The US mid-term elections have seen a level of outright lying and racism and bigotry and fearmongering by Trump and the Republicans that is far beyond anything that I have witnessed before. Things that used to be signaled with coded dog-whistles to avoid being seen as an awful person have been abandoned and are now on naked display. They are owning to being disgusting people.
The ugliness is sickening and can be better stomached if wrapped in satire as in this piece by Jordan Klepper.
Republicans are going all out to try and rig the mid-term elections in their favor by a variety of means: gerrymander seats to make them more favorable to them, remove voters from rolls, try to make it harder for voters to show eligibility to vote, and remove polling stations in locations that they think favor Democrats.
The last feature was on display in North Carolina to prevent Black college students from voting but that effort may have backfired.
On 15 October, the first day of early voting in North Carolina, mostly Black students from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (NC A&T), Bennett College and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) marched from their college campuses to their nearest polling sites for the first day of early voting.
Previously, students were able to vote on their respective campuses; however, late last year, with Republicans at the helm, the North Carolina board of elections removed several polling sites from local colleges: UNCG, NC A&T, Western Carolina University (WCU) and Elon University. As a result, students have taken it upon themselves to organize voting. The marches – two, so far – took about two hours round trip, but protecting their right to vote, the students say, is worth it.
[Read more…]
The 20th century saw the apex of US power. Even during the Cold War with the Soviet Union as a rival nuclear superpower, the US was still dominant. This dominance came with a massive cost for many people in other countries. as we saw the US being behind the murder of millions of people all across Asia, Africa, and Central and South America in its global anti-Communist rampage, that left many countries devastated and reeling and still struggling to recover. The cynical and callous way that the US behaved is something that many Americans do not fully appreciate since the US and other western media have been complicit in hiding the ugly truth from its own people, enabling them to think that the US has largely been a benevolent force in the world.
(For those who think I am exaggerating, I recommend the book The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World by journalist Vincent Bevins that describes in great detail how the US instigated coups and put into power rulers in many countries who carried out large scale massacres of leftists and democracy activists. Starting after World War II, this program saw its fruition in Indonesia and Brazil in the 1960s and that murderous model was later used in dozens of other countries across the world. I will be giving a detailed review of the book in the future.)
But along with this brute force military-based dominance, there was also the concomitant development of soft power.
[Read more…]
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, after coming in second in the first round of presidential voting three weeks ago, staged a dramatic come-from-behind victory in the run-off, defeating Flavio Bolsonaro, the son of the former president and Trump acolyte Jair Bolsonaro.
With nearly 99% of votes counted the 80-year-old leftist received 51.75% of the vote to his 45-year-old rival’s 48.25%.
Lula narrowly lost the first round of the election to Bolsonaro in early October, casting his political future into doubt and plunging progressive Brazilians into three weeks of despair. Never, since the return of democracy in the 1980s, has the first round runner-up won the second vote.
But Lula did precisely that on Sunday, prompting joyous scenes on the streets of São Paulo, where he had been following the count, and at the hotel where he was watching the count.
…For Lula, who turns 81 on Tuesday, the victory represents a sensational final chapter in a storied political career that began when he emerged as a union leader in São Paulo’s industrial suburbs in the late 1970s.
After entering politics, the former factory worker who was born in rural poverty made three unsuccessful presidential bids, in 1989, 1994 and 1998, before finally becoming Brazil’s first elected working-class president in 2002.
Lula stepped down after the maximum two consecutive terms allowed by the constitution but returned to power after winning the 2022 election against Bolsonaro’s father, then the incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro, who was subsequently jailed for plotting a coup.
Lula’s win is bad news for Bolsonaro who is serving a 27-year sentence for that botched power grab and was hoping to be freed and given a role in government had his son prevailed.
Dire warnings about the dangers posed by AI have been around since it first burst into the news. But back in July, more serious alarms were raised when it was revealed that the company Hugging Face had been hacked by agents from the OpenAI system.
I did not quite understand what had happened or why this particular incident had raised alarms to a whole new level or even what the difference was between a ‘bot’ and an ‘agent’. So I was glad to come across this explainer as to why there was so much concern about this particular hack.
Women face dangers in all manner of situations that men rarely do. The news has been full of stories of men sexually assaulting and raping women whom they managed to get alone, some of the most recent and disgusting ones emerging from the trial in the UK of Russell Brand. He is accused of being a “ruthless, calculated and manipulative sexual predator”, almost maniacal in the way he tried to assault women even in spaces where there was little privacy.
