Still from The Three Stooges.
Fascism was not simply a conspiracy—although it was that—but it was something that came to life in the course of a powerful social development. Language provides it with a refuge. Within this refuge, a smoldering evil expresses itself as though it were salvation.
– Theodor Adorno
+ Peter Matthiessen’s final novel, In Paradise, was a searing critique of “Holocaust tourism,” which seems to be Trump’s plan for Gaza, once the bodies are extracted from the rubble and the remaining Palestinians rounded up and shipped off to desert encampments in the Sinai in a new Trail of Tears, just like his hero Old Hickory. He wants to turn the Strip into the Monte Carlo of the Middle East, with sparkingly coastal pleasure palaces and casinos for international jet set–but scrubbed of any troubling reference to the genocide that just took place there.
Reporter: “Would Palestinians have the right to return to Gaza, if they left during the rebuilding?”
Trump: “It would be my hope that we could do something really nice, really good, where they wouldn’t want to return, the place has been hell.”
A reporter yells: “It’s their home, sir!”
Trump: “We can build a really good quality town, like someplace where they could live and not die because Gaza is a guarantee that they’re gonna die, the same thing is gonna happen again. Who would wanna go back? They’ve experienced nothing but death and destruction.”
+ The sinister, “can-you-believe-this-shit” smirk on the face of Netanyahu tells you everything you need to know about the direction things are heading…
+ Earlier this week, Trump referred to Gaza as a “demolition site” and then he rolled out the red carpet at the White House to welcome the man (referred to in a White House press release as “His Excellency”) who has been indicted for demolishing it and lavished him with gifts, including a billion-dollar shipment of new bombs, shells and military hardware, a pledge to take over Gaza off his hands and forcibly evict the 1.9 million Palestinians who survived the demolition by US-made weapons previously gifted to Israel by Biden, reconstruct it into a seaside resort and, in a few weeks, give him the green light to annex the entire West Bank.
Trump: “ Palestinians have no alternative but to leave Gaza.”
+ Holocaust denialism took root and spread in part because the Nazis burned many of the records of their crimes and often spoke obliquely about their genocidal plans. That’s not the case here, where ethnic cleansing is openly and vividly described as if it were a real estate pitch.
Reporter: You are talking tonight about the US taking over a sovereign territory. What authority would allow you to do that? Are you talking about a permanent occupation?
Trump: “I do see a long-term ownership position of Gaza after Palestinians are moved elsewhere. This is not a decision made lightly. Everybody I’ve spoken to loves the idea of the United States owning that piece of land.”
+ Trump seems to believe that if he describes the crime he plans to commit before he commits it and no one stops him, it’s no longer a crime. And, I suppose, experience has proved him right.
+ The lack of revulsion at the prospect of US troops being sent to Gaza (to replace the US private security forces just sent there) is a sign of the general senescence of a country that seems to have forgotten not only the quagmire of Iraq but why Reagan pulled the Marines out of Lebanon.
+ The nice blonde Christian lady who doubles as White House press secretary said on Wednesday that “the US would not pay for the reconstruction of Gaza,” which means this is a typical Trump real estate swindle, where he wants to own something without paying for it.
+ This assertion seems in conflict with Marco Rubio’s attempt to clean up Trump’s mess when he characterized the ethnic cleansing to create a Riviera in the Middle East as an act of generosity: “What President Trump announced yesterday is the offer, the willingness of the United States to become responsible for the reconstruction of that area…it’s an enormous undertaking…It was not meant as a hostile move. It was meant as a very generous move.”
+ I tend to believe the lovely Christian lady. She wouldn’t lie, would she?
+ Some enterprising White House correspondent should ask her, Who’s the boss? Trump, Elon or Bibi? Or is there some kind of power-sharing arrangement?
+++
+ We’ve reached that terminal point of imperial decay when the highest ambition of most members of Congress is to be a sycophant (though few of them could spell or define the word without consulting ChatGTP). It’s rather bracing to watch nearly the entire Congress stand mute as Trump and Musk usurp the key constitutional powers assigned to the House and the Senate and dismantle agencies and whole departments of government created and funded by acts of Congress.
