Roaming Charges: Bored of Peace

+ Since the doormat to my office no longer serves as a legal deterrent to raids by federal agents, Lola has taken up guard duty…

+ In 1934, Herman Göring arrived late to a dinner party in Berlin hosted by the British Ambassador to Germany, Sir Eric Phipps. The pompous president of the Reichstag offered this excuse for his tardiness: “My apologies, I was out hunting.” Phipps quipped in reply to a man he’d already pegged as a sadist, “Animals, I hope.” According to Richard J. Evans, the great British historian of the rise and fall of the Nazis, Göring, the planned successor to Hitler as leader of the Third Reich, was a closet transvestite, “who painted his fingernails, sometimes wore lipstick, and liked to dress as a Roman emperor, in a toga.” Caligula, no doubt. When Göring arrived at the Luxembourg palace, where high-ranking Nazis were held before the Nuremberg trials, the former head of the Luftwaffe brought with him “16 matched and monogrammed suitcases, a red hatbox, and his valet, Robert Krupp.” His fingernails and toenails were varnished a bright red, according to Colonel  Burton C. Andrus, the US officer who ran the prison.  (See Hitler’s People: the Faces of the Third Reich) Trump, Hegseth, Bovino and Vance, with their passion for facial makeup, fascist haute couture and cruelty, would have fit right in.

+ John Ganz: “The degree to which they want people to stop saying Nazi and Gestapo is striking. They are trying to do this blackmail where they say if you do it, you’re inciting violence, but even Joe Rogan is saying it, so it’s not working.”

+ Only days after TikTok came under the control of US investors close to Trump, the platform began suppressing posts on the killings and protests in Minneapolis.

+ Trump’s solution to what he perceives as his PR problem in Minneapolis is to replace the trigger-happy Gregory Bovino with Border Czar Thomas Homan, the man who created the child-separation policy under Obama and (allegedly) took grocery bags stuffed with cash from undercover FBI agents posing as businessmen eager to secure ICE contracts under Trump. 

+ Of course, the main PR advantage Homan gives Trump is that he can blame any of Homan’s “excesses” on Obama, who awarded the brutal immigration cop a Presidential Rank Award for Distinguished Service, which is like an Iron Cross for deportations. 

+ A note on US geography: the Canadian border is 320 miles north of Minneapolis.

+ Trump continues to invoke the “insurrection” theme, telling Fox News on Tuesday that “these are paid insurrectionists.” Meaning the protesters, not the Constitutional insurrectionists under his own command. And there are rumors circulating among National Guard members in Minnesota that Trump is primed to invoke the Insurrection Act in the Twin Cities. If so, the Insurrection Act should be imposed against his own DHS, since the insurrection is entirely of their own making.

+ In the same interview, Trump said the changes in Minneapolis weren’t a “pull back” but merely a “little bit of a change.” He laid the blame for any perceived excesses squarely on Bovino, saying, “Maybe it wasn’t good” to dispatch the trench coat-wearing petty Oberführer to Minneapolis. “He’s a pretty out-there kind of guy.” Just the kind of guys Trump has boasted about in the past.

+ Two Republicans, Lisa Murkowski and Thom Tillis, have joined the calls for the ouster of Kristi Noem as Secretary of DHS. But who thinks Noem is really calling the shots? She’s little more than a monosyllabic, puppy-killing, hair-extended, lip-inflated brand model for Stephen Miller’s plan to purge the US of immigrants and dissidents. Rearranging the deck chairs isn’t going to alter the doomed course of this ship of state.

+ CBP waited nearly three days to confirm that two officers fired their weapons at the unarmed Alex Pretti and their report on the killing doesn’t mention Pretti threatening them with a weapon or attacking the officers, as Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller alleged.

+ CNN reported that the perjurious Border Patrol prima donna Gregory Bovino has been banned from his social media accounts, which he’ll no doubt find a more excruciating punishment than being exiled back to El Centro.

