Roaming Charges: When Farce Repeats Itself

“History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.”

– Jean Baudrillard, The Agony of Power

Put yourself behind the wheel of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s white Kia. You’re 25-years-old. You’ve been living in the United States for three years. You’ve played by the rules, as you understand them. You haven’t made trouble for anyone. You haven’t broken the law. You’ve tried to settle in.

You came to Maine from Colombia looking for a safer and fuller life for yourself, for your wife and your infant daughter, the girl you called your “little princess.”

You didn’t come to Maine to deal drugs, join a gang, rape or rob anyone or leech off the system. You came to work and make a new home for your family. You applied for and received a permit to work legally in the United States more than a year ago. The permit was authorized by the Trump-run government.

Your love for animals led you to get a job cleaning a veterinary clinic each morning. It wasn’t your dream job, but it was a good start for a good cause. It wasn’t enough to get by on, so you got a second job delivering groceries and food in the afternoon and early evening in your white Kia.

You were doing okay. Your daughter had just turned three. You and your wife, Karo, had made a new life for yourselves. The transition was a challenge, but you did it.  You and Karo were learning the language. Getting a good feel for the way of the land and the way things were supposed to work here. You were trying to fit in. You were starting to feel at home.

You felt safe here in coastal Maine. You’d heard about ICE. You’d seen the shootings and arrests and protests. But somehow here in Biddeford, you felt far removed from the terrors visited upon immigrants in Minneapolis, Los Angeles and Chicago. This was a quiet city. You and your neighbors cared about each other. You felt safe; you felt secure.

You grew up as a middle-class kid in Bucaramanga, Colombia. A big city in the mountains. Colombia had been through wars. It had been plagued by gang violence. Riven by political corruption. You’d been through it. Things were more stable now. But for how long?

You’d grown up playing soccer. You did well enough in school. You served in the Colombian military and survived the experience mostly unscathed. Your dad sold truck tires. You installed windows. You had a bulldog you cherished named Draco. But it just wasn’t enough. Not after you fell in love. Not after your daughter was born. You wanted a better life, especially for your kid. So, you took up a friend’s offer to come north to Maine and work for him.

You got up early Monday morning. You played with your daughter. You talked with your wife. You drank your coffee, ate your breakfast and got ready for work.

It looked like a nice summer day as you walked to your car. You started the engine, pulled onto the street and headed out to do your job.

You had no idea that ICE was coming for you. Why would you? You were here legally. You hadn’t committed any crimes. You weren’t wanted by law enforcement. There were no warrants out for your arrest or removal from the country.

Before you reached the first intersection, you were surrounded by cars and men with guns. They were shouting. Why were they shouting? What did they want? What had you done?

One of the men is pointing a gun at you. He says stop. You say you are trying to stop. You say it loud enough that a neighbor hears your voice. The man pointing the gun at you may hear it, too. Surely he does, doesn’t he? But this man doesn’t know you. He doesn’t know anything about you. That you’re here legally. That you’re on your way to work. That you just said goodbye to your daughter and her mother. This man doesn’t know that you’re not the man he’s looking for. But he doesn’t care. He’s got you in his sights and he’s not going to let you go. You hear a shot. It’s the last sound you hear before everything goes black. As your body slumped to the whole, your Kia kept going, in slow, aimless circles before coming to a stop.

Your wife and your daughter were in the apartment where you lived when they heard the shots that killed you. Your daughter dropped her pink backpack to the floor. Karo ran to the window. She saw the white Kia lodged against the curb. The windshield was shattered with bullet holes. Then she saw you. She saw your body, at least, flat on the pavement. Your body is all bled out. There’s a bullet wound to your head. “Mi amor, mi amor,” Karo screamed.

These men who shot you, who killed you, who murdered you, lied about you before they even knew who you were. They said you were “illegal.” They said they had a warrant to pick you up. You weren’t illegal. They didn’t have a warrant for you. You weren’t the man they wanted. They lied about you after they killed you. They said you tried to kill them with Kia. They said you were going to run over other people. They said they had no choice but to kill you. These men, these law enforcement officers, lied to cover their own asses. 

