Roaming Charges: Footprints Dressed in Red 

A tyrant institutionalizes stupidity, but he is the first servant of his own system and the first to be installed within it.

– Gilles Delueze

+ The best story of the summer so far is Trump fleeing the NATO summit in a catering cart….The great American bully sneaking away in a white van filled with cupcakes, eclairs, and macarons, as his Qatari-gifted luxury jet sat on the tarmac, deemed too easy a target for Iranian missiles that Pistol Pete Hegseth had supposedly bombed out of existence, is an image that will stay with me for a long time. I hope Trump didn’t forget, as Clemenza admonished Michael Corleone in The Godfather, to “take the cannoli” home to the ever-adulatory Natalie Harp, his Human Printer. But, alas, fearing for his life, he probably did.

+ Even though the CIA said it had little confidence in the intelligence (courtesy of the Israelis, natch) that Iran was plotting to knock down (Qatari) Air Force One, Trump had reason to be spooked. After all, the Iranians had succeeded in taking out 25 percent of the Pentagon’s stockpile of Reaper drones, at $120 million a drone. So Trump turned tail and ran up one door of the plane, out the other and into the pastry van. Well, he didn’t run so much as lurched, perhaps in a leg brace. 

+ Of course, Iran can’t feel too triumphant about downing all those overpriced drones. In a recent war game pitting the US against Ukraine’s drone force, the Ukrainians kicked the Pentagon’s ass, wiping out an entire US tank brigade. The US military isn’t what it once was and hasn’t been since around 1946.

+ The fact that it was all caught on video, Trump leaving a trail of footsteps dressed in red, seems like a pretty serious lapse in the security for his escape plan, especially when you consider that Trump hires “only the best people”…

+ At -27 percent, Trump’s approval rating has sunk to an all-time low, falling even lower than after the J6 riots (-19 percent)…Yet, Democrats may still not take the House in November, according to a recent Washington Post analysis, which tells you all you need to know about their state of dysfunction.

+ As Trump deflates towards the lowest approval ratings of any president since Herbert Hoover (-27 percent), Comrade Mamdani floats at an Olympian +45 among the residents of the only city Trump ever wanted to be adored by…

NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani favorables
(New York City surveyed)

Favorable 69%

Unfavorable 24%

(Highest favorability yet according to Siena)
Siena poll | 8/3-8/6 LV

+ Trump putting the Cracked into Crackpot, after Al-Sayed won the Michigan Democratic Senate primary:

We have jihadists being elected all over the place. Whether it’s communism. Jihadism. You know, a friend of mine called up and said, “You know, really, you should use the word, ‘Jihadis’ because that’s what’s happening.” And if you look at what’s happening in other countries, I think that’s not necessarily how we want to live. But when you look at the radicalism and the craziness of the candidates and the stupidity of what they’re suggesting: Let’s get rid of the Supreme Court. Let’s get rid of the presidency. Let’s get rid of the Senate. They want to get rid of the Senate. Sometimes, I’d like to get rid of the Senate too. They want to get rid of the House. But they’re thinking about maybe keeping the House. Isn’t that nice. These are people who are not too successful. They’re people who are, in many cases, failures. They come from other failed countries and they come here and tell us how to run our country. They come from places like, uh, I won’t mention because I don’t want to get myself into a controversy but they come from countries that are not great. They come from, let’s say, for example, Somalia. They come in and tell us how our Constitution, how our Declaration, how it works. It doesn’t work that way. They’re not smart. They have no aptitude. They have nothing going and they’re telling us how to run our country. People don’t want to have radical lunatics running our country.

+ Trump’s race-fueled hatred of Somalians seems visceral, perhaps intensified by the mighty Ilhan Omar’s refusal to be intimidated by him. Trump takes out his hostility towards Ilhan’s beautiful impertinence by relentlessly attacking Somalia for no justifiable reason, battering one of the world’s poorest countries with 600 attacks in his 4.5 years in office–six times as many airstrikes as Bush, Obama and Biden combined during their 20 years in office.

Number of US Air, Ground and Drone Strikes on Somalia

Bush     (2001-2009): 16
Obama (2009-2017): 43
Trump  (2017-2021): 214
Biden    (2021-2025): 52
Trump  (2025-2026): 203

+ Sky News reporter: “[Trump] says you’re full of shit.”

Abdul El-Sayed: “At least I don’t let mine go in the middle of the Oval Office.”

+ JD Vance: “We don’t want the next administration, whoever, God forbid you’re gonna have President El-Sayed in three years … ”

+ Laura Ingraham: “They’re [DSA candidates] preparing to come for your home, your car, your air conditioning, your 401K, and your factory.” I draw the line at those pinkos coming for my factory! (Maybe Ingraham secretly longed to be a Factory Girl.)

+ If you’re a defeatist, Kamala’s your candidate:

“I honestly don’t believe that it will be anytime soon that we are going to revive the Voting Rights Act. So, I don’t believe it is going to be the best use of our energy right now to try to get that done because I don’t know that it will get done right now the way this Congress is composed and the way they have been treating civil rights issues.”

If you’re not going to fight to restore the Voting Rights Act, what would you possibly fight for?

+ You can always count on the Democrats to be ruthless against their own youth movements.

+ In 2024, the Democrats ran a (bad) presidential candidate who was half black/half Asian and the turnout by blacks went down about 10% and Asians by 15%…They saw through her better than anyone else. (Chart from the deleted chapter of the Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Report.)

+ The missing chapter of the DNC’s 2024 autopsy was finally leaked:

According to the man who wrote the autopsy, there was a missing chapter. The chapter raised pointed questions that were notably absent from the draft that the party put out, both about President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s ill-fated decision to run for re-election and the sway of an operative class that had become “generationally wealthy off politics” while steering Democratic strategy.

Still no mention of genocide, Israel, Gaza or Palestinians…

+ No one who is seriously running for public office should use “Overton Window” in a sentence, unless they’re planning to defenestrate through one. In fact, no one should use it in a sentence, period. It’s worn out its meaning, if it ever really had a meaning. It didn’t for 98% of the American public. Political science speak is the worst kind of speak.

+ I still don’t believe Talarico can win in Texas, even running against such a corrupt politician and grotesque human being as Ken Paxton.