+ An infuriated Patrick Schiltz, the chief judge of the Minnesota Federal District Court, accused ICE of ignoring judicial orders, lying to the court and engaging in “rampant violations of federal law.” In a acidly-written three-page order issued on Monday, the Bush-appointed judge said the court’s “patience is at an end” and demanded that the head of ICE, Todd Lyons, appear before the court to explain the agency’s repeated refusals to abide by court rulings. “The practical consequence of respondents’ failure to comply has almost always been significant hardship to aliens (many of whom have lawfully lived and worked in the United States for years and done absolutely nothing wrong),” wrote Schiltz. “The detention of an alien is extended, or an alien who should remain in Minnesota is flown to Texas, or an alien who has been flown to Texas is released there and told to figure out a way to get home.”

+ In the latest trampling of free speech rights, FBI Director Kash Patel said this week that the Agency will begin investigating Minnesotans who use the Signal messaging app to track ICE movements. 

+ A new website, “Combatting DHS Misinformation,” exposing lies and misinformation by Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security, has been set up by employees of the Minnesota Department of Corrections. According to  Minnesota Corrections official Safia Khan:

We are witnessing the machinery of propaganda operate at scale. So we fought back with facts. We released proof, footage, and records showing that ICE arrests being touted on federal websites were, in reality, routine, pre-scheduled state-to-federal custody transfers, not a result of Operation Metro Surge…The Department of Corrections alone has identified at least 68 false claims, and we have made every one of them public. Our team didn’t seek this fight, but we have met it with clarity and resolve.

+ According to private chats among ICE agents that fell into the acquisitive hands of Ken Kippenstein, one of them texted, “Ten versus one and somehow they couldn’t find a way to subdue the guy or use a less-than-lethal. They all carry belts and vests with 9,000 pieces of equipment on them and the best they can do is shoot a guy in the back?”

+ Clark Neil, a lawyer at Cato who was one of the attorneys in the Heller case before the Supremes, which expanded gun rights,  backs my contention (Where the Sidewalk Ends, the Lies Begin) that this is a make-or-break moment for the pro-gun lobby…

+ Law professors Barry Friedman and Steve Vladeck writing in the NYT on the legal challenges of prosecuting federal officers for the shootings in Minneapolis:

A series of decisions by the Supreme Court has made it all but impossible to hold federal officers liable for damages in federal lawsuits for violating our constitutional rights, such as in a February 2020 decision involving a Border Patrol agent who shot and killed an unarmed teenager without provocation. Instead, the historical backstop for a lack of federal accountability, going all the way back to the founding, has been state law…[But] the ability to prosecute federal law enforcement officers who commit state crimes in the course of their duties would turn on whether a reasonable officer in their position would have believed that their actions were necessary to fulfill their duties. That standard may be appropriately strict, to maintain federal authority when it is needed (think of federal protection for civil rights protesters in the 1960s), but at least based on the videos so many of us have seen, it should not be impossible.” 

+ Since July, the Trump administration declared 16 shootings by immigration agents justified before the investigations have even been completed. Some of the investigations hadn’t even started yet. Why waste time and money when the conclusion is foregone?

+ In defiance of Congress, ICE has failed to disclose information on the deaths of at least 8 people being held in its detention prisons since last February.

+ Washington Post: “A battle of narratives?” Yes, one is a fictional narrative and the other a factual account. This takes both-siderism to a new low…

+ Even Rand Paul sees through the White House’s smokescreen: “When people watch that video and the government tells them, ‘Well, he was assaulting the police officers,’ nobody with any objectivity believes that’s what’s happening. No American believes he was assaulting the officers. In fact, the opposite appears to be true. So we have to get some rules of the game.”

+ “Reform” is the Democratic Party’s excuse for increasing the budgets of agencies that are terrorizing American neighborhoods. You get the sense that politicians like Chris Murphy and Cory Booker would gladly offer total immunity for ICE killings if they’d just wear a body cam and take off their masks.