At 7 in the morning, the phone rings at your parents’ house in Bucaramanga. It’s the day of the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, the patron saint of Colombia. The neighbors hear screams from your parents’ house. It’s your mother’s voice. She’s saying, “It can’t be. It can’t be. I’d give my life for my son. Why did they shoot him?”

Why, indeed.

+++

+ Has any recent political movement been vindicated more decisively than the much-derided Defund ICE! campaign?

+ ICE claimed they shot 26-year-old Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, to protect the public from a speeding car. But shooting the driver in the head doesn’t stop a car; it merely stops them from steering or braking the car, putting the “public” in even more danger.

+ The ICE agent who shot Guerrero was a new recruit. There are 10,000 of these “new recruits”. And many of the seasoned “veterans” have only been around a year…

+ ICE has shot at least 17 people while they were inside their vehicles.

+ On Tuesday, Susan Collins told Maine voters that she had used her persuasive powers to convince ICE to place a moratorium on traffic stops. Trump just cut her off at the knees…The question is, who will Collins apologize to, Mainers or Trump?

+ Congress appropriated $20 million to equip all ICE agents with body cameras. None of them was in either Texas or Maine.

Reporter: The ICE agents who killed a person in Maine yesterday were reportedly not using body cameras. That’s despite DHS officials coming to Congress and repeatedly saying they want to expand body cam usage. Does there need to be accountability?

Mike Johnson: Uh, I don’t know anything about this event. I was a little busy yesterday. You guys can mock me for not knowing that. I worked about 22 hours.

Speaking of accountability, maybe Johnson’s son got the urge to watch a lot of porn last night and the Speaker had to stay up late talking him, uh, down, as part of their “accountability partner” agreement …

+ “I would shut down ops until we got a handle on shit,” an ICE official told PunchUp. “Not doing traffic stops. Not blocking the vehicles. If they run. They run. Find them later. Don’t force a bad position.”

+ ICE and the FBI tried to smear the innocent man they murdered in Houston by leaking to the press earlier this week that Lorenzo Salgado’s white van was transporting meth. But the bags of a “crystal-like” substance turned out to be a crystal-like substance known to the scientific community as…salt. Why all the salt? To replace the sodium and electrolytes they lose working construction all day in the merciless Texas sun.

+ Fox News’ Jesse Watters appears to suggest that ICE is justified in shooting undocumented immigrants to keep them from voting Democratic. “We used to win landslide elections in this country. Remember Nixon? Remember Reagan? 49 out of the 50 states? All of a sudden, we bring in this foreign-born population, Democrats are all of a sudden competitive. They didn’t change how persuasive they were. They just imported everybody that lived outside of the country. That’s why they want them here.”

+ In the 20th century, the Democrats won presidential elections in 1912, 1916, 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944, 1948, 1960, 1964, 1976, 1992 and 1996.

+ Half of Trump’s cabinet members couldn’t pass a real “English test.” These people are likely to drive anyway and businesses are likely to hire them to do so, for even less money. But why would you want them to drive without licenses or insurance? In what bizarro world does that make sense?

+ Dave Matthews: “I don’t know why we let some people make excuses for why we should kill each other. There’s always reasons for why we should kill each other. I don’t know what’s wrong with us or why we’ve lost our way. Or maybe we’ve just always been like this. We just got better at making excuses to kill each other. This father and grandfather who was murdered by ICE in Houston, Texas. Then they say he’s not even the guy they were looking for. Well then, don’t pull the trigger, you assholes. It just makes me mad. I want to send this to the memory of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo.”

+++

+ Hegseth wants to force all members of the US military 30 and older to take testosterone tests, including women. How does this square with Hegseth’s views on bodily autonomy? Mandatory T-tests but not vaccines or flu shots!? Forget the Mindshaft Gap, America is losing wars because of a T-level gap with more manly-men countries like Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea and Vietnam! (Soldiers getting lectured on their T-scores by Hair of the Dog Hegseth would make a great Monty Python sketch.)

+ What is the optimum T-level for a drone operator?

