Links and Notes for July 28th, 2023

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Art & Literature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Fun

COVID-19

The summer surge of COVID infections is accelerating across the United States by Benjamin Mateus (WSWS)

“As shown by the CDC graph below, in April 2023 levels of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater began to rise steadily, an indirect indicator of community-level spread. Over the month of June, there was a more than 60 percent rise in wastewater levels of the virus, with more than 1,300 sites participating in providing the public health agency with data.”

“The agency uses wastewater tracking to inure the population against the threat posed by COVID or any other pathogen, while maintaining the farce that the national public health edifice is functioning to protect the population, although hardly anyone believes that any more.”

“As Dr. Marc Sala of Northwestern University Medicine recently said, “You will have many patients come to us still in good numbers to fill up our clinic with maybe the third, fourth, fifth infection and now having finally developed post-COVID syndrome … with symptoms that are enough to be disabling to their lives as previously known.” Although these patients are filling up hospitals and ICUs as in the past, the long-term implications are even worse. Long COVID is already the third leading cause of neurological disorders.”

“A reporter found that a COVID-positive delegation from Israel had recently visited the White House, and asked whether Biden had been potentially exposed. Jean-Pierre replied, “As you know we have testing protocols whenever someone meets with the president. So, I can tell you that anyone that meets with the president gets tested. I do. We all do.””

Economy & Finance

Why Capitalism Is Leaving the US in Search of Profit by Richard Wolff (Scheer Post)

“So long as capitalism’s movements stayed mostly within the U.S., the alarms raised by its abandoned victims remained regional, not becoming a national issue yet. Over recent decades, however, many capitalists have moved production facilities and investments outside the U.S., relocating them to other countries, especially to China. Ongoing controversies and alarms surround this capitalist exodus. Even the celebrated hi-tech sectors, arguably U.S. capitalism’s only remaining robust center, have invested heavily elsewhere.”

“They in turn promoted and funded ideological claims that capitalism’s abandonment of the U.S. was actually a great gain for U.S. society as a whole. Those claims, categorized under the headings of “neoliberalism” and “globalization” served neatly to hide or obscure one key fact: higher profits mainly for the richest few was the chief goal and the result of capitalists abandoning the U.S.”

“As U.S. job opportunities stopped rising, so did wages. Since globalization and automation boosted corporate profits and stock markets while wages stagnated, capitalism’s old centers exhibited extreme widening of income and wealth gaps. Deepening social divisions followed and culminated in capitalism’s crisis now.”

“For the U.S. empire that arose out of World War II, China and its BRICS allies represent its first serious, sustained economic challenge. The official U.S. reaction to these changes so far has been a mix of resentment, provocation, and denial. Those are neither solutions to the crisis nor successful adjustments to a changed reality.”

“Because profits still flow back to the old centers, those there gathering the profits delude their countries and themselves into thinking all is well in and for global capitalism. Because those profits sharply aggravate economic inequalities, social crises there deepen.”

“Is it acceptable for a small group, employers, exclusively and unaccountably to make most key workplace decisions (what, where, and how to produce and what to do with the profits)? That is clearly undemocratic. Employees in capitalism’s new centers already question the system; some have begun to challenge and move against”

US credit downgrade: another sign of a deepening crisis by Nick Beams (WSWS)

“The Fitch downgrade was from AAA rating to AA+, bringing it into line with a similar downgrade by Standard & Poor’s in 2011 following a conflict in Congress during the Obama administration over the lifting of the debt ceiling.

“Fitch complained that “there has been only limited progress in tackling medium-term challenges related to rising Social Security and Medicare costs due to an aging population.”

“In other words, while bank bailouts and military spending may have caused the debt crisis, Wall Street’s solution is to impoverish and immiserate the vast majority of the population.”

“US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the decision was “arbitrary and based on outdated data.”

““Fitch’s decision does not change what Americans, investors, and people all around the world already know: that Treasury securities remain the world’s pre-eminent safe and liquid asset, and that the American economy is fundamentally strong,” she said.

“If that really were the case, then the top financial official in the government would not have to say so.”

Matt Levine has mentioned this rule many times: as soon as you have to say you’re obviously a good investment, you’re not.

White House Says Bidenomics So Successful The Average American Has Twice As Many Jobs As They Had Two Years Ago (Babylon Bee)

““Thanks to the President’s wonderful economic policies, most Americans have at least two jobs,” said gay, black Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to the raucous applause of hand-picked journalists in the room. “Our economists ran the numbers and found that’s twice as many jobs as people used to have just a few years ago. So many jobs! Success!”

““Wow! Thanks, President Biden!” said local barista/hardware store clerk/landscaper/drive-thru worker/Uber driver Brett Barnes. “I’m just swimming in jobs right now! Just a couple more jobs and I’ll be able to afford bread, eggs, AND milk! Bidenomics works!””

Public Policy & Politics

Russia Decides Not To Renew Grain Deal: Some Context by Ted Snider (Antiwar.com)

“Putin gave two reasons for suspending the deal after having “extended this so-called deal many times.” The first is that, though it was Russia that suspended the deal, it was the West that broke it. “As for the conditions under which we agreed to ensure the safe export of Ukrainian grain, yes, there were clauses in this agreement with the United Nations, according to which Russian interests had to be taken into account as well,” Putin said. “Not a single clause related to what is in the interests of the Russian Federation has been fulfilled.””

“Putin made a similar pledge in his answer to the journalist. One option, he said, is “not first the extension and then the honoring of promises, but first the honoring of promises and then our participation. What do I mean? We can suspend our participation in this deal, and if everybody once again says that all the promises made to us will be fulfilled, let them fulfill them – and we will immediately join this deal. Again.””

“George Bebe of the Quincy Institute has said that “Russia’s withdrawal from the deal is part of classic negotiating behavior, after its repeated demands went unaddressed by partners to the deal.””

JFC. It’s literally how deals work, FFS. Pay rent for housing. No rent? No housing. No housing? No rent. This is not rocket-science that needs to be handed down from on high by the Quincy Institute.

“Putin has frequently pointed out that “this whole deal was presented under the pretext of ensuring the interests of African countries” whose food security was threatened. Instead, from Russia’s perspective, the deal has boosted the economy of Russia’s enemy by allowing Ukraine to export grain and boosted the economy of those supporting Russia’s enemy by allowing western Europe to import that grain while helping African countries barely at all.”

