Wait - what ?

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The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

New York City Images: 1850-1980

Jim Ho 

Lunch Atop A Skyscraper, 1932

It’s the most perilous yet playful lunch break ever captured: 11 men casually eating, chatting and sneaking a smoke as if they weren’t 840 feet above Manhattan with nothing but a thin beam keeping them aloft. That comfort is real; the men are among the construction workers who helped build Rockefeller Center.

But the picture, taken on the 69th floor of the flagship RCA Building (now the GE Building), was staged as part of a promotional campaign for the massive skyscraper complex. While the photographer and the identities of most of the subjects remain a mystery—the photographers Charles C. Ebbets, Thomas Kelley and William Leftwich were all present that day, and it’s not known which one took it—there isn’t an ironworker in New York City who doesn’t see the picture as a badge of their bold tribe. In that way, they are not alone.

By thumbing its nose at both danger and the Depression, Lunch Atop a Skyscraper came to symbolize American resilience and ambition at a time when both were desperately needed. It has since become an iconic emblem of the city in which it was taken, affirming the romantic belief that New York is a place unafraid to tackle projects that would cow less brazen cities.

"Whosoever has any contact with reality is called an Idiot. The word idiot has two meanings: the true meaning that was given to it by the ancient sages was to be oneself. A man who is himself looks and behaves like a madman to those who live in the world of illusions: so when they call a man an idiot they mean that he does not share in their illusions. Everyone who decides to work on himself is an idiot in both meanings. The wise know that he is seeking for reality. The foolish think he has taken leave of his senses."

"America has changed over the years. But these values my grandparents taught me -- they haven't gone anywhere. They're as strong as ever; still cherished by people of every party, every race, every faith. They live on in each of us. What makes us American, what makes us patriots, is what's in here. That's what matters. And that's why we can take the food and music and holidays and styles of other countries, and blend it into something uniquely our own. That's why we can attract strivers and entrepreneurs from around the globe to build new factories and create new industries here. That's why our military can look the way it does -- every shade of humanity, forged into common service. That's why anyone who threatens our values, whether fascists or communists or jihadists or homegrown demagogues, will always fail in the end."

Rebecca Solnit 

My Guardian editor asked me to write about what happened to summer. Also just out: news that three lions in Tokyo's zoo died of heatstroke. I wrote:

Far beyond the fires raging across Europe and North America, the smoke, dangerous to breathe, hangs in the air, dimming the view, changing the very color of sunlight into something grimly unsettling.

An estimated 20,000 are said to have died in the extreme heat in Europe earlier this year, and heat is climate change’s quiet killer, compared to the dramatic violence of death by fire or flood. In eastern Washington, 600 homes have just burned down, and in both Europe and North America, firefighters have died in the effort to contain the climate-fueled firestorms.

Once, across much of the the world’s temperate zones, we looked forward to summer as a time of delights, from summer’s bounty of fruits, long days, warmth, school holidays, activities like camping and swimming, travel and adventure. Now many of us dread it.

Wildfires are raging – and the world has junked 45 climate pledges. Disaster looms, and little wonder.

Summer was the sweet season celebrated in poetry and song, often pictured as a gentle goddess; now it is too often a threat and a misery. All this makes me think of Bill McKibben’s 2011 book Earth, a proposal that we can understand climate change as equivalent to moving to a more perilous, unwelcoming planet than the gentle, stable one we evolved over the 12,000 years since the last ice age.

I know that there are parts of the world where summer was already harsh, intense – 20 years ago, my friend Mark Klett, a photographer living near Phoenix, Arizona, joked: “Phoenix has two seasons: summer and hell,” summer being January and February; hell being the rest of the year.

But even in Phoenix, summer is now more intense; there, people get severe burns from falling down on superheated asphalt. It’s changed everywhere.

I’ve driven to New Mexico almost every summer since 1989. A few years ago, I found that I feared heat for the first time: the temperature in Needles, a California desert town on the Colorado River near the Arizona border, was going to be 116F (46.6C). I didn’t know if my car could survive temperatures like that, and I feared what survival would look like for me if the air-conditioned car broke down on the highway. (I managed it by staying on the edge of the Mojave Desert the night before and darting across the low desert to Flagstaff, which at 7000ft elevation stays cooler, and pressing on to New Mexico the next day.)