Or, as David Graeber wrote in The Utopia of Rules: “It’s not just that some people get to break the rules—it’s that loyalty to the organization is to some degree measured by one’s willingness to pretend this isn’t happening.”
+ Justin Chen, Pres. AFGE (American Federation of Government Employees) Local 1003: “It appears as if there is an unelected billionaire more or less running the federal gov right now, who none of us voted for, who seems to be breaking both the law and potentially the constitution all over the place.”
Rep Sarah McBride: McBride: If they can get away with this, with USAID, they can do it anywhere. And that means that no part of the federal government, including programs like Medicare and Social Security, will be safe from this administration.
CNN: I will say they do seem sensitive to making sure that people know those programs are not going to be touched. They’ve been very sensitive about that.
McBride: They lied during the course of the campaign when they said that they wouldn’t be implementing project 2025. Well, this is project 2025, so we cannot take them at their word when they say that Social Security and Medicare are protected.
+ Trump and Musk’s surreal assertion that the US was spending $50 to $100 million on “condoms for Hamas,” which apparently stemmed from the fact that they didn’t know the difference between the Gaza province of Mozambique and the Gaza Strip, is even more absurd when you realize that the entire Middle East has only received a sliver of funding from USAID for any contraceptive aid (and that peaked during Trump’s previous term), with most of the resources going to Africa, Asia and Latin America…
+ Elon Musk: “USAID was a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.”
+ Alex Rubinstein: “Not to make too big a deal of it but the idea that USAID is/was filled with “radical-left Marxists” is kind of insane given that much of their job was to enforce neo-liberal economic shock therapy.”
+ Why was USAID an early target of Musk’s slash-and-burn raid on federal agencies? According to reporting in The Lever: “Musk is trying to shut down USAID as the agency was investigating its oversight of a public-private partnership involving equipment from Musk’s company. Various USAID webpages mentioning Musk’s company are now not accessible on its website.”
+ While I appreciate the Constitutional threat to the separation of powers doctrine, I can’t summon much sympathy for those protesting Musk taking a wrecking ball to the coup-plotters at the NED or US AID, an agency that once demanded birth control implants for food in Haiti, under Bill Clinton, no less.
+ Still, Trump and Musk seem intent on unplugging all the measures the US government has implemented since the Great Depression to prevent the rise of militant movements of disenfranchised and poor people here and abroad. Be careful what you dismantle, boys.
Reporter: Wouldn’t it take an act of Congress to do away with USAID?
Trump: “I don’t know, I don’t think so. Not when it comes to fraud. These people are lunatics, and if it comes to fraud, you wouldn’t have an act of Congress. I’m not sure you would anyway.”
+ Senator John Kennedy, the hawker of cornpone anecdotes and ad hominem smears from Louisiana, offered this louche non-sequitur for why he supports shuttering US AID: “I could eat an omelet at every meal. I like omelets better than sex.” I assume the Eggman’s wife feels the same…Googoogajoob!
+ While we’re on the topic of the sexual perversities of the far-right, consider this account by the Italian writer and diplomat Curzio Malaparte of his encounter with Heinrich Himmler in a sauna at a Nazi base in Finland (quoted in the British historian Richard Evans’ fascinating recent book, Hitler’s People: the Faces of the Third Reich)…
I thought I recognized one of the naked men seated on the lowest shelf. Sweat was streaming down his high-checkboned face, in which nearsighted eyes, stripped of their glasses, glittered with a whitish, soft light, that is seen in the eyes of fish. He carried his head high with an air of arrogant insolence…He sat with his hands resting on his knees like a punished schoolboy. Between his forearms protruded a little rosy swollen drooping belly, the naval strangely in relief, so that it stood out against that tender rosiness like a delicate rosebud–a child’s navel in an old man’s belly…large drops of sweat flowing down his chest glided over the skin of that soft belly and gathered in the hair like dew on a bush. The man seemed to be dissolving in water before our eyes…In a twinkling of an eye, only a pool of perspiration on the floor would be left of him.
