Voting machines are terrible but not like Trump and MAGA say they are. “… if you’ve conditioned yourself to reflexively dismiss voting machine criticisms as conspiratorial nonsense, then you are part of the problem.” — Cory Doctorow
The Film That Explains Contemporary America — The Sorrow and the Pity has lessons for how authoritarianism takes root—and how to fight against it. By David A. Graham at The Atlantic
Heather Cox Richardson: “On the evening of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln went to Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C., to see a production of the comedy Our American Cousin. The Lincolns had spent the afternoon taking a carriage ride together and discussing the future, including the travel they hoped for, to Europe and to California to see the Pacific Ocean.
“One of the last men to speak with the president before he left for the theater said it seemed the cares of the previous four years were melting away. The Confederacy was all but defeated, and the nation seemed to be on its way to a prosperous, inclusive new future.”
With Lincoln dead and Andrew Johnson as their champion, Confederate leaders and their successors for more than 160 years have worked to undo their defeat. Confederate apologists rebranded their cause as a Southern war for individual liberty over Northern tyranny, rather than being fought to preserve slavery, which is what the Confederates themselves said it was as the war was being fought. Donald Trump is their latest champion.
Heather Cox Richardson updates on the state of the Iran war as of Friday evening (already out of date). Also, the Atlantic investigates FBI director Kash Patel and finds him to be “a poor manager who is terrified he is going to lose his job and whose overuse of alcohol, tendency to disappear, and purges of FBI agents who had investigated Trump endangers our national security…. Patel has kept his job thanks to his willingness to use the FBI to target Trump’s perceived enemies, but his focus on things like whether FBI merchandise looks ‘fierce’ has made officials think ‘we don’t have a real functioning FBI director.’” And Trump is negotiating with the IRS to settle a $10 billion lawsuit he filed against it — as both plaintiff and President, Trump is negotiating both sides of the deal.
Cerberus at the pet store
William S. Burroