On enforced ignorance of history

It should probably not come as a surprise that this very cogent denunciation of the Republican Supreme Court's murder of a pillar of racial justice under law should come from a writer whose experience is in studying and teaching the American Civil War to school groups and other ordinary citizens.

Kevin M. Levin pulls no punches about the Callais decision: 

Jim Crow Didn't Die. It Went to Law School. 

... The Voting Rights Act was written in blood following years of sacrifice and bloodshed. It came directly after Selma. After the clubs and the fire hoses were unleashed on African Americans trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965.

Alabama police assault John Lewis, Selma, Alabama, 1965

It came after centuries during which Black Americans were systematically oppressed and for decades following the end of Reconstruction, when they were legally stripped of the franchise. The Act was the hard-won answer to a hard, ugly question: will this country actually mean what it says?

For sixty years, imperfectly but meaningfully, it tried to. Today, that answer is being rolled back. 

But this ruling does not exist in isolation. It sits inside a broader campaign of manipulation and erasure.

Look at the push to return Confederate monuments to public property—statues of men who took up arms against the United States to preserve the institution of slavery and white supremacy. The argument made for these monuments is almost always framed as “heritage” or “history.” But heritage is a choice. 

We choose what to honor. Returning these statues to pedestals of prominence is not a neutral act of preservation. It is a statement about whose history matters, and whose suffering can be brushed aside in the name of regional pride.

Look at the Trump administration’s assault on how Black history is taught and remembered. Federal pressure on universities and schools, the gutting of diversity programs, the reframing of civil rights history as divisive “ideology” rather than documented fact. These are not random culture-war skirmishes. They are part of a systematic effort to make the full truth of American history inaccessible, uncomfortable, or simply illegal to teach.

It’s a cliche, but true. You cannot understand where you are going if you are not allowed to honestly reckon with where you have been.

Self serving, exploitative lies about the full humanity of all people, and enshrining those lies in an economic system and laws, got us a Civil War once. It seems all too likely that the philosopher George Santayana's aphorism will be proved out again: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Little as the MAGAs might understand this, an important way to avert more civil conflict is to fight back against their attempt to erase accurate history. Oddly enough, truthful history can make possible a path forward.

Rural sacrifice zones courtesy of MAGA

It seems to be accurate to point out that much of the rural United States is being transformed into "Sacrifice Zones." The term is usually associated with devastating environmental exploitation which renders a place uninhabitable -- but can also include economic development which the local population doesn't support. A definition:

A sacrifice zone or sacrifice area is a geographic area that has been permanently changed by heavy environmental alterations (usually to a negative degree) or economic disinvestment, often through locally unwanted land use (LULU). 

Following the news of Trump's America, I find myself coming across two stories that are seldom told in the same frame, but which seem to me closely analogous. .

• All over the country, rural people a learning that some tech behemoth wants to transform or build what looks like a warehouse, but is actually an energy and water sucking data center. The locals might welcome more opportunity for economic activity, but they smell a rat. Jess Piper tells one story from rural Missouri: 

... I opened my local paper, The Maryville Forum, a few days back, and saw an article on a new AI data center that looks like it has been in the works for a while. I am sure you know that if anyone stays on top of the news, it’s me. If anyone regularly reads and subscribes and pays for news, it’s me.

And I didn’t know anything about a data center coming to my own county.

I had no idea, and by the time I did have an idea, it looked as if the “planning” part of the AI data center deal is well past the planning stage. It looks like some developers came in and met with county officials without making noise. It also looks like there may already have been at least one NDA signed with the data center developers, and that just doesn’t sit right with me. Why would anyone need to sign a non-disclosure agreement with a developer?

... What a ripoff, and for what? The data center is only projecting 100-130 jobs, and I am not sure I believe that number. There has been no transparency on what kind of jobs or how long they would last.

My god…I feel like we are being sold a pile of shit, and they aren’t even bothering to wrap it with a bow... 

Read the whole story, told in Jess's inimitable voice. 