+ Rep. Tammy Duckworth on Hegseth’s Great Testosterone Hunt: “Well, it sounds like gender affirming care to me. So I’m glad he has come around to supporting gender affirming care.  Frankly, this is just more performative bullshit from the least qualified secretary of defense in our nation’s history. He’s failing at the war in Iran. He has no strategy. He has no plan. He needs to be focused on that and less on testosterone.”

+ Here’s Hakeem Jeffries’ letter announcing that he will vote against a resolution introduced by Thomas Massie that would cut off all aid to Israel, a measure that is supported by more than 70 percent of people who identify as Democrats…

+ In the end, nearly half (103) of the Democrats in the House, including Nancy Pelosi, voted to end all US funding to Israel. Thomas Massie was the lone Republican to vote YES on his own measure. (I don’t give Pelosi any credit for this lame duck vote, but I do credit the Movement that made her do something once unthinkable.)

Still, 98 Democrats voted against the measure. Here are their names…

+ Give the Yellow Badge of Courage award to ten other Democrats who stood up and resolutely voted “Present”: Bera (CA), Brown (OH), Bynum (OR), Elfreth (MD), Huffman (CA), McCollum (MN), Morrison (MN), Chris Pappas (NH),  Sánchez (A.) and Thompson (CA).

+ On Tuesday, a lawsuit filed on behalf of Mahmoud Khalil by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Beldock Levine & Hoffman, under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, alleges that he was the target of a conspiracy between private actors and federal officials who coordinated to target, detain, and attempt to deport him because he is Palestinian and he advocated for Palestinian rights. The suit charges that not only Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Rubio, and other senior Trump Administration officials, but also the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission, and Betar with a conspiracy in a coordinated plot to punish, silence and intimidate advocates for Palestinian freedom and liberation.

+ Condoleeza Rice on attacking Iran: “People will say the threat wasn’t imminent. Do you really want to wait until it’s imminent?” If you don’t wait until the threat is ‘imminent,’ it’s a war crime by definition.

+ CNBC: “Iran will consider all of Elon Musk’s companies in the Middle East, including SpaceX’s Starlink internet service, as military targets.” Iran’s new leadership seems to have read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People…

+ In a three-hour interview with Joe Rogan, JD Vance accused Israel of smearing him and using paid “influencers” to sabotage the Iran peace deal. Vance pointed to a Time magazine article that said the money originating with the Israeli government went through the accounts of a former Trump campaign official. Vance claimed the influencers had maligned him as an anti-semite. ‘My response to that is, well, go to hell,’ Vance told Rogan.

+ A senior Iranian official told Drop Site News their negotiators sent back-channel messages warning JD Vance that Trump’s Middle East envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witcoff, were trying to sabotage the agreement, using their position to enrich themselves and leaking inside information to the Israelis. Witkoff and Kushner reportedly checked in with Netanyahu and Mossad head Roman Gofman nearly every day.

+ Mike Johnson: “You heard the president talk about how he wants to effectively double the funding for national defense. Look, we live in dangerous times. We’re fighting communism on our own shores.” By “communist,” he means anyone to the left of John Fetterman…

+ Rep. Ro Khanna described to Mehdi Hasan being detained by armed Israeli settlers while in the West Bank: “You have these two young hoodlums, one with an M4 rifle, marching around our van, kicking the tires, wiping the windshields, telling us that we can’t leave. It’s very upsetting to me that the American ambassador [Mike Huckabee] isn’t looking out for American citizens.”

+ Like Joe Manchin and Bill Maher before him, John Fetterman is threatening to leave the Democratic Party over Israel: “If our party ever becomes — and just makes it official — the anti-Israel party, that’s when I would leave because that’s been a moral clarity for me.” That’s some perverse sense of moral clarity, Sen. Lurch…

+ There’s a new Watergate every week with this gang….NYT on the FBI subpoenaing its reporters in a witch-hunt for the sources of their stories on Trump’s Qatari Air Force One fiasco:

The White House directed Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, to oversee a leak investigation into reporting by The New York Times about security issues with the new Air Force One, leading to a flurry of subpoenas to several Times reporters Friday night, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Mr. Patel scuttled a planned trip to Chicago and spent roughly eight hours at the White House on Friday, running the investigation from there rather than F.B.I. headquarters — a major departure from historical practice. Mr. Patel also briefed senior administration officials on the investigation, two people said.