I’m in New Mexico now, as I write, enjoying the beauties of its incomparable skies and summer thunderstorms, but 37 summers since I started coming, summer is not what it used to be. It’s hotter.

The monsoon rains are less reliable and often more violent when they come; one New Mexico town, Ruidoso, has over the past few years been beaten up repeatedly by flood and fire. Like so many westerners, I have too often breathed in the toxic smoke of burning forests, have followed the news of forests and towns being consumed by flames, have friends whose homes have been reduced to ash and rubble, have seen brick chimneys standing above the blackened ruins of a neighborhood.

As I hear about summer tourists sweltering miserably from Japan to Spain, I wonder if, going forward, travelers will shift peak vacation times to spring and fall, if schools will change when students have their holidays.

Keeping them indoors in air-conditioned spaces may be even a safety measure for those who lack such protection at home. Summer has too often, in too many places, become to brace against, prepare for, and dread: the season of danger, heat, fire, misery. The New Yorker reports: “ A conflagration west of Bordeaux, described as four times the size of Paris, prompted the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s history: 220,000 people.”

It’s as if we launched a war against nature, and that has turned place after place into something that resembles a war zone. The climate movement is a peace movement, a movement to end this war and its casualties.

We often talk about what climate change has wrecked in terms of what’s material, tangible, structures lost to fire, flood, or sea level rise, trees dying, species threatened, glaciers melting in warmer weather. But summer was an immaterial treasure and joy that belonged to all of us.

Steven Jennings

CONFUSED ABOUT THE AI CONTROVERSY?

I go for the simplest explanation, one that considers the two things that drive all gazillionaires, power and wampum.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," in the words of Lord Acton. Look at Trump being given immunity and crushing the age-old operation of the separation-of-powers doctrine. Look at the tech bros. But, here, Truscott reminds us about the free market that can make things "cheap" and also undermine monopoly power when someone like, say, China, does everything---as the Frank Sinatra song puts it---its way, and provides choice. Strange, isn't it, how a communist country threatens a malignant capitalist Epstein Class with the principles of a free market? The tech bro protection racket needs the wampum to buy the politicians, and along come communist China, like a new gang in town.

Perhaps. I still remain confused by all this, but Lucian K. Truscott IV is helping me understand.

EXCERPT: Here is what I think is happening. AI companies are selling information that already exists. What they’ve done is collect it and repackage it and sell access to it in a new, shiny, faster, supposedly cleaner way. But what AI is really selling is easier-faster. The question is, how fast can you make the machine go? What happens when somebody comes along and adds cheaper to the easier-faster equation?

It’s already happening. China is doing it cheaper. My question is, what is going to happen when all those data centers they are building can’t find buyers for the data they’re collecting? All that electricity, all that water to cool all those processing chips, and somebody is doing it cheaper, and because there are no tariffs on electrons that travel through fiber optic cable and via satellite, that somebody is going to dominate the market.

Remember the phrase, “information economy?” I always wondered what would happen when information got cheaper and cheaper. Where would the profits come from?

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

August 3, 2026

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 04, 2026

Just before midnight last night, news broke that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche had rescinded the order of May 18, 2026, establishing a $1.776 billion slush fund for those who claimed that the Department of Justice under former president Joe Biden had persecuted them. The fund was widely perceived to be a way to pay off those convicted of crimes related to their attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

What Blanche’s order did not do was to change the terms of the nonprosecution order providing that the Department of Justice would not prosecute Trump, his sons, the Trump Organization, or their associates for crimes related to tax returns filed before May 19, 2026. Last night, Blanche reiterated that the nonprosecution order applies “only retroactively,” but that was always the case.

At stake is at least $100 million it appears Trump owes to the American people from previous tax shenanigans that turned up in audits. It’s possible there are other irregularities, but if so, under this order, we would not know: the order says that the IRS will not audit the tax returns of Trump and his associates before the May 19 date. Ron Filipkowski of MeidasNews noted: “Pretty convenient that Trump gets immunity from IRS audits for the year where he made, by far, the most money of his entire life in shady deals all over the globe.”

And, as legal analyst Barb McQuade noted, even the promise to kill the slush fund is hollow. Last week, the Department of Justice paid $1.2 million to Paul Vaughn, who was convicted in 2024 of violating the FACE Act, which bans “force or threat of force or… physical obstruction” that “intentionally injures, intimidates or interferes with… any person… obtaining or providing reproductive health care services.” While Vaughn claimed he was arrested for praying, in fact he blocked the doors of a reproductive health care clinic in Tennessee.