But who knows…

US Senate Texas 2026
(Hispanic voters surveyed)

James Talarico 57%
Ken Paxton 38%

Texas Southern U poll | 7/27-7/30 LV

2024 Hispanic vote in Texas

Trump 55%
Harris 43%

(CNN exit poll)

+ And if Talarico does win, someone said, only half in jest, that Paxton will arrest him.

+ France has enacted a new law banning unsolicited telemarketing calls. Someone could be elected president of the US if they ran solely on this issue and reelected if they actually succeeded in doing it.

+ During the 1970s federal investigations into housing discrimination by the Trumps, one Trump Organization employee told an F.B.I. agent that for years the company had refused to rent to blacks and did everything they could to chase black families out of   Trump-acquired buildings:

Fred Trump told me not to rent to Blacks. He also wanted me to get rid of the Blacks that were in the building by telling them cheap housing was available to them at only a five-hundred-dollar down payment, which Trump would offer to pay himself.

+ Michael Bailkin, a former top aide to NYC Mayor Abe Beame, told Trump during the debates over tax abatements for one of his buildings in Manhattan:  “You’re a very shallow person.”

Trump: “Of course. That’s one of my strengths. I never pretend to be anything else.”

+ What Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump, according to NYT reporter David Cay Johnstone:

Ignore the rules, do what you want to do, don’t leave a paper trail, don’t keep a calendar, never do things in writing, and, if somebody gets onto you, rat out other people to save yourself. Delay, delay, delay, ’cause grand juries have a limited time, and you can run out the clock. And call in the news media. Make up a fantastic story. We’re just honest businessmen who are being attacked by these corrupt New York City police, or F.B.I. agents, or especially the corrupt and heartless I.R.S. agents. And that’ll be the news story. It’ll put the government on the defensive.

+++

+ Here in the US, we just endured (for those who did endure it) not just the hottest July ever, but the hottest month ever.

+ A little perspective from the mathematician Eliot Jacobson…

+ It’s only August 14, with three months left in the fire season, and Oregon has already broken the all-time record for total acreage burned, at more than 2.3 million acres and counting, surpassing the previous record of 1.93 million acres set in 2024.

+ At 575,000 acres and still largely uncontained, the Big Grass Fire, which started on July 23rd, is six times the size of Portland and the largest fire in Oregon history…Five of the 10 biggest fires in Oregon history have occurred in the last 10 years. Three of the 10 biggest fires ignited this year. And 8 of the top 10 have started since 2000.

Big Grass (2026): 5775,341 acres
Long Draw (2012): 557,028 acres
Biscuit (2002): 500,000 acres
Bootleg (2021): 413,717 acres
Crosswhite East (2026): 354,308 acres
Coleman Creek (2026): 308,721 acres
Durkee (2024): 294,765 acres
Tillamook Burn #1: 240,000
Tillamook Burn #2: 217,000

+ The Oregonian’s description of a planned briefing by the Forest Service on the three new fires that have erupted this week in the canyon of Our Little River (Clackamas) pretty much sums up the DOGE-ravaged, timber-industry-controlled agency under Trump: “Boxes of water were stacked beside a shuttered shed, while signs pointing toward a briefing area led to little more than a row of portable toilets.”

+ Wildland firefighting is dangerous enough (at least 50 have died in the US already this year) without having to defend yourself from assaults and harassment by MAGA ranchers, as is happening on the fire lines in eastern Oregon and western Idaho.

+ The Air Quality Indexes around central Washington’s Lake Chelan last week were off the chart with readings of between 1000-3250 around Wenatchee, Leavenworth, and Plain. For comparison, the AQI in Portland was about 200 on the day it claimed the prize for having the worst air quality for a major city in the world. The air was a sickly gray and had a putrid, scorched odor. A short walk with Lola left my eyes and throat burning.

+ Randy Erwin, president of the National Federation of Federal Employees on how DOGE’s cuts eviscerated federal firefighting operations:

In the middle of fire season, DOGE and the Trump administration’s policies and actions have weakened our ability to safely fight wildfires. DOGE recklessly cut more than 6,000 USFS workers, thousands of them qualified wildland firefighters, and the Trump administration now threatens pointless relocations or terminations of many more, including shuttering 57 of 77 research labs critical to fire preparedness and response.

Already outlawed in the current year’s appropriations, the president is directing an illegal and irresponsible reorganization of the Forest Service, forcing qualified professionals to relocate or quit at the height of the fire season. This has extremely dangerous ramifications, as wildland firefighters on the front lines will face logistical hurdles from managerial restructuring and resource deployment issues.

This reorganization also threatens to force out additional qualified personnel – those with red cards – from the workforce. It is unconscionable that President Trump, his supporters in Congress, and USDA and USFS leadership believe this is a smart idea. Tragically, this fire season has already proved deadly, with millions of acres burned from coast to coast.
 
“America owes a debt of gratitude to the brave federal workers on the front lines of the wildfire crisis, who are doing their best to mitigate emergencies nationwide despite being understaffed and under-resourced. It is imperative that we halt this reckless reorganization, hire more personnel, and pass critical legislation to ensure federal wildland firefighters can do their jobs and save lives.

+ The Trump crowd wants the fires to burn all summer, so that they can “salvage” log them without even pretending to adhere to environmental laws. That may be one reason MAGA ranchers in eastern Oregon and western Idaho have been harassing and threatening firefighters on the frontlines of big conflagrations in the Wallowa-Whitman and Boise National Forests.

+ Spokane’s Deputy Fire Chief Lance Dahl: “There is not a fire department in the United States that can handle a wind-driven event this size.”

+ One of the world’s greatest hotels, Timberline Lodge, which provided the exteriors for Kubrick’s The Shining, is under evacuation orders from the Grasshopper Fire on the eastern slope of Mt Hood, a fire that has already consumed an historic fire lookout station and 21 other houses and outbuildings.

+ Does any other planet in the known universe have firenadoes? There’s some human exceptionalism for you…

+ As England gets slammed with its fifth extreme heatwave of the summer, more than three-quarters of the country is in a state of drought.

+ For the first time in 155 years, the weather station at Kew Botanical Gardens in London measured no precipitation for an entire month.

+ It wasn’t just the July air temperatures that cracked records; the temperature of global ocean waters also hit new highs. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported that average sea surface temperatures outside polar regions hit 20.96C last month, topping the previous high of 20.89C in 2023.

+ This was the week the Arctic hit 90F.