+ Kent Smith: “There are ‘pest exterminator’ companies, and there are ‘pest management’ companies.”

+ After Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller slimed Alex Pretti as a domestic terrorist, AFGE, the largest federal employee union, called on Trump to fire the smear-mongering duo for defaming the slain VA nurse, who was an AFGE member: “Our demand is clear: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was responsible for carrying out the policy that led to Alex’s needless killing, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of that policy, must resign immediately. If they refuse, President Trump must dismiss them.”

+ ICE’s net approval is at an all-time low under Trump (-27 pt) and still falling. DHS approval is at an all-time low under Trump at 42%. It hit a high of 59% at this point in Trump’s first term). Puppy Killer’s net approval (-17%) hit a new low and has been negative in every poll since she took office.

+ Sy Hersh’s column this week is most notable for this chilling photo of Stephen Miller, standing in the shadows (not of love, that’s for sure) behind Trump, like a bald Rasputin leading the pretend emperor step by blood-soaked step across the bodies of the Republic toward his movement’s inevitable, if long-delayed, doom…

+ On the Friday before Alex Pretti’s murder, hundred of Target workers submitted a letter to the manage of Target demanding that the company ban ICE and CPB from the Minneapolis-based companies stores: “Target’s continued inaction in the face of the current administration puts all of us at risk of more harm in our workplaces and represents a moral failure to protect those in our community.”

+ According to the Congressional Budget Office, Trump’s aggressive deployments of National Guard troops to US cities have already cost $589 billion and could increase by more than a billion by the end of the year. It costs between $18 and $21 million per month to deploy 1,000 Guard troops to an American city.

+ Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara: “The Minneapolis Police Department went the entire year last year recovering about 900 guns from the street, arresting hundreds and hundreds of violent offenders, and we didn’t shoot anyone.” But three weeks after Gregory Bovino, and his 2000 Border Patrol goons showed up in the Twin Cities, federal agents have shot at least three people, killing two of them.

+ Megan Day: “The White House’s AI-altered image of the anti-ICE protester wasn’t a ‘meme.’ It was revenge porn for the MAGA goon cave. The Right is in the rapturous throes of ethical disinhibition. Their sadism is deeply disturbing.”

+ An ICE unit has been invited by Italy to provide security at the Winter Olympics in Milan. Makes sense. Fascism started in Milan with the founding of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento by Mussolini in March 1919.

+ Sepp Blatter, the former president of FIFA, has added his support to the boycott of the World Cup in the United States, citing the FIFA Peace Prize winner’s abusive treatment of immigrants and those protesting their arrest and deportation. 

+ By this summer, 65% of the country will be in ICE’s “domestic terrorist” database … and if you’re not, what’ve you been doing with yourself?

 

+ Susan Collins has become a parody of herself: “The most vulnerable Republican in the Senate would not say whether she supported the federal enforcement effort.”

+ I wouldn’t put too much faith in that “was”. I assume we still “are” next.

+ No surprise here, either. I’ve long thought of Oregon and Minnesota as mirror images of each other, mainly distinguished by the temperature and consistency of the precipitation.

+ Now that white people in the northern states are being shot, gassed, beaten and killed, there is an eruption of national outrage over the hyper-violence of CPB and ICE, as there well should be. But since 2010, there have been 364 people killed in encounters with Border Patrol, the means of death include shootings, car chases, beatings, asphyxiations and Taserings. And, as Todd Miller points out, “at least 10,000 people have died crossing the U.S.-Mexico border since the 1990s, a number that could be three to eight times higher.” The anger and indignation are a long time coming…

+ In honor of Lysistrata, the greatest peace activist of them all, they should add No Sex…

+++

+ After years of racist vilification and incitement from Trump and his cacophonous claque, a maniac finally attacked Ilhan Omar with a syringe at a town hall in Minneapolis, spraying her with a malodorous liquid. Ilhan stood her ground (when he-men Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley would have pissed their pants), but the fearless one needs better security. 