+ The owner of a South Korean aluminum company facing penalties from the Commerce Department for exports to the United States paid $2 million to Trump’s holding company last year. 

+ I guess this is what JD Vance meant when he said Nixon “is enjoying a bit of a renaissance:”

The Treasury Department’s top tax policy official was forced out of his job after he warned that the White House was at risk of violating a federal law prohibiting senior officials’ involvement in IRS audits, according to people familiar with the matter. Kenneth Kies, an assistant Treasury secretary and acting chief counsel of the Internal Revenue Service, is leaving those posts in the coming weeks.

+ This one’s for you, Hunter Biden!  As Trump fattens the Pentagon budget to Pantagruelian girth, Don Jr. and Eric Trump have started investing millions in weapons companies doing business with the Department of War. According to the Washington Post,

Most of the investments have taken place since Trump was elected president for a second time. The companies have collectively generated at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options. Some have gained coveted spots on shortlists of preapproved contractors that can bid exclusively on up to nearly $200 billion in future work.

+ Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent showing Fox’s Jesse Watters a sheet of hundred-dollar bills bearing Trump’s scrawl on it. Bessent: “He used a mini-sharpie. The more cash that people in the US or around the world are willing to hold, then the better it is for our budget. I think people are going to want to hold the president’s signature.” For the first time in US history, American currency will feature the signature of the president, rather than the Secretary of the Treasury. Imagine if Obama had been the first president to break this tradition: a third of the country would’ve made bonfires of their bills, or pretended to. 

+++

Aaron Ross Sorkin: We have more debt, inflation is worse, consumer prices are worse, unemployment is worse, the jobs number is worse, the GDP number is maybe worse. That’s just empirical math.

Sen. Tim Scott: You’ve gotta take both presidencies in aggregate 

Aaron Ross Sorkin:  Those who are measuring from the end of the Biden presidency to today may take a different view.

+ Jim Cramer: “Tech feels like the only game in town.” But according to Fortune, “More tech workers are retiring early because they don’t want to deal with AI-related changes.” 

+ Trump, while serving as president, “earned” more from crypto than every publicly traded crypto company in the US…

+ The “art” of Trump deals is to sell others “down the river,” while he cashes in on their misfortune. But what does that mean? The phrase comes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, when Tom is sold down the Mississippi into the hands of the vicious plantation owner Simon Legree. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling book, not just a novel, in the US during the 19th century. As Lincoln said, “the little lady’s” book may have “started this Great War.” But it also seems to have informed predatory capitalists of the following centuries how to make a financial killing from wage-slavery and other kinds of trade in human labor. These days, Simon Legree stands not as a villain but as a role model for the likes of Trump, Thiel and Musk.

+ If you want proof that King’s arc bending toward justice is not an “arc” but something resembling Mitch McConnell’s EEG chart, consider that while Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the bestselling book in America of the 19th Century, for most of the 20th Century that distinction went to Margaret Mitchell’s lost cause melodrama, Gone With the Wind. 

+ Trump on his $2.4 million haul in 2025: “You know why I’m profiting? Because the stock market’s going up, everybody’s profiting.” The wealthiest one percent of Americans own more than half of the shares of capital markets, while the bottom fifty percent of Americans own a combined 1.1 percent.

+ Warren Buffett on the stock markets: “Since humans love to gamble so much, there’s more money in actually cultivating gamblers than in cultivating investors.”

+ Trump: “Affordability—that’s a fake word they use. They caused the affordability problem. It’s called high prices. They came up with this word. They’re good at coming up with words. We came up with a good word too. They’re Dubmocrats. Dumb. You take the “b” out. Most people don’t know that Dumb has a B in it. Okay? But the “u” replaces the “e” and you have a Dumbocrat. And I just don’t understand.” When he says “most people don’t know,” he means, of course, that he didn’t know.”

