July 16 Update: Phillippine Death Squads Target Environmentalists; Meta Scoffs at News as Anecdote to Disinfo; Bibi Sabotages Peace Talks (Again); Mining on Colorado's Stolen Land; Clarence Thomas, Legal Arsonist

Stranger than fiction: Colombia supporters try to sneak into Sunday night's Copa America final against Argentina through the ventilation system of Miami's Hard Rock Stadium. Don't try this at home, please.

The United States had our modern day John Hinckley Jr. moment last weekend: a gun-crazy kid from Western Pennsylvania took and missed his shot, sparking a two day media cycle (crazy how quick that happens). The wild speculation about the shooter's motivation will take some time to settle, since he was shot to death by law enforcement, whose failure to secure the Saturday rally are being picked over in minute detail. That's part of the reason I held the update for two days, in the hope that more information would emerge. No such luck. Oh and did I mention there were two cup finals on Sunday?

Not that it matters in the longer run: the slide towards authoritarianism continues apace, with a Peter Thiel-funded Christian nationalist pick for the GOP's vice presidential slot. If you want an idea about the 'New Right' movement Thiel has been bankrolling for the past few years, read this essential 2022 Vanity Fair feature by James Pogue, and take a look at this 404 Media examination of why Silicon Valley's favorite scammers are exultant at JD Vance's selection. Needless to say, he's also in the pocket of big oil.

We're slipping into the dog days of summer, with the eastern half of the country in the midst of another heat wave that somehow brought one hell of a derecho/tornado/big fucking windstorm to Chicago last night. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Texans are still without power in the Houston area more than a week after Hurricane Beryl made landfall.

That's not to say we aren't busy over here: I finally dumped my notebook from the Woodward-Bernstein homicide trial and pulled together ~1,500 words of thoughts, observations and analysis for paid subscribers, sadly. Gotta keep the lights on and stay up to date with those PACER bills. More features are in the works on policing, spooks and Neo-Nazis (including a big lay out for a glossy monthly later in a few months time). Oh, and did I mention Darwin & I optioned The Riders Come Out At Night for a scripted series? Fingers crossed it floats and doesn't fall into "development hell"

Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-Six years ago, Bay Area environmental activist Brandon Lee narrowly survived an assassination attempt in the Phillipines while helping farmers and small landowners in rural Luzon resist rapacious development by large corporate interests. Lee's experience, per journalist Alessandra Bergamin's investigation for In These Times, was not an isolated incident: her reporting found a number of prior murders of environmental activsts were attributable to similar deaths squads, some of which are connected to the Phillippine military. A hard-to-get story and one where the difficulty of reporting and the sheer amount of time and external support for this project are readily apparent.

-As tech giants thrash and wail against the prospect of California taxing their profits to fund journalism, a nice little item that encapsulates how little responsibility Silicon Valley's overlords feel for the chaos wrought by their platforms: Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp (a massive percentage of modern messaging and social media apps), now claims news and accurate information is not an appropriate antidote or counter to the sea of disinformation, propaganda and lies circulating on its platforms. There are entire library shelves worth of writing on the role of tech giants in supercharging disinformation, hollowing out professional journalism for their own profits, and directly impacting elections. Nothing will change until these firms are held to account.

-Yet more Ha'aretz reporting on something we've known for a while: Netanyahu worked assiduously to sabotage hostage negotiations for the past six months, prolonging the slaughter in Gaza and heightening tensions with Hezbollah across the border in Lebanon to save his own political career and avoid a possible criminal conviction. All worth nothing as Israeli airstrikes continue to slaughter dozens of civilians (at least) a day with no end to the carnage in sight.

-For those seeking some longer perspective on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, here's a long interview with eminent historian Rashid Khalidi from the most recent issue of New Left Review. Professor Khalidi spoke with NLR co-founder Tariq Ali about the genesis of the conflict, the Israeli security state's roots in the British colonial occupation, American complicity in the occupation, and the Palestinian movement's own internal fissures and failures. Trenchant and cutting as ever.

-The enormous scale of extractive industries in North America is hard to comprehend unless you get beyond the cities and urban corridors where most of the United States population is concentrated and see a logging or mining operation first-hand. Western states like California, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado in particular have spawned massive fortunes and huge industries from primary resource industries - almost all of it taking place on lands illegally seized from Native American tribes over the past two hundred years. This sad state of affairs is far too often taken for granted, which is why Grist's recent article exploring the incredible scale of profit from the mining sector in Colorado was so welcome last week. Give that outlet whatever support you can, they're truly doing the lord's work.

-Yep, it's bad out there. 2023 was the hottest year on record, and 2024 is set to smash that record. Heat advisories, power outages, travel delays and destructive storms are all ripping across the United States this summer, and we haven't even hit peak fire season out west. Might be time for, I dunno, states to do something about greenhouse gas emissions? Or just stick their heads further in the sand, a la New York arsonist and erstwhile Governor Kathy Hochul. Here's Grist with a sobering lay of the land.

-Shocked at U.S. District Court Aileen Cannon's decision yesterday to throw out the open-and-shut classified documents case against Donald Trump? Don't be. Judge Cannon (a wildly inexperienced Trump appointee) took her cues from a sole-justice dissent penned by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas earlier this month in SCOTUS' decision to exempt 'official acts' of American presidents from criminal liability. It's just the latest in Thomas' pattern of using his written opinions to lay out targets for conservative legal activists to pursue in court, a development that has played out at an alarming pace over the past half decade. The Guardian's Ed Pilkington wrote a tremendous but under-the-radar piece about Thomas' role as a key cog in the revanchist turn in American jurisprudence.

BOOK - Granta, for those not familiar, is a long-running literary quarterly from Great Britain. I was introduced to the magazine while in high school, and was struck by the quality of the reported features that are sprinkled throughout each issue. They're proper, long-form journalism that isn't stifled by the 'house style' that makes many publications like the New Yorker all but unreadable. There's also an affiliated publishing house, which in 2006 reissued its omnibus collection of reported pieces. You'll find the BBC's John Simpson with a long, first-person account of the Tienanmen Square massacre, Ian Jack's excavation of a notorious execution of an Irish Republican Army team in Gibraltar by Britain's Special Air Service, Wendell Steavenson's devastating profile of a jihadi named Osama in the years after 9/11, Joe Lelyveld's on the ground account of Apartheid South Africa, James Fenton's account of the fall of Saigon, and even a long profile of a late Cold War espionage imbroglio in Switzerland by none other than John Le Carre. First rate beach reading.

FILM/SERIES - During the first wave of the pandemic, I devoured as many well-reviewed limited series as I could stomach in between working my tail off and running or cycling myself into the ground to avoid thinking about the hundreds of New Yorkers dropping dead around me every day. One of those series, a British police/espionage procedural called Informer (2018), sticks with me to this day not only for the quality of acting and the intelligent interweaving of how UK law enforcement deals with violent extremism with the social and racial dynamics which produce such ideologies. And then, as with any good British product that touches on this topic, there's the inevitable role of the state's own agencies in the fallout, be it MI5 or Counterterror Police.

MUSIC - Tom Waits might actually be old enough now to naturally speak the way he sounded throughout the '80's and '90s, when he threw his voice into an agonized growl and churned out a string of mauldin, macabre, yet beautiful albums on the Island Label. Beautiful Maladies (1998) was part of the soundtrack to my adolescence, and encapsulates the peak of a truly unique artist, who had a pretty successful side career as an actor as well (Jim Jarmusch's Down By Law, anyone?).