As Malaparte was led into the room, his host, General Eduard Dietl, commanding officer of the Wehrmacht in Finland, raised his arm and gave the salute now familiar to all followers of Elon Musk and declaimed, “Heil Hitler!” prompting the naked Himmler to stand and return the infamous gesture. According to Evans, Himmler’s salute “was mistaken for the signal to begin the traditional ending of the sauna, in which the participants flog each other with small branches of silver-birch twigs before rushing out into the snow.” Now back to Malaparte:
The other men raised their birch switches and began hitting each other first; then, by common consent, with ever-increasing energy, they applied their switches to Himmler’s shoulders and back…At first, Himmler tried to fend them off, shielding his face with his arms, and laughed, but it was forced laughter revealing rage and fear…Finally, Himmler saw the door of the sauna open behind us, stretched out his arms to push his way through, and ran out the door, pursued by the naked men, who never ceased to hit him, and fled towards the river, into which he dived…Naked Germans are wonderfully defenseless; they are no longer frightening.
+ All in all, I might prefer having omlettes with incels –even if that does sound kind of French.
+++
+ According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, a 25-year-old software engineer named Marko Elez working for Elon Musk’s DOGE operation that is rummaging through the Treasury Department’s payment systems resigned on Thursday after the Trump White House was told of his connections to a now-deleted social media account that called for repealing the Civil Rights Act and said “I want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask.”
One post on the account, disparaging the number of people from India working at tech jobs in Silicon Valley, said: “Normalize Indian hate.” Another post from September declared, “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity.” In July, he wrote: “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool.”
According to the WSJ, Elez worked for Musk Starlink, SpaceX and X, where, according to his personal website, he “focused on artificial intelligence.” No one could possibly be surprised by this turn of events.
+ How did the guy (now Veep) who spread racist lies about Haitian immigrants in his own state killing and eating cats and dogs respond to news that a Musk staffer, one of two people given permission to rummage through the Treasury Dept’s financial transactions database, called for a “eugenics based immigration policy?”….He was just a kid (he is 25), bring him back!
+ I wonder if Vance’s wife, Usha Bala Chilukuri, whose parents moved to the US from India in the 1980s (her father landing a job as a mechanical engineer in the tech industry), feels that mini-Musk Marko Elez calling for true-blooded Americans to “Normalize Indian Hate!” makes him a “bad dude” or just another TechBoy prankster?
+ Christopher Harrison: “Thank goodness he didn’t post anything sympathetic to poor people or about getting everyone quality health care. Then JD would be calling for him to be cast out of the country for being a Marxist, if not sent to the wall.”
+ DOGE’s other “kid” hacker, the 19-year-old Edward Coristine, who once called himself Big Balls, was fired at his previous job with a cybersecurity firm for leaking company secrets and not in an Edward Snowden kind of way. Now, the teen has access to the secret data of the US government and many of its employees, citizens, and businesses.
+ David Sirota: “Trump’s party controls Congress and most of the judiciary, which means governing via extralegal executive orders rather than by legislation is not some agenda necessity – it’s a deliberate *choice* to destroy whatever remains of the country’s already weak democratic institutions.”
+ This week, Trump says his minions are preparing an Imperial Edict to abolish the Department of Education, which was created by an act of Congress on October 17, 1979. It’s the smallest Department in the federal government, employing only 4,500 workers, but for some reason, it generates the most ire from the rightwing. Nearly 75% of the Department’s meager budget (which has been slashed by 60 percent in recent years) is taken up by its administration of Pell Grants, Direct Federal Student Loans, and Title I grants to schools in low-income districts. Most of the remainder of the budget goes to funding Special Education programs.
So, Musk and Trump want to eliminate the department that distributes student loans but keep the students who received them in debt for the next 30 years.