• Meanwhile, wherever they see a likely target, ICE/DHS is scooping up rural warehouse spaces in which to lock up immigrants they want to deport, all to meet Trump and Stephen Miller's quest to Make America White Again. 

Neighbors don't much like the idea of having a warehouse/concentration camp nearby. Even Republicans don't want these uses in their town. Bolt reports from Roxbury, New Jersey:

On Christmas Eve, residents of Roxbury, New Jersey, a township 50 miles west of Manhattan, learned from a Washington Post article that the Department of Homeland Security had plans to purchase a vacant warehouse on the outskirts of town and convert it into an ICE detention facility. The news was part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s larger plan to buy up warehouses across the country to house 92,600 new detention beds for expediting deportations, a scheme acting ICE director Todd Lyons likened to “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” 

By mid-January, Roxbury’s Township Council, an elected body of seven people, all Republicans, passed a resolution affirming that it “unequivocally opposes” modifying town warehouses for ICE use. Roxbury Mayor Shawn Potillo, who forms part of the council, stated during the vote that his approval of the resolution did not mean that he opposes the country’s immigration laws. 

The resolution was merely symbolic; it wouldn’t actually stop ICE from buying the warehouse in town and turning it into a detention center....

... The fight against the facility has brought together an unlikely coalition of immigrant rights advocates and town leadership who have said they support the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda but do not want to host an ICE facility. Small towns across the U.S. caught in clashes with DHS over warehouse conversions have turned to similar arguments in a bid to stop the projects. 

“The town council is unsurprisingly caught in a very difficult position, because they are having to fight efforts from the Trump administration, despite them being very supportive in general, of Donald Trump and the Republicans in power,” William Angus, the co-founder of immigrant advocacy organization Project No Ice North Jersey Alliance, or Project NINJA, told Bolts. ...

 The story goes on to explain the projected effect of turning the warehouse into a camp:

... The facility has just four toilets and is approved to supply 12,000 gallons of water each day. But increasing the capacity for 1,500 people would require roughly 187,500 gallons each day and add more than fifteen times the amount of sewage currently processed by the facility, according to the lawsuit. 

Despite DHS needing approval from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the Highlands Council to complete the project, Spinelli said that the agency has not filed plans for changing the water system. The review of the site could happen quickly, he explained, but there would likely be new legal challenges to the final decision filed by the losing side that would stretch on for years.  ...

The Roxbury facility is not alone in facing challenges from neighbors. All over the country, ICE concentration camps are meeting resistance from rural people. The New York Times [gift article] reports on an array of challenges as rural communities resist the unexpected role the Trump administration has assigned to them: "Sacrifice Zone for MAGA bigotry."

Now they want to test the water to control women

If you live in a blue state -- and especially in a blue city -- it's easy to forget that a part of the MAGA authoritarian project is to rob women of our bodily autonomy.

If you live somewhere where the Supreme Court's 2022 Dobbs decision empowered state governments to outlaw abortion and the people have not been able to stop anti-abortion pols from implementing the ban, this will probably not surprise you.

Jessica Valenti who keeps track of the anti-abortion fanatics at Abortion, Every Day reports a new assault on women's freedoms. The Trumped-up EPA Tells States to Test the Water for Birth Control and Abortion Pills.

... After years of anti-abortion pressure, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recommended that states test their drinking water for abortion medication and birth control, putting the drugs on a federal list of potential “contaminants.”

The move clears the way for Republicans to restrict abortion and contraception under the guise of protecting the environment—including humiliating regulations that could force women to bag up their pregnancy tissue as medical waste. And at a moment when pregnancy-related arrests are rising and states are moving to punish abortion patients, it marks a dangerous acceleration toward a full-blown reproductive surveillance state.

 ... Anti-abortion activists claim that when women use medication to end their pregnancies, remnants of the drug poison the environment and water supply. They also say that pregnancy tissue is getting into the drinking water, and that Americans are all “drinking abortions.”

As you can probably guess, there is no truth to any of this. ...

