The Invasion (2)

Continuing with the idea that Trump’s second term in office is essentially a hostile invasion, he is — through his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth — trying to convert the U.S. military into an occupying army.

Thus he has arbitrarily established a new military zone along the southern border where troops may be used against Mexico under some sort of Trumped-up excuse like raiding drug cartels, etc.

Hegseth has also attempted to clear out all the senior military officials deemed too pro-democracy and therefore not pro-Trump enough. 

He has also eliminated the traditional pro-democracy training protocols under the pretense of eradicating “woke” ideas and references from all training manuals and guides.

This has nothing to do with the essence of woke thinking and everything to do with establishing an authoritarian ethos in the military.

Trump has ordered the military to carry out his mass deportations of “illegal” immigrants, including U.S. citizens caught up in ICE raids. Although the courts have protested his policies in this area, his occupying government has blatantly violated court orders, precipitating a slow-moving constitutional crisis.

There is very little anyone can do to halt Trump’s takeover of the military since by law he is Commander-in-Chief.

Unfortunately, he is also a traitor.

HEADLINES:

• Judge temporarily blocks Trump admin from revoking Harvard enrollment of foreign students (Reuters)

• In Attacks on Harvard, Chinese See Yet Another Reason to Write Off the U.S. (NYT)

• America is in danger of experiencing an academic brain drain (Economist)

• Trump, Rubio take aim at National Security Council's "Deep State" (Axios)

• House GOP budget adds $150 billion for Trump’s immigration enforcement (WP)

• How Trump misrepresented images to support claims of "White genocide" in South Africa, including Congo video (CBS)

• Kyiv comes under large-scale Russian drone and missile attack (NBC)

• Ukraine and Russia begin the largest prisoner-of-war exchange since the invasion (NPR)

• US-Iran latest nuclear talks end with limited progress, as Tehran sources express skepticism (CNN)

• U.S., Iran Aim for Framework to Guide Talks Toward Nuclear Deal (WSJ)

• At least 60 people killed by Israeli strikes in Gaza as Israel lets minimal aid in (AP)

• How to Disappear (Atlantic)

• President Donald Trump's long-running dream of firing any perceived enemy in the federal bureaucracy got even closer to reality Thursday, thanks to a little-noticed provision in his massive tax bill. One union official calls it "criminal extortion," HuffPost's Dave Jamieson reports. [HuffPost]

• Pregnant news anchor stays on air during labor. ‘If I disappear, that’s what’s going on,’ she says (AP)

• Anthropic’s new AI model threatened to reveal engineer’s affair to avoid being shut down (Fortune)

• Elon Musk Announces Plans To Step Back From Fatherhood (The Onion)

 

The Invasion

The Trump administration can be understood as a hostile army invading the United States. They are opening up new fronts almost every day — so much so that those of wishing to defend our democracy don’t know which way to turn.

Taking a page from his hero Putin’s playbook, Trump just keeps sending wave after wave of his troops (“executive orders”) at us, not really caring if they live or die, with the expectation that we will just become exhausted and stop resisting his grab for complete power.

Meanwhile, the creaky institutions of democracy — the lower courts, the Senate, the Supreme Court, even though they are thoroughly infected with Trumpism — are slowly starting to resist.

By nature these democratic processes move at a gradual pace, careful to preserve the rights, norms and conventions that have gotten us here to a point almost 250 years into the era of constitutional democracy.

I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking it is time they sped up their resistance while there still are enough resources to resist the invasion. Democracy has been dying before our eyes, drip by drip. It is bleeding out.

We can sit and watch or join forces by backing those leading the nascent resistance to save the patient, repel the invaders and begin the long, slow recovery.

Oh, but wait! I’m getting ahead of myself. First we have to get rid of the would-be king. To do that non-violently and democratically, we need to turn his minions in the GOP out of office in the midterms and those are next year, 2026.

One year before the country celebrates its 250th anniversary, democracy will be finally able to start its comeback. That, or there will be literally nothing to celebrate.

