Strict Scrutiny: Rapid unscheduled disassembly

David Lynch Saw the Nightmare Beneath the American Dream

His work could be weird, disturbing, nonlinear, even perverse. But there’s a method to the madness, and deep meaning to be discovered in the confusion he so expertly sowed.

The anti-social century, a sports-memorabilia crime ring, Narendra Modi’s populist facade, and a Christian war on the secular state. Plus Han Kang, the new Rasputins, apocalypse lit, Georgia O'Keeffe, Saint Francis, Betty Shamieh, new fiction by Brandon Taylor, and more.

Anybody keen to buy 25 footy fields of land overlooking Sydney’s Northern Beaches for a lazy $2m? Too late, you missed out! It’s gone to a mystery buyer.

What’s the scam? The agent described it as ‘affordable’, which is something of an understatement as the views stretch from the golf course on Long Reef headland down to Manly.

 The photo is a bit misleading though, as much of the land, formerly owned by NSW Aboriginal Land Council, is on the steep hill above Brookvale oval.

Sydney beaches property expensive? Pfft, dirt cheap!

Joe Biden Issues Dire Warning In His Farewell Speech To America 

"Today an oligarchy is taking shape in America that literally threatens our democracy, our basic rights, our freedoms," the president 

The midair explosion of SpaceX’s Starship rocket took over social media on Thursday with space watchers ridiculing the Elon Musk-owned company’s rebranding of the incident as “a rapid unscheduled disassembly.”

“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn,” the company wrote in a post on X of the company's seventh test of its mega-rocket. “Teams will continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause.”

Rapid unscheduled disassembly

Strict Scrutiny

“A podcast about the United States Supreme Court and the legal culture that surrounds it. Hosted by three badass constitutional law professors– Leah Litman, Kate Shaw, and Melissa Murray– Strict Scrutiny provides in-depth, accessible, and irreverent analysis of the Supreme Court and its cases, culture, and personalities. Each week, Leah, Kate, and Melissa break down the latest headlines and biggest legal questions facing our country, emphasizing what it all means for our daily lives. 

Whether you’re a lawyer or law student, or you’re just here for the messy legal drama, Strict Scrutiny has you covered. New episodes out every Monday… plus bonuses whenever SCOTUS takes away another one of our rights.”

ABA Free Legal Answers surpasses 400k inquiries; nearly 100,000 pro bono hours served

Free Legal Answers, the virtual legal advice clinic sponsored by the American Bar Association, hit a major milestone, crossing the 400,000-mark in the total number of questions handled since the program’s inception in 2016. 

The program’s more than 15,000 attorneys registered nationally to volunteer performed over 16,500 hours of pro bono service in 2024, assisting with family, divorce and custody-related problems; housing and eviction; consumer rights; employment; and civil rights, among others.  FLA is a project of the ABA Standing Committee on Pro Bono and Public Service. Now in 42 states and territories, the program allows users to post civil legal questions at no cost to be answered by pro bono attorneys licensed in their state. The 2024 summary report is here…”

Current Developments In Tax Malpractice: Basics And Beyond

 

Current Developments In Tax Malpractice: Basics And Beyond

16

Does the FT think there’s a Musk-insprired conspiracy against Labour?

I noted yesterday my suggestion that the supposed crisis surrounding gilt prices might have been created by those in the City of London who wished to fulfil Elon Musk's demand that Keir Starmer's Labour government in the UK be brought down.

Last night, this was the FT homepage headline:

Downer and Howard’s East Timor lies. History missing in action.

by Rex Patrick | Jan  2025

The Government commissioned an official history of our operations in Timor and then censored the historian, removing an entire chapter. The partially redacted chapter obtained by MWM confirms lies told by the Howard Government.

53

What but Musk can explain this week’s financial crisis?

The comments I made here yesterday and on Radio 2 about the possibility of there being a degree of coordination in what is happening right now in bond markets have attracted a lot of attention.

So, let's be clear. I offered speculation. The reason is simple. Something very weird is happening in financial markets, and no events, bar one, explain why it might be happening now. That one event is that Musk said at the weekend that the UK's Labour government needs to be pulled down.  He then ran a poll on Twitter on this issue. He also spread scurrilous rumours. And as the FT has noted, the attempt at a coup that is following from those comments appears to be very real and front page news. I hardly had to make this up: it is out there.

