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AMG Turns 15: Middle Management Speaks
By Carcharodon
15 years ago, on May 19, 2009, Angry Metal Guy spoke. For the very first time as AMG. And he had opinions: Very Important Opinions™. The post attracted relatively little attention at the time, but times change and, over the decade and a half since then, AMG Industries has grown into the blog you know today. Now with a staff of around 25 overrating overwriters (and an entirely non-suspicious graveyard for writers on permanent, all-expenses-paid sabbaticals), we have written more than 9,100 posts, comprising over seven million words. Over the site’s lifetime, we’ve had more than 107 million visits and now achieve well over a million hits each and every month. Through this, we’ve built up a fantastic community of readers drawn from every corner of the globe, whom we have (mostly) loved getting to know in the more than 360,000 comments posted on the site.
We have done this under the careful (if sternly authoritarian) stewardship of our eponymous leader Angry Metal Guy and his iron enforcer, Steel Druhm, while adhering to strict editorial policies and principles. We have done this by simply offering honest (and occasionally brutal) takes, and without running a single advert or taking a single cent from anyone. Ever. Mistakes have undoubtedly been made and we may be a laughing stock in the eyes of music intellectuals, socialites and critics everywhere but we are incredibly proud of what AMG Industries represents. In fact, we believe it may be the best metal blog, with the best community of readers, on the internet.
Now join us as the people responsible for making AMG a reality reflect on what the site means to them and why they would willingly work for a blog that pays in the currency of deadlines, abuse, and hobo wine. Welcome to the 15th Birthdaynalia.
Thou Shalt Have No Other Blogs!
Carcharodon
AMG and me
I lurked quietly on AMG for about five years, reading daily, discovering great records, but never entering the fray. Not so much as a single comment. I didn’t feel qualified to get involved. Until that is, I inexplicably decided—I’m still not sure why—to answer the 2018 casting call. To my surprise, I got a shot and, under the threatening (but surprisingly fair) tutelage of Steel Druhm, I evolved from nameless_n00b_17 to become Carcharodon Sharkboi. I figured it would be a fun hobby for a year or two.
Coming up six years and more than 250 posts later, AMG Industries is so much more than a hobby. It’s become part of my daily life. And that is because of the people and the culture here, not just the staff, but also the regular readers and commenters. Although there’s a wry humor to nearly everything we do, and more in-jokes than even the seasoned staffers can keep up with, people actually care. They care. About the music. About our editorial standards. About the quality of our output. About each other. And, apparently, about Yer Mom. Caring and having standards are rare commodities on the internet, and it makes the AMG community a special place to be a part of. Are we perfect? No. Mistakes have been made. We Melvins that make up AMG are a dysfunctional family, but you love your family and you’re always a part of it. This adoptive family helped me get through some really tough times as a new(ish) dad during the COVID lockdowns and exposed me to some really impressive people, I would likely never have met otherwise. Thanks AMG for starting this place and, along with Steel, Grier and other key players, ensuring that it remains what it’s always been: a place for appreciating the music we love, free from adverts, clickbait, and dicks. I’m proud to have played my small part in it.
AMG gave to me …
Gorguts // Colored Sands – I couldn’t tell you exactly when I started perusing AMG but I remember this being one of the first reviews I stumbled across. Today, it’s not a record I reach for often but it completely changed my perception of death metal. Until I heard Colored Sands, death metal to me fell into either the Cannibal Corpse school, or the progressive Opeth and late-era Death camp. The former wasn’t for me, the latter very much was. Gorguts ripped my preconceptions apart. The band was completely unknown to me but the technical precision and dissonance they channeled into this record blew me away. And having heard it, it’s impossible not to hear Gorguts’ influence on dozens of other bands. As Noctus opined, the “riffs are absorbing, dizzying and uncompromisingly heavy … [while the] mix is dynamic, well-balanced and above all, crushing.” But it’s more than that. It’s such a complete package and, together, all the elements are simply transcendent.
Mistur // In Memoriam – It pains me to say it but Grier was right. Okay, so it was once, about eight years ago but he was still right: Mistur’s In Memoriam is an absolute banger. It does deserve a 4.5. And I did miss it. And it’s absolutely in my top-5 black metal records of the 2010s. Would I have found it without him? Perhaps. Perhaps not. After all, I didn’t know their 2009 debut, Attende. But I didn’t need to do the work because Grier did it for me. He was also right to say that In Memoriam is packed full of highlights but that the “record is impossible to appreciate unless listened to from beginning to end.” It’s a perfectly crafted piece of Windir-inspired melodic black metal, with absolutely no fat on its “magnificently structured” carcass. Every track is excellent in its own way (the duo of “Matriarch’s Lament” and “The Sight” being my personal highlights), but the album is undoubtedly greater than the sum of its parts. As a general rule of thumb, do not trust Grier but he was right on the money about Mistur.
Gazpacho // Demon – Demon is in my top ten records of all time. From the yawing note, fragile vocal line, and keys that open the record on “I’ve Been Walking, Pt. 1a” to the final notes of “Death Room”, it gives me chills every time. I’m not someone who has overly emotional reactions to music, as a rule. But I love Demon. There is something about this record’s dark vulnerability that haunts me. And given the band’s shitty name, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with it were it not for the review here. Sitting right on the intersection of alt-rock and prog, with a few heavier riffs, I could say that it has all the progressive chops of Radiohead’s OK Computer and that there’s something of Thom Yorke in Gazpacho frontman Jan-Henrik Ohm’s quiet, emotive power. I could point to the excellent use of violin (the polka that closes “The Wizard of Altai Mountains” is just fun). I could, as AMG did in the review that hooked me in, praise the fantastic production. He also, rightly, said that “[e]very listen to brings forth new experiences, new ideas, new emotions”. But it’s more than that. Demon just has that undefinable something. It’s heart-wrenching, somber and I never tire of it.
I wish I had written …
Grymm Comments: On Mental Health Awareness and Our Favorite Music. Okay, I don’t actually wish I had written this. Nor should I have been allowed to. However, I am extremely glad that Grymm, Kenstrosity and The Artist Formerly Known As Muppet took on this project. In any space, it’s an incredibly important subject but mental health struggles seem to have an outsize impact on people in our (still relatively niche) scene, as the engagement with this piece showed. The number of incredibly personal and moving stories people felt able to share in response to Grymm‘s post made me very proud to be part of this place and I like to think that, perhaps, it helped a few people, who felt they had nowhere else to turn, feel a little less alone. Chapeau gentlemen.
I wish I could do over …
Kanonenfieber – Menschenmühle [Things You Might Have Missed 2021]. In the write-up of my favorite record of 2021, I opened with a disclaimer, setting out what this record categorically was not. It was an effort to head off what I predicted would inevitably become an issue for a German band, writing and singing about war in German … you figure it out. To be fair, when I interviewed its creator, Noise, a couple of years later, it seems I was right. Still, I don’t think my efforts helped. If anything, they sparked a pointless debate in the comments (of which I was part). I should have left well alone and just focused on this outstanding record.
I wish more people had read …
The Art of Labelling – Part I and Part II. All the way back in early 2020, while locked up in my house, I penned a two-part feature looking at three great, independent record labels—Hypnotic Dirge, Naturmacht and Transcending Obscurity. I wanted to understand the challenges, and opportunities, facing them and their founders. I found these fascinating to write and I learned a lot. Part I did ok numbers, not great but ok; Part II … less so. Given the huge amounts of time Nic, Robert and Kunal gave up to help me with these pieces, I had hoped to get more exposure for these excellent labels.
GardensTale
AMG and me
It’s hard to overstate the impact AMG has had on my life. When I found the site, checking out reviews for Book of Souls, I wasn’t listening to that much metal anymore. The quality of the writing drew me in, I got caught up on recent big releases, and the writing bug sank its teeth in me. Soon, metal had become a big part of my life again. Not long after, my partner expressed an interest as well and I introduced her to the various types and subgenres of metal, and we started going to more concerts and festivals, which is our favorite shared experience to this day. We started going to Roadburn, met and befriended several bands. We made friends from Wales at Graspop. During the pandemic, the staff started doing Zoom calls,1 and I got to know many of my fellow writers. After the pandemic, we made more friends through Roadburn and Angry Metal Days. We’ve been to Brutal Assault, with people we met at other festivals. One even moved to our city and has become a close companion since then. How much smaller would our world be without these friendships and experiences! This one shared interest—the love of music—is a wonderful, ongoing journey, that has enriched our lives in ways I can scarcely describe, and the match that set the fire was a click on a link while I was bored at work. AMG has brought my partner and me incalculable joy. Here’s to 15 more years!
AMG gave to me …
King Goat // Conduit – Conduit is important to me for several reasons. It was my first Album of the Year at AMG, with the title track a well-deserved Song of the Year. But it was also the album that showed me how wrong I was about doom metal. I had this notion that Swallow the Sun levels of drudgery were the standard for the genre, something I could (at the time) only tolerate in small amounts. Having just begun my AMG career in August that year, I was keen to unearth as much as I could from 2016, and King Goat blew my mind wide open, an obliteration of preconceptions that has served me well since. Despite the cataclysmic recalibration, I have not yet discovered a doom album to top Conduit. The mighty vocals, the colossal riffs, the cosmic scale of it all … it is a truly monumental album. Just thinking of the anthemic duet of the title track’s bridge still sends chills down my spine.
Disillusion // The Liberation – If you didn’t see this coming, welcome to AMG! I have made no secret of how much I love The Liberation.2 It is, quite literally, my all-time favorite album. The first time I heard it, it was overwhelming. The second time, “Time To Let Go” got its powerful hooks into me. Third time round, the sheer scope of “Wintertide” began to land. Every time I span it, I discovered more depth, more hooks, more intricate details, which connected all the tracks like a perfect web. It’s a bold treatise on dying and letting go, emotionally charged not just through the vocals but with every chord. I love progressive music principally for its storytelling ability, as the freedom from structure allows the music to emulate the endless ways to build a narrative arc. It’s why I love Pink Floyd and, more recently, Major Parkinson so much, and it’s the reason Edge of Sanity’s Crimson is one of the only albums I’ve done a YMIO for. But none do it better than Disillusion, and they’ve never done it better than on this album.
Madder Mortem // Red in Tooth and Claw – I’d heard Madder Mortem before, back in their Desiderata days. Although I enjoyed that album, it hadn’t stuck with me somehow. Red in Tooth and Claw brought me back into the fold in a big way, and Madder Mortem’s become one of my favorite bands since, owing to its unique sound and peerless emotional acuity. This album’s closer, “Underdogs,” remains one of the most effective and affecting tracks in the stellar discography of Norway’s best-kept secret. A disastrously scheduled and attended gig during the Marrow tour allowed my partner and me hours of drinks and conversations with the band, especially with vocalist extraordinaire Agnete Kirkevaag, and it remains the best and most personal experience I’ve had with any band. Madder Mortem will always hold a special place in my heart, and I would likely never have gone back to them if I hadn’t read Jean-Luc Ricard‘s review and decided to give a long-forgotten band another shot.
I wish I had written …
Alcest – Kodama Review. We have some mighty fine writers here at AMG, each with their own style and voice. But few could match the poetry of Roquentin. Starting out here, this was the review that made me sigh dreamily and wish for the ability to write such extraordinary prose. When you’ve been writing reviews for a while, you often find yourself trying new ways to phrase the same things; this is good, that is bad, etcetera. The Kodama piece is a masterclass in melding these points into a beautifully phrased flow, which never feels repetitive or perfunctory. Roquentin, you are missed.
I wish I could do over …
Hemina – Venus Review. I’m only human, and humans make mistakes. My biggest mistake, though, was the framing of Hemina’s Venus. A lengthy, winding progressive metal album from my early AMG career, I found the love-themed concept album trite and too cheesy. And though I may have been able to defend that musically, I was completely wrong about the concept, which dealt with the happiness love brings, as well as the drama and destruction. And the band called me out on it in the comments, in the worst way: with polite kindness. One more memory for the ‘lie awake at night’ bank, I suppose.
I wish more people had read …
Wills Dissolve – Echoes Review and Album Premiere. We don’t do a lot of premieres around here, so when we run one, it’s a special event. Hypnotic Dirge is not an unknown label, Wills Dissolve had a very good album with a great Burke cover. All the ducks in a line, right? Crickets. 3 comments, 2 of which talked about the lack of comments. Just a strange fluke, it seems, but certainly one of my bigger AMG disappointments.
Kenstrosity
AMG and me
When I first applied to write for AMG, I felt terribly unconfident that I would get anywhere with it. A certain commenter’s (Septic, you scoundrel, you) and my meatspace friends’ constant, and sometimes irritating, encouragement and support conspired to keep me from chickening out. Lo and behold, I jammed my foot into the Hall door. Just. Brutal though that training was, now that I’m here and somewhat seasoned, I can say that this gig represents one of the most rewarding and meaningful hobbies in my life. I’ve learned a ridiculous amount, both about metal at large and about writing—and made an unprecedented number of great friends along the way—in the last six years (this November), and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. I’m not the same person I was when I applied, of that there’s no doubt. But, I like to think that, with the support of the staff, the commentariat, the silly goofy Discordians, and all of the readers that keep this place vibrant and burgeoning with views, I’m better for it. I owe this place and the people in it a huge debt, one I can never repay. Thank you everyone, for everything!
AMG gave to me …
Sulphur Aeon // Gateway to the Antisphere – Up until discovering this review, back when I first encountered AMG in 2017, I listened almost exclusively to metalcore, Evanescence, and operatic symphocheese. Then I hit play on this incredible record, and my life forever changed. I’d heard snippets of death metal and other extreme fare before, but it never clicked. Sulphur Aeon, on the other hand, had me swooning within seconds, initiating what was, effectively, the musical equivalent of the Big Bang in my brain. A whole universe of metal, extreme and otherwise, expanded exponentially before me in an instant. Those cosmic wonders revealed to me in the process, provided endless hours of joy, excitement, and vigor, the likes of which I could never anticipate. With time, I only grew fonder of Gateway to the Antisphere, until it eventually became a Ken icon, the standard by which I judge all other records of its ilk, even today.
Slugdge // Esoteric Malacology – If you asked me to curate a Top 10 metal records of the 2010s, Esoteric Malacology easily hits my Top 3. If you asked me to curate a Top 10 metal records of all time, Esoteric Malacology easily hits my Top 5.[Um … what?! – Carcharodon] Much like Gateway to the Antisphere before it, Slugdge’s fourth LP clicked immediately and, all these years later, shines just as bright, if not brighter. Rarely does a week go by without me picking this back up for some quirky, proggy death metal fun. Esoteric Malacology even transcends the trend of clumsy lyrics endemic to metal writ large, instead showcasing devilishly clever prose and subversive messaging that conveys meaningful themes, and compelling emotional depth. Then you have the stellar performances of this dynamic duo (now trio), perhaps most effectively portrayed in Song o’ the Decade contender “Putrid Fairytale,” which remains to this day my favorite piece of progressive death metal of the modern era. Needless to say, I love this record. HAIL MOLLUSCA!!!
Unfathomable Ruination // Finitude – Brutal tech death doesn’t get better than this. Easily my most cherished Kronos find, Unfathomable Ruination’s unbelievable triumph of crushing artistry left me speechless when I first span it. Considering this was my first foray into the dense, challenging extremities of more technical music, I expected Finitude to fly way over my head. I found myself bewildered that its impenetrable density and ridiculously high level of detail were so effortless for me to access. Blame that on the record’s immense groove and flawlessly structured writing. With enough time to acclimate to the intense environment conjured by Unfathomable Ruination, I found greater appreciation for its nuanced detailing and deeply satisfying tones. Hell, that perfect snare alone brings enough aural pleasure to overwhelm even the coldest spirit. At the end of the day, you should just go read Kronos‘ review of this beast, as it explains, more eloquently than I ever could, why this should be on everyone’s essential listening schedule.
I wish I had written …
In This Moment – A Star-Crossed Wasteland Review. Boy was I mad when I found this piece for one of my favorite metalcore albums. While my confounding taste is the butt of many a joke for my colleagues and our readers alike, seeing a 1.0 for this record truly hurt my soft baby heart at the time. Given the chance, my assessment would’ve likely precluded me from being hired by AMG Inc in the first place, but nothing could change how dear this record is to me. Even now, over a decade since its release, I still regularly reach for these romantic, adventurous, and theatrical tunes.
I wish I could do over …
Ascend the Hollow – Echoes of Existence Review. I’ll be frank, this review is bad. Like, really bad. Partly due to the last minute nature of the piece and partly due to my unbridled enthusiasm for the record itself, I unleashed a tidal wave of unhinged band comparisons, more than half of which don’t make any sense in retrospect. An insane density of passive voice further plagues this write-up. It’s actually kind of embarrassing. The only things that wouldn’t change much are the overall score and some of the hard points of my analysis. Otherwise, this post desperately needs an overhaul.
I wish more people had read …
Into the Obscure: Straight Line Stitch – When Skies Wash Ashore. While I’m over the moon that one of the band members unexpectedly dropped by in the comments to offer kind words for my coverage of Straight Line Stitch’s excellent When Skies Wash Ashore, I do wish more readers had given this album a chance. Many didn’t bother to even read this article because of the tags, unwilling to spend even five minutes of their time. For an album personally significant to me, that felt pretty lame.
Holdeneye
AMG and me
What does Angry Metal Guy mean to me? Honestly, this is a question that I’m constantly trying to answer. As life goes on, and my kids enter their busy teen years, my hunger to listen to, and write about, new music has definitely waned. But there was a time when this music blog was exactly what I needed in my life. I’ve never felt totally fulfilled by my job as a firefighter, and I went through a period where I questioned whether it was actually the career for me. I considered going back to school or switching professions in order to be able to better use some of my seemingly untapped skills. I’d been reading AMG off and on for years at that point and had already fantasized about joining the roster of talented writers when a casting call came about. I answered the call, forever marring the Angry Metal archives with my questionable taste and questionable humor—and forever changing my life. Put simply, Angry Metal Guy is where I found my voice; it’s where I realized that no matter what it is that I want to say, I have a natural ability to say it in a way that seems to resonate with people. I may have dreams of writing something a little more meaningful than a heavy metal review filled with potty humor, but if that dream should one day come to fruition, all those poop, fart, and penis jokes will have been instrumental in bringing it about.
AMG gave to me …
Anaal Nathrakh // The Whole of the Law – When I first heard this record, it was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Grymm‘s review and the album’s subsequent success during List Season 2016 convinced me to give this thing a whirl, despite it lying way outside my wheelhouse. Sure, I’d enjoyed some extreme metal before, but Anaal Nathrakh was in a whole different league for me. Until The Whole of the Law, I never dreamed I could actually like something so insanely … well … insane. The project’s brand of philosophical violence hit me at a time when I was struggling to reshape my worldview after deconstructing my inherited Christian faith, and just about everything about the album’s aesthetic clicked with me. This record has fueled many a sweaty therapy session in Holdeneye‘s Iron Dungeon of Pain and Enlight(dark)enment™, and it opened me up to a whole new world of musical brutality.
Sabaton // Carolus Rex – This one will probably shock a lot of people. I was a late adopter when it came to Sabaton, and I never really gave their early records a shot because I felt the whole history-metal thing was too gimmicky. But when Angry Metal Guy and Steel Druhm gave Carolus Rex the old tag-team tongue bathing, I took notice. I think the conceptual nature of the album really helped the band’s schtick resonate with me. It was the first time an album had me running to Wikipedia to learn more about the events described in the music, and this combination of learning history and enjoying heavy metal has become the best part of every new Sabaton release since. It’s no exaggeration to say that Sabaton has become one of my favorite bands of all time, and I’ll always be grateful to this site’s malevolent dictators for showing me the way.
Candlemass // Epicus Doomicus Metallicus – If I had to choose a feature that solidified Angry Metal Guy as my go-to metal blog, it would have to be when Angry Metal Guy and Steel Druhm each curated their personal top 50 heavy metal songs of all time back in 2011.3 These features reveal a lot of each of their personalities and their tastes in music, and I found a lot in common with both lists. I used them as tools for broadening my musical horizons, but no other new-to-me album hit me as hard as Candlemass’ EDM. Steel recommended “A Sorcerer’s Pledge” as a ‘doom odyssey akin to Rainbow’s “Stargazer,”‘ and that was all the nudge I needed to give the full album a try. As far as I know, EDM was the first full-fledged doom album I ever loved, and it has grown into a personal desert-island record. Thanks, Boss!
I regret nothing! But I wish I could do over …
Scardust – Strangers Review. While I don’t actually wish I could do this one over, I wish I would have done it harder. Strangers is a world-class album, and it’s only gotten better in the years since its release. This should have been a 4.5, minimum, and it should have been my Album o’ the Year for 2020. I took so much delight in how divisive the album was for our beautiful commenters, and I can only imagine how much more fun it would have been to watch you guys lose it over an even higher score. Scardust is a uniquely talented band, and I really wish I could have helped insert that glowing eggplant into even more earholes.
Sentynel
AMG and me
AMG landed in my life at a pivotal time for my music taste. I stumbled into 70s classic rock and prog in my early teens, and on to Nightwish, Blind Guardian then Isis by my late teens. Searching for more, I found the Skyforger review here and, unwittingly, an endless deluge of new music. I am terribly novelty-seeking, and AMG has kept me interested in music – not for me the endless adulthood of listening to one’s teenage favorites. I’ve picked three highlights I haven’t already written anything about anywhere below, but choosing was a brutal process and I had over a dozen Desert Island Discs-worthy choices shortlisted. But the music is only part of it. Ten years of running the servers here has taught me a lot, and it’s also a source of pride how stable it’s been over that time.4 Eventually, I was talked into trying my hand at reviewing. It’s been rewarding and great for my writing more generally, even if I don’t have time to write as much as I’d like. Huge, huge thanks to Dr. Wvrm‘s editorial help and support. Finally: there’s a weird, worldwide crew of friends behind this site, and I’m proud to be a part of it.
AMG gave to me …
The Ocean // Pelagial – This is the obvious choice for this spot; my favorite record of the 2010s and possibly ever. I never tire of listening to Pelagial, over a decade later. From the opening piano to the last guitar line fading into electrical noise I am transfixed. Sitting on the boundary between prog and post-metal, it’s rich, melodic, even catchy at times, crushing at others. Each of its moods and styles hits perfectly, while the narrative and thematic arc of a descent into the deep gives it an enduring coherence. It’s taken me a few attempts to actually write this piece because I keep getting distracted just listening to it. I’ll never stop seeking out new music, but contenders to Pelagial’s throne are few and far between.
Esben and the Witch // Older Terrors – Perhaps the record I reference the most while trying to explain my specific music taste. This is an incredibly me album. Sparse, hypnotic, atmospheric, Older Terrors does an awful lot with very little. The balance here is incredibly delicate. Getting music this minimalist to have real impact is hard, and the albums where it works are some of my all-time favorites. Here, the folk stylings—the sense of forests, rituals and magic—are key to its success. I associate this album with its cover art much more viscerally than anything else I listen to. It’s genuinely transportive; pressing play feels like stepping into that starlit forest.
Vienna Teng // Aims – Ah, how can I pass up an opportunity to write about an album that only tangentially qualifies for this section on a bunch of axes? I mentioned my love of Teng’s work in my 2023 AotY list, but I think Aims is particularly special. It’s at once incredibly catchy and poppy, yet also very experimental, and really shows off her lyrical and thematic flair. “The Hymn of Acxiom” casts an internet marketing database as a choral hymn, more relevant now than ever; “Landsailor” is a love duet between humanity and capitalism.5 These songs sit alongside more traditional themes of love and loss. They’re heavy subjects handled in a way that’s sensitive and moving. None feel out of place, and I still get them stuck in my head out of the blue regularly. Metal isn’t completely devoid of meaningful lyrics—last year’s Wayfarer did a good job here, for example—but it’s rare that I would describe anything as poetic, or that it makes me think to this degree.
I wish I could do over …
Mitochondrial Sun – Mitochondrial Sun Review. When I penned this review, I was very new to actually writing here, and hadn’t quite figured out my voice or a writing process that really worked for me. I don’t think I did a terrible job by any means, and this isn’t the only thing I’ve underrated here either (looking at you, Musk Ox), but this record is really something special and deserved both a better review and more attention generally.
Huck N Roll
AMG and me
I am olde, and I am stuck in my ways. I only ever read reviews at two sites, and the first of those was AMG. When I applied to write here, I knew for sure I would not get the gig. But by some stroke of luck, AMG Himself missed my application and Steel—perhaps just wanting an equally olde curmudgeon on staff—brought me in. I loved every minute of it. Hopefully, I became a better writer, thanks to all the talented miscreants I was with. What a great group of people – the writers and the regular (and irregular) commenters. It’s certainly a regret of mine that life got in the way and I had to leave the team.
It was the actual reviews on AMG that got me hooked. They were irreverent, entertaining, and always, always brutally honest. Hands down AMG could (and still can, even with 4.0ldeneye)6 be counted on more than any other site for the TRVE review. No 5.0-pandering to labels and bands: if it sucked, it sucked, and if it was good, well, it sucked less.
You might also be surprised to learn what great people these AMG writers are because, once you get behind the review curtain, they are a bunch of sweethearts. I miss them all!7
AMG gave to me
Darkher // Realms – The year I started with AMG, I was a deer in the headlights. Thankfully, I didn’t have to do a full year-end list, just a quick Top Ten(ish). And tops for me was Realms, from Darkher. Thanks to my good friend Grymm’s amazing writeup, I jumped on this album and never jumped off. This album got me more into doom than I’d ever been, and it’s a genre I still go to quite often (although more in the dark of winter than other times). I still spin the vinyl quite a bit. Thanks Grymm!
The Night Flight Orchestra // Amber Galactic – Another of my albums of the year that I discovered thanks to the undying admiration of my (still) good friend Dr. Fisting. Such fun. And when the guy from Bear Mace says he loves it, well, you take him seriously folks! I always read all the reviews here (still do!) and sample anything highly-rated. Amber Galactic is a big reason why.
A whole bunch of super friends // Whether they know it or not – Yes, even you, Grier!8
I wish I had written …
More YMIO features on Kiss. I did manage one for Love Gun but still, the site is sorely lacking in Kiss material.9 There should be two dozen YMIO features now.10 There should be an album ranking.11 There should be … well, maybe that’s enough.
But seriously, I wish I had written a lot more than I did in my final days. Having to cut down to two reviews a month sucked. I love finding new bands (Sermon) and writing about them, and doing it half as much, meant I was also way less engaged with the rest of the staff. So it was a double whammy. Less new music, and less camaraderie.
I wish I could do over …
Raven – Metal City. If I had known the olde feller from Raven was going to pounce on the comments because I said his album was a 2.5, I would have gone lower just to get him going even more. Nothing in my AMG days made me prouder than “Off you fuck, chief” becoming the catchphrase of the year. And Steel, I never bothered listening to All Hell’s Breaking Loose but I know for a fact you overrated it!12
#2024 #Alcest #AMGTurns15 #AnaalNathrakh #AscendTheHollow #BlogPost #BlogPosts #Candlemass #Darkher #Disillusion #EsbenAndTheWitch #Gazpacho #Gorguts #GrymmCommentsOn #Hemina #HypnoticDirgeRecords #InThisMoment #Kanonenfieber #KingGoat #Kiss #MadderMortem #MentalHealthAwareness #Mistur #MitochondrialSun #NaturmachtProductions #Raven #Sabaton #Scardust #Slugdge #StraightLineStitch #SulphurAeon #TheNightFlightOrchestra #TheOcean #TranscendingObscurity #UnfathomableRuination #ViennaTeng #WillsDissolve
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US urged to ‘think bigger’ on healthcare amid Trump onslaught on sector
An academic journal may inject some optimism into US health policy – a scarce commodity amid the Trump administration’s mass layoffs, funding freezes and the ideological research reviews.
A new issue of Health Affairs Scholar argues the conversation around healthcare can change – and radically – if academics think “bigger” and policymakers invest in their communities.
“We saw what happened in the public outcry of the murder of the United HealthCare CEO,” said Dr Victor Roy, a family physician and director of the health and political economy project at the New School in New York City.
“There is a sense people are fed up and people are looking forbigger alternatives. People have really visceral feelings around these issues and we have a way to tackle them if people come up with ideas on the scale of the challenges people are experiencing.”
Health policy has quickly become a major touchstone of the Maga-right, as the Trump administration undertakes a shock and awe campaign that has dramatically altered public health institutions.
In just a few weeks in office, the administration has scrubbedgovernment health websites of information on women and racial minorities, reviewed billions in scientific grant applications for conformity to the president’s agenda, and confirmed the nation’s foremost vaccine critic, Robert F Kennedy Jr, as the nation’s top health leader at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The administration has also said it will pull the US out of the World Health Organization (WHO), which it helped found in 1948.
Additionally, congressional Republicans have floated major cuts to Medicaid, a health insurance program for the low-income and disabled that insures about 72 million Americans, to extend tax cuts that largely benefit the wealthy.
But even outside recent upheaval, the scale of challenges to American healthcare is something to behold:
the US spends more on healthcare than almost any other country as a share of gross domestic product,
yet has some of the worst outcomes among developed democracies.It is a global outlier for failing to offer universal healthcare and one of the few countries that allows its citizens to be bankrupted by medical debt.
How to fix it?
Don’t tinker around the edges, Roy argues.
Instead, look upstream for solutions to health problems.
Abandon narratives about “deserving-ness”.
Examine what is working in cities and states.
In an interview, Roy cited the example of the "Philadelphia Joy Bank" – a small program that provides pregnant and postpartum women with a $1,000 basic income.
This money comes with no questions asked, which is a world of difference from traditional “welfare”, or temporary assistance for needy families ( #TANF ).
TANF once provided temporary cash assistance to the poor. Since Clinton-era welfare reforms,
the program has been drained of resources;its scant payments have lost venue with inflation and work requirements have saddled many with insurmountable bureaucratic barriers.
In Connecticut, lawmakers established first-in-the-nation
“baby bonds”,
a small investing account for each low-income child born in the state.The program provides $3,200 per child that is invested in the market, and can be used to buy a house, start a business, or pay for higher education or retirement.
In Washington DC, reformers at the American Economic Liberties Project are using the lessons of recent anti-trust victories to push for a proposed
“Glass-Steagall for healthcare”.The initiative, called "Break Up Big Medicine", refers to the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall legislation that separated investment banks from commercial banks.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/22/us-healthcare-trump?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other -
Lilly Wachowski calls out right-wing appropriation of ‘The Matrix’ – Entertainment Weekly
The Matrix co-director Lilly Wachowski calls out right-wing appropriation of film’s real message: ‘This is what fascism does’
The hit sci-fi movie’s famous “red pill” scene has taken on new meaning on the far right.
By Ryan Coleman, December 1, 2025 8:46 p.m. ET
Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss in ‘The Matrix’. Credit: Jasin Boland /Warner Bros.- Lilly Wachowski, who co-directed The Matrix, is criticizing right-wing misinterpretations of the hit sci-fi film.
- “Right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything,” Wachowski said on a recent podcast. “They appropriate left-wing points of view, and they mutate them for their own propaganda, to obfuscate what the real message is.”
- She and her sister, Lana Wachowski, have taken issue with some conservatives twisting the meaning of the film’s famous “red pill” scene, which they conceived as a trans allegory.
Lilly Wachowski has had it with misreadings and misinterpretations of The Matrix.
The sci-fi classic she co-directed with her sister, Lana Wachowski, in 1999 tells the story of a lonely computer programmer named Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves), who suddenly wakes up to the fact that his drab reality is in fact an advanced computer simulation keeping humanity repressed. The movie’s prescient exploration of the choice between a familiar yet crippling illusion and a scary yet liberating truth has proven to be an enduring cultural touchpoint.
But lately, Lilly isn’t happy with what some viewers are doing with The Matrix‘s message.
“Right-wing ideology appropriates absolutely everything. They appropriate left-wing points of view, and they mutate them for their own propaganda, to obfuscate what the real message is,” Lilly said on a recent episode of the So True podcast. “This is what fascism does.”
The red pill and blue pill scene in ‘The Matrix’. Credit: Warner Bros.She continued, “They do it with absolutely everything. They do it with ‘Make America Healthy Again,” referencing Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s controversial public health initiative, which claims a mission of “pursuing truth, embracing science, and enacting pro-growth policies” but has targeted services like transgender medical care and vaccine programs.
“This idea of… there is only two biological genders,” Wachowski said. “They’re calling it science, but it is not science. And that is what fascism does. It takes these things, these ideas that are generally acknowledged as questions or investigations, or truisms about humanity and life, and they turn them to something else… They remove the weight of what those things represent.”
Will Smith will not star in ‘The Matrix 5’ despite cryptic teaser‘Matrix’ star Joe Pantoliano says the Wachowskis ‘f—ing lied’ to him about Cypher’s fate
Lilly Wachowski came out as trans in 2016, giving “thanks to my fabulous sister,” who had “done it before, but also because they’re fantastic people.” Indeed, Lana Wachowski came out as trans in 2008, reflecting later on her trepidation about going public with her identity, “When I say it’s a matter of life and death, I’m saying that some people who have problems with transgender people suddenly recognize [us] as transgender, and that can have dire consequences when you live in a culture that’s so uncomfortable with gender variation.”
The Matrix scene that has gained the most traction in right-wing circles is the one in which Reeves’ protagonist is given a choice between taking a blue pill, which will return him to the ignorance of his normal life, and a red pill, which will forever wake him up to the harsh realities of living within the totalitarian control of a surveillance apparatus.
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
“Red-pilling” has been interpreted by many conservatives as waking up to the “truth” of prohibitive views on cultural issues like LGBTQ rights. But in fact, both Wachowskis have revealed in the years since the film’s release that its deeper meaning, encapsulated in the pill scene, is a trans allegory.
“That was the original intention, but the corporate world wasn’t ready for it,” Lilly explained in 2020, noting that the very concept of the Matrix “was all about this desire for transformation, but it was all coming from a closeted point of view.”
Continue/Read Original Article Here: Lilly Wachowski calls out right-wing appropriation of ‘The Matrix’
Tags: 1999 Film, Appropriation, Carrie-Ann Moss, Entertainment Weekly, EW, Facism, Film, Keanu Reeves, Lana Wachowski, Lilly Wachowski, Politics, Propaganda, Red-pilling, Right Wing, Right-Wing, Ryan Coleman, Transgender#1999Film #Appropriation #CarrieAnnMoss #EntertainmentWeekly #EW #Facism #Film #KeanuReeves #LanaWachowski #LillyWachowski #Politics #Propaganda #RedPilling #RightWing #RightWing #RyanColeman #Transgender
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The thread about Edinburgh’s 1970s Interceptor Sewers – the great untold engineering feat that cleaned up the Firth of Forth
- Part 1 of Edinburgh’s sewage history was the Thread About the East Foul Burn and the Irrigated Meadows.
- Part 2 of Edinburgh’s sewage history was the Thread About the Sewage Problems of Victorian Edinburgh and How to Fix Them.
- Part 3 of Edinburgh’s sewage history was the The thread about the Interceptor Sewers; how Victorian Edinburgh cleaned up the Water of Leith. Twice.