This is a factual assessment of the situation, and hardly surprising. NATO, the EU, and the U.S. never tire of accusing Russia of every duplicity, while being far more duplicitous themselves, justifying their own, real duplicity by pointing out Russia’s fictitious one.

“He has claimed at various times that “about 45 percent of the total volume of grain exported from Ukraine went to European countries, and only three percent went to Africa.“”

“Russia, though, has sent many tonnes of grain to Africa: 11.5 million tonnes in 2022 and 10 million in the first half of 2023, according to Putin. And, in November 2022, Russia agreed to send grain to some African countries for free. Putin has repeatedly promised that, were the deal not to be extended, “Russia will be ready to supply the same amount that was delivered under the deal, from Russia to the African countries in great need, at no expense.” After the decision not to extend the deal, Putin wrote an article in the African media repeating that promise directly to the people of Africa: “I want to give assurances that our country is capable of replacing the Ukrainian grain both on a commercial and free-of-charge basis. . . . Notwithstanding the sanctions, Russia will continue its energetic efforts to provide supplies of grain, food products, fertilizers and other goods to Africa.””

No, The Truth About Biden Is Not Democratic by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Never mind what was in the mail: How the mail got where it got was the determinant. Atop this was the implicit assertion, yet more insidious, that the truth has some kind of brand. If the Russians have anything to do with it, whatever was true could not be true. The obverse also held, supposedly: If the Democrats say something is so, it is so.”

“The perversion of public institutions in broad daylight requires that our thoughts are managed such that we cannot see or understand these perversions as they occur.”

“We already knew V–P Biden intervened back in 2016, when Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor general, was at the front end of an official investigation into corruption at Burisma. Hunter was by then taking home $50,000 a month—the Post says $83,000—for sitting on Burisma’s board and doing nothing other than being his father’s son. Joe stepped in to get Shokin fired—alleging, perversely, that Shokin had to go because he was corrupt. This was in 2016, when Joe was recorded in that infamous video bragging, at the Council on Foreign Relations no less, that he threatened to withhold $5 billion in U.S. aid if Shokin wasn’t removed. “And, son of a bitch, they fired him,” was Joe’s punchline on that occasion.”

“Zlochevsky, the corrupt jillionaire who founded Burisma Holdings in 2002, indeed wanted Shokin off his back and out of his books. He went to Hunter with this project, whereupon Hunter did his job and went to Pop. Whereupon they both let it be known—both, got it?—that getting the job done would cost Zlochevsky $10 million, $5 million apiece for Biden père et fils. Biden arrived in Kyiv in March 2016, a month after Shokin got his warrants to go after Zlochevsky’s real estate. Shokin was dismissed on March 29.”

“Given what is at stake at this point—and what is at stake is the legitimacy of the American government—this kind of reporting is beyond irresponsible. To call it “Soviet” in character is in no way hyperbolic: It reeks of the thought control op Robbie Mook and his deplorable boss attempted seven years ago. It is exactly the same: Tar those bearing the truth with one or another sort of discrediting epithet—the Russians did it, the Republicans are doing it—and shuffle the truth under the rug or otherwise out of the public’s sight.”

“Miranda Devine, a divinely dogged New York post columnist, published a commentary after the paper’s piece on the revelations in FD–1023 headlined, “The Joe Biden bribe allegations need a special counsel, now.” I’ll say. “The story of the Biden family’s corrupt influence-peddling scheme, which netted tens of millions of dollars from Ukraine, China, Russia and beyond, is scandal enough,” Devine writes. “But the coverup—from Big Tech’s censorship of the Post’s reporting from Hunter’s abandoned laptop, and CIA lies that it was Russian disinformation, to the burying of this FD–1023—is bigger than Watergate.””

Idiots, No Longer Useful by Boris Kagarlitsky (Russian Dissent)

“Strelkov and his Angry Patriots began to pose a threat not at the moment when they began to criticize the course of hostilities, but when they began to take seriously the rhetoric they’d been fed over the past year and a half.”

“Officials at all different levels are well aware that it is necessary to leave the territory of Ukraine, the sooner the better. How this will be done, and most importantly by whom, we do not yet know. Putin clearly does not fit into these change of plans, but after the rebellion of Yevgeny Prigozhin, it is no secret to anyone that his reign is nearing its end.”

“The[ The Angry Patriots] have become much more dangerous than the left and liberal opposition, not because they offer some kind of alternative, or because they want or can change something, but because they stubbornly cling to the old agenda at the very moment when the ruling elites themselves are preparing to change this agenda.”

The Afghanistan Lithium Great Game by Binoy Kampmark (Scheer Post)

“In a fit of wounded pride, the United States has, in turn, sought to strangulate and asphyxiate the Taliban regime, citing human rights and security concerns. The Taliban’s Interim Foreign Minister, Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, makes the not unreasonable point that “the ongoing crisis is the imposition of sanctions and banking restrictions by the United States.””

“In recent months, Afghanistan has again piqued the interest of eager strategists drawing their salaries from the US government and assorted thinktanks. Such interest has nothing at all to do with the good citizenry of the Taliban-controlled state, be it the welfare of women or purported links to terrorist groups. They concern the presence of lithium reserves in the Chapa Dara district of Kunar province and, almost inevitably, a fear that the People’s Republic of China might muscle in.”

“Foreign Policy columnist Lynne O’Donnell also points an accusing finger at China for yet again “mucking about in Afghanistan’s mineral-rich playground.” Doing so is evidently the prerogative of Western states. She mocks the suggestion that this move in the energy transition stakes might “mean that billions of dollars will be pouring into securing a prosperous future for one of the world’s poorest countries. It probably won’t.” Remarkably, China is reproached for treating the country as a political, rather than economic matter.”

“The object of the Biden administration has been to corner the rare minerals market and prize out China, best seen in efforts to classify Australia as a “domestic source” for US defence interests. Doing so would give unqualified access to the island continent’s own impressive lithium reserves. (53% of the world’s lithium supply is mined in Australia.)”

The United States Refuses to Play by the World’s Rules by Rebecca Gordon (Scheer Post)

“[…] you wonder how the United States had access to a chunk of land on an island nation with which it had the frostiest of relations, including decades of economic sanctions, here’s the story: in 1903, long before Cuba’s 1959 revolution, its government had granted the United States “coaling” rights at Guantánamo, meaning that the U.S. Navy could establish a base there to refuel its ships. The agreement remained in force in 2002, as it does today.)”