HEADLINES:

• Trump administration bars Harvard from enrolling international students (CNN)

• Harvard Sues Trump Administration Over Move to Bar International Students (NYT)

• The plan to protect America by shooting down missiles mid-air (Economist)

• US judge blocks Trump's plan to dismantle Education Department (Reuters)

• Trump tax bill clears the House in a victory for Republicans, advances to the Senate (CNBC)

• The Decline and Fall of Elon Musk (Atlantic)

• Elon Musk Reacts to Article About His 'Decline and Fall' (Newsweek)

• Supreme Court blocks creation of religious charter school in Oklahoma (NPR)

• Trump and Republicans are targeting blue states’ climate policies (WP)

• Venezuelan migrants lost legal status. Here’s what that means for the economy. (WP)

• Deportees Went Where? (NYT)

• Diseases are spreading. The CDC isn't warning the public like it was months ago (NPR)

• The history behind Trump’s focus on White South African farmers (WP)

• European Officials Say Trump Tells Their Leaders Putin Isn’t Ready to End War (WSJ)

• What Israeli Officials Are Privately Saying About Starvation in Gaza (New Yorker)

• Stop making cents: US Mint moves forward with plans to kill the penny (AP)

• CBS News staffers see leader’s departure as a sign of Trump settlement (WP)

• News publishers call Google’s AI Mode ‘theft’ (Verge)

• DOGE Used Meta AI Model to Review Emails From Federal Workers (Wired)

• OpenAI’s Ambitions Just Became Crystal Clear (Atlantic)

• Will Writing Survive AI? (NYT)

• Understaffed National Weather Service Still Weeks Away From Issuing Kentucky Tornado Warning (The Onion)

 

If Truth Still Matters

What are journalists to do when the president lies on the world stage, subjecting this country to ridicule? Wednesday’s meeting in the White House with the president of South Africa was a travesty.

There is no “genocide” of white farmers in that country, as Trump has alleged and the film he dramatically showed was not what he claimed — thousands of crosses marking burial sites of victims.

They were not burial sites and there are no victims. It was a bald-faced lie.

As someone who devoted his half-century career to digging up and documenting true stories, Trump’s propaganda makes me want to scream. Have the standards for truth fallen so low in this country that our fellow citizens will keep falling for this kind of crap?

It’s patently obvious that Trump, a life-long racist, is still angry about the way that the global anti-apartheid movement displaced the white government in South Africa decades ago, so he is trying to flip the historical script now.

If the truth matters at all in these times, his blatantly racist ploy will fail. If the truth still matters.

HEADLINES:

• Trump’s National-Security Disaster (Atlantic)

• How China became cool (Economist)

• Trump confronts South African president, pushing false claims of genocide (WP)

• Trump, South African president clash in White House meeting (CBS)

• Israel’s Allies Condemn Expansion of Gaza War (NYT)

• The UN says no aid that has entered Gaza this week has reached Palestinians (AP)

• Ukraine will ask the EU next week to consider big new steps to isolate Moscow, including seizing Russian assets and bringing in sanctions for some buyers of Russian oil, as US President Donald Trump has backed off from tightening sanctions. (Reuters)

• The Radical Courage of Noor Abdalla (New Yorker)

• World’s supply of critical minerals for clean energy is concentrated in fewer countries, report finds (AP)

• Trump and GOP’s tax bill would force cuts to Medicare, CBO says (WP)

• Trump's big tax and policy bill stalls as GOP conservatives push for changes (USAToday)

• Noem Incorrectly Defines Habeas Corpus as the President’s Right to Deport People (NYT)

• A Democratic senator hit back at Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for botching the definition of a foundational right that separates the U.S. from "police states." [HuffPost]

• Under RFK Jr., COVID shots will only be available to people 65+, high-risk groups (ArsTechnica)

• Judge says Trump administration violated court order on third-country deportations (NPR)

• Financial Reckoning Hits Universities: Pay Cuts, Layoffs and No Coffee (WSJ)

• Federal Cuts Become ‘All Consuming’ at Harvard’s Public Health School (NYT)

