“You remember the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? It’s the one that had about as much to do with sports as I do. I was more of a Better Homes and Gardens kind of guy. I wasn’t the best at landing a free throw, but damn I could landscape a backyard. I bring up that old magazine, because (like Hunter Biden) it’s now trying hard to change. For their 2021 swimsuit edition, they feature three ‘stars’ on the cover: tennis pro Naomi Osaka; rapper Megan Thee Stallion; and trans activist Leyna Bloom. The magazine ticked more boxes than a meth head doing his SATs. But damn that’s gunna confuse the 90-year-olds who still subscribe to the once legendary magazine. It’s perfect — for it’s designed as outrage theater for the right, and noble approval seeking from the left.” (07/21/21)
“A US couple whose gender reveal party last year was blamed for starting a deadly California wildfire face up to 20 years in prison, officials say. Refugio Manuel Jimenez Jr and Angela Renee Jimenez have been charged with several offences, including involuntary manslaughter, over the El Dorado fire. Officials say a smoke bomb used at the gender event last September sparked the blaze, in which one firefighter was killed and others were hurt. The couple have pleaded not guilty. The El Dorado fire lasted more than two months and covered over 22,000 acres of southern California, destroying homes and other properties. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, alleged that a ‘smoke-generating pyrotechnic device’ used during a gender reveal party near the city of Yucaipa on 5 September was the cause of the blaze.” (07/21/21)
“The hilarious 2006 film ‘Idiocracy’ offers a vivid depiction of American politics. The movie is classified as a sci-fi comedy, but it is more like a searing documentary. It almost perfectly describes America’s crisis of survival today. In ‘Idiocracy,’ set 500 years in the future, America is suffering from famine. Every public function has been turned over to some self-serving corporate interest. A fruit-drink company controls crop irrigation, and the nation’s crops are being poisoned by the fruit drink. In the meantime, the public is kept in a state of abject ignorance and distraction by demolition derbies, drugs, and debauchery. The nation is saved when an average Joe, miraculously resuscitated from the distant past, reintroduces clean water to the crops …. Which brings us to America’s idiocracy in 2021. Our most important public functions are handed over to corporate sponsors.” (07/21/21)
“A business owner in Minneapolis, who set up shop across town a year after his first Indian restaurant was burned down last summer during riots after George Floyd’s death, says his van full of supplies for his new establishment was stolen. Ruhel Islam, an immigrant who grew up under a Bangladeshi dictatorship, said someone took the stolen van to his new restaurant, Curry In A Hurry, from in front of his home then used the keys left inside the truck to enter the building Monday, taking $500 from the register …. His first restaurant, called Gandhi Mahal, was located just blocks away from the Minneapolis Police Department’s 3rd Precinct, which was also burned down by rioters last summer. The restaurant caught fire during the demonstrations. Islam and his daughter, Hafsa Islam, went viral on Facebook, writing in a post at the time, ‘Let my building burn. Justice needs to be served.'” (07/21/21)
Source: The American Prospect
by David Dayen & Alexander Sammon
“In 2017, at the end of the first annual conference put on at the University of Chicago about monopolies and economic concentration, a handful of attendees sat at a lone table in the back of the room. They were the backbone of what came to be known as the ‘New Brandeis movement,’ a collection of think tankers, lawyers, academics, and analysts who wanted to restore the anti-monopoly tradition to America, and begin to reverse the mindset that they believed had led to a narrowing consolidation across the majority of the nation’s industries. At the time, they were out of power, and trying to figure out how to build their movement, from a small group of intellectuals battling within the entrenched antitrust establishment to the upper echelons of policymaking.” (07/21/21)
“‘If they could squeal, I’m sure they would have done.’ Palaeontologist Tim Ewin is standing in a quarry, recalling the calamity that’s written in the rocks under his mud-caked boots. ‘They tried to protect themselves, adopting the stress position of pulling their arms in,’ he continues. ‘But it was all in vain; you can see where their arms got snagged open, right up to the crown. They were pushed into the sediment and buried alive.’ There’s a little smile creeping across Tim’s face, and he’s got reason to be happy. The misfortune that struck this place 167 million years ago has delivered to him an extraordinary collection of fossil animals in what is unquestionably one of the most important Jurassic dig sites ever discovered in the UK.” (07/21/21)
“It would be hard to think of an idea more manifestly idiotic than ‘defund the police.’ For such a slogan to become the mainstream rallying cry of Left-wing community organizers and media elites during a stunning rise in murders and homicides nationwide would seem unfathomable … But that is exactly what happened last year. When the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement rose in June of 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, Democrats saw it as an opportunity. America was already reeling from COVID-19, and there was a tremendous national anxiety to exploit. To mobilize the Democrats into the streets during a nationwide pandemic lockdown, the institutional Left, woke corporations, and the hysterical media embraced the cynical lie that police in America are systemically racist and murder unarmed black men routinely and without consequence.” [editor’s note: It would have been a great idea, but of course they didn’t mean it – TLK] (07/21/21)
“Rochester Mayor Lovely Warren pleaded not guilty Wednesday to charges stemming from a police raid that allegedly turned up a rifle and pistol, and her 10-year-old daughter alone, in the home she shares with her husband. A grand jury indicted Warren and her husband Timothy Granison last week on a felony count of criminal possession of a firearm, as well as misdemeanor counts of endangering the welfare of a child and having unsecured guns in a home. Warren and Granison pleaded not guilty during brief court appearances and left without speaking with reporters. Warren’s attorney, Joseph Damelio, said the mayor didn’t know about the guns and that he was eager to review the prosecution’s evidence. Authorities searched the family’s home May 19 as part of a cocaine trafficking investigation, investigators said at the time.” (07/21/21)
“Pennsylvania’s high court on Wednesday dealt a blow to victims of child sexual abuse, throwing out a lawsuit by a woman whose lower court legal victory had given hope to others with similarly outdated claims who’d sued in the wake of a landmark report that documented decades of child molestation within the Catholic church in Pennsylvania. The 5-2 decision ended plaintiff Renee Rice’s legal effort to recover damages from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown for allegedly covering up and facilitating sexual abuse she said had been inflicted on her by a priest in the late 1970s. Rice sued in 2016, but the court majority said that was too late under the Pennsylvania statute of limitations. A Superior Court panel in 2019 had ruled there were enough facts to let a jury decide if Rice had been prevented from learning about the alleged cover-up of her abuse.” (07/21/21)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“America has the single worst government in the world. Shut the fuck up about Cuba. Hands off Cuba and regime change America. … ‘Stop saying the US is the worst government on earth! Others are way worse!’ Name one. Name one that’s currently doing anything that rises to the level of murdering millions and displacing tens of millions in imperialist wars and working to destroy any nation which disobeys it. You can’t. You can’t name a single government that’s anywhere near as destructive and tyrannical as Washington today. All you can do is talk about what other governments have done generations in the past or pretend domestic oppression is as bad as killing millions in unjust wars.” (07/21/21)