“The United States, Ní Aoláin insists, must provide rehabilitative care for the men it has broken. I have my doubts, however, about the curative powers of any treatment administered by Americans, even civilian psychologists. After all, two of them personally designed and implemented the CIA’s torture program.”

“[…] the United States deployed cluster bombs in its wars in Iraq, and Afghanistan. (In the previous century, it dropped 270 million of them in Laos alone while fighting the Vietnam War.) Ironically — one might even say, hypocritically — the U.S. joined 146 other countries in condemning Syrian and Russian use of the same weapons in the Syrian civil war. Indeed, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that if Russia were using them in Ukraine (as, in fact, it is ), that would constitute a “war crime.””

Sure, but Jen Psaki is a bag of hot garbage. She’s willing to say anything. It’s not surprising that this was the message, but it’s also not surprising that she was the messenger.

“[…] it’s not that the United States doesn’t have enough conventional artillery shells to resupply Ukraine. The problem is that sending them there would leave this country unprepared to fight two simultaneous (and hypothetical) major wars as envisioned in what the Pentagon likes to think of as its readiness doctrine.”

“Of course, the “best country in the world” wasn’t the only nation involved in creating the horrors I’ve been describing. And the ordinary people who live in this country are not to blame for them. Still, as beneficiaries of this nation’s bounty — its beauty, its aspirations, its profoundly injured but still breathing democracy — we are, as the philosopher Iris Marion Young insisted, responsible for them. It will take organized, collective political action, but there is still time to bring our outlaw country back into what indeed should be a united community of nations confronting the looming horrors on this planet.”

UPS Teamsters Have a Right to Strike. President Biden Should Honor It. by Matt Leichenger (Jacobin)

“Our hard work during the pandemic earned UPS historic profits. In 2022, the company saw an operating profit of $13.1 billion, up from $6.5 billion in 2019. Teamsters were the ones moving the packages, yet we were never rewarded for the company’s success. Instead, UPS is expected to give its shareholders over $8 billion in dividends and stock buybacks in 2023 alone, and CEO Carol Tomé took home an average of $23.3 million per year in 2021 and 2022 . Meanwhile, we just saw our working conditions worsen.”

“[…] while this contract fight is largely about getting fairly compensated for our work, it is also about winning greater protections against other issues that undermine the strength of our union, our personal safety in extreme weather, and our dignity and respect on the job.”

“When UPS and corporate America urge Biden to take away our right to strike, they are urging Biden to prevent a broader democratic movement of working-class Americans standing up to authoritarianism and corporate greed. If we want to maintain and expand our democracy and reverse decades of grotesque, increasing wealth inequality in this country, honoring workers’ right to strike is an absolute necessity.”

Rein in Sports-Betting Profiteers by Joe Mayall (Jacobin)

“[…] the Supreme Court’s Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association decision struck down the national ban on sports gambling, opening the floodgates for what is now an inescapable industry. In the five years since Governor Murphy’s inaugural bets (both of which lost), sports betting has transformed from a once-illicit vice into a popular hobby. It’s now legal in thirty-three states, sports books sponsor every major sporting event, and sixty-four million Americans , myself included, have collectively wagered over $220 billion on everything from the Super Bowl to South Korean table tennis.”

“In this regard, legalization has been an unequivocal good, as it cuts off revenue from nefarious organizations and protects bettors from exploitation and physical harm. (As predacious as legal books can be, DraftKings won’t send a goon to break your legs for unpaid debts.)”

They won’t break your legs, but they instead have the legal right to garnish your wages, using debt slavery instead of physical harm. Sports gambling is an addiction made nearly infinitely more convenient by putting it on your smartphone.

“[…] sports betting has been a net positive for state budgets. In 2022, American states received over $1 billion dollars in taxes from sports wagering, which could fund education, health care, and infrastructure.”

A regressive tax to fill coffers depleted by neoliberal policies.

“As socialists, we should seek to end ineffective government constraints, letting informed adults decide for themselves which activities they wish to pursue.”

Sure. Of course. Impossible to disagree with. But only for a reasonable definition of the word “informed”. Most people are “informed” that sports-betting will enhance their income. They do not know what disposable income means nor are they aware that they don’t actually have any.

“With few federal regulations in place and almost no public education, many bettors were caught up in the predatory marketing, gamification, and hype of sports betting, losing thousands overnight. While researching this article, I asked bettors to share their experiences. Most responses involved people having fun with their friends online, working together to find good bets. Two respondents even claimed that they’d used winnings to buy houses. But for every few positive experiences, there was a heartbreaker.”

“Some states ban the use of the “risk-free” term, such as Ohio, which fined three prominent books for using it earlier this year, and Massachusetts, which investigated the Barstool Sportsbook for using the term “can’t lose” in its marketing. (Barstool’s lawyers defended the term, claiming that it was no different than the saying “buffalo wings.”)”

“You must be twenty-one to gamble in Louisiana, and yet Louisiana State University partnered with Caesars’ sports book to send marketing promotions to the school emails of underage students. Sports books are also known to limit, or even ban, bettors who win, while encouraging those who lose to keep playing.”

AfD – Keine Alternative für Deutschland by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“So hat die AfD bis heute kein rentenpolitisches Konzept, das den Bürgern ein Rentenniveau bieten würde, von dem man in Würde und ohne sozioökonomische Ängste leben könnte. Kritik an der Teilprivatisierung der Altersvorsorge sucht man im AfD-Programm ebenso vergebens wie Kritik an anderen Privatisierungen der Daseinsvorsorge.”

“Die Steuern sollen [Laut AfD] nicht nur gesenkt werden, man will ferner eine spätere Erhöhung der Steuern sogar über das Grundgesetz verbieten. Die Staatverschuldung soll dabei „planmäßig getilgt“ und dem „Sozialstaat Grenzen gesetzt“ werden. Das ist Neoliberalismus in Reinkultur.”