Soon after the accusations surfaced, he claimed to have found Jesus and appeared just three weeks ago at a RFK Jr’s MAHA event with Mehmet Oz, where Tony Lyons, the head of the MAHA PAC, strongly supported him.
Brand was charged more than a year ago, based on allegations from four women, but MAHA groups and the movement’s founder, Kennedy, have stood by him. Brand spoke on Lyons’ regular conference call for movement activists on Wednesday, the third day of his trial.
“He’s been falsely accused, he’s been vilified, persecuted, deplatformed, demonetized, censored, prosecuted,” Lyons said in introducing Brand.
Brand has denied the charges, three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault, saying any sex he had was consensual.
On his weekly podcast, he spoke with the Democratic candidate for the senate seat in Michigan. The interview lasts about 90 minutes and is engrossing.
El-Sayed comes across as charismatic, likeable, whip smart, principled, disciplined, and focused on the key issues. I can see why Trump, Republicans, oligarchs, Big Pharma, the hospital and Israeli lobbies, the tech billionaires, and other powerful interests are freaked out by the possibility of him winning and are throwing huge amounts of money into the race to try and defeat him.
Mo Amer talks about the unhinged Islamophobia on display and the extreme labels that the right are trying to pin on him.
We are now less than two weeks away from the mid-term elections to be held on November 3. There have been many predictions of a ‘blue wave’ of Democratic wins due to Trump’s record low poll numbers, high cost of gas prices, persistent inflation, and the stalemate in the US-Israel initiated war with Iran. I have become very wary of such predictions. I have been through many election cycles where the polls predicted Democratic wins only to find that the final results were underwhelming. I am particularly skeptical about potential wins in states like Texas and Florida, that have often proved to be mirages.
We are also now well into ‘October Surprise’ territory, where it is speculated that Trump and Republicans will spring some major new action in an effort to distract voters in general and galvanize their own supporters to go to the polls in large numbers. We never know what form these surprises take until after they happen but this article in The Atlantic says that planning is underway to renew attacks on Iran.
[Read more…]
I was surprised to learn that the Deputy Press Secretary in the White House for the past two years has been Anna Kelly, who seems to meet pretty much all the requirements for a Trump spokesperson, being young (29 years old), female, a smooth liar, a Trump fangirl, and former beauty contestant. She was deputy to Karoline Leavitt for two years and could have taken over that role when Leavitt left and avoided the Zacharia debacle. The one thing that may have sunk her candidacy is that she has red hair and is not a blonde and Trump must not have been able to overlook that fatal flaw.
Meanwhile Jordan Klepper is miffed that his carefully researched piece on Katie Zacharia was not ready to air before her flameout.
If you have played any musical instrument at all, you may have imagined how wonderful it would be to be playing in an ensemble, while knowing that you would never be good enough to do so. The Portsmouth Sinfonia was created in 1970 to meet such a need and was open to anyone who wanted to play. But while expertise was not required, attendance at rehearsals was mandatory and orchestra members were expected to take it seriously and give it their best shot.
The orchestra spokesperson Robin Mortimore told Rolling Stone that they played as well as they could and did not intend to caricature professional orchestras. Bryars said the notion that members were required to be novices was a “scurrilous rumour” spread by the BBC. [Brian] Eno said the orchestra included a mixture of skilled and unskilled players, which created “a very blurry version, a soft-focus version, of classical music” and “produced some beautiful music … There were some exquisite moments — the mixture of chance and choice.” Nyman described the orchestra as avant-garde and found it moving and exciting. He argued that the music was profound and subversive, and that the members were serious artists and experimental musicians, not deliberately incompetent. He said “the combination of everybody’s individual errors built a musical structure that was incomparable”.
…On 28 May 1974, by which point they had 82 members, the orchestra performed a sell-out concert at the Royal Albert Hall, London. They were joined by an accomplished pianist, Sally Binding, who transposed Piano Concerto No. 1 to A minor as the orchestra was “unnerved” by sharps and flats. In 1979, the Portsmouth Sinfonia released the album 20 Classic Rock Classics, inspired by the Classic Rock series of albums by the London Symphony Orchestra. That year, they performed at the Rainbow Theatre, London. They last performed in 1979. Prompted by the 1981 album Hooked on Classics by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Portsmouth Sinfonia released a single, “Classical Muddly”, that reached number 38 on the UK singles chart in 1981. Plans for the BBC to broadcast a film about the Portsmouth Sinfonia in 1994 were cancelled as the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra feared the public might confuse the orchestras.
Here they are with the fanfare of the tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, which I am sure that everyone has heard, at least from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I wish I had been able to play with them. I would have fit in so well.