She explains that, yes, the scientific studies have been done.

We metabolize abortion and birth control pills like any other medication, and only trace amounts leave our bodies at all. Using anti-abortion logic, every single drug people take—from antidepressants to Viagra—would be a “pollutant.”  

This, like all the right's anti-abortion and anti-contraception hysteria, is about controlling women. We've had enough of this BS!

AI for the love of lucre

Yesterday I ran across a polling finding that stopped me cold. According to the Pew Research Center: 

About four-in-ten U.S. adults believe humanity is ‘living in the end times’.

Apparently the sense that some kind of radical break is imminent is very powerful among us. (For the record, for myself, I doubt this. History records societies and the species evolving over time, not through genuine disjunctions. We're stuck in time, and not going to escape.)

But the notion of a coming apocalypse does seem to have become the norm among our tech overlords. And their vision seems a combination of vicious and silly. But what would you expect from a bunch of emotionally crippled white men unleashed by their wealth?

Timothy Noah is a New Republic staff writer who investigates one of the core questions of this time:

How the Tech World Turned Evil 

... The talk may be of a literal or figurative God, but what’s really at stake—as usual—is Mammon. Tech lords’ ferocious opposition to government interference reflects a collective financial investment in AI that’s quite literally unprecedented within the private sector. In February, The Wall Street Journal reported that the $670 billion to be spent this year developing AI by Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (Google) represents 2.1 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product. 

That’s slightly more than what the United States spent to build the railroads in the 1850s (2 percent of GDP), and considerably more than the amount spent to build the Interstate highway system (0.4 percent) or to put a man on the moon (0.2 percent). The only national investment the Journal could identify that represented a larger slice of GDP was the Louisiana Purchase (3 percent), which nearly doubled the size of the United States. That was in 1803, when GDP was a puny $488 million, not today’s $31 trillion. And unlike these earlier infrastructure projects, this year’s $670 billion investment in AI draws entirely on private-sector funds.

There's a good deal of Greek mythology about what happens when humans think we are as gods. If their educations were a little wider, the bros might have heard of Icarus. 

Peter Theil of Palantir has made himself the spokesman for tech hubris. Noah goes on: 

... Palantir, of which Thiel is co-founder and board chair, is the most obviously sinister of these firms, because, among other things, it supplies surveillance technology to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which, according to one contract award, provides “increased efficiency in deportation logistics, minimizing time and resource expenditure.” A 2020 Amnesty International report concluded that “there is a high risk that Palantir is contributing to serious human rights violations of migrants and asylum-seekers by the U.S. government.” To this a Palantir representative replied, “We will not allow our software to be used for immoral or illegal purposes.” 

But at a February videoconference with shareholders, Palantir’s T-shirted, wild-haired chief executive Alex Karp could scarcely contain his glee as he said, “Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them” (italics mine). By early March, Palantir was doing just that, picking bombing targets in the Iran war and seeing its stock climb 15 percent.

... Tech’s final descent into unambiguous villainy was the result of three events during Joe Biden’s presidency: Lina Khan’s appointment as Federal Trade Commission chair in 2021; the advent of ChatGPT in 2022; and the election of President Donald Trump in 2024. Amazon and Meta lobbied against Khan’s nomination because she sought to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement, and after she was confirmed, both companies sought unsuccessfully for Khan to be recused from cases concerning them. 

ChatGPT’s introduction in November 2022 set off the arms race among Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other tech companies that resulted in tech throwing $670 billion this year at AI. And Trump, three days after his second inauguration, issued an executive order reversing what he later called “my predecessor’s attempt to paralyze this industry.” 

Trump also eased up on antitrust enforcement and within a year drove away the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Gail Slater, not long after Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks hired two Trump allies to go over her head and settle an antitrust lawsuit on favorable terms.

Seems pretty evil to me, though evil rich guys are a dime a dozen in history. There's not as much novelty here as they like to think. Noah insists that human beings need to do an intervention to stop these boys and their toys.