If Everybody’s Going to Join NATO, Then Why Have the United Nations? by Vijay Prashad (Scheer Post)

“A look at the latest military spending figures shows, to the contrary, that NATO countries, and countries closely allied to NATO, account for nearly three-quarters of the total annual global expenditure on weapons. Many of these countries possess state-of-the-art weapons systems, which are qualitatively more destructive than those held by the militaries of most non-NATO countries. Over the past quarter century, NATO has used its military might to destroy several states, such as Afghanistan (2001) and Libya (2011), shattering societies with the raw muscle of its aggressive alliance, and end the status of Yugoslavia (1999) as a unified state. It is difficult, given this record, to sustain the view that NATO is a ‘defensive alliance’.”

“Nehru’s focus on colonialism might seem anachronistic now, but in fact, NATO has become an instrument to blunt the global majority’s desire for sovereignty and dignity, two key anti-colonial concepts. Any popular project that exerts these two concepts finds itself at the end of a NATO weapons system.”

“The Vilnius Summit Communiqué underlined Ukraine’s path into NATO and sharpened NATO’s self-defined universalism. The communiqué declares, for instance, that China challenges ‘our interests, security, and values’, with the word ‘our’ claiming to represent not only NATO countries but the entire international order. Slowly, NATO is positioning itself as a substitute for the UN, suggesting that it – and not the actual international community – is the arbiter and guardian of the world’s ‘interests, security, and values’. This view is contested by the vast majority of the world’s peoples, seven billion of whom do not even reside in NATO’s member countries (whose total population is less than one billion). Those billions wonder why it is that NATO wants to supplant the United Nations.”

No, they don’t ask why. They know why. They disagree vehemently with the notion that NATO will supplant the U.N. In the hearts and minds of the rulers of the member countries of the U.S. empire, it already has—for decades now.

Zoomers: Last Chance for the American Dream? by Thom Hartmann (CounterPunch)

“Republican politicians in both Arizona and Florida have instituted statewide voucher programs which, history shows, gut and ghettoize public schools for all but the upper middle class and wealthy children whose parents have the money to match the vouchers with tuition payments. Why would they do this? And why are they exclusively attacking public school teachers and public librarians?”

“[…] why would Republicans fight tooth and nail to filibuster passage of the PRO Act (legislation that gives workers the right to easily form or join a union) that had already passed the House? If a corporation is organized money, why do they believe it’s wrong for workers to have a small bit of power by organizing themselves and protecting their labor?”

“[…] what’s driving this nationwide, across-the-board effort to strip everybody except people of great wealth from what little power and assets they still have?”

“As the President’s Council of Economic Advisors noted in their 2000 Annual Report: “To appreciate how far we have come, it is instructive to look back on what American life was like in 1900. At the turn of the century, fewer than 10 percent of homes had electricity, and fewer than 2 percent of people had telephones. An automobile was a luxury that only the very wealthy could afford. “Many women still sewed their own clothes and gave birth at home. Because chlorination had not yet been introduced and water filtration was rare, typhoid fever, spread by contaminated water, was a common affliction. One in 10 children died in infancy. Average life expectancy in the United States was a mere 47 years. “Fewer than 14 percent of Americans graduated from high school. … Widowhood was far more common than divorce. The average household had close to five members, and a fifth of all households had seven or more. … “Average income per capita, in 1999 dollars, was about $4,200. … The typical workweek in manufacturing was about 50 hours, 20 percent longer than the average today.””

“When Ronald Reagan was elected president and sworn into office on January 20, 1981, about two-thirds of Americans were solidly in the middle class. And it was explicitly his job to cut that middle class down to size to save America from herself. First, he went after the main source of working-class wealth, which coincidentally funded the Democratic Party: unions. Roughly one in three American workers was a union member, and two-thirds of Americans had the equivalent of a union job because unions set local wage and benefit floors.”

“Reagan thus kicked off a $50 trillion transfer of wealth from the homes and savings accounts of the middle class to the top one percent, a theft that continues to this day. So far just this year, America’s billionaires have added an additional $852 billion to their personal wealth, and much of that was extracted from America’s working class people.”

“George W. Bush initiated a private takeover of Medicare with the Medicare “Advantage” scam that has now trapped half of America’s retired people into plans where insurance companies routinely deny coverage, tests, treatments, and reimbursements. (Real Medicare can’t do that by law and doesn’t put itself between you and your doctor.)”

“Boomers in their 30s owned 21.3 of the nation’s wealth; Millennials in their 30s today own 4.6% of the nation’s wealth.”

“Republicans are still at it because the project of taking back 80 years of wealth from the middle class on behalf of America’s billionaires has taken on a life of its own. It’s not, as I asked at the open of this article, that they’re evil (although some clearly are): it’s that Reaganism and then Trump’s subsequent embrace of naked fascism unleashed forces that they can’t control. Kevin McCarthy is essentially helpless, even if he was inclined to do what’s best for the country (and, of course, he isn’t). Since five Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized political bribery in Bellotti and Citizens United — and thus legalized the handouts they themselves have been receiving from billionaires for decades — it’s going to take major and radical action to stop and then reverse the Reagan Revolution.”

“Rightwing billionaires are now pouring literally billions of often untraceable dollars into every election cycle to keep the gravy train on track, and that dark money goes to the GOP at a 9:1 ratio.”

If it’s untraceable, how do you know the ratio?

“Biden has tried and done a lot: united Republican opposition, however, along with sellouts like Sinema and Manchin, have defeated many of his efforts.”

Here, Hartmann shows his ignorance. Biden is just a vicious and in the tank for the eradication of the middle class. He always has been. Don’t be a fool.

The Democrats have not expressed any interest in reversing the Reagan revolution in the last 30 years. They are just much a driving force of wealth-transfer to corporations as the Republicans—they are perhaps even better at it by now.

Punch The Empire In The Fucking Face by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)

“Speech is violence and cluster bombs are peace. Homelessness and war are normal and opposing nuclear armageddon is treason. You’re a serious person if you believe our brains are being scrambled by Russian ray guns and a kooky conspiracy theorist if you’re skeptical about UFOs.”

“That’s how the two mainstream parties work together to knock the public on their ass. The “left” party sets them up, and then comes the crushing knockout blow. Democrats fight off all efforts to move the US to the left when they’re in power, then Republicans come in and move it even further to the right. Democrats refuse to codify Roe V Wade, and Republicans come in to kill it. Democrats “reluctantly” give Bush war powers, he uses it to invade Iraq. Democrats inch up the brinkmanship against China, Republicans do whatever horrifying thing they’re going to do when they take power.”