+ The UK’s MetCast 4 Weather:

Earth is now warming faster than at any point in recorded geological history – around 10 times faster than the extreme warming event 56 million years ago and 20 times faster than at the end of the last ice age.  We are almost certainly in a new extinction event.

+ Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

The extreme heat, fire, droughts displacing > 200000 and killing > 20000 in Europe, happens on a 1.4°C planet. We are inevitably breaching 1.5°C and heading towards 3°C. It will inevitably get worse. It will get worse and worse and worse to the point where, I’m afraid, we’ll be passing the limits of adaptation.

+ Nuclear plants need water. Lots and lots of water. They’re water boilers. And when they don’t get the water they need, things start to go wrong. Very, very wrong. Last Thursday, Romania raced to sink four barges laden with rock into the Danube River in an attempt to redirect water downstream toward a nuclear power plant, to buy more time before its second reactor is likely forced offline due to record-low water levels.

+ Nuclear reactors currently under construction by country…

China: 39
India: 8
Russia: 7
Egypt: 4
Turkey: 4
South Korea: 4
Bangladesh: 2
Japan: 2
Ukraine: 2
United Kingdom: 2
Argentina: 1
Brazil: 1
Iran: 1
Pakistan: 1
Slovakia: 1
Hungary: 1

+ The rivers are so low in Europe they’re dynamiting them to divert the flows. Puerto Rico is rationing water. Lake Mead and Lake Powell are running dry. These events should be freaking people out, but the press won’t give them the attention they deserve because they all involve climate change and the masters of the media have collectively decided that no one cares about climate change anymore…and, aside from the people whose houses are burning down, maybe they don’t…

+ The flow of the Tiber through Rome has dwindled to such a trickle that it has exposed the foundations of a bridge built in year 39 of the Common Era by Caligula, who, it must be said, supervised more public works than the present day leader he’s often unfairly compared to, Donald Trump, whose infrastructure projects, from the White House ballroom, to the Arch in Search of a Triumph, are all to serve to his vanity.

+ According to a UN Report, the ravages inflicted by El Niño Maximo could drive an additional 50 million people into a state of acute hunger by the end of 2027

+ Trump: “Any country with windmills is a loser.” There are 75,000 utility-ready windmills in the US. The two states with the most windmills, Texas and Iowa, both went for Trump three times…. (Number of windmills in China, 227,000.)

+ Thousand-year floods are coming twice a year now. Check out the scenes this week in Muncie, Indiana…

+ At least 247 wolves were killed in Montana during the 2025/2026 wolf killing season; 145 of the wolves were killed by hunters (59%) and 102 were killed by trappers (41%). The annual slaughter caused the population in the state to decline by at least 22 percent. But the real percentage is possibly much higher, given that biologists in Montana recently admitted they have vastly over-estimated the level of wolf “abundance” in the state.

+ A new study from California shows that the more mountain lions there are, the safer the roads. Let the cougars do their thing and you’ll be much less likely to have a deer crash through your windshield…

+ A study found that the vocalization patterns of bird and whale songs follow a fundamental structural principle found in all human languages. But almost certainly the reverse is true…

+ Jackson Lears on Chomsky’s anthropocentric view of “language:”

There is one thing about which Chomsky remains certain: language is unique to humans. This shifts the framework of discussion from thought to communication – the very framework Chomsky rejects with respect to people. Why not give animals the benefit of the same doubt? Isn’t it possible that an I-language for certain animals – a Universal Grammar for whale song – might exist but remain inaccessible to human cognition?

+ “What broke the (California) insurance market is the urban fires,” said David Forte, senior property and casualty policy adviser with the Washington State Office of the Insurance Commissioner. “In northwest Spokane, it is in neighborhoods. It looks like a California event. It is too early to tell, but I don’t know how (insurance companies) are going to react.”

+ Flesh-eating bacteria from filthy warming oceans will kill more people in the US (>100) than sharks (<1). Will Animal Planet give up its shark scaremongering and replace Shark Week with Flesh-Eating Bacteria Week?

+ Climate deaths are going to be gruesome: charred corpses, desiccated bodies, limbs stripped of flesh, flood victims hanging from trees like figures in a panorama of the damned by Hieronymous Bosch…

+ A big tech company has been trying to get farmers in southwestern Indiana to sell them their land so they can build a data center. They’re being met with a fierce rural resistance. “This land has been in our family since 1849,” said Dennis Herrenbruck. Purchased by my great-great-grandfather. I’m 75 years old; this is my 57th crop. I’ve never hated what I do, any morning that I get up. We turned them down. There’s not enough money in the world to buy my farmland that’s been here for 175 years. You’re not gonna grow corn, soybeans, and wheat here, because it’s gonna be a desert. And it’s gonna devalue all the property around you.”

+ When I was doing environmental organizing in Indiana back in the Cretaceous Age (aka, the 1980s), farmers felt the same way about natural gas pipelines that they now do about data centers (as well as pipelines). But the politicians who normally claimed to be the farmers’ champion stabbed them in the back, as they’ll likely do on data centers. The Posey County Commissioners have been meeting with the tech companies but say they can’t talk about it because the company for the commissioners to sign NDAs.

“We’ve lived out here all our life and that’s where I grew up, and that’s what I know,” said Herrenbeck’s son-in-law Jason Naab, who co-manages the family farm. “As you can see, it’s a mainly agricultural community. We don’t feel free anymore. It’s like, we don’t have a decision for our future. We’re being told what our future’s going to be. They’re gonna deplete the water; they’re gonna deplete our ability to grow food for everybody by getting rid of farmground. It’s way bigger than everybody thinks. We owe it to all our community. It’s going to take everyone to stand and say they’re fed up. So you better join the fight now, because it’s gonna be on your doorstep next.”

