+ Rep. Tim Burchett: “God put coal in the ground, let’s use it… There’s a reason as Trump told me that there’s no windmills in China.”
+ Paul Musgrave: “The China challenge isn’t what American policymakers think it is. It’s not primarily about security threats or unfair trade practices—it’s about Chinese companies making better products for less money, and winning hearts and minds in the process.”
+ China now dominates the global market share across every major sector of clean energy technology.
+ Wind and solar power together generated a quarter (26%) of the China’s electricity in April 2025. Wind power accounted for 13.6% of generation while solar contributed 12.4%.
+ Bill McKibben: “It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later, and the third will arrive either later this year or early next.” Largely thanks to China.
+ According to new research published in Nature Geoscience, climate change is making heatwaves hotter and longer in duration: “Each increment of regional time-averaged warming increases the characteristic duration scale of long heatwaves more than the previous increment.”
+ French “heatwaves” since 1947…
+ Public concern about climate change is declining even as extreme weather events are on the rise: “The nonprofit also found the share of people concerned about climate change has fallen over the past year, dipping from 68% to 60%. Support for the UK’s target to hit net zero emissions by 2050 fell even further, plunging from 62% to 46%.”
+ The UK has missed its tree planting targets by more than 36,000 hectares, an area about the size of the Isle of Wight.
+ A report published in the New Scientist finds that “offsetting the estimated 182 billion tons of carbon held in the reserves of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies would require covering more land with trees than the entirety of North and Central America.
+ New York’s congestion pricing program, which Trump has vowed to quash, seems to have succeeded in doing most of the things it was meant to do, that is reducing commute times and encouraging more commuters to use mass transit…
-$500M in revenue in 6 months
-Rush hour delays at Holland Tunnel down 65%
-Subway ridership up 7%
-Bus ridership up 12%
-Long Island Railroad ridership up 8%
-Metro-North ridership up 6%
-Access-A-Ride ridership up 21%
+ Transportation Sec. Sean Duffy: “It’s dangerous to ride the subway in New York … It’s just stupid liberals with stupid policies that impact the lives of New Yorkers”
+ Crimes per 1M mass transit trips…
+ NYC: 1.3
+ Miami: 2.6
* Dallas: 38.0
+ Every major US metropolitan area except one, offered fewer transit services in 2024 than it did in 2019, prior to the pandemic. The one standout: Dallas. Which was up by 5%.
Atlanta: -15%
Baltimore: -3%
Boston: -9%
Chicago: -8%
Dallas: +5
Denver: -30%
Detroit: -20%
Houston: -9%
Las Vegas: -3%
Los Angeles: -8%
Miami: -4%
Minneapolis: -12%
New York: -5%
Philadelphia: 12%
Phoenix: -8%
Portland: -8%
Riverside: -25%
Sacramento: 1%
San Antonio: -17%
San Francisco: -5%
Seattle: -14%
St. Louis: -20%
Tampa: -7%
Washington, DC: -1%
+++
+ This is an official communication from what will soon become the largest and spookiest domestic police agency in the history of the US, its armed and armored agents roving the country like masked wraiths, equipped with a more lavish budget than the US Marines and bigger than the militaries of many large countries, including Brazil.
+ ICEtroopers on horseback make made-for-TV raid to terrorize people enjoying a sunny July day in LA’s MacArthur Park…
+ In filings with the United Nations, El Salvador unequivocally said that while it “facilitated the use of the Salvadoran prison infrastructure” by the Trump Administration, “the jurisdiction and legal responsibility for these persons lie exclusively with the U.S.” This completely contradicts the Trump administrations repeated assertions in federal court that the U.S. has no control over the people it sent without trial into El Salvador’s notorious prisons.
In 2020, a lawsuit was filed against Trump’s CBP/ICE for racial profiling in the area around Havre, Montana. These agents weren’t fired. They’ve been promoted into leadership of the current pogroms…
+ When you’ve lost Joe Rogan and the Catholic Church on the same day…
Rogan: “It’s insane. The targeting of migrant workers, not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers. Just construction workers showing up on construction sites and raiding them.”
Cardinal McElroy, Archbishop of Washington, DC: “It’s right to be able to control our borders. However, what’s going on now is something far beyond that. It’s not only incompatible with Catholic teaching, it’s inhumane and morally repugnant.”