+ CBS: The median US home is now more unaffordable to the median American than at any point in history. In 2016, the mortgage rate was 3.5% and the average new home cost $350,000.  Today, the rate is 6.5% and the average new home costs $540,000. This is perhaps the key reason that 49% of young adults now live at their parents’ home. Up from 37% in 2019.

+ What’s the maximum we should work a week, Senator?

+ An Urban Institute study reports that one in 10 US adults relied on “buy now, pay later” loans to pay for their groceries and, of those, about a third missed a payment last year. About 20% of working-age adults said they had dipped into long-term savings or emergency funds at least once in the last 12 months to pay for groceries. 

+ Nearly 20% (9.16 million US borrowers) of the 43 million Americans with federal student debt are now in default.

+ On the pickleball courts at the senior center, this is what’s called getting your ass kicked…

+++

+ Conspiracy theories from the Left and Right on the “real” cause of Lindsey Graham’s death are about to overtake those regarding Charlie Kirk’s murder. If Putin didn’t Novichuk, Graham, you can see why he might have fantasized about it.

+ Trump on Lindsey Graham: “He had one bad moment in the January 6 thing when he stood up — ‘alright, now I’ve had it, that’s it, I can’t do it anymore’ — then he called me about 40 minutes later and said, ‘Did I really say that? I can’t believe it.’ And he took it back. So I give him a 99.9 instead of 100.”

+ It’s probably no surprise that Kamal Harris would praise Lindsey Graham, given that her shadow vice presidential candidate was Liz Cheney.

+ And now a few words from Klobocop, who, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sat through Graham’s histrionic badgering of witnesses testifying about Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual harassment and general unfitness for a seat on the Supreme Court…

Enough already!

+ Stasis you can believe in…

Zogby Poll of Likely Democratic Party Voters

For whom would you vote if the Democratic Primaries were today and the candidates were…

Harris: 37.5
Newsom: 19.1
AOC: 12.3
Mayor Petebot: 9.2
Shaprio: 7.0
Mark Kelly: 5.9
Pritzer: 5.3
Gallego: .6
Someone else: 3.2

+ Meanwhile, the latest odds on the 2028 election by the bookies in Vegas…

2028 Election Winner, Current Odds

Gavin Newsom; 4/1
J.D. Vance: 5/1
Marco Rubio: 6/1
Jon Ossoff: 8/1
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: 12/1
Kamala Harris: 14/1
Donald Trump Sr.: 25/1
Pete Buttigieg: 25/1
Tucker Carlson: 28/1

What a country.

+ It’s not Bernie’s revolution anymore, not now, or ever, apparently…

+ Yet, the revolution rolls on without the senator from Vermont. Take it from Matt Drudge (and CNBC), baby…

+ Thomas Massie: “It’s ironic that we control the House, Senate, Supreme Court, & the White House — and we’re yelling ‘election fraud’? We won all the damn elections. What are we doing with that? We’re bankrupting the country. We’re starting new wars. We’re violating the Constitution. We’re not cracking down on the fraud. The problem is not the elections. We won the damn elections. The problem is that we’re wasting the opportunity voters gave us.”

+++

+ The El Niño Supremo-driven heatwave in the Pacific Ocean is larger than the surface of the Moon.

+ There have already been more days in England that reached at least 86F in 2026 than there were in 1976, previously “the benchmark for hot summers.”

+ Europe is being scorched by its third extreme heat wave of the summer, with the average high across Western Europe was forecast to be 29.4°C, which is 6.3° above the normal high for July 14 from 1961-1990. The most extreme temperatures were forecast for Belgium and France, where highs were expected to reach more than 9 degrees above historic norms.

+ European countries recorded more than 10,000 excess deaths during the record-breaking heatwave that engulfed the west of the continent in late June, according to data from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the World Health Organization.

+ The French energy giant TotalEnergies is conducting fracking operations outside Arlington, Texas, that are within 300 feet of homes, schools and daycare centers.

+ Climate change has reduced the global area suitable for humans by one-third since the beginning of the 20th century, according to research published in Ecological Economics.

+ Smoke from climate-fueled Canadian wildfires is streaming across the Upper Midwest and the Northeast Coast.