... to succeed, regulating AI will require standing up to a class of plutocrats more fanatically opposed to public accountability than any in history. The robber barons of the Gilded Age have gone down in history as the epitome of private avarice, but at least they believed in democracy (albeit as something to buy or sell). 

The tech lords, who match the robber barons’ greed, are weakly committed to democracy at best—and at worst, they’re millenarian nutcases who would dispense with government altogether. Suggest we slow the march to Singularity, and they’ll peg you as a literal or figurative devil. They’ve invested too much cash in their digital Second Coming to think otherwise.

Taming the tech lords won’t be a battle on the scale of Armageddon. But the stakes will surely be higher than we’re able right now to know. Democrats, and indeed all humankind, should prepare for a long and bitter fight, because this enemy is at least as crazy as it is rich—and it’s really, really rich. 

If our societies can't figure out how to intervene, I suspect material reality will. Climate apocalypse seems more likely than the bros' Singularity. 

On lockdown ... behind the plastic gates

Suppose you need a bottle of dish soap. You can buy one at the Walgreens around the corner ... if you can find a clerk to unlock the plastic case where the item is confined. Good luck with that. You push the call button and sometimes a harried employee appears to unlock the soap. And sometimes no one responds. Usually you give up.

Walgreens has taught you to take your business elsewhere. (I get such items at Costco where the quantities are excessive, but you can put what you need in your cart without plastic hindrance.)

The plastic barriers are supposed to deter shop lifters. Makes you envision an old person who who slips a bar of soap into a purse or a kid who pockets a candy bar. I'm sure that happens all the time, but that's not the significant shoplifting problem. That's not what inspired retailers to adopt the plastic lockdown.

Where I live, organized retail theft at scale was happening. I've seen swarms of young males sweep products into laundry bags and run out the door. Those commodities will soon appear on blankets in front of street sellers around the corner. I doubt either the thieves or the street sellers are making much, but it's an economy of sorts. 

I sympathize with Walgreens needing to break the cycle to thrive. I sympathize also with people who get by in the informal economy, much of it extra-legal.

But plastic land isn't working. The only part of the Walgreens store that is crowded is the line for the pharmacy. 

Shopping without plastic barriers is becoming a luxury experience here in the inner city.

• • •

Another kind of plastic gate now collects fares and allows entrance and exit to the regional underground rail system, BART. We used to see groups of young people who jumped the waist high barriers at the fare stations. But no more. In my experience, the gates work reasonably smoothly and are not particularly daunting even to San Francisco's many tourists. 

I hope the gates have improved the BART experience; riders are way down since folks started working from home during the pandemic. This thing was designed to carry the region into downtown San Francisco. Now the system is gaining riders for Saturday events, though business traffic is still sluggish -- as is revenue.

Transit activists in San Francisco and also the five other BART counties are collecting signatures for November 2026 ballot measures to put the public systems on a firmer footing. This is something I can support.  Please do sign on!

Friday cat blogging

 

Today, let's give Mio pride of place. Here he is, being magnificent, while over looking the room.

Here he is, bathing actively. Perhaps he'd prefer not to be observed. But when you are Mio-sized, you don't worry about being interrupted. Always those eyes!

Popularity discontents

This morning while dipping into the endless stream of punditry, this from Obama's communications guy Dan Pfeiffer caught my eye: 

The best way to protect democracy is to punch fascism in the mouth. ... If there’s one lesson of the Trump era, it’s that moral victories aren’t really victories at all.

This definitely makes me sad. Pfeiffer's boss, Barack Obama, the very election of a Black president (who was rather good at the job), was a moral victory. We need more of those, more demonstrations of the positive potential of the American story.

But Pfeiffer is also certainly correct. Trumpism needs a punch in the kisser. 

Polling guru G. Elliot Morris has been investigating Democratic discontent. His national findings: 

Democrats are not unpopular. They’re unsatisfying.