+ Eric Levitz: “We should not sacrifice the Constitution on the altar of deficit reduction. But that isn’t even the trade Musk is offering: He is asking us to let him break laws, so that he can cut tiny ‘woke’ programs — before Trump’s tax cuts add trillions to the debt.”
+ According to Axios, 40,000 federal employees accepted Trump’s questionable buyout offer to leave their positions but be paid through September. Now comes news that they may be unknowingly forfeiting their federal pensions.
+ Eliminating OSHA and worker-safety provisions will make it easier to hire 12-year-olds to work the midnight shift sharpening the killing blades at the slaughterhouse to pay for their school lunches…
+ Waleed Shahid: “In any other country, a billionaire donor like Musk installing loyalists to seize federal agencies, access private citizen data and information about his competitors, and gut working class policies to fund his own tax cut would be called a coup.”
+++
+ Few American writers were as cynical as Henry Adams, who will be familiar to readers of Thomas Pynchon’s V. and Gore Vidal’s Empire, if not for his own memoir The Education of Henry Adams, where he famously refers to himself in the third person throughout. And while one might dispute his view of Paris, I don’t think many would find fault with his assessments of London or DC: “In Paris and London he had seen nothing to make a return to life worthwhile; in Washington he saw plenty of reasons for staying dead.”
+ Adams’ History of the United States (1801-1817) remains one of the most definitive accounts of the early Republic. He also wrote the excellent novel Democracy. And his Chapters of Erie, written with his brother Charles Francis, was an early classic of muckraking journalism, exposing the financial and political scandals of the robber barons, the re-reading of which would prove edifying toward understanding our current predicament. Adams should be much better known and surely would be in a more literate nation than our own, like, say, the Dominican Republic or Mongolia….
+ Share of Imports into US by Country…
Mexico: $480 billion
China: $448 billion
Canada: $429 billion
Germany: $163 billion
Japan: $151 billion
South Korea: $120 billion
Vietnam: $119 billion
India: $87.3 billion
Ireland: $82.7 billion
Italy: $75.2 billion
UK: $64.8 billion
France: $59 billion
Thailand: $56.6 billion
Switzerland: $52.8 billion
+ Trump’s trade war is getting off to a humiliating start. Humiliating for him, as both Justin Trudeau and Claudia Sheinbaum swatted down his 20 percent tariffs with few concessions they hadn’t already made months ago.
+ Trump: “We had a good talk with Trudeau. But we are treated unfairly. We don’t need anything they’ve got. We don’t need Canadian cars, lumber, agriculture.”
+ The US imports around 4 million barrels of oil from Canada…per day.
+ Almost everyone knows the following Tweet is a lie, even most of Trump’s cult, who will believe him despite the fact they made a withdrawal at Bank of America the last time they were in Vancouver or Toronto. (This is not to discount the possibility that some MAGA-hat wearing visitors to a Citibank branch in Montreal may have been told by a Quebecoise teller to, “Va te faire foutre!”)
+ According to the Canadian Bankers Association, 16 U.S.-based bank subsidiaries and branches are currently operating in Canada, holding around CAD $113 billion in assets.
+ No Canadian would want to trade their health care and banking systems for the predatory operations we must endure down here. Consider the fact that Canada’s banks didn’t need rescuing in 2008, despite the Giant Sucking Sound from south of the Saint Lawrence Seaway…
+ In hitting the pause button on his tariffs against Canada, Trump brayed that Trudeau had capitulated to his demands for increased border security. But that was actually a plan that had been announced in December and was negotiated under the Biden administration.
+ The last time I recall Canadians booing the US national anthem was during the Iraq War…
+ Now, Trump is considering hitting the EU with 10% tariffs on imported goods, which seems to have excited few people, except Vladimir Putin, who predicted (facetiously or not; it’s always hard to tell with him) that the Europeans “will all stand at the feet of the master and will wag their tails a little. Everything will fall into place.”
+ Europe, if you’re listening, Claudia Sheinbaum gave a master class on how to negotiate with a temperamental toddler.
