February 10 update: NYPD loses big, Atlantic Ocean currents destabilizing, Finnish Neo-Nazis, Chicago weighs discontinuing ShotSpotter, Israeli war crimes & newsroom pushback

Second bite at the apple for Riders

Enjoying the hottest winter on record? If you're in California (particularly Southern), that record rainfall, flooding and mudslides might be your preoccupation of the moment - more on all that with the book of the week. If you're back East, it's most likely gray, muddy and strangely humid. Either way, 2024 will be a cool year in retrospect.

Have a story dropping on Monday with the Guardian in collaboration with San Francisco's Mission Local, a solid outlet that is worth your support in one of the most distorted local media markets in the United States (heavy neoliberal, Pelosi/Newsom/Willie Brown bent for those not familiar, particularly after the demise of the alt-weeklies). Won't say too much and will file a subscriber-only update when it runs with a lot of material that didn't make it past edits, but here's a hint: gray money.

Some other exciting news as evidenced by the above photo: received the physical copies of The Riders Come Out at Night's trade paperback edition. Atria Books designed a terrific new cover for the softcover, and there's a few updates to the conclusion from Darwin and I given OPD's catastrophic 2023 and the consequent counteroffensive from East Bay reactionaries over that familiar hue and cry of "law and order." The paperback goes on sale March 12: you can pre-order at Bookshop.org here (pleaeeeaseeee not Amazon!!!).

Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-Melting icecaps in Greenland and both Poles are destabilizing the Atlantic Ocean's current system that helps regulate established weather patterns in much of the Western Hemisphere, per Jonathan Watts' report in the Guardian. Though there is no estimate on precisely when that tipping point will be reached, the shifting current pattern is yet another sign of the massive damage humans have inflicted on the marine ecosystem, from microplastics pollution to red-lining the oceans' ability to act as a carbon sink, causing widespread acifidication, coral bleaching, fish die-offs and dead zones. Far more attention needs to be paid to ocean health.

-In a huge loss for the New York City Police Department/the full employment program for New York suburban men, a federal district court judge batted down a challenge from the city's largest police union to a settlement agreement that heavily restricts how the NYPD will treat protests. Nick Pinto at Hell Gate has the writeup. The agreement stems from several civil suits brought in the wake of the NYPD's brutal repression of the George Floyd uprising in summer 2020, which was spearheaded by a specialized anti-protest/anti-terrorism unit still in operation and widely condemned by international human rights groups for mass arrests, wanton violence, summary arrest, and illegal detention. I wrote about those combined legal actions, which involved the New York Civil Liberties Union, the state Attorney General, and the Legal Aid Society among others, for New York magazine in 2022. Whether the restrictions on kettling, mass arrests and dispersal orders will have any teeth remains to be seen, but this is the first major loss the NYPD has taken in more than 30 years over their jackbooted approach to protected First Amendment activity.

-Jake Hanrahan's Popular Front side project on contemporary Neo-Fascist militancy is off to a blazing start after our initial episode on Turkey's Gray Wolves, with a terrific second edition delving into recent arrests of Order of Nine Angles-influenced Nazis in Finland. Researcher Pierre Vaux does the honors and traces out the lineage of recently arrested Fascist cells who assembled their own 3D-printed firearms and were nabbed in the process of planning attacks. The Hammerskins, O9A, Kampf Der Niebelungen and other signposts of the contemporary Far Right all figure in to this wild ride.

-Surveillance technology has no impact on violent crime, case #515320 - Chicago's entrenched gun violence problem is a sad feature of life in that city. I experienced it directly while at college on the South Side. The city has tried a number of technological 'silver bullet' solutions to combat this problem, including a citywide CCTV network, a widely-hyped but ultimately unsuccessful 'predictive policing' program, and of course, those gunshot detection microphones made by ShotSpotter (now known as "SoundThinking," I shit thee not) found in so many cities. The microphones are always on, have been widely rumored to pick up random conversations, and are costly with questionable return-on-investment for actual crime reductions.