+ The Catholic Diocese of San Bernardino has issued an extraordinary dispensation permitting its congregation to skip Mass for fear of the mass arrest and deportations of its parishioners on their way to or from church…
+ At Trump and DeSantis’s Alligator Auschwitz, noncitizens with green cards are being held in Gitmo-like conditions. It floods. The toilets don’t flush. Temperatures swing from freezing to sweltering. The showers don’t work. There are no confidential calls with lawyers. There are maggots in the food. The lights are kept blazing 24 hours a day. There’s limited access to medicine and doctors. One man had his Bible snatched away and was told, “Here there is no right to religion.”
+ According to the CBO’s analysis of what Cato’s David Bier calls the One Big Police State bill, Trump’s mass deportation raids will concentrate on working-age noncitizens (not the gangs, rapists and insane asylum escapees Trump kept fulminating about)…
+ The Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins (former Queen of the Cotton Bowl Classic), thinks that she can mass deport all immigrant farmworkers and replace them with automation and people forced to work to keep their Medicaid…”I can’t underscore enough. There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations will continue. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation and with 34 million able-bodied people on Medicaid we should able to do this fairly quickly.”
+ Here’s how Trump–who has now authorized home invasions by masked ICEtroopers to encourage self-deportations–explained Mitt Romney’s loss to Obama in 2012…
+ Trump’s only consistent ideology is that of power: gaining it, holding it and exercising it to his own profit and advantage.
+ Trump is terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Honduras and Nicaragua, meaning that he is revoking the legal status of more than 50,000 people, who have lived here productively for the last quarter century and have passed background checks every year and a half. What possible justification can there be for this kind of official cruelty other than racism?
+ Carol Miller, a public health nurse and Green Party activist from northern New Mexico, provided a plausible if ominous answer: “The reason is to normalize roundups and detention of people who are being deported to any willing country or cage fighting in the WH circus. Each level of cruelty and lawlessness is testing the limits of absolute power and there is no other rationale or law.”
+ The immigrant population (meaning foreign born) of the US is around 42 million. The Hispanic population of the country is 65 million. Loomer and her ill-willed ilk apparently want all of them interned at Alligator Auschwitz Their goal is ethnic cleansing not limiting immigration.
+ A few weeks ago it was reported that Kristi Noem was in discussions with the producers of Duck Dynasty to develop a “reality” show where detained migrants compete against each other to “win” the right to reside in the US. Last week Trump said he plans to host cage fights on the lawn of the White House. Then came this posting from the Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter account, where the White House, looking as if it’s situated in the “darkest depths of Mordor,” is fitted out for what appears to be a cage fight pitting noncitizens against each other in a Trump/Noem version of Squid Game…
+++
+ According to a piece in the Atlantic on why evangelical Christians turned their backs on aid to help poor countries combat HIV infections: “More than 75,000 adults and children are now estimated to have died because of the effective shutdown of PEPFAR that began less than 6 months ago. Another adult life is being lost every 3 minutes; a child dies every 31 minutes.”
+ 14 million preventable deaths, 4.5 million of the children.
+ The ongoing measles outbreak in the US is the highest in 33 years, with declining vaccination rates leading to a resurgence of the virus US declared eradicated more than three decades ago.
+ Dr. Abdul el-Sayed, running for US Senate in Michigan: “$17.99/month is already too much for Netflix. Now imagine after binging every episode of Bridgerton, they charge you an extra $19.99 to watch the season finale. Well, that’s how our healthcare system works.”
+ Tell Tchaikovsky the news…(He’s likely to do more about it from his grave than Schumer or Jeffries.)
Do you support or oppose “Medicare for all”?
Support: 59%
Oppose: 27%New Economist/YouGov poll
+ A new study finds that air pollutants are causing DNA mutatiing lung-cancers in non-smokers: “Our research shows that air pollution is strongly associated with the same types of DNA mutations we typically associate with smoking,” Prof Ludmil Alexandrov, a lead author of the study, told The Guardian.
+++
+ You don’t even have to read between the lines to know what Israel has planned for Gaza. Just read the lines.
+ The plan calls for the hoarding of Gaza’s population into concentration camps, followed by the forced evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza. The Boston Consulting Group now claims that its reconstruction plan for a Gaza ethnically cleansed of Palestinians was the work of two rogue employees, who were “exited from the company” after the scheme leaked to the Financial Times. But among the “rogues” complicit in the scheme was none other than Tony Blair, roving miscreant without a portfolio.
+ Trump on Netanyahu, the international fugitive who was welcomed to the White House for the third time this year: “The greatest man in the world.”
Reporter: “Do you know how many Americans the Israeli military has killed in the past 20 months?”