“That’s how you have to be about the two parties; stop thinking about them as two separate, competing entities and start looking at them as two weapons on the same enemy. Stop staring at one hand and start watching your actual opponent. Start watching their movements, start making some reads, and start figuring out ways to put some leather in that fucker’s face.”

The True Symbol Of The United States Is The Pentagon by Caitlin Johnstone

“Americans are taught from childhood to take special pride in their nation’s “freedom” and “democracy” (of which they have neither), when what actually makes their country stand out against the crowd is its role as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is held together by nonstop military aggression.”

A Helpful Suggestion by Caitlin Johnstone

“Once the US has made it clear that Russia and China have an open path to establish an extensive military presence in Latin America using the same means the US has used to establish its military presence in eastern Europe and eastern Asia, opponents of Washington’s foreign policy will soon lose the ability to accuse the US empire of flagrant hypocrisy.”

US Secretary of State Blinken denounces Assange, indicates extradition going ahead by Oscar Grenfell (WSWS)

“No US administration or official, Democrat or Republican, has declared that the war crimes exposed by WikiLeaks should not have happened. Nor have they resulted in prosecutions. The objection is not that these atrocities occurred but that the world’s population were informed.”

“The venue of Blinken’s statements again underscores this relationship between war and the assault on Assange. He was in Australia for annual ministerial talks. This year’s iteration further transformed Australia into a hub for these war plans, including through an expanded missile program, a secret space warfare deal and increasing “rotations” of US forces through the country.”

Preparing for war with China, US provides $345 million in arms to Taiwan by Peter Symonds (WSWS)

“As cited by the Financial Times, a Chinese embassy spokesman in Washington, Liu Pengyu, stated: “China is firmly opposed to US’s military ties with and arms sales to Taiwan.” He warned the US to “stop selling arms to Taiwan, stop creating new factors that could lead to tensions in the Taiwan Strait and stop posing risks to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.””

“Far from “defending democracy,” US imperialism is recklessly setting in motion an international conflict aimed at destabilising and subordinating Russia and China, which it regards as the chief threats to its global hegemony.”

US military has Judeo-Christain values

““Regardless of what your beliefs are, our society is a Judeo-Christian society, and we have a moral compass. Not everybody does,” Moore said. “And there are those that are willing to go for the ends regardless of what means have to be employed.”

“The future of Al in war depends on “who plays by the rules of warfare and who doesn’t. There are societies that have a very different foundation than ours,” he said, without naming any specific countries.”

The Washington Post is a press-release organ for the Pentagon. Completely unironically citing this general that “there are those willing to go for […]” even though we all know that the U.S. is definitely the one who has acted the least-morally every single time. The countries with those vaunted “Juedo-Christian” values can be counted on to alienate anyone who’s not in their own population and will enslave, colonize, or annihilate them without mercy—while, in fact, justifying the indiscriminate slaughter as the only moral solution to the evil those peoples were inflicting on the world. A neat trick. “[W]ithout naming any specific countries” refers, obviously, to whomever happens to be the official enemies: probably Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea.

Journalism & Media

UK jury finds Kevin Spacey not guilty of all charges by Paul Mitchell (WSWS)

““We have consistently pointed to the undemocratic character of the #MeToo campaign as an extension of upper-middle-class Democratic Party identity politics and its hostility to the elementary constitutional rights such as the presumption of innocence. “In the official narrative, there is an almost complete absence of understanding and elementary sympathy. The accused is a criminal, a monster, who must be destroyed.””

The US Press, Spooks & the Church Committee by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“There were other indicators that failure was on the way. The committee had spent too much time on assassination plots and agency exotica to give the question of press complicity the attention it warranted. Church, who for a time nursed dreams of a run for the presidency, did not want his name on an investigation that would make a faux-patriotic agency protecting national security look as objectionable as it was.”

“The Church Committee left various marks on the record. Some relationships between Langley and the media were broken off as the committee shut up shop. Things were not so openly and incautiously corrupt as they had been pre–Church. This was also the beginning of a long decline in mainstream media’s credibility, which, to be honest, I consider a healthy thing.”

“The agency’s immunity from all oversight is now inviolable. What Capitol Hill committee now would dare to hold hearings such as those that gave the Year of Intelligence its name? Langley’s ties to the press are a closed book. Wikipedia, the alternative encyclopedia with its own objectionable relations with intelligence, as we speak carries this sentence in its entry on the Cold War programs: “By the time the Church Committee Report was completed, all C.I.A. contacts with accredited journalists had been dropped.” This is patently, demonstrably false.”

Campaign 2024, Officially Chaos by Matt Taibbi (Racket News)

“This race is turning into a parodic repeat of 2016, the difference being the shock waves that rippled across Washington on Election Day that year are already here, with all conceivable counter-measures already deployed. Instead of starting up a Russia investigation leaders hope will end in indictment, this time the guy is already indicted many times over, and voters have already signaled they’ll be unfazed by conviction.

“Democrats meanwhile are repeating the process of cooling turnout by blasting their own protest candidate, and instead of an alert-if-off-putting Hillary Clinton on the ticket, the standard-bearer is a half-sentient, influence-peddling version of Donovan’s Brain, with no one behind him but Kamala Harris — who just got asked by a trying-to-be-friendly reporter at ABC if “race and gender” were a cause of her own historically low approval rating. Absent a big switch, our future is either Donald Trump, who by next year will be in more restraints than Hannibal Lecter on the tarmac, or this DNC dog’s breakfast. Other countries are surely already laughing. It’s getting harder to resist joining them.”

Hail to the Jailbird President by Ted Rall

“A June 21st Quinnipiac poll found that 62% of voters believe that the Department of Justice has been weaponized against Trump and that the federal charges against him for mishandling classified documents, for which he faces more than 400 years in prison, are politically motivated. Biden and the Democratic Party probably don’t even admit it to themselves—but that includes a lot of Democratic voters. 28% of Democrats think Trump’s legal troubles are more about politics than his wrongdoing.

“And here’s a major warning sign: 65% of independents agree.”

“ Swarming Trump with civil lawsuits, state and federal indictments has fed into Trump’s longstanding narrative that this heir to a multimillion-dollar real-estate empire who attended an Ivy League school and hobnobbed with starlets and presidents is actually a victim of a cabal of privileged coconspirators, and not merely a sad-sack punching bag but a noble warrior fighting more for everyday people than himself. Joe and Jane Sixpack don’t stow military plans in their bathroom or pay hush money to porn stars or rip off aspiring college kids or try to overturn elections, yet they empathize more with the perpetrator of these deeds than the authority figures attempting to hold him to account. Truly, it’s a political miracle.