What all of this suggests is that Democrats do not have the problem many political narratives say they do. The party’s core weakness is not that voters see it as elitist or too extreme; it is that too many voters, including their own, see Democratic politicians as unmoored, passive, and ineffective. Republicans, by contrast, still project the kind of strength and clarity that voters often reward — though their extremism is a huge drag on votes.

More Americans see the GOP as extreme, out of touch, and worthy of intense dislike. That is why Democrats can be underwater on their favorability and still in a stronger electoral position overall.

His research leads him to conclude that Dems currently really do have strong chances going into the 2026 election, despite how little most of us thrill to their candidates.

The California gubernatorial race seems to have all the worst features of this moment. 

Nobody sane or decent wants this war

War, huh (good God y'all)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing

This lyric, performed by Edwin Starr and later The Temptations, hit the top of the charts in 1970. After eight years of the American war in Vietnam, almost 60,000 US killed and perhaps a million Vietnamese, most of us knew what we thought of wars.

Donald Trump's idiotic Persian adventure isn't yet causing carnage on that scale, but the longer it goes on, the more death and destruction that results, the more vehement the opposition will likely grow.

 

Dozens of veterans and military family members protesting the Iran war were arrested by U.S. Capitol Police on Monday after they occupied the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. 

U.S. Capitol Police said 66 people were arrested during the demonstration, which was organized by several veterans groups including About Face, the Center on Conscience and War (CCW), Veterans For Peace, Common Defense, the Fayetteville Resistance Coalition, Military Families Speak Out and 50501 Veterans. (The Hill) 

Military historian Phillips P. O'Brien is frankly aghast at what he is seeing of Trump's war:

The Most Corrupt War In US History

All wars are horrible and this is no exception. However the US-Iran War of 2026 will never be the most horrible war in US history, the longest, the most destructive, etc. That is a good thing. However, something pretty horrible is unfolding in front of us. The US government is being used as a tool to corruptly enrich certain people, to a tune of billions of $’s. And that means US service personnel and Iranian civilians (the people who are suffering the most in this war) are being sacrificed so that others who have enriched themselves through their loss can enrich themselves further. 

For the US military, this has to be a devastating situation. Soldiers sign up to defend the Constitution of the USA, on the assumption that when they are put in harms way, it is being done for the greater good of the country. To understand that they are now tools for corruption of their masters, not for the country at large, has to destroy the whole idea of serving the country. 

For the Iranian people, whom Trump encouraged to rise up for their freedom, with no intention of actually helping them, the effect is something similar. They might have had hope for a while, even with Trump’s track record, that the USA would help them. Now they know the US cares not at all for them, used them for what Trump had hoped to be his political advantage, and has now abandoned them to a worse version of their original government. 

 So those who serve or want freedom get nothing. However, the corrupt at the top seem to be using every opportunity, even manipulating the course of the war, to cash in wherever and however they can. ...

O'Brien goes on to recount how Trump's gyrations, whether intentionally or not, seem to encourage gambling on the price of oil by traders with inside information. Perhaps these are some of his inner circle? This is a leaky bunch; we'll eventually find out who benefited.

Though the Israel's attacks on Iran and concurrent invasion of Lebanon, are popular with many on the home front, Israelis sure know how to denounce the motives of politicians. Israeli journalist Alon Pinkas is scathing.

Trump and Netanyahu Have Royally Screwed Each Other Over

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu share a lot of traits. They are both solipsistic, mendacious, narcissistic, and paranoid megalomaniacs who perceive themselves as victims of a cabal of elites. Now they share something else: They have lost a war together. Driven by vanity and hubris, the U.S. president and Israeli prime minister miscalculated Iran’s mettle, and now their mutually inflicted failure is causing them considerable political harm at home. What started as a Smith & Wesson partnership has degenerated into a Thelma & Louise ending.... 

... [There will be no conqueror's statues for these two.] Trump and Netanyahu, in their infinite delusions of grandeur, expected this to be a quick win that would buoy their respective political fortunes. They probably envisioned being showered with praise by their countrymen and the media, and relished the thought of rubbing the victory in their opponents’ faces. The exact opposite has happened instead, and they have no one to blame but themselves—and each other.