This is part 4 – the final instalment – of my threads on Edinburgh’s sewer story – the great untold engineering feat of the 1970s Interceptor Scheme. We left off part 3 at the end of the 19th century, when Edinburgh and Leith had finally managed to clean up the polluted Water of Leith by the construction of two “interceptor” sewers to prevent waste getting into it. However none of the sewage that was diverted by these sewers and prevented from entering the river was simply piped below the low tide level and discharged, raw, into the Firth of Forth where it was hoped for that the tide and currents would move it offshore and out into the estuary. As the city grew in the 20th century, this same basic system was expanded to cope; new sewers were added to keep other rivers and streams such as the Almond, the Jordan / Pow Burn, the Figgate Burn, the Braid Burn etc. clear, but these all just diverted the effluent out into the Forth. hoped for the best that the tides and currents would carry it out to sea
The principal sewers of Edinburgh by the middle of the 20th centuryIn 1951, the Rivers (Prevention of Pollution) (Scotland) Act made provision for the establishment of river purification boards to begin to tackle the issue of discharge of raw waste into tidal waters. This saw the Lothians River Purification Board created. This had the power to make the Forth subject to a “Tidal Waters Order” and in 1960 such an order was made. A follow on act gave the Board the power to make the Edinburgh Corporation, as it was, take action through the licensing of discharges and making that subject to conditions.
River Purification Authorities and Boards in Scotland as set up in 1951The clock was ticking now for the Corporation to take action. Initial planning of what should be done started in 1966 and was agreed with the Purification Board in 1967, to be completed by 1976. The fundamental challenge was Edinburgh’s hilly topography that divided the city up into different water catchments – and had caused the sewage network to develop piecemeal following the natural drainage. As such the system was in no way integrated and had 9 separate discharges into the Forth, none of which were treated.
Most of the existing older sewers were “interceptor” sewers, the new system had to “intercept the interceptors”. It then had to consolidate all this waste somewhere for treatment; the natural “centre of gravity” of the city’s drainage is in Leith Docks. It had to run East-West along negligible gradients and yet still be gravity worked, to avoid the expense of pumping. It then had to treat all of the waste and discharge the treated primary effluent somewhere beyond the gently shelving seabed, where the weak tidal flow made natural dispersion tricky. And lastly it had to do something about the sewage sludge leftover from primary treatment. So there was a huge amount to do.
The 1970s Interceptors (green) intercepted all the existing sewers (brown) to prevent them from discharging directly into the ForthAt the centre of the scheme would be a new primary treatment works near Leith Docks at Seafield and requiring land reclamation. This would dispose of the treated effluent through a single 2.8km long outfall that reached far out underneath the Forth and it would capture the primary sludge to be disposed far off in the other reaches of the Forth by means of a disposal tanker. The works would be fed with the sewage of the city by two vast new interceptor sewers, one each approaching the works from the east and the west, tapping off all of the existing raw discharge outlets into the Forth.
Schematic of the 1970s Sewage Disposal Scheme. Credit ICEThings moved remarkably quickly. The council approved the scheme in 1970 and got approval from the Scottish Development Department for the necessary financial loans, some of which came from the European Investment Bank. The project was valued at over £35m (£181m in 2023) and was “a massive civil engineering undertaking involving more than 30 main contracts.” Shovels began to enter the ground in 1971 for exploratory works associated with the land reclamation at Seafield and the first construction contract followed within months. The new interceptors were to be 15.3km long in total and of a large diameter, getting wider as they went. The western sewer started at 1.4m diameter and grew to 3.1m. The eastern sewer started at 0.7m and grew to 2.3m. They intercepted the old network at 26 separate points. It was not possible to work entirely under gravity and 6 pumping stations were required to lift the waste uphill via rising mains from parts of the coast that would not naturally drain themselves.
A huge engineering challenge was the sheer range of geological conditions to be dug through; coals, sandstones, mudstones, clays, shales, geological folding, jointing, the Pentland Fault and all sorts of impressively named features like the “Midlothian Syncline“. Most of the route ran under built up areas and therefore 73%, or 11.6km, of the route would have to be tunnelled. The geology required the use of explosives, limited by the presence of the buildings overhead. Much of the excavation was done by compressed air at high pressure, this pressure helped hold back the ground water given how shallow the tunnelling was through fairly wet ground. In some places the ground had to be artificially drained in advance and in others, where there was no other option due to the ground being saturated fine silt and sand, liquid nitrogen was injected into the ground to freeze it, making it stable enough to dig through. As if these weren’t challenges enough, the western sewer also had to cross the Water of Leith at some point. The location was in St. Mark’s Park, which required an inverted syphon on the river bed. This was constructed by building a cofferdam, diverting the river around it, and draining the river within.
The new treatment works was reclaimed out of the East Sands of Leith – home of the Pennybap Stane and the bogle Shellycoat – by extending the existing sea wall of the dock railway yards and then filling in behind it; there was still no shortage of demolition rubble from clearances in the city in the early 1970s, plus an almost endless supply of colliery waste.
Semi transparent overlay of early 1960s OS map over modern aerial photograph. The white line shows the sea wall line prior to the construction of Seafield Sewage Works.The sewers and works were calculated to treat the waste of a population of 470,000 within its drainage catchment – 250,000 cubic meters of flow a day. It allowed for an increase to 600,000 people and 336,000 cubic meters a day. While the works has grown since to make use of this built in capacity, the core of it is still the 1970s construction.
Plan of the Seafield Sewage Works as it opened in 1976 overlaid on modern aerial photography. Credit, after ICE.There are a couple of great pictures here of the Seafield works in the later phase of construction from Beqi’s Flickr:
In the second picture above, notice the 3 concrete sewage inlets rising out of the ground into the screens, just below the big white shed building. These screens separated insoluble solids and flotsam out of the sewage, which were scraped off the screens, collected in skips and taken to the Corporation incinerator at Powderhall for disposal. Grit was also removed, washed and disposed of and storm tanks collected any excess inflow for later treatment.
After screening, the waste was pumped into one of the 8 sedimentation tanks (the large concrete circles) where the solids settled out into a sludge on the base of the tank. The treated liquid effluent was then drained off for disposal at the outfall. The concentrated sludge was collected and pumped to two storage tanks at Leith Docks. The sludge tanks at both Seafield and Leith Docks were fitted with a deodorising system, whereby Ozone was generated in a high voltage discharge, dissolved in water and then sprayed over the stench. I can’t comment if that worked! From the docks, the sludge would be collected by the Corporation’s new, purpose-built sewage tanker, the amusingly named MV Gardyloo.
The Gardyloo at Leith, c. 1995. CC-by-SA 2.0, AlljengiTwo or three times a week, the Gardyloo would carry it out to the outer reaches of the Forth between the Bell Rock and St. Abb’s Head (depending on the season) and then dump it overboard. In a typical display of 1970s municipal pride, the vessel was painted in the Corporation colours of maroon and white and was licensed to could carry passengers; the city would “treat” school children and pensioners to a 7-hour day trip on the boat, complete with a lunch of fish and chips from the vessel’s cafeteria. The paying public could also take this offer up for a small fee. You can see an amateur cine film of one of these trips at the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive.
This just left the liquid effluent to get rid of. This was (and still is) by means of a gigantic outfall shaft, 7m in diameter and sunk 52 meters straight down into the ground before turning through 90 degrees, reducing in diameter to 3.7m and heading out to sea for 2.8km.
Sinking the outflow shaft. Credit; ICE.The outfall tunnel was constructed according to standard colliery practices. This makes perfect sense; the miners and engineers of the Lothians coalfield had been digging roadways under the Forth in this manner for a hundred years or more. During construction, the outfall tunnel had a double track narrow-gauge, battery-powered railway in it to bring the excavated spoil back to the main shaft for disposal. The tunnel was made wider at this point to accommodate a siding of the railway for spoil wagons. The diffuser outlets were drilled down into the end of the outlet tunnel from above the surface by the jack-up rig GEM126 moored overhead in the Forth.
GEM 126 drilling piles for the Immingham oil terminal in 1970Work on the whole scheme proceeded remarkably quickly and efficiently, slowed down mainly by restrictions on spending. The scheme was transferred from the City of Edinburgh Corporation to Lothian Regional Council during local government reorganisations in 1975. The initially completed part of the scheme started operation in the autumn of 1976, with most of the parts of the wider scheme in place by 1978, when the Gardyloo started operations. The estimated cost in 1975 was £26.04 million, or about £224 million in 2021 money.
The construction of the sewers was relatively incident free, however I have read that a mistake during blasting in one section caused two houses above to become so damaged they had to be demolished. I haven’t yet found out where they may have been. Update, October 2023. The houses have been found! There were in fact two different instances of subsidence as a result of the tunnelling, both in the eastern section between Seafield and McDonald Road. The first occurred in November 1972 when a sinkhole appeared in the back green of the tenement at 20 Dryden Street in Pilrig, jeopardising the stability of the tenement in front of it which was home to 6 families. While the City Engineer, Gerard Pakes, said that they were merely taking precautions, the Scotsman suggested that the tenement was “in danger of collapse” – it is still there to this day however.
Workmen remove the front garden fence at 20 Dryden Street to allow the waiting crane behind access to lift shoring timber over the tenement to the sink hole behind. Scotsman, November 16th 1972.The second incident occurred in August 1973 when two bungalows on Prospect Bank Crescent near Seafield began to exhibit dangerous cracks and had to be braced with a forest of scaffolding. Robert and Nellie Taylor at no. 15 and John and Catherine Walker and their 3 children at no. 17 were given a weeks notice to quit their houses, a decision that was later reversed. The householders suffered sticking doors and windows followed by cracks appearing in walls and ceilings, loose plaster, gas pipes being cut off and “intermittent shocks from underground blasting.” Residents of Prospect Bank Terrace claimed that the tunnel was being dug only 10 feet below the surface when it should have been 30 feet deep. Depute City Engineer Mr A. S. Crockett replied that there was no commitment to it being that deep and it was about 15 feet below to allow for a sufficient gradient for downhill flow. Again, the houses are there to this day so this was obviously not terminal damage.
Bungalows at Prospect Bank Crescent shored up. Scotsman, August 30th 1973The success of the scheme can be measured in whether or not it cleaned up the inshore waters of the Forth off of Edinburgh and Leith. Limits on the “amenity” beaches were set at 2,400 E. coli per 100ml water. The raw sewage entering the works at Seafield was 20,000,000/100ml. The scheme reduced the levels in the beach waters to 1,000/100ml in the worst flow conditions; 60% below the limit.
From 1978 to 1998, in more than 2,600 voyages, the MV Gardyloo dumped 8.5 million tonnes of the concentrated sewage sludge of the citizens of Edinburgh and Leith into the North Sea. It was as a direct result of the EC (as it was) Urban Waste Water Treatment Directive that this practice ended and secondary treatment of the sludge was finally commenced. The Gardyloo had been passed to the East of Scotland Water Authority in 1996 during another local government reform, and was sold out of service in 1999. After 5 years service as a general purpose tanker she was bought by a company in Azerbaijan and transferred to the Caspian Sea where, in a strange but somehow apt about turn, she is now the drinking water tanker Shollar!
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Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland
From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr):
let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“You’re not in Ireland now.”I grew up in Ireland using expressions and grammatical constructions that I took to be normal English, only to discover years later that what counts as normal in language usage can be highly dependent on geography and dialect. I amn’t sure when I realised it, but amn’t is an example of this.
Standardized English has an array of forms of the verb be for various persons and tenses with a negative particle (n’t) affixed: isn’t, wasn’t, aren’t, weren’t. But there’s a curious gap. In the tag question I’m next, ___ I?, the usual form is the unsystematic am I not or the irregular aren’t I (irregular because we don’t say *I are). Why not amn’t?
Amn’t I talking to you? (Anne Emery, Death at Christy Burke’s, 2011)
Amn’t I after telling you that, said Donal. (Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949)
Amn’t /’æmənt/, though centuries old, is not part of standardized English. But it is common in Ireland, used especially in colloquial speech though not limited to informal registers. It’s also used in Scotland (alongside amnae and other variants) and parts of England – the OED says the north, and west midlands – and occasionally elsewhere, such as Wales.
How amn’t came to be so geographically limited is not fully clear. Another variant, an’t, probably supplanted it in general usage because speakers wanted to avoid sounding /n/ immediately after /m/; see Michael Quinion and Robert Beard for brief commentary on this. David Crystal says it was therefore:
a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an’t.
An’t, also spelt a’n’t, is the “phonetically natural and the philologically logical shortening”, writes Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage. It too fell from favour, but not before morphing in two significant ways. It gave rise to ain’t, which has its own lively history, and it also began being spelt aren’t (by “orthographic analogy”, in Crystal’s phrase), which is pronounced the same as an’t in non-rhotic accents.
This explains aren’t I, which would otherwise seem a grammatical anomaly. Indeed, Gabe Doyle notes that its irregularity “earns the ire of the accountants” of English. But it has steadily gained acceptability in major English-speaking regions. Irish and Scottish dialects are the exception in retaining and favouring its ancestor, amn’t I.
Despite its vintage, its logic, and its convenience, not everyone likes amn’t. It’s dismissed as “ugly” by Eric Partridge and as “substandard” by Bryan Garner in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman describe amn’t I as “clunky” in Origins of the Specious.
Garner is wrong, and the other pronouncements are subjective or prejudicial. Amn’t is not part of standardized English, but it is thoroughly normal in Irish English. There’s nothing intrinsically unsound or deficient about it unless you revere prestige. It’s often called awkward, but it doesn’t feel awkward if you grow up with it. Even aesthetically, amn’t has unique appeal.
Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)
Ye don’t want me, don’t ye? And amn’t I as good as the best of them? Amn’t I? (Patrick MacGill, The Rat-pit, 1915)
So how is amn’t used? Commonly in questions: straightforward interrogative (Joyce, above), tag (MacGill), and rhetorical (see post title). These are the structures typically noted by lexicographers: Robert Burchfield’s revision of Fowler says it’s “used as part of the tag question amn’t I?”, while Terence Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English associates it with “negative first-person questions”.
Neither Burchfield nor Dolan mentions other uses, but amn’t is also used, for example, in declarative statements of the form I amn’t. Though even Irish people, in my experience, usually say I’m not in such cases, some of them also say I amn’t.
I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010)
And you, my poor changling, have to go to Birmingham next week, and I, poor divil, amn’t well enough to go out to far-away places for even solitary walks. (J.M. Synge, Letters to Molly, 1971)
A bit odder is the double negative question amn’t I not, which I’ve come across in both tags (I’m not drunk neither, amn’t I not) and more centrally (amn’t I not turble [terrible] altogether). A straw poll I held on Twitter suggests, unsurprisingly, that it’s a good deal rarer than other uses of amn’t, but several people still confirm using it.
My Twitter query also showed that amn’t occurs in more than just tag questions in Scotland, disproving a claim I’d encountered earlier. It prompted lots of anecdata and discussion on the word’s contemporary use in Ireland and elsewhere, and is available on Wakelet for interested readers.
If I amn’t mistaken, the pinch is here. (Athenian Gazette, May 1691)
Oh, Peader, but amn’t I Dublin born and bred? (Katie Flynn, Strawberry Fields, 1994)
Amn’t may grow in frequency and stature or it might, like ain’t, remain quite stigmatised in formal English. At the moment it’s undoubtedly a minority usage, with just four hits in the vast COHA corpus, five in COCA, and one in the BNC. Even GloWbE, with its 1.9 billion words from informal sources, offers a mere 31 hits.
Last year I retweeted a comment from @Ann_imal, a US speaker who said she had “started saying ‘amn’t I’ instead of ‘aren’t I,’ and no one (except AutoCorrect) has questioned me”. A search on Twitter suggests she’s not alone: amn’t has modest but undeniable currency in Englishes and idiolects around the world.
Social attitudes are decisive. Language Hat has noted that children acquiring language sometimes use amn’t – it is, after all, an intuitive construction – only to lose it along the way; a search on Google Books returns similar reports. LH used the word himself, and says, “I don’t remember when or why I stopped. The pressures of ‘proper English’ are insidious.”
In a neat inversion of the usual pattern, a commenter at Language Log recalls using aren’t I as a child and being corrected to amn’t I. More of this kind of parental guidance, or at least less proscriptive regulation in the other direction, may help amn’t gain more of a foothold outside Ireland and Scotland.
Not that I’ve anything against aren’t I, or ain’t for that matter. But if anyone felt they wanted to adopt amn’t and got past the social barrier, they would likely find it a handy, pleasing contraction. And that counts for a lot these days, amirite amn’t I right?
https://twitter.com/StanCarey/status/822016562953682945
*
Today, by the way, is (US) National Grammar Day, which by semantic sorcery I’m interpreting as International Grammar Day to highlight a characteristic feature of grammar in Ireland. The Sentence first archives have lots more Irish English grammar and vocabulary.
Updates:
Eavan Boland has also written about this episode in prose, in her book Object Lessons (1995):
“Language is fossil poetry,” says Emerson, and it may well be. But it also home truth. Whatever the inventions and distortions of my imaginings, my tongue, the sounds it made in my mouth, betrayed me. I was no English Alice. I was an Irish child in England. […]
The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom in school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”
Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.
At her blog The Other Side of Sixty, Corkonian wisewebwoman says: “you wouldn’t believe the shellacking I took for brazenly using ‘amn’t’ when I moved to Canada. Laughter, disbelief and mockery ensued.”
I like a good coincidence. While editing this post I listened to the Mogwai song ‘Wizard Motor‘ on repeat, unaware, before a tweet from Helen McClory, that Mogwai also have a song called ‘Moses? I Amn’t’:
#amnt #contractions #dialects #eavanBoland #grammar #hibernoEnglish #ireland #irishBooks #irishEnglish #irishEnglishGrammar #irishLiterature #lexicography #linguistics #morphology #nationalGrammarDay #negation #poetry #prescriptivism #sociolinguistics #standardizedEnglish #usage #words #writing
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I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
-- Robert McCloskey -
Auspol #GoughWhitlam #JohnMenadue #TheDismissal
#Zionism #TheLoansAffair #PinceKingCharles #PineGap
#ForeignInvestments #Power #TheLoansAffairWhat would Whitlam think of the Albanese Government?
an interesting conversation between John Menadue and Bart Shteinman about whitlam’s style, compared to that of albanese
—-a mid length but rewarding read covering a range of topics“John Menadue: On the American relationship, it would be very, very different. Whitlam showed his colours about a month after his election by criticising the American bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. The Americans were terribly upset with that, because we were supposed to be a locked-in ally. People around the White House with Nixon were calling us — or at least the Australian Government, the prime minister — “North Vietnamese collaborators”. And there were some rude words that Nixon said about Whitlam – that they were “peaceniks” or worse!”
and
“Whitlam was the first person who explained to me the difference between Judaism and Zionism. As a young man I hadn’t appreciated the difference. He explained it to me, and it was quite a revelation.”
———
an interjection from maude:incidentally, 🤔 iirc, israel in the 60s & 70s had the west’s sympathy (“remember the holocaust”, and Leon Uris books)… the reaction in 1978 after the oscars where Vanessa Redgrave spoke in favour of Palestine was huge
anyway, back to the article discussing whitlam and albanese
————-“John Menadue: Most people would agree the politics of the Connor fundraising left a lot to be desired. It was messy, very difficult. Gough expressed a lack of confidence in Treasury and Treasury paid it back in spades, leaking a lot of information about the loan raising. So it was politically very damaging.
But what drove Rex Connor and was supported in the Labor Party generally was lost sight of in the whole “loans affair”. It was an attempt by the government to address the problem of foreign ownership of our resources. Now, around 80% of our resource industries are owned offshore: BHP, Rio Tinto, and so on, and Rex Connor was trying to head that off. Instead of selling off our companies, we would borrow but retain ownership in Australia. That would have been difficult to achieve, but that’s what drove Rex Connor, and most Australians would applaud that now.”and
“We often hear Lord Acton: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” but it was Robert Caro who made the point that power reveals what people are really like…”https://johnmenadue.com/post/2025/11/what-would-whitlam-think-of-the-albanese-government/
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“Bobby.. have you been playing with access codes again?” – illustration ‘Night of the Hackers‘, Newsweek, November 12th, 1984
This is the second in a series of blogs I’m writing about those times over the years that journalists got too close to the world of hackers and became part of their own news story. You can find the first entry, about the hacking of an Iowa university for a TV special, right here.
Night of the Hackers
I’ve written about how 1983 was the year that America woke up to the concept of hackers and became in equal parts fascinated with and fearful of hacking itself.
By 1984 journalists gradually moved from simply regurgitating the same short list of infamous hacking incidents or information gleaned from interviews with prominent early hackers who were caught, to chasing down their own stories, getting in amongst hackers in the wild.
Richard Sandza, a reporter for Newsweek, took on the identity of computer whiz-kid “Montana Wildhack” in late 1984 and decided to start dialling up hacker bulletin board systems (BBSes) across the US, so that he could see what hackers were discussing in private and what kinds of illicit information they were sharing.
Moving through Dragonfire’s offerings, you can only marvel at how conversant these teenagers are with the technical esoterica of today’s electronic age. Obviously they have spent a great deal of time studying computers, though their grammar and spelling indicate they haven’t been diligent in other subjects. You are constantly reminded of how young they are.
“Well it’s that time of year again. School is back in session so let’s get those high school computer phone numbers rolling in. Time to get straight A’s, have perfect attendance (except when you’ve been up all night hacking school passwords), and messing up you worst teacher’s paycheck.”
‘Night of the Hackers‘, Richard Sandza, Newsweek, November 12th, 1984
Richard Sandza shared with Newsweek readers the names and general location of many of the prominent underground BBSes of 1984, the names of hackers who ran or were posting on some of the BBSes and some of the topics being discussed. Posing as a hacker he chatted with denizens and operators of the BBSes he picked through for his article.
‘Night of the Hackers‘, Richard Sandza, Newsweek, November 12th, 1984I think this subterfuge along with the collection and disclosure of information by Sandza angered the US hacking scene at the time, any outsiders gathering information on hacking or hackers back then was labelled a “narc”, regardless of whether they were actually law enforcement or not.
The article lists the states various boards are located in and titbits of information about the content on the boards that would inevitably provoke pressure on US law enforcement to act. The article includes details such as that “Ranger’s Lodge is chock-full of phone numbers and passwords for government, university and corporate computers” and that on a Florida based BBS called Plovernet “amid a string of valid VISA and MasterCard numbers are dozens of computer phone numbers and passwords”.
An educated guess would be that the way Richard Sandza wrote about the hackers and their world probably angered them just as much.
In the article Sandza notes that the hackers he observes “have spent a great deal of time studying computers, though their grammar and spelling indicate they haven’t been diligent in other subjects” and that reading messages on the boards he was “constantly reminded of how young they are”.
You have to wonder if this information is accurate. Can this really be the phone number and password for Taco Bell’s computer? Do these kids really have the dial-up numbers for dozens of university computers? The temptation is too much. You sign off and have your computer dial the number for the Yale computer. Bingo — the words Yale University appear on your screen. You enter the password. A menu appears. You hang up in a sweat. You are now a hacker.
‘Night of the Hackers‘, Richard Sandza, Newsweek, November 12th, 1984
All in all ‘Night of the Hackers’ was an interesting article that gave a whistle-stop tour of some genuine underground hacker haunts of 1984, perhaps revealing a little too much in the process.
‘Computer hackers vow they’ll take revenge against reporter‘, Lisa Levitt Ryckman, Gainesville Sun, 5 December, 1984What happened next was probably predictable to anyone who knew the hacking scene well back then, but I imagine came as a bit of a shock to Richard Sandza.
The Revenge of the Hackers
‘The Revenge of the Hackers‘, illustration, Newsweek, December 10th, 1984Less than a month after ‘Night of the Hackers’ was published in Newsweek Richard Sandza had written a follow up in the magazine, ‘The Revenge of the Hackers‘, to document the personal fallout his initial article had caused. As Sandza observed in his follow up article, “within days, computer “bulletin boards” around the country were lit up with attacks on NEWSWEEK’s “Montana Wildhack” (a name I took from a Kurt Vonnegut character), questioning everything from my manhood to my prose style”.
In naming names, both BBSes and hackers, and trespassing throughout the back alleys of the burgeoning hacker scene of late 1984, Richard Sandza had essentially kicked a hornet’s nest and outraged hackers seemed determined to out-do each other in terms of exacting revenge.
The Associated Press quote Sandza in an article that I found in the Gainesville Sun on December 5th of 1984 as saying “I think the ones who are really ticked off feel threatened by this. Some said their parents read the article and shut down their bulletin boards. Others said they felt my reporting was not really fair because I was ripping them off because I wasn’t a hacker and phone ‘phreak'”
Sandza documents in ‘The Revenge of the Hackers‘ that “the hackers of America have called my home at least 2000 times” and that he was notified by a friendly hacker that “someone has broken into TRW and obtained a list of all your credit-card numbers, your home address, social-security number and wife’s name and is posting it on bulletin boards around the country”.
UPI and others reported on a BBS post by a hacker angry about the first Newsweek article, ‘I’m sure you guys have heard about Richard Standza (sic) … He’s the guy who wrote the obscene story about phreaking in NewsWeek (sic). Well my friend did a credit card check on TRW … try this number, it’s a VISA … Please nail this guy bad … Captain Quieg (sic).’
In parallel with this ad-hoc harassment was what was known as a “teletrial” or “tele-trial”, organized through, and taking place on, the Dragonfire BBS. According to the AP, “Sandza said he was put on teletrial on a Gainesville, Texas, bulletin board known as Dragonfire, with a prosecutor called Unknown Warrior and a judge known as Ax Murderer”.
Sandza described a teletrial as “a video-lynching in which a computer user with grievance dials the board and presses charges against the offending party”, in this case the charge against the Newsweek reporter was “endangering all phreaks and hacks”.
He has not abandoned Montana Wildhack, the alter ego that carried him into the computer underground when a Silicon Valley source first gave Sandza a few hackers’ bulletin-board telephone numbers. Logging on as Wildhack, Sandza has put up a spirited defense as he is subjected to “teletrial” on the underground BBS (Bulletin Board System) called Dragonfire. The charge, in the language of his anonymous accusers, is “endangering hacks and phreaks” — the odd spelling is a reference to “phonephreaks,” or the hackers who use electronic tones to steal long-distance telephone time. The rules of the trial are rigorously argued, with Ax Murderer sitting in as judge and Storm Bringer offering his services as public defender should Sandza not locate suitable counsel.
‘Hack Attack‘, Cynthia Gorney, Washington Post, December 6th, 1984
Teletrials are an absolutely fascinating topic and this incident is essentially the only time the practice broke out of the computer underground scene into mainstream media. They were, by all accounts, half in-joke and half a means for specific BBSes to self-police, a threat against scene transgressions, a way to maintain basic social order and discourage narcing.
Teletrials were apparently the creation of King Blotto, of the hacker BBS Blottoland. While teletrials are said to have peaked as a practice in the mid 1980’s I still heard the term used actively on IRC in the 90’s.
I tracked down an angry response to a history of the hacking underground article by notorious hacker charlatan Captain Zap that had been published in 2600 Magazine in 1988. The response highlights what the writer sees as various inaccuracies in the article by Zap, including his account of teletrials.
As for Richard Sandza, Tele-Trial still existed at the time of the publishing of his articles for Newsweek. The “Tele-Trial” he was put on was simply a conference of abusive kids who felt that he had given hackers unfair treatment. In retaliation they threatened him: a Captain Quieg posted his credit report and numerous kids ran up bills on his credit cards, sending assorted junk to his house.
Hackers cannot “perform the destruction” of anyone. All they can do is scare the shit out of “normal” people who are shocked that a bunch of kids can get their unlisted number, credit cards, and various other records, and abuse them.
In any case, Sandza is something of an exception since he managed to piss off a large percentage of people who were in a position to make life hard for him in return. Most people who disagree with him can write a complaint to Newsweek, but if you have the ability to bring your displeasure to his personal attention, in a way that will ensure he gives notice to it, wouldn’t you do the same thing? After all, it isn’t Newsweek you’re mad at, it’s Richard Sandza. Some of you probably wouldn’t, but that’s one of the fringe benefits of being a hacker. Instead of being bound by “the system’s” rules and regulations, you can get around it and let your conscience be your guide (if you happen to have a conscience).
‘A Reader’s Reply‘, Rancid Grapefruit, 2600 Magazine, Summer 1988
It is interesting to me that even other journalists described Sandza as a “writer who snitched”, as below. Also I just love “vengeful byte”, what great wording.
‘Writer who snitched feels vengeful byte of hackers‘, Associated Press, Orlando Sentinel, Wednesday, December 5th, 1984Cleveland area hacker King Blotto, as the apparent originator of the very concept of teletrials, was ironically Richard Sandza’s defender in the trial. I have to wonder if the fact that Sandza was very complimentary of Blotto in his original article had something to do with that. Sandza had spoken in glowing terms of “this teenager’s security” which was “as they say, awesome” and noted that “professional computer-security experts could learn something from this kid”.
Modesto Bee, December 11th, 1984A hacker called Ax Murderer was the presiding teletrial judge on Dragonfire, with another hacker known as Unknown Warrior as the prosecutor.
King Blotto eventually put his finger on the scales of digital justice, or as Sandza put it, “King Blotto has taken up my defense, using hacker power to make his first pleading: he dialed up Dragonfire, broke into its operating system and “crashed” the bulletin board, destroying all of its messages naming me.” However he noted that “the board is back up now, with a retrial in full swing. But then, exile from the electronic underground looks better all the time.“
By December 11th Steve Wilstein, reporting for the Associated Press, was writing the headline ”Teletrial’ clears Newsweek writer’ and that the “beleaguered Newsweek reporter” had “announced with relief” that he had been informed by King Blotto that he had been acquitted on the Dragonfire BBS but that “his telephone and credit card accounts are still under attack”.
Aftermath
‘Aid for hackers‘, AP, The News Tribune, 28th November, 1985Richard Sandza had his credit cards reissued with new numbers, had to contact the TRW credit agency and Lenox (Mass.) Savings Bank, a bank that had had their TRW account compromised which had then been used to grab his credit records. In the Washington Post Sandza says that he was not interested in trying to pursue charges against any of the hackers who victimised him, but that he felt “one of my biggest problems is where do I stop being a reporter and when do I start being a cop?”
“Last week, I got a call from a bank that issued my VISA Card and they told me there had been an attempt to charge. $1,100 from it,” he said. “They were unsure whether it had gone through.
“I honestly don’t know if this thing is going to die out,” he said. “I don’t know whether people out there are satisfied or whether someone feels he should get me. I do know that if I plug the phone in, it’ll ring.”
‘‘Teletrial’ clears Newsweek writer‘, Steve Wilstein – AP, Modesto Bee, December 11th, 1984
The whole saga of Richard Sandza and the hackers from beginning to end got a lot of prominent coverage in newspapers across the US. Other journalists definitely paid attention to the fate of their fellow reporter who found himself put on trial by teenage hackers, and the resulting mayhem in his life.
As well as drawing attention to hacker BBSes, hackers themselves and the world they inhabited the revenge campaign against Sandza for revealing hacker secrets ironically caused more secrets to make the national newspapers.
TRW access, access to credit agency systems that can be used to retrieve sensitive financial records, credit card numbers, home addresses, and Social Security numbers relating to an individual, was apparently fairly commonplace among hackers who wanted to get it. Sandza himself, after having his records rifled through, said he was offered TRW access by friendly hackers he discussed the system with.
‘Hackers can easily get credit information‘, Rita Beamish – Associated Press, Lawrence Journal-World, 9th December, 1984Information on more than 120 million consumers in the nation’s largest credit information storage system is readily available to computer pirates who pilfer access codes from its users, a spokeswoman for the credit company says.
So-called hackers invade TRW’s vast computerized credit library using codes stolen from the banks, stores or finance companies who are its customers, said Delia Fernandez, spokeswoman for the TRW’s information services division.
Most recently, Newsweek reporter Richard Sandza complained that hackers, apparently upset over an expose he wrote about their activities, entered the TRW system and got his VISA card number.
‘Hackers can easily get credit information‘, Rita Beamish – Associated Press, Lawrence Journal-World, 9th December, 1984
Although Sandza’s case highlighted the issue of hackers gaining access to credit agencies for fraud and doxing people this sort of issue continues to this day and hackers still buy and trade access to large equivalent databases.
‘Woodhead: Kids Give ‘Hackers’ Bad Name’, The Journal, 5 December 1984Some tech people of 1984 also waded in to comment on the harassment of Sandza, in The Journal on 5th of December 1984 (‘Woodhead: Kids Give ‘Hackers’ Bad Name’), Robert Woodhead, co-creator of a best selling computer game called Wizardry, labelled the hackers “misguided or evil kids” who were giving legitimate “hackers” a bad name.
WizardryRobert Woodhead went on to say “they’re really not ‘hackers,”” and that “we refer to them as ‘crackers’.”
“They’re really not all that skilled,” Woodhead went on to say. “Most really good hackers are sufficiently skilled that they wouldn’t be caught. People like this give the rest of us a bad name.”
In the programming business, Woodhead says, the crackers’ have made themselves an expensive nuisance by trading information on how to illegally enter privately owned computer systems in colleges, businesses and government agencies.
‘Woodhead: Kids Give ‘Hackers’ Bad Name’, The Journal, 5 December 1984
“It’s the dark side of computing,” Woodhead was quoted as saying, “It’s like dynamite. It’s very powerful, when it’s used correctly it can do a lot of good, but in the wrong hands, it can hurt a lot of people.”
‘Revenge of the computer whiz kids‘, Max Miller, The Sacramento Bee, December 5th, 1984For his part Sandza was surprisingly philosophical about everything other than the credit agency data leak and the credit card fraud. Sandza described the constant prank phone calls as was “sort of a game. They were calling me up, I was talking to some and hanging up on others”.
About a year after the fallout from his Newsweek articles died down Richard Sandza was still fairly magnanimous when discussing hackers, all things considered. In December of 1985 he spoke with researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories and said of teenage hackers that “if we put all those brains in jail, that’s not going to solve any problems” and urged scientists to “adopt” them and give them a legitimate outlet to satisfy their curiosity about computers.
Richard Sandza interview on hackers, CBS News, August 1985I contacted Richard Sandza via email to ask if he wanted to add anything to this blog but never got a response, this to me is still one of the most fascinating stories about hackers and reporters in hacking history.
#1980s #1984 #1985 #2600 #AssociatedPress #BBS #Blottoland #CaptainZap #computer #cybersecurity #DragonFire #Dragonfire #ForbiddenZone #hacked #hacker #hackers #hacking #history #journalism #journalist #journalists #KingBlotto #Newsweek #Plovernet #RancidGrapefruit #reporter #reporters #RichardSandza #Shadowland #technology #teleTrial #teletrial #TheVault #WashingtonPost
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The Weimar Republic Shaped the 20th Century. Can Today’s Leaders Avoid Its Fate? – The New York Times
The German National Theater in Weimar, Germany, where leaders met in 1919 to create a new national Constitution. Credit…Lena Mucha for The New York Times.Weimar Dispatch
A Failed State Shaped the 20th Century. Can Today’s Leaders Avoid Its Fate?
A fragile democracy, the Weimar Republic, briefly took hold in Germany before the Nazis seized power. Now, Weimar’s collapse is seen as a warning.
Listen to this article · 6:36 min Learn more
By Clay Risen, Clay Risen reported from Weimar, Germany, and spoke to historians about the Weimar Republic’s continued relevance.
- Jan. 12, 2026
In the winter of 1919, the leaders of the newly founded German Republic, having overthrown Emperor Wilhelm II at the end of World War I, went looking for a city to hold a constitutional convention. The delegates quickly settled on the small city of Weimar, which was centrally located and boasted a theater large enough to hold them all.
The resulting document, approved on Aug. 11, 1919, became the republic’s guidebook for over a decade, until Adolf Hitler dissolved the Constitution in 1933. The city, in turn, gave its name to the era: the Weimar Republic.
Today that brief stretch of time between an emperor and a dictator is memorialized by the House of the Weimar Republic, which sits across a wide plaza from the stately theater where the constitutional delegates met.