+ Trump on EVs, the people who drive them and US oil reserves after conquering Venezuela:

We have 1,000 years of gasoline. And it’s what people prefer. And you know I ended the electric mandate. I don’t like to talk about it because Elon wasn’t exactly thrilled. We love Elon. But I ended it because it said that within a very short period of time, like 2030, everybody had to have an electric car. [The “mandate” was a goal of US car-makers–if there are any left–selling at least 50% of their vehicles as EVs by 2032.] Even though there was no way you could charge it. Did you ever see the signs? You’re driving along in your electric car. They have a disease, you know, it’s a disease. It’s called like they get screwed up, they’re driving and they realize the battery’s getting low and they start thinking about it when it’s 3.4 full. It loses a little bit and you’re driving down the highway and you see a sign, “Electric Charging Station” with an arrow, 89 miles to the right. These people are crazy [The average distance between EV charging stations on US highways is between 5 and 17 miles. The largest gap on I-5 is 42 miles in Oregon.]…The thing is, we have unlimited; we have more gasoline, but we have more oil and gas, than any country in the world. [The US ranks 10th in proven oil reserves.] And now you add Venezuela to it. Add that.T And we have 60 percent of the world’s oil and gas. Including Venezuela. [Venezuela has 17% of the world’s oil, the US 4.7 percent, which adds up, under the old math, to 21.7%]. Think of that. What a great thing.

+ An AI program created a virus not found in nature. We’re way beyond Wuhan now…

Reporter: I think I heard you say the MMR vaccine is quite lethal. Is there any evidence of that?

Trump: No. I’ve heard some people say that. I’ve heard when you put them together, they can be explosive…They have a vaccination that’s the size of a bottle of soda poured into a child’s body.

+ In reality, a single dose of the MMR vaccine is 0.5 milliliters, about one-third of a teaspoon.

+ Trump’s former Surgeon General, Dr. Jerome Adams, on his executive order on childhood vaccines and who it benefits, Big Pharma:

The new EO on vaccines will make life harder & more expensive for parents who want to vaccinate their kids. What used to be one office visit + one low-cost combo shot (~$10–$75 range… or free under VFC) will now be THREE separate shots at three separate visits. MORE trips, MORE time off work, MORE admin fees, MORE hassle, MORE pain for America’s children – and higher odds kids miss doses. “Big Pharma” & healthcare providers? They could actually sell/administer THREE TIMES the product and bills for three visits under this EO!

+ RFK Jr., unraveling under the simplistic questioning of CNN’s Dana Bash: “You probably don’t understand this because you’re not a scientist.”

Dana Bash: “Well, you’re not either.”

+ Molly Fischer on Anthony Fauci’s self-glorifying diary: “He is an immunologist with seemingly no antibodies against the charms of stardom.”

+ Is Zohran Mamdani winning the war on rats? A report in Bloomberg News says that rat sightings in New York City are down 22% over the first seven months of this year.

+ Virginia has reported the first-ever case of the Dengue Fever virus that was locally acquired in the commonwealth.

+ Marc Chagall writing in his diary on living and painting next to a slaughterhouse in the Montparnasse district of Paris:

Two, three o’clock in the morning. The sky is blue. Dawn is rising. Over there, further away, the cattle were being slaughtered, the cows bellowing, and I painted them. I can still hear their screams in the night as their heads were being cut off.

We should all hear the dying screams of the animals who are killed for our sustenance.

+++

+ Some of the grim numbers from the July jobs (or lack thereof) report…

* Nonfarm payrolls fell by 23,000 jobs last month.

* The public sector lost 53,000 jobs in July.

* The manufacturing sector has lost 62,000 jobs since Trump took office.

* Federal employment has declined by 327,000 jobs since January.

* Meanwhile, wages only increased 3.2 percent, below the rate of inflation.

+ Here’s how Trump’s obsequious economics advisor, Kevin Hassett, explained the faltering jobs report: “It was one of those weird seasonal things. Because there was a lot of snow in the winter, a lot of schools had to stay open longer for the snow days, so the teachers got laid off in July instead of the end of June.”

+ Not so, says economist Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Institute:

Large losses in the public sector in July (-53k), particularly in local education (-49.6k jobs). An initial look doesn’t suggest an issue with seasonal adjustment because losses were also registered in NSA data for June and July. Local education jobs have fallen by nearly 100k (-98.3k) since March.

+ The Perversities of Capitalism in a Nutshell: The July jobs report was dismal. But the news of a shrivelling job market and stagnant wages sent the Dow leaping giddily to a new record high.

+ Rep. Tom Emmer, the Indiana Republican and House Whip: “Right now there are great things happening in our economy. Nobody wants to talk about 78-cent eggs, nobody wants to talk about milk that’s under $2. No, no. They want to focus on gas prices.” The average price of a dozen Grade A Large eggs in the US is $2.17. The average price of a gallon of milk is $4.32.

+ Here’s some depressing news for those of you who believed the stories that the millionaires, billionaires and financial capitalists were fleeing Manhattan for the friendlier havens of Tallahassee, Tuscaloosa and Texarkana. According to Crain’s Business Journal New York, the NYC office market “is having an historic summer as demand reaches levels not seen in decades.”

+ Fox News: 76% of voters say the economy is fair or poor. When can Americans expect relief?

Kevin Hassett: The prices went up so much under Joe Biden that we understand why people are still frustrated.

+ The former money honey Maria Bartiromo on Democrats campaigning on the faltering economy: “That’s just propaganda. I mean, look, things are going well. And I think we’re all feeling it. I’ve spoken with a number of CEOs … ”

+ According to the Wall Street Journal, auto insurance companies refused to pay out 45% of claims last year…yet, most states require you to buy insurance in order to drive legally.

+ The share of U.S. gross domestic income going to wages and salaries has fallen to 43%, near its lowest level since records began in 1929.

+ Overall, 37% of Americans either just break even (20%) or fall into a deficit (17%) after expenses each month and 63% of Americans say they have less than $500 left over each month after bills and are living paycheck to paycheck.

+ Houses are now selling below the asking price in 38 of the 50 largest cities in the US.

+ When the American Dream becomes a lifelong financial nightmare: 31% of those Americans 80 and older are still paying down their mortgages, in part because they’ve had to keep refinancing their homes to pay the bills.

+ The credit card succubus Visa reports that “25% of millennials have received down payment assistance from their parents, and 26 percent said they would not have been able to buy their current home when they did without the help of their parents.”

+ According to Schroders, the London-based asset management company, one 1 in 3 working adults in the US has more credit card debt than retirement savings.

+ A report by LendingTree estimates that 30% of Americans admit to shoplifting, up from 24% in 2024. People gotta eat.

+ Wine sales in the US have declined so precipitously, especially for pinot noir, that wineries in California are burning their vineyards instead of harvesting the grapes: In California, winemakers produced less wine last year than at any point in the last quarter century. It’s often cheaper to let grapes rot on the vine than to harvest them because so many unsold bottles clog shelves of storerooms and wine shops.”