So ... here we are. President Barack Obama's national security aide Ben Rhodes [gift link] is trying to figure out how the idealistic country he thought he worked for came to spread stupid, unnecessary carnage around the world. He shares some insights from listening to thar very damaged, but very thoughtful, veteran of our Wars on Terror, Graham Platner, an aspiring Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. 

... “We are so broken emotionally when it comes to our politics that we’ve literally created this story that it’s inherent in being a competent political leader to kill civilians,” Mr. Platner told me. “If you’re not willing to do some hard things and drop some bombs, then you’re not up to the task of power. I think it’s the opposite. You’re not up to the task of being in power if you do not think about the cost of violence. If that’s not at the front of your mind, then I don’t think you are morally in the right place to be in positions of power.” 

We like to frame our wars as virtuous, but they are not. Instead, they resemble a declining empire sowing chaos along its periphery as a matter of strategy: Economic and political elites profit while the Americans who fight suffer along with the places they attack. 

“The only way we change that is by talking about it publicly,” Mr. Platner told me. “If we start to revisit the morality of military conflict and how we use violence, that’s going to have a direct correlation to what is good for America.” 

With the decline of American empire which is certainly underway, proven every day by the ascendancy of the Orange Toddler, maybe yet another generation can teach us that war is not the answer.

Defeated by arithmetic

Los Angeles basketball great Kareem Abdul Jabbar is disgusted by the current California primary election kerfuffle: five quasi-plausible aspirants whose self-serving continuation of egotistical campaigns might give this blue state a MAGA governor. He calls bullshit.

The California Democrats have pulled off a rare feat: they’ve turned a massive home-court advantage into a self-made crisis. In sports, we call this “hero ball.” It’s what happens when a team has all the talent in the world, but five guys are trying to drive to the hoop at the exact same time. The result is usually a turnover, and right now, the Democratic party is handing the ball directly to the opposition.

Seven Democratic candidates are currently splitting the vote. None will drop out, no one will pivot, and two Republicans are watching the whole thing fall apart from a very comfortable lead.

The problem is the “jungle primary.” It’s a rule that sends the top two finishers to the general election, regardless of their jersey color. It works fine when you’re organized, but it becomes a trap the moment you splinter. Strategist Paul Mitchell calculated the odds of an all-Republican November at 27% back in March. In the NBA, if you have a 27% chance of turning the ball over on every possession, you aren’t going to win many championships.

Every Democrat left in this race has convinced themselves they are the “chosen one.” Matt Mahan actually said, “I plan to be the one,” while polling in the low single digits. That’s either extraordinary confidence or a complete break from basic arithmetic. Nobody wants to be the first to head to the bench, so they stay on the floor, and the combined result is that they all lose together.

Then there is Tom Steyer. He’s spent over $130 million on ads and he’s still tied at 14% with a county sheriff. I’ve seen this before, owners who think they can buy a championship by just throwing money at the roster without checking if the players actually fit the system. Steyer spent $345 million on his 2020 presidential run and walked away with zero delegates. He’s currently on track for a repeat performance. The most jarring part? He told a reporter he hasn’t followed Governor Newsom’s record “closely enough to give him a grade.” Imagine walking into a locker room and telling your teammates you haven’t bothered to watch the game film. You’d lose the respect of the room before you even laced up your sneakers.  ...

Let's applaud former state Controller Betty Yee (a controller oversees the state accounting) who can read numbers and did have the decency to get out! How about some more of them taking one for the team -- that is, the people of California.

Kareem looks to Gov. Gavin to lead Dems out of this dead end alley. Gavin has never been much of a team player, but Kareem is probably right that Newsom is the only one in the party who might be able to knock some sense into this field of ambitious infants. We've already got an Orange Toddler in DC;  California should be able to do better.

Thought for a rainy Monday

Back to the fray on Tuesday.