Sen. Susan Collins: [Silencio.]
Reporter: “No insight on the Americans killed by the Israeli military, Senator?”
Collins: “I’m pro-Israel!”
+ You don’t say, Susan.
+ What the Washington Post calls “flaws,” Israeli troops themselves say were “orders”…
+ Sky News interviewed an Israeli reservist who served in Gaza who said that IDF troops killed Palestinian civilians at random, with orders to shoot often depending “on the mood of the commander.”
“[We shoot] pretty much everyone that comes into the territory, and it might be like a teenager riding his bicycle… They [the commanders] don’t really talk to you about civilians.”
+ These may soon become the rules of engagement for ICE here in the States.
+ If you refuse to leave your home, where your family has lived for decades on land Israel occupies militarily but has no legal right to, Israel awards itself the “legal justification” to kill you…
+ You can now stream Gaza: Doctors Under Attack, the documentary on Medicide that The BBC commission and then pulled following public comments by one of the film’s directors calling Israel a “rogue state,” here on Channel 4…
+ While the BBC canceled the broadcast of a documentary on medicide in Gaza, Haaretz presses on with new revelations about Israel’s intentional destruction of Gaza’s medical infrastructure, including the destruction of nearly every hospital and clinic in Gaza and the killing of more than 1580 medical workers …
+ A letter signed by more than 100 BBC journalists and staff claimed they were forced to do pro-Israel PR:
“We’re writing to express our concerns over opaque editorial decisions and censorship at the BBC on the reporting of Israel/Palestine. We believe the refusal to broadcast the documentary ‘Gaza: Medics Under Fire’ is just one in a long line of agenda driven decisions. It demonstrates, once again, that the BBC is not reporting “without fear or favor” when it comes to Israel.”
+ “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation,” Avner Cohen, a former Israeli religious affairs official who worked in Gaza for more than two decades, told the Wall Street Journal in 2009.
+ One of the largest teacher’s unions in the US voted to sever all times with the Anti-defamation League over its smearing of students and teachers as anti-semites for protesting the genocide in Gaza. One NEA member: “Why would we partner with an organization that does us harm?”
+ Daniella Lock writing in the LRB on the UK’s decision to label Palestine Action a terrorist group: ‘Given the large numbers of people it is likely to turn into “terrorists”, proscribing Palestine Action could impose a significant burden on the state to increase its surveillance of citizens who pose no threat, at a time when MI5 claims already to have “one hell of a job on its hands”. Its undermining of civil society may also make it harder to hold the government accountable for the proper use of terrorism powers. On the current picture, the real threat to the life of the nation comes not from Palestine Action but from the home secretary’s attempt to proscribe it.’
+ Liam Cunningham: “In Britain it is now terrorism to spray red paint on a plane. That same plane used to dismember children is not terrorism. This is where we are.”
+ Zohran Mamdani didn’t say “globalize the Intifada,” but Rep. Randy Fine did say this (and much worse) to Ilhan Omar, eliciting no outrage, or even notice, from the press, never mind a Congressional censure. Islamophobia isn’t just tolerated by the elites in US politics and media, they share it…
+ From 2020-2024, 54% of Pentagon spending ($2.4 trillion) went to private contractors, according to a report by Stephen Semler and Brown’s Cost of War Project. In the last five years, the top five Pentagon contractors alone have pocketed more tan $770 billion from the war-making budget. Thanks, Joe Biden!
+ In Iowa last week, Trump celebrated passage of his ruinous budget bill with his own verbal version of a Nazi salute: “Think of that: No death tax. No estate tax. No going to the banks and borrowing from, in some cases, a fine banker – and in some cases, Shylocks and bad people.”
+ When questioned by a reporter about using one of the oldest anti-Semitic slurs, Trump claimed ignorance of its literary roots but demonstrated he clearly understood the meaning of the anti-Jewish stereotype that dates back to the Middle Ages: “No, I’ve never heard it that way. To me, Shylock is somebody that, say, a money lender at high rates.” Clearly he knew Shylock was a lender, if not the iambic pentameter speaking one in the Merchant of Venice.
+ In yet another unflattering parallel, Joe Biden also invoked Shakespeare’s infamous loan shark–who guaranteed his usurious loans with the collateral of a pound of flesh–in an impromptu swerve from his teleprompter during a speech on payday loans to military families while Obama’s VP in 2014: “Shylocks who took advantage of these women and men while overseas.” Biden later apologized for what he called his “poor choice of words.”
+ “Words, words, words.” So sayeth, the Danish prince (and Bo Burnham).