+ Agricultural Sec. Brooke Rollins, the former Cotton Bowl Queen, who pocketed more than $1 million a year running the pro-Trump group, America First Policy: “For those who love work and celebrate work and want people to work and not be on food stamps, it’s a pretty big win when we’ve moved [ie, “kicked] 5 million people off food stamps, y’all.” SNAP is for poor Mothers and children, whose gross household income is 130% or less than the federal poverty level. Total SNAP spending amounts to roughly 1.4% of the federal budget.

+ Frederic Jameson on why we shouldn’t “love” or “celebrate work”:

Obstinacy is what constantly resists discipline. It is the source of disobedience and it is life itself. What is the role of obstinacy in capitalism? Nobody wants to work under a wage-labor system. Given the nature of our society, of course, everybody thinks productivity is good. Marx lay around on his couch, dozed, covered himself with the ashes of his cigarettes and cigars. Okay, well, that is surely unproductive. But Marx says at some point: No, productivity is making surplus value for the boss, the owner. Who wants to do that? There is no virtue in laboring productively.

+ Mark Cuban: “All this talk about AI taking white-collar jobs is ridiculous when it can’t even do the basic tasks.” And yet, Goldman Sachs estimates that AI is currently eliminating 16,000 jobs per month. Most of the lost jobs belong to men. In the last year, jobs held by men in the US fell by 142,000, while women gained 298,000 jobs.

+ The Financial Times reported that AI will increase oil and gas production more than renewable energy.

+ Barron Trump’s net worth is approximately $150 million. He’s now wealthier than his mom, the prenup-constrained Melania Trump (Net Worth: $20 million), despite the $75 million Jeff Bezos sank into a sycophantic documentary, which largely seemed to focus on her shoes.

+ The national average price of a gallon of gasoline has breached $4 per gallon for the third time this year, a new record. (This is the highest gas prices have ever been in mid-August). In Oregon, the average price of gas is $4.69 per gallon and is as high as $4.89 in some precincts of the Portland metro area and $5.13 per gallon in Wallowa County, near Hells Canyon.

+ Reporter: Why is the US intervening to support the Japanese yen at this time?

Trump: Japan’s been very good to us, with the exception, of course, of Pearl Harbor.

If you say so, Mr. President…

+++

+ The French novelist Honoré de Balzac hid from his creditors for nearly seven years on the top floor of a house on the Rue Berton in the Passy district of Paris, keeping his location secret from nearly everyone except his mistress, the Polish countess, Madame (Ewelina) Henska. He could rarely venture outside because his Balzacian girth made him instantly recognizable to the bailiffs who were looking to arrest him and toss him into debtor’s prison. So he wrote and he wrote, his swelling body swaddled in a monk-like white cashmere hooded gown and fueled by 50 cups of coffee a day  In a letter to Henska he described his writing routine: “Working, dear Countess, is to get up every night at 12, write until 8, take breakfast for a quarter of an hour, then work until 5, dine, go to sleep, wake up at midnight and start all over again.” In his seven years in the house, he wrote the novels: The Black Sheep, Cousin Bette, A Murky Business, Cousin Pons and Lost Illusions. Not bad for a hedonist.

If you’re lying in bed at Fitzgerald’s witching hour (3 am, unable to get back to sleep (nearly every night for me these days) you might try another book Balzac wrote in his secret garret, the novella Sarrasine, about a young French sculptor who goes to Rome to become the next Michelangelo and falls madly in love with a singer who turns out to be a castrato. In Balzac’s story, Sarrasine attends the opera one night and becomes obsessed with the beauty of one of the singers, who goes by the flamboyant stage name La Zambinella. Sarrasine rushes back to his studio and, in a lustful frenzy, begins molding a clay statue of the singer, viewing her as the very model of modern femininity. He attends the same play over and over again and ultimately tries to seduce her, but she resists his advances without offering a convincing explanation. Finally, he plots to abduct her during an appearance at the French embassy in Rome, where La Zambinella appears dressed in men’s clothing. Surprised, but intrigued by her appearance, Sarrasine is told that Zambinella is not a young woman, but a male castrato, whose testicles had been hacked off as a young teen to sustain the soprano registers of his voice. Humiliated and enraged, Sarrasine grabs Zambinella and drags “her” to his studio, where he plans to kill the object of his desire, only to discover, too late, that he/she has other admirers, less unnerved by her transgendered nature, including a cardinal of the Church, who has sent his agents to stab Sarrasine to death before he can slit Zambinella’s throat.  The whole story is pretty far-out, particularly for 1830.

The novella formed part of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine series but had been suppressed for obvious reasons until 1970, when Roland Barthes took it apart almost sentence by sentence in his book S/Z. The Barthes book is barely readable, but Balzac roars along as immediate as ever and nearly 200 years later almost perfectly captures the gender hysteria of our time. The Crying Game has nothing on this story.

+++

+ On June 21, Israeli forces raided the home of Dr. Mazen Al-Rantisi. Rantisi is known throughout the West Bank as the Doctor of the Poor, nicknamed for the low-cost and often free medical care he provides Palestinians living in Ramallah. Rantisi was arrested and jailed in the notorious Ofer Prison after being indicted for chairing a non-profit health care service that had been banned by Israel. According to an account in Haaretz, the 71-year-old doctor was imprisoned in an overcrowded cell, tear-gassed and denied essential medications. Dr. Al-Rantisi told lawyers with the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel that he had been blindfolded and forced to walk bent over. He said that he and other detainees had been repeatedly beaten and tear-gassed by guards during raids on his prison cell. During the first 10 days of his confinement, Al-Rantisi was denied his prescribed medications and denied repeated requests to be evaluated by a doctor.

+ More than 300 Palestinian children in Gaza have been killed by Israeli forces in the 300 days since a ‘ceasefire’ went into effect on October 10, 2025.  UNICEF’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Edouard Beigbeder: “A ceasefire that leaves an average of one child dead each and every day is failing children. With hundreds more children injured, many severely, children in Gaza are still waiting for the end to the violence they were promised.”

+ The Times of Israel reported this week that at least 191 Palestinian children were being held in “administrative detention” in Israeli prisons in March 2026. This is an increase of 88 kids from 103 being locked up in January of 2025, according to data collected by Parents Against Child Detention.

