“The Flock database system is distinct from other LPR systems for two reasons. First, Flock produces cameras that are automated license plate readers (ALPRs), meaning that they scan each and every car that drives by. Second, data collected by Flock is not stored locally like prior LPR systems. This means that every capture from Flock–plate, vehicle characteristics, exact time and GPS location, etc.–is stored in a centralized database that is accessible to any locality that has plugged into the national database. This sounds like something from science fiction or the kind of surveillance that George Orwell considered bizarre enough for his novel 1984.” (09/04/26)
“New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has established the Office of Worker Power, a first-in-the-nation initiative to connect workers with education, resources, and organizations to help them form a union or demand better working conditions on the job. The office will also allow workers more input into city labor policies and assist them in reporting violations by their employers, Mamdani wrote in an executive order. Julie Su, the deputy mayor for economic justice and a former acting U.S. labor secretary, will coordinate efforts on the office, and Tony Perlstein, a longtime union organizer most recently with the United Auto Workers, will become its first executive director. The staff head count of the office and its budget have yet to be determined. Mamdani signed the executive order in front of workers in the construction, hotel, caregiving, and food service industries.” (09/07/26)
“I’ve argued elsewhere that ‘beautiful losers’ are people who don’t care about recognition or ‘victory’ in the culture wars. Instead, they’re active, with others, in intrinsically worthwhile pursuits, rejuvenating culture by actually doing things, not just talking about them. They’re certainly not yelling on social media about the way the pursuits have been corrupted, or loudly informing the world that they are the only ones who have things right. Still, this vision of life has a downside. In attempting to live well and do good where we are, we may begin to feel some self-doubt. Are our private activities really so meaningful? If nobody is talking about us, do we matter?” (09/04/26)
“[M]many of the right and many more of the left have attributed virtually every American ill since the Reagan administration to free trade and deregulation. Yet [JD] Vance argues for [Milton] Friedman’s obsolescence by contending that his ideas succeeded back then — but only due to ‘a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity’ that has become impoverished enough to require a ten-dollar substitute for its devaluated coinage. The usual demonization of Friedman posits Margaret Thatcher as a Wicked Witch East of the Atlantic to his Elphaba, ignoring his influence on Estonia and New Zealand. Vance would need to make a stretch to find the ‘powerful institutional Christianity’ responsible for the embrace of international markets in Israel, Singapore or even the India of Usha Vance’s ancestors.” (09/04/26)
“The current leadership in the Pentagon is quite fond of saying it is ‘the most transparent Department of Defense in history.’ Now, bald-faced misrepresentations by government officials are never healthy in a functioning republic, but one almost has to admire the chutzpah of blatantly lying about being honest. In fact, the Pentagon has endeavored to control, limit, and mislead when it comes to public information about the department, its operations, and facts affecting service members in the United States military. This effort takes multiple forms above and beyond lying to the public—firing officials based on insecure fears of unflattering whispers, putting onerous restrictions on the legacy Pentagon press corps, and, most recently, hiring a roster of propaganda artists.” (09/04/260
“A jury narrowly deadlocked on Friday in the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the 36-year-old Massachusetts woman accused of killing her children. Accused is the correct word in a legal sense. But it feels like the wrong one in a general sense, because it is not in doubt that in January 2023 she killed Cora, Dawson, and Callan Clancy, her three young kids. She admits as much. The jurors instead were tasked with analyzing her state of mind. … Did she ultimately plunge into a state of psychosis? Or was she just deeply anxious and depressed? Absent clairvoyance, how on earth was a jury supposed to know which was more likely to be true? All the evidence in the world cannot transport a juror into Clancy’s mind during the moments she killed her children.” (09/04/26)
“Lawyers are supposed to protect and defend America’s justice system. Kevin Reddington, the Massachusetts attorney defending Lindsay Clancy, seems more like an abuser thereof. In what law professor Jonathan Turley described as ‘a breathtaking abandonment of restraint and decency’, Reddington went after the lone holdout juror in the case of the killer mom — a (so far) unknown figure who we’re told was one of the panel’s three males. Reddington, in an unhinged press conference after a mistrial was called, accused the dissident of stealing his fellow jurors’ time: ‘They know that they were robbed by one man for whatever his agenda was, who stole seven weeks of the life of these other jurors.’ He also charged the holdout with hostility toward the disabled — that is, toward the crazed defendant.” (09/07/26)
“When you run a business, the goal is to price as high as you can while producing as cheaply as you can. Using enslaved, indentured and migrant workers is how this country’s economic system came to be. Underpaying factory employees, forcing them to work 12-hour shifts, in poor conditions, with no lunch breaks, no vacations, no health insurance — all of this shaped what it means to be a laborer in the United States today. And the more we need to work to afford to have a life, the harder it is to separate being a citizen of the United States from being one of its employees.” (09/04/260
“It may be the president’s goofiest idea yet. His Monday brainstorm was for the federal government to get into the movie business. In a Truth Social post, Mr. Trump floated the notion of creating a ‘Federal Production Incentive to create Entertainment Jobs in America.’ So this isn’t exactly a socialist proposal — where the government would seize the means of production and go about making movies — it’s a subsidy proposal: tax breaks; to ‘benefit ALL of America.’ Trump posts as if he has worked the math out, where the booty the government loses in direct taxation ‘will be made up tenfold by the money pouring into the Treasury’s coffers.’ A familiar rationale. But does it work?” (09/04/26)
