Wertheimer

Edit: Fixed link.

“I feel like last night’s NYC election result is like a spiritual Kristallnacht. It proved Jew hatred is now OK,” posted Jill Kargman, a Jewish writer and actress.

...

“The Jewish community has seen time and again how violent rhetoric has transformed into actual violence, so for us it’s just deeply unsettling to have a mayoral candidate who condones and uses that language,” said Rabbi Diana Fersko, senior rabbi at the Village Temple, a Reform congregation in Manhattan, and the author of a book on antisemitism. “My hope is that if Mamdani is elected, he will become more sensitive and more aware of the needs of a significant part of the population that he is going to be leading.”

Is there anyone who's written a book on antisemitism who knows what antisemitism is?

I expect Mamdani is significantly more likely than his critics to have condemned the largest mass arrest of Jews since the Holocaust, something that actually made New York Jews unsafe. But his critics also have to bootlick the NYPD:

“It’s not that they expect to be run out, or they expect that the N.Y.P.D. won’t be there to protect them,” said Deborah E. Lipstadt, who was the Biden administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism. “It’s just another hit in the jaw, that these very deep-seated concerns could have been so easily brushed off by so many people.”

Sounds like a subtle way to say "the pigs should threaten the mayor's family again he doesn't comply with Porky's wishes" to me.

https://theonion.com/shroom-for-improvement/

A sprawling 2,560-bed facility in the high desert town of California City (Kern County) is poised to become the largest migrant detention center in California under a new agreement between Immigration and Customs Enforcement and private prison contractor CoreCivic.

...

“Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now,” CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger said during an earnings call with shareholders last month, citing the company’s general business.

This guy's address is googleable.

California City Mayor Marquette Hawkins acknowledged potential economic benefits, including an estimated 550 new jobs.

“However, we understand that 40% of our residents are Latino,” Hawkins told the Californian. “We want to make sure there is fairness there. We talked about oversight and my office having the ability to do that.”

Incredible.

This is the latest in a series of acts of vandalism targeting Sunset Dunes since the 2-mile, 50-acre park opened in April, months after San Franciscans created it by voting to close a section of the Great Highway to cars. The measure has been highly controversial, and the supervisor who championed it, Joel Engardio, will face a recall election in September driven by groups opposed to the Upper Great Highway’s closure.

I guess it doesn't matter anyway

Under a review of a book that helpfully informs us that revolutions are authoritarian.

“Authoritarianism,” he writes, “is one of the most striking features” of revolutions. Napoleon was an archetype, followed by a grim parade of successors: “Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot … Khomeini.”

...

“The principle of popular sovereignty could be disregarded in the name of the people,” Mr. Edelstein writes. “It was in the name of a future, improved democratic government by people Y that the present, inferior democratic government by people X must be suspended.” Ancient despots had promised order. Modern despots were empowered by the allure of so-called historical progress, to be achieved with terror and coercion. The hiss and thud of the guillotine, the gutters running with blood, the show trials and purges, the inevitable dictatorships of “virtue” or the “proletariat”: These were not failures, Mr. Edelstein suggests, but the necessary if exorbitant price of progress.

...

“The inevitable compromises of democratic governance,” he writes of our present moment, “do not sit easily with either progressives or traditionalists. Liberal democracy gets worn down by historical expectations or regrets.” This general ennui produces perilous effects: a taste for centralized power, distain [sic] for procedural justice, aggressive ideological purity, contempt for moderation. Whatever his intentions, Mr. Edelstein may find that his study of revolutions induces in readers an appreciation for the age-old, Polybian balance of the U.S. Constitution, even as history threatens to overtake it. We should certainly hope so.

https://theonion.com/gingham-style/

https://theonion.com/the-needled-and-the-damaged-son/

From yesterday, but if it was posted already I can't find it beneath all of the E~L~O~N gossip.

https://theonion.com/guise-and-dolls/

Archive

In researching Cummings’ life for my book about gun culture and capitalism in Cold War America, I often encountered a rumor: Interarms, the business that Cummings founded in 1954 and built into the world’s largest private arms dealer in just a few short years, began as a front for the Central Intelligence Agency. People interested in the who and why of the JFK assassination might have found the March release underwhelming, but for me, one document seems to offer confirmation of decades of historical hearsay: The CIA created and owned America’s largest gun distributor.