+ Trump’s response to the attack on Ilhan Omar: “I don’t think about her. [He thinks about her all the time.] I think she’s a fraud. [He feels threatened by her.] I really don’t think about that. [He can’t stop thinking about “that.”] She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her. [If a shard of teleprompter glass in Pennsylvania hadn’t nicked his ear, he would’ve nicked it himself.]”

+ Dizzied by a flurry of body blows from Ilhan, gasping for breath and his heart-muscle seizing, Trump, who looked like he had to shed about 80 pounds to make weight, waved his heavy arms at the ref and groaned, “No mas, no mas!” about 45 seconds into the long-awaited match with the Somali-American tigress from Minneapolis.

+ A couple of days before Omar was attacked, a man confronted Rep. Maxwell Frost, who is black, at the Sundance Film Festival. After proclaiming how proud he was to be “white,” he told Frost that Trump was going to deport him. Then he punched Frost in the face. 

+ Interviewer: The whole world is now asking itself: Is what Trump stands for a new kind of fascism?

Wolfgang Streeck, German economist.

To put it bluntly, there is hardly anything new about it, except that the fig leaves have been dropped, but not all violence is fascist; it is enough as it is. The US has always been astonishingly prone to violence, both internally and externally. For them, the post-war period began with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then Korea, Vietnam (no one knows anymore why millions of people were burned with napalm there, without rhyme or reason), and after 1990, there was not a single day when the US was not waging war somewhere in the world. They currently maintain approximately 750 military bases abroad, spread across the globe. Trump has unleashed the violent potential of American society internally by pitting one half of the population against the other. However, his brand of civil war still falls far short of the slavery and Indian wars of the 19th century, and he is not responsible for the absurdly huge prison system that is life-threatening for inmates, but rather his predecessors.

+ Not much chance of this one being coöpted like “Born in the USA” was by Lee Atwater and the Reaganites…

And, yes, I know it’s been harder and harder to take Springsteen the half-billionaire seriously after his slobbering, uncritical interview with Obama, the deporter-in-chief, the man who set Tom Homan loose on immigrant families and droned American citizens without even a warrant to arrest them, never mind kill them. Springsteen is a Democrat. The meaning of being a Democrat is to forgive anything a fellow Democrat does, except defend Palestinians. Bernie Sanders is just as bad in this respect. Even worse, because he claims to be an Independent Socialist and not a member of the Democratic Party. But in this case, it’s about the song, not the singer. Spread it. Use it. Blast it.

+++

+ Antonio Gramsci: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” This is an uncannily accurate description of our current interregnum, which has been going on for about 250 years now…

+ Voters’ feelings about the affordability of the following items

Housing

Unaffordable: 54%
Somewhat affordable: 31%
Mostly affordable: 13%

Having a family

Unaffordable: 44%
Somewhat affordable: 38%
Mostly affordable: 13%

Groceries

Unaffordable: 28%
Somewhat affordable: 54%
Mostly affordable: 17%

NYT/Siiena poll

+ Economist Hal Singer “Wild that we live in a country where groceries and food–basic necessities, which should in theory be competitively supplied–are considered unaffordable or somewhat unaffordable by the majority of voters (82% and 85%, respectively).”

+ The Mamdani Effect: All grocery delivery apps in New York City (including Instacart) must now pay workers at least $21.44/hr. This figure does not include tips.

+ Means-testing turned out great for accounting firms and terrible for state budgets and people desperate for help: “Since Georgia implemented work requirements in 2020, they have spent twice as much on Deloitte consultants and administrative costs as on healthcare for people.”

+ Last year, UPS cut 48,000 jobs. This week, UPS announced that it will slash another 30,000 jobs in 2026.

+ Long-term unemployment in the US has reached a four-year high. According to the Financial Times, “It now takes an average of more than 11 weeks for an unemployed person in the US to find a new job, the longest since 2021, according to newly released labour department data.”