Vaughn’s payoff shows that the Department of Justice will simply give out “individual settlements instead of one designated fund,” McQuade wrote.

Nonetheless, Senators Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, who sit on the Judiciary Committee and were openly opposing Blanche, this morning issued a joint statement saying they will now support Blanche’s nomination for attorney general, allowing the nomination to move out of the Judiciary Committee to the full Senate.

Legal analyst Lisa Rubin noted that “[i]n their statement, Sen[ator]s Cornyn and Tillis refer to this one pager as a ‘binding written order that the audit settlement is limited to the plaintiffs and the scope does not extend beyond the defendants in the lawsuit, the IRS and the Treasury.’ But this isn’t an order nor does it bind anyone.”

The top-ranking Democratic member of the House Judiciary Committee, constitutional law professor Jamie Raskin of Maryland, released a statement titled “Blanche’s Empty Promises Do Nothing to Kill [the] Slush Fund, Stop the Flow of Money to Convicted J6 Felons and MAGA Allies, or End Trump Family Super Pardon.” He called for “six patriotic House Republicans” to join with House Democrats to pass a discharge petition that would force a vote on stopping the “unconscionable” deal.

Now the rest of Republican senators have to decide whether Blanche’s fig leaf gives them enough plausible deniability of support for paying off violent Trump supporters and Trump’s IRS immunity to confirm Blanche’s nomination to become the attorney general tomorrow. While the focus has been on Tillis and Cornyn, Semafor’s senior Washington editor Elana Schor told MS NOW on Sunday that other Republican senators were quietly cheering Tillis and Cornyn on. “If the Senate voted on this fund today there would be almost 60 votes to kill it, maybe 70,” she said.

In The Freedom Academy with Asha Rangappa, counterintelligence scholar Rangappa suggests the Republican senators have gone so far down the road of enabling Trump that they will simply rubber-stamp Blanche. If “you’ve confirmed Pam Bondi, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Kristi Noem, you’ve funded ICE, you’ve stood by while Trump hollowed out the [intelligence community], fired thousands of people, drained the U.S. Treasury, hijacked the country’s semiquincentennial, trashed the White House lawn for a WWE event, and drained the reflecting pool. Twice…. Is Todd Blanche really going to be THE LINE?” she asks. “Come on.”

Rangappa is probably right that Senate Republicans will vote to confirm Blanche. But the cost of enabling Trump has risen as his job approval ratings have tanked. Only about a third of Americans approve of his job performance, numbers that rival those of President Richard M. Nixon just before he resigned. Confirming Blanche, who clearly works for Trump alone, carries with it the fact that Blanche appears to have been the person most responsible for ignoring the Epstein Files Transparency Act. According to U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan, Blanche essentially admitted he had violated the law when he failed to address allegations brought by independent journalist Katie Phang, who sued for access to documents she claimed were unlawfully redacted.

The judge is now reviewing those documents to see if the redactions were proper. If not, their exposure after Republican senators have put Blanche in the position of the top law enforcement official in the country would make the senators appear complicit in the Epstein files cover-up. While that issue has fallen out of the headlines since Trump began his war on Iran, it is an issue MAGA Republicans elected Trump to expose and could easily reignite.

And then there is the increasingly erratic behavior of Trump himself. This morning, he posted: “My REAL Polling Numbers, not those made up by the Fake News Media, are the best they have ever been, and why wouldn’t they be with the biggest tax cuts and employment numbers EVER, the biggest outside Investment in America in World history, a totally secure Border, a giant Victory in Venezuela, the Denuclearization of Iran, unparalleled respect and success throughout the World, and much more? Don’t believe the Radical Left’s Fake Poll numbers. They are Crooked and Corrupt, just like the Country Destroying Dumocrats are Crooked and Corrupt. VOTE REPUBLICAN FOR GREATNESS IN AMERICA!”

This version of Trump’s America is as fantastical as his post yesterday of an AI image of himself writing on a map of the U.S. with presidents George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, or of himself dressed as a svelte Elvis the day before.