+ Accusations of US politicians displaying “dual loyalties” with Israel have always been denounced by Zionists as evidence of the antisemitism of the accuser. But I don’t know how else you would explain this exchange between the late Lindsey Graham and Benjamin Netanyahu which goes well beyond diplomatic collegiality…

+ In 2024, as the International Criminal Court was preparing to issue arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, Netanyahu called Lindsey Graham for help in smearing ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, by getting a group of senators and House members to sign a letter urging the ICC to withhold the arrest warrants. Graham, who was being filmed by a documentary crew at the time, urged them to record the conversation and put his phone on speaker…

Netanyahu to Graham: Is it possible to have to appeal to the court to say, “Okay, we want to reveal this before you do anything, before you issue the arrest warrant.  There has to be a review about this entire process. About whether the prosecutor motivated…

Graham: Right, the original action. Exactly. Exactly.

Netanyahu: This cloud or stain has to be removed and this has to be exposed. And I suggest that you send a letter with maybe some other senators; I don’t know if you could get any Democrats on it, but you should. But it’s not…Maybe the group you had of eight people. I don’t know.

Graham: I tell you, the perfect person would be the Speaker, Speaker Johnson.

Netanyahu: Would be what?

Graham: Speaker Johnson.

Netanyahu: He would get the other people to…

Graham: No. To have him on the letter.

Netanyahu: Yeah, sure. He would. Would he get Democrats?

Graham: I don’t know. I’ll try. But I will try. I promise you that.

A few days later, Graham rings up Netanyahu to brag about getting two  Democrats on the letter (Benjamin Cardin and Richard Blumenthal, not really a Herculean task).

Graham:

Y’all should fucking pay me for all this. I should get tons of shekels. ..[Bibi: I’ll take you to dinner.] Yeah, bullshit. It’s gonna be more than dinner. All right, we got them both. So they both want to do the letter. Yeah, no. I’m so here’s why I’m calling you. I’m trying to get it out the door Wednesday Washington time. So send me over whatever you want to send. They want to say two things. They want to say you should reconsider not talking to Israel. You should talk to them, and two, you shouldn’t move ahead until this case–the cloud is lifted. So slow down. But I do need you, if you don’t mind, tomorrow, to call Blumenthal (CT) and Cardin (MD). And thank them for being fair-minded on this and also, thank them for trying to help with Saudi-Israel normalization. You appreciate it. You’re very interested in it and that will encourage both of them.

+ Reality TV show (‘Shark Tank’) veteran and Netanyahu pal Oren Dobronsky called Trump “morally corrupt piece of shit,” for his ceasefire deal with Iran. The Israeli-American businessman who founded a hummus restaurant chain in California and was hand-picked as a Likud candidate for the Knesset by Netanyahu, also wrote that Gaza “must be destroyed to the ground.” So, we have a “morally corrupt piece of shit” denouncing “morally corrupt piece of shit.”

+ With much of Europe and North America burning, Israel has decided to light fires in southern Lebanon to drive people from their homes, burn their crops and destroy their olive groves.

+ Boy George threatened to fire any of his band members who refuse to play his pro-Israel musical slop. What an unbelievable jerk this half-hit flash in the pan turned out to be…

+ Writing in the Intercept, Adam Johnson reports that Bari Weiss has hired Tanya Lukyanova, one of her former flunkies, at The Free Press to work as a producer at 60 Minutes. Lukyanova has justified the killing of journalists in Gaza:

Tanya Lukyanova’s reporting …has veered into outright right-wing tabloidism. This climaxed with her contribution to two of the most shameful supposedly journalistic contributions since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began in late 2023: an article she produced herself in September 2025 helping justify Israel’s unprecedented attacks on journalists in Gaza, and an article she co-bylined in August 2025 downplaying mass starvation in Gaza.

+ It’s one thing for Weiss to cover up Israel’s crimes, and another to cover up Jeffrey Epstein’s–though perhaps they’re related, given Epstein’s ties to Mossad…”Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) has claimed that a 60 Minutes investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s banking relationships, for which he was interviewed, never aired following the exit of veteran correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi as part of the show’s staffing upheaval.”

+ Since Trump brazenly announced that Hamas had agreed to disarm (with conditions applied to Israel), Israel has killed at least 30 Palestinians in Gaza.

+ Stumped by the stalled war against Iran, where none of Trump’s military objectives have been achieved, the Pentagon is turning to its troops for “creative and unconventional” ideas on how to inflict more destruction on Iran. Who’s laughing now, Pete?

+ In another certifiable Truth Social post, Trump threatened to hunt down and jail the “treasonous” leakers who disclosed that the US had exhausted much of its high-tech missile arsenal in the 6-month war against Iran. If the stories aren’t true and there is no missile shortage, then the leakers aren’t “leaking”; they’re lying and doing the US a favor by misleading Iran, Russia, China and North Korea on the status of the US missile arsenal. But they are lying; they’re leaking, which is why Trump is apoplectic.

But apparently Trump lit into Hegseth over his mismanagement of the Iran war. Hegseth quickly shifted the blame to his deputies.

At a Cabinet meeting at Camp David last week, President Trump demanded answers from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on why he had apparently been misled on extreme munitions shortages that now threaten to limit military options with Iran. Hegseth defended himself and blamed his deputy, Stephen Feinberg, for the shortages and for not ensuring Trump was fully apprised of the issue, both persons familiar said.

The personal responsibility crowd takes credit for everything and responsibility for nothing.

If the Hegseth-run military suffers Premature Missile Depletion (PMD…not sure if Eli Lilly has a fix for this) against Iran, imagine sending Hegseth to war against China or Russia…

+ The USS Abraham Lincoln is in its ninth month at sea. The $6.8 billion aircraft carrier has spent a record 250 consecutive days without making land. The situation has deteriorated so badly that sailors, sick, sick of going months without fresh food and being fed spoiled and rotten meat, have been literally jumping ship. The biggest threat to US national security seems to be the Pentagon under the incompetent control of Pete Hegseth.