This small museum has an outsize mission: to tell the full story of the Weimar era, and to remind people that its lessons remain relevant — not only in Germany, where the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or A.f.D., is on the rise, but in a growing number of suddenly fragile democracies.
“We never have trouble raising funds,” said Michael Dreyer, the museum’s president and a political scientist at the nearby University of Jena. “Whenever the A.f.D. comes into the news, politicians call wanting to know if we are turning into Weimar.”
Birgit Witt, who works for her family’s driving school in Weimar, said she always encourages visitors to stop by the museum “because it’s so important right now to understand why people voted for the Nazi Party and Hitler back then.”
Michael Dreyer, the president of the House of the Weimar Republic museum, said that Weimar could be used “to denote the dangers for democracy.” Credit… Lena Mucha for The New York TimesWeimar is a political touchstone in political circles in the United States, too. Critics of the Trump administration frequently invoke its precedent as an example of democratic backsliding. “Welcome to Weimar 2.0,” read a headline on an article in Foreign Policy last year by the historian Robert D. Kaplan.
Conservatives, in turn, have also found a different reason to dredge up Weimar — they use the era to give historical weight to its warnings about left-wing violence: At a White House meeting in October, the far-right activist Jack Posobiec claimed that the antifa movement had its roots in the Weimar Republic.
Coincidentally, even as Weimar has re-emerged in political debates, historians’ understanding of how it fell apart — and what that collapse means today — has changed.
After World War II, German politicians and academics, looking to absolve everyone except the Nazis for the country’s descent into tyranny, denounced the republic as a failure from the start because of what they said was a fatally flawed Constitution. For many, “Weimar” became a byword for disaster. Nothing, historians at the time concluded, could have saved Germany from Nazism.
Now a different consensus is emerging. A new book, translated into English last year as “Fateful Hours,” argues that Weimar was not brought down by some original flaw, but the determination of anti-democratic elites to destroy it — and the failure of the liberal establishment to stop them.
“The Republic’s failure was not predetermined from the outset,” said the book’s author, Volker Ullrich. “There was no automatic path to ruin.”
Constitution…
Dr. Dreyer agreed, adding that the Weimar Constitution was robust and progressive. It promised universal suffrage and comprehensive health insurance. It included tools that should in theory have blocked an authoritarian takeover, including the power to ban extremist parties.
Visitors watching a video at the House of the Weimar Republic, a museum focused on the era. Credit… Lena Mucha for The New York TimesCritics single out the Constitution’s Article 48, which gave the president power to rule by emergency decree. But the article also gave the German Parliament the power to veto such a declaration.
“The Constitution certainly had flaws,” said Kathleen Canning, a historian at Rice University in Texas. “But it survived a lot of crises,” she said, including hyperinflation and coup attempts.
Weimar was especially challenged by the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. When voters blamed their struggles on the left-wing Social Democrats, the largest party, conservatives took advantage.
And yet, Dr. Ullrich said, even economic catastrophe was in itself not enough to bring down the republic, which survived almost four more years.
“Many astute contemporaries were convinced that Hitler’s rise to power had been halted and his movement was in an unstoppable decline,” he said. “His eventual rise to power on Jan. 30, 1933, was the result of a sinister power struggle behind the scenes.”
Anti-democratic forces on both the right and the far left refused to work with the Social Democrats, and instead pushed through austerity measures that undermined the country’s safety net.
Editor’s Note: Featured image at top generated by WP AI. –DrWeb
Continue/Read Original Article Here: The Weimar Republic Shaped the 20th Century. Can Today’s Leaders Avoid Its Fate? – The New York Times
Tags: 1919, 1933, 20th Century, antifa, Before Nazis, Clay Risen, Far Right, Fateful Hours, Fragile Democracy, Germany, Historians, History, Leaders, Museum, Politics, The New York Times, Weimar Republic
#1919 #1933 #20thCentury #antifa #BeforeNazis #ClayRisen #FarRight #FatefulHours #FragileDemocracy #Germany #Historians #History #Leaders #Museum #Politics #TheNewYorkTimes #WeimarRepublic -
In Texas and across the country,
far-right candidates have won control of school boards,
swiftly banning books, halting diversity efforts and altering curricula that do not align with their beliefs.O’Hare’s election in Tarrant County, however, takes the battle from the schoolhouse to county government,
offering a rare look at what happens when hard-liners win the majority and exert their influence over municipal affairs in a closely divided county.Since he was elected county judge
— a position similar to that of mayor in a city
— O’Hare has pushed his agenda with an uncompromising approach.
He has led efforts to cut funding to nonprofits that work with at-risk children, citing their views on racial inequality and LGBTQ+ rights.
And he has pushed election law changes that local Republican leaders said would favor them.
O’Hare’s rise in Tarrant County has come as he and his allies continue to align with once-fringe figures while targeting private citizens with whom they disagree politically.
In July, O’Hare had a local pastor removed from a public meeting for speaking eight seconds over his allotted time.
Days later, O’Hare appeared onstage at a conference that urged attendees to resist a Democratic campaign to “rid the earth of the white race” and embrace #Christian #nationalism.
The agenda prompted some right-wing Republicans to condemn or pull out of the event.“We’re seeing a shift of what conservatism looks like,
and at the lower levels, they’re testing how extreme it can get,”
said Robert Futrell, a sociologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas who studies political extremism.
“The goal is to capture local Republican Party infrastructure and positions and own the party, turning it to more extremist goals.”Frequently, those aims include pushing back against broader LGBTQ+ acceptance, downplaying the nation’s history of racism and the lingering disparities caused by it, stemming immigration, and falsely claiming that America was founded as a Christian nation and that its laws and institutions should thus reflect conservative evangelical beliefs.
With 2.2 million people, Tarrant County is Texas’ most significant remaining battleground for Democrats and Republicans.
When the county voted for Beto O’Rourke for U.S. Senate in 2018 and Joe Biden for president in 2020,
many political observers suspected the end was nigh for the era of Republican dominance in the purple county.Two years later, voters elected the most hard-line Tarrant County leader in decades.
After two years under O’Hare’s leadership, voters in November will decide two races between Republican allies of O’Hare and their Democratic opponents.
The election of both Democrats would put O’Hare into the minority.The changes in county leadership have been dramatic, said O’Hare’s Republican predecessor, #Glen #Whitley, who served as Tarrant County judge from 2007 until retiring in 2022.
Whitley said O’Hare has implanted an “us vs. them” ideology that has increasingly been mainstreamed on the right.
“They no longer feel like they have to compromise,” said Whitley, who recently endorsed Democratic Vice President #Kamala Harris for president and U.S. Rep. Colin #Allred of Texas in the U.S. Senate race.
“You either vote with these people 100% of the time, or you’re their enemy.”https://www.propublica.org/article/tarrant-county-judge-tim-ohare-far-right
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The Trump administration is considering #Houman #Hemmati, an ophthalmologist, entrepreneur and frequent Fox News guest,
to serve as the nation’s next top regulator of #vaccines and treatments for complex diseasesIf selected, Hemmati would replace #Vinay #Prasad, who is slated to leave the high-ranking position at the Food and Drug Administration at the end of April
after a rocky year.Prasad had overseen controversial decisions about drugs and a new plan to tighten vaccine approvals, which drew condemnation from former agency leaders.
Prasad was briefly forced out last summer after just three months on the job.
He was reinstated less than two weeks later with the help of vaccine critic Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary.Hemmati, if given the job, would arrive amid scrutiny from the White House on FDA operations.
Concerns over the agency’s direction mounted late last year as leadership turned over,
rattling the drug industry,
which relies on a predictable FDA to understand what it needs to do to win approvals for new treatments.Hemmati has served in various industry roles,
including top medical positions at Optigo Biotherapeutics,
which focuses on treatments for neovascular and degenerative retinal diseases,
and Vyluma, a company developing eye drops.He has worked as an adjunct clinical assistant professor at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Hemmati’s outspoken skepticism of the federal government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic helped win him fans,
including Makary and then-Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya
— who now hold senior roles in the Trump administration.
Hemmati, who has said he was forced to flee Iran with his family as a child, also has supported President Donald Trump’s efforts for regime change in the country, expressing support for the American military in a TV appearance last month and on social media.In 2023, Hemmati questioned why the federal government should be paying for more coronavirus vaccines.
He praised a new approach to the coronavirus vaccine that Prasad outlined last year, which narrowed approval for updated shots to older adults and people with at least one health condition. -- In past years, shots had been broadly recommended, including to children and generally healthy adults
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is
refusing to consider Moderna’s application for a new flu vaccine
made with Nobel Prize-winning mRNA technology.The news is the latest sign of the FDA’s heightened scrutiny of vaccines under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,
particularly those using mRNA technology,
which he has criticized before and after becoming the nation’s top health official.Moderna received what’s called a “refusal-to-file” letter from the FDA
that objected to how it conducted a 40,000-person clinical trial comparing its new vaccine to one of the standard flu shots used today.
That trial concluded the new vaccine was somewhat more effective in adults 50 and older than that standard shot.The letter from FDA vaccine director Dr. #Vinay #Prasad said the agency doesn’t consider the application to contain an
“adequate and well-controlled trial”
because it didn’t compare the new shot to “the best-available standard of care in the United States at the time of the study.”
Prasad’s letter pointed to some advice FDA officials gave Moderna in 2024, under the Biden administration, which Moderna didn’t followAccording to Moderna, that feedback said it was acceptable to use the standard-dose flu shot the company had chosen
— but that another brand specifically recommended for seniors would be preferred for anyone 65 and older in the study.Still, Moderna said, the FDA did agree to let the study proceed as originally planned
The company said it also had shared with FDA additional data from a separate trial
comparing the new vaccine against a licensed high-dose shot used for seniors.The FDA “did not identify any safety or efficacy concerns with our product”
and “does not further our shared goal of enhancing America’s leadership in developing innovative medicines,”
Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement.
https://apnews.com/article/moderna-vaccine-flu-mrna-2fc551cb2fb45735e67db0a4e2e2b0fb -
The real story of the “Penny Tenement”: the thread about slum landlordism in 1950s Edinburgh
The story of the “Penny Tenement” is a (relatively) well known one; a slum tenement whose owner couldn’t give it a way to the City Corporation . Its very dramatic and well publicised collapse on November 21st 1959 seared it into the public consciousness, something that (just about) lingers on locally to this day. But its very nature also held the public gaze in a certain direction and meant much of the story got simply overlooked, its full details obscured. This thread is a valiant attempt at a fuller re-telling of the tale of the Penny Tenement; or Landlordism in 1950s Edinburgh.
The short, accepted version of the Penny Tenement story was that it was a condemned slum in the St. Leonard’s district of the city, so called because its owner tried (and failed) to sell it to an MP for that amount after the Edinburgh Corporation refused to take it off his hands. Everyone knew it might fall down – and then it did. Fortunately no one was badly hurt. And none of that is untrue, but there’s more to it than that. Much more. And while it happened over 65 years ago, it’s still remarkably pertinent to the city’s housing situation and the state of some of its old tenement housing stalk. So gather round, let’s start at the beginning shall we and see how the long version of the story unfolds?
Corner of Beaumont Place and St Leonards Street, Adam H. Malcolm, 1959. © Edinburgh City LibrariesNumber Six Beaumont Place, to give it its proper name, was part of a row of basic tenements built in 1812 and 1813, adjoining an existing 1780s tenement at 200-202 Pleasance. It is the four storey plus attic tenement to its right in the 1927 photo below. Post-WW1 slum clearances saw some demolition and rebuilding in the worst of the Southside. The demolition order for 200-202 Pleasance came in 1931, and it was for that reason it was part of a photo recording project at that time.
“2 Beaumont Place (Pleasance corner)”, A.H. Rushbrook, 1927. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe removal of this end block on Beaumont Place required those massive and dramatic wooden buttresses to shore up the party wall with no. 6 (no. 4 was the ground floor shop beneath the flats). So to be clear, in 1959 when the photograph was taken, these were old buttresses, which had been there 25 or more years. Ironically, this part of the building did not collapse! But they make a great photo and draw stark attention to the neglected condition in partially-cleared districts where progress had stalled and which had been left like this for decades.
Contemporary newspaper image after the collapse of the Penny Tenement. A dramatic, but frequently misinterpreted image.Number Six (and adjoining numbers) was bought by a local man, Donald Rosie, in 1952 for all of £50 (c. £1,190 in 2024). He owned similarly decrepit tenements in Leith on Bangor Road and had some in Union Place at Greenside too. One of the first facts that has been missing in this story is that Donald Rose bought Beaumont Place knowing full well his purchase was condemned “as unfit for human habitation” – he was a slum tenement landlord and speculator. In 1935, the gable end of a tenement in adjacent Carnegie Street had dramatically collapsed, but nobody was hurt and it was simply demolished. But many neighbouring houses, including those on Beaumont Place, were condemned at this time. But that didn’t really mean much; they could still be bought and sold and let out to tenants. There was still money to be made out of this sort of housing; rents to collect and repairs to ignore if you didn’t let the ethics of it get in your way. The photo below of the Carnegie Street collapse is sometimes mistaken for that of the Penny Tenement, but it was 100 metres to the north of it and 14 years earlier.
10 Carnegie Street gable wall collapse. Newspaper photo 13th August 1935.The valuation rolls for number 6 show that in 1940 it had 23 flats and brought in £222 a year in rents. By 1953 that was £266 (c. £5,700 in 2024( or just a little over five times what Rosie paid for it. In December 1952, the same year he bought it, Donald Rosie publicly tried to sell the tenement to the Labour MP for Camlachie, William Reid, for a penny. He told the Courier & Advertiser that the condition of the sale was “[William Reid] will maintain the property, as I am expected to do, on the clear rents only, execute all repairs, meet all owner’s obligations and prove to the public that this can be done on the rents“. This was a stunt; Rosie said he wanted to show MPs how hard it was for landlords to repair and maintain tenements on the rental income alone, with fairly strict rent controls still in place after World War 2. Reid naturally refused. The fact here is that Rosie wouldn’t put any of his own money into the property. Indeed, he is on the record multiple times in both print and in Court saying that the problem was the rents, after taxes and costs, wouldn’t not pay for any repairs. It must not have occurred to him to improve his building at his own expense. The position of the landlords was that they should be allowed to increase rents first, to allow for repairs and maintenance to be improved (rather than the other way around, as was the Government position).
Because of this stunt, the Penny Tenement name stuck in the press. Rosie now tried to simply give it away to the Edinburgh Corporation (a Progressive, i.e. Tory administration). But they too declined; taking the liability of decrepit properties on for themselves and repairing them or rehousing residents to allow demolition wasn’t part of their rather gradual slum clearance plans. Perhaps Rosie had overplayed his hand somewhat now with the city authorities as as in June 1953 the City Prosecutor took him to the Burgh Court for failing to comply with a repair order from the City Engineer that had been issued in February that year. Rosie didn’t trouble himself to appear before the Magistrate. He sent his lawyer, who said it was estimated the repairs would cost £600 to complete. The City Engineer told the court “Nothing has been done so far as the roof work is concerned and the position has greatly deteriorated… Within the last day or two the ceiling in one of the houses fallen down and children have been injured to a minor extent“. Rosie’s lawyer said his client would pay “every penny of free rent” into the repairs and asked for a 3 month extension, which was granted.
Three months passed. Nothing happened. The Court summoned Rosie again for failing to comply. Again, he sent his lawyer along. The City Prosecutor said he “could not allow more latitude” and so a trial was set for October 2nd 1953. At the trial, Rosie tried but failed in a bid to call the Town Clerk, City Engineer and Housing Executive Officer as witnesses. The Magistrate Bailie Mrs K. Cameron found him guilty of “failing to comply with a Corporation order” but gave him another 3 months to make the repairs. those three more months passed. Nothing happened and Six Beaumont Place remained neither wind nor water right.
“Penny Tenement, Beaumont Place”, 1959. Adam H. Malcolm. © Edinburgh City LibrariesIn January 1954, the Burgh Court once again summoned Donald Rosie to appear for non-compliance. He sent them a letter instead and so in his absence a trial date was set for January 29th. At this he claimed to have made £74 of repairs but the City Engineer had made an inspection and told the Court no work had been done since 1953, and that residents had made two further complaints about the building to him while he was there. Rosie was found guilty (again) of failing to comply with the repair order. The Magistrate handed down a fine this time – of £2! Yes, that’s not a typo. Two Pounds. The landlord got a £2 fine for failure to carry out £600 of essential repairs. You can see now how landlords could and did act as they did with relative impunity.
Two months later, on 19th April 1954, Donald Rosie was in front of the Magistrates yet again. This time he was charged with failing to make repairs at a tenement he owned at 76 Bangor Road in Leith. At this time we now come upon another overlooked fact. One month after this, in May 1954, Rosie formed The Bangor Tenement Co. Ltd. with a capital of only £100, himself and mother as directors and himself as company secretary. Into this company the ownership of his tenements were placed. By doing this, he was cutting off his personal financial liability towards them. This was a smart financial move as he could probably see the Corporation and Courts were now intent on pursuing and making an example of him.
Newspaper notice of the formation of the Bangor Tenement Co. Ltd., Scotsman, May 29th, 1954One assumes Rosie finally made enough repairs to keep the City Engineer off his back for a while, but not for long. Two years later, in April 1956, the Dean of Guild Court ordered repair work to be carried out by the Bangor Tenement Co. after a petition by the Procurator Fiscal. But yet again, no repairs were made. At this time, Rosie claimed to have asked the Corporation to take 6 Beaumont Place off his hands or demolish it again. But if he did try this, again they didn’t want it.
It was around this time that Rosie now adopted a new tactic. He started “selling” flats at Beaumont Place to their residents. This was a clever scheme, it diluted Rosie’s ownership and liability and made the Corporation’s legal paperwork a lot more complicated. Instead of dealing with 1 owner, the Corporation were now dealing with a multitude of owners; it was top-level obfuscation. Except these “owners” weren’t really owners, even if they were entered as such on the Valuation Rolls – Donald Rosie kept the deeds. He admitted so much himself later in Court. Local councillor Pat Rogan, who we will meet further on in our story, described these “sales” as being conveyed on “scraps of paper” with transactions recorded in plain notebooks. This sort of scheme again was fairly common amongst slum landlords. The tenants stumped up a sizeable amount of their cash (from £14 to £100 was noted at Beaumont Place) and in return they got to lived in a slum rent free. But they owned it only at the discretion of their landlord and had no real security. Many tenants knew what was going on and entered willingly into such transactions; there was an attraction to the prospect of rent free living and there was hope that progress would come along soon and sort things out for them. Others also hoped – naively or cynically – that voluntarily living in a condemned slum would get them a council house sooner.
“Corner of Dalrymple Place and Carnegie Street”, Adam H. Malcolm. 1959. © Edinburgh City LibrariesOver the following 2 years, Rosie managed to “sell” at least 14 of his condemned flats on Beaumont Place to their residents. But the City Engineer eventually lost patience with the repairs and had some of the basic essentials carried out themselves. In January 1958 they sued Rosie for £12 14/- to recoup the cost of these. No surprise, Rosie didn’t pay this and went before the Sheriff Court (the next step up the Scottish legal system from the Burgh Court). He contended that as the City had declined his free offer of Number Six and as they had refused him a “closure order” on it, they were obliged to acquire it off of him instead. He lost this case and the City got its £12 14/-.
Two more years passed, in which time Rosie managed to “sell” at least 14 of his condemned flats on Beaumont Place. The City Engineer lost patience with the repairs though and had some basics carried out themselves. In January 1958 they sued Rosie for £12 14/- for these. But the wheels of progress in the St. Leonard’s district by now were now (slowly) beginning to turn, interminably. In February the following year, 1959, the city issued Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs) for the worst of the housing around Beaumont Place. This extended to 391 flats with 538 different owners, superiors, occupiers and holders of heritable security (in Scottish property law, mortgage lenders) to deal with. The Landlords had helped conspire to make the ownership of property in the Slums incredibly complex and it was now slowing everything down. All this legal paperwork was just for a few streets, with scores more like them in the neighbourhood. As a result, it took a full 9 months to sort the mountain of paperwork out for the “Carnegie Street areas A & B“. It was not until the 19th November 1959 that the CPO finally crossed the desk of the Secretary of State for Scotland, Rt. Hon. John Scott Maclay MP, and was approved.
“Carnegie Street from the East.” (looking towards the Pleasance, this is the street adjacent to Beaumont Place). 1959, Adam H. Malcolm. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe Penny Tenement would now be purchased by the Corporation for a lot more than a penny and demolished, and it would no longer be Donald Rosie’s problem. But there was a catch; CPOs did not become operative until 30 days after signing. So he had better hope nothing happened in the next 30 days. The tenement had stood for 145 years, surely it could manage one more month?
It started to rain.
It rained a lot in fact. It was mid-November in Scotland after all. It rained all the next day, November 20th. In the evening, local Councillor Pat Rogan was called to Number Six by concerned residents. He was well known and popular locally; “one of us“, a son of the district. Although he was a Labour councillor and the Progressives held power, Rogan was not content to just sit in opposition made and made slum clearance his personal priority. He was energetic about his duties and did what he could to help people in his ward. He was on good terms and first names with Corporation officials and workers and was able to swing many favours to not circumvent the usual channels and get things sorted for people. “Pat” was also a builder by trade and by his account had become something of an “out of hours” housing service for his constituents. On occasions where he couldn’t rouse a member of the City Engineer’s department to deal with an issue, he had been known to go to his own yard to get materials to make emergency repairs. So there wasn’t anything that unusual in the residents of Six Beaumont Place summoning a city councillor to their tenement one evening to look over something with his builder’s eye and to see if he could get anything done.
Pat Rogan (centre right figure, to the right of prospective PM Harold Wilson holding the pipe) when he was Housing Committee Chairman, showing Harold Wilson around the slums of Jamaica Street in 1964.At Number Six, Rogan took one look at the way the back wall of the tenement had stated to bulge and did not like what he saw. As it was late, he advised its occupants to sleep as close to the centre of the building as they could that night and that he would arrange for the City Engineer to make a visit first thing the following morning. Rogan went home to bed, but at 4AM the following morning received a call from the Parish priest to say the back wall of the Penny Tenement had just collapsed…
It was around 3AM when John Kernachan, 27, was awoken by his wife’s screams to find himself watching the back wall of his flat disappearing before his eyes. As he got out of bed, the floor beneath him gave way too. He managed to grab on to something, anything, and pull himself up and out to safety with his wife and young child. The Brocks family, on the third floor, were not quite so lucky. Five year old Catherine fell through the floor and landed in the flat of William Cranston below her. He was able to bundle her up and out the door before his floor too disappeared down with the rest. Catherine’s little sister, two year old Margaret, fell clean out of the flat and onto the pile of rubble forming in the back green below. Her mother, Betty, jumped after her and pulled her to safety before more came crashing down. The pair were bashed, cut and bruised, but miraculously otherwise unhurt and the only casualties.
When the dawn broke it was clear quite what a catastrophe had been narrowly averted. Where once there had been a scrap of back green there was now a pile of four storeys of back wall, floors, windows, furniture and assorted possessions. There were 20 occupied flats (out of 23) at Six Beaumont Place and yet nobody had been seriously injured.
Sunday Post photo showing the aftermath of the collapse.All the adjacent flats on that side of Beaumont Place were evacuated on the spot; residents were advised to go to friends or relations, or offered emergency accommodation in the City homeless centre in the former City Poorhouse at Greenbank. A police guard was put on the street to keep spectators at a safe distance. The City Engineer’s men moved in to clear the worst of the rubble and shore up the back wall with scaffolding. The Housing Committee and Lord Provost came on an inspection, with the City Engineer pointing out the huge crack in the end gable of Dalrymple Place facing the disaster site.
Newspaper photo of the inspection by the Housing Committee behind No. 6 Beaumont Place, with the end gable of Dalrymple Place behind having an obvious crack in it.That crack was inspected closer. On November 27th, 22 families at the end of Dalrymple Place were given 2 hours to pack up and leave. Within days, 100 flats had been condemned in the surroundings streets and 250 people made homeless.
This was a huge headache for the city, but what is remarkable is that the day after the collapse of the Penny Tenement, 18 of the 20 families who had lived there found themselves in new council houses in Niddrie & Craigmillar, with the other 2 declining and making their own arrangements. A huge operation had swung into effect for the other displaced people. Vacant council properties were turned around in a fraction of the usual time.; the Housing Department’s key cabinet at City Chambers was literally emptied. “Let us have every key you can lay your hands on“, the City Architect’s department was told and new properties approaching completion were rushed to finish and made ready for occupation. The gas, water and electric board employees worked round the clock to make the necessary services connections. The Civil Defence sent a mobile HQ to St. Leonards to coordinate operations, communicating with the City Chambers by shortwave radio. The Women’s Voluntary Service sent their Meals on Wheels mobile too, to provide workers and residents tea, soup and sandwiches. The Cleansing Department provided lorries to move people’s possessions to their new houses. By 30th November, all 250 residents in the district who had been evacuated in the preceding 9 days were now in council homes where they wanted them, with 80% of them being kept in their preference of the south of the city.
The City Engineer leeds the Lord Provost and the Housing Committee on an inspection tour through the condemned flats on Beaumont Place.On December 1st, the Housing Committee went on another walkabout tour of the slums. They got short shrift: “Why don’t you drop a bomb on this place?” yelled one resident in Leith’s Kirkgate at them. “Come inside instead of walking about” another demanded from her window in Arthur Street in Dumbiedykes. At the “Grand Committee on Scottish Affairs” at Westminster, Edinburgh Central Labour MP Tom Oswald asked if the Secretary of State would intervene to help speed up Compulsory Purchase Orders and provide compensation to the evicted. He declined on both points. At the City Chambers, Labour passed a motion to try speed up city centre rehousing and slum clearance. The Progressive majority on the Housing Committee defeated it 8-4. Pat Rogan condemned the “procrastination” and stated certain houses were “crumbling and insanitary prisons“. He later gave an extreme example; when they were evacuating the tenements around Beaumont place, in neighbouring Dalrymple Place they found a windowless basement flat with no bed, only a mattresses on a stone floor. Living here they found two young women caring for two babies. Both were working as prostitutes, in shifts, with one out on the streets while the other was in the cellar with the babies.
On the 4th of December, the Edinburgh Corporation served demolition orders at 4 to 8 Beaumont Place. The principal owner was Donald Rosie’s “Bangor Tenement Co.”, but thanks to his “sales”, there were now were 14 other quasi-owners in total. To his credit, Rosie fessed up at the Dean of Guild Court that the others weren’t actually legal owners (despite them already telling the Clerk of Court that they thought they were!). He alone held the title deeds and he alone should be appearing. The owners were given 2 weeks to start demolition, and 6 weeks to complete it – at their own expense. The Compulsory Purchase Order would not come into action for 17 more days, until then they were still liable.
It was as if the slums themselves were now trying to keep up the momentum that had finally driven the city authorities to action. On December 16th the same day (and in a scene oddly reminiscent of recent happenings in Edinburgh) 21 families were given hours to evacuate from 2 tenements in Greenside Row when cracks appeared in the building and the road was closed off by the police…
BBC News Website, 27th January 2024. A tenement in Leith is evacuated after mystery structural cracking appears in its walls.They needn’t have bothered; the tide had now thoroughly turned in Edinburgh against the slums and their landlords. The Scotsman’s editorial drew parallels to the “Fall of Heave Awa Land” back in 1861 and wondered aloud as to how this was happening in the “age of Dounreay and Chapelcross“. The wheels of civic machinery had been set in motion. On December 19th 1959, the Dean of Guild Court petitioned the owners at Beaumont and Dalrymple Place and also Bangor Road in Leith (where Rosie was an owner) for repairs that had not been made. Ten days later, more demolition orders were served for demolition around Beaumont Place where owners were refusing to make properties. A week later, January 6th 1960, Donald Rosie – true to form – appealed to the Court of Session against demolition orders served on him.
The Scotsman, January 6th 1960.He wanted a delay of one month; this would allow the Compulsory Purchase Order on his properties to come into force before anything had to be demolished – he feared that once the bricks and mortar of his “assets” were gone, he’d have no bargaining position regards the price. Dragging his heels in the courts was the only thing he could do here. The Court have him 2 weeks instead. This seems to have sped things up and the CPO went through; the city bought up the slums of Dalrymple Place, Carnegie Street and Beaumont Place and demolished the lot. The owners didn’t get what they wanted, but they got shot of their demolition liability. A year later, the Evening News printed a stark photo (below) of these streets; Beaumont Place is in the foreground, the roadway of Dalrymple Place runs into the distance on the left. In the distance beyond the fence is Carnegie Street and further beyond that on the left is the Deaconess Hospital. On the right we can see numbert 1-23 St. Leonard’s Hill.
Evening News photo of the Carnegie Street CPO area, 5th October 1961The end was nigh for most of St. Leonards and Dumbiedykes. In 1962, tenants were warned not to clean their windows in case the frames fell out of the walls onto the street. One woman narrowly avoided being killed by falling masonry as she stepped into a corner shop. Housewives reported hoarding boxes in case they had to flit in an emergency. Roofs leaked, walls gaped. “HERIOT MOUNT TENANTS ARE AFRAID HOMES MAY COLLAPSE” said the headline. But by now, Pat Rogan found himself chair of the Housing Committee due to local political deadlock and it being a difficult job nobody really wanted. He set about this immense responsibility with his usual single-minded determination and practical approach. His policy was simple (simplistic, even); demolish thoroughly, build quickly. Construction land for council housing was freed up quickly by prioritising the replacement of the low-density, postwar prefabricated bungalows and a crash-building programme of tower block construction was initiated. By 1964, 1,500 houses had been demolished in the St. Leonards and Dumbiedykes area after it was designated a Comprehensive Development Area.
Scotsman Photo, 3rd August 1964 showing the clearance of Dumbiedykes and St. Leonards.On the site of the Penny Tenement, an award-winning new development by Ross-Smith & Jamieson of 63 houses for 200 people was erected from 1964-67 called Carnegie Court (after Carnegie Street). The rest of Beaumont Place wasn’t redeveloped until 1989. At this point, the District Council decided that the street name had been spelled wrong since 1815 and should actually be Bowmont after an ancient landowner here, Robert Ker, Duke of Roxburghe and Marquesses of Bowmont. And so they changed it.
Carnegie Court, looking down Bowmont Place to Salisbury Crags.You may well have got to the end of this thread and yet are still thinking “just where on earth actually was the Penny Tenement?” Well, this composite overlay image might just help answer that:
No 6 Beaumont Place in 1959 overlaid on modern Bowmont Place, looking towards Heriot Rise and Arthur’s Seat. Original image © Edinburgh City LibrariesNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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Educating Children, Bakers and Tourists: the thread about Castlehill Public School
Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (1872-1918) have for some reason a particular fascination for me, one which is more profound where they are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about each of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but rapidly snowballed into an intention to cover each, in alphabetical order, on its own and in rather more detail, but not so much that they can’t be posted quite frequently.
The third chapter of our series looking at the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” investigates the life and times of Castlehill School. This occupied the site of the Gordon House, the 17th century residence of George Gordon, 1st Duke of Gordon who was Captain and Constable of Edinburgh Castle and is remembered for surrendering that fortification all too readily to the Protestant Lords during the Glorious Revolution of 1689. His property came later into the possession of the Bairds of Saughtonhall who gave their name to Blair’s Close that forms the western boundary of the school plot.
Gordon House in 1887, immediately before demolition to make way for Castlehill School. Photo by Alexander Adam Inglis, Edinburgh & Scottish Collection of Edinburgh City LibrariesThe school was designed by Robert Wilson, architect to the Edinburgh School Board, and was a radical departure in style from its rather austere Collegiate Gothic contemporaries by the adoption of Scots Baronial Revival; complete with turrets, crowstepped gables and mock battlements. This was seen as more befitting of its prominent location at the head of the Old Town. Another change was the use of red Cornockle sandstone from Lochmaben in Dumfriesshire to add a visual contrast with the more usual yellowy-grey from the local Hailes Quarry.
Castlehill School, north elevation on the Castlehill itself. CC-by-SA 2.0 Neil T, via FlickrA third change from its predecessors was the extension from two to three storeys; an attic level, lit by rooflights, providing rooms for teaching specialist subjects such as needlework and drawing. This was done to make the best use of a cramped site which amounted to just quarter of an acre; half that of the contemporary Milton House School in the Canongate and even less than the notoriously cramped Bristo Public School. (The only other three storey board school before this was West Fountainbridge, which had a similarly small plot)
Ordnance Survey Town Plans of Edinburgh, 1876 (right) and 1893 (left), before and after Castlehill School opened. Move the slider to compare. Note in the 1876 map that the Church of Scotland and Free Church both have schools in the district; St. Columba’s and St. John’s respectively. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandInternally, three original mantlepieces from the Gordon mansion were incorporated into staff rooms as was an old entrance door. To the rear (south), the site dropped steeply away down the slope of the Old Town’s Crag and Tail topography. An additional level was therefore required, originally this was an open colonnade, providing a covered extension to the playgrounds, but later it was enclosed to provide additional teaching areas. A tall retaining wall faced onto Johnston Terrace at the rear, with entrance staircases (separate for boys and girls) up to the playgrounds and a three storey Janitor’s house bridged the two levels.
South (rear) elevation of Castlehill School, showing the plot sloped steeply in two directions; down from the Castlehill and down Johnston Terrace. The additional lower storey to the rear with the arched windows, the retaining wall with entrance stairways and the three-level janitor’s house can be seen. The spire of the Highland Tolbooth St John’s church towers over an already tall school. CC-by-SA 4.0 Stephencdickson via FlickrThe school opened on Monday December 3rd 1888. Although there was no formal ceremony to mark the occasion, over 800 pupils were marched out of their old schools (those inherited by the School Board at Brown Square, Borthwick and Old Assembly Close and Victoria Terrace) up the hill to their new home. A formal opening would take place exactly 5 months later on May 3rd 1889.
Former Brown Square school in 1913. This was one of the Heriot Trust day schools that were merged into the School Board after 1872, immediately identifiable by all the Jacobean decorations modelled off of Heriot’s Hospital itself. Edinburgh Photographic Society collection, via National Galleries Scotland.Interestingly, the legend carved prominently into both the front and read façades reads “CASTLE HILL SCHOOL”, even though it was nearly always officially referred to as one word, just Castlehill, a change that was also reflected in the Ordnance Survey maps around the time.
“CASTLE HILL SCHOOL” on the north façade from the Flickr of Bob White, CC-by-NC-ND 2.0From the beginning the school was also used for evening education. But – maintaining the theme of being different – at Castlehill this was not for adults. Instead it catered only for children under 14, pupils given special dispensation by the School Board to attend evening school on account of them needing to work during the school day to help support their families. In 1898 there were 212 boys and girls so registered. In 1890, the school’s first headmaster, John Davidson, resigned on account of poor health. In May 1898 headmaster William C. S. Hunter died and was replaced by James C. Anderson of Leith Walk School. His salary of £340 being equivalent to around £38,400 in 2025 and his “reign” was formally inaugurated with a presentation by Colin G. Macrae, chairman of the School Board, and concert at the school on Wednesday 1st June that year.