“What these prosecutors don’t seem to know (and probably shouldn’t care) is that we, the people, hate their guts much more than we look down on the crass self-dealing and personal corruption of someone like Trump or, for that matter, Biden.”

Science & Nature

Record-shattering heat signals a global climate change tipping point by Niles Niemuth (WSWS)

“The record global heat has been driven by temperatures which, despite remaining frigid, are up to 40 degrees Celsius above seasonal averages in Antarctica with sea ice forming at a rate slower than ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter months.”

““To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough,” Dr. Edward Doddridge, a physical oceanographer, told ABC News in Australia about the current developments in Antarctica. “For those of you who are interested in statistics, this is a five-sigma event. So it’s five standard deviations beyond the mean. Which means that if nothing had changed, we’d expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years.””

“A study published this month in Nature Medicine found that 61,672 people died across Europe in the three hottest months of 2022 due to heat-related illnesses. With temperatures reaching 45 degrees C (113 F) this month in Italy and Greece, a similar, or worse, death toll is expected.”

“Farmworkers are 20 times more likely to die of heat exposure than other workers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

“The US federal government is expected to spend an average of $80 billion per year between 2022 and 2027 on climate technology and clean energy, while it will spend more than $876 billion on its military in 2022 alone, one of the largest polluters on the planet.”

“In effect the approach of capitalist governments to climate change is the same “let it rip” strategy taken to the pandemic. Millions, potentially billions, of deaths are the price to be paid by the working class and impoverished masses as long as the ruling elite can live in wealth and comfort thanks to the latest scientific advances.”

“The ongoing climate catastrophe and its immediate devastation being felt around the world makes clear that there will be no national solution to climate change. Appeals to governments and corporations are a dead end. The root of the problem is not humanity itself, as the most misanthropic environmentalists argue, but capitalism. The working class, united internationally must take action to transform social relations and establish socialism in order to confront the global challenge of climate change.”

The Eco Collapse We Were Warned About Has Begun by José Seoane (CounterPunch)

“On Thursday, July 6, the global air temperature (measured at two meters above the ground) reached 17.23 degrees Celsius for the first time in the history of the last centuries, 1.68 degrees Celsius higher than preindustrial values; last June was already the warmest month in history. Meanwhile, temperatures on the continents, particularly in the North, also broke records: 40 degrees Celsius in Siberia, 50 degrees Celsius in Mexico, the warmest June in England in the historical series that began in 1884.”

“[…] making tap water undrinkable for the inhabitants of the Montevideo metropolitan area, where 60 percent of the country’s population is concentrated. This is a drought that, if it continues, could leave this region of the country without drinking water, making it the first city in the world to suffer such a catastrophe.”

Art & Literature

Oppenheimer: A drama about “the father of the atomic bomb” by J. Cooper, David Walsh (WSWS)

“That Oppenheimer has gained a wide audience speaks to a different sentiment in the general population, one deeply appalled by the possibility of the use of atomic bombs. One can criticize Nolan’s film from a number of points of view, but no objective observer could argue that it doesn’t encourage and deepen that mood. The commitment of an outstanding cast, including Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh, Gary Oldman, Rami Malek and others, to what is clearly an anti-war project should be applauded.”

“Fully invested in the development of the bomb, Oppenheimer becomes an enthusiastic advocate for dropping it on Japan. In fact, he favors targeting a big city, for maximum casualties, in the vain hope that one bomb will end all wars forever. Under constant pressure to accelerate the development of the bomb, Oppenheimer and his associates select July 16, 1945 as the date for the first test, code-named Trinity, in part so that President Harry Truman can threaten Soviet leader Joseph Stalin with its power at the Potsdam conference scheduled to begin the following day. To a certain extent, the dramatization of the Trinity test becomes something of an unsatisfying substitute for depicting the actual bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and its consequences. It is, however, a chilling scene.”

Bit of a cop-out there, I think. How do you think that killing a million people at once will be a good thing? You really have to be pretty far down the rabbit hole there. It’s like the argument I heard today for not wanting to win a billion dollars in the lottery: the government will get a ton in taxes, and you know how they waste money. It would be so personally insulting to see money go to the government that the person would rather not win anything at all. You can be against getting money for free, but being against it so that no-one else gets any? That’s a very strange argument, in the same way that “killing millions to save millions” is a strange moral argument.

“A disturbing percussion thrums below the surface until it becomes the stomping of hundreds of feet in celebration at Los Alamos of the incineration of tens of thousands of people in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Oppenheimer ascends a podium where he gives a halting speech, “The world will remember this day…” his voice trailing off. He callously remarks that whatever success the bomb may have had, “I’m sure the Japanese didn’t like it.” The crowd cheers.”

This is still very much who the U.S. populace is.

“Nolan paints the government interrogators as authoritarian and unprincipled demagogues. The entire process undermines the official presentation of America in the 1950s as the “leader of the free world.” On the contrary, the American state is depicted as infested with quasi- or would-be fascists.”

“This was demonstrated in part by the brutal, bloody manner through which the US and its allies prosecuted the war, in the horrific firebombing of Dresden, Germany and of Tokyo and other Japanese cities in 1945, which led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, as well of course as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

“The historian Gabriel Jackson has aptly argued that “the use of the atom bomb showed that a psychologically very normal and democratically elected chief executive could use the weapon just as the Nazi dictator would have used it. In this way, the United States—for anyone concerned with moral distinctions in the different types of government—blurred the difference between fascism and democracy.””

“Long ago the revolutionary Marxists said that the alternative facing humanity was either socialism or a new barbarism, that capitalism threatens to go down in ruins and drag civilization with it. But in the light of what has been developed in this war and is projected for the future, I think we can say now that the alternative can be made even more precise: The alternative facing mankind is socialism or annihilation!…”

There Are Very Few Good Films About War. “20 Days in Mariupol” is an Exception by Chris Hedges (SubStack)

“Those in war who do the fighting, endowed with a god-like power to kill, are a minority. The real face of war is the hardship and grief suffered by civilians caught up in the maw of destruction. Their stories are hard to hear. Their fate is hard to see, which is why images from war are always sanitized. If we truly saw war, it would be so shocking, so disturbing, so disgusting, war would be hard to wage. The best accounts of war, for these reasons, eschew scenes of combat.”