+ Trump’s Justice Department has slashed funds to combat child trafficking. What a demoralizing year for QAnon…

+ The latest from the Bezos Post…His “free market” economy was doing so well that he just begged for and got a $20 billion bailout from his Imperial loan sharks and a line of credit for another $20 billion in the inevitable event that he should need it.

+ Did Milei use one of his bailout billions to buy his seat on the Board of Peace?

+++

+ What is the Board of Peace meant to do? Only Trump knows for sure. He’d kept the charter for the organization secret until someone leaked the document to the Times of Israel. It’s the Trump-Kennedy Center on steroids. Trump has appointed himself the chairman for life. Yes, he will remain its leader well after his presidency ends, if it ends. He alone invites the board members, who will serve a three-year term, unless they pay (him) a cool billion, which secures them a lifetime seat (unless he decides to evict them). All serve at Trump’s pleasure. Although originally conceived as a governing board for the reconstruction of Gaza, the charter doesn’t even mention the Strip. Instead, it indicates a willingness to intrude anywhere it wants “to promote stability, restore dependable and lawful governance, and secure enduring peace in areas affected or threatened by conflict.” Humanitarian interventionism, Trump-style. Trump reserves the right to veto any policies adopted by the board, kick people off the board (no refund), choose his own successor as chairman and impose his own policies by executive fiat. Pax Trumpiana, in other words.

+ Meanwhile, already bored with peace, Trump has sent the USS Lincoln carrier fleet to the western Indian Ocean with new threats to bomb Iran. With his latest spat of cruise-missile rattling, Trump seems to be doing everything in his power to rescue the Mullahs. Nothing will unite the feuding factions in Iran like a US attack on the faltering regime.

+ Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi: “Years of austerity alongside the rise of an increasingly kleptocratic and predatory elite have steadily eroded the state’s capacity to respond to crises, while the language of ‘resistance’ has long since ceased to mean anything to the population at large. Many Iranians blame their country’s isolation and economic immiseration on their leaders’ foreign policy decisions, which have long been decoupled from the people’s will and their democratic aspirations.”

+ Marco Rubio is once again leveling threats against the Venezuelan government: “We are prepared to use force to ensure maximum cooperation if other methods fail. We will closely monitor the performance of the interim authorities as they cooperate with our stage-based plan to restore stability to Venezuela…[Delcy] Rodríguez “is well aware of the fate of Maduro. She has committed to opening Venezuela’s energy sector to American companies, providing preferential access to production, and using revenues to purchase American goods. She has pledged to end Venezuela’s oil lifeline to the Cuban regime and to pursue national reconciliation with Venezuelans at home and abroad.” The implication being that if she doesn’t follow through, she’ll be taken out. In fact, Rodriquez admitted as much in an audio recording obtained by the Guardian, where she said that the US had threatened to kill leaders of the Venezuelan government if they didn’t cooperate with US forces on the ground.

+ Rand Paul skewering his old rival from 2016, Marco Rubio, during a Senate hearing on Venezuela: “So I would ask you, if a foreign country bombed our air defense missiles, captured and removed our president and blockaded our country, would that be considered an act of war?”

+ After another airstrike on a small boat in the Caribbean, the US has now killed at least 126 people in 36 airstrikes on alleged drug boats. Still no legal justification for any of these extra-judicial killings or proof that the boats were carrying drugs bound for the US.

+ A lawsuit filed by the families of Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, aims to hold the Trump administration accountable for the  “manifestly unlawful killing” of the two Trinidadian men in an airstrike in the Caribbean.

+ The Israeli military has acknowledged that the Gaza death toll is at least 71,667. But Ralph Nader puts the real number at more than 600,000. 

+ As the New York Times reported on Saturday, despite Trump’s inflammatory accusations, neither China nor Russia is threatening to seize Greenland or loot its minerals. In fact, Russia has endorsed a US takeover of the Arctic island, since it would legitimize Russia’s seizure of Crimea and Donbas. 