The school and its pupils suffered as a result of the harsh social conditions in Edinburgh’s Old Town in the late 19th and early 20th century. Headmaster Anderson was one of a number of his peers in the district who in spoke publicly in 1904 on “how drunkenness [of parents] affects the children“. 150 of his pupils were on the “food roll” due to the inability of their parents to feed then, with a further 30 receiving relief from the district fund. This was almost a quarter of the school and other children of leaving age (14) were being taught with 7 year-olds on account of how much schooling they had missed. Anderson put this down to drunkenness which he said was getting worse, as was thriftlessness. In 1908, under the terms of the Education (Scotland) Act of that year, the School Board instituted a meal scheme for necessitous children, each receiving a bowl of soup and bread during their school day. This was a great success and was expanded in 1911 by converting West Fountainbridge School into a dedicated central cooking centre. One hundred children from Castlehill were among the first recipients to benefit, but as their school lacked a dining hall they went to the Independent Labour Party Hall on Melbourne Place to eat. The tickets for these dinners issued daily at school to encourage children deserving of the meals to actually attend their lessons. They could also be purchased for 6d a week; with a little bit of liberal rounding they became known as “penny dinners“.
Soup and bread is served for lunch at North Canongate School, c. 1914. The man with the moustache and white apron is the headmaster. Note the lack of shoes on a number of the boys’ feet.Feeding was not the only effort made to improve the lot of the children of Castlehill. In 1908 permission was gained by the School Board to adopt a piece of ground on Johnston Terrace next to the Church of Scotland Normal School (a teacher training college) for use as a playground, that at the school being completely insufficient in size and aspect. In 1909, under the auspices of Patrick Geddes’ Edinburgh Social Union, a patch of wasteland on Johnston Terrace was converted by pupils at the school into a model demonstration garden of their very own. Geddes established numerous such gardens, believing them as living classrooms for teaching both biology and self-improvement. Vegetable plots 150 feet long and 7 feet wide grew potatoes, peas, beans, cauliflowers, cabbages, turnips, leeks, onions, carrots, lettuces and other salad vegetables which were used in cookery classes in the school. This space was used for teaching natural history lessons and the principles of crop rotation. It also allowed the school to apply for a valuable additional grant for teaching gardening from the Education Department.
The Castlehill School garden off Johnston Terrace, c. 1914The next year, 1910, headmaster H. F. Sim brought the first case of its kind in Edinburgh to the City Police Court under the Children Act 1908, when two shopkeepers were charged with and pleaded guilty to selling “smoking mixture” to to children under the age of 16. Sim had caught boys in the school trying to smoke a pipe filled with the ersatz tobacco and confiscated from them their paper bag marked “The Boys’ Smoking Mixture and Pipe: price One Halfpenny“. On questioning, he had found from them where they had acquired it and reported the matter to the city’s Medical Officer of Health. The magistrate admonished the defendants and said “a warning should be given to tobacconists that the sale of such a mixture was an illegal practice, and that in other cases of the kind the offenders would certainly be punished.“
A production of scenes from Julius Caesar for the benefit of the School Board by the boys of Castlehill School, March 1912. The Evening News recorded that Mark Anthony was played by William Caldwell and that he “made a very excellent attempt at the speech at Caesar’s funeral”.In October 1912, to remedy a lack of accommodation in the school, the adjacent ancient tenement known as Cannonball House – the last block of old Castlehill – being acquired by the Board for £1,925. It had recently been bought by the Cockburn Association with a view to preservation and the Board spent £3,500 thoroughly renovating and converting into additional teaching spaces. Its four principal classrooms could accommodate 180 children and there were special rooms for practical subjects such as cookery. In the basement were “spray baths“; showers for the children, most of whom lacked even basic domestic sanitation in their homes. The building was substantially altered, with one wing and the old Blair’s Close removed to improve ventilation and daylight. A number of original 17th century features were uncovered during restoration and were retained and installed in the fabric in new locations, making the end result something of a chimaera. The east gable is the biggest give-away way that not all is what it seems with this apparently old tenement; look for the tall classroom windows and the Edinburgh School Board emblem high up on the pediment.
Cannonball House, before and after. In 1900, an image by James C. H. Balmain (left) and in 1957 by H. D. Wyllie. Photos in the Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries. Move the slider to compare.In WW1 the school was requisitioned by to act as a depot and billeting for soldiers of the 5th Royal Scots based out of Edinburgh Castle. The Church of Scotland Young Men’s Guild was given the use of a room the following year to run a canteen and recreation room for them, with a gramophone, games, books, newspapers and writing materials. A teacher at the school, James Bathgate, was injured on war service in July 1915 when serving as a private with the College Company, 4th Royal Scots, in France. In April 1917, Headmaster Sim lost his son, Charles Henry Stuart, who died in hospital having been fatally injured serving with the Royal Field Artillery.
After the war, in April 1922, Headmistress Miss C. E. Anderson retired and was presented with a gold wristlet watch from the parents and her colleagues and a diamond brooch from the pupils. She had been teaching the children of the area since the school opened – a record period of 41 years!
In 1936 a new technological front in teaching was opened up at Castlehill when a room was specifically converted for the use of the Edinburgh branch of the newly instituted Scottish Educational Film Association for the production of educational films. It had been recognised that technology had a part to play in education – in 1931 a group from Canonmills School had been given a trial lesson on the theme of sound recording and reproduction at their local cinema – but further progress was wanting on account of a lack of suitable films for the classroom. The Education Committee thus resolved to make them for themselves: as well as providing the studio for the Association, they also covered the (then) substantial overhead of film costs and in return had a controlling say in the content of films. The first production was a four-part geography film entitled “The Port of London“. The Association would remain at Castlehill until 1957, when they moved to Boswell’s Court.
Members of the Scottish Educational Film Association and school teachers working on a production in the new studio at Castlehill. Edinburgh Evening News, December 19th 1936On the morning of September 1st 1939, children showed to schools all over the city with their coat, a bag or case and a cardboard label – they were being evacuated. Some 200 gathered at Castlehill before heading to Waverley station and destinations unknown. The school remained open for those children that stayed behind and there were still 273 on the roll in September 1940. The logbook records the peculiarities of an education during wartime; there were separate air raid shelters for infants, girls and boys; all children had to carry their gas masks with them; there were weekly gas mask drills and weekly marching drills to and from the shelters.
Excerpt from the logbook at Castlehill School for February 1940 with notes on the gas mask and air raid shelter drills.Additional wartime uses were found for the partially vacant school. A central depot for clothing for evacuees was established in October 1939; donations were received and sorted before being distributed to those in need who had been evacuated and found themselves wanting during their “enforced holiday to the country“. This was organised by Miss Cairns, Superintendent of Domestic Subjects for the Corporation, and she had 50 sewing mistresses from across the city under her direction. The supply of children’s coats proved insufficient and so these “clever-fingered” women picked apart the excess of larger items, cut them down to the required sizes and put them back together again. They were joined by women of the Edinburgh Personal Service League who performed a similar operation for men’s clothing, to be sent via the Red Cross to injured servicemen and prisoners of war. Wartime cookery classes were run in the school by the Corporation’s night school teachers. These were aimed at women to try and instruct them in how to eke out their rations, substitute various items that were off ration to recreate old favourites and how to do so more healthily and with less waste of fuel. Mrs Gray of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) established a group of like-minded women to make soft toys and dolls and clothing for babies and toddlers who were being cared for in public nurseries, their mothers being on war work. Most of these things were no longer being manufactured during wartime. Such was the success of this endeavour that it later relocated to a dedicated workshop at Bristo School as the Nursery Equipment Centre.
A wartime cookery lesson at Castlehill. Edinburgh Evening News, May 14th 1940Postwar, a shock announcement in May 1951 broke news that the school was to be closed at the end of that term. It had been built for 800 but as a result of the long term urban depopulation of the city it was down to 293 by this point; there was plenty excess capacity to rehouse them at Milton House, Tollcross and South Bridge schools for the same reason.
A Castlehill class, 1947A secondary reason behind the closure was that the authorities wanted to establish a Central School Of Bakery and Catering where apprentice workers from the city’s important baking industry (as well as more general cookery and catering) could undertake industry-specific further education. Parents protested the decision but the Corporation was unmoved and voted by 14 to 5 for closure. Its only concession was to promise crossing guards to help children navigate the busy roads that they now needed to transit on their way to their new schools.
One mother vents her frustration towards Councillors Thomson and Hedderwick of the Education Committee at a meeting to oppose the closure of Castlehill School, May 25th 1951.The bakery school opened on Monday 19th January 1954, Councillor H. A. Brechin performed the honours and stated “these new premises, together with the modern equipment, give Edinburgh one of the most up-to-date baking and catering schools in the United Kingdom“.
Mr John Russell shows apprentices a loaf fresh from the oven (left) and John Notman (right) is supervised in the correct way to serve diners at Castlehill School in these photos from the Evening News, October 2rd 1957It did not last long however and as a result of changes to further education and the city’s industries, it was closed by 1970. While it once again sought a purpose, during the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh that year it served as a temporary museum of regimental history at Edinburgh Castle. In 1971 the main building was converted to offices for the City Engineer’s department and would later be occupied by the Drainage Department of Lothian Regional Council. Between 1972 and 1974 it was also the home for the Theatre Workshop, an arts and drama centre for children, while it was found permanent premises.
1965, the sad sight of the abandoned School Garden. Photo by Ronald Alexander © Edinburgh City LibrariesIn August 1986, Lothian Region accepted an offer for £250,000 from William Muir distillers who proposed to convert the former school it into a whisky museum and heritage centre. £2 million was spent on this project which opened its doors on 3rd May 1988, the building’s centennial year. It was an instant success and is now into its 5th decade of offering a very different sort of education than that the building’s planners had in mind.
Cannonball House was retained by the Education Department when the main building became the bakery school and was used for community education, passing to Lothian Regional Council on the formation of that organisation. In 1984 a Children’s History Centre was opened and the building was later properly converted by the Region for £200,000 for use as a schools education centre modelled on Patrick Grddes’ ideas; the Castehill Urban Studies Centre. It was the first such centre in Britain and I recall school trips there in the early 1990s, the name of the guide was Mrs Quick – I’m not sure why that name stuck with me, but it did!. Between 1999 until the opening of the new Scottish Parliament at Holyrood in 2004, Cannonball House was used as a schools education centre for the temporary parliament housed in the General Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland on the Lawnmarket. In 2013, 100 years after it opened as part of the school, it found a new life as a high-end restaurant by the Scottish-Italian Contini family, who themselves had started out in Scotland a century before.
Contini Cannonball Restaurant and Bar, via Contini.comWant to read more about Edinburgh’s Lost Board Schools? The previous chapter was about Canonmills School.
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Another Horrible Week Under the Trump Regime
Good Morning!!
By Leonid Kiparisov
It has been another horrible week under the Trump regime. Almost no one who is paying attention still believes that we still live in a democracy. We retain a few of the trappings–the courts (except the Supreme Court, of course), a few Congresspeople, some courageous journalists, citizens protesting in the streets.
The “president” who would be king is busy slapping gold on the walls of the oval office and talking to architects about his planned $200 million golden ballroom, while Stephen Miller runs the country. Oh, and he’s still signing executive orders prepared by Project 2025 and throwing tantrums when anyone dares to criticize or make fun of him.
Andrew Perez, Nikki McCann Ramirez, Asawin Suebsaeng summarize the latest dictatorish happenings at Rolling Stone: Donald Trump’s Most Authoritarian Week Yet.
It was clear Donald Trump and his allies would ramp up their crackdown against any and all opposition in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — and this week, the president’s second administration unleashed its most authoritarian blitz yet.
The Trump administration got late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show taken off the air by threatening companies’ broadcast licenses if they continued to run his show. Trump and his team threatened to strip the tax-exempt status of liberal nonprofit groups, while the president called for left-wing activists to be jailed for protesting him at dinner. Trump announced he’ll once again try to designate “antifa” — America’s disparate anti-fascist movement — as a terrorist group, with no legitimate basis, clarifying once again where he stands on the whole fascism question.
Meanwhile, the administration worked toward its goal to deport a legal U.S. resident for speaking out against Israel’s relentless assault on Palestine. Reports trickled out that Trump would fire a U.S. attorney for failing to bring charges against one of his enemies, before Trump publicly called for his departure and he quit.
This ugly, authoritarian week didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump just last month mused about how Americans want a “dictator,” and the administration now appears to be using Kirk’s shocking murder as an excuse to escalate Trump’s ongoing campaign for total power.
The ramp-up began on Monday, as Vice President J.D. Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast from the White House and huddled with Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff and the man responsible for leading his mass vengeance campaign.
“You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, ‘Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech. No, no, no,” Vance said, before immediately pledging to go after a network of liberal nonprofits that supposedly “foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”
During the discussion, Miller repeatedly invoked Kirk’s death to justify the effort to shut down liberal groups.
On the Jimmy Kimmel firing:
…[O]n Wednesday, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, began issuing explicit threats, demanding that broadcasters take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air.
Speaking with right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, Carr pressured broadcasters to tell ABC: “‘Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.’”
By Diya Sanat
Carr added, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Within hours, ABC had indefinitely suspended Kimmel’s show and two large broadcast companies, Nexstar and Sinclair, announced they wouldn’t run it. (Note: The companies all have regulatory matters before the FCC.) Sources told Rolling Stone that while multiple executives at ABC and its parent company, Disney, did not feel that Kimmel’s comments merited a suspension, they caved to pressure from Carr.
“They were terrified about what the government would do, and did not even think Jimmy had the right to just explain what he said,” a person familiar with the internal situation said on Thursday, calling the decision “cowardly.”
Throughout Trumpland and the federal government, there was a heightened sense of glee over their silencing of Kimmel. Administration officials feel emboldened by the multiple scalps they’ve now collected — first Stephen Colbert, now Kimmel — to the point that they’re confident they have momentum to pressure corporate bosses to get rid of Trump’s late-night nemeses over at other networks.
Trump has gotten so full of himself after this big win that he’s now claiming that criticism of him is illegal.
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: Trump Says Critical Coverage of Him Is ‘Really Illegal.’
President Trump said Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively have broken the law, a significant broadening of his attacks on journalists and their First Amendment right to critique the government.
A day after asserting that broadcasters should potentially lose their licenses over negative news coverage of him, Mr. Trump escalated his condemnations of the press, suggesting such reporters were lawbreakers.
“They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”
He added: “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”
Mr. Trump did not cite a specific law he said he believed had been violated. It remained unclear Friday why Mr. Trump believed negative news coverage, which every president has faced and is protected by the Constitution, would be “really illegal.”
Asked for comment, the White House did not cite a specific law Mr. Trump believed was being violated, but a White House official pointed to settlements that media companies, including ABC, have agreed to pay after Mr. Trump’s legal team filed lawsuits against them, and suggested Mr. Trump was attempting to rein in “extreme left-wing bias in television.” [….]
Mr. Trump’s comments on Friday came a day after he suggested that protesters who called him “Hitler” to his face inside a Washington restaurant should be jailed.
The president, who has accused the protesters of being paid agitators and said such people “should be put in jail,” told reporters on Air Force One that he believed the protesters were “very inappropriate” and “a threat.”
Trump got some pushback from a surprising source. NBC News: Ted Cruz rips FCC chair’s Jimmy Kimmel threat as ‘unbelievably dangerous.’
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr on Friday for threats he made this week related to Jimmy Kimmel’s show, calling the Trump administration official’s actions “dangerous as hell.”
“I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” Cruz said on his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”
Girl with Cat – Augusta Oelschig , 1945 American, 1918–2000
“I like Brendan Carr. He’s a good guy, he’s the chairman of the FCC. I work closely with him, but what he said there is dangerous as hell,”Cruz said.
Cruz is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the FCC. He warned Carr’s actions could have long-term consequences.
“It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, yeah, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it,”Cruz said….
Cruz went on to say Friday: “I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said,” but likened Carr’s comments about Disney taking the easy way or the hard way to a classic mob movie.
“I gotta say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,” Cruz said.
Of course Kimmel never said anything critical of Charlie Kirk. What he did do was make fun of Trump blowing of a question about how he was recovering from the loss of his friend to brag about his White House ballroom construction:
Kimmel has also mocked Trump for a specific comment he made in response to being asked by a reporter how he was personally “holding up” after the assassination of Kirk, who he has said was a friend.
Trump had replied saying he was “very good” and then immediately started boasting about the new ballroom he is building at the White House.
Kimmel said after the clip: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
There’s also no evidence of involvement of left wing groups in the Kirk assassination. NBC News:
The federal investigation into the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack down after the killing, three sources familiar with the probe told NBC News.
One person familiar with the federal investigation said that “thus far, there is no evidence connecting the suspect with any left-wing groups.”
“Every indication so far is that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive,” this person continued.
In addition, two of the people familiar with the probe said it may be difficult to charge Robinson at the federal level for Kirk’s killing, while the third source said there is still an expectation that some kind of federal charge is filed against Robinson.
Factors that have complicated the effort to bring charges at the federal level include that Robinson, a Utah resident, did not travel from out of state; Kirk was shot during an open campus debate at Utah Valley University. Additionally, Kirk himself is not a federal officer or elected official.
Disney (and perhaps even right wing Sinclair) apparently regret the sudden firing of Jimmy Kimmel.
Screen Rant: Disney Is Scrambling After The Backlash To Jimmy Kimmel’s Cancellation Blew Up.
Wholly unsurprising to anyone paying attention, the backlash over the abrupt cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live! is only continuing to grow and spread, and Disney is now scrambling to fix a situation quickly spiraling out of its control. After far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, reactions have been intense, but it’s Disney’s knee-jerk reaction that has drawn the most ire.
Carl Wilhelmson, Svarta Katten (Black Cat).
There has been considerable pressure from the right to crack down on anyone saying anything even remotely controversial about Kirk, and media companies have acquiesced to this pressure. Earlier this week, on Wednesday, Disney announced that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel from the air indefinitely after a monologue in which he didn’t hold back about Trump’s seeming indifference to Kirk’s murder. [See the quote from Kimmel that I posted above.] You can watch the video at the link.
The media is generally framing it as Kimmel being indefinitely suspended for his comments about Charlie Kirk. If you just watched the above, however, and are now wondering why, as Kimmel’s jabs weren’t aimed at Kirk, but Trump, then you’ve hit on precisely why the backlash against Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel decision is growing – and why it’s not likely to stop any time soon.
The fallout from the decision to pull Kimmel off the air was immediate; the Jimmy Kimmel suspension is already so much worse than Stephen Colbert’s cancellation. On Thursday, hundreds of union writers and actors protested Kimmel’s suspension outside Disney’s Burbank studios (via Deadline). On-air and off-air talent have made their anger clear; mega-successful producer Damon Lindelof, for example, has stated he will not work with Disney unless it reinstates Kimmel.
Read more at Screen Rant.
In more First Amendment news, Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times isn’t going well.
This story made my day. Madiba K. Dennie at Balls and Strikes: Federal Judge Strikes Trump Defamation Lawsuit For Being Too Annoying to Read.
On Friday, September 19, a federal district judge in Florida struck President Donald Trump’s complaint in his $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, four Times reporters, and Penguin Random House, describing the complaint as “decidedly improper and impermissible.” Under Rule 8 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a complaint is supposed to include “a short and plain statement” alleging enough facts that, if true, could warrant legal relief. The complaint Trump filed on Monday, by contrast, is 85 pages long and reads more like an anthology of his Truth Social posts, with slightly better punctuation.
By Leonid Kiparisov
Most complaints filed in federal courtrooms do not get tossed under Rule 8, but most complaints filed in federal courtrooms do not spend dozens of pages recounting, as Trump’s does, the plaintiff’s “singular brilliance” and “history-making media appearances” in programs like Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson. Trump’s complaint is also crowded with boasts about his purported magnificence (for example, “President Trump secured the greatest personal and political achievement in American history”) and snipes about legacy media’s anti-Trump bias (for example, “Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way”).
Friday’s order, in turn, is full of the judge’s unmasked exhaustion. “As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective,” wrote Steven Merryday, a judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. “This complaint stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements of Rule 8.” Merryday gave Trump 28 days to amend the complaint and come back with something less ridiculous, and not exceeding forty pages. “This action will begin, will continue, and will end in accord with the rules of procedure and in a professional and dignified manner,” he wrote.
Read the rest at the link.
In immigration news, ICE is ramping up their activities in Chicago.
AP: ICE arrests nearly 550 in Chicago area as part of ‘Midway Blitz.’
PARK RIDGE, Ill. (AP) — Immigration enforcement officials have arrested almost 550 people as part of an operation in the Chicago area that launched a little less than two weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security said Friday.
The updated figure came hours after a senior immigration official revealed in an interview with The Associated Press that more than 400 people had been arrested in the operation so far. The figures offer an early gauge of what is shaping up as a major enforcement effort that comes after similar operations were launched in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
The figures released by Homeland Security include arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as other federal agencies assisting in the operation.
ICE launched its Chicago area operation dubbed “Midway Blitz” on Sept. 8, drawing concern from activists and immigrant communities who say there’s been a noticeable uptick in immigration enforcement agents. That has deepened dread in communities already fearful of the large-scale arrests or aggressive tactics used in other cities targeted by President Donald Trump ’s hardline immigration policies.
The operation has brought allegations of excessive force and heavy-handed dragnets that have ensnared U.S. citizens, while gratifying Trump supporters who say he is delivering on a promise of mass deportations.
A political candidate was roughed up. The Washington Post: Congressional candidate thrown to ground during protest outside ICE facility.
Federal agents clashed with protesters and threw a congressional candidate to the ground Friday morning during a protest outside a Chicago-area Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
The chaotic scene unfolded in Broadview, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago. Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old Democratic candidate running for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District seat, was thrown to the ground by an armed and masked federal agent outside the ICE facility, according to video footage posted on her social media.
Abughazaleh said about 100 demonstrators were at the facility to protest what the Trump administration has labeled “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, a drastic ramp-up of immigration operations and ICE raids that began in early September.
Chic Woman with a Cat, Robert Bereny, 1927
In an interview with The Washington Post, Abughazaleh described arriving to the protest about 4 a.m. as a van was entering or exiting the facility. During one clash, officers pushed protesters back and dragged one individual by the hood of his sweatshirt, she said, before she also was picked up and thrown to the ground.
A later incident, which Abughazaleh described as “more aggressive” and which was captured on video, occurred about 9 a.m., when an officer she described as an ICE agent pulled her away and threw her on the ground again as another ICE vehicle was leaving the facility.
Video depicts what appears to be a mix of ICE agents and Customs and Border Protection officers on the scene….
“They had dragged a protester into the facilities. … They put this person in chains, in a van, and they had the van come out, and ICE tried to drive through us,” Abughazaleh told The Post. “My friend was on the hood of the car. They started shooting pepper balls at us. A man got shot in the face with one, a guy almost fell into the wheel of a car. Then they teargassed us, and the van drove away with the protester in there.”
More violations of the First Amendment, but what else is new?
Trump wants to put more restrictions on legal immigration unless you’re a billionaire. The Washington Post: Trump unveils $100K yearly fee on H-1B visas in clampdown on legal immigration.
President Donald Trump on Friday announced an annual $100,000 fee on successful applicants for a high-skilled worker visa program that is widely used in Silicon Valley, constraining a key path to legal immigration.
The president also signed an executive order that would allow wealthy foreigners to pay $1 million for a “gold card” for U.S. residency and companies to pay $2 million for a “corporate gold card” that would permit them to sponsor one or more employees.
“The main thing is we’re going to have great people coming in and they’re going to be paying,” Trump said. “We’re going to take that money and we’re going to be reducing taxes and we’re going to be reducing debt.”
Self portrait with Cat – Charlotte ‘Sarika’Góth, 1934. Hungarian , 1900 – 1992
Both moves probably will face legal challenges. If upheld, however, they would dramatically tighten legal immigration systems while opening access to the United States for wealthy foreigners. That would deliver a win to outspoken members of Trump’s nationalist base who have argued for years that the H1-B program takes jobs from American workers. Left-leaning critics also have faulted the program, which they say can be used to exploit workers from overseas….
The $100,000 payment for an H-1B visa could be made each year for six years, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an Oval Office ceremony unveiling the actions. Roughly half a million people in the U.S. work through H-1B visas, and most renew their status every three years. A significant number apply for green cards through their employer to receive legal permanent residency but confront significant delays because of backlogs in processing.
“The company needs to decide … is the person valuable enough to have a $100,000-a-year payment to the government, or they should head home, and they should go hire an American,” Lutnick told reporters. “Stop the nonsense of letting people just come into this country on visas that were given away for free. The president is crystal clear: valuable people only for America.”
This will just drive skilled workers to other countries.
Three more stories, before I wrap this up:
Trump murdered three more people in a fishing boat. CNN: Trump announces another lethal strike on alleged drug-trafficking vessel in international waters.
President Donald Trump on Friday announced another lethal military strike on an alleged drug-trafficking vessel in international waters that he said was affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.
In a social media post, Trump said the strike targeted a vessel operating in US Southern Command’s area of responsibility – which includes Central America, South America and the Caribbean – and killed three male “narcoterrorists” onboard….
“On my Orders, the Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics and was transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage enroute to poison Americans.”
“STOP SELLING FENTANYL, NARCOTICS, AND ILLEGAL DRUGS IN AMERICA, AND COMMITTING VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM AGAINST AMERICANS!!!,” the president said.
Trump attached a video of the strike to his post.
The third grade “president” has spoken.
The New York Times: U.S. Attorney Investigating Two Trump Foes Departs Amid Pressure From President.
The U.S. attorney investigating New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey said he had resigned on Friday, hours after President Trump called for his ouster.
Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation. Mr. Trump has long viewed Ms. James and Mr. Comey as adversaries and has repeatedly pledged retribution against law enforcement officials who pursued him.
By Ruskin Spear, 1911
Mr. Siebert informed prosecutors in his office of his resignation through an email hours after the president, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said he wanted him removed because two Democratic senators from Virginia had approved of his nomination.
“When I saw that he got two senators, two gentlemen that are bad news as far as I’m concerned — when I saw that he got approved by those two men, I said, pull it, because he can’t be any good,” Mr. Trump said. The president did not mention that he nominated Mr. Siebert only after the two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, had already written Mr. Trump praising him.
When asked if he would fire Mr. Siebert, Mr. Trump responded, “Yeah, I want him out.”
Ms. James, he told reporters, was “very guilty of something.”
Mr. Trump later disputed that Mr. Siebert had resigned, saying in a late-night social media post, “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”
Mr. Trump’s comments came after a high-stakes internal debate raged on Friday over the fate of Mr. Siebert — with Mr. Trump’s own appointees at the Justice Department and key Republicans on Capitol Hill arguing to retain the veteran prosecutor.
Another childish tantrum. It’s so embarrassing for our country.
The New York Times: Pentagon Expands Its Restrictions on Reporter Access.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What stories are you following?The Pentagon said Friday it would impose new restrictions on reporters covering the Department of Defense, requiring them to pledge not to gather or use any information that had not been formally authorized for release or risk losing their credentials to cover the military.
The new mandate, described in a memorandum circulated to the press on Friday, was the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to limit the ability of the media to cover the federal government without interference.
The Department of Defense said in the 17-page memo that it “remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust.” But it added that “information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”
In addition, the document constrains the movements of the media within the Pentagon itself, designating large areas of the building off limits without escorts for the roughly 90 reporters credentialed to cover the agency. Although many offices and meeting rooms in the Pentagon are restricted, the Pentagon press corps had previously been given unescorted access throughout much of the building and its hallways.
The move could drastically restrict the flow of information about the U.S. military to the public. The National Press Club called the policy “a direct assault on independent journalism” and called for it to be immediately rescinded.
#ABC #authoritarianism #BrendanCarr #CharlieKirk #Chicago #dictatorship #Disney #DonaldTrump #ErikSSiebert #extraLegalBoatStrikes #fascism #FCC #firstAmendment #H1BVisas #ICE #immigration #JimmyKimmel #KatAbughazaleh #MidwayBlitz #PentagonReporterRules #TedCruz #TylerRobinson
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Another Horrible Week Under the Trump Regime
Good Morning!!
By Leonid Kiparisov
It has been another horrible week under the Trump regime. Almost no one who is paying attention still believes that we still live in a democracy. We retain a few of the trappings–the courts (except the Supreme Court, of course), a few Congresspeople, some courageous journalists, citizens protesting in the streets.
The “president” who would be king is busy slapping gold on the walls of the oval office and talking to architects about his planned $200 million golden ballroom, while Stephen Miller runs the country. Oh, and he’s still signing executive orders prepared by Project 2025 and throwing tantrums when anyone dares to criticize or make fun of him.
Andrew Perez, Nikki McCann Ramirez, Asawin Suebsaeng summarize the latest dictatorish happenings at Rolling Stone: Donald Trump’s Most Authoritarian Week Yet.
It was clear Donald Trump and his allies would ramp up their crackdown against any and all opposition in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — and this week, the president’s second administration unleashed its most authoritarian blitz yet.
The Trump administration got late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show taken off the air by threatening companies’ broadcast licenses if they continued to run his show. Trump and his team threatened to strip the tax-exempt status of liberal nonprofit groups, while the president called for left-wing activists to be jailed for protesting him at dinner. Trump announced he’ll once again try to designate “antifa” — America’s disparate anti-fascist movement — as a terrorist group, with no legitimate basis, clarifying once again where he stands on the whole fascism question.
Meanwhile, the administration worked toward its goal to deport a legal U.S. resident for speaking out against Israel’s relentless assault on Palestine. Reports trickled out that Trump would fire a U.S. attorney for failing to bring charges against one of his enemies, before Trump publicly called for his departure and he quit.
This ugly, authoritarian week didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump just last month mused about how Americans want a “dictator,” and the administration now appears to be using Kirk’s shocking murder as an excuse to escalate Trump’s ongoing campaign for total power.
The ramp-up began on Monday, as Vice President J.D. Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast from the White House and huddled with Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff and the man responsible for leading his mass vengeance campaign.
“You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, ‘Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech. No, no, no,” Vance said, before immediately pledging to go after a network of liberal nonprofits that supposedly “foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”
During the discussion, Miller repeatedly invoked Kirk’s death to justify the effort to shut down liberal groups.
On the Jimmy Kimmel firing:
…[O]n Wednesday, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, began issuing explicit threats, demanding that broadcasters take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air.
Speaking with right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, Carr pressured broadcasters to tell ABC: “‘Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.’”
By Diya Sanat
Carr added, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Within hours, ABC had indefinitely suspended Kimmel’s show and two large broadcast companies, Nexstar and Sinclair, announced they wouldn’t run it. (Note: The companies all have regulatory matters before the FCC.) Sources told Rolling Stone that while multiple executives at ABC and its parent company, Disney, did not feel that Kimmel’s comments merited a suspension, they caved to pressure from Carr.
“They were terrified about what the government would do, and did not even think Jimmy had the right to just explain what he said,” a person familiar with the internal situation said on Thursday, calling the decision “cowardly.”
Throughout Trumpland and the federal government, there was a heightened sense of glee over their silencing of Kimmel. Administration officials feel emboldened by the multiple scalps they’ve now collected — first Stephen Colbert, now Kimmel — to the point that they’re confident they have momentum to pressure corporate bosses to get rid of Trump’s late-night nemeses over at other networks.
Trump has gotten so full of himself after this big win that he’s now claiming that criticism of him is illegal.
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: Trump Says Critical Coverage of Him Is ‘Really Illegal.’
President Trump said Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively have broken the law, a significant broadening of his attacks on journalists and their First Amendment right to critique the government.
A day after asserting that broadcasters should potentially lose their licenses over negative news coverage of him, Mr. Trump escalated his condemnations of the press, suggesting such reporters were lawbreakers.
“They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”
He added: “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”
Mr. Trump did not cite a specific law he said he believed had been violated. It remained unclear Friday why Mr. Trump believed negative news coverage, which every president has faced and is protected by the Constitution, would be “really illegal.”
Asked for comment, the White House did not cite a specific law Mr. Trump believed was being violated, but a White House official pointed to settlements that media companies, including ABC, have agreed to pay after Mr. Trump’s legal team filed lawsuits against them, and suggested Mr. Trump was attempting to rein in “extreme left-wing bias in television.” [….]
Mr. Trump’s comments on Friday came a day after he suggested that protesters who called him “Hitler” to his face inside a Washington restaurant should be jailed.
The president, who has accused the protesters of being paid agitators and said such people “should be put in jail,” told reporters on Air Force One that he believed the protesters were “very inappropriate” and “a threat.”
Trump got some pushback from a surprising source. NBC News: Ted Cruz rips FCC chair’s Jimmy Kimmel threat as ‘unbelievably dangerous.’
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr on Friday for threats he made this week related to Jimmy Kimmel’s show, calling the Trump administration official’s actions “dangerous as hell.”
“I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” Cruz said on his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”
Girl with Cat – Augusta Oelschig , 1945 American, 1918–2000
“I like Brendan Carr. He’s a good guy, he’s the chairman of the FCC. I work closely with him, but what he said there is dangerous as hell,”Cruz said.
Cruz is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the FCC. He warned Carr’s actions could have long-term consequences.
“It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, yeah, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it,”Cruz said….
Cruz went on to say Friday: “I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said,” but likened Carr’s comments about Disney taking the easy way or the hard way to a classic mob movie.
“I gotta say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,” Cruz said.
Of course Kimmel never said anything critical of Charlie Kirk. What he did do was make fun of Trump blowing of a question about how he was recovering from the loss of his friend to brag about his White House ballroom construction:
Kimmel has also mocked Trump for a specific comment he made in response to being asked by a reporter how he was personally “holding up” after the assassination of Kirk, who he has said was a friend.
Trump had replied saying he was “very good” and then immediately started boasting about the new ballroom he is building at the White House.
Kimmel said after the clip: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
There’s also no evidence of involvement of left wing groups in the Kirk assassination. NBC News:
The federal investigation into the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack down after the killing, three sources familiar with the probe told NBC News.
One person familiar with the federal investigation said that “thus far, there is no evidence connecting the suspect with any left-wing groups.”
“Every indication so far is that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive,” this person continued.
In addition, two of the people familiar with the probe said it may be difficult to charge Robinson at the federal level for Kirk’s killing, while the third source said there is still an expectation that some kind of federal charge is filed against Robinson.
Factors that have complicated the effort to bring charges at the federal level include that Robinson, a Utah resident, did not travel from out of state; Kirk was shot during an open campus debate at Utah Valley University. Additionally, Kirk himself is not a federal officer or elected official.
Disney (and perhaps even right wing Sinclair) apparently regret the sudden firing of Jimmy Kimmel.
Screen Rant: Disney Is Scrambling After The Backlash To Jimmy Kimmel’s Cancellation Blew Up.
Wholly unsurprising to anyone paying attention, the backlash over the abrupt cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live! is only continuing to grow and spread, and Disney is now scrambling to fix a situation quickly spiraling out of its control. After far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, reactions have been intense, but it’s Disney’s knee-jerk reaction that has drawn the most ire.
Carl Wilhelmson, Svarta Katten (Black Cat).
There has been considerable pressure from the right to crack down on anyone saying anything even remotely controversial about Kirk, and media companies have acquiesced to this pressure. Earlier this week, on Wednesday, Disney announced that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel from the air indefinitely after a monologue in which he didn’t hold back about Trump’s seeming indifference to Kirk’s murder. [See the quote from Kimmel that I posted above.] You can watch the video at the link.
The media is generally framing it as Kimmel being indefinitely suspended for his comments about Charlie Kirk. If you just watched the above, however, and are now wondering why, as Kimmel’s jabs weren’t aimed at Kirk, but Trump, then you’ve hit on precisely why the backlash against Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel decision is growing – and why it’s not likely to stop any time soon.
The fallout from the decision to pull Kimmel off the air was immediate; the Jimmy Kimmel suspension is already so much worse than Stephen Colbert’s cancellation. On Thursday, hundreds of union writers and actors protested Kimmel’s suspension outside Disney’s Burbank studios (via Deadline). On-air and off-air talent have made their anger clear; mega-successful producer Damon Lindelof, for example, has stated he will not work with Disney unless it reinstates Kimmel.