+ Our friend Tommy Jed sent these photos of the Mackinaw Bridge in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula on Wednesday morning. The air quality in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan hit 350.

+ Holy Toledo!

+ If Sarah Palin and Lauren Boebert had a baby (It’s possible, isn’t it?), she would sound a lot like Rep. McClain of Michigan, who wants to invade Canada to stop the wildlfres: 

+ But take a look around, Lisa, Oregon is burning…

+ The American West is burning…

+ Even Alaska is burning…

+ If you want to invade someone to stop these fires, you might want to start with Exxon…

+ As another heat dome grips much of the US, the Trump Administration took down more than 1660 webpages on Department of Energy sites that offer guidance on staying cool, while saving energy and keeping power costs down.

+ According to a JAMA study, from 1999 to 2023, heat-related deaths in the US surged by 117 percent.  A 2020 study by Duke estimated that 12,000 Americans died that year from heat-caused deaths.

+ Since retaking the Presidency, Trump has delayed or cancelled $83 billion in clean energy projects.

+ New York is the first state to enact a moratorium on new data center construction. There are loopholes, naturally…

+ Colson Whitehead: “You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”

+ Using climate-driven wildfires as the rationale, insurance companies in California have hiked homeowners’ rates by 84% since 2020 and denied coverage to more than 300,000 households.

+ There’s much to contemplate from this map and chart of June temperatures in Europe, none of it good, some of it downright terrifying…

+ 58% of Oregon is now under drought conditions with no relief in sight.

+ Natural gas power in the US has hit a 17-year high and keeps going up. According to a report by the financial house Lazard, the price of energy produced by natural gas plants rose to $90 a megawatt-hour in 2026, an increase from $78 last year.” 

+ In a study of 13 US states, PJM, the company that runs the nation’s largest electric grid, found that data centers have increased power costs by at least $6.3 billion.

+ Not so fast, says the guy whose principal qualification for becoming Trump’s Secretary of Energy was drinking fracking fluid on TV.

+ Apparently, data centers are immune to the immutable laws of supply and demand.

+ Tucker Carlson, the Marx of the Maine backwoods:

The promise of AI is that the overwhelming majority of the population will suffer and will have their life’s work taken from them. A tiny number of people will get richer than anyone’s ever gotten and the physical environment will be completely degraded. It’ll be rendered ugly through data centers and dry through water use. Everything about the future that AI promises is worse for the overwhelming majority of the people, but it empowers and enriches a tiny percentage of the population. That’s so crazy that only a society that worships money could even live with that for one day without resorting to revolution.

+ China’s Hainan province became the first in the nation to “prohibit the sale of internal combustion engine vehicles” by 2030. Nationwide, EVs now make up  13.2% of China’s total vehicle fleet, an increase of 2.9 percent from last year. By contrast, EVs make up less than 2 percent of all the vehicles on US roads.

+ From the Africa Report on the spreading Ebola outbreak in the Congo: Updated numbers issued by the UN health agency showed there have been 1,759 confirmed cases in DRC since the outbreak was declared in mid-May, including 600 confirmed deaths.

This is the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever, not only among the previous Bundibugyo outbreaks, but all the different viruses that are causing Ebola,” Wessam Mankoula, head of emergency preparedness and response for the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC), told reporters. He compared it to the deadliest Ebola outbreak – in 2013-16 in West Africa – when there were 994 cases in the first six weeks, while there have been 1,596 in the current one. “Unfortunately, the virus is still ahead of our response. It’s moving faster than deploying the resources to control the situation,” Mankoula said…More than 10,000 contacts of infected people are being monitored, at a follow-up rate of 82%. The WHO believes a rate of 95 % is needed to get on top of the outbreak. Laboratory capacity has increased from 30 tests per day in the capital, Kinshasa, to more than 2,000 tests daily in decentralized labs in the affected provinces. The WHO wants $115 million to strengthen its Ebola response, of which 32% has been received to date.

+ If America were to be defined by a disease, you’d be hard-pressed to top the symbolic resonance of “Explosive diarrhea”. NBC News: A San Diego infectious disease doctor says it’s probably best to stay away from fresh produce for the next week or so, even if you wash it. A fecal parasite illness, known as cyclosporiasis, has now reached California.”