• 'Don't know how we will survive': Medicaid cuts could put this group of mothers in peril (USAToday)

• How Johnson & Johnson Misled America (Atlantic)

• U.S. Formally Accepts Luxury Jet From Qatar for Trump (NYT)

• The planet may have already warmed enough to melt the world’s ice sheets, study says (WP)

• OpenAI to Buy AI Device Startup From Apple Veteran Jony Ive in $6.5 Billion Deal (Bloomberg)

• Google is stuffing even more ads into its AI results (Verge)

• Teens are sexting with AI. Here’s what parents should know (WP)

• Republican Infighting Erupts Over Whether Trump Bill Beautiful Or Handsome (The Onion)

Media R.I.P.

Until the early 1990s, print journalism had relied on essentially the same technology ever since well before the American Revolution.

Newspapers, broadsheets, magazines, and books had all existed when the Constitution was written and their co-dependence was critical to how democracy in North America evolved.

The Constitution with its First Amendment guaranteeing our rights as the press wasn’t broadcast and it wasn’t posted to the Web. It didn’t get tweeted or followed on Instagram. No one made a YouTube video about it. You couldn’t tell your friends on Facebook or TikTok about it. You also could not scroll through it on your cellphone, send a text about it, or “own” a copy as an NFT.

It’s true that earlier in the 20th century, another form of electronic technology, radio, had disrupted the publishing industry, followed by a few decades its close cousin television, but the federal government had regulated both of those much more tightly than print — largely to minimize the potential for authoritarian abuse.

The initial regulatory structure for the airwaves was established in the 1920s and led by Herbert Hoover, who was the leading voice for how to preserve free speech while managing the anti-democratic threat posed by radio. The Communications Act of 1934 codified these principles and extended them to telecommunications.

But by the time web browsers came along in the last decade of the century, the traditional regulatory structure could not be reasonably extended to the Internet without stifling the growth of a lucrative new industry.

Congress debated what to do and the result was Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. That regulation essentially guaranteed the freedom of web-based companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple and (soon) Google, Facebook, and Twitter to host user-generated content without being liable for its accuracy or fairness.

This instantly put both print and broadcast media outlets at a major disadvantage, one from which they have never recovered. What it actually meant in practice is that anyone could now call himself or herself a journalist and attract an audience for their claims, however bizarre and undocumented they might be.

Millions of people quickly took advantage of that opportunity and new websites popped up everywhere. Among them were a handful, like Wired, Salon and Slate in the early years, that attempted to preserve the quality standards of traditional journalism during the transition to this new interactive digital world, with varying degrees of success. (I was at both Salon and Wired during this period.)

But the traditional media and new media alike were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new information sources. Very rapidly, the existing world of media began to crumble into ruins.

Thirty years later, it’s fair to say we are paying the price for what’s been lost.

HEADLINES:

• U.S. economy is experiencing ‘death by a thousand cuts’, says Deutsche Bank, as confidence in national debt management erodes (Fortune)

• Lawyers accuse Trump administration of deporting Vietnamese and Burmese migrants to South Sudan in violation of court order (CNN)

• Majority of US companies say they have to raise prices due to Trump tariffs (Guardian)

• New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver faces felony assault charge in conflict at ICE facility, court filing shows (Politico)

• This is a fight over Obamacare, again (Axios)

• Why Walmart decided to say it would raise prices — and risk Trump’s fury (CNBC)

• A maintenance worker was arrested after a New Orleans jailbreak. (NPR)

• A family divide shows how the ‘strongest bond’ between US and Canada is being broken (CNN)

• Sea level rise will cause ‘catastrophic inland migration’, scientists warn (Guardian)

• White House officials wanted to put federal workers ‘in trauma.’ It’s working. (WP)

• While Trump overhauls FEMA, Mississippi tornado survivors await assistance (AP)

• Trump unveils plans for 'Golden Dome' defence system (BBC)

• Iran's Khamenei slams 'outrageous' US demands in nuclear talks (Reuters)