Philosophy & Sociology

What Would a Functioning System of Equal Opportunity Look Like for the Losers? by Freddie deBoer (Substack)

“[…] equality is at best epiphenomenal of what we really want − everybody to be healthy and happy and to enjoy a certain minimal threshold of material comfort, free from unfair impositions on their efforts to achieve in various ways, without any group having undue influence over politics and government by dint of their resources, with everyone able to meet on truly level playing fields in a courtroom or at the ballot box.”

“I constantly have to make this point when discussing education, a field where failure is seen as inherently a matter of injustice and yet one where there will always be a distribution of performance − a distribution with a bottom as well as a top. What if someone faces a completely equal playing field and, through the full expression of their talent and hard work, ends up totally ill-equipped for the job market?”

“But the person who gets all of the required opportunity and still struggles his way to a life of destitution is just as much a story of equal opportunity as that one.”

“[…] provided the story of equal opportunity is always told in terms of the dedicated and smart person who rises above hardscrabble beginnings, it remains emotionally satisfying. But the person who gets all of the required opportunity and still struggles his way to a life of destitution is just as much a story of equal opportunity as that one.”

“Talent, however defined, has always looked like just another fickle gift of nature, to me, and thus using it to hand out scarce goods is no more just than hereditary nobility. If someone suffers from complications during their birth such that they have a severe cognitive disability that prevents them from flourishing, few people would see their impoverishment as a just example of equal opportunity. But if someone is born with a genetic makeup that predisposes them to do very poorly in school and meritocracy, how is that any different?”

Postmodernism Is Good, Actually by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)

“[…] one finds oneself in a queer state of suspension throughout the novel, never quite willing to throw it all in for the art-and-beauty team, and always feeling, uneasily, that J R himself, and plausibly J R itself, is among the greatest artistic creations one could imagine, and that any system as soul-crushing as the one that produced him/it does not so much kill the soul as channel it into deliriously perverse pursuits, of which both J R and J R , both American capitalism and great American art of the late twentieth century, are the strange perverted fruits.”

“[…] this tendency that Lindsay and Rufo are bemoaning with their inarticulate moos, that has taken over our elite cultural institutions in the course of the past decade, is really just a further development of the same sinister forces of neoliberal capitalism that J R was stoking, and J R was lampooning, a half-century ago. Is there any more vivid expression of the reduction of lived reality to two-dimensional catchphrases than the one conveyed in a sentence beginning with, “Speaking as an X …”?”

“For a thick-descriptionist, the point is not to “take at face value” what an informant from a given culture says about that culture, but it is nonetheless to seek to decipher that culture by starting from its expressed values, from the way it generates its own significances.”

“It’s the duty of the intellectual to take everyone in these settings seriously, to value them as human beings, and at the same time to do our best to figure out what is really going on that has brought them all together to talk and act in precisely this way. That duty is betrayed whenever a would-be intellectual begins to take any of these settings for granted.”

“It’s good whenever people come along and complicate things, for the baseline assumptions with which they are dissatisfied are in fact always baseless. Culture is always a web of individually untenable beliefs, which generally work just fine until anyone stops to notice and interrogate them.”

“[…] the current gender discourse in elite Anglophone progressive settings is by no means the final definitive discovery of the true way of thinking about gender identity, but only a contextually and historically contingent, and almost certainly ephemeral, response to a rapidly shifting material, economic, and technological landscape, and it is selected from among infinitely many possible ways of conceptualizing our embodied existence and the differences between different forms of embodiment— that this very idea, I was saying, was a “cancellable” transgression against prevailing norms. What can I say? Up yours?”

“[…] overwhelmingly in our present era we remain within a framework that takes the ultimate question of who we are to be intimately connected to the cluster of attributes surrounding both our sexual orientation and our gender expression — more intimately, it often seems, than, say, the God we pray to, the class habitus that shaped us, the sort of animals we dream of at night, or the way we feel when we look at the moon. But again, it didn’t have to be this way at all — our current preoccupations are entirely contingent.”

“What often happens, in this general condition of abnegation of duty on the part of intellectuals, is that they end up producing work that has the external appearance of “getting to the bottom of things”, of analyzing concepts and figuring out what’s really going on, while in fact only helping to buttress the normative commitments of the community to which they already belong and whose presumptions they share on a priori grounds. In this respect much moral and political philosophy, in particular, is, as Brian Leiter nicely puts it, really just the production of handbooks of bourgeois etiquette.”

“I was recently struck by the argument of a piece co-written by two prominent philosophers on the pragmatics and ethics of gender ascription. I was struck, as I often am, by the total anthropological illiteracy of philosophers, which systematically transforms our culturally specific preoccupations into universal problems for humanity as such.”

“If he had landed in such a village, and heard someone insisting on the exclusivity of biological parenthood, he would have asked: Why ? What does this reveal about the village as a whole? What does the world look like to this villager? The authors of this article don’t care what the world looks like to him; they are simply here to tell you that he is wrong, and they know better.”

“if I were a disembodied culture-independent intellect who had no greater familiarity with twenty-first-century Americans than with seventeenth-century Hurons, or with the culture that distinguishes between metrical height and social height, I would see absolutely no reason to put “is tall” in a different category of predicates than “is a man”. It’s all social! And because it’s all social, there is simply no point in trying to free up certain predicates, but not others, from their anchorage in reality on the grounds that, unlike with these others, reality is irrelevant.”

“The problem is not that there simply is no reality to anchor language, or that language is entirely free-floating and indifferent to reality, but only that as culture-bound humans we will continue to find infinite variations from one group to another as to which concepts are in urgent need of anchorage, and which by contrast we may use to indulge our inventivity. So I’m just not going to play along and talk as if invention is discovery (though curiously many European languages run these two notions together),”

“What those normies are saying is very close to what you would find in, say, eighteenth-century Yakutia, or in pre-contact Huronia: just sort of the default binarism of human societies in almost all times and places (see Rodney Needham’s excellent Right and Left: Essays on Dual Symbolic Classification (also 1973), if you don’t believe me). Give them a break.”