+++
+ What does it take to unite the “leaders” of the Democratic Party of New York? The threat of Zohran Mamdani (who garnered the most votes ever recorded in a NYC mayoral primary) becoming mayor of NYC and wrecking their Tammany Hall-like grip on power.
+ The real reasons they’re desperate to keep Mamdani from taking office. This shit might catch on!
Nationally – Net Support For Mamdani’s Policies:
Raises Taxes On Corporations/Millionaires: +43%
Free Child Care For Children Under 5 Years: +38%
Freezing Rent For Lower-Income Tenants: +38%
Government-Owned Grocery Stores: +20%
Eliminating Fares On Public Buses: +10%
YouGov / June 30, 2025
+ The Zohran Effect..(It’s about more than the beard, Mayor Petebot.)
+ Didn’t the Republicans used to be the party of limited government, local control and state’s rights?
+ It’s surely worth noting that NYC’s most famous and successful mayor, Fiorello “the Little Flower” LaGuardia, was a socialist and a Republican.
+ Yes, Zohran Mamdani was only seven when he was “permitted in” and apparently, as much as his parents tried to gag their precocious child, they couldn’t stop him from reciting “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” from memory during his immigration interview, but at the end of the day the CBP agent decided what he heard made a lot of sense and let the pipsqueak revolutionary in…
+ In one of his books, Zohran’s father, the acclaimed political scientist Mahmoud Mamdani, described how his own introduction to Marx came courtesy of the FBI, during his interrogation after being arrested at a SNCC civil rights protest in Selma, Alabama…
They wanted to know who had influenced me. After one hour of probing, the guy said, “Do you like Marx?”
I said, “I haven’t met him.”
Guy said,” “No, no, he’s dead.”
“Wow, what happened?”
“No, no, he died long ago
I thought the guy Marx had just died. So then,
“Why are you asking me if he died long ago?”
“No, he wrote a lot. He wrote that poor people should not be poor.”
I said, “Sounds amazing.”
I’m giving you a sense of how naive I was. After they left, I went to the library to look for Marx. So that was my introduction to Karl Marx.
+ Joe Scarborough: “Why is it that in the Democratic Party, the three most compelling figures” have been “the mayoral candidate [Zohran Mamdani], Bernie Sanders and AOC. Why can’t moderate Democrats…make that same compelling message?” To ask this question, Joe, means you’ll never accept the answer…
+ Question for Dean (“I’m a Younger Joe Biden”) Phillips on CNN this week: “Is there room for a Zohran Mamdani and a Dean Phillips in the Democratic Party?”
Phillips: ”The answer ultimately I think is no.”
Dean who?
Mamdani won more votes in the NYC mayoral primary (565,639), than Dean Phillips did in his entire 2024 presidential campaign across 20 states , before his scarcely-noticed withdrawal after Super Tuesday (529,486).
+ Asked about threats to primary incumbent Democrats, Rep. Ritchie Torres, who last week vowed not run for governor of New York if Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of NYC, quipped. defiantly: “We couldn’t care less about Mickey Mouse primary challenges. We do not care about the Democratic Socialists of America.” Famous Last Words, Ritchie…
+++
+ Philly sanitation workers make a *maximum* annual salary of $42,000
Philly cops make a *minimum* annual salary of $69,492
+ These “micro-retirements” used to be called vacations. They still exist, but increasingly only if you’re in a union…
+ Federal Reserve: “Since 1989, the share of American household wealth held by the top 0.1% has increased by more than 60%. For comparison, the share of those in the 99% to 99.9% range increased about 20%, those whose wealth is in the 90% to 99% range fell 4.1%, those in the 50% to 90% range fell 17%, and the bottom 50% of the population has fallen about 46% in their share of the national wealth.”
+ At some point, you’d think a political party would say something about this (other than “Let’s give the people who hold a fistful of billions another tax break”). In fact, you might think they’d make it their core issue, especially in an age where people seem to eagerly consume populist economic rhetoric. But any lone wolf politician who does, like Sanders or Mamdani, gets car-jacked by his own side as soon as the words “economic inequality” leave their lips and their followers are scolded to embrace “abundance” theory (aka, trickledown economics for Hipsters) instead.
+ Venice Strikes Back: Bloomberg reported that Amazon’s first day traffic for Prime Day was down 41%.