+ Canadian PM Mark Carney, when asked whether he was toning down his anti-US rhetoric, after his phone call with Trump: “I meant what I said in Davos. Canada was the first country to understand the change in U.S. trade policy that he had initiated, and we’re responding to that.”

+ Italian Neo-fascist Giorgia Meloni, when asked if the EU should distance itself from the US: “So what should Europe do then—shut down American bases, tear up trade deals, boycott McDonalds?” It’s a start.

+ The draft dodging president gratuitously insulted British troops who served in Afghanistan: “We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that, and they did, they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.” 457 British troops were killed in Afghanistan, second only to U.S. casualties. Whether they should have been there in the first place, stayed as long as they did or made the situation for Afghans even worse than it was before 9/11 are different questions.

+ The people who stayed farthest from the frontlines in Afghanistan were Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric.

+ Lyin’ Ted (Cruz) Unbound…Axios got hold of hitherto “secret” audio recordings of Ted Cruz unloaded on his 2026 rival for the presidency, JD Vance, calling him Tucker Carlson’s puppet: “Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker’s protégé, and they are one and the same.” Cruz blamed Carlson and Vance for the ouster of Mike Walz as Trump’s National Security Adviser, supposedly because Walz supported a bombing campaign against Iran, and his replacement, Daniel Davis, didn’t. Cruz called Davis “a guy who viciously hates Israel” and bragged about getting him fired.

On the tape, Cruz describes a meeting in April with Trump, who he described as being “in a bad mood,” where Cruz warned the president that his tariffs were going to be his downfall: “Mr. President, if we get to November of 26 and people’s 401(k)s are down 30% and prices are up 10-20% at the supermarke we’re going to go into Election Day, face [sic] a bloodbath…You’re going to lose the House; you’re going to lose the Senate; you’re going to spend the next two years being impeached every single week.”

Trump snarled, “Fuck you, Ted.”

+++

+ The state of Utah dispatched a kill team to track down and shoot three wolves from the greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, who had entered the only geographical sliver of the state where the wolves didn’t enjoy the protections of the Endangered Species Act. The purpose of the slaughter (or “lethal removal” in the anodyne euphemism of the state) was to “ensure they don’t establish breeding populations in Utah.” Doesn’t sound very Mormon of them. Utah should welcome wolves, not gun them down. All scientific research shows they are beneficial to the ecology, cause little to no economic harm to ranchers, and are not a threat to humans. 

+ I’ve rarely, if ever, seen Wy’East (Mt. Hood to whitey) this barren of snow in late January. Even the northern slopes of the 11,000-foot supervolcano are down to bare basalt. Officially, the snowpack is only 34% of the median historic level, among the lowest readings in the last 40 years. One immediate benefit is that the snow drought has given the mountain a much-needed break from the obnoxious hordes of skiers and snowboarders that normally scour its southern flanks each winter. The outlook for the summer is dire, though, with low river flows and an escalating risk for catastrophic wildfires.

+ The New York Times reported this week that genetic data and brain scans taken from more than 20,000 children in the US were “misused” for “race science,” in an attempt to prove the intellectual superiority of “white” people.  Looks like they’ll have to remake Ira Levin’s The Boys from Brazil as The Boys from America. 

+ Russian airstrikes on Kiev have cut power to much of the city, including the Kiev zoo, where keepers now have to deliver firewood five times a day to keep a stove in the gorilla house constantly burning to maintain the temperature at 20 degree celsius.

+ The measles outbreak in South Carolina is the largest in the US since the highly infectious disease was declared eliminated in the States more than 20 years ago.

+ Seth Harp, author of the-must-read Fort Bragg Cartel: “Enshittification is most intense at the airport. Every crew is a skeleton crew. Digital systems are brittle. At every step, you’re tagged with a fee. You’re the target of relentless advertising and surveillance. The surroundings are dirty. The food is garbage. The air is unclean.”

+++

+ How does Mick Jagger feel about the fact that so many MAGA women want to pump up their lips to look like his?