+ Steven Mandernach, executive director of the Association of Food and Drug Officials, on the challenge of detecting the presence of the parasite that causes cyclosporiasis: “This isn’t like detecting a needle in a haystack. It’s like detecting a microscopic portion of a needle in a haystack.”

+ From Peter Geoghegan and Lucas Amin’s piece in the LRB on Palantir and the NHS:

Palantir’s expansion in the UK has been rapid. A decade ago, the firm was largely unknown here. It now holds public contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in everything from financial regulation to local government. Its head of UK operations, Louis Mosley (grandson of Oswald), appears regularly in the British media. Although usually more measured than his US bosses, at last year’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference he warned that Western civilisation was in an existential battle against a “distributed idea suppression complex” consisting of “armies of fact-checkers and experts”, lawyers, activists, academics and journalists. Organised opposition to Palantir has increased in Britain, but Labour ministers continue to stress the importance of its technology to the running of a modern state. In recent months, the investigative newsletter Democracy for Sale, where we both work, has been looking into Palantir’s business in the UK, and particularly its contracts with the NHS. Behind the company’s bombastic self-image, we found there was often a much more prosaic reality: problems with software, pressure from management, staff resistance, but also an unrivalled level of political access.

+ I need a wall-sized print of this photo for the Roaming Charges office…

+++

Mark Twain: “The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter; they are an entire banquet.”

+ Trump is turning the White House into the tackiest Thai Restaurant in DC, a rebranding of the old place that is undoubtedly long overdue.

+ It turns out that the American Flag Blue of the Reflecting Pool is more like Rebel Gray, which figures given that it was a Virginia firm (Atlantic Industrial Coatings) that did the painting. How much more does Lincoln have to suffer?

+ Laura Ingraham on “normal men”: “Men don’t like liberals. Normal men like strength, patriotism and common sense. Alpha male Trump has driven Democrats bonkers.”

+ Apparently, normal men do it in gated communities in Florida with vacuum cleaners…

+ US soccer star Folarin Balogun on how Trump’s intervention with FIFA to get his red card suspension rescinded affected the US team before getting blown out in an elimination game by Belgium:

My initial reaction was that I was happy to be back in the team, but when I kind of started to reflect, I knew it was going to cause a lot of controversy, and I could almost see within my teammates a bit of nerves, because it’s something that is so unique. But the closer we got to the game, I tried to just focus as best as I could, but it was difficult. A lot of outside noise, and that’s hard to avoid.

+ With due respect to the World Cup, the Wall Street Journal writers who called England v. Argentina the “greatest rivalry in sports” have obviously never attended a Civil War football game pitting Oregon against Oregon State, played at Reser Stadium in Corvallis in drenching rain, where the always heavily-favored Ducks could rarely defeat, and usually got pulverized by, the lowly Beavers, no matter how much money Nike paid the pampered Oregon players.

+ A few Americans (but not all that many considering the song is the national anthem) know that the third verse of Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangeled Banner contains an attack on free blacks and fugitive slaves for joining the British during the war of 1812, an invading Army lead by Alex’s relative Admiral George Cockburn: “No refuge could save the hireling or slave/ from the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.” But it’s certainly much less well known that Key was also the District Attorney for Washington, DC., where, among other cases, he prosecuted the physician Reuben Crandell on charges of sedition for publishing and distributing anti-slavery pamphlets in DC and Maryland. Crandell–the brother of the Connecticut abolitionist and educator Prudence Crandall, who ran one of the first schools for black girls–was acquitted in an early and righteous case of jury nullification. Even though he lived in Georgetown, not on a plantation, Key owned slaves most of his adult life, including 8 when he died in 1843. The national war poet, who branded the US “the land of the free,” wasn’t in the least conflicted on the subject of slavery, as Madison (“man shall have no property in man”) and Jefferson (“execrable commerce”) at least professed to be. He was a racist who considered “the whole colored race” (not the institution of slavery) to be “the great moral and political evil amongst us.”