• Trump Calls For Investigations of Springsteen, Beyoncé, Oprah and U2’s Bono for Endorsing Harris (Daily Kos)

• New Trump vaccine policy limits access to COVID shots (AP)

• Head Start preschool programs for low-income US children are scrambling to cope with funding cuts and delays, as they feel the squeeze of Trump's cost-cutting drive. Meanwhile, Trump's mass layoff threat drives tens of thousands of US government workers to resign. (Reuters)

• Trump administration pulls $60M in Harvard grants in third round of cuts (WP)

• Israeli air strikes killed at least 50 Palestinians in Gaza, local health authorities said, as Israel continues its bombardment despite mounting international pressure to stop military operations and allow aid into Gaza unimpeded. (Reuters)

• How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future (NYT)

• Google will let you ‘try on’ clothes with AI (Verge)

• Zero-click searches: Google’s AI tools are the culmination of its hubris (ArsTechnica)

• Can AI therapists really be an alternative to human help? (BBC)

• I’m a LinkedIn Executive. I See the Bottom Rung of the Career Ladder Breaking. (NYT)

• AI Mode is obviously the future of Google Search (Verge)

• Artificial intelligence was more persuasive than humans in a new study. (WP)

• Chicago Sun-Times Prints AI-Generated Summer Reading List With Books That Don't Exist (404)

• Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results (The Onion)

The Penny

The other day I found a penny, or rather it found me.

It had been sitting in place for a few days. Many people had passed it by but none had thought it worth their time to scoop it up.

Maybe out of pity for the cast-off, which over the course of our lifetimes has lost almost all of its value, I picked it up.

The penny was marked with the date it was minted, 1971.

Every coin has its story; few of them get told.

***

1971 — What a year that was! I returned from the Peace Corps in Afghanistan, only later to quit my job as a pizza deliveryman for Cottage Inn Pizza in Ann Arbor and drive an old white Chevy van with "Ft. Myers, Fla." stenciled on the side all the way across America.

Exiting the freeway in San Francisco, we chugged up Fell Street, turned right onto Fillmore Street, and drove until just before Pine Street, arriving at our destination: the self-proclaimed world headquarters of Running Dog Inc., publisher of the forthcoming SunDance magazine.

The building was nestled into a space next to a blues club called Minnie’s Can-Do.

We were a very small start-up team and before we could publish this brand new magazine, we had to build out the office by sheet-rocking the walls, painting them, refinishing and shellacking the floor.

As a flourish of sorts, we sealed a penny into that newly shiny hardwood just before we finished preparing the space that would see an amazing menagerie of the famous (John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Jerry Rubin, etc.) and the crazy (too many to list) and the talented (everybody) walk through its front door over the next two years.

The experience of helping produce that magazine helped shape my career, leading directly to Rolling Stone, the Center for Investigative Reporting and all the rest.

***

Many years later, when SunDance was a distant memory, I happened to be back in what was by then known in real estate terms as the Upper Fillmore District. There were no blues clubs left in the area but plenty of fancy shops. After a brief search, I located the building at 1913 and stepped inside for the first time since our magazine dream had died there three decades earlier.

The space was by then a boutique. I feigned interest in the women's clothes on the racks. What I was actually seeking was pretty vague — some wisp or ghost of a memory, nothing more than that. The sheetrock had long since been dismantled, the walls had been repainted many times, and the track lighting overhead was a major upgrade from our day. All the evidence of our time there seemed to have vanished.

But then, near the rear of the store, I spotted something that stopped me dead in my tracks. There was the penny we’d imbedded in the hardwood floor, still frozen in time with its date: 1971.

Every coin has a story; few of them get told.

This one’s did.

(From 2023.)