+++

On Monday, Carolina Molina, a US citizen who is the daughter of Salvadoran immigrants, was dropping off cards at an immigration lawyer’s office in Falls Church, Virginia, when she spotted ICE agents dragging two Latino men across the road. She rolled down her window and shouted: “You’re a ho! You’re fucked up.” Molina said she stopped taunting the officers with her “big mouth” because she didn’t want to get other people in trouble, especially the immigration lawyers. A few seconds later, she found herself surrounded by masked men wearing bulletproof vests reading “police.” One of the men approached her car with his gun drawn and pointed at her head. She started recording him with her cellphone. The ICE agent pointed his gun at her cellphone and screamed, “Yeah, you record us. You almost ran us over.”

Molina replied, “I didn’t almost run you over.”

ICE agent: “You almost ran us over. Stop lying!”

Molina: “I didn’t almost run you over. You’re so full of shit.” 

ICE agent: “Stop lying. You’re not funny.”

Molina: “You’re not funny.”

ICE agent: “I will arrest you.” 

Molina: “I’m a legal citizen.”

ICE agents: “I don’t care.”

Molina: “Oh, my goodness…”

ICE agent: “Keep it up, I will lock you up.”

Molina: “Okay. For what?”

ICE officer to the other ICE officers: “She’s the one who tried to run us over!”

Molina: “Run you over when? I have recordings. My car has a dash cam. That’s a lie. You’re so full of shit. I never tried to run you over.”

The ICE took photos of Molina and her car’s license plate, then left.

The dash cam video from Molina’s car shows that the ICE agent’s claim that she tried to run him over is a lie. Molina later told the Washington Post: “I don’t think I comprehended it in that moment, but looking back on it, it really felt like a Renée Good situation.” 

+ After Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered by ICE and Border Patrol officers in Minneapolis, the Department of Homeland Security launched a major investigation. Not into the killings of two US citizens, but into what the New York Times called “left-leaning” organizations. (Note: In the same edition of the paper, the NYT referred to CounterPunch as a “left-leaning” publication in its obituary for the ingenious and radical historian Johanna Fernandez, who tragically died this week at the age of 55.) It’s not at all clear how the Times or the DHS define “left-leaning.” But according to the report, DHS investigated the financial records of the Sunrise Movement, the Communications Workers of America and the SEIU, all in an effort to find who was funding the civilian protests that erupted in the Twin Cities after ICE and Border Patrol invaded their cities. 

DHS agents spied on protesters, infiltrated chat groups, sent undercover agents into churches, libraries and parks. They took photos of protesters and people who merely attended meetings. They wrote down their names, what they said, and their license plates, even though none of these people had been accused of committing crimes and were merely exercising their First Amendment right to protest the abusive actions of their government.

According to the NYT report, “as the investigation moved forward, prosecutors showed grand jurors a PowerPoint slide asserting that 18 groups — including the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the country’s largest federation of labor unions — were part of a conspiracy to impede the work of immigration officers in Minnesota.

Ultimately, that supposed conspiracy led in June to the indictment of 15 people accused of interfering with law enforcement agents as members of the far-left movement known as Antifa.”

+ Once upon a time, the public exposure of this kind of COINTELPRO-like domestic spying operation helped take down a presidency. Here it’s just another day in Trumplandia….

+ An investigation by the Associated Press has found that Trump’s immigration raids have locked up more than 50 spouses and parents of people serving in the military. The idea that Trump and Miller care about the lives of people serving in the military, rather than enriching the lives of military contractors, is laughable…

+ ICE can’t spend all of the money Trump and Congress kept dumping on it. For years, ICE’s budget hovered around $10 billion. Then Trump opened the budgetary floodgates, hoping to create his own domestic police force, armed with more lethal weapons than 90 percent of the world’s military. But after two reconciliation bills and nationwide raids, ICE has only managed to spend 12% of what Congress has given the agency. It’s still got $100 billion in reserves. Is this what Trump plans to use to police polling places in November?

+ In April, Congress appropriated $20 million to equip all ICE officers with body cameras, yet none of the officers involved in two recent fatal shootings in Maine and Texas wore body cameras. Even if they had worn them, there’s no guarantee the footage would have been released. According to an investigation by the Associated Press, ICE policy allows for the release of footage from shootings or serious confrontations only when the agency’s director determines it is “in the best interests of the agency.”

+ From Dhruv Mehrota’s investigation for Wired that revealed ICE collected the DNA from nearly one million people last year, including children: Internal documents show ICE’s DNA collection has skyrocketed in the second Trump administration. Now hundreds of thousands of people never convicted of a crime are in an FBI criminal database forever.

+ Sen. Tommy Tuberville: “If we don’t straighten out this country’s voting and immigration system, we’re not gonna make it. It’s gonna be over. I’m gonna go back to Alabama and hey, we might build a 30-foot wall around our state. I know what’s coming. I can hear what’s coming.” If Alabama builds its wall, sealing itself inside like Poe’s story The Cask of Amontillado, how will Coach Tommy get to his Florida beach house?

+ According to Border Patrol statistics, there’s more fentanyl being trafficked out of the US into Canada than from Canada into the US. Oh dear…

+ A former U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer has been sentenced to 9 years in federal prison after admitting he used his position at the Tecate Port of Entry to help Sinaloa cartel-linked traffickers smuggle drug-filled vehicles into the U.S….Why didn’t Hegseth drone the guy?

+Fairy Tale Hour with Grandpa Trump…

Reporter: How many individuals take advantage of birth tourism?

Trump: I’ll tell you right now, hundreds of thousands. You have one man who came in with a family who said he had 56 children. Another one came in—they said they had 98 children.

+ CBS News reported that a 75-year-old lifelong Republican named John Gannon, who voted for Trump, now regrets that decision after his fiancée was arrested by ICE in Houston. “Go after the criminals. We’re all for that. But leave the mom and pops and the kids alone.” It’s all good, until they come for you and yours…

+ ICE wrongly detained and cuffed John Carter, a US citizen, in the Atlanta Airport as he was about to board a Delta flight to Las Vegas, based on a ‘faulty” facial recognition software reading…Shamefully, Delta gate attendants helped facilitate the wrongful arrest. “I’ll never approach a door of an aircraft without wondering if there’s guys standing back there,” Carter said.