China releases world’s most powerful electronic warfare weapon design software – for free South China Morning Post

  How a major bank cheated its customers out of $2 billion, according to a new federal lawsuit Popular Information

Founder of muckraking financial information firm Hindenburg Research calls it quits AP

The Governments That Survived Inflation Foreign Affairs

The Bitter End Doomberg

Xiaohongshu (RedNote)

‘TikTok refugees’ unexpectedly turn to Chinese alternative as ban looms LA Times

 

America’s youth longs for Chinese e-commerceGarbage Day. Worth a read on social media.

Biden tightens the noose on Putin with a farewell blitz

Biden tightens the noose on Putin with a farewell blitz

Stephen Bartholomeusz

Too much sitting hurts the heart

 The Big Things make an impact.

The Little Things make a difference.

Do both.

Too much sitting hurts the heart Even with exercise, sedentary behavior can increase risk of heart failure by up to 60%

AI Is Like Tinkerbell: It Only Works If We Believe in It Keep clapping. Louder

Futurism – “There’s no limit to the promise of artificial intelligence. Or at least, there’s no limit to the promises that the powerful make about AI. We’re told by tech companies and their investors that AI has the capacity to transform everything, making us more productive workers and more efficient learners— before eventually making us obsolete by AI agents that “won’t complain about work-life balance” while they automate away the majority of our jobs.

 And of course, all these promises are steps along the path to constructing a cyber-god in the form of artificial general intelligence. But the future is a fickle thing. It can fail to materialize in the way envisioned. Our expectations for emerging tech are always at risk of being dashed against the rocks of reality. We often look to science fiction as a beacon that can help us navigate the waves of uncertainty, predict the future of tech, and discern what it means for society. 

However, if we want to understand what fuels the AI boom — and how the bubble might burst — the best analogy comes instead from children’s fantasy. In the story of “Peter Pan,” the fairy Tinkerbell only exists if people believe in her and clap for her. Once we stop believing in her magic, she starts fading away. It’s at this point she implores Peter Pan — and the broader audience — to clap as loud as they can. Tinkerbell is sustained by our attention…

Cryptocurrency Public Key Reporting: Using Embedded Technology To Aid Tax CompliancE

 The most 21st century Shakespeare play is Othello, a story about a middle manager whose response to a black man getting promoted ahead of him is to burn literally everyone and everything around him to the ground.

Incoming Trump team is questioning civil servants at National Security Council about their loyalty

Cryptocurrency Public Key Reporting: Using Embedded Technology To Aid Tax Compliance

Eyal-Cohen Reviews Mehrotra'sThe Intellectual Origins Of The Modern International Tax Regime

Since Trump’s victory, we’ve avoided the F-word. We need to bring it back

Tyrants cannot abide being laughed at, and humor is ever their weakness…

Since Trump’s victory, we’ve avoided the F-word. We need to bring it back

Politics used to seem so predictable. It wasn’t that long ago that you could go to bed and pretty much guess what the world’s political leaders would be saying the next morning.

A rough formula of what to expect would go something like this: new policy x polling + spin = a neat backdown from a solemn election promise. Batteries of pollsters and political columnists and podcasters would confidently tell us what the leaders and parties were going to do and why; sometimes they would even guess right. Not so now.

In the past fortnight, we have woken to hear Donald Trump threatening to make Canada the 51st state of the US, invade Greenland, seize the Panama Canal and blame the LA fires on diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring policies in the Californian fire services.

We heard his sidekick, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, call for the overthrow of UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, the replacement of Nigel Farage as the head of Reform UK because he’s too moderate, and for Germans to support the neo-Nazi-linked AfD at the federal election in February. And we heard another media tycoon, Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, declare fact-checking, and therefore the concept of political truth, to be obsolete.

Just one of these announcements might have seemed unthinkable not that long ago. But together they are telling us something. The MAGA elite is generating a blizzard of intimidating political aggression in an attempt to sow fear and confusion and knock their political opponents off balance. We are, perhaps, in the early phase of a political revolution.