+ If you didn’t know this letter to South Korea’s president threatening to impose punitive tariffs unless he capitulates to the White House’s increasingly arbitrary demands closes with Trump’s signature, you’d be forgiven for thinking it might have been written by Crazy Eddie…
+ Trump had promised to make 90 trade deals in 90 days–150 days later, he’s signed two minor ones. Desperate to stir up some action, Trump’s staff fired off almost identical letters to dozens of countries, big and small, including one to Bosnia and Herzegovina, addressed as follows…
+ Just one hitch. “Mr. President”? Here’s Željka Cvijanović …
+ Gaston Bachelard: “The words of the world want to make sentences.” I’m afraid the desire of the words will always remain unfilled when emanating from this White House.
+ When asked at the Alligator Auschwitz press conference on July 1, if there was an expected timeline for how long detainees would be kept in the concentration camp in the swamp, “would it be days, weeks, months?” Trump rambled on incoherently about how long he will stay in Florida:
In Florida? I’m going to spend a lot in my home state. I love it. I love your government.I love all of the people around.These are all friends of mine. They know them very well. I’m not surprised that they do so well. These are great people. Ron has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very comfortable in the state. I will spend a lot of time here. I want to, you know, for four years I’ve got to be in Washington. And I’m okay with it because I love the White House. I even fixed up the little Oval Office. I think it’s like a diamond. It’s beautiful. So beautiful. Wasn’t maintained properly. I will tell you that. But even when it wasn’t, it’s still the Oval Office, so it meant a lot.But I’ll spend as much time as I can. You know, my vacation is generally here because it’s convenient. I live in Palm Beach. It’s my home. And I have a very nice little place with a nice little cottage to stay. All right? But we have a lot of fun. And I’m a big contributor to Florida and pay a lot of tax. And a lot of people move from New York and I don’t what New York is going to do. A lot of people move to Florida from New York, and it’s for a lot of reasons, but one of them is taxes. The taxes are so high in New York, they’ll leave. I don’t know what New York is going to do about that, because some of the biggest and wealthiest people, and some of the people who pay the most taxes of any people in the world, for that matter. They’re moving to Florida and other places. So we’re going to have to help some of these states out, I think. But thank you very much! I’ll be here as much as I can. Very nice question.
+ Very nice, indeed.
+ During a lunch with African leaders on Wednesday, Trump complimented Joseph Nyuma Boakai, the president of Liberia, on how well he spoke English, apparently ignorant of the fact that it’s been the country’s official language since its founding in 1847 by the American Colonization Society as a settlement for freed American slaves. Of course, Biden made similar remarks about Barack Obama during the 2008 Democratic primaries…
+ This week the Trump Justice Department concluded to the consternation of MAGAworld that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t have a client list, never attempted to blackmail anyone, killed himself and that the only people who committed any crimes involving the more than 1000 girls and women, many of whom were under the age of consent, who had the grave misfortune to enter his rapine orbit were Epstein himself and his procurer Ghislaine Maxwell…By next week, they might be denying he had plane or an island to land it on.
+ FoxNews is so invested in the Clinton offed Epstein theory that they’re finally giving Trump’s people a hard time for “burying” it.
DOOCY: So what happened to the Epstein client list that the attorney general said she had on her desk?
LEAVITT: I think if you go back and look at what the attorney general said
DOOCY: I’ve got the quote. She said, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”
+ Trump angrily interrupted a reporter’s question to Pam Bondi about the FBI’s findings (or lack thereof) on the Epstein case: “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking…We have Texas, we have this…we have all of these things. Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable. You want to waste the time?”
+ Glenn Greenwald on Trump’s response to the Epstein non-revelations, which is basically Trump’s response to every question he finds annoying or inconvenient: “I mean, how anyone who is a Trump supporter can listen to that and not feel completely condescended to and devalued and ignored is something I’ll never understand.”
+ Cat got your tongue, JD?
+ Greg Grandin: “The Epstein case has officially been classified as an X File and handed over to special agents working out of a basement office.”