+ One commitment (sure to be broken once word leaks to the NRA) Sheinbaum extracted from Trump is a pledge to try to restrict for the first time the flow of guns from the US into Mexico, which is fueling so much of the violence below the border. How about curbing the flow of guns in the US, Don?
+++
+ Cockburn and I used to run a feature in CounterPunch called First Blood, commemorating the first kill strike made by each new president. Killing people in far-off lands who pose no direct threat to our domestic tranquility is a kind of initiation ritual of Imperial rule…On Day 12, Trump ordered “precision strikes” targeting an unnamed “senior ISIS operative” (more likely a goatherder and his herd or a wedding party) in Somalia. Trump: “We will find you, and we will kill you!”
+ This from the guy who wants to confiscate Greenland, Canada and Gaza and re-confiscate the Panama Canal Zone…
+ The latest target in Trump’s widening War on the World (China, Mexico, Canada, Denmark, Panama, Palestine) is South Africa, which he apparently wants to return to an Apartheid state at the behest of Elon.
+ For the record, the population of South Africa is 90% black, but 70% of the land is still owned by whites, a legacy of previous Apartheid land laws that limited black ownership to 7% and later 15% of the private land in the nation.
+ Trump continues to bellow like an old milk cow left out in the pasture after dark about the US having to pay for Canada’s defense. Defense from what? The only nation threatening Canada is its neighbor to the South, which is acting like a mob protection racket, trying to extort money and territory from a threat it, and it alone, poses.
+ The last military engagement between the US and Canadian/British forces was the Pig War of 1859 on San Juan Island in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Perhaps, the coming confrontation should be called The Pig’s War.
+ And, come to think of it, the War of 1812 didn’t turn out all that well for the residents of the White House.
+ In the summer of 1981, Kimberly and I squatted in a place just down the road from the house of Caleb Bentley in Brookeville, Maryland, where James Madison briefly took refuge, supposedly with a strongbox that contained the entirety of the US treasury (which in those days was real money backed by gold and not promissory notes or quantitative easing printed cash), while Admiral George Cockburn and a group of freed slaves put torch to their former abode on Pennsylvania Avenue. An event immortalized on the cover of his descendant Alexander Cockburn’s book, Corruptions of Empire…
+ A new UN report documents an “alarming rise” in the executions of captured Ukrainian soldiers by Russia: Since the end of August 2024, the Human Rights Monitoring Mission recorded 79 such executions in 24 separate incidents. The UN mission also documented the execution of a wounded Russian soldier by Ukrainian soldiers. Who will end this war?
+ The Virginia House of Delegates voted unanimously (99-0) to pass the “Defend the Guard Act,” a bill that would keep the VA National Guard from foreign conflicts without a congressional declaration of war. Could you imagine Congress doing the same? I can’t.
+ That flight to Gitmo should have contained Bush, Cheney, Rice, Yoo, Tenet, Haspel…and the corpse of Donald Rumsfeld.
+ In the 1980s, the Reagan administration reached a similar “extraordinary” agreement with El Salvador and many of those who were deported were either immediately imprisoned by the regime or later murdered by its death squads–though I don’t believe even the Reaganauts contemplated deporting US citizens–a truly Trumpian innovation…
+ Trump said he’d send US citizens to Nayib Bukele’s mega-prison (aka, Terrorism Confinement Center) “in a heartbeat”–the prison is notorious for its intentional overcrowding (40,000-plus), wretched conditions, high death rate and use of torture. A report by Amnesty International (Behind the Veil of Popularity: Repression and Regression in El Salvador) published in December 2023 found that the Buekele regime in El Salvador engages in “systemic torture” of alleged gang members in detention, many of whom–surprise!– turned out not to be actual gang members.
+ Before he abolishes the Department of Education, Trump is weaponizing it to investigate five US universities for promoting antisemitism (aka, pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide protests) on campus…
-Columbia University
-Northwestern University
-Portland State University
-University of California, Berkeley
-University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
+ You’ve hit the big time, PSU!