Read more at Screen Rant.
In more First Amendment news, Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times isn’t going well.
This story made my day. Madiba K. Dennie at Balls and Strikes: Federal Judge Strikes Trump Defamation Lawsuit For Being Too Annoying to Read.
On Friday, September 19, a federal district judge in Florida struck President Donald Trump’s complaint in his $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, four Times reporters, and Penguin Random House, describing the complaint as “decidedly improper and impermissible.” Under Rule 8 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a complaint is supposed to include “a short and plain statement” alleging enough facts that, if true, could warrant legal relief. The complaint Trump filed on Monday, by contrast, is 85 pages long and reads more like an anthology of his Truth Social posts, with slightly better punctuation.
By Leonid Kiparisov
Most complaints filed in federal courtrooms do not get tossed under Rule 8, but most complaints filed in federal courtrooms do not spend dozens of pages recounting, as Trump’s does, the plaintiff’s “singular brilliance” and “history-making media appearances” in programs like Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson. Trump’s complaint is also crowded with boasts about his purported magnificence (for example, “President Trump secured the greatest personal and political achievement in American history”) and snipes about legacy media’s anti-Trump bias (for example, “Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way”).
Friday’s order, in turn, is full of the judge’s unmasked exhaustion. “As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective,” wrote Steven Merryday, a judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. “This complaint stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements of Rule 8.” Merryday gave Trump 28 days to amend the complaint and come back with something less ridiculous, and not exceeding forty pages. “This action will begin, will continue, and will end in accord with the rules of procedure and in a professional and dignified manner,” he wrote.
Read the rest at the link.
In immigration news, ICE is ramping up their activities in Chicago.
AP: ICE arrests nearly 550 in Chicago area as part of ‘Midway Blitz.’
PARK RIDGE, Ill. (AP) — Immigration enforcement officials have arrested almost 550 people as part of an operation in the Chicago area that launched a little less than two weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security said Friday.
The updated figure came hours after a senior immigration official revealed in an interview with The Associated Press that more than 400 people had been arrested in the operation so far. The figures offer an early gauge of what is shaping up as a major enforcement effort that comes after similar operations were launched in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
The figures released by Homeland Security include arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as other federal agencies assisting in the operation.
ICE launched its Chicago area operation dubbed “Midway Blitz” on Sept. 8, drawing concern from activists and immigrant communities who say there’s been a noticeable uptick in immigration enforcement agents. That has deepened dread in communities already fearful of the large-scale arrests or aggressive tactics used in other cities targeted by President Donald Trump ’s hardline immigration policies.
The operation has brought allegations of excessive force and heavy-handed dragnets that have ensnared U.S. citizens, while gratifying Trump supporters who say he is delivering on a promise of mass deportations.
A political candidate was roughed up. The Washington Post: Congressional candidate thrown to ground during protest outside ICE facility.
Federal agents clashed with protesters and threw a congressional candidate to the ground Friday morning during a protest outside a Chicago-area Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
The chaotic scene unfolded in Broadview, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago. Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old Democratic candidate running for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District seat, was thrown to the ground by an armed and masked federal agent outside the ICE facility, according to video footage posted on her social media.
Abughazaleh said about 100 demonstrators were at the facility to protest what the Trump administration has labeled “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, a drastic ramp-up of immigration operations and ICE raids that began in early September.
Chic Woman with a Cat, Robert Bereny, 1927
In an interview with The Washington Post, Abughazaleh described arriving to the protest about 4 a.m. as a van was entering or exiting the facility. During one clash, officers pushed protesters back and dragged one individual by the hood of his sweatshirt, she said, before she also was picked up and thrown to the ground.
A later incident, which Abughazaleh described as “more aggressive” and which was captured on video, occurred about 9 a.m., when an officer she described as an ICE agent pulled her away and threw her on the ground again as another ICE vehicle was leaving the facility.
Video depicts what appears to be a mix of ICE agents and Customs and Border Protection officers on the scene….
“They had dragged a protester into the facilities. … They put this person in chains, in a van, and they had the van come out, and ICE tried to drive through us,” Abughazaleh told The Post. “My friend was on the hood of the car. They started shooting pepper balls at us. A man got shot in the face with one, a guy almost fell into the wheel of a car. Then they teargassed us, and the van drove away with the protester in there.”
More violations of the First Amendment, but what else is new?
Trump wants to put more restrictions on legal immigration unless you’re a billionaire. The Washington Post: Trump unveils $100K yearly fee on H-1B visas in clampdown on legal immigration.
President Donald Trump on Friday announced an annual $100,000 fee on successful applicants for a high-skilled worker visa program that is widely used in Silicon Valley, constraining a key path to legal immigration.
The president also signed an executive order that would allow wealthy foreigners to pay $1 million for a “gold card” for U.S. residency and companies to pay $2 million for a “corporate gold card” that would permit them to sponsor one or more employees.
“The main thing is we’re going to have great people coming in and they’re going to be paying,” Trump said. “We’re going to take that money and we’re going to be reducing taxes and we’re going to be reducing debt.”
Self portrait with Cat – Charlotte ‘Sarika’Góth, 1934. Hungarian , 1900 – 1992
Both moves probably will face legal challenges. If upheld, however, they would dramatically tighten legal immigration systems while opening access to the United States for wealthy foreigners. That would deliver a win to outspoken members of Trump’s nationalist base who have argued for years that the H1-B program takes jobs from American workers. Left-leaning critics also have faulted the program, which they say can be used to exploit workers from overseas….
The $100,000 payment for an H-1B visa could be made each year for six years, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an Oval Office ceremony unveiling the actions. Roughly half a million people in the U.S. work through H-1B visas, and most renew their status every three years. A significant number apply for green cards through their employer to receive legal permanent residency but confront significant delays because of backlogs in processing.
“The company needs to decide … is the person valuable enough to have a $100,000-a-year payment to the government, or they should head home, and they should go hire an American,” Lutnick told reporters. “Stop the nonsense of letting people just come into this country on visas that were given away for free. The president is crystal clear: valuable people only for America.”
This will just drive skilled workers to other countries.
Three more stories, before I wrap this up:
Trump murdered three more people in a fishing boat. CNN: Trump announces another lethal strike on alleged drug-trafficking vessel in international waters.
President Donald Trump on Friday announced another lethal military strike on an alleged drug-trafficking vessel in international waters that he said was affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.
In a social media post, Trump said the strike targeted a vessel operating in US Southern Command’s area of responsibility – which includes Central America, South America and the Caribbean – and killed three male “narcoterrorists” onboard….
“On my Orders, the Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics and was transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage enroute to poison Americans.”
“STOP SELLING FENTANYL, NARCOTICS, AND ILLEGAL DRUGS IN AMERICA, AND COMMITTING VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM AGAINST AMERICANS!!!,” the president said.
Trump attached a video of the strike to his post.
The third grade “president” has spoken.
The New York Times: U.S. Attorney Investigating Two Trump Foes Departs Amid Pressure From President.
The U.S. attorney investigating New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey said he had resigned on Friday, hours after President Trump called for his ouster.
Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation. Mr. Trump has long viewed Ms. James and Mr. Comey as adversaries and has repeatedly pledged retribution against law enforcement officials who pursued him.
By Ruskin Spear, 1911
Mr. Siebert informed prosecutors in his office of his resignation through an email hours after the president, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said he wanted him removed because two Democratic senators from Virginia had approved of his nomination.
“When I saw that he got two senators, two gentlemen that are bad news as far as I’m concerned — when I saw that he got approved by those two men, I said, pull it, because he can’t be any good,” Mr. Trump said. The president did not mention that he nominated Mr. Siebert only after the two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, had already written Mr. Trump praising him.
When asked if he would fire Mr. Siebert, Mr. Trump responded, “Yeah, I want him out.”
Ms. James, he told reporters, was “very guilty of something.”
Mr. Trump later disputed that Mr. Siebert had resigned, saying in a late-night social media post, “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”
Mr. Trump’s comments came after a high-stakes internal debate raged on Friday over the fate of Mr. Siebert — with Mr. Trump’s own appointees at the Justice Department and key Republicans on Capitol Hill arguing to retain the veteran prosecutor.
Another childish tantrum. It’s so embarrassing for our country.
The New York Times: Pentagon Expands Its Restrictions on Reporter Access.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What stories are you following?The Pentagon said Friday it would impose new restrictions on reporters covering the Department of Defense, requiring them to pledge not to gather or use any information that had not been formally authorized for release or risk losing their credentials to cover the military.
The new mandate, described in a memorandum circulated to the press on Friday, was the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to limit the ability of the media to cover the federal government without interference.
The Department of Defense said in the 17-page memo that it “remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust.” But it added that “information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”
In addition, the document constrains the movements of the media within the Pentagon itself, designating large areas of the building off limits without escorts for the roughly 90 reporters credentialed to cover the agency. Although many offices and meeting rooms in the Pentagon are restricted, the Pentagon press corps had previously been given unescorted access throughout much of the building and its hallways.
The move could drastically restrict the flow of information about the U.S. military to the public. The National Press Club called the policy “a direct assault on independent journalism” and called for it to be immediately rescinded.
#ABC #authoritarianism #BrendanCarr #CharlieKirk #Chicago #dictatorship #Disney #DonaldTrump #ErikSSiebert #extraLegalBoatStrikes #fascism #FCC #firstAmendment #H1BVisas #ICE #immigration #JimmyKimmel #KatAbughazaleh #MidwayBlitz #PentagonReporterRules #TedCruz #TylerRobinson
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Another Horrible Week Under the Trump Regime
Good Morning!!
By Leonid Kiparisov
It has been another horrible week under the Trump regime. Almost no one who is paying attention still believes that we still live in a democracy. We retain a few of the trappings–the courts (except the Supreme Court, of course), a few Congresspeople, some courageous journalists, citizens protesting in the streets.
The “president” who would be king is busy slapping gold on the walls of the oval office and talking to architects about his planned $200 million golden ballroom, while Stephen Miller runs the country. Oh, and he’s still signing executive orders prepared by Project 2025 and throwing tantrums when anyone dares to criticize or make fun of him.
Andrew Perez, Nikki McCann Ramirez, Asawin Suebsaeng summarize the latest dictatorish happenings at Rolling Stone: Donald Trump’s Most Authoritarian Week Yet.
It was clear Donald Trump and his allies would ramp up their crackdown against any and all opposition in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — and this week, the president’s second administration unleashed its most authoritarian blitz yet.
The Trump administration got late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show taken off the air by threatening companies’ broadcast licenses if they continued to run his show. Trump and his team threatened to strip the tax-exempt status of liberal nonprofit groups, while the president called for left-wing activists to be jailed for protesting him at dinner. Trump announced he’ll once again try to designate “antifa” — America’s disparate anti-fascist movement — as a terrorist group, with no legitimate basis, clarifying once again where he stands on the whole fascism question.
Meanwhile, the administration worked toward its goal to deport a legal U.S. resident for speaking out against Israel’s relentless assault on Palestine. Reports trickled out that Trump would fire a U.S. attorney for failing to bring charges against one of his enemies, before Trump publicly called for his departure and he quit.
This ugly, authoritarian week didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump just last month mused about how Americans want a “dictator,” and the administration now appears to be using Kirk’s shocking murder as an excuse to escalate Trump’s ongoing campaign for total power.
The ramp-up began on Monday, as Vice President J.D. Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast from the White House and huddled with Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff and the man responsible for leading his mass vengeance campaign.
“You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, ‘Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech. No, no, no,” Vance said, before immediately pledging to go after a network of liberal nonprofits that supposedly “foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”
During the discussion, Miller repeatedly invoked Kirk’s death to justify the effort to shut down liberal groups.
On the Jimmy Kimmel firing:
…[O]n Wednesday, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, began issuing explicit threats, demanding that broadcasters take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air.
Speaking with right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, Carr pressured broadcasters to tell ABC: “‘Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.’”
By Diya Sanat
Carr added, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Within hours, ABC had indefinitely suspended Kimmel’s show and two large broadcast companies, Nexstar and Sinclair, announced they wouldn’t run it. (Note: The companies all have regulatory matters before the FCC.) Sources told Rolling Stone that while multiple executives at ABC and its parent company, Disney, did not feel that Kimmel’s comments merited a suspension, they caved to pressure from Carr.
“They were terrified about what the government would do, and did not even think Jimmy had the right to just explain what he said,” a person familiar with the internal situation said on Thursday, calling the decision “cowardly.”
Throughout Trumpland and the federal government, there was a heightened sense of glee over their silencing of Kimmel. Administration officials feel emboldened by the multiple scalps they’ve now collected — first Stephen Colbert, now Kimmel — to the point that they’re confident they have momentum to pressure corporate bosses to get rid of Trump’s late-night nemeses over at other networks.
Trump has gotten so full of himself after this big win that he’s now claiming that criticism of him is illegal.
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: Trump Says Critical Coverage of Him Is ‘Really Illegal.’
President Trump said Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively have broken the law, a significant broadening of his attacks on journalists and their First Amendment right to critique the government.
A day after asserting that broadcasters should potentially lose their licenses over negative news coverage of him, Mr. Trump escalated his condemnations of the press, suggesting such reporters were lawbreakers.
“They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”
He added: “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”
Mr. Trump did not cite a specific law he said he believed had been violated. It remained unclear Friday why Mr. Trump believed negative news coverage, which every president has faced and is protected by the Constitution, would be “really illegal.”
Asked for comment, the White House did not cite a specific law Mr. Trump believed was being violated, but a White House official pointed to settlements that media companies, including ABC, have agreed to pay after Mr. Trump’s legal team filed lawsuits against them, and suggested Mr. Trump was attempting to rein in “extreme left-wing bias in television.” [….]
Mr. Trump’s comments on Friday came a day after he suggested that protesters who called him “Hitler” to his face inside a Washington restaurant should be jailed.
The president, who has accused the protesters of being paid agitators and said such people “should be put in jail,” told reporters on Air Force One that he believed the protesters were “very inappropriate” and “a threat.”
Trump got some pushback from a surprising source. NBC News: Ted Cruz rips FCC chair’s Jimmy Kimmel threat as ‘unbelievably dangerous.’
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr on Friday for threats he made this week related to Jimmy Kimmel’s show, calling the Trump administration official’s actions “dangerous as hell.”
“I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” Cruz said on his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”
Girl with Cat – Augusta Oelschig , 1945 American, 1918–2000
“I like Brendan Carr. He’s a good guy, he’s the chairman of the FCC. I work closely with him, but what he said there is dangerous as hell,”Cruz said.
Cruz is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the FCC. He warned Carr’s actions could have long-term consequences.
“It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, yeah, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it,”Cruz said….
Cruz went on to say Friday: “I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said,” but likened Carr’s comments about Disney taking the easy way or the hard way to a classic mob movie.
“I gotta say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,” Cruz said.
Of course Kimmel never said anything critical of Charlie Kirk. What he did do was make fun of Trump blowing of a question about how he was recovering from the loss of his friend to brag about his White House ballroom construction:
Kimmel has also mocked Trump for a specific comment he made in response to being asked by a reporter how he was personally “holding up” after the assassination of Kirk, who he has said was a friend.
Trump had replied saying he was “very good” and then immediately started boasting about the new ballroom he is building at the White House.
Kimmel said after the clip: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
There’s also no evidence of involvement of left wing groups in the Kirk assassination. NBC News:
The federal investigation into the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack down after the killing, three sources familiar with the probe told NBC News.
One person familiar with the federal investigation said that “thus far, there is no evidence connecting the suspect with any left-wing groups.”
“Every indication so far is that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive,” this person continued.
In addition, two of the people familiar with the probe said it may be difficult to charge Robinson at the federal level for Kirk’s killing, while the third source said there is still an expectation that some kind of federal charge is filed against Robinson.
Factors that have complicated the effort to bring charges at the federal level include that Robinson, a Utah resident, did not travel from out of state; Kirk was shot during an open campus debate at Utah Valley University. Additionally, Kirk himself is not a federal officer or elected official.
Disney (and perhaps even right wing Sinclair) apparently regret the sudden firing of Jimmy Kimmel.
Screen Rant: Disney Is Scrambling After The Backlash To Jimmy Kimmel’s Cancellation Blew Up.
Wholly unsurprising to anyone paying attention, the backlash over the abrupt cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live! is only continuing to grow and spread, and Disney is now scrambling to fix a situation quickly spiraling out of its control. After far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, reactions have been intense, but it’s Disney’s knee-jerk reaction that has drawn the most ire.
Carl Wilhelmson, Svarta Katten (Black Cat).
There has been considerable pressure from the right to crack down on anyone saying anything even remotely controversial about Kirk, and media companies have acquiesced to this pressure. Earlier this week, on Wednesday, Disney announced that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel from the air indefinitely after a monologue in which he didn’t hold back about Trump’s seeming indifference to Kirk’s murder. [See the quote from Kimmel that I posted above.] You can watch the video at the link.
The media is generally framing it as Kimmel being indefinitely suspended for his comments about Charlie Kirk. If you just watched the above, however, and are now wondering why, as Kimmel’s jabs weren’t aimed at Kirk, but Trump, then you’ve hit on precisely why the backlash against Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel decision is growing – and why it’s not likely to stop any time soon.
The fallout from the decision to pull Kimmel off the air was immediate; the Jimmy Kimmel suspension is already so much worse than Stephen Colbert’s cancellation. On Thursday, hundreds of union writers and actors protested Kimmel’s suspension outside Disney’s Burbank studios (via Deadline). On-air and off-air talent have made their anger clear; mega-successful producer Damon Lindelof, for example, has stated he will not work with Disney unless it reinstates Kimmel.
Read more at Screen Rant.
In more First Amendment news, Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times isn’t going well.
This story made my day. Madiba K. Dennie at Balls and Strikes: Federal Judge Strikes Trump Defamation Lawsuit For Being Too Annoying to Read.
On Friday, September 19, a federal district judge in Florida struck President Donald Trump’s complaint in his $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, four Times reporters, and Penguin Random House, describing the complaint as “decidedly improper and impermissible.” Under Rule 8 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a complaint is supposed to include “a short and plain statement” alleging enough facts that, if true, could warrant legal relief. The complaint Trump filed on Monday, by contrast, is 85 pages long and reads more like an anthology of his Truth Social posts, with slightly better punctuation.
By Leonid Kiparisov
Most complaints filed in federal courtrooms do not get tossed under Rule 8, but most complaints filed in federal courtrooms do not spend dozens of pages recounting, as Trump’s does, the plaintiff’s “singular brilliance” and “history-making media appearances” in programs like Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson. Trump’s complaint is also crowded with boasts about his purported magnificence (for example, “President Trump secured the greatest personal and political achievement in American history”) and snipes about legacy media’s anti-Trump bias (for example, “Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way”).
Friday’s order, in turn, is full of the judge’s unmasked exhaustion. “As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective,” wrote Steven Merryday, a judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. “This complaint stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements of Rule 8.” Merryday gave Trump 28 days to amend the complaint and come back with something less ridiculous, and not exceeding forty pages. “This action will begin, will continue, and will end in accord with the rules of procedure and in a professional and dignified manner,” he wrote.
Read the rest at the link.
In immigration news, ICE is ramping up their activities in Chicago.
AP: ICE arrests nearly 550 in Chicago area as part of ‘Midway Blitz.’
PARK RIDGE, Ill. (AP) — Immigration enforcement officials have arrested almost 550 people as part of an operation in the Chicago area that launched a little less than two weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security said Friday.
The updated figure came hours after a senior immigration official revealed in an interview with The Associated Press that more than 400 people had been arrested in the operation so far. The figures offer an early gauge of what is shaping up as a major enforcement effort that comes after similar operations were launched in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
The figures released by Homeland Security include arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as other federal agencies assisting in the operation.
ICE launched its Chicago area operation dubbed “Midway Blitz” on Sept. 8, drawing concern from activists and immigrant communities who say there’s been a noticeable uptick in immigration enforcement agents. That has deepened dread in communities already fearful of the large-scale arrests or aggressive tactics used in other cities targeted by President Donald Trump ’s hardline immigration policies.
The operation has brought allegations of excessive force and heavy-handed dragnets that have ensnared U.S. citizens, while gratifying Trump supporters who say he is delivering on a promise of mass deportations.
A political candidate was roughed up. The Washington Post: Congressional candidate thrown to ground during protest outside ICE facility.
Federal agents clashed with protesters and threw a congressional candidate to the ground Friday morning during a protest outside a Chicago-area Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
The chaotic scene unfolded in Broadview, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago. Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old Democratic candidate running for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District seat, was thrown to the ground by an armed and masked federal agent outside the ICE facility, according to video footage posted on her social media.
Abughazaleh said about 100 demonstrators were at the facility to protest what the Trump administration has labeled “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, a drastic ramp-up of immigration operations and ICE raids that began in early September.
Chic Woman with a Cat, Robert Bereny, 1927
In an interview with The Washington Post, Abughazaleh described arriving to the protest about 4 a.m. as a van was entering or exiting the facility. During one clash, officers pushed protesters back and dragged one individual by the hood of his sweatshirt, she said, before she also was picked up and thrown to the ground.
A later incident, which Abughazaleh described as “more aggressive” and which was captured on video, occurred about 9 a.m., when an officer she described as an ICE agent pulled her away and threw her on the ground again as another ICE vehicle was leaving the facility.
Video depicts what appears to be a mix of ICE agents and Customs and Border Protection officers on the scene….
“They had dragged a protester into the facilities. … They put this person in chains, in a van, and they had the van come out, and ICE tried to drive through us,” Abughazaleh told The Post. “My friend was on the hood of the car. They started shooting pepper balls at us. A man got shot in the face with one, a guy almost fell into the wheel of a car. Then they teargassed us, and the van drove away with the protester in there.”
More violations of the First Amendment, but what else is new?
Trump wants to put more restrictions on legal immigration unless you’re a billionaire. The Washington Post: Trump unveils $100K yearly fee on H-1B visas in clampdown on legal immigration.
President Donald Trump on Friday announced an annual $100,000 fee on successful applicants for a high-skilled worker visa program that is widely used in Silicon Valley, constraining a key path to legal immigration.
The president also signed an executive order that would allow wealthy foreigners to pay $1 million for a “gold card” for U.S. residency and companies to pay $2 million for a “corporate gold card” that would permit them to sponsor one or more employees.
“The main thing is we’re going to have great people coming in and they’re going to be paying,” Trump said. “We’re going to take that money and we’re going to be reducing taxes and we’re going to be reducing debt.”
Self portrait with Cat – Charlotte ‘Sarika’Góth, 1934. Hungarian , 1900 – 1992
Both moves probably will face legal challenges. If upheld, however, they would dramatically tighten legal immigration systems while opening access to the United States for wealthy foreigners. That would deliver a win to outspoken members of Trump’s nationalist base who have argued for years that the H1-B program takes jobs from American workers. Left-leaning critics also have faulted the program, which they say can be used to exploit workers from overseas….
The $100,000 payment for an H-1B visa could be made each year for six years, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an Oval Office ceremony unveiling the actions. Roughly half a million people in the U.S. work through H-1B visas, and most renew their status every three years. A significant number apply for green cards through their employer to receive legal permanent residency but confront significant delays because of backlogs in processing.
“The company needs to decide … is the person valuable enough to have a $100,000-a-year payment to the government, or they should head home, and they should go hire an American,” Lutnick told reporters. “Stop the nonsense of letting people just come into this country on visas that were given away for free. The president is crystal clear: valuable people only for America.”
This will just drive skilled workers to other countries.
Three more stories, before I wrap this up:
Trump murdered three more people in a fishing boat. CNN: Trump announces another lethal strike on alleged drug-trafficking vessel in international waters.
President Donald Trump on Friday announced another lethal military strike on an alleged drug-trafficking vessel in international waters that he said was affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.
In a social media post, Trump said the strike targeted a vessel operating in US Southern Command’s area of responsibility – which includes Central America, South America and the Caribbean – and killed three male “narcoterrorists” onboard….
“On my Orders, the Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics and was transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage enroute to poison Americans.”
“STOP SELLING FENTANYL, NARCOTICS, AND ILLEGAL DRUGS IN AMERICA, AND COMMITTING VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM AGAINST AMERICANS!!!,” the president said.
Trump attached a video of the strike to his post.
The third grade “president” has spoken.
The New York Times: U.S. Attorney Investigating Two Trump Foes Departs Amid Pressure From President.
The U.S. attorney investigating New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey said he had resigned on Friday, hours after President Trump called for his ouster.
Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation. Mr. Trump has long viewed Ms. James and Mr. Comey as adversaries and has repeatedly pledged retribution against law enforcement officials who pursued him.
By Ruskin Spear, 1911
Mr. Siebert informed prosecutors in his office of his resignation through an email hours after the president, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said he wanted him removed because two Democratic senators from Virginia had approved of his nomination.
“When I saw that he got two senators, two gentlemen that are bad news as far as I’m concerned — when I saw that he got approved by those two men, I said, pull it, because he can’t be any good,” Mr. Trump said. The president did not mention that he nominated Mr. Siebert only after the two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, had already written Mr. Trump praising him.
When asked if he would fire Mr. Siebert, Mr. Trump responded, “Yeah, I want him out.”
Ms. James, he told reporters, was “very guilty of something.”
Mr. Trump later disputed that Mr. Siebert had resigned, saying in a late-night social media post, “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”
Mr. Trump’s comments came after a high-stakes internal debate raged on Friday over the fate of Mr. Siebert — with Mr. Trump’s own appointees at the Justice Department and key Republicans on Capitol Hill arguing to retain the veteran prosecutor.
Another childish tantrum. It’s so embarrassing for our country.
The New York Times: Pentagon Expands Its Restrictions on Reporter Access.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What stories are you following?The Pentagon said Friday it would impose new restrictions on reporters covering the Department of Defense, requiring them to pledge not to gather or use any information that had not been formally authorized for release or risk losing their credentials to cover the military.
The new mandate, described in a memorandum circulated to the press on Friday, was the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to limit the ability of the media to cover the federal government without interference.
The Department of Defense said in the 17-page memo that it “remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust.” But it added that “information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”
In addition, the document constrains the movements of the media within the Pentagon itself, designating large areas of the building off limits without escorts for the roughly 90 reporters credentialed to cover the agency. Although many offices and meeting rooms in the Pentagon are restricted, the Pentagon press corps had previously been given unescorted access throughout much of the building and its hallways.
The move could drastically restrict the flow of information about the U.S. military to the public. The National Press Club called the policy “a direct assault on independent journalism” and called for it to be immediately rescinded.
#ABC #authoritarianism #BrendanCarr #CharlieKirk #Chicago #dictatorship #Disney #DonaldTrump #ErikSSiebert #extraLegalBoatStrikes #fascism #FCC #firstAmendment #H1BVisas #ICE #immigration #JimmyKimmel #KatAbughazaleh #MidwayBlitz #PentagonReporterRules #TedCruz #TylerRobinson
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Lazy Caturday Reads: Another Horrible Week Under the Trump Regime
Good Morning!!
By Leonid Kiparisov
It has been another horrible week under the Trump regime. Almost no one who is paying attention still believes that we still live in a democracy. We retain a few of the trappings–the courts (except the Supreme Court, of course), a few Congresspeople, some courageous journalists, citizens protesting in the streets.
The “president” who would be king is busy slapping gold on the walls of the oval office and talking to architects about his planned $200 million golden ballroom, while Stephen Miller runs the country. Oh, and he’s still signing executive orders prepared by Project 2025 and throwing tantrums when anyone dares to criticize or make fun of him.
Andrew Perez, Nikki McCann Ramirez, Asawin Suebsaeng summarize the latest dictatorish happenings at Rolling Stone: Donald Trump’s Most Authoritarian Week Yet.
It was clear Donald Trump and his allies would ramp up their crackdown against any and all opposition in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — and this week, the president’s second administration unleashed its most authoritarian blitz yet.
The Trump administration got late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show taken off the air by threatening companies’ broadcast licenses if they continued to run his show. Trump and his team threatened to strip the tax-exempt status of liberal nonprofit groups, while the president called for left-wing activists to be jailed for protesting him at dinner. Trump announced he’ll once again try to designate “antifa” — America’s disparate anti-fascist movement — as a terrorist group, with no legitimate basis, clarifying once again where he stands on the whole fascism question.
Meanwhile, the administration worked toward its goal to deport a legal U.S. resident for speaking out against Israel’s relentless assault on Palestine. Reports trickled out that Trump would fire a U.S. attorney for failing to bring charges against one of his enemies, before Trump publicly called for his departure and he quit.
This ugly, authoritarian week didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump just last month mused about how Americans want a “dictator,” and the administration now appears to be using Kirk’s shocking murder as an excuse to escalate Trump’s ongoing campaign for total power.
The ramp-up began on Monday, as Vice President J.D. Vance hosted Kirk’s podcast from the White House and huddled with Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff and the man responsible for leading his mass vengeance campaign.
“You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, ‘Stephen Miller and J.D. Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech. No, no, no,” Vance said, before immediately pledging to go after a network of liberal nonprofits that supposedly “foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”
During the discussion, Miller repeatedly invoked Kirk’s death to justify the effort to shut down liberal groups.
On the Jimmy Kimmel firing:
…[O]n Wednesday, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman, Brendan Carr, began issuing explicit threats, demanding that broadcasters take Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air.
Speaking with right-wing influencer Benny Johnson, Carr pressured broadcasters to tell ABC: “‘Listen, we are going to preempt, we are not going to run Kimmel anymore, until you straighten this out because we, we licensed broadcaster, are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.’”
By Diya Sanat
Carr added, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Within hours, ABC had indefinitely suspended Kimmel’s show and two large broadcast companies, Nexstar and Sinclair, announced they wouldn’t run it. (Note: The companies all have regulatory matters before the FCC.) Sources told Rolling Stone that while multiple executives at ABC and its parent company, Disney, did not feel that Kimmel’s comments merited a suspension, they caved to pressure from Carr.
“They were terrified about what the government would do, and did not even think Jimmy had the right to just explain what he said,” a person familiar with the internal situation said on Thursday, calling the decision “cowardly.”
Throughout Trumpland and the federal government, there was a heightened sense of glee over their silencing of Kimmel. Administration officials feel emboldened by the multiple scalps they’ve now collected — first Stephen Colbert, now Kimmel — to the point that they’re confident they have momentum to pressure corporate bosses to get rid of Trump’s late-night nemeses over at other networks.
Trump has gotten so full of himself after this big win that he’s now claiming that criticism of him is illegal.
Luke Broadwater at The New York Times: Trump Says Critical Coverage of Him Is ‘Really Illegal.’
President Trump said Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively have broken the law, a significant broadening of his attacks on journalists and their First Amendment right to critique the government.
A day after asserting that broadcasters should potentially lose their licenses over negative news coverage of him, Mr. Trump escalated his condemnations of the press, suggesting such reporters were lawbreakers.
“They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”
He added: “Personally, you can’t take, you can’t have a free airwave if you’re getting free airwaves from the United States government.”
Mr. Trump did not cite a specific law he said he believed had been violated. It remained unclear Friday why Mr. Trump believed negative news coverage, which every president has faced and is protected by the Constitution, would be “really illegal.”
Asked for comment, the White House did not cite a specific law Mr. Trump believed was being violated, but a White House official pointed to settlements that media companies, including ABC, have agreed to pay after Mr. Trump’s legal team filed lawsuits against them, and suggested Mr. Trump was attempting to rein in “extreme left-wing bias in television.” [….]
Mr. Trump’s comments on Friday came a day after he suggested that protesters who called him “Hitler” to his face inside a Washington restaurant should be jailed.
The president, who has accused the protesters of being paid agitators and said such people “should be put in jail,” told reporters on Air Force One that he believed the protesters were “very inappropriate” and “a threat.”
Trump got some pushback from a surprising source. NBC News: Ted Cruz rips FCC chair’s Jimmy Kimmel threat as ‘unbelievably dangerous.’
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, blasted Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr on Friday for threats he made this week related to Jimmy Kimmel’s show, calling the Trump administration official’s actions “dangerous as hell.”
“I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” Cruz said on his podcast, “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”
Girl with Cat – Augusta Oelschig , 1945 American, 1918–2000
“I like Brendan Carr. He’s a good guy, he’s the chairman of the FCC. I work closely with him, but what he said there is dangerous as hell,”Cruz said.
Cruz is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the FCC. He warned Carr’s actions could have long-term consequences.
“It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, yeah, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it,”Cruz said….
Cruz went on to say Friday: “I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said,” but likened Carr’s comments about Disney taking the easy way or the hard way to a classic mob movie.
“I gotta say, that’s right out of ‘Goodfellas.’ That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, nice bar you have here, it’d be a shame if something happened to it,” Cruz said.
Of course Kimmel never said anything critical of Charlie Kirk. What he did do was make fun of Trump blowing of a question about how he was recovering from the loss of his friend to brag about his White House ballroom construction:
Kimmel has also mocked Trump for a specific comment he made in response to being asked by a reporter how he was personally “holding up” after the assassination of Kirk, who he has said was a friend.
Trump had replied saying he was “very good” and then immediately started boasting about the new ballroom he is building at the White House.
Kimmel said after the clip: “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of somebody called a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
There’s also no evidence of involvement of left wing groups in the Kirk assassination. NBC News:
The federal investigation into the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has yet to find a link between the alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, and left-wing groups on which President Donald Trump and his administration have pledged to crack down after the killing, three sources familiar with the probe told NBC News.
One person familiar with the federal investigation said that “thus far, there is no evidence connecting the suspect with any left-wing groups.”
“Every indication so far is that this was one guy who did one really bad thing because he found Kirk’s ideology personally offensive,” this person continued.
In addition, two of the people familiar with the probe said it may be difficult to charge Robinson at the federal level for Kirk’s killing, while the third source said there is still an expectation that some kind of federal charge is filed against Robinson.
Factors that have complicated the effort to bring charges at the federal level include that Robinson, a Utah resident, did not travel from out of state; Kirk was shot during an open campus debate at Utah Valley University. Additionally, Kirk himself is not a federal officer or elected official.
Disney (and perhaps even right wing Sinclair) apparently regret the sudden firing of Jimmy Kimmel.
Screen Rant: Disney Is Scrambling After The Backlash To Jimmy Kimmel’s Cancellation Blew Up.
Wholly unsurprising to anyone paying attention, the backlash over the abrupt cancellation of Jimmy Kimmel Live! is only continuing to grow and spread, and Disney is now scrambling to fix a situation quickly spiraling out of its control. After far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, reactions have been intense, but it’s Disney’s knee-jerk reaction that has drawn the most ire.
Carl Wilhelmson, Svarta Katten (Black Cat).
There has been considerable pressure from the right to crack down on anyone saying anything even remotely controversial about Kirk, and media companies have acquiesced to this pressure. Earlier this week, on Wednesday, Disney announced that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel from the air indefinitely after a monologue in which he didn’t hold back about Trump’s seeming indifference to Kirk’s murder. [See the quote from Kimmel that I posted above.] You can watch the video at the link.
The media is generally framing it as Kimmel being indefinitely suspended for his comments about Charlie Kirk. If you just watched the above, however, and are now wondering why, as Kimmel’s jabs weren’t aimed at Kirk, but Trump, then you’ve hit on precisely why the backlash against Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel decision is growing – and why it’s not likely to stop any time soon.
The fallout from the decision to pull Kimmel off the air was immediate; the Jimmy Kimmel suspension is already so much worse than Stephen Colbert’s cancellation. On Thursday, hundreds of union writers and actors protested Kimmel’s suspension outside Disney’s Burbank studios (via Deadline). On-air and off-air talent have made their anger clear; mega-successful producer Damon Lindelof, for example, has stated he will not work with Disney unless it reinstates Kimmel.
