HOW NOBLE CAUSES turn people into monsters

SAD THAT THIS IS IMPORTANT:  UK Court Rules Bible Facebook Posts Are Not ‘Discrimination’ Against LGBT People.

Markets in everything: the “my girlfriend is not hungry” option takes off.

  HOW NOBLE CAUSES turn people into monsters.

Does This Video Show Banksy?

It was shown on ITV London at the time but then forgotten about until the Bristol-based ITV News reporter Robert Murphy stumbled upon it when he was doing some research on Banksy. – Irish Times

Subject: Trump consultant reportedly made fake websites for Biden, Democrats
Source: Business Insider
https://www.businessinsider.com/patrick-mauldin-trump-consultant-fake-biden-website-2019-6?utm_source=feedly&utm_medium=referral

• A consultant for Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, has made several dupes of prominent 2020 Democratic candidates’ campaign websites, theNew York Times reported Saturday.
• The fake websites are similar in appearance to real ones, but paint the candidates in an unflattering light with images, videos, and quotes taken out of context alongside negative write-ups.
• The fake Joe Biden campaign website, for instance, has received more visitors than Biden’s real website, partially thanks to search engine boosts from news media and Reddit.

The consultant, Patrick Mauldin, runs a Republican political consulting firm called Vici Media Group, which the Trump campaign hired for the 2016 election and currently has on retainer for 2020.

How Amazon and the Cops Set Up an Elaborate Sting Operation That Accomplished Nothing Vice. UserFriendly: “Amazon, now actively getting you arrested.”

Tesla stock surges after setting new delivery and production records CNBC

Bob Dylan & the Culture Industry’s Destruction of Dissent Consortiumnews (furzy)

When Brokers Act Badly at Wells Fargo, Women Take the Fall Intercept

“New Yorkers on bikes are being killed at an alarming rate,” said Marco Conner, the interim co-executive director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group.

Across the city, 14 cyclists have been killed in crashes this year, four more than all of last year, according to city officials. New York’s streets have seen an increase in bicycling while also becoming more perilous, in part because of surging truck traffic fueled by the booming e-commerce industry.

The mayor himself acknowledged on Monday that the city was facing an “emergency.”

That is from the New York Times, you will find more detail, and some further points of interest, at the link.

David Remnick recently interviewed Robert Caro and if you’ve read Caro’s book,Working, or the New Yorker article based on the book, there’s not much new here, but this exchange at the end is worth highlighting:

Caro: Well, I think that that’s correct. And I think, [what] you say about Johnson, what does it mean to [be like] Johnson? You say, well, he wins election over Barry Goldwater, in 1964, by this tremendous majority. So the next morning he’s on the phone — or the morning after, he’s still hoarse the day of the election — calling the House Majority Leader and saying, “You know, the only thing that can hold this up here is the Rules Committee. Now is the moment to change the Rules  Committee. Here’s how to do it.” And in the next couple of months he passes Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, the voting-rights bill… I’m forgetting the rest of it. The most amazing — he could seize a moment because of this political genius that he has, and change, really, the face of America. It’s hard to remember a day when there wasn’t Medicare or Medicaid.

Remnick: We are living in a political moment, and when you watch the current President it seems that one of the saving graces is that, for all his erratic thinking, insulting thinking, his insults directed at minority groups — and, well, practically everyone — that he’s not that good at the exercise of power. He won the election, but if he had Johnsonian capacities in terms of the exercise of power, we might be even in deeper trouble than we already are.

Remnick: You write in “Working” that there is evil and injustice that can be caused by political power. But there’s also great good that can come out of it. It seems to me sometimes that people have forgotten this, you write. Why have we forgotten it?

Caro: You ask very good questions. I think we’ve forgotten it because we’ve had too many Presidents who don’t use political power — you say, what are things that change people’s lives? In the last century, Social Security, Medicare-like, right now I’m working on a section that, you could say, if I wanted to call it this, is what it was like to be old and sick in America before Medicare. And as I’m doing this I’m thinking, People aren’t even going to be able to imagine this. What was it like to be old in America before Social Security? People can’t imagine it. The power of government to do good for people is immense. And I think we have forgotten that power.

“The level of supply chain effort and professional polish that goes into the smallest cup of coffee is mind boggling.”   via  Balaji Srinivasan.

Joao Gilberto has passed away, music here.