+ For the “Trump is a closet case” file…

Lawrence Jones, Fox and Friends: Today marks two years since they tried to assassinate you in Butler. How are you feeling?

Trump: I’ve known Ainsley longer than the two of you. I’ve known her through a very handsome man named Sean Hannity. She seemed to be attracted to him for whatever the Hell reason.

+ Ainsley Earhardt gets paid more than $3 million a year to sit and smile dutifully through Trump’s ogling and misogynistic “locker room” talk about her, though that may be less of a strain than going home to that “handsome man” Sean Hannity every night.

+ And here’s another “handsome guy”…

+ Trump: “The new Prime Minister [of Iraq]. It’s great to have you at the White House. He’s young, and he’s handsome.”

+ In a note to John Frohnmeyer, a relatively laid-back Oregonian who was the head of the NEA during what we wrongly believed to be the height of the culture wars but was, in reality, just a prudish preview of even more hysterical tantrums to come, George HW Bush complained about grants supporting the work of the artist Andres Serrano (Piss Christ) and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, writing: “I do support you—difficult job. But Barbara and I are bothered about the raunchy stuff—urine . . . fist up rectum.”

+ It wasn’t support for genocide, arming Ukraine’s bloody war against Russia or runaway inflation that most irritated JD Vance about Joe Biden, but the way he ate ice cream! “The thing I couldn’t get over about Biden is bad staff work, man. The way that he ate ice cream. I mean, it’s like, we could bring some of this stuff up, but it’s like they could get him eating ice cream in the most ridiculous, suggestive way imaginable.”

+ Is that really worse than having your staff demand the use of a military helicopter to fly your son to golf lessons?

+ Over to you, Wallace Stevens…

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wearing, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

+ The law school at the University of Chicago has not only banned AI but also all electronic devices, laptops, phones and iPads, for first-year students. “The idea that AI creates shortcuts, saves time and avoids effort; these are all things that could be very beneficial in the professional context,” William Hubbard, a professor of law and economics and chair of the AI Committee, told the Financial Times. “But they are very, very damaging in the educational context, when the whole point is to do things the hard way–because that’s how you learn.”

+ By 1969, in his lecture, “What is an Author?”, Michel Foucault had already anticipated this dilemma as the inevitable destination of modernity’s drive to assert total power over the individual to the point of wiping authorial identity altogether…

We can easily imagine a culture where discourse would circulate without any need for an author. Discourses, whatever their status, form, or value, and regardless of our manner of handling them, would unfold in a pervasive anonymity. No longer the tiresome repetitions:

“Who is the real author?”

“Have we proof of his authenticity and originality?”

“What has he revealed of his most profound self in his language?”

New questions will be heard:

“What are the modes of existence of this discourse?”

“Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?”

“What placements are determined for possible subjects?”

“Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?”

Behind all these questions, we would hear little more than the murmur of indifference:

“What matter who’s speaking?”

+ With more than 1.42 citations, Foucault is the world’s most cited “thinker.” Think about that!

+ RIP Sam Neill: “It’s not a happy place, America, and I wasn’t happy there. I’m interested in the condition of America now. It beggars belief what’s happening there now. When you hear a slogan like Make America Great Again, it makes a sort of weird sense because America could be great again, but at the community level. Not with sort of strange billionaires making weird decisions.” (2025)

+ Last week, I nominated Johnnie Taylor’s “Last Two Dollars,” as our National Economic Anthem. But Steve from the Twin Cities said I must’ve overlooked  “I Need Money Bad” by John Whitehead (not our columnist, alas). He’s got a case…

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

A Table for Fortune
William T. Vollman
(Skyhorse)

Recomposed: Music, Climate, Crisis, Change
Kyle Devine
(Verso)

My Head for a Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Bishnoi, the World’s First Eco-Warriors
Martin Goodman
(Greystone Books)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Fathers
Fathers
(Blue Note)

Set of All Sets
Parts & Labor
(Ernest Jenning)

Indigo Red
Fabienne Delsol
(Damaged Goods)

 Mouthing Lunatics

“When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man’s moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?” – Mark Twain, “Consistency,” 1887.