This week, my friend Freddy Martinez over at Lucy Parsons Labs provided leaked documents from top prosecutors in Chicago to the Sun-Times indicating the gunshot detection system has negligible impact on criminal cases, further calling into question the technology's rationale at a time when Mayor Brendan Johnson is evaluating a renewal of SoundThinking's contract. Not surprising, and very reminiscent of a similar episode in Oakland about a decade ago where ShotSpotter pulled out all the stops and illegally lobbied to keep their contract after then-police chief Sean Whent told city officials he did not view the technology cost effective.

-As Israel pushes into Southern Gaza and spins a yarn about 'evacuating' the 1.4 Palestinian refugees trapped between the IOF and the Egyptian border, the death toll pushes north of 28,000 and snipers kill medical workers in their operating rooms, there are cracks in the American media framework that egregiously slants coverage in favor of the country committing war crimes on an hourly basis. Anonymous CNN staffers speaking to the Guardian's Chris McGreal provided extensive information about the news giant's strict internal controls on information, which include running all stories about the current war through the Jersualem Bureau (and thereby Israeli censors), failing to provide adequate perspective on the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, a mandatory framing of the current conflict only in terms of the October 7th massacre and not the decades-long occupation and illegal settlement of Palestinian territory, and the stark contrasts between what CNN International airs abroad and what American viewers see.

There have been similar leaks at other news organizations like the New York Times (Jeffrey Gettleman is apparently the new Rukmini Callimachi - too big to fail) and Axel Springer. It is extremely heartening to see journalists stand up to blatant malpractice in this fashion. Long may it continue.

BOOK OF THE WEEK

If Southern California is flooding, burning, experiencing mudslides, earthquakes or catastrophic air quality, it is natural law that Mike Davis' Ecology of Fear (1998) be resurrected. Davis, who died last year (and blurbed Riders!), HATED his reputation as a prophet of doom, but so much of his writing was eerily prescient. This book is his follow-up to City of Quartz (1990), the pre-Rodney King study of Los Angeles' securitized architecture and mano duro policing that underpinned the 1992 riots.

Anchored by a terrific opening chapter about letting the elite beachside enclave of Malibu, much of which is built into the tinder-dry Santa Monica mountains, burn to a crisp, Ecology of Fear explores the tempestuous nature of Southern California's ecology that lurks beneath the region's seemingly perfect weather, from early 20th Century flooding in arroyos and dry riverbeds reactivated by torrential rains to the devastation of the 1995 North Ridge earthquake. Time and again, Davis exposes the folly of Los Angeles' modern development and the region's perpetual battle against its inherent nature.

FILM/TV - Bureau Des Légendes

If you're into political thrillers, espionage or simply well-made episodic television, this 2010s staple from France is at the top of the field. Starring actor-director Mattieu Kassovitz (La Haine, 1995 among many others), the series focuses on the Middle Eastern operations of the clandestine division of France's foreign intelligence service, the Direction générale de la Sécurité extérieure (DGSE). As one of the former colonial powers in Africa and MENA, and still a significant military force, France's long involvement in the Levant and North Africa gets far less attention than American or British escapades but is no less significant. Rather than a jingoistic portrayal of heroism, Bureau Des Légendes shows the human toll and amorality of intelligence work, with a particular focus on the Syrian Civil War.

If you're in Europe, try watching with Vudu. Stateside, it's either Apple or Amazon (which I won't link to).

MUSIC - When I write and research, I often listen to things that are loud, and fast, and complex. The same music happened to be playing last week while I spoke with a source at a terrific dive bar last week: two hours of Cliff Burton-era. To say it was a crowdpleaser would be an understatement. There are tons of albums to choose from, but for me it'll always be Ride the Lightning (1984), the same year as this absolutely wild show at the Oakland Coliseum and the very same album that features the hair-raising adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's Spanish Civil War Novel.