+ Not the Onion. Real merch!

+ John Ioannou: “I heard ‘Melania’ was shown on a flight and people still walked out.”

+ RIP Sly Dunbar, one of the greatest percussionists of our (or any) time. Here he is keeping the beat with his partner in rhythm, Robbie Shakespeare, and the great Dennis Brown…

+ On Tuesday, the 88-year-old composer Philip Glass informed the Kennedy Center that he did not want his new symphony, based on Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address, performed on its stage. “Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the symphony.” Given Glass’s politics, the Lincoln symphony likely isn’t consonant with the Biden-era values of the Kennedy Center either.

+ I found this shot of one of Edward Abbey’s trucks in a box of photos I hadn’t looked at in 25 years. It’s parked in the lot of the visitor’s center at Glen Canyon Dam for a protest led by two of Ed’s closet friends, Ken Sleight (aka Seldom Seen Slim) and the folksinger Katie Lee. Later that night, I had dinner and drinks (martinis by the pitcherful) with Katie and a few others at Marble Canyon Lodge (one of the country’s greatest motels and still a wifi-free zone the last time I was there) Katie told stories about Abbey, which would violate every rule of this website and some Zuckerberg and his censors aren’t imaginative enough to think up…It’s really too bad Cockburn and Abbey never met. They could’ve traded busted-up trucks and no one would have noticed. Cockburn attacked Abbey, without even having read him at the time, in one of his columns in the late 80s and Abbey wrote in his diary that he was deeply hurt by the jibes because Alex had always been one of his favorite writers and he thought they were kindred spirits. Alex later regretted it. And after he moved to the West and turned more and more into an anarchist, he spoke and wrote fondly of Abbey. But too late. Ed was dead. Still, Alex did make a pilgrimage to Abbey’s secret, sidewinder-guarded grave in the Cabeza-Prieta a couple of years before he died, led by Hayduke himself, Doug Peacock.

+ This week, Neil Young pulled all of his music off of Amazon and gifted his entire catalog for free to Greenlanders. Regarding Amazon, Young said: “The president’s international policies and his support of ICE make it impossible for me to ignore [Bezos’] actions. If you feel as I do, I strongly recommend that you do not use Amazon. There are many ways to avoid Amazon and support individual Americans and American companies that supply the same products. I have done that with my music and people who are looking can find it in a lot of other places.”

+ In a separate letter to the people of Greenland, Young wrote: 

As a gesture of kindness and respect, we stand with you, along with a majority of Americans.

I would like to offer a free one-year subscription to all Greenland residents. I hope my Music and Music Films will ease some of the unwarranted stress and threats you are experiencing from our unpopular and hopefully temporary government.

It is my sincere wish for you to be able to enjoy all of my music in your beautiful Greenland home, in its highest quality.

This is an offer of Peace and Love. All the music I have made during the last 62 years is yours to hear.

You can renew it for free if you are in Greenland. We do hope other organizations will follow in the spirit of our example.

Love,

Neil

I Hope They Didn’t Come Here to Stay

Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…

Anthropause: the Beauty of Degrowth
Stan Cox
(Seven Stories)

Food Justice Undone: Lessons for Building a Better Movement
Hanna Garth
(California)

Indiana Nature Notes
Daniel Wolff
(Harrington Press)

Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…

Scenes From Above
Julian Lage
(Blue Note)

Guitars on Life
Jack West and Walter Strauss
(Otá)

ElectroSoul
DJ Harrison
(Stones Throw)

The Secret of Fascism

“I really am a pessimist. I’ve always felt that fascism is a more natural governmental condition than democracy. Democracy is a grace. It’s something essentially splendid because it’s not at all routine or automatic. Fascism goes back to our infancy and childhood, where we were always told how to live. We were told, Yes, you may do this; no, you may not do that. So the secret of fascism is that it has this appeal to people whose later lives are not satisfactory.”

– Norman Mailer

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