+++
“Recent discoveries” have led the wife of Texas’s family-values spouting AG Ken Paxton to file for divorce…
+ Speaking of family values among the far right…As I was walking Lola along the rim of the canyon at 4:30 in the morning on Tuesday, I caught an interview with Mary Lovell on the BBC History podcast about Unity Mitford, the aristocratic Mitford sister who stalked Adolf Hitler across the cafés of Berlin in 1937 and may have (and at very least deeply desired to) become his lover. Unity’s sister Diana, another Nazi-admirer who had a scandalous affair with and later married British fascist Oswald Mosley in the house of their dear friends Josef and Magda Goebbels, thought Unity’s coital desire was never consummated because Hitler was more aroused by other matters, like invading Poland and rounding up Jews, homosexuals and Communists. “She definitely would’ve,” Diana speculated. “But Adolf had a low sex drive.” Even so, Unity and the Fürher became intimate friends, though perhaps without carnal benefits. When Hitler confessed to Unity that war with Britain was inevitable and she should leave Munich for England, she instead went out in the middle of a street and shot herself in the head with the pearl-handled pistol Hitler had gifted her, badly it turned out, because she blew part of her face off but not enough of her brains out to extinguish herself. She was sent to a hospital in England for a long recovery, where she was eventually found to be pregnant. Rumors circulated for years that Unity carried Hitler’s spawn. In fact a film maker made an entire documentary asserting the truth of the story. Then he interviewed the Mitfords’ biographer, the aforementioned Mary Lovell, who told the documentarian if it really was Hitler’s child it would be the “longest gestation in history,” since Unity Valkyrie Mitford gave birth 14 months after arriving in England. The film maker replied tartly, “This is really problematic because the film is basically done.” When the documentary finally aired, it spent 55 minutes arguing that Unity was impregnated by Hitler and gave the last 5 minutes to Lovell proving this couldn’t possibly be the case. How many people will claim to be (or have given birth to) a Trump love child in the next 20 years?
+ Who says, Americans are not achievers anymore? Don’t tell Joey Chestnut: “The time to consume one hot dog in the international contest has fallen by 96.3 percent since 1967. To put it in perspective, for every hot dog Walter Paul ate in 1967, Joey Chestnut downed 26.6.”
+ Alex Abramovich writing in the LRB on Chuck Berry’s first hit: “Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ recently turned seventy. Recorded on 21 May 1955 in a studio on the South Side of Chicago, it tells the story of a man chasing his girlfriend down the highway. He’s in a Ford V8, she’s driving a Cadillac. She’s cheating, the car’s overheating, he’s trying to catch her before she gets away for good. ‘Maybellene’ isn’t Chuck Berry’s best song but it was his first single. Without it there’d be no Bob Dylan. No rock and roll as we know it. It’s a miracle.” Check out this performance backed by an Italian jazz combo…The Italians probably hadn’t seen anything like this since one of Nero’s boat parties on Lake Como.
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
Little Red Barns: Hiding the Truth, From Farm to Fable
Will Potter
(City Lights)
The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests
G.E.M. de Ste. Croix
(Verso)
Rise of the Zombie Bugs: The Surprising Science of Parasitic Mind-Control
Mindy Weisberger
(Johns Hopkins)
Sound Grammar
The best jazz recordings of 2025, so far…
Here’s my Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll ballot for the best new jazz and reissues at the mid-point of the otherwise dismal year of 2025. The results can be found on Tom’s informative site and later on ArtsFuse.
Best New Albums
1. The Music of Anthony Braxton
Steve Lehman Trio + Mark Turner
(Pi Recordings)
2. Fukushima
Sinsuke Fujieda Group
(So Fa Records)
3. Apple Cores
James Brandon Lewis Trio
(Anti-)
4. Defiant Life
Vijay Iyer and Wadada Leo Smith
(ECM)
5. Consentrik Quartet
Nels Cline
(Blue Note)
6. A Paradise in the Hold
Yazz Ahmed
(Night Time Stories)
7. New Dawn
Marshall Allen
(Mexican Summer)
8. Spirit Fall
John Patitucci
(Edition Records)
9. For the Love of It All
Brandon Woody
(Blue Note)
10. Entrance Music
Okonski
(Colemine)
Rara/Avis (Reissues/Archival)
1. City Life
Blackbyrds
(Jazz Dispensary)
2. Landslide
Dexter Gordon
(Blue Note/Tone Poet)
3. An Afternoon in Norway: the Koenigsberg Concert
Art Pepper
(Elemental)
4. On Fire: Live From the Blue Morocco
Freddie Hubbard
(Resonance)
5. Further Ahead: Live in Finland
Bill Evans
(Elemental)
Pulling the Emergency Cord
“There is a tendency among the Left today—and I mean all varieties of the Left—of being reduced to protecting things. It is a kind of conservatism; saving all the things that capitalism destroys which range from nature to communities, cities, culture and so on. The Left is placed in a very self-defeating nostalgic position, just trying to slow down the movement of history. There is a line by Walter Benjamin that epitomizes that—though I don’t know how he thought of that himself—revolutions are ‘pulling the emergency cord,’ stopping the onrush of the train.”
– Frederic Jameson
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