HEADLINES:

• Joe Biden's cancer diagnosis and when illness strikes just as you finally retire (USA Today)

• Rep. LaMonica McIver charged by DOJ over incident with ICE agents (ABC)

• Supreme Court allows Trump to revoke protected status for thousands of Venezuelans (NBC)

• Trump’s Threats to Defy Courts Suddenly Get More Dangerous (TNR)

• America’s College Towns Go From Boom to Bust (WSJ)

• FBI director Kash Patel weighed in on the conspiracy theory that undercover FBI agents "egged people on" during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. "That answer is coming," he said. [HuffPost]

• Police secretly monitored New Orleans with facial recognition cameras (WP)

• Russia Unleashes One of Its Largest Drone Barrages of the Ukraine War (NYT)

• After Putin call, Trump says Russia and Ukraine to start 'immediate' talks on ceasefire (Reuters)

• Putin just showed Trump how little he needs him (CNN)

• Nobody in Ukraine Thinks the War Will End Soon (Atlantic)

• The European Union and Britain reached a tentative agreement on defense and security, fisheries and youth mobility ahead of a EU-UK summit, paving the way for British firms to participate in large EU defence contracts. (Reuters)

• Israel lets aid into Gaza after 11-week blockade but UN calls it 'drop in ocean' (BBC

• Iran says nuclear talks will fail if US pushes for zero enrichment (Reuters)

• Judge strikes down DOGE takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace (NBC)

• RFK Jr.'s next target: A common weedkiller (Axios)

• RFK Jr. pledged not to upend US vaccine system, but big changes are underway (AP)

• Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet (Wired)

• I have seen the future of AI. It’s in Western Pennsylvania. (WP)

• GOP Maintains Solid Hold On Youth That Already Look Like Old Men (The Onion)

Imagine That

"I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem." -- Richard Feynman

One of the most confusing things about our imagination is when it takes us to a place we can't go to yet. We may well be able to reach that place one day, but not now.

We know the universe is vast and that the odds of other inhabitable worlds are extremely good. We also know that the sun will ultimately explode and die, rendering life on this planet impossible. So for our species to survive we will eventually have to travel.

While we believe all these things to be true, our ability to do anything about them is apparently limited by the laws of physics. On the other hand, quantum mechanics, suggests none of those constraints are immutable -- that space and time and consciousness are all figments of our imagination.

Thinking too hard about all this will take us around the circle Feynman so eloquently described. There is no escape (for now).

But some of us yearn to break away from the constraints that bind us to current reality. Perhaps none more than journalists, who are stuck covering reality in its gritty detail every day. That is where some combination of art and fiction come in, as our most imaginative impulses take the form of music, dance, painting, sculpture, film, novels, short stories, poems and more.

These help deliver the future to us. Meanwhile, predicting it is, at best, a crap shoot.

The book "Super Forecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction," by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, describes a massive effort by an army of volunteers to forecast global events. According to this research, once they given the best evidence, about two percent of those involved prove to be "super forecasters," able with uncanny accuracy to figure out what is going to happen next about almost anything.

Alas, I’m not one of those.

HEADLINES:

• Pro-European centrist beats right-wing nationalist in Romanian vote (WP)

• The MAGA revolution threatens America’s most innovative place (Economist)

• ‘I own the store’: Trump seeks a direct role in the economy (WP)

• Amid Cease-Fire Talks, Israel Says It Has Expanded Ground Operations in Gaza (NYT)

• Israel has launched a new offensive in blockaded Gaza. Here’s what to know (AP)

• How to Take Medicaid from Millions of Americans, in Less Than 72 Hours (Bulwark)

• Trump Justice Dept. considers removing key check on lawmaker prosecutions (WP)

• Federal Courts’ Emerging Bottom Line: Due Process Rights for Immigrants (NYT)

• Trump’s clash with the courts raises the prospect of a showdown over separation of powers (AP)

• Behind Microsoft Layoffs, Automation Efforts Boom (The Information)

• Since taking office, Trump has used power of government against speech in prominent ways (WP)

• The Group Behind Project 2025 Has a Plan to Crush the Pro-Palestinian Movement (NYT)

• Investors Await Another Monday Jolt After Moody’s Downgrades US (Bloomberg)

• Trump orders the government to stop enforcing rules he doesn’t like (WP)

• Joe Biden diagnosed with 'aggressive' prostate cancer (BBC)