. . .

Summarizing Cummings’ file, the previously released redacted version of the document states that “On 17 August 1954 CUMMINGS became the principal agent of the [redacted] International Armaments Corporation and Interarmco.” In the newly released, unredacted version, it reads: “On 17 August 1954 CUMMINGS became the principal agent of the CIA-owned companies known as International Armaments Corporation and Interarmco” (emphasis mine).

In other words, the CIA “owned” the country’s largest importer and distributor of guns, the company that would spearhead a remarkable boom in gun ownership in the United States in the decade and a half before the Gun Control Act iced war-surplus imports.

. . .

Speak about destruction:

Scholars have long written of a phenomenon called “blowback” to describe what happens when the CIA’s international meddling leads to unexpected, and often disastrous, long-term consequences—think of U.S. support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s, for instance, eventually giving rise to al-Qaida. What would it mean to add “founded the country’s largest gun distributor” to the Blowback Hall of Fame?

During the past year, I found it hard to explain, to family and friends, a strange truth. I was reporting on places where starvation and dehydration deaths had unfolded across a span of weeks or months—but these were not overseas famine zones or traditional theatres of war. Instead, they were sites of domestic lawlessness: American county jails. After meeting Carlin and Karina, I identified and scrutinized more than fifty cases of individuals who, in recent years, had starved to death, died of dehydration, or lost their lives to related medical crises in county jails. In some cases, hundreds of hours of abusive neglect were captured on video, relevant portions of which I reviewed. One lawyer, before sharing a confidential jail-death video, warned me, “It will stain your brain.” It did.

The victims were astoundingly diverse. Some, like Mary, were older. Some were teen-agers. Some were military veterans. Many were parents. In nearly all the cases I reviewed, the individuals were locked up pretrial, often on questionable charges. Many were being held in jail because they could not afford bail, or because their mental state made it hard for them to call family to express their need for it. (These jail deaths would not have occurred, several lawyers pointed out to me, in the absence of the cash-bail system.) Others were awaiting psychiatric evaluation or a court-mandated hospital bed. Often, the starvation victims were held in solitary confinement or other forms of isolation, which is well proved to deepen psychosis. Some were given no toilet and no functioning faucet, or were expected to sleep on mats on concrete floors, in rooms where the lights never turned off.

Meet the real president of the United States.

His name is Gavin Christopher Newsom. He is chief executive of America’s richest and most populous state.

And in this peculiar moment, that makes him the real president, by default.

Sure, there’s a guy living in the White House who some people call president. But real presidents swear an oath to execute the laws and to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. Donald Trump violates the laws and the Constitution constantly, thus abandoning the post to which he has elected.

In response, Newsom has effectively assumed the presidency, though the public doesn’t yet understand this. One common complaint is that Newsom is distracted by issues beyond California. Another dig is that he is pursuing future presidential ambitions.

But those gripes miss what’s really going on. Newsom isn’t running for president; he’s acting like the president, not a governor, because the country needs someone to act like a president.

...

Newsom’s controversial new podcast, with its pluralistic mission — “tackling tough questions, engaging with people who don’t always agree with me, debating without demeaning” — is of a piece with his defend-the-system presidency.

Members of his own party have rightfully criticized Newsom for failing to challenge the far-right figures who appear as guests. (Newsom’s surrender to anti-trans ideology was ugly). But the gambit makes sense if you’re a president seeking consensus in a polarized country. On the podcast, he isn’t really interviewing anyone — he is presiding, since even MAGA strategists like Steve Bannon are the real president’s constituents, too.

I don't think we have any Gruesome Newsom emojis. Maybe we can do something with this?