The “Trump normalisers” are telling us that he’s just playing with our minds and that he doesn’t really mean it. Meanwhile, the track record of mainstream commentators and political strategists has been shocking of late. Think of how many celebrity talking heads got Trump’s first – and latest – election win completely wrong.

Whatever the case, we need to think differently. Historically. The current political madness all seems so new, but to the historian it’s all so recognisable. This is exactly how populist extremists operated to intimidate democracy in the 1920s and ’30s. Always making new outrageous demands, always blaming easy hate figures, always using heavy-handed intimidation, always claiming they can generate their own truth. A never-ending hurricane barrage of political aggression that leaves opponents dizzy and exhausted. A repetitive assertion of fearlessness, strength and contempt that aims to impart fear.

This unpredictability was one of the reasons the political generation of the interwar years was initially bamboozled and defeated by the populists. They simply couldn’t get a handle on what the radicals might do next. It was outside their experience as careful, moderate democratic politicians to believe contemporary populists like Hitler and Mussolini would continually up the ante, make yet more outrageous demands, and call democrats’ bluff over and over again. They were completely psychologically unprepared for what was happening. We can’t afford to be. Think of the bullying chutzpah of Donald Trump Jr flying to Greenland for a supposed five-hour tourist visit the very day his dad threatened to annex the Arctic wilderness to build bases and “drill, baby, drill”.

There is something else about the MAGA movement that looks familiar to the historian: its modernity and futurism. Despite promising to return America to some old glory, the MAGA movement speaks the language of the future. 

It loves AI, cryptocurrency, reusable rocketry, the conquest of Mars. It makes the movement exciting, sleek, flash, led by people who think themselves smarter and sexier than us. And it appeals to the young – the generation that until now has been the wellspring for progressive politics. It’s all too easy to be confused, overawed, doddery.

The populists of the ’20s and ’30s worshipped new technology too. They campaigned using cutting-edge tools such as aeroplanes, records and radio. They invented propaganda and misinformation. Their imagery and uniforms were sharp and appealing. Their rallies were irresistible. They even invented modern rocketry to conquer other planets and – more practically, perhaps – bombard London.

Whatever mainstream politicians of the past did to negotiate with and contain the populists just made them look old and cowardly.

In the aftermath of the latest Trump victory, we’re told it’s not helpful to mention the F-word any more. But just because calling the MAGA movement “fascist” didn’t win Kamala Harris the election doesn’t mean it can’t shed light on how the movement might behave in the future. Because populist movements, including fascist movements, thrive on aggression, unpredictability and novelty. They are political tactics, but also essential to fascism’s being, which is to intimidate, undermine and cow democratic institutions.

My guess is that the wariness we feel about the MAGA movement today was shared by our grandparents and great-grandparents during the rise of right-wing populism almost a century ago.

Believers in liberal democracy back then at least had an excuse. Modern populist movements like fascism and Nazism were genuinely new. Their methods had never been seen before. It’s not surprising people didn’t have a clue how to counter it and were completely overwhelmed. Our generation doesn’t have that excuse.

As we face the inauguration of the second Trump presidency, and the possibility of new political gains for the far-right across Europe, the starting point for the defenders of liberal-democracy is to imbibe lesson number one: don’t be surprised, don’t be intimidated, and don’t give them an inch.

Dennis Glover is a political speechwriter, novelist and author of Repeat: A Warning From History, published by Black Inc.

Coda

 "The Last Man in Europe : A Novel". AustLit: Discover Australian Stories. The University of Queensland. Retrieved 2023-11-18.

'April, 1947. In a run-down farmhouse on a remote Scottish island, George Orwell begins his last and greatest work: Nineteen Eighty-Four.

'Forty-four years old and suffering from the tuberculosis that within three winters will take his life, Orwell comes to see the book as his legacy – the culmination of a career spent fighting to preserve the freedoms which the wars and upheavals of the twentieth century have threatened. Completing the book is an urgent challenge, a race against death.

'In this illuminating novel, Dennis Glover masterfully explores the creation of Orwell’s classic work, which for millions of readers worldwide defined the twentieth century. Simultaneously a captivating drama, a unique literary excavation and an unflinching portrait of a beloved British writer, The Last Man in Europe will change the way you understand Nineteen Eighty-Four.' (Publication summary)