• World Health Organization looks ahead to life without the US (Reuters)

• U.S. funding halted Africa’s HIV crisis. Trump’s cuts have forced a reckoning. (WP)

• Fatal blast near Palm Springs fertility clinic 'act of terrorism' - FBI (BBC)

• Willie Nelson, 92, and Bob Dylan, 83, Reunite for Legendary Performance (Parade)

• Troubled Democrats To Undergo Party Counseling (The Onion)

 

And Then It All Changed

If there is a better window into the popular culture of the 1960s than our music, I’m not aware of it, and this video nails it — a 45-minute reel of excerpts from every #1 Billboard hit from that decade.

It jumps song to song, and watching it I felt as though I was relieving my youth.

Given how much time I spent listening to the radio as a teenager, it didn’t really surprise me that I knew almost every song. The decade was rolling along just fine until 1964 when the Beatles arrived and changed everything.

And they kept changing everything for the rest of the time they stayed together. But the biggest surprise for me was just how many #1 hits the Supremes had.

Digging back ten years earlier, a 20-minute companion reel documents Billboard’s hits from the 1950s, a much more staid period starting with “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” at #1.

Staid that is until Elvis burst onto the scene.

I’m sure historians have other, better ways to recapture the history of bygone eras, but as a superficial cliff-notes version, these kinds of YouTube sessions seem to work just fine.

HEADLINES:

• 1 Dead as Bomb Damages Palm Springs Fertility Clinic, Mayor Says (NYT)

• Two dead as Mexican Navy ship crashes into Brooklyn Bridge (BBC)

• ‘Very disturbing’: Trump receipt of overseas gifts unprecedented, experts warn (Guardian)

• Supreme Court denies U.S. deportations under wartime law (Reuters)

• Supreme Court Retains Block on Using Wartime Law to Deport Venezuelans (NYT)

• Court lifts block on Trump order to strip federal workers of union rights (WP)

• Pet-Eating Lies to Deportation Fears: Haitians in Trump’s Crosshairs (Reveal)

• Nonprofit leaders brace for possible targeting by the Trump administration after tax measure advances in Congress (CNN)

• On Corruption in America (Journal of the Plague Years)

• The New Acting Administrator of FEMA Wrote a Novel. It’s Not Good. (TNR)

• A Big, Beautiful Detour for the GOP (WSJ)

• Steve Bannon Floats Worst Person Ever as Trump’s Successor Spoiler alert: It’s not JD Vance. (TNR)

• Russia Plotted to Put Incendiary Devices on Cargo Planes, Officials Say (NYT)

• Russia and Ukraine meet low expectations in Istanbul (Reuters)

• Trump to speak to Putin and Zelenskyy in fresh peace bid (Financial Times)

• Deadly Israeli strikes pound Gaza (Reuters)

• Bob Dylan, 83, Stuns Fans Singing Beloved Hit Song for First Time in 15 Years (Parade)

• Trump bashes Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift on Truth Social (WP)

• Walmart prepares for a future where AI agents do the shopping (TechSpot)

• Musk's xAI updates Grok chatbot after 'white genocide' comments (Reuters)

• For One Hilarious, Terrifying Day, Elon Musk’s Chatbot Lost Its Mind (NYT)

• Ear Of Genetically Modified Corn Begs For Death (The Onion)

LESLIE’s LINKS:

The Khashoggi Compromise

US Completely Loses Perfect Credit Rating for First Time in Over a Century

Moody's strips US of top-notch triple-A credit rating

Meet ‘Ice,’ ‘Ogle’ and other crypto millionaires who bought a night with Trump

Trump Justice Dept. considers removing key check on lawmaker prosecutions

At Least 27 Dead After Tornadoes and Storms Tear Across Central U.S.

How a tornado tested a Kentucky weather office that cut its overnight staff

Trump's actions are pushing thousands of experts to flee government

Is the University Of Austin Betraying Its Founding Principles?

ARCHIVAL VIDEO: 

EVERY BILLBOARD #1 HIT (1960 - 1969) WITH VIDEO