September 18, 2024

The Stuttering Lede, Sept. 18th 2024

48 days until we know if we can stop fascism

“The world does not give us very much now; it often seems to consist of nothing but noise and fear, and yet grass and trees still grow." Hermann Hesse

Election 2024

• Russian government-linked efforts to interfere in the upcoming U.S. presidential election have increasingly shifted to target the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, Microsoft reported in findings published Tuesday.

• The Republican candidate for Senate in Ohio recently campaigned with a state representative who called for the Holocaust to be taught “from the perspective of a German soldier.”

• Republicans are going all in on contempt for people without children. Noah Berlatsky writes, “they're Nazis deeply invested in patriarchy and eugenics.”

• Every time JD Vance tells a story, a sinkhole swallows 30 people.

• JD Vance got a former professor to delete a blog post Vance wrote in 2012 attacking GOP over anti-immigrant rhetoric.

• JD Vance says the United States’ support for NATO should be contingent on Europe’s support for Elon Musk and Twitter.

• This fall, Ohioans’ ballots will falsely inform them that an amendment to END gerrymandering would actually REQUIRE gerrymandering. A brazen lie, now greenlit by the Ohio Supreme Court. It is, as one dissenting justice put it, a “fraud upon the voters.”

• Michigan state Senate Democrats have passed a state-level Voting Rights Act to establish & expand upon many voting protections in the federal VRA that the U.S. Supreme Court has increasingly eroded.

Politics

• The chief justice who emerged last term is done with compromise and middle ground. He's powering the 6–3 supermajority to new extremes, freezing out the liberals while basking in the glow of the conservatives' sycophancy. The mask is well and truly off.

• Roberts is in the tank for Trump and will help him in this election if he can.

• Hannah Arendt Lesson #13: Terror is used to dominate human beings from within.

• GOP's journey to full-blown ethnonationalism is complete.

• Springfield is a success story. The arrival of so many new people has reversed population decline and helped the city start a new chapter.

• Doesn't mean it will happen, but JD Vance was pretty clearly decrying Obamacare's pre-existing condition protections in his interview the other day and suggesting alternative ways to cover people the right has promoted in the prior repeal efforts.

• “Political extremists are less knowledgeable about politics than political moderates: the mildly left and mildly right. So says a study spanning 45 nations and more than 63,000 participants.”

• The natural gas boom was supposed to bring prosperity to West Virginians in poverty. That didn’t happen.

• Big energy issue in Pennsylvania is low natural gas prices, not fracking.

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• Judge Aileen Cannon whose oversight of the Donald Trump classified documents case has garnered widespread criticism, has repeatedly violated a rule requiring that federal judges disclose their attendance at private seminars.

• NATO reiterates full support of EU efforts in Kosovo.

• For decades, law enforcement agencies across California have used confidential settlements to bury the misconduct of their officers.

• Britain was naive when it negotiated Brexit. If Keir Starmer wants to get anywhere with his reset, he needs to learn the lessons of the past.

• How anti-disinformation research came under fire.

• Federal prosecutors say they will seek to have Sean "Diddy" Combs detained while he awaits sex trafficking trial.

• Why Russians and Ukrainians are helping the same side in Sudan’s war?

• Most Western governments do not appear to think of themselves as being at war with Russia. Russia, however, is at war with the West."

Ukraine/Russia

• A major Ukrainian drone attack on Russia triggered a giant blast and forced the partial evacuation of residents near the site of a large Russian arsenal in the Tver region.

• Ukrainian OWA-UAV's successfully struck and have severely damaged the Toropets Northeast Ammunition Depot. The data right now indicates that there is significant damage to the newer expansions of the depot, primarily among the reinforced ammunition bunkers on the eastern side of the facility along with several of the original 150' x 40' storage buildings and among the barracks and administrative buildings by the depot entrance on the Northern side of the depot.

• Tatarigami_UA writes, “Without exaggeration, this is a very significant achievement. We’re likely looking at the loss of thousands of tons of explosive materials, shells, and rockets. In events of this magnitude, replacement can't be quick. I rarely comment on similar events, but definitely not today.”

• The massive smoke plume from Russia's exploding 107th GRAU Arsenal in Toropets is visible from space.

• The Toropets explosion had a seismic footprint that registered as a magnitude 2.7 earthquake.

  

• The Ukrainian drone attack on Russia's Toropets munitions depot is reported to have destroyed 20 billion rubles ($217 million) worth of ammunition.

• Corruption may have contributed to Ukraine's ability to destroy Russia's 107th GRAU arsenal at Toropets.

• If they don’t die, our infantry will’ on Ukraine’s pivotal battle for Pokrovsk.

• Peace can never rely on Vladimir Putin’s word, it can only be built on Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.

• IMF returning to Russia??

• #VatnikSoup on Jill Stein. I’d only add that she is also a leading anti-vaxxer, as a doctor herself!!

• I was wrong. There is at least one person in Russian opposition who understands the need for complete decolonization of the empire.

• Leaked documents provide a rare glimpse into a Russian campaign designed to exacerbate internal rifts in Israel, polarize opposing camps, as well as undermine Israel's relations with other countries and erode Israeli support for Ukraine.

Middle East

• Hezbollah ordered "over 3000" pagers from the Taiwanese company Apollo. Somewhere between Taiwan and Lebanon, Israel planted between 1-2oz of explosives into them, next to the battery.

• Was yesterday’s pager attack on Hezbollah a strategic win for Israel?

• Collateral damage in Lebanon: Lebanon’s health minister with latest casualty figures from yesterday’s explosions: 12 dead including 2 children under 12, up to 2,800 wounded.

• Israel having the ability to target militant networks in this sophisticated way as well as its targeting of high level Hamas figures abroad makes its operation in Gaza look even more deliberately genocidal.

• Professor Paul Bernal writes, “As someone who works in the tech field, if you’re not profoundly disturbed by this pager story, you should be. The implications are massive.”

Gun Violence

• Gregory Delpeche was on the way to the hospital job he has worked for more than 20 years when he was hit by a stray slug fired by an NYPD cop.

• Mayor Adams praises NYPD for 'great level of restraint' in subway shooting.

• A teacher has been arrested for threatening to shoot third-graders at a Louisiana elementary school. A parent told authorities the teacher said, “some of the students would not survive.”

• An 11-year-old middle school student in Port Orange, Florida, has been charged with a felony after threatening to commit a mass shooting at a middle school, authorities said Monday.

Tech

• Hitler speeches that appear to be AI-generated are getting millions of views on TikTok. Humans really got AI and said “Let’s create English-language Hitler speeches and set them to some reverb beats.”

• The Secret Service has launched a probe into Elon Musk after he tweeted that “no one is even trying” to kill Kamala Harris or Joe Biden.

• X's Grok AI can easily generate misleading images about the 2024 US election. Elon Musk's platform didn't reject any of the 60 prompts tested, including disinfo about candidates and election fraud.

Humour

“Our elephants beautifully f*cking hit the UAF base in Sudzha. I orgasmed. UPD: this is Toropets, Tver region. Sorry, I didn't check. Partial evacuation of the city has been announced. F*ck.” Russian popular military propagandist Pozdnyakov.