August 11th Update: Britain's Far Right Riots; Crypto's Love Affairs with Trump; Twitter Embraces Incitement as Telegram Moderates; America's Forgotten Environmental Awakening; Memes Pollute; The AI Bubble Bursts

Rahm Emmanuel is not welcome here

It's been a few weeks of radio silence, for which I apologize (in part). Everyone's gotta take a break now and then, and vacation is a rare but deeply enjoyable occasion for me. Particularly this year as current affairs continue their morose drift. I don't have much else to say other than it's been wonderful to check out....

...to a certain degree. In keeping with Murphy's Law, a clutch of projects culminated during my break. First mention goes to a knock-on article from my investigations in 764 and the Order of Nine Angles with my longtime collaborator Jake Hanrahan for WIRED, plumbing the past of longtime FBI informant and propagandist Joshua Caleb Sutter, whose influence is everywhere in the most violent, sadistic corners of the Far Right. Chalk another one up to the FBI's long and reprehensible record of confidential informants run amok.

There's a lot happening in Oakland, California, at present, which I will explore in a longer post later this week. First off, disgraced former police chief LeRonne Armstrong and his second in command Darren Allison were found culpable by Oakland's civilian police oversight agency in short-circuiting an Internal Affairs investigation into the conduct of Sergeant Phong Tran, a homicide investigator currently charged with perjury and bribing a witness into falsely testifying in the conviction of two men, since released from state prison. Darwin BondGraham and I unearthed the culpability of both commanders and several subordinates in two articles for The Oaklandside., one in late April and another on July 25.

There's also been an interesting development in the FBI's public corruption investigation into Oakland politics that have caught up Mayor Sheng Thao and the Duong family which operates that city's recycling contract and have spread their money like peanut butter throughout Northern California politics from the Bay to Sacramento. I dug into the FBI's interest in a lucrative OPD overtime detail in that city's Chinatown long with a team from the East Bay Times that the feds may be investigating for theft of public funds (pandemic-era federal grant money used by Oakland to plug gaps in OPD's budget). Watch this space

Lastly, welcome to the significant number of you who've subscribed in the past few weeks and a big thank you to Gil Duran's The Nerd Reich for the referral. If you're interested in my past work, see here. Hope you all stick around for the ride.

Let's get to it.

BLEEDING EDGE JOURNALISM

-Right wing extremists rioted in cities across England for much of the past two weeks in the largest civil disturbances seen in the United Kingdom for decades. There are reams written about it to date, but the British Broadcasting Corporation has two very good summaries of goings-on so far that take stock of who the agitators are (more than 70 percent have criminal records, several of whom have past terrorism-related convictions) and a deeper explainer about the scope and breadth of the violence. I recommend following my colleague Daniel De Simone for more coverage on this topic, he's the Beeb's point man on the Far Right in Britain. 161.

-Cryptocurrency is a pyramid scheme. There's no ifs, ands, or buts about what the industry looks like in its current form no matter how interesting the underpinning blockchain technology is. Given Silicon Valley's obsession with it and the far right tendencies of the crypto industry's biggest proponents (a certain South African nepobaby comes to mind), it's entirely unsurprising to see these folks throw theyir lot in with America's foremost con man and his couch-loving sidekick. The Financial Times' Edward Luce wrote a terrific column this week on the unholy marriage between Trump, JD Vance and Big Crypto that had me laughing and fuming all at once.

-Elon Musk is stirring the pot, claiming 'civil war is inevitable' in Great Britain and allowing xenophobic disinformation and violent incitement to flourish on Twitter. He's almost certainly cruising for an encounter with British and European regulators, since the UK is still technically in the European Community insofar as telecommunications and privacy laws are concerned. WIRED's David Gilbert dug into Elon's decision to allow racism, disinformation, and incitement to riot foment on his platform, while Telegram of all companies decided to be adults in the room, for once, even as use of the platform known as Terrorgram surged during the mayhem in the UK over the past few weeks .

-The lost history of climate change, which played a tremendous role in the creation of the clean air act in the 1970s. Harvard scientists, including renowned author Naomi Oreskes, plumbed the archives for information about the scientific and political climate (pun intended) that led up to the United States' landmark environmental laws of the 1970s that the current Supreme Court is hell-bent on unwinding. It's a painful reminder of how facts are forgotten and distorted by well-funded industry efforts to obfuscate and rewrite history. If you don't support it, please consider giving Grist a dollar or two a month. They warrant it.

-Today's small action you can take to stop torching the planet is give up your shitposting memes, once and for all. Along with those 'reply all' emails. Turns out the energy thirst of our online activities is being slaked with an unsustainable demand for power, most of which is still not generated by renewable energy. Just see your friends and loved ones in person and show them the photo, or describe it. Or.....just delete your message history every now and then instead of putting it all on the cloud.

-If it hasn't been apparent from the start, the most recent 'bubble' out of Silicon Valley is bursting. That's 'generative' artificial intelligence, most commonly known as the copyright-infringing, dog-ate-my-homework technology behind shit like ChatGPT and other similar dreck. Longtime tech journalist Brian Merchant took a long look at the vaporware technology's unfulfilled promise and false dawns in his edition of the Blood in the Machine newsletter, using recent stock market fluctuations and analyst reports as grist for the mill. A refreshing departure from the usual cheerleading tech press.

BOOK - The late 2000's and early 2010's were defined in part by the freewheeling, anarchist hacktivism of collectives such as Anonymous, LulzSec and others who fueled movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street before the full weight of the United States and British governments came crashing down. Journalist Barrett Brown often fence-walked during that era, crossing back and forth between reporting and direct involvement with Anonymous, paying the price with years in prison for allegedly taking part in the hack of a private security firm.

His recent memoir,

My Glorious Defeats, is a sardonic and self-depreciating look back at his own personal trajectory and is one of the best looks inside the daily workings on a federal prison I've read. It won't get much mainstream press, but Brown's book is an excellent account of a period that increasingly feels like the ancient past.

FILM - Frogs falling from the sky? Existential crises? Tom Cruise as a psychotic self-help guru? Peak Phillip Seymour Hoffman? P.T. Anderson's Magnolia has it all and then some, from the best year (1999) in American cinema in a loooong time. I hadn't seen this since my friends and I walked out of the movie theater in utter astonishment back when this was released. Buckle up, because it's not short and takes quite a few unexpected turns.

MUSIC - It's summer, and you should be outside. And you should be listening to Woody Guthrie, because he's not only got lovely ballads to the Great American Outdoors and rants against Donald Trump's slumlord father, but Depression-era bankrobber ballads and an epic Hitler diss track as well. He talked the talk, but walked the walk. Just remember - this machine kills Fascists.