Read more at Screen Rant.
In more First Amendment news, Trump’s lawsuit against The New York Times isn’t going well.
This story made my day. Madiba K. Dennie at Balls and Strikes: Federal Judge Strikes Trump Defamation Lawsuit For Being Too Annoying to Read.
On Friday, September 19, a federal district judge in Florida struck President Donald Trump’s complaint in his $15 billion defamation lawsuit against The New York Times, four Times reporters, and Penguin Random House, describing the complaint as “decidedly improper and impermissible.” Under Rule 8 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a complaint is supposed to include “a short and plain statement” alleging enough facts that, if true, could warrant legal relief. The complaint Trump filed on Monday, by contrast, is 85 pages long and reads more like an anthology of his Truth Social posts, with slightly better punctuation.
By Leonid Kiparisov
Most complaints filed in federal courtrooms do not get tossed under Rule 8, but most complaints filed in federal courtrooms do not spend dozens of pages recounting, as Trump’s does, the plaintiff’s “singular brilliance” and “history-making media appearances” in programs like Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson. Trump’s complaint is also crowded with boasts about his purported magnificence (for example, “President Trump secured the greatest personal and political achievement in American history”) and snipes about legacy media’s anti-Trump bias (for example, “Defendants baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way”).
Friday’s order, in turn, is full of the judge’s unmasked exhaustion. “As every lawyer knows (or is presumed to know), a complaint is not a public forum for vituperation and invective,” wrote Steven Merryday, a judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. “This complaint stands unmistakably and inexcusably athwart the requirements of Rule 8.” Merryday gave Trump 28 days to amend the complaint and come back with something less ridiculous, and not exceeding forty pages. “This action will begin, will continue, and will end in accord with the rules of procedure and in a professional and dignified manner,” he wrote.
Read the rest at the link.
In immigration news, ICE is ramping up their activities in Chicago.
AP: ICE arrests nearly 550 in Chicago area as part of ‘Midway Blitz.’
PARK RIDGE, Ill. (AP) — Immigration enforcement officials have arrested almost 550 people as part of an operation in the Chicago area that launched a little less than two weeks ago, the Department of Homeland Security said Friday.
The updated figure came hours after a senior immigration official revealed in an interview with The Associated Press that more than 400 people had been arrested in the operation so far. The figures offer an early gauge of what is shaping up as a major enforcement effort that comes after similar operations were launched in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
The figures released by Homeland Security include arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement as well as other federal agencies assisting in the operation.
ICE launched its Chicago area operation dubbed “Midway Blitz” on Sept. 8, drawing concern from activists and immigrant communities who say there’s been a noticeable uptick in immigration enforcement agents. That has deepened dread in communities already fearful of the large-scale arrests or aggressive tactics used in other cities targeted by President Donald Trump ’s hardline immigration policies.
The operation has brought allegations of excessive force and heavy-handed dragnets that have ensnared U.S. citizens, while gratifying Trump supporters who say he is delivering on a promise of mass deportations.
A political candidate was roughed up. The Washington Post: Congressional candidate thrown to ground during protest outside ICE facility.
Federal agents clashed with protesters and threw a congressional candidate to the ground Friday morning during a protest outside a Chicago-area Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.
The chaotic scene unfolded in Broadview, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago. Kat Abughazaleh, a 26-year-old Democratic candidate running for Illinois’ 9th Congressional District seat, was thrown to the ground by an armed and masked federal agent outside the ICE facility, according to video footage posted on her social media.
Abughazaleh said about 100 demonstrators were at the facility to protest what the Trump administration has labeled “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, a drastic ramp-up of immigration operations and ICE raids that began in early September.
Chic Woman with a Cat, Robert Bereny, 1927
In an interview with The Washington Post, Abughazaleh described arriving to the protest about 4 a.m. as a van was entering or exiting the facility. During one clash, officers pushed protesters back and dragged one individual by the hood of his sweatshirt, she said, before she also was picked up and thrown to the ground.
A later incident, which Abughazaleh described as “more aggressive” and which was captured on video, occurred about 9 a.m., when an officer she described as an ICE agent pulled her away and threw her on the ground again as another ICE vehicle was leaving the facility.
Video depicts what appears to be a mix of ICE agents and Customs and Border Protection officers on the scene….
“They had dragged a protester into the facilities. … They put this person in chains, in a van, and they had the van come out, and ICE tried to drive through us,” Abughazaleh told The Post. “My friend was on the hood of the car. They started shooting pepper balls at us. A man got shot in the face with one, a guy almost fell into the wheel of a car. Then they teargassed us, and the van drove away with the protester in there.”
More violations of the First Amendment, but what else is new?
Trump wants to put more restrictions on legal immigration unless you’re a billionaire. The Washington Post: Trump unveils $100K yearly fee on H-1B visas in clampdown on legal immigration.
President Donald Trump on Friday announced an annual $100,000 fee on successful applicants for a high-skilled worker visa program that is widely used in Silicon Valley, constraining a key path to legal immigration.
The president also signed an executive order that would allow wealthy foreigners to pay $1 million for a “gold card” for U.S. residency and companies to pay $2 million for a “corporate gold card” that would permit them to sponsor one or more employees.
“The main thing is we’re going to have great people coming in and they’re going to be paying,” Trump said. “We’re going to take that money and we’re going to be reducing taxes and we’re going to be reducing debt.”
Self portrait with Cat – Charlotte ‘Sarika’Góth, 1934. Hungarian , 1900 – 1992
Both moves probably will face legal challenges. If upheld, however, they would dramatically tighten legal immigration systems while opening access to the United States for wealthy foreigners. That would deliver a win to outspoken members of Trump’s nationalist base who have argued for years that the H1-B program takes jobs from American workers. Left-leaning critics also have faulted the program, which they say can be used to exploit workers from overseas….
The $100,000 payment for an H-1B visa could be made each year for six years, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in an Oval Office ceremony unveiling the actions. Roughly half a million people in the U.S. work through H-1B visas, and most renew their status every three years. A significant number apply for green cards through their employer to receive legal permanent residency but confront significant delays because of backlogs in processing.
“The company needs to decide … is the person valuable enough to have a $100,000-a-year payment to the government, or they should head home, and they should go hire an American,” Lutnick told reporters. “Stop the nonsense of letting people just come into this country on visas that were given away for free. The president is crystal clear: valuable people only for America.”
This will just drive skilled workers to other countries.
Three more stories, before I wrap this up:
Trump murdered three more people in a fishing boat. CNN: Trump announces another lethal strike on alleged drug-trafficking vessel in international waters.
President Donald Trump on Friday announced another lethal military strike on an alleged drug-trafficking vessel in international waters that he said was affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.
In a social media post, Trump said the strike targeted a vessel operating in US Southern Command’s area of responsibility – which includes Central America, South America and the Caribbean – and killed three male “narcoterrorists” onboard….
“On my Orders, the Secretary of War ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization conducting narcotrafficking in the USSOUTHCOM area of responsibility,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Intelligence confirmed the vessel was trafficking illicit narcotics and was transiting along a known narcotrafficking passage enroute to poison Americans.”
“STOP SELLING FENTANYL, NARCOTICS, AND ILLEGAL DRUGS IN AMERICA, AND COMMITTING VIOLENCE AND TERRORISM AGAINST AMERICANS!!!,” the president said.
Trump attached a video of the strike to his post.
The third grade “president” has spoken.
The New York Times: U.S. Attorney Investigating Two Trump Foes Departs Amid Pressure From President.
The U.S. attorney investigating New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey said he had resigned on Friday, hours after President Trump called for his ouster.
Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, had recently told senior Justice Department officials that investigators found insufficient evidence to bring charges against Ms. James and had also raised concerns about a potential case against Mr. Comey, according to officials familiar with the situation. Mr. Trump has long viewed Ms. James and Mr. Comey as adversaries and has repeatedly pledged retribution against law enforcement officials who pursued him.
By Ruskin Spear, 1911
Mr. Siebert informed prosecutors in his office of his resignation through an email hours after the president, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said he wanted him removed because two Democratic senators from Virginia had approved of his nomination.
“When I saw that he got two senators, two gentlemen that are bad news as far as I’m concerned — when I saw that he got approved by those two men, I said, pull it, because he can’t be any good,” Mr. Trump said. The president did not mention that he nominated Mr. Siebert only after the two senators, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, had already written Mr. Trump praising him.
When asked if he would fire Mr. Siebert, Mr. Trump responded, “Yeah, I want him out.”
Ms. James, he told reporters, was “very guilty of something.”
Mr. Trump later disputed that Mr. Siebert had resigned, saying in a late-night social media post, “He didn’t quit, I fired him!”
Mr. Trump’s comments came after a high-stakes internal debate raged on Friday over the fate of Mr. Siebert — with Mr. Trump’s own appointees at the Justice Department and key Republicans on Capitol Hill arguing to retain the veteran prosecutor.
Another childish tantrum. It’s so embarrassing for our country.
The New York Times: Pentagon Expands Its Restrictions on Reporter Access.
Those are my recommended reads for today. What stories are you following?The Pentagon said Friday it would impose new restrictions on reporters covering the Department of Defense, requiring them to pledge not to gather or use any information that had not been formally authorized for release or risk losing their credentials to cover the military.
The new mandate, described in a memorandum circulated to the press on Friday, was the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration to limit the ability of the media to cover the federal government without interference.
The Department of Defense said in the 17-page memo that it “remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust.” But it added that “information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”
In addition, the document constrains the movements of the media within the Pentagon itself, designating large areas of the building off limits without escorts for the roughly 90 reporters credentialed to cover the agency. Although many offices and meeting rooms in the Pentagon are restricted, the Pentagon press corps had previously been given unescorted access throughout much of the building and its hallways.
The move could drastically restrict the flow of information about the U.S. military to the public. The National Press Club called the policy “a direct assault on independent journalism” and called for it to be immediately rescinded.
#ABC #authoritarianism #BrendanCarr #CharlieKirk #Chicago #dictatorship #Disney #DonaldTrump #ErikSSiebert #extraLegalBoatStrikes #fascism #FCC #firstAmendment #H1BVisas #ICE #immigration #JimmyKimmel #KatAbughazaleh #MidwayBlitz #PentagonReporterRules #TedCruz #TylerRobinson
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Philosopher journalist Robert D. Kaplan talking about fun feelgood
uplifting stuff:
> The coming anarchy was published in 1994 as an essay. It came out
> in book form in 1996. That was the heart of the n the mid 1990s
> when the policy elite at famous posh conferences in Davos and
> elsewhere were predicting a world of liberal humanism. Uh they
> predicted that uh Africa, Asia, every place would just follow
> Eastern Europe into democracy and good governance. And I was
> traveling around Africa, the Middle East, and other places, and I
> said, "That's not true at all. These places have different
> histories. They're at a different time in their development, and
> they're not just following what happened with the collapse of the
> this a number of regimes in former communist Eastern Europe. So,
> you know, I I saw a totally different world than the policy elites
> at the time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezpWWP0Yow8&t=4m26s
Taken from Youtube's automatic transcription of Making Sense no. 440 -
How to Understand Our Global Emergency.
More here:
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/440-a-world-in-crisis
#makingsense
#podcast
#robertdkaplan
#robertkaplan
#samharris
#schadenfreude
#thecominganarchy
#theendofhistory -
“I know they wanted JFK Jr, but RFK Jr is a nice addition to the trump campaign.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The Trumplican Party continues to devolve. I doubt my father would even recognize it if he were alive. The latest example is the addition of RFK Jr., a conspiracy nut with habits that the word eccentric can’t even begin to describe. This headline from The Wrap, written by Stephanie Kaloi, is something regular folks can’t wrap their head around. “RFK Jr.’s Daughter Says Dad Cut Off a Whale’s Head, Drove It 5 Hours Home. When they would accelerate, “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy explained to Town & Country Magazine.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter Kick Kennedy may or may not be spending time with Jennifer Lopez’s estranged husband Ben Affleck (as reported by Page Six), but she certainly spent time with Town & Country Magazine for a profile that has been resurfaced and made waves on social media, in which she shared an anecdote about her father and a dead whale that still checks out with what we know about the odd politician — especially when it comes to his love for dead animals.
When she was 6, her dad chopped off the head of a whale that washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Due to RFK Jr.’s love of studying animal skulls and skeletons, they then strapped the dead whale’s head to the car and spent five hours driving it to their home.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kennedy said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
RFK Jr. made headlines earlier this month when he shared the story of taking a dead bear that he found as roadkill, intent on saving it to eat, before ultimately dumping it in a bizarre prank in New York City’s Central Park. On Friday, the independent candidate dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump.
RFK Jr. approached the Harris/Walz campaign, but they didn’t answer his calls. That’s just some American common sense with nothing to do with political savvy. What possible benefit could his addition add to a campaign? But he’s just another (yawn) Maga Sideshow full of weirdos who generally wind up in trouble with the law, one way or another. His J6 “gala” next month will undoubtedly highlight the number of criminals that actually might actually violate his terms of release. Also, Rudy Guilliani will be there. He is definitely on the Trumplican weirdo and felon list. This information popped up on Alternet, and I just had to share it. “Trump’s ‘gala’ honoring ‘courage and sacrifice’ of J6 rioters may violate his terms of release” is written by Carl Gibson and answers my call out to all the parole officers in charge of these folks.
Convicted felon and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump is planning on hosting a gathering of other convicted felons next month. One legal expert is pointing out that the event may frustrate his efforts to remain a free man.
According to NJ.com, the ex-president is hosting a “J6 awards gala” at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club next month. Progressive group MeidasTouch reported that on September 5, Trump will be joined by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and MAGA influencer Anthony Raimondi at the event, where he is expected to personally address participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
…
However, if Trump follows through with the gala, it may complicate his own legal situation. According to attorney Tristan Snell – who prosecuted the former president over his sham Trump University while at the New York Attorney General’s office — New York state law would prohibit such an event given the expected guest list.
“Someone should alert Trump’s probation officer — because convicted felons are legally prohibited from associating with other felons,” he tweeted.
While Trump has been convicted by a jury on 34 class E felony counts, he won’t be sentenced until September 18. At that point, assuming the former president isn’t ordered to serve time behind bars (Judge Juan Merchan has the ability to sentence him to as much as 20 years in prison), he will then be issued a probation officer, who he will be required to check in with on a regular basis. This means the September 5 event will be legal, though it likely won’t help his case when he appears before Merchan less than two weeks later.
The former president narrowly dodged the ire of prosecutors at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade pointed out that some of the convention’s attendees included indicted “fake electors,” and that Trump seen associating with them may have resulted in Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and/or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis petitioning the court to incarcerate Trump prior to his trial for consorting with criminal defendants.
DonOld is facing new lawsuits from musicians who don’t want their music to be associated with MAGA craziness. The first to take action was the son of Issa Hayes. This is reported in the Daily Beast by Clay Walker. “Isaac Hayes Estate Marks Victory in Suit Against Trump.” The candidate and the campaign continue to act like laws don’t matter.
The estate of the late soul singer Isaac Hayes is moving forward in their lawsuit against Donald Trump for using a song co-written by the artist. “The Federal Court has granted our request for an Emergency Hearing to secure injunctive relief,” the late singer’s son, Isaac Hayes III, wrote on X Friday. According to Hayes III, Trump himself will have to appear in court in September. The lawsuit was originally filed earlier this month and sought $3 million for the former president’s campaign’s unauthorized use of “Hold On, I’m Coming,” a 1960s song originally performed by duo Sam & Dave, more than 100 times. Prior to the filing, the Trump campaign was asked to discontinue the use of the song, but things came to a head on August 10, the anniversary of the singer’s 2008 death, when Trump used it again at a Montana rally. “Donald Trump represents the worst in integrity and class with his disrespect and sexual abuse of Women and racist rhetoric. We will now deal with this very swiftly,” Hayes III wrote on X.
Next up in court is the band Foo Fighters. This is from The Hill. “Trump campaign disputes Foo Fighters claim song use was unauthorized.” Laura Sforza writes on the Foo Fight.
A spokesperson for the Foo Fighters said in a statement to The Hill late Sunday the band did not give permission to the Trump campaign to use the song at a Friday campaign rally in Arizona. The spokesperson said any royalties the band earns off the song would be donated to Vice President Harris’s campaign.“Foo Fighters were not asked permission, and if they were they would not have granted it,” the spokesperson said.
However, the Trump campaign said it had permission to play the song.
“We have a license to play the song,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an email to The Hill.
He also took to the social platform X to dispute the claim.
“It’s Times Like These facts matter, don’t be a Pretender. @foofighters,” he wrote, referring to two other songs by the band.
“My Hero” could be heard playing at Trump’s rally in Glendale on Friday as the former president introduced former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign earlier in the day and threw his support behind Trump.
And there’s more in the Weirdos and Felons news. We have this from the LGBTQ Nation. Seriously, we’ve gone way past the deplorable basket at this point. “MAGA ex-GOP party chair calls gay lawmaker a “f*g” on social media. She called Pete Buttigieg a “weak little girl” in 2022, before she got indicted.” This is written by Alex Bollinger.
A former high-ranking state Republican official who has been indicted in an alleged conspiracy to steal the 2020 election used an anti-gay slur to describe a gay Democratic lawmaker.
Meshawn Maddock used to be the head of the Michigan Republican Party until shortly after she was charged in connection to a scheme to make Michigan’s votes go to Donald Trump in 2020 instead of President Joe Biden, who won the state. Now she is now using slurs on social media.
She was responding to a post on X from Michigan state Rep. Jason Morgan (D), who is an out gay lawmaker and the vice chair of the state’s Democratic Party. Morgan posted a picture of the Michigan congressional delegation at the DNC last Friday, where they were smiling and holding American flags.
“F*gs and hags,” Maddock responded. X responded by reducing the visibility of her post due to a potential violation of the platform’s Hateful Conduct policy. However, the post has not been deleted by the platform.
Stay Classy you god-fearing Christians you! I have to agree with this Op-Ed headline at The Hill. “The right’s killjoy politics only fuel Harris’s momentum.” It’s written by Svante Myrick.
It’s been a couple of days since I flew home after attending the Democratic National Convention. And at the risk of sounding corny, I think I could have done it without the plane. To attend that convention was to experience a sense of joy so powerful that it made you feel like you had wings.
My organization, People for the American Way, was very excited to bring to the convention posters designed especially for us by the artist Victoria Cassinova, which we felt represented the pride and hopefulness of this campaign.
The posters featured a portrait of Harris with the single word: “Freedom.”
We had fun posting them all over the city. We were thrilled to see lots of residents and convention-goers admiring them and taking pictures and selfies. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) shared hers on Instagram.
Then, on the third night of the convention, something sad happened. A group calling itself Artists for Kennedy and Trump defaced a wall of these Harris portraits.
Capturing themselves on video, the vandals spray-painted crimson streaks across the images, focusing on the portrait’s face and eyes. They used words like “war” to describe what they were doing.
It was an ugly but galvanizing reminder of what we’re up against in this race.
I — we — have had enough of creepy authoritarians trying to censor art, ban books and steal our joy.
Because while art does give joy, it also gives strength. It has always been a tool to challenge injustice and enforced conformity, to resist oppression and authoritarianism. That’s why dictators down through history have suppressed and banned art and even murdered artists.
It’s why artists and creators face an enormous threat today, not just from vandals roaming the streets of Chicago but from the deadly serious, powerful operatives behind Project 2025, who are intent on stigmatizing and suppressing vast numbers of artworks by calling them “pornography.”
I remember being shocked and stunned by Trump stalking Hillary on the debate stage and the lack of response to it by the debate’s moderators. Now I think we know exactly how low they go, and as far as I can tell, there is no bottom. If they stage an insurrection and try to nullify votes, they’ll do anything, and we should all be prepared. So, the Harris/DonOld debate with ABC is now in jeopardy. I bet we all had this on our bingo card. This is from Marianne Levine, who is writing for the Washington Post. “Trump suggests he might skip ABC debate with Harris. The Sept. 10 debate with ABC is the only one both campaigns have agreed to.”
Former president Donald Trump suggested Sunday evening that he might skip a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris (D), after agreeing earlier this month to participate.
“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s (K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump asked in a social media post Sunday evening.
During a campaign stop Monday after visiting Arlington National Cemetery, Trump reiterated his criticism of ABC News, calling it “the single worst network for unfairness” and saying that ABC “really should be shut out.”
The Sept. 10 debate is the only one that both campaigns have officially committed to. Trump’s renewed questioning of the ABC News debate comes as Harris has increased her lead in national polls and is gaining ground in key swing states. As of Sunday, The Washington Post polling average has the vice president leading in Wisconsin by three percentage points, in Pennsylvania by two points and in Michigan by less than one point. Trump continues to lead in four Sun Belt swing states, but Harris has significantly narrowed the gap.
The latest rift between the campaigns is about the terms and conditions about how the debate would work. Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, said in a statement that the campaign has told ABC and other networks that “both candidates’ microphones should be live throughout the full broadcast.”
“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Fallon said.
When asked by a reporter Monday about whether he wanted his microphone muted, Trump replied, “Doesn’t matter to me, I’d rather have it probably on.”
Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the campaign agreed to the “the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” referring to a June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, before Biden ended his reelection campaign.
Oh, I officially quit the New York Times a while ago. I would like to say that seeing the headline on a guest’s op-ed today reinforced my excellent decision. Here’s a brief statement: I agree with her. I can’t say
more because I refuse to read it. Rich Lowry can bite his crank for writing “Trump Can Win on Character.” RIFF NYT. Rest in Fuckery and Failure.
Now, back to the normal news. This is from Salon’s Charles R. Davis. As the Vice President said, she’s been a prosecutor and knows his type. “”He’s now terrified of debating her”: Trump’s debate flip-flop is a sign Harris has him figured out. The former president suggested Sunday that he would not attend his scheduled Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris.”
Donald Trump is not feeling great. This year alone he’s been found liable by a jury for sexual assault, convicted by another jury on 34 felony counts of fraud, and shot at by a young registered Republican at a campaign rally, the one previously safe space where the president could comfortably rant and complain to certain applause. Then he had to spend a week at home watching Democrats pull off their convention without a hitch, just a month after an unprecedented switch at the top of the ticket.
The former president’s own campaign is publicly predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris will now surge in the polls (after already leading, nationally, by an average of about 3.6%). In a similar situation, the current president and his team decided it was time to debate, saying a televised contest would “reset” the race; the subsequent performance cost Joe Biden the Democratic nomination.
Perhaps that’s why Trump himself is doubting his own commitments.
“Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump posted on social media Sunday night, complaining about an ABC News interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and panel discussion earlier that day, saying the former was “biased” and the latter full of “Trump Haters.” The Republican nominee filled the rest of his post with tedious name calling — “Crooked,” “Marxist” — and attacks on the insufficiently fawning journalists of ABC.
“They’ve got a lot o questions to answer!!!” Trump posted just after 10 p.m. Eastern. “Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”
The former president already agreed to debate Harris on Sept. 10, which was originally slated to be the second of two televised confrontations with Biden. He did so after previously trying to pull out of the event when Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, initially claiming the debate was off because Biden was out of the race and then trying to move it to the friendlier waters of Fox News, a media platform that was forced to pay out $787 million after admitting that it cynically aired what its knew to be MAGA lies about the 2020 election.
This last read is from the New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky. “Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him. Kamala Harris gets it. Yes, we should fear Trump—but we should also mock him mercilessly because it drives him nuts.”
Donald Trump is in free fall. Read this description from Sunday’s Washington Post of how the GOP nominee spent last week: “[A]ides did not want a situation where he was watching the convention every night, getting angry, and then just golfing all day and stewing, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions. Trump also had grown annoyed with the news coverage that depicted him as not working as hard as his opponent, one person who talked to him said.”
If you didn’t know that the article was about Trump and you just read it cold without knowledge of the context, you might think it was a description of parents trying to figure out how to handle an ungovernable four-year-old. So they convinced Trump to get out of Bedminster and hit the road, trading suck-ups with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the past, Trump has called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of the Kennedy family and a “radical left lunatic.” Kennedy has called Trump a “terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath.”
Will RFK’s endorsement get Trump a few votes? It might. But these two unprincipled freakos deserve each other, and if it ever looks like RFK might matter, all Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have to do is say something like that.
Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences—but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.… Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?
And third and most of all: Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in. He probably likes it when we call him a fascist or authoritarian, because it expresses fear of him, and he aches to be feared. It acknowledges his power. This motivates him and makes him stronger.
Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.
And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?
Brilliant! When he goes low, we make fun of him and call him weird. He becomes lethargic and fussy. He says weird things and makes weird decisions. That’s a daily event in Day Cares everywhere and evidently in not-so-posh Jersey Golf Clubs with Galas for Criminals. This is getting fun.
Embrace the JOY!!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/26/mostly-monday-reads-the-weirdo-trifecta/
#2024ABCPresidentialDebate #2024PresidentialCampaign #Repeat1968 #DonOldWeirdo #J6FelonsGala #JDVanceWeirdo #JohnBuss #KamalaHarrisForThePeople #RFKJrWeirdo
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“I know they wanted JFK Jr, but RFK Jr is a nice addition to the trump campaign.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The Trumplican Party continues to devolve. I doubt my father would even recognize it if he were alive. The latest example is the addition of RFK Jr., a conspiracy nut with habits that the word eccentric can’t even begin to describe. This headline from The Wrap, written by Stephanie Kaloi, is something regular folks can’t wrap their head around. “RFK Jr.’s Daughter Says Dad Cut Off a Whale’s Head, Drove It 5 Hours Home. When they would accelerate, “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy explained to Town & Country Magazine.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter Kick Kennedy may or may not be spending time with Jennifer Lopez’s estranged husband Ben Affleck (as reported by Page Six), but she certainly spent time with Town & Country Magazine for a profile that has been resurfaced and made waves on social media, in which she shared an anecdote about her father and a dead whale that still checks out with what we know about the odd politician — especially when it comes to his love for dead animals.
When she was 6, her dad chopped off the head of a whale that washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Due to RFK Jr.’s love of studying animal skulls and skeletons, they then strapped the dead whale’s head to the car and spent five hours driving it to their home.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kennedy said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
RFK Jr. made headlines earlier this month when he shared the story of taking a dead bear that he found as roadkill, intent on saving it to eat, before ultimately dumping it in a bizarre prank in New York City’s Central Park. On Friday, the independent candidate dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump.
RFK Jr. approached the Harris/Walz campaign, but they didn’t answer his calls. That’s just some American common sense with nothing to do with political savvy. What possible benefit could his addition add to a campaign? But he’s just another (yawn) Maga Sideshow full of weirdos who generally wind up in trouble with the law, one way or another. His J6 “gala” next month will undoubtedly highlight the number of criminals that actually might actually violate his terms of release. Also, Rudy Guilliani will be there. He is definitely on the Trumplican weirdo and felon list. This information popped up on Alternet, and I just had to share it. “Trump’s ‘gala’ honoring ‘courage and sacrifice’ of J6 rioters may violate his terms of release” is written by Carl Gibson and answers my call out to all the parole officers in charge of these folks.
Convicted felon and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump is planning on hosting a gathering of other convicted felons next month. One legal expert is pointing out that the event may frustrate his efforts to remain a free man.
According to NJ.com, the ex-president is hosting a “J6 awards gala” at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club next month. Progressive group MeidasTouch reported that on September 5, Trump will be joined by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and MAGA influencer Anthony Raimondi at the event, where he is expected to personally address participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
…
However, if Trump follows through with the gala, it may complicate his own legal situation. According to attorney Tristan Snell – who prosecuted the former president over his sham Trump University while at the New York Attorney General’s office — New York state law would prohibit such an event given the expected guest list.
“Someone should alert Trump’s probation officer — because convicted felons are legally prohibited from associating with other felons,” he tweeted.
While Trump has been convicted by a jury on 34 class E felony counts, he won’t be sentenced until September 18. At that point, assuming the former president isn’t ordered to serve time behind bars (Judge Juan Merchan has the ability to sentence him to as much as 20 years in prison), he will then be issued a probation officer, who he will be required to check in with on a regular basis. This means the September 5 event will be legal, though it likely won’t help his case when he appears before Merchan less than two weeks later.
The former president narrowly dodged the ire of prosecutors at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade pointed out that some of the convention’s attendees included indicted “fake electors,” and that Trump seen associating with them may have resulted in Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and/or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis petitioning the court to incarcerate Trump prior to his trial for consorting with criminal defendants.
DonOld is facing new lawsuits from musicians who don’t want their music to be associated with MAGA craziness. The first to take action was the son of Issa Hayes. This is reported in the Daily Beast by Clay Walker. “Isaac Hayes Estate Marks Victory in Suit Against Trump.” The candidate and the campaign continue to act like laws don’t matter.
The estate of the late soul singer Isaac Hayes is moving forward in their lawsuit against Donald Trump for using a song co-written by the artist. “The Federal Court has granted our request for an Emergency Hearing to secure injunctive relief,” the late singer’s son, Isaac Hayes III, wrote on X Friday. According to Hayes III, Trump himself will have to appear in court in September. The lawsuit was originally filed earlier this month and sought $3 million for the former president’s campaign’s unauthorized use of “Hold On, I’m Coming,” a 1960s song originally performed by duo Sam & Dave, more than 100 times. Prior to the filing, the Trump campaign was asked to discontinue the use of the song, but things came to a head on August 10, the anniversary of the singer’s 2008 death, when Trump used it again at a Montana rally. “Donald Trump represents the worst in integrity and class with his disrespect and sexual abuse of Women and racist rhetoric. We will now deal with this very swiftly,” Hayes III wrote on X.
Next up in court is the band Foo Fighters. This is from The Hill. “Trump campaign disputes Foo Fighters claim song use was unauthorized.” Laura Sforza writes on the Foo Fight.
A spokesperson for the Foo Fighters said in a statement to The Hill late Sunday the band did not give permission to the Trump campaign to use the song at a Friday campaign rally in Arizona. The spokesperson said any royalties the band earns off the song would be donated to Vice President Harris’s campaign.“Foo Fighters were not asked permission, and if they were they would not have granted it,” the spokesperson said.
However, the Trump campaign said it had permission to play the song.
“We have a license to play the song,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an email to The Hill.
He also took to the social platform X to dispute the claim.
“It’s Times Like These facts matter, don’t be a Pretender. @foofighters,” he wrote, referring to two other songs by the band.
“My Hero” could be heard playing at Trump’s rally in Glendale on Friday as the former president introduced former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign earlier in the day and threw his support behind Trump.
And there’s more in the Weirdos and Felons news. We have this from the LGBTQ Nation. Seriously, we’ve gone way past the deplorable basket at this point. “MAGA ex-GOP party chair calls gay lawmaker a “f*g” on social media. She called Pete Buttigieg a “weak little girl” in 2022, before she got indicted.” This is written by Alex Bollinger.
A former high-ranking state Republican official who has been indicted in an alleged conspiracy to steal the 2020 election used an anti-gay slur to describe a gay Democratic lawmaker.
Meshawn Maddock used to be the head of the Michigan Republican Party until shortly after she was charged in connection to a scheme to make Michigan’s votes go to Donald Trump in 2020 instead of President Joe Biden, who won the state. Now she is now using slurs on social media.
She was responding to a post on X from Michigan state Rep. Jason Morgan (D), who is an out gay lawmaker and the vice chair of the state’s Democratic Party. Morgan posted a picture of the Michigan congressional delegation at the DNC last Friday, where they were smiling and holding American flags.
“F*gs and hags,” Maddock responded. X responded by reducing the visibility of her post due to a potential violation of the platform’s Hateful Conduct policy. However, the post has not been deleted by the platform.
Stay Classy you god-fearing Christians you! I have to agree with this Op-Ed headline at The Hill. “The right’s killjoy politics only fuel Harris’s momentum.” It’s written by Svante Myrick.
It’s been a couple of days since I flew home after attending the Democratic National Convention. And at the risk of sounding corny, I think I could have done it without the plane. To attend that convention was to experience a sense of joy so powerful that it made you feel like you had wings.
My organization, People for the American Way, was very excited to bring to the convention posters designed especially for us by the artist Victoria Cassinova, which we felt represented the pride and hopefulness of this campaign.
The posters featured a portrait of Harris with the single word: “Freedom.”
We had fun posting them all over the city. We were thrilled to see lots of residents and convention-goers admiring them and taking pictures and selfies. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) shared hers on Instagram.
Then, on the third night of the convention, something sad happened. A group calling itself Artists for Kennedy and Trump defaced a wall of these Harris portraits.
Capturing themselves on video, the vandals spray-painted crimson streaks across the images, focusing on the portrait’s face and eyes. They used words like “war” to describe what they were doing.
It was an ugly but galvanizing reminder of what we’re up against in this race.
I — we — have had enough of creepy authoritarians trying to censor art, ban books and steal our joy.
Because while art does give joy, it also gives strength. It has always been a tool to challenge injustice and enforced conformity, to resist oppression and authoritarianism. That’s why dictators down through history have suppressed and banned art and even murdered artists.
It’s why artists and creators face an enormous threat today, not just from vandals roaming the streets of Chicago but from the deadly serious, powerful operatives behind Project 2025, who are intent on stigmatizing and suppressing vast numbers of artworks by calling them “pornography.”
I remember being shocked and stunned by Trump stalking Hillary on the debate stage and the lack of response to it by the debate’s moderators. Now I think we know exactly how low they go, and as far as I can tell, there is no bottom. If they stage an insurrection and try to nullify votes, they’ll do anything, and we should all be prepared. So, the Harris/DonOld debate with ABC is now in jeopardy. I bet we all had this on our bingo card. This is from Marianne Levine, who is writing for the Washington Post. “Trump suggests he might skip ABC debate with Harris. The Sept. 10 debate with ABC is the only one both campaigns have agreed to.”
Former president Donald Trump suggested Sunday evening that he might skip a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris (D), after agreeing earlier this month to participate.
“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s (K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump asked in a social media post Sunday evening.
During a campaign stop Monday after visiting Arlington National Cemetery, Trump reiterated his criticism of ABC News, calling it “the single worst network for unfairness” and saying that ABC “really should be shut out.”
The Sept. 10 debate is the only one that both campaigns have officially committed to. Trump’s renewed questioning of the ABC News debate comes as Harris has increased her lead in national polls and is gaining ground in key swing states. As of Sunday, The Washington Post polling average has the vice president leading in Wisconsin by three percentage points, in Pennsylvania by two points and in Michigan by less than one point. Trump continues to lead in four Sun Belt swing states, but Harris has significantly narrowed the gap.
The latest rift between the campaigns is about the terms and conditions about how the debate would work. Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, said in a statement that the campaign has told ABC and other networks that “both candidates’ microphones should be live throughout the full broadcast.”
“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Fallon said.
When asked by a reporter Monday about whether he wanted his microphone muted, Trump replied, “Doesn’t matter to me, I’d rather have it probably on.”
Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the campaign agreed to the “the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” referring to a June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, before Biden ended his reelection campaign.
Oh, I officially quit the New York Times a while ago. I would like to say that seeing the headline on a guest’s op-ed today reinforced my excellent decision. Here’s a brief statement: I agree with her. I can’t say
more because I refuse to read it. Rich Lowry can bite his crank for writing “Trump Can Win on Character.” RIFF NYT. Rest in Fuckery and Failure.
Now, back to the normal news. This is from Salon’s Charles R. Davis. As the Vice President said, she’s been a prosecutor and knows his type. “”He’s now terrified of debating her”: Trump’s debate flip-flop is a sign Harris has him figured out. The former president suggested Sunday that he would not attend his scheduled Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris.”