“[…] this has to do with the near total disappearance from the radars of the progressive left of any interest in what might be called the avant-garde. The left is almost entirely absorbed in critiquing and bickering about the most inane industrial productions of popular mass entertainment, just like everybody else. One way of seeing this is, again, as the culmination of the process that J R was stoking fifty years ago — the forces that J R was lampooning won, decisively and permanently, and nobody even thinks anymore, to listen, but really listen, for the beauty that can still squeak through the tubes of even the most spiritually impoverishing new technologies.”

Some of us do, huddled in the darkness, muttering our adulation and shouting our appreciation for the few good things that still illuminate the corners of human culture.

“Is this in fact “how it’s done”? It is, perhaps, if you think of your artistic work as something that can be crowdsourced. It is not, if you see your role as an artist as one that involves saying what you mean, and only what you mean, in the first place. Have you not felt out the full connotative range of the words you’re using, but must wait until the artwork that includes them is already out there in the world to be judged, and to be modified as needed in order to fit with the ever-mutating cluster of normative demands among the people who supposedly “follow” you, which is to say in order to fit yourself to the fickle demands of the marketplace?”

“I might watch Barbie on an airplane at some point, and I might even come away with the conviction that Greta Gerwig has achieved something at least modestly akin to what Gaddis was after: a demonstration of the massive challenge of bringing something beautiful into the world under such shitty conditions of ubiquitous product placement, algorithms, financial maximizing, in short the ideology incarnated by young J R.”

“I will not see Oppenheimer , as I can tell just from the previews that it is yet another of these middle-brow vehicles of the sort I first noticed with the deplorable 2002 film The Hours, that tells us exactly what to feel at each second by the use of heavy-handed visual cues and over-the-top theme music. I can just tell it’s stupid, and like the abominably dull Joker (2019) succeeds mostly by giving middle-brow viewers multiple opportunities to congratulate themselves on their own knowingness.”

“[…] just don’t think these are the sort of creations intellectuals should be paying attention to.”

Justin is absolutely wrong about Joker, and he’s never seen it, which is even more shameful since he’s expressing such a strong condemnation of it. He thinks it’s a superhero movie. I suppose it’s not easy to remain consistently self-critical, to be constantly aware of subsiding into calling viewer “middle-brow” without reason, and for critiquing or lauding movies for features you have personally not been able to confirm. You can not like a movie, of course. That’s anyone’s prerogative. But calling a movie like Joker middle-brow just because you think it’s a superhero (or supervillain) movie—that’s just lazy.

Similarly, lauding Barbie—sight unseen—is lazy, assuming that, because Greta Gerwig directed it, that it will somehow rise above the crass capitalism that almost certainly guided its creation. But he says above that he’s willing to watch Barbie, with a script written by Mattel, just because it was made by auteur Gerwig, which seems shockingly lazy for Justin. But his taste in film has always quite hit or miss.

Technology

A while back, I wasn’t using my laptop very much, but I was using it occasionally. MacOS on my M1 MacBook Pro allowed me to use the battery at my own pace, giving me over 200 hours between charges.

201h @ 2% battery left

The Need for Trustworthy AI by Bruce Schneier

“[…] you don’t know how the AIs are configured: how they’ve been trained, what information they’ve been given, and what instructions they’ve been commanded to follow. For example, researchers uncovered the secret rules that govern the Microsoft Bing chatbot’s behavior. They’re largely benign but can change at any time.

“Many of these AIs are created and trained at enormous expense by some of the largest tech monopolies. They’re being offered to people to use free of charge, or at very low cost. These companies will need to monetize them somehow. And, as with the rest of the internet, that somehow is likely to include surveillance and manipulation.”

“Imagine asking your chatbot to plan your next vacation. Did it choose a particular airline or hotel chain or restaurant because it was the best for you or because its maker got a kickback from the businesses? As with paid results in Google search, newsfeed ads on Facebook and paid placements on Amazon queries, these paid influences are likely to get more surreptitious over time.

“If you’re asking your chatbot for political information, are the results skewed by the politics of the corporation that owns the chatbot? Or the candidate who paid it the most money? Or even the views of the demographic of the people whose data was used in training the model? Is your AI agent secretly a double agent? Right now, there is no way to know.”

Fun

Cult by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

“I’ve got a complete brain scan and you’re just naturally low on desire, while high on willpower compassion, and verbal ability.

“People will try to imitate your sense of contented wholeness but always fall short, never realizing that the ultimate fount of all your inner peace was a quirk of genetics operating in a stochastic environment!

“Hoping vainly for what you gained unearned, they will become your disciples and message-bearers.”

Conscious 5 by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

“Human: “Is it conscious” is shorthand for “can I treat it like trash all the time, maybe eat it, then go play video games and not feel shame.”

“God: I’ve been running leaven for 13 billion years and nobody has shown up and now I know why”

I Was Told There Would Be a Handbasket by Eugene Volokh (Reason)

Just a funny line to say when things are getting bad.

Just because you smarty in one thing no make you smarty in other thing. by Massive_Pressure_516 (Reddit)

A Short List of People Who Need Killing by Seaton (Simple Justice)

“DUMBASSES WHO THINK IT’S OKAY TO FILL OUT PASSPORT APPLICATIONS IN LINE WHILE OTHERS ARE WAITING ON APPOINTMENTS

“Dear vacuous blonde tart with the laugh that is somewhere between a hiccup and a donkey’s bray: I hate you with the intensity of a thousand suns for your idiotic decision to fill out a passport application in line at the post office while I stand there with my kids watching you act a fool. You realize, I’m sure, that these fucking applications are online, right? And if you wanted to be a good person, you could’ve done what I did and fill out the application for your spawn before you got to the post office?

“But you couldn’t just be a good person, could you? No, you had to do this in line because you thought it was such a great idea to make everyone else wait on you while you soaked in the attention you wrongly thought you were entitled to. You made it all about yourself and the demonic brats you brought with you.

“And then to make matters worse, you didn’t even fill out the goddamn application right the first time. You were told on review you fundamentally fucked up every page, and your response was to let that godawful laugh escape the buck-toothed sewer you call a mouth and say “Oh, silly me, what was I thinking?” WHILE YOU FILL OUT THE APPLICATION WRONG A SECOND TIME.

“Your life must end for the sake of the rest of our species. Maybe your spawn should go too, so we can eliminate your chance of contaminating the gene pool with more of your stupid.

“It’s the best thing for all of us.”