+ ICE agents are being equipped with gloves that give painful electrical shocks to anyone they touch, more often than not, someone they’re not looking for. Imagine the Sadean mischief they’ll get up to in their hotel rooms after hours…

+++

+ An exasperated Sigmund Freud famously (or notoriously, depending on your point of view) asked, “What does a woman want?” Having read most of Freud, I never ran across this passage and have long been curious about the origin of the quote. It didn’t sound like something the Viennese know-it-all would commit to writing. And now I know, thanks to fellow Hoosier Emily Eakin’s fascinating book, The Frenchmen…or My Life in Theory. The full quote goes like this: “[A question] that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul: What does a woman want?” To be clear, Freud never wrote this. Rather, it was recorded in the diary of one of Freud’s most famous patients and students, the Parisian psychoanalyst, Marie Bonaparte, great-grandniece of the wild Corsican marauder and one of the people who yanked Freud out of Vienna before the Nazis could nab him and send him to the death camps, as they did to two of his sisters.

Even as recorded by Bonaparte, Freud’s question, long taken as evidence of his misogyny, may not refer to all women, but to “a woman” in particular, Marie Bonaparte, after she informed the aghast advocate of the “talking cure” that she had twice undergone surgeries to move her clitoris closer to the opening of her vagina in order to help her achieve a satisfactory orgasm. Bonaparte must be something of a Patron Saint to the women who run with billionaires, now eager to get “designer vaginas,” through the surgical magic of labiaplasty and vaginoplasty. Most men have enough trouble finding the G-spot without it constantly moving around.

Speaking of the merger of Eros and Thanatos, the self-described “human Barbie” announced last month she was getting her “puff tightened” in a procedure using fat from human cadavers, which will give new meaning to the Stones’ notorious lyrics in Start Me Up (“You, you make a dead man cum.”)

+ In Eakin’s book everyone gets a well-deserved skewering, even Emily herself. As opposed to her subjects (primarily Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, de Man and Derrida), Eakin writes very clear and vivid prose. She explains the Frenchmen’s theories better than they do, exposing the holes and contradictions hidden behind the often arcane and knotty rhetoric. It’s also a gossipy romp. Most of these guys, and they’re nearly all guys, were, to put it politely, quite mad.

Eakin fell under the spell of French theory about 10 years after I did and more completely. My introduction came in the late 70s in the history department of American University and was largely limited to writings of Foucault on the history of sexuality, madness and prisons. There was only a single (very gifted) professor named Terry Murphy versed in Foucauldian thought and he was considered an outlier not only in the stodgy history department but the university itself. But Eakin hit Harvard’s literature department in the late 80s when theory was the rage and immediately began deconstructing everything she read from comic books to Jane Austen. Her detox took longer than mine and she describes it in unflinching detail.

+ In 1948, Belgian literary scholar Paul de Man arrived in New York City, where he quickly ingratiated himself with Manhattan’s literary circle, including the socialist Dwight Macdonald, former editor of the Partisan Review (and movie critic for the Today Show!) and novelist Mary McCarthy, with whom he likely had an affair. De Man cultivated the image of a Resistance fighter; along with what Harold Bloom called his Apollo-like looks, that persona helped propel him to the heights of literary theory, with posts at Harvard, Cornell, and Yale and a lifelong friendship with Jacques Derrida. In essence, de Man’s theory held that searching for meaning in literature is futile: there’s nothing but the text and the text means nothing. So it’s not for nothing (or perhaps it is for “nothing”) that his Yale colleague Geoffrey Hartman called de Man “the connoisseur of nothingness.”

Yet de Man, who became a celebrity professor at Yale and one of the world’s most-cited post-structuralist thinkers, was hiding a secret that may help explain his insistence that written works have no fixed meaning. Far from fighting in the Belgian or French Resistance, de Man had written more than 100 columns for the Nazi-controlled Belgian newspaper Le Soir—a fact he concealed until 1987, three years after his death from cancer.

In one of those historical synchronicities that would have thrilled Carl Jung, an early devotee of Paul de Man was none other than Henry Kissinger, who a few years later would leave his own trail of nothingness from Southeast Asia to South America. In the early 1950s, Kissinger hired de Man as his private French tutor and was quickly dazzled by the Belgian savant’s wide-ranging, if nihilistic, intellect. Kissinger may not have known that de Man had written for a pro-Nazi, antisemitic publication. But as a self-proclaimed sage of postwar European history, he was almost certainly aware that de Man’s uncle, Hendrik de Man, was a Nazi collaborator who served as the Hitler-approved prime minister of Belgium during the occupation.

+ The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino on re-reading Gone With the Wind:

“Gone with the Wind” is evil, and far more interesting for being evil. (Scarlett, one of the finest comic characters ever written in literature, is, terrifyingly and amazingly, a lot like Donald Trump.) The novel registered to me as a paragon depiction of American political consciousness, or lack thereof. Scarlett’s world is constructed through immeasurable exploitation; it implodes in war and reconstitutes itself in hideous struggle. It all happens about a half-inch away from her face, and yet all she really thinks about is her wardrobe, her dinner options, her love life, her bank account. Plenty among us, as our country commits atrocities across the globe, might relate.”

+  The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s description of the unconscious: “The best image to sum up the unconscious is Baltimore in the early morning.” As a former Baltimorean, I can attest to the veracity of this observation. It may well be one of the few things Lacan got right.

+ The last words of the German media theorist Frederich Kittler: “Shut off all devices.” Kittler, who developed an unhealthy obsession with V-2 rockets as a child and became one of the most perceptive critics of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, died in 2011. If only we’d followed his advice, what a relative panacea we’d be living in today, eh?

You better cheat, cheat, no reason to play fair /Cheat, cheat, or don’t get anywhere

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

On Resistance
Curtis White
(Melville House)

The Hit Doctors: Care, Harm and the Art of Survival
Sarah Brothers
(California)

The Rulers: Corporate Power in the Age of AI and the Cloud
Cecilia Rikap
(Verso)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Coherence
Cindy Blackman Santana
(Mack Avenue)

Blues Now
GA-20 with Charlie Musselwhite
(New West)

Swimming By Moonlight
Chet Baker
(Slow Down Sounds)

Madness is the Milestone

“Today’s milestone is human madness. Politics is a part of it, particularly in its lethal outbursts. Politics is not, as it was for Hannah Arendt, the field where human freedom is unfurled. The modern world, the world of world war, the Third World, the underground world of death that acts upon us, do not have the civilized splendor of the Greek city state. The modern political domain is massively, in totalitarian fashion, social, leveling, exhausting. Hence madness is a space of antisocial, apolitical, and paradoxically free individuation” – Julia Kristeva, Black Sun