Donald Trump is not feeling great. This year alone he’s been found liable by a jury for sexual assault, convicted by another jury on 34 felony counts of fraud, and shot at by a young registered Republican at a campaign rally, the one previously safe space where the president could comfortably rant and complain to certain applause. Then he had to spend a week at home watching Democrats pull off their convention without a hitch, just a month after an unprecedented switch at the top of the ticket.
The former president’s own campaign is publicly predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris will now surge in the polls (after already leading, nationally, by an average of about 3.6%). In a similar situation, the current president and his team decided it was time to debate, saying a televised contest would “reset” the race; the subsequent performance cost Joe Biden the Democratic nomination.
Perhaps that’s why Trump himself is doubting his own commitments.
“Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump posted on social media Sunday night, complaining about an ABC News interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and panel discussion earlier that day, saying the former was “biased” and the latter full of “Trump Haters.” The Republican nominee filled the rest of his post with tedious name calling — “Crooked,” “Marxist” — and attacks on the insufficiently fawning journalists of ABC.
“They’ve got a lot o questions to answer!!!” Trump posted just after 10 p.m. Eastern. “Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”
The former president already agreed to debate Harris on Sept. 10, which was originally slated to be the second of two televised confrontations with Biden. He did so after previously trying to pull out of the event when Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, initially claiming the debate was off because Biden was out of the race and then trying to move it to the friendlier waters of Fox News, a media platform that was forced to pay out $787 million after admitting that it cynically aired what its knew to be MAGA lies about the 2020 election.
This last read is from the New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky. “Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him. Kamala Harris gets it. Yes, we should fear Trump—but we should also mock him mercilessly because it drives him nuts.”
Donald Trump is in free fall. Read this description from Sunday’s Washington Post of how the GOP nominee spent last week: “[A]ides did not want a situation where he was watching the convention every night, getting angry, and then just golfing all day and stewing, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions. Trump also had grown annoyed with the news coverage that depicted him as not working as hard as his opponent, one person who talked to him said.”
If you didn’t know that the article was about Trump and you just read it cold without knowledge of the context, you might think it was a description of parents trying to figure out how to handle an ungovernable four-year-old. So they convinced Trump to get out of Bedminster and hit the road, trading suck-ups with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the past, Trump has called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of the Kennedy family and a “radical left lunatic.” Kennedy has called Trump a “terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath.”
Will RFK’s endorsement get Trump a few votes? It might. But these two unprincipled freakos deserve each other, and if it ever looks like RFK might matter, all Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have to do is say something like that.
Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences—but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.… Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?
And third and most of all: Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in. He probably likes it when we call him a fascist or authoritarian, because it expresses fear of him, and he aches to be feared. It acknowledges his power. This motivates him and makes him stronger.
Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.
And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?
Brilliant! When he goes low, we make fun of him and call him weird. He becomes lethargic and fussy. He says weird things and makes weird decisions. That’s a daily event in Day Cares everywhere and evidently in not-so-posh Jersey Golf Clubs with Galas for Criminals. This is getting fun.
Embrace the JOY!!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/26/mostly-monday-reads-the-weirdo-trifecta/
#2024ABCPresidentialDebate #2024PresidentialCampaign #Repeat1968 #DonOldWeirdo #J6FelonsGala #JDVanceWeirdo #JohnBuss #KamalaHarrisForThePeople #RFKJrWeirdo
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“I know they wanted JFK Jr, but RFK Jr is a nice addition to the trump campaign.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
The Trumplican Party continues to devolve. I doubt my father would even recognize it if he were alive. The latest example is the addition of RFK Jr., a conspiracy nut with habits that the word eccentric can’t even begin to describe. This headline from The Wrap, written by Stephanie Kaloi, is something regular folks can’t wrap their head around. “RFK Jr.’s Daughter Says Dad Cut Off a Whale’s Head, Drove It 5 Hours Home. When they would accelerate, “whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kick Kennedy explained to Town & Country Magazine.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s daughter Kick Kennedy may or may not be spending time with Jennifer Lopez’s estranged husband Ben Affleck (as reported by Page Six), but she certainly spent time with Town & Country Magazine for a profile that has been resurfaced and made waves on social media, in which she shared an anecdote about her father and a dead whale that still checks out with what we know about the odd politician — especially when it comes to his love for dead animals.
When she was 6, her dad chopped off the head of a whale that washed up on Squaw Island in Hyannis Port. Due to RFK Jr.’s love of studying animal skulls and skeletons, they then strapped the dead whale’s head to the car and spent five hours driving it to their home.
“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet,” Kennedy said. “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.”
RFK Jr. made headlines earlier this month when he shared the story of taking a dead bear that he found as roadkill, intent on saving it to eat, before ultimately dumping it in a bizarre prank in New York City’s Central Park. On Friday, the independent candidate dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Donald Trump.
RFK Jr. approached the Harris/Walz campaign, but they didn’t answer his calls. That’s just some American common sense with nothing to do with political savvy. What possible benefit could his addition add to a campaign? But he’s just another (yawn) Maga Sideshow full of weirdos who generally wind up in trouble with the law, one way or another. His J6 “gala” next month will undoubtedly highlight the number of criminals that actually might actually violate his terms of release. Also, Rudy Guilliani will be there. He is definitely on the Trumplican weirdo and felon list. This information popped up on Alternet, and I just had to share it. “Trump’s ‘gala’ honoring ‘courage and sacrifice’ of J6 rioters may violate his terms of release” is written by Carl Gibson and answers my call out to all the parole officers in charge of these folks.
Convicted felon and 45th President of the United States Donald Trump is planning on hosting a gathering of other convicted felons next month. One legal expert is pointing out that the event may frustrate his efforts to remain a free man.
According to NJ.com, the ex-president is hosting a “J6 awards gala” at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club next month. Progressive group MeidasTouch reported that on September 5, Trump will be joined by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and MAGA influencer Anthony Raimondi at the event, where he is expected to personally address participants in the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
…
However, if Trump follows through with the gala, it may complicate his own legal situation. According to attorney Tristan Snell – who prosecuted the former president over his sham Trump University while at the New York Attorney General’s office — New York state law would prohibit such an event given the expected guest list.
“Someone should alert Trump’s probation officer — because convicted felons are legally prohibited from associating with other felons,” he tweeted.
While Trump has been convicted by a jury on 34 class E felony counts, he won’t be sentenced until September 18. At that point, assuming the former president isn’t ordered to serve time behind bars (Judge Juan Merchan has the ability to sentence him to as much as 20 years in prison), he will then be issued a probation officer, who he will be required to check in with on a regular basis. This means the September 5 event will be legal, though it likely won’t help his case when he appears before Merchan less than two weeks later.
The former president narrowly dodged the ire of prosecutors at last month’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade pointed out that some of the convention’s attendees included indicted “fake electors,” and that Trump seen associating with them may have resulted in Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and/or Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis petitioning the court to incarcerate Trump prior to his trial for consorting with criminal defendants.
DonOld is facing new lawsuits from musicians who don’t want their music to be associated with MAGA craziness. The first to take action was the son of Issa Hayes. This is reported in the Daily Beast by Clay Walker. “Isaac Hayes Estate Marks Victory in Suit Against Trump.” The candidate and the campaign continue to act like laws don’t matter.
The estate of the late soul singer Isaac Hayes is moving forward in their lawsuit against Donald Trump for using a song co-written by the artist. “The Federal Court has granted our request for an Emergency Hearing to secure injunctive relief,” the late singer’s son, Isaac Hayes III, wrote on X Friday. According to Hayes III, Trump himself will have to appear in court in September. The lawsuit was originally filed earlier this month and sought $3 million for the former president’s campaign’s unauthorized use of “Hold On, I’m Coming,” a 1960s song originally performed by duo Sam & Dave, more than 100 times. Prior to the filing, the Trump campaign was asked to discontinue the use of the song, but things came to a head on August 10, the anniversary of the singer’s 2008 death, when Trump used it again at a Montana rally. “Donald Trump represents the worst in integrity and class with his disrespect and sexual abuse of Women and racist rhetoric. We will now deal with this very swiftly,” Hayes III wrote on X.
Next up in court is the band Foo Fighters. This is from The Hill. “Trump campaign disputes Foo Fighters claim song use was unauthorized.” Laura Sforza writes on the Foo Fight.
A spokesperson for the Foo Fighters said in a statement to The Hill late Sunday the band did not give permission to the Trump campaign to use the song at a Friday campaign rally in Arizona. The spokesperson said any royalties the band earns off the song would be donated to Vice President Harris’s campaign.“Foo Fighters were not asked permission, and if they were they would not have granted it,” the spokesperson said.
However, the Trump campaign said it had permission to play the song.
“We have a license to play the song,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an email to The Hill.
He also took to the social platform X to dispute the claim.
“It’s Times Like These facts matter, don’t be a Pretender. @foofighters,” he wrote, referring to two other songs by the band.
“My Hero” could be heard playing at Trump’s rally in Glendale on Friday as the former president introduced former presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign earlier in the day and threw his support behind Trump.
And there’s more in the Weirdos and Felons news. We have this from the LGBTQ Nation. Seriously, we’ve gone way past the deplorable basket at this point. “MAGA ex-GOP party chair calls gay lawmaker a “f*g” on social media. She called Pete Buttigieg a “weak little girl” in 2022, before she got indicted.” This is written by Alex Bollinger.
A former high-ranking state Republican official who has been indicted in an alleged conspiracy to steal the 2020 election used an anti-gay slur to describe a gay Democratic lawmaker.
Meshawn Maddock used to be the head of the Michigan Republican Party until shortly after she was charged in connection to a scheme to make Michigan’s votes go to Donald Trump in 2020 instead of President Joe Biden, who won the state. Now she is now using slurs on social media.
She was responding to a post on X from Michigan state Rep. Jason Morgan (D), who is an out gay lawmaker and the vice chair of the state’s Democratic Party. Morgan posted a picture of the Michigan congressional delegation at the DNC last Friday, where they were smiling and holding American flags.
“F*gs and hags,” Maddock responded. X responded by reducing the visibility of her post due to a potential violation of the platform’s Hateful Conduct policy. However, the post has not been deleted by the platform.
Stay Classy you god-fearing Christians you! I have to agree with this Op-Ed headline at The Hill. “The right’s killjoy politics only fuel Harris’s momentum.” It’s written by Svante Myrick.
It’s been a couple of days since I flew home after attending the Democratic National Convention. And at the risk of sounding corny, I think I could have done it without the plane. To attend that convention was to experience a sense of joy so powerful that it made you feel like you had wings.
My organization, People for the American Way, was very excited to bring to the convention posters designed especially for us by the artist Victoria Cassinova, which we felt represented the pride and hopefulness of this campaign.
The posters featured a portrait of Harris with the single word: “Freedom.”
We had fun posting them all over the city. We were thrilled to see lots of residents and convention-goers admiring them and taking pictures and selfies. Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) shared hers on Instagram.
Then, on the third night of the convention, something sad happened. A group calling itself Artists for Kennedy and Trump defaced a wall of these Harris portraits.
Capturing themselves on video, the vandals spray-painted crimson streaks across the images, focusing on the portrait’s face and eyes. They used words like “war” to describe what they were doing.
It was an ugly but galvanizing reminder of what we’re up against in this race.
I — we — have had enough of creepy authoritarians trying to censor art, ban books and steal our joy.
Because while art does give joy, it also gives strength. It has always been a tool to challenge injustice and enforced conformity, to resist oppression and authoritarianism. That’s why dictators down through history have suppressed and banned art and even murdered artists.
It’s why artists and creators face an enormous threat today, not just from vandals roaming the streets of Chicago but from the deadly serious, powerful operatives behind Project 2025, who are intent on stigmatizing and suppressing vast numbers of artworks by calling them “pornography.”
I remember being shocked and stunned by Trump stalking Hillary on the debate stage and the lack of response to it by the debate’s moderators. Now I think we know exactly how low they go, and as far as I can tell, there is no bottom. If they stage an insurrection and try to nullify votes, they’ll do anything, and we should all be prepared. So, the Harris/DonOld debate with ABC is now in jeopardy. I bet we all had this on our bingo card. This is from Marianne Levine, who is writing for the Washington Post. “Trump suggests he might skip ABC debate with Harris. The Sept. 10 debate with ABC is the only one both campaigns have agreed to.”
Former president Donald Trump suggested Sunday evening that he might skip a Sept. 10 ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris (D), after agreeing earlier this month to participate.
“I watched ABC FAKE NEWS this morning, both lightweight reporter Jonathan Carl’s (K?) ridiculous and biased interview of Tom Cotton (who was fantastic!), and their so-called Panel of Trump Haters, and I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump asked in a social media post Sunday evening.
During a campaign stop Monday after visiting Arlington National Cemetery, Trump reiterated his criticism of ABC News, calling it “the single worst network for unfairness” and saying that ABC “really should be shut out.”
The Sept. 10 debate is the only one that both campaigns have officially committed to. Trump’s renewed questioning of the ABC News debate comes as Harris has increased her lead in national polls and is gaining ground in key swing states. As of Sunday, The Washington Post polling average has the vice president leading in Wisconsin by three percentage points, in Pennsylvania by two points and in Michigan by less than one point. Trump continues to lead in four Sun Belt swing states, but Harris has significantly narrowed the gap.
The latest rift between the campaigns is about the terms and conditions about how the debate would work. Brian Fallon, the Harris campaign’s senior adviser for communications, said in a statement that the campaign has told ABC and other networks that “both candidates’ microphones should be live throughout the full broadcast.”
“Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own,” Fallon said.
When asked by a reporter Monday about whether he wanted his microphone muted, Trump replied, “Doesn’t matter to me, I’d rather have it probably on.”
Jason Miller, senior adviser to the Trump campaign, said the campaign agreed to the “the ABC debate under the exact same terms as the CNN debate,” referring to a June 27 debate between Trump and President Joe Biden, before Biden ended his reelection campaign.
Oh, I officially quit the New York Times a while ago. I would like to say that seeing the headline on a guest’s op-ed today reinforced my excellent decision. Here’s a brief statement: I agree with her. I can’t say
more because I refuse to read it. Rich Lowry can bite his crank for writing “Trump Can Win on Character.” RIFF NYT. Rest in Fuckery and Failure.
Now, back to the normal news. This is from Salon’s Charles R. Davis. As the Vice President said, she’s been a prosecutor and knows his type. “”He’s now terrified of debating her”: Trump’s debate flip-flop is a sign Harris has him figured out. The former president suggested Sunday that he would not attend his scheduled Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris.”
Donald Trump is not feeling great. This year alone he’s been found liable by a jury for sexual assault, convicted by another jury on 34 felony counts of fraud, and shot at by a young registered Republican at a campaign rally, the one previously safe space where the president could comfortably rant and complain to certain applause. Then he had to spend a week at home watching Democrats pull off their convention without a hitch, just a month after an unprecedented switch at the top of the ticket.
The former president’s own campaign is publicly predicting that Vice President Kamala Harris will now surge in the polls (after already leading, nationally, by an average of about 3.6%). In a similar situation, the current president and his team decided it was time to debate, saying a televised contest would “reset” the race; the subsequent performance cost Joe Biden the Democratic nomination.
Perhaps that’s why Trump himself is doubting his own commitments.
“Why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Trump posted on social media Sunday night, complaining about an ABC News interview with Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and panel discussion earlier that day, saying the former was “biased” and the latter full of “Trump Haters.” The Republican nominee filled the rest of his post with tedious name calling — “Crooked,” “Marxist” — and attacks on the insufficiently fawning journalists of ABC.
“They’ve got a lot o questions to answer!!!” Trump posted just after 10 p.m. Eastern. “Why did Harris turn down Fox, NBC, CBS, and even CNN? Stay tuned!!!”
The former president already agreed to debate Harris on Sept. 10, which was originally slated to be the second of two televised confrontations with Biden. He did so after previously trying to pull out of the event when Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, initially claiming the debate was off because Biden was out of the race and then trying to move it to the friendlier waters of Fox News, a media platform that was forced to pay out $787 million after admitting that it cynically aired what its knew to be MAGA lies about the 2020 election.
This last read is from the New Republic‘s Michael Tomasky. “Finally, the Democrats Have Found Trump’s Achilles’ Heel: Ridicule Him. Kamala Harris gets it. Yes, we should fear Trump—but we should also mock him mercilessly because it drives him nuts.”
Donald Trump is in free fall. Read this description from Sunday’s Washington Post of how the GOP nominee spent last week: “[A]ides did not want a situation where he was watching the convention every night, getting angry, and then just golfing all day and stewing, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private interactions. Trump also had grown annoyed with the news coverage that depicted him as not working as hard as his opponent, one person who talked to him said.”
If you didn’t know that the article was about Trump and you just read it cold without knowledge of the context, you might think it was a description of parents trying to figure out how to handle an ungovernable four-year-old. So they convinced Trump to get out of Bedminster and hit the road, trading suck-ups with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In the past, Trump has called Kennedy the “dumbest member” of the Kennedy family and a “radical left lunatic.” Kennedy has called Trump a “terrible human being” and “probably a sociopath.”
Will RFK’s endorsement get Trump a few votes? It might. But these two unprincipled freakos deserve each other, and if it ever looks like RFK might matter, all Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have to do is say something like that.
Harris’s campaign so far has been a work of genius on several levels, but maybe the most ingenious stroke of all has been the decision to mock Trump—to present him not only as someone to fear but also to ridicule. Harris perfectly encapsulated this two-pronged attack in these memorable lines from her acceptance speech: “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences—but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.… Just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails.”
But the emphasis has been on ridicule (Tim Walz’s “weird” comment, Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s jab at Trump’s bone spurs, Barack Obama’s hilarious hand gesture when he was talking about Trump’s obsession with crowd size). It’s great on three levels. The first is that it must drive Trump nuts, and when he goes nuts, he says especially nutty things. Second, it’s arguably more persuasive to swing voters than calling Trump a fascist. Trump is a fascist, make no mistake. But he’s also ridiculous. Mocking him over his Hannibal Lecter obsession will stick in apolitical people’s minds far more strongly than warning about his plans to wreck the Justice Department, and in its way, it’s just as disqualifying. Do we really want a president who thinks an eater of human flesh, however fictional, was misunderstood?
And third and most of all: Sustained ridicule has the potential to reinforce the downward spiral Trump is now in. He probably likes it when we call him a fascist or authoritarian, because it expresses fear of him, and he aches to be feared. It acknowledges his power. This motivates him and makes him stronger.
Ridicule makes him weaker. Ridicule makes him small. Ridicule makes him desperate. He’ll try to respond with ridicule of his own, but he is not a clever man. He’s a stupid man. He has no wit. He has no sense of mischief. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t think beyond first reactions. These nicknames of his, which the press has made such a big deal of over the years—they’re nothing. They’re dick contests put into words. Little Marco, Sleepy Joe. There’s nothing remotely clever about any of them.
And now he reportedly thinks he’s come up with a great one in “Communist Kamala.” Well, it’s alliterative, I’ll give him that. But I doubt very much that it’ll play beyond the base. First of all, people under 40 barely know what a communist was. Even for older people who do know, is communism the specter it once was?
Brilliant! When he goes low, we make fun of him and call him weird. He becomes lethargic and fussy. He says weird things and makes weird decisions. That’s a daily event in Day Cares everywhere and evidently in not-so-posh Jersey Golf Clubs with Galas for Criminals. This is getting fun.
Embrace the JOY!!!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
https://skydancingblog.com/2024/08/26/mostly-monday-reads-the-weirdo-trifecta/
#2024ABCPresidentialDebate #2024PresidentialCampaign #Repeat1968 #DonOldWeirdo #J6FelonsGala #JDVanceWeirdo #JohnBuss #KamalaHarrisForThePeople #RFKJrWeirdo
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The thread about the Guse Pye; house of a poet and a painter that’s still there if you know where to look
There is a stunning watercolour landscape painting of Edinburgh in the mid-18th century, observed from the point of view of the Castle looking north to Leith by Paul Sandby (there’s a whole thread on that if you click the link). In the mid-ground of that picture is a prominent and intriguing building: a tall octagonal structure with a wing and portico to its front. This building was Ramsay Lodge or Ramsay Hut, the home of the romantic poet and stalwart figure of the Edinburgh enlightenment, Allan Ramsay.
“Edinburgh & the North Lock with the Bank on Which the New Town is Built” By Paul Sandby, c. 1750. Showing inset an enlargement of the prominent house in the mid-ground. Maps K.Top.50.96.b, British Library, PD.During his 4 years in Edinburgh, the young Paul Sandby – a military draughtsman engaged in assisting William Roy with his “Great Map” of North Britain – had become well acquainted with Allan Ramsay and a welcome addition to the social circle that redeveloped around him. It is therefore not surprising that his house features so prominently in this and another landscape painting by Sandby.
Ramsay was born in Leadhills, Lanarkshire, the son of the superintendent of the lead mines that gave the settlement its name. As a boy, he was apprenticed to a wigmaker in Edinburgh and it was in this trade that he would first find success, both financial and professional. A man of broad interests and intelligence, in 1720 he entered the book selling trade from his shop on Niddrie’s Wynd and in 1722 he relocated himself and the business to the Luckenbooths – 18th century Edinburgh’s premier retail space. It was from the first floor here,in 1725, that he opened Scotland’s first circulating library. This establishment had over 30,000 titles available to borrow and it became the hangout for city’s literati.
Allan Ramsay the Poet (1684 – 1758), by William Aikman. This painting belonged to Ramsay’s correspondent and patron, Sir John Clerk of Penicuik. Aikman was a friend of both men. CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandAs well as a businessman, Ramsay was something of a wit and a writer, and published his own work. His romantic poetry, exemplified by The Gentle Shepherd brought him critical acclaim and he found himself desiring a “poet’s nest” as befitting a bard of his standing. What he needed was a suburban retreat, at once in the heart of the city’s bustling Old Town but at the same time outwith its confines. He found this such a spot on the northern slopes of the Castle Hill, commanding views over the fields: past the smoky smudge on the shoreline of Leith and across the Forth and Fife beyond to the Highland mountains in the distance.
“Edinburgh Castle” by Paul Sandby, with the Guse Pye house bright and prominent on the Castle Hill. The West Kirk (St. Cuthbert’s) is the church at the head of the Nor Loch on the right. CC-by-NC-ND 3.0 Tate GalleryIn September 1733, Ramsay acquired a portion of garden land at this location from Robert Hope, a surgeon. In Memorials of Edinburgh, a story is related that he desired “as much land as he could get” to build a “cage for his burd” (i.e. his wife, of whom he was fond) and that this was the reason for its unusual, tall, octagonal structure. From an architectural point of view, it is thought the house may be inspired either by the Tower of the Winds in Athens or the 1720 Octagon Room of Orleans House in Twickenham by Scottish architect James Gibb for James Johnston, a former Secretary of State for Scotland.
View of the Tower of the Winds, Athens, Rey Etienne, 1867 (PD)The Octagon Room, Orleans House. CC-by 2.0 Matt BrownRamsay wanted the whole town to admire his mansion but the wags of the city derided his hubris and called his octagonal house the Guse Pye, after the shape of the traditional Scottish Christmas dish. Ramsay’s pride was hurt and he complained to Patrick Murray, 5th Lord Elibank, who retorted “Indeed, Allan, when I see you in it, I think the wags are not far wrong“. The ownership of the house was transferred to his son, also Allan Ramsay, in 1741. This Allan Ramsay is as famous as his father, but as a portrait painter, and he had designs on using the building as his studio (although he would spend most of his time away from his native City).
Allan Ramsay the Painter (1713 – 1784), copy of a self-portrait by Alexander Nasmyth. CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandIn 1742, Ramsay the Poet retired to his Guse Pye, shutting up his house and bookshop in the Luckenbooths. He intended to spend what would be the final 12 years of his life in “ease and tranquil enjoyment” however his burd, Christian Ross, died the following year. He was not alone in life however, as his company was courted by all ranks of Edinburgh, who sought him out at the Guse Pye. It is said that he preferred instead to be surrounded by his family and their young friends, joining in their fun and games with “hearty life and good humour“. These young friends included the Paul Sandby also painted a very intimate sketch of Ramsay smoking an enormous “Churchwarden’s Pipe” in the house. Surrounded by two young women; with a book on his table; a cup by his side to drink from and a candle burning on the wall, it is a very homely scene. Ramsay was a bit of a closet Anglophile at heart, desiring to be an equal with the London literary wits, and this talented young Englishman would have been a fine addition to his circle.
Alan Ramsay the Poet, in later life by Paul Sandby, c. 1750 RCIN 914403 © Royal Collection TrustWhen the Jacobites routed the Hanoverian Army under Sir John Cope at Prestonpans in September 1745, Ramsay the Poet – despite his known Jacobite sympathies (or perhaps because of them) – retired a safe distance to Mavisbank in Midlothian, the home of his correspondent and friend Sir John Clerk of Penicuik, 2nd Baronet. The Highland army of Charles Edward Stuart soon occupied the city, without resistance, where Ramsay the Painter, happened to be present on one of his infrequent sojourns north. Word was soon sent to him from the Palace of Holyroodhouse, desiring him to come at once and paint a picture of the Prince who hoped to be his King: which he did.
Prince Charles Edward Stuart, Allan Ramsay, 1745During this period, the Guse Pye found itself damaged by the cannons of Edinburgh Castle and then ransacked by the garrison, who damaged many of the buildings on the Castle Hill to try and stop them being occupied by the Jacobite pickets. The latter were under direct orders from the Young Pretender to prevent – on pain of death – supplies and communications from reaching the Castle. As the last building between the city and the Castle, Ramsay’s house was directly in the firing line. By November however the Prince and his army were gone south – as had Ramsay the Painter too – but unlike the Former, the latter would make it to London.
Allan Ramsay’s House and Garden, 1871. © City of Edinburgh CouncilThe Ramsays continued to extend their landholding on the Castle Hill; acquiring the portion further down the slope from the house in 1748 from the Hopes and adding a new frontage, new wing and a proper entryway as befitting a house of its status. In 1754, workmen improving the garden accidentally broke through into a subterranean chamber some 14 feet square. In amongst the rubble and detritus they found a statue of white stone with a crown upon its head – supposed to be a Virgin Mary – two brass candlesticks, a dozen old Scottish and French coins and two cannon balls. It was supposed that this space dated to the middle of the 16th century when a large fortification, known as the Spur, was built out of the castle by its French garrison under the Regent Mary of Guise. Another theory was it was the remains of a supposed medieval chapel to St. Andrew which had once stood on the castle hill.
When Ramsay the Poet died in 1757, his son the Painter succeeded to it and let it out. By 1759 it was occupied by William Johnston, an advocate and a member of Ramsay’s Select Society.
The Guse Pye, by George Manson (1850-1876). CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandIn 1765, Ramsay junior was granted permission to build two town houses – known as Ramsay Street – to the east of the Guse Pye, on the site of the town’s old Bell Foundry which he had acquired from the City. It was his intention that these houses, to designs by the family friend Robert Adam, should be “in the English fashion, fit to accommodate two small families of distinction“. These houses were never built and instead in 1768 he erected a terrace of three, four-storey houses, known as Ramsay Garden. One of these houses was occupied by Ramsay’s widowed mother-in-law and his sister in law.
The Ramsay Garden townhouses, with Patrick Geddes’ additions to the left. © Edinburgh City LibrariesRamsay the Painter spent little time in Scotland in the later years of his life and was appointed Principal Painter to His Majesty in London in 1767. But he continued to consolidate his land on the north slopes of the Castle Hill, acquiring the last portion of the Hope’s holding in 1773. He died in 1784, the lands and houses of Ramsay Garden now passing to his only surviving son, Captain (later General) John Ramsay.
General John Ramsay (1768-1845), by François Ferrière. CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandJohn had accompanied his late father on a “Grand Tour” of Italy in 1782, and despite a career as a soldier, he found time to take up painting himself. He died without issue and as a result the house and his fortune passed to a distant relative: Lord Murray of Henderland (for whom the district of Murrayfield is named). An 1850s plan to build a large terrace infront of the Guse Pye for the statue of Allan Ramsay senior, which now resides in West Princes Street Gardens, came to nothing.
Ramsay Garden and proposed terrace for a monument, engraging, 1853. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe houses of Ramsay Lodge and Ramsay Garden were let out, until the former was purchased in 1890 by the sociologist, philanthropist and pioneering town planner Patrick Geddes.
1878 Engraving of Poet’s Guse Pye House, with Ramsay Garden built by his son the painter on its left.Geddes engaged the architect Stewart Henbest Capper to design a 5-storey, arts and crafts fantasia around the Guse Pye. His intention was to establish a mixed community, composed of artisans and students alongside private dwellings, to promote regeneration in the decrepit Old Town of the City. Capper’s 1892 development was extended two years later by Sydney Mitchell, who incorporated, extended and redeveloped the Guse Pye and the original Ramsay Garden into the structure as a hall for residence for students, the first of its kind in Edinburgh.
The second phase of Geddes’ Ramsay Gardens under construction, by as unknown photographer, probably in 1895. CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandThe end result – which we’ll pluralise as Ramsay Gardens – was a striking complex, high up on the Castle Hill, a curious mix of late medieval and early modern Scottish architectural style and (then) modern ideas about construction and planning and one which rendered the original house almost unrecognisable. This rambling, highly ornamented and colourful building was in radical contrast to the prevailing, conservative architecture of Edinburgh at the time:
Ramsay Gardens, by H. D. Wyllie 1945. © Edinburgh City LibrariesThe grey old metropolis of the North had been getting greyer year by year with freestone and slate, when suddenly on the east slope of the Castle Hill, a bright-hued pile arose, shocking the devotees of drab.
Margaret Armour, writing in “The Studio”, 1897Geddes part-financed the project himself and when it was complete took up residence in one of its main apartments and established a co-operative publishing company from there. He also incorporated into it an art school, the Old Edinburgh School of Art, where the Celtic revival painter John Duncan led classes in design, metalwork, leatherwork, woodwork etc. in the spirit of the arts and crafts movement. It was Geddes who commissioned Duncan to design the Witches’ Well, which is installed nearby on the Castle Hill as a monument to those executed near that spot for witchcraft.
Geddes had further plans for the redevelopment, including arts studios and a sculpture gallery built into the slopes below, a gatehouse – crowned with a full-scale replica of the city’s old Netherbow Port – spanning Ramsay lane to link it into the quadrangle of the New College buildings and a new public hall next door atop the Castle Hill Reservoir. His various schemes financially overstretched him however and he was declared bankrupt, owing £60,000, in 1896, putting an end his ambitions. His friends and supporters set up a philanthropic company, the Town and Gown Association, to take over Ramsay Gardens and run it in the spirit with which he had intended it.
George Shaw Aitken’s unrealised final designs for Ramsay Gardens, including the studios and gallery to the front and the replica of the Netherbow Port tower to the left (the taller tower behind is the steeple of the Victoria Hall – the General Assembly building of the Church of Scotland – later the Highland Tolbooth St. John’s church.Ramsay Gardens was sold by the Town and Gown Association in 1945 to the Commercial Bank of Scotland, who used it as a residential building for staff and a training centre. It has subsequently passed into private hands and is a mix of exlusive residential homes, pieds-à–terre and holiday lets. The original houses of the two Allan Ramsays are still there in plain site, within this most famous of skylines, even if you’d hardly know it to look at them.
Ramsay Gardens, highlighting the core of the original Guse Pye house in orange, and Allan Ramsay junior’s Georgian terrace of Ramsay Garden in magenta. After CC-by-SA 3.0 David MonniauxNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
Report By Amy Corbin
Posted October 1, 2004
Updated April 1, 2010"For more than two decades, the #Shoshone and #Paiute peoples, scientists, #environmentalists, the federal government, Nevada citizens and politicians have wrestled over the fate of Yucca Mountain. The federal government had selected the mountain to become the nation’s primary dumping ground for deadly, high-level #NuclearWaste, but the long-contested project is at last on its way to being closed. Meanwhile, the #WesternShoshone fight off federal efforts to sell their land in order to give multinational #corporations access to its #mineral resources. But the Western Shoshone stand firm. Raymond Yowell, Chief of the Western Shoshone National Council, said, 'Western Shoshone title is still intact… We’ve never accepted their money and never will — our land, the earth mother is not for sale and we will protect her and continue our responsibilities as caretakers under the Creator’s law.'
The Land and Its People
"Yucca Mountain is located within the Western Shoshone Nation and has long been a place of powerful spiritual energy for the Shoshone and the Paiute. To the Western Shoshone it is #SnakeMountain, a place with rock rings that transmit prayers to the Great Spirit and messages back to the people. The late Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney told a traditional story that Snake Mountain will one day be awakened and split open, spewing out poison. This prophecy may predict the potential disaster of #volcanic activity and nuclear waste leakage. Shoshone ancestors are buried in the mountain and the water in the area is sacred, as it is with many desert peoples.
"The 60 million acres of Western Shoshone territory in Nevada, Idaho, Utah and California, which includes Yucca Mountain, was never deeded to the U.S. government. According to the 1863 #RubyValleyTreaty that the Shoshone signed with the government, most of the area now used by the U.S. military for #NuclearWeapons testing and the proposed waste storage site was explicitly recognized as Shoshone land. However, the U.S. government now claims 80 to 90 percent of it, meaning that the Shoshone are unable to control what happens on their ancestral land. Legislators continue to try to persuade the Shoshone to accept financial compensation for this land, which most view as a way to extinguish aboriginal title and preclude future land claims, easing the way for renewed nuclear weapons testing and waste storage, as well as resource #extraction.
"In the late 1970s government scientists began to study Yucca Mountain as a possible repository for nuclear waste, and since 1987 it has been the only site considered for 77,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste. While the Yucca Mountain Project has been debated, the amount of nuclear waste needing burial has already surpassed what the repository was designed to hold. In the meantime, nuclear waste continues to sit in steel-lined pools or casks near power plants throughout the country that produce 2,000 tons of high-level waste per year. The waste is lethal for 10,000 years and dangerous for 250,000 years."
[...]
"The Yucca Mountain Project calls for the highly radioactive nuclear waste to be encased in steel containers and buried deep in the mountain. Since the canisters will last for 1,000 years at most, the dryness of the mountain will have to guarantee against leakage and migration — an assumption that environmentalists and many scientists say is flawed and dangerous. Surface water percolating into the mountain will carry radioactive particles into the water table and render it toxic. This water table currently supplies water to local communities and farming regions that produce food products for the entire country.
"In 2005, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman confirmed that internal department e-mails allude to the #falsification of data on how quickly water flows through Yucca Mountain. This revelation caused a federal investigation, and condemnation from Congress triggered the Department of Energy to completely reorganize the project and lay off 500 employees. Robert Hager, attorney for the Western Shoshone, said that the Yucca site would have been disqualified years ago if the true nature of the subterranean water flow was known.
"With several local #FaultLines and a #volcano nearby, earthquakes make it likely that the mountain will fracture the repository and send even more water to the waste. There are also grave concerns about the safety of transporting nuclear waste over long distances through several U.S. states, particularly in an era of terrorist threats. During the later Bush years, as environmental concerns mounted and citizens from other states grew more leery, the project began to look more and more unlikely."