Indeed, Saturday was quite a day of posting on social media for the president of the United States. In addition to portraying himself as Elvis, he posted a flattering picture of himself with the caption: “President Trump ages in reverse!,” himself as a Continental Army officer, a split portrait with his face as one half and George Washington as the other, and a “Trump 2028” poster.

Trump has given Republican senators little reason to give him cover. He has been openly feuding with Republican senators over things he wants Congress to do for which Republican leadership can’t find enough votes.

Those include the SAVE America Act, which would dramatically rework voting in the U.S. and which Trump seems to think would enable Republicans to win the 2026 midterms. But even if the Republicans nuke the filibuster so they could pass it without any Democratic votes—something they don’t want to do—it’s not clear they have enough votes for a simple majority. To get his way on the SAVE America Act, Trump hamstrung Republicans by refusing to sign a popular housing bill, which had to become law without his signature, hurting Republicans’ ability to claim credit for the measure.

Trump also wants a major supplemental funding bill for the enormously unpopular Iran war, which the Republicans would prefer not to pass before the midterms.

Manu Raju and Sarah Ferris of CNN reported yesterday that Trump is barely communicating with Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) except through the media. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters on July 23 that Trump’s “patience is running out” with Thune, and Raju and Ferris note that Senator Lindsey Graham’s death on July 11 hampered communication as the South Carolina Republican was close to both Trump and Thune.

Now the infighting appears to be getting worse. “We need to be talking up the wins, talking about how crazy Democrats are, and instead we are knifing each other,” a Republican senator told the CNN reporters.

The infighting between Trump and Republican senators was muted this weekend compared to the fighting between Trump and cabinet members. After U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro moved to dismiss criminal charges against David Hearn, the U.S. Olympian the Justice Department indicted for vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, both Trump and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum took to social media to challenge her.

Trump repeatedly posted on social media that “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro” and posted a video of the reflecting pool in broad daylight, with the workers skimming algae in it and people around it, focusing on what seemed to be a young man briefly kneeling by the pool as “proof” the “material is being cut with a knife or a box cutter, for all to see!” Alayna Treene of CNN reported today that Trump is furious with Pirro and is considering firing her.

Pirro blamed the Interior Department for the mistaken indictment, and Burgum fought back, supporting Trump’s version of events. He posted that the “evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool. Some of these acts were even caught on camera.” Unlike Pirro, Burgum did not have to defend his statements in a court of law. He did, though, get corrected by community notes, which pointed out that the Department of Justice had stated that damage to the pool came from a “botched contractor installation.”

And the fight between cabinet members paled in comparison with the extraordinary fight playing out between Republican federal lawmakers from Ohio, where Representative Max Miller on Sunday took to social media to post a twenty-minute video he apparently thought would exonerate him from well-supported stories that he abused his baby daughter and wife. The video delivered such eye-poppingly classic examples of abuse that it seemed to prove his guilt rather than his innocence. Documents he posted to accompany the video also supported the stories.

After Miller released the video, his former father-in-law, Senator Bernie Moreno, who had remained silent about the stories, finally made a public statement on social media calling Miller’s behavior “increasingly erratic and dangerous” and saying the representative—who is running for reelection—“needs serious psychological help” and “should not serve in the House of Representatives.”

Miller responded with what seemed to be a reference to stories that MAGA Republican Moreno is gay: “You know this isn’t true and the only reason you are speaking out now is to hide from your own media circus,” Miller wrote. “This is all political.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

Mitch Jackson

Bill Varie. Route 66, US Highway System, Los Angeles. June 28, 1977

* * * * * “Because getting to know the world happens anyway, by living in it, as soon as you walk out the door you’re confronted with the world directly. With the whole world. With up and down, back and front, ugliness and beauty, perfectly normal. There’s no need to want this. It happens of its own accord. And if you never leave the house, the process is the same.”

- Thomas Bernhard

Isla del Cap Marti, Javea, 1905, Joaquín Sorolla Medium: oil,canvas

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“The trick, it seems, is to be able to hold both things very close – the gratitude and the misery – and then, with a semblance of faith, to let them fly.”

–Elizabeth Aquino

If Republicans would throw an Olympian in prison for ten years on the obviously false and ridiculously Trumped up charge of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, KNOWING THEY HAD NO EVIDENCE AND THAT THEY'D SIMPLY MADE UP THE CRIME TO PLEASE TRUMP AND COVER UP HIS INCOMPETENCE, imagine what they'll do to you.