+++
+ Apparently, there was a demonstration outside the Senator from Citibank’s building this week…
+ The constituents of WTF Chuck weren’t too happy with his excuse for his party’s passivity in the face of Trump and Musk looting the federal government and bullying the allies and neighbors of the country: “Just wait. Trump will screw up” …
+ The resistance in the House is proving even more inept, where even the self-professed “progressive” Democrats continue to be MIA…
+ Chuck Munson: “What if there was a technology where this group of Democrats could coordinate their activities, like something that would blast out alerts to a group of them?”
+ Meet the Democratic Party’s newly elected Chair, Ken Martin: “There are a lot of good billionaires out there that have been with Democrats, who share our values, and we will take their money. But we’re not taking money from those bad billionaires.” The Good, the Bad and the WTF?
+ There are good billionaires on both sides, I guess.
+ Speaking of billionaires, they made out pretty, pretty well under Bidenomics…
Source: Gabriel Zucman.
+ Meanwhile, in The Gilded Age, Mark Twain pretty much described the financial condition of the rest of America: “I wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars.”
+ US Retail Outlets That Announced the Most Store Closures
2024
Family Dollar–718
CVS–586
Conn’s–563
rue2–543
Big Lots–5172025
Party City–738
Big Lots–601
Walgreens–323
7-Eleven–148
Macy’s–51Source: Coresight
+ Jamie Dimon (once a potential Democratic presidential candidate) on whether tariffs will cause inflation: “I mean, get over it. National security trumps a little bit more inflation.”
+ According to the National Association of Realtors, the average age of a homebuyer in the US is now 56, up from 49 only two years ago. For first-time homebuyers, the average age is 38, a new high. In 1981, the average age of first-time buyers was only 29.
+ 38: the percentage of Americans who are satisfied with the state of the country, a record low, which is still seven points higher than those who approve of the Democratic Party.
+++
+ California’s largest home insurer, State Farm, which dropped coverage for tens of thousands of California homeowners last year, is asking state officials to approve an emergency rate hike of 22% due to wildfire claims.
+ Since many national parks rely on seasonal workers, Trump’s hiring freeze will make it impossible to hire for the summer season.
+ Temperatures at the North Pole during the first week of February are 20C above average and above the melting point of ice…
+ After Trump imposed 10% tariffs on China, allegedly over fentanyl production, China responded with a much-needed 15% carbon (tax) tariff on US coal and liquified natural gas imports and a 10% tariff on crude oil, farm equipment, large-displacement vehicles, and pickup trucks. The Chinese tariffs are set to take effect next week.
+ Tesla is getting its ass kicked this year by by Chinese EV-maker BYD in European markets. Take a look at UK sales in January for 2024 and 2025
Tesla
Jan. 2024: 1,581
Jan: 2025: 1,458 (-11%)BYD
Jan: 2024: 248
Jan. 2025: 1,614 (+550.8%)
+ Number of cattle in Montana: 2,500,000
Number of wolves in Montana: 1,250
Number of Montana cattle taken by wolves a year: 60
Percent of Montana cattle taken by wolves a year: 0.002%.
Number of wolves Montana wants to kill for killing 60 cattle: 334
Percentage of wolves Montana wants to kill for killing 0.002% of Montana’s cattle: 26.7%
+ In the US, the Supreme Court saw fit to award corporations the rights (if not the legal accountability) of human beings. In New Zealand, the legislature has given Mount Taranaki the same legal rights as a person, thus vindicating two landmark essays from the 1970s, Christopher Stone’s “Should Trees Have Standing” and Roderick Nash’s “Do Rocks Have Rights?” Both argue that nature itself and natural features such as mountains and rivers should have legal standing in lawsuits challenging their destruction or degradation…
+ Remember those Nancy Reagan-sponsored ads of a frying egg, warning, “This is Your Brain on Drugs?” Well, this is your brain on plastic…
+ Most of us would prefer daily tabs of mescaline instead of scraps of plastic bags embedded in our gray matter. You also might want to thank your kidneys for holding firm.
+ The water released from two California reservoirs will likely go to waste and not help Los Angeles with firefighting, experts say. No shit, Sherlock…
+ California is considering a new law that would permit victims of climate-driven disasters to sue fossil fuel companies for damages. Under existing law, utilities, such as PG&E, can (and have) been held liable if their equipment, such as transformers or power lines, starts wildfires. This move comes as So Cal Edison admitted its power lines (and not the Delta Smelt) may have been responsible for igniting the Eaton Fire that raging through Altadena.
+ Citing climate and environmental concerns, Gustavo Petro ordered the state-run oil company Ecopetrol to cancel a joint venture with Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) that was expected to produce around 90,000 barrels of oil per day, citing environmental concerns.”
+ NYC’s congestion pricing plan now enjoys the support of 66% of the drivers who pay the toll the most frequently.
+ First, they ignored Congress; now, the Courts…”Two judges have ordered the administration to lift the freeze. But nonprofits and states still can’t get money for contracts backed by the Inflation Reduction Act.” There are no checks; the system is out of balance.
+ Environmental journalist Alexander Kaufman disclosed that the Huffington Post is ending its coverage of “what I consider the most urgent story of this lifetime,” which prompted him to accept a buyout and move on:
Last week, I learned HuffPost would be ending its dedicated coverage of energy and climate change.
This comes right after the world hit 1.5 degrees Celsius, the temperature average above pre-industrial norms that most nations on Earth wanted to keep warming from exceeding. In the United States, the country most responsible for the cumulative carbon added to the atmosphere, we are at the dawn of a massive upswing in electricity demand from data centers, air conditioning and electrification. The new Trump administration is set to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords and embark on a radical new era of drilling, deregulation, and power plant construction. All of this requires diligent, balanced journalism. You can count on me to keep providing that.
But it won’t be at HuffPost. Last Friday, I requested a buyout. Thanks to our union contract, I’m walking away with an enviable runaway by even the standards of some of my friends in professions with far better pay than journalism.
+++
+ Doctors for America, a nonprofit membership organization, is suing the Trump administration over the sudden removal of public health data from government websites, per Bloomberg, arguing it creates a “dangerous gap” in information available to track disease and diagnose patients. “All of the data for HIV is gone,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan. “I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t know it was going to be this bad. It’s like a data apocalypse.”
+ Worse, Trump’s freeze of foreign aid has resulted in HIV groups abroad not receiving any funding, puttingthe health of more than 20 million people, including 500,000 children, in jeopardy.
+ The following makes me wonder where Dr. Ben got his medical (chiropractic) degree. I hope he’s not appointed to a position at the NIH (if there continues to be an NIH). Cancer cells have been detected in dinosaur fossils dating back 70 million years. (For the record, that’s at least 6,000 years before the first vaccines, even if you use the Creationist Calendar.)
+ Among the “doctors” who signed a “physician’s letter” in support of RFK, Jr’s nomination were a self-described journalist, a certified public accountant, a firefighter/paramedic, a certified health coach and someone who said they had a bachelor’s degree “with an emphasis on Jungian Psychology.”
+ Meanwhile, more than one million children may have been affected by long COVID-19 in 2023, new federal data published Monday suggests. And higher levels of long COVID were found in lower-income households.
+ The Argentine regime of mini-Trump Javier Milei is also pulling out of the WHO, saying with characteristic machismo: “We Argentinians will not allow an international organization to intervene in our sovereignty, much less in our health.”
+ Elizabeth Warren: “I want to talk for a moment about one thing Trump’s done that hasn’t gotten enough attention. He signed an executive order that will make it more dangerous for women—in states where abortion is legal—to walk safely from their cars to the front door of an abortion clinic.”
+ According to a report from Mashable, “Mark Zuckerberg ordered the removal of tampons from men’s restrooms at Meta HQ. Then Meta employees put them back. Meanwhile, Meta platforms, Facebook, and Instagram, have started blocking posts by abortion pill providers.
+++
+ Trump said this week that he’s signing an executive order to make his new Attorney General Pam Bondi the head of a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” I’m volunteering to head up a task force to eradicate the much more insidious scourge of anti-antinomian bias.
+ Trayvon Martin would have been 30 years old this week. Oh, how far we’ve come in the 12 years since he was murdered…in reverse.
+ It’s impossible to think of Trayvon without immediately flashing to my pal, Kevin Gray, whom I miss every damn day, not the least because I know a call from Kev during this current madness would have featured a stream of profanities, curses, and invectives that would have blasted from South Carolina to Oregon like an Archie Shepp solo and made me laugh for the rest of an otherwise gut-wrenching week.
+ RIP Francis Boyle, the ferocious defender of human rights and international law and longtime law professor at the University of Illinois. Francis wrote quite a few pieces for us over the years and often gently pointed out the errors in my own thinking and writing, corrections I appreciated and learned from.
+ Let’s dip into the CounterPunch mailbag to see what the peeps are thinking about. Here’s an intriguing one from Nagib Sayed, who says he’s been a faithful follower of CounterPunch since 1996…
The foolish and crippled mind left wing lunatics have no place in the human world except to be held accountable and punished for their stupidity!
Where in the world or in history the Marxism [sic] did a good thing? It never happened! Because Marx along [with] his master Hegel and Neitcha [sic] were British agents and their foolish theories were not based on reality and they were not based on science and truth! Socialism is known to be another form of imperialism and the Trump is elected to eliminate the woke parasite and liberate the country from the evil Soros followers!
For you counterpunch, it is time to stop being used as a pawn of the evil British empire of lies and deception. I followed you from 1996 but never find anything useful in your posts because you left wingers are just foolish and incapable to understand [sic] reality! You are similar to those terrorist groups that your master created recently.
Nagib Sayed…
+ Thanks, Nagib. I’ll consult “our Master” and get back to you on that…
+ Biden’s first film, The Old Man and the Sea Pier That Sank….
+ Here’s the author bio for a story in the Daily Beast credited to “Phillipe Naughton” on Bianca Censori’s “uncensored” appearance at the Grammy’s: “Custom AI tools were used in the process of creating this article. It was selected, edited, and fact-checked by Daily Beast staff in compliance with our Code of Ethics.”
+ And now a message from MAGA’s trans wing: Karla Sofía Gascon, the trans actor nominated for her role in the movie “Emilia Pérez, attempted to apologize this week for social media posts that surfaced this week praising Adolf Hitler, saying Islam should be banned, and smearing George Floyd as “a drug addict and a hustler…who very few people ever cared” about.
+ I have a hard time believing John Lennon would have approved a “SuperDeluxe” boxed set “Special Limited Edition Package” for an LP that even he felt was one of his most didactic and uninspired, and then hawked it on the site that bears his name for $1,350…
View the World From American Eyes, Bury the Past, Rob Us Blind…
Booked Up
What I’m reading this week…
Banished Men: How Migrants Endure the Violence of Deportation
Abigail Leslie Andrews
(UC Press)
Subjugate the Earth: the Beginning and End of Human Domination of Nature
Philipp Blom
(Polity)
My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Passionaria
Andrée Blouin
(Verso)
Sound Grammar
What I’m listening to this week…
List of Demands
Damon Locks
(International Anthem)
Honey From a Winter Stone
Ambrose Akinmusire
(Nonesuch)
Downstate
Prison
(Drag City)
As Much the Men as the Women
“I’m happy to be a woman, but much of it was learned over the course of life. Really thudded into me. You learn it. It’s a kind of mastery and artistry. The deeper person underneath the scent of Diptyque Philosykos or whatever is much less gendered. Every person has a range. In fiction, you get to be it all. I’m as much the men in my book as I am the women. I write how I write and there is no mission to stake a claim.”
– Rachel Kushner
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