Read more:
https://sacredland.org/yucca-mountain-united-states/#EnvironmentalRacism #Pauite #PauiteShoshone #CulturalGenocide #NativeAmericans #nuclear #nuclearwaste #WaterIsLife #RespectTheTreaties #NoNukes #NoDumping
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Report By Amy Corbin
Posted October 1, 2004
Updated April 1, 2010"For more than two decades, the #Shoshone and #Paiute peoples, scientists, #environmentalists, the federal government, Nevada citizens and politicians have wrestled over the fate of Yucca Mountain. The federal government had selected the mountain to become the nation’s primary dumping ground for deadly, high-level #NuclearWaste, but the long-contested project is at last on its way to being closed. Meanwhile, the #WesternShoshone fight off federal efforts to sell their land in order to give multinational #corporations access to its #mineral resources. But the Western Shoshone stand firm. Raymond Yowell, Chief of the Western Shoshone National Council, said, 'Western Shoshone title is still intact… We’ve never accepted their money and never will — our land, the earth mother is not for sale and we will protect her and continue our responsibilities as caretakers under the Creator’s law.'
The Land and Its People
"Yucca Mountain is located within the Western Shoshone Nation and has long been a place of powerful spiritual energy for the Shoshone and the Paiute. To the Western Shoshone it is #SnakeMountain, a place with rock rings that transmit prayers to the Great Spirit and messages back to the people. The late Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney told a traditional story that Snake Mountain will one day be awakened and split open, spewing out poison. This prophecy may predict the potential disaster of #volcanic activity and nuclear waste leakage. Shoshone ancestors are buried in the mountain and the water in the area is sacred, as it is with many desert peoples.
"The 60 million acres of Western Shoshone territory in Nevada, Idaho, Utah and California, which includes Yucca Mountain, was never deeded to the U.S. government. According to the 1863 #RubyValleyTreaty that the Shoshone signed with the government, most of the area now used by the U.S. military for #NuclearWeapons testing and the proposed waste storage site was explicitly recognized as Shoshone land. However, the U.S. government now claims 80 to 90 percent of it, meaning that the Shoshone are unable to control what happens on their ancestral land. Legislators continue to try to persuade the Shoshone to accept financial compensation for this land, which most view as a way to extinguish aboriginal title and preclude future land claims, easing the way for renewed nuclear weapons testing and waste storage, as well as resource #extraction.
"In the late 1970s government scientists began to study Yucca Mountain as a possible repository for nuclear waste, and since 1987 it has been the only site considered for 77,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste. While the Yucca Mountain Project has been debated, the amount of nuclear waste needing burial has already surpassed what the repository was designed to hold. In the meantime, nuclear waste continues to sit in steel-lined pools or casks near power plants throughout the country that produce 2,000 tons of high-level waste per year. The waste is lethal for 10,000 years and dangerous for 250,000 years."
[...]
"The Yucca Mountain Project calls for the highly radioactive nuclear waste to be encased in steel containers and buried deep in the mountain. Since the canisters will last for 1,000 years at most, the dryness of the mountain will have to guarantee against leakage and migration — an assumption that environmentalists and many scientists say is flawed and dangerous. Surface water percolating into the mountain will carry radioactive particles into the water table and render it toxic. This water table currently supplies water to local communities and farming regions that produce food products for the entire country.
"In 2005, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman confirmed that internal department e-mails allude to the #falsification of data on how quickly water flows through Yucca Mountain. This revelation caused a federal investigation, and condemnation from Congress triggered the Department of Energy to completely reorganize the project and lay off 500 employees. Robert Hager, attorney for the Western Shoshone, said that the Yucca site would have been disqualified years ago if the true nature of the subterranean water flow was known.
"With several local #FaultLines and a #volcano nearby, earthquakes make it likely that the mountain will fracture the repository and send even more water to the waste. There are also grave concerns about the safety of transporting nuclear waste over long distances through several U.S. states, particularly in an era of terrorist threats. During the later Bush years, as environmental concerns mounted and citizens from other states grew more leery, the project began to look more and more unlikely."
Read more:
https://sacredland.org/yucca-mountain-united-states/#EnvironmentalRacism #Pauite #PauiteShoshone #CulturalGenocide #NativeAmericans #nuclear #nuclearwaste #WaterIsLife #RespectTheTreaties #NoNukes #NoDumping
-
Report By Amy Corbin
Posted October 1, 2004
Updated April 1, 2010"For more than two decades, the #Shoshone and #Paiute peoples, scientists, #environmentalists, the federal government, Nevada citizens and politicians have wrestled over the fate of Yucca Mountain. The federal government had selected the mountain to become the nation’s primary dumping ground for deadly, high-level #NuclearWaste, but the long-contested project is at last on its way to being closed. Meanwhile, the #WesternShoshone fight off federal efforts to sell their land in order to give multinational #corporations access to its #mineral resources. But the Western Shoshone stand firm. Raymond Yowell, Chief of the Western Shoshone National Council, said, 'Western Shoshone title is still intact… We’ve never accepted their money and never will — our land, the earth mother is not for sale and we will protect her and continue our responsibilities as caretakers under the Creator’s law.'
The Land and Its People
"Yucca Mountain is located within the Western Shoshone Nation and has long been a place of powerful spiritual energy for the Shoshone and the Paiute. To the Western Shoshone it is #SnakeMountain, a place with rock rings that transmit prayers to the Great Spirit and messages back to the people. The late Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney told a traditional story that Snake Mountain will one day be awakened and split open, spewing out poison. This prophecy may predict the potential disaster of #volcanic activity and nuclear waste leakage. Shoshone ancestors are buried in the mountain and the water in the area is sacred, as it is with many desert peoples.
"The 60 million acres of Western Shoshone territory in Nevada, Idaho, Utah and California, which includes Yucca Mountain, was never deeded to the U.S. government. According to the 1863 #RubyValleyTreaty that the Shoshone signed with the government, most of the area now used by the U.S. military for #NuclearWeapons testing and the proposed waste storage site was explicitly recognized as Shoshone land. However, the U.S. government now claims 80 to 90 percent of it, meaning that the Shoshone are unable to control what happens on their ancestral land. Legislators continue to try to persuade the Shoshone to accept financial compensation for this land, which most view as a way to extinguish aboriginal title and preclude future land claims, easing the way for renewed nuclear weapons testing and waste storage, as well as resource #extraction.
"In the late 1970s government scientists began to study Yucca Mountain as a possible repository for nuclear waste, and since 1987 it has been the only site considered for 77,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste. While the Yucca Mountain Project has been debated, the amount of nuclear waste needing burial has already surpassed what the repository was designed to hold. In the meantime, nuclear waste continues to sit in steel-lined pools or casks near power plants throughout the country that produce 2,000 tons of high-level waste per year. The waste is lethal for 10,000 years and dangerous for 250,000 years."
[...]
"The Yucca Mountain Project calls for the highly radioactive nuclear waste to be encased in steel containers and buried deep in the mountain. Since the canisters will last for 1,000 years at most, the dryness of the mountain will have to guarantee against leakage and migration — an assumption that environmentalists and many scientists say is flawed and dangerous. Surface water percolating into the mountain will carry radioactive particles into the water table and render it toxic. This water table currently supplies water to local communities and farming regions that produce food products for the entire country.
"In 2005, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman confirmed that internal department e-mails allude to the #falsification of data on how quickly water flows through Yucca Mountain. This revelation caused a federal investigation, and condemnation from Congress triggered the Department of Energy to completely reorganize the project and lay off 500 employees. Robert Hager, attorney for the Western Shoshone, said that the Yucca site would have been disqualified years ago if the true nature of the subterranean water flow was known.
"With several local #FaultLines and a #volcano nearby, earthquakes make it likely that the mountain will fracture the repository and send even more water to the waste. There are also grave concerns about the safety of transporting nuclear waste over long distances through several U.S. states, particularly in an era of terrorist threats. During the later Bush years, as environmental concerns mounted and citizens from other states grew more leery, the project began to look more and more unlikely."
Read more:
https://sacredland.org/yucca-mountain-united-states/#EnvironmentalRacism #Pauite #PauiteShoshone #CulturalGenocide #NativeAmericans #nuclear #nuclearwaste #WaterIsLife #RespectTheTreaties #NoNukes #NoDumping
-
Report By Amy Corbin
Posted October 1, 2004
Updated April 1, 2010"For more than two decades, the #Shoshone and #Paiute peoples, scientists, #environmentalists, the federal government, Nevada citizens and politicians have wrestled over the fate of Yucca Mountain. The federal government had selected the mountain to become the nation’s primary dumping ground for deadly, high-level #NuclearWaste, but the long-contested project is at last on its way to being closed. Meanwhile, the #WesternShoshone fight off federal efforts to sell their land in order to give multinational #corporations access to its #mineral resources. But the Western Shoshone stand firm. Raymond Yowell, Chief of the Western Shoshone National Council, said, 'Western Shoshone title is still intact… We’ve never accepted their money and never will — our land, the earth mother is not for sale and we will protect her and continue our responsibilities as caretakers under the Creator’s law.'
The Land and Its People
"Yucca Mountain is located within the Western Shoshone Nation and has long been a place of powerful spiritual energy for the Shoshone and the Paiute. To the Western Shoshone it is #SnakeMountain, a place with rock rings that transmit prayers to the Great Spirit and messages back to the people. The late Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney told a traditional story that Snake Mountain will one day be awakened and split open, spewing out poison. This prophecy may predict the potential disaster of #volcanic activity and nuclear waste leakage. Shoshone ancestors are buried in the mountain and the water in the area is sacred, as it is with many desert peoples.
"The 60 million acres of Western Shoshone territory in Nevada, Idaho, Utah and California, which includes Yucca Mountain, was never deeded to the U.S. government. According to the 1863 #RubyValleyTreaty that the Shoshone signed with the government, most of the area now used by the U.S. military for #NuclearWeapons testing and the proposed waste storage site was explicitly recognized as Shoshone land. However, the U.S. government now claims 80 to 90 percent of it, meaning that the Shoshone are unable to control what happens on their ancestral land. Legislators continue to try to persuade the Shoshone to accept financial compensation for this land, which most view as a way to extinguish aboriginal title and preclude future land claims, easing the way for renewed nuclear weapons testing and waste storage, as well as resource #extraction.
"In the late 1970s government scientists began to study Yucca Mountain as a possible repository for nuclear waste, and since 1987 it has been the only site considered for 77,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste. While the Yucca Mountain Project has been debated, the amount of nuclear waste needing burial has already surpassed what the repository was designed to hold. In the meantime, nuclear waste continues to sit in steel-lined pools or casks near power plants throughout the country that produce 2,000 tons of high-level waste per year. The waste is lethal for 10,000 years and dangerous for 250,000 years."
[...]
"The Yucca Mountain Project calls for the highly radioactive nuclear waste to be encased in steel containers and buried deep in the mountain. Since the canisters will last for 1,000 years at most, the dryness of the mountain will have to guarantee against leakage and migration — an assumption that environmentalists and many scientists say is flawed and dangerous. Surface water percolating into the mountain will carry radioactive particles into the water table and render it toxic. This water table currently supplies water to local communities and farming regions that produce food products for the entire country.
"In 2005, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman confirmed that internal department e-mails allude to the #falsification of data on how quickly water flows through Yucca Mountain. This revelation caused a federal investigation, and condemnation from Congress triggered the Department of Energy to completely reorganize the project and lay off 500 employees. Robert Hager, attorney for the Western Shoshone, said that the Yucca site would have been disqualified years ago if the true nature of the subterranean water flow was known.
"With several local #FaultLines and a #volcano nearby, earthquakes make it likely that the mountain will fracture the repository and send even more water to the waste. There are also grave concerns about the safety of transporting nuclear waste over long distances through several U.S. states, particularly in an era of terrorist threats. During the later Bush years, as environmental concerns mounted and citizens from other states grew more leery, the project began to look more and more unlikely."
Read more:
https://sacredland.org/yucca-mountain-united-states/#EnvironmentalRacism #Pauite #PauiteShoshone #CulturalGenocide #NativeAmericans #nuclear #nuclearwaste #WaterIsLife #RespectTheTreaties #NoNukes #NoDumping
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A Long History of Ableism – The Changeling Narrative
The Devil as he replaces an infant with a changeling.A few weeks ago, the American Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy claimed that use of the pain medication Tylenol in pregnant women is linked to autistic children – an absurd claim without any scientific evidence to its name. But this fits into a larger pattern of hysteria about and against people with autism, including blaming the mothers for something allegedly being “wrong” with their autistic children.
While the specifics of this particular hysteria are new, the general pattern is not – as I shall show, it fits into the “changeling” narratives where “apparently healthy” infants were switched by spirits with entities that appeared to be “misbehaving” or disabled in some manner.
Content warning: Ableism, child abuse, and infanticide.
The Grass Devil
A long time ago, a maid lived at Siegburg who was a serf of the monastery.[1] She gave birth to a little boy before she was led to the altar by a man. She suffered a harsh punishment for becoming a mother in such a sinful manner. For when her child was a few months old and it was the time for the hay harvest, she took the little one with her to work when she was called up to do her labors on the meadow.[2] And when she was preoccupied with turning grass over,[3] she put him down on a half-dry heap. She was working at a stone throw’s distance in this manner when he started to cry pitifully. Then she went there in order to breastfeed him. But even though the child had been calm and content until now, she was no longer able to satiate him.
And he seemed to be completely changed, for he cried nonstop day and night and partook of so much nourishment that ten children might have been satiated by it otherwise. He furthermore caused a lot of hardship to the mother because of his overwhelming filthiness. During all this, he did not grow, did not gain any weight, but stayed like he was, which bothered the mother greatly and which she tearfully lamented to clever women.
Then she heard from everyone that the child had been bewitched, and that there would be no other way of curing him than to bring him to St. Cyriacus at Overrath, weigh him on the scales of Cyriacus, and give him something to drink from Cyriacus’ Well.[4] This was the custom in those times which is still adhered to in our days. Children who do not grow and thrive will be weighed on the great scales of St. Cyriacus, and people are then convinced that, by the ninth day after this, the fate of the weighed child will be decided to be either death or recovery.
The sorrowful mother saw no other path to saving her child, and thus went on the way, carrying her child, until she had reached the Acher bridge.[5] Then the little glutton seemed to be so heavy to her that she was unable to proceed further, and, gasping for breath and drenched in sweat, leaned against the guardrails of the bridge.
At this moment, a traveling mendicant monk came along the path, spoke to the exhausted woman in a friendly manner, bid her greetings, and said: “Well, my dear woman, what kind of horrible creature do you have on your back? That one will push you into the ground if you do not let it go.”
“It is my dear child”, replied the sorrowful mother, “who won’t grow and prosper. Thus, I am going to the scales of St. Cyriacus in order to weigh him, as the old women have told me. Then hopefully the poor little worm will get better again, for it seems that he has been cursed by an evil witch.”
“What witch?” exclaimed the wise padre. “There is no enchantment upon this brat. End your cuddling which is horribly wasted on this burden. Instead, throw it into the water, for this is not your child and no child of any human, but an actual grass devil! It is an old dwarf which has been switched with your child. Throw the trickster down into the water, for the love of your true child and your own salvation!”
“No,” answered the frightened mother, “how could I do such a terrible thing to my own flesh and blood? I have carried the poor little worm, stilled it, and raised it, and know that it is my child. But when I went out with other women in order to make hay on the abbot’s meadow and put the child on a dried heap of grass, an evil eye passed over him. For then he started to cry like he has never done it before, and from that moment on he seems to have changed for the worst.”
“At that moment, the malicious kobolds[6] from the Wolsberg[7] moment stole your child and put that creature at the same spot,” replied the monk. “They take care of your child within the mountain, like they have done with quite a few other stolen children. But if you throw this changeling into the water, then they must bring your child back within the hour. Then you will find it at home in the crib, healthy and hale, well-grown like other children – and not like this creature, which will suck you into the grave if you keep him for any longer.”
The devout monk said this with such conviction that the woman was barely able to stay on her feet. Then, in a whirlwind of fear, dread, and love, half will-less and subconsciously, she let the child drop over the guardrails. Then the little creature screamed horribly, and down in the water a ruckus arose as if the river was about to boil, and a roar as if bears and lindwurms[8] were moving around in it. Then the mother realized that the monk had spoken the truth. Driven by fear and hope, she hurried back home where she indeed found her child in the crib as the monk had predicted it – healthy and hale, and well-grown like other children.
[1] This refers to Michaelsberg Abbey, a Benedictine monastery founded in 1064 by Anno II, the archbishop of Cologne. It was finally dissolved in 2011 when the number of monks serving in it became too small.
[2] As a serf, she had to do corvée labors for her liege lord – in this case, the monastery.
[3] The goal was to dry the grass so that it could be collected as hay.
[4] This likely refers to a chapel that used to be located in what is now modern-day Cyriax, a district of Overrath. Both are named after Cyriacus, a Roman noble who converted to Christianity and was subsequently martyred in 303 during the Diocletianic Persecution. A monastery in this village was secularized in 1803, and its buildings were subsequently used for agricultural purposes. The whole journey would have covered a distance of more than 17 km.
[5] Most likely a bridge over the river Agger. The most logical location of this bridge would have been at Wahlscheid, a district of Lohmar.
[6] As a reminder, “kobold” is a generic term for “small, mischievous spirit” in German, similar to the British “goblin”.
[7] The Wolsberg is a hill located within the Wolsburg district of Siegburg.
[8] Another name for dragons, usually of a wingless and serpentine variety.
Commentary: Here we see the basics of the changeling narrative. First, it is the mother who is blamed for getting a changeling. The story claims that this is a direct consequence for having a child out of wedlock, without presenting any evidence for this. And then it is the mother’s inattention for allowing the spirits to switch the child, even though this was hardly a moral failing on her part – she simply did not have any support group which could have provided childcare while she was working, and was too poor to hire anyone (and her liege lords obviously did not care about this state of affairs, either).
The rest of the story is even more insidious: “This misbehaving, underdeveloped creature is not the woman’s real child – so the solution is to get rid of it in a likely-lethal way so that the real child (which is well-behaved and healthy) will be brought back by the spirits!”
I have to wonder: How many mothers of centuries past, upon hearing such tales, convinced themselves that their infant child was not their real child because it has some mental or physical disability? Or perhaps she was suffering from (obviously undiagnosed) postpartum depression, and used this narrative as an explanation for her moods. Or perhaps she was resentful about her pregnancy and new motherhood in general – after all, this was during a time when women barely had any control over their fertility other than in the most crude ways. No matter what the mother’s precise circumstances were, the changeling narrative was a useful justification for infanticide.
As for the rest of the community, rural populations who frequently experienced famine and starvation were often rather more enthusiastic supporters of eugenics than the laws of the land – or church doctrine. Their goal was to have healthy, grown-up men and women who would support their parents in old age, not people with disabilities who would consume resources but who would be unable to contribute as much as healthy people. Thus, changeling narratives were useful as a justification for infanticide for the rest of the community as well.
I have little doubt that a lot of children died because of such stories.
The Changeling. Premenk
(Haupt and Schmaler II, p. 267. Oral account.)[1]
Until the time when a child has reached an age of six weeks, there must always be a person nearby. For otherwise, an old woman might come from the mountains or from the forest and replace the infant with a changeling. This changeling is misshapen, as well as weak in body and mind. At the very least, people should place a hymn book next to the head of the child before they leave the chamber.
But if this misfortune has occurred due to neglect, then it is good if you realize this early on. Then you need only fashion a rod from the branches of the silver birch, and thoroughly beat the changeling with it.
When it screams, the old woman will come and have the switched child with her. She will give the child back, and leave with the creature. However, you must let her go on her way, and in no case berate or admonish her. For otherwise, you will be stuck with the changeling.
Source: Haupt, K. Sagenbuch der Lausitz. Erster Theil: Das Geisterreich. 1865, p.69.
[1] This refers to the second volume of “Volkslieder der Wenden in der Ober- und Nieder-Lausitz” by Leopold Haupt and Johann Ernst Schmaler. The relevant text – a slightly abbreviated entry in encyclopaedic form – can be found here.
Commentary: Again, the appearance of a changeling is blamed on negligence, although the mother is not explicitly singled out as being at fault for this situation. And again, the suggested solution is violence against the apparent infant. The true nature of the “old woman” is unclear, although she obviously is a spirit of some kind. But we never learn why she would switch out children, nor why she would bring them back if the changeling is abused.
Driving a Changeling Away By Beating Them With A Blunt Broom
The people on a large estate were busy with threshing grain. A new mother wanted to help with the work. She thus left her small child lying in the crib, and went into the barn in order to help with the threshing. When she came back to the chamber, her child was gone, and an ugly thing was lying in the crib which was extremely foolish[1] and which cried without pause. The child had thus been switched and a changeling had been put into the crib.
The women in the neighborhood thus gave her the advice that she should beat it with a blunt broom until she received her own child back. And indeed, she did so, and hit it so pitylessly that the changeling writhed horribly and screamed. But she did not stop, and soon bloody streaks were visible on its body. Then suddenly the door was ripped open and her own child was pushed in. The child was just as beaten up as the changeling, which was now suddenly gone.
(Oral tale from the cook Anna Cl. from Langenau at Katscher.[2] 1906.)
Source: Kühnau, R. Schlesische Sagen. Zweiter Theil: Elben- Dämonen und Teufelsagen. 1865, p. 158.
[1] The German term used was “Strudelkopf” (“Strudel head”, with “Strudel” representing a type of German pastry). I initially took this to be a comment on the appearance of the changeling, but it turned out that this used to be a metaphor for “an extremely foolish person”).
[2] Langenau was incorporated into Katscher, now the town of Kietrz in the Opole Voivodeship of Poland.
Commentary: Here the violence gets even more intense, with the mother continuing to beat the apparent infant until it is bloody all over. Whatever entity switched the changeling did obviously not appreciate this kind of treatment, as they returned the actual infant in a similar sorry state.
Of course, this narrative could also be used to cover up child abuse: “My child was switched by a changeling, so I had to beat up the changeling in order to get my real child back! And the spirits returned my child in this sorry state!” In other words, the mother did not just beat their own child until they were bloody in a fit of rage – it was the spirits’ fault!
Changeling Beaten By A Rod
(Prätor. Weltbeschreibung I. 365. 366.)[1]
The following true story occurred in the year 1580: A noteworthy nobleman lived near Breslau[2] who needed a lot of grass to be cut and turned into hay in the summer, and his subjects had to do these labors for him. Among these there was a new mother who had rested in bed after having given birth for a mere eight days. As she saw that this was the will of the noble and she was unable to refuse, she took her child with her, put the child on a small heap of grass, went away and assisted with the haymaking.
When she had worked for a good while and went to breastfeed her child, she looked at the child, screamed loudly, threw her hands up in horror, and wailed vehemently that this was not her child since it greedily sucked from her milk and howled in such an inhuman manner which she was not used to from her own child.
Despite everything, she kept it with her for many days, and it acted in such a horrible manner that the poor woman was close to ruin. She complained about this to the noble, and he said to her: “Woman, if you believe that this is not your child, so go and carry it to the meadow where you have put the previous child. There you should beat it heavily with a rod, and then you shall see strange things.”
The woman followed the advice of the noble. She went outside and beat the changeling with a rod so that it screamed loudly. Then the Devil brought her stolen child and spoke: “There you have it!” And with these words, he took his own child away.
This story is well known to both young and old in the same area in and near Breslau.
Source: Grimm, J. and W. Deutsche Sagen, Band 1. 1816, p. 144f.
[1] “Anthropodemus Plutonicus, das ist, Eine Neue Weltbeschreibung”, published in 1666 by Johannes Praetorius. The relevant section can be found here.
[2] Now Wrocław in the Lower Silesian Voivodeship.
Commentary: Beyond providing us a glimpse into the harsh labor conditions of 16th century Silesia, where women were expected to do hard work soon after giving birth (which was a widespread state of affairs – generally, only women from the upper classes or who lived in developed countries were able to rest for multiple weeks before resuming their usual daily work), this story implies that a changeling comes directly from the Devil – and like all spawn of Hell, it thus deserves no pity or consideration.
Which again fits into the larger, horrible narratives about changelings: If an infant does not “function to specifications” – that is to say, if they are too loud, too fussy, or if they have some kind of developmental disorders – then they are not a real human infant, and not the real offspring of the mother. Instead, they are an otherworldly creature that must be abused until the “proper” state of affairs is restored.
In other words, such tales are encouragement for child abuse – and while the folkloric changeling tales may be gone, similar modern narratives have taken their place. I’ve mentioned the recent anti-autism hysteria, but there are many others. How many LGTB children have been rejected by their parents for not fitting into their parents’ narrow world views – or being forced into “conversion therapy” (another form of child abuse which in its own way is no less cruel than the beatings that were portrayed in these tales)?
Folklore is not a thing of the past. It lives on – for good or ill. And we need to be aware of the latter, and how it shapes our politics, societies, and very lives.
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#ableism #autism #changeling #childAbuse #folklore #infanticide #RFKennedy #Tylenol
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Pope Leo XIV: “You Must Go On”
The following is an excerpt from a homily delivered by Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, O.S.A., then Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, during a fraternal visit to the Diocese of Chiclayo, Peru, on Sunday, 11 August 2024.
We encounter the prophet Elijah. He feels tired. He feels like his mission has failed. He no longer wants to continue.
In his prayer, after a full day in the desert, he says: “Enough, Lord! Take my life. I am no better than my ancestors” [1 Kg 19:4]. He lies down under a broom tree and falls asleep.
Maybe he thought that was the end.
But, as we hear in the reading, the Lord never abandons us. Not only does He not abandon us, but He often pushes us and says: “Get up! You must go on. I will not leave you alone. I will feed you. I will give you what you need to continue.”
In this case, the angel of the Lord came to Elijah, gave him bread, gave him nourishment, and said: “Eat, for the journey will be too much for you.” And Elijah, attentive to the Lord’s word, ate, got up, and continued on his way [1 Kg 19:7–8].
Pope Leo XIV (Robert Francis Prevost, O.S.A.)
Homily, Chiclayo Cathedral, 11 August, 2024 (excerpt)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAukfwsn4rk
Translation from the Spanish text is the blogger’s own work product and may not be reproduced without permission.
Featured image: Detail from Elijah under the Juniper Tree: I Kings 19:4–8, attributed to the School of Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669). Pen and brown ink, brown and gray wash, with correction in opaque white on the right portion of the figure’s cloak, on paper. Image credit: The Morgan Library & Museum / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
⬦ Reflection Question ⬦
When I feel like Elijah—tired, discouraged, or alone—how does the Lord give me the strength to go on?
⬦ Join the conversation in the comments. -
The General Who Defied a President
Perhaps no period characterized chaos about the future of the Republic than the years 1866-1868. And perhaps no one individual did so much to save it in those years as the man who had labored so hard to preserve it from 1861-1865: Ulysses S. Grant.
Pres. Andrew Johnson (LoC)One would think that having put down a rebellion, the United States would be on a path to recovery and strength. Enter President Andrew Johnson. President by virtue of Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson was the worst man at the worst place at the worst time (oh, for an alternate universe where Lincoln kept amiable Mainer Hannibal Hamlin as VP in 1864). As a pro-Union Southerner, Johnson was not only conciliatory to the former self-declared Confederacy but downright magnanimous. And less than enthused about the prospect of abolition, to put it lightly. A dedicated enthusiast of the White race’s dominance in the U.S., Johnson would stand in the way of any civil rights legislation.
Scarcely had the guns stopped firing on the battlefield than Johnson began to show warning signs that the victory won on the field was about to be lost politically. Johnson welcomed former Southern congressmen back to the House – many of whom had just taken off their Confederate Army officer uniforms. As northern and Unionist congressmen watched their recent antagonists resume the seats in the government they had just tried to restore, their tempers exploded. In a simple act of bureaucratic procedure, the clerk of the House refused to read in the names of the Southern congressmen during roll call opening the 39th session of Congress in December 1865. The House remained solidly Unionist and abolitionist.
However, Johnson would not be de-fanged so easily. Even with a solid block of loyal Republicans in Congress, Johnson wielded his veto to try to strike down any civil rights legislation and any bills that would protect Southern Blacks from the “rebellious spirit” of Southern Whites, as George Armstrong Custer (of all people) called it. 1 He also attempted to withdraw U.S. troops from the South, the line of defense for freed people against terrorism, kidnapping, and brutality. Congress halted the withdrawal of U.S. Army troops in January of 1866. The Army was now very definitely in politics. And so was its general-in-chief.
Defender of the Republic (Again)
Ulysses S. Grant would not have described himself as a politician, but as General of the Army, he played a significantly political role. And for the first time, Grant found himself taking an opposite position from the president he was supposed to support and advise. Releasing General Orders No. 3, Grant directed the Army to protect loyal citizens and Blacks in the Southern states not just from physical violence, but from political violence – quietly letting commanders know that they were to obey orders coming from him, not the executive branch. The order directed commanders to protect African Americans from unfair prosecution by state and local courts. Unwilling to publicly challenge the popular general, Johnson let this slide. For now. But he marked that Grant had sided with Congress.
The summer of 1866 was marked by violence: physical, from Whites against Blacks in the South; and political, between the president and congress. As White mobs committed murders, rapes, and atrocities in towns and cities across the South, Congress pushed through the 14th Amendment and extended Federal judicial protection for freed people – all over Johnson’s attempts to veto. As Grant watched the president fight so hard against everything the war had been fought over, he became, as an aide said, “more & more radical.” Most of all, he would not allow the Army to become a “party machine.”2
For his part, Johnson realized that he would not get anywhere until Grant was out of the way. To test the General-in-Chief’s loyalty, Johnson had Grant accompany him on an August political tour of Northern states. Grant grew so disgusted at Johnson’s ranting against the 14th Amendment that he claimed illness and went home early, writing to his wife Julia that he looked upon the president as “a national disgrace.” Johnson openly wondered about using the military to purge his enemies from Congress, asking Grant which side the Army would take in such a trial. Grant sidestepped this by replying whichever side the law was on, while quietly ordering weapons moved out of arsenals in the South. Writing to his old friend and fellow Ohioan Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan, Grant confided his worst fears: “we are fast approaching the point where he [Johnson] will want to declare the body [Congress] illegal, unconstitutional and revolutionary.”3
The Banishment to Mexico
William Tecumseh Sherman (LoC)Johnson resolved to get Grant out of the way before the autumnal elections. Governor Thomas Swann of Maryland requested federal troops to oust Republican voting registrars from Baltimore, where the city had just defeated a bill that would have granted voting rights to ex-Confederates. Grant had resisted this request, so Johnson resorted to the age-old method of removing a troublesome subordinate: appoint them to a diplomatic mission and get them out of the country. In this case, Mexico. Johnson directed William Tecumseh Sherman to come east to replace Grant, believing that Sherman would fall into line. Sherman came east, but refused to have anything to do with Johnson. Johnson even promised him the position of secretary of war. Nothing doing. As Sherman is said to have stated about Grant, “Grant stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk, and now we stand by each other.” Once again, he stuck with Grant. Finally, Johnson ordered Grant to Mexico. But there was a problem. Grant refused.
Lt. Col. Theodore Lyman once said of Grant, ““[Grant] habitually wears an expression as if he had determined to drive his head through a brick wall, and was about to do it.” To say he was stubborn is an understatement. Claiming that he lacked the diplomatic skills for such a mission and that the president would be better served with someone from the State Department, Grant dodged the assignment. Johnson ordered him to do so in a cabinet meeting, which caused Grant to answer, “I am an American citizen, and eligible to any office to which any American is eligible. I am an officer of the Army, and bound to obey your military orders. But this is a civil office, a purely diplomatic duty that you offer me, and I cannot be compelled to undertake it. … No power on Earth can compel me to do it.” Annoyed, Johnson sent Sherman to Mexico and asked Grant for troops in Maryland to “intervene on the governor’s side to prevent violence.” “This,” Grant observed, “would produce the very result intended to be averted.” He refused to send troops but did issue G.O. No. 44., ordering U.S. Army officers to enforce the Civil Rights Act. Johnson and Grant were now in their own conflict.4
Reduction by Promotion
The fall 1866 elections brought another veto-proof Republican majority back to Congress which began to execute Congressional Reconstruction, returning the South to military districts until each state met conditions of equality and adherence to the 13th and 14th Amendments. Congress also passed a rider in the military appropriations bill which removed presidential authority to give direct orders to the Army: all orders would have to go through, or come from, Grant. When in 1867 Johnson’s attorney general tried to reduce the authority of U.S. Army officers; Grant told district commanders that since the opinion did not come through military channels, they were free to use their own judgement.5
Gen. U.S. Grant (LoC)When Congress recessed for the summer, Johnson decided one more time to get rid of this troublesome general who kept interfering in his plans. This time, he would get Grant out of the way by suspending Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (another Ohioan who gave Johnson constant headaches via stubborn resistance) and replacing him with Grant ad interim. A reluctant Grant acceded, possibly to keep another more compliant person from occupying the position.
But the fall 1867 elections brought more Democrats into office and a surge of terrorist groups in the South, such as the Ku Klux Klan. Johnson moved swiftly to consolidate power, firing generals heading military departments. Notably, he fired Sheridan, further alienating Grant and inflaming the situation in the South where violence levels grew. As Maj. Gen. John Pope left command of the district encompassing Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, he noted to his replacement, Maj. Gen. George Meade, “the Rebellion is as active & so far as the people of this Dist. are concerned, nearly as powerful as during the War.”6
Congress entered the fray in January of 1868, setting the stage for Grant’s last battle with the president he served. Congress ordered Stanton’s immediate reinstatement. Johnson refused. Grant, then, was left with the thorny choice of disobeying the Senate and violating the Tenure of Office Act, or directly opposing his president. It probably comes as no surprise that Granted handed over the keys to the War Department to Stanton. This utterly enraged Johnson, who went off on Grant in a cabinet meeting. Johnson then tried Sherman again, offering him command of a special division to be headquartered in D.C. – a thinly veiled threat to Congress. A disgusted Sherman headed west. Johnson then gave the same offer to Virginian Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas. He should have known better than to try to coopt a man who broke from his family and state to stay loyal to the Union in 1861. Thomas turned him down. An infuriated Johnson then fired Stanton, but that cantankerous cabinet member locked himself in his office and refused to come out. This was the last straw, and after three days of Stanton confinement, the House impeached Johnson.7
Conclusion
Civilian control of the military is a bedrock of American democracy, repeatedly enforced by Washington during the Revolution and embodied in law thereafter. Could any general other than Grant have gotten away with this resistance, and could Grant have done it if it had been any president other than Johnson? We will probably never know. Grant was a national hero and Johnson was vilified by half the country. The era was one of repeated constitutional crises, so gray areas were more common. What we do know is that Grant’s steadfast devotion to civil rights and stubborn commitment brought him to national political attention, and he was on the ballot as the Republican candidate for president in 1868. His nemesis, Johnson, did not even get the nod from his own party and did not appear on the ballot.
Yet another opponent who lost to Grant.
Sources:
- Robert Wooster, The U.S. Army and the Making of America: From Confederation to Empire, 1775-1903 (University of Kansas, 2021), 204. ↩︎
- Wooster, 210. ↩︎
- Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, General Grant Refuses President Johnson’s Diplomatic Request, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/general-grant-refuses-president-johnson-s-diplomatic-request.htm; David O. Stewart, Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy (Simon & Schuster, 2010). Ivan Perkins, Vanishing Coup: The Pattern of World History since 1310 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). ↩︎
- Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, General Grant Refuses President Johnson’s Diplomatic Request; Wooster, 212. David Priess, “How a Difficult, Racist, Stubborn President Was Removed From Power—If Not From Office,” Politico (Nov. 13, 2018), https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/11/13/andrew-johnson-undermined-congress-cabinet-david-priess-book-222413/ ↩︎
- Wooster, 215. Priess. ↩︎
- Wooster, 215-217. ↩︎
- Ulysses S Grant National Historic Site, Ulysses S. Grant is Appointed Secretary of War Ad Interim, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/ulysses-s-grant-as-appointed-secretary-of-war-ad-interim.htm; Wooster, 217-219. ↩︎
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The opinions represented here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the U.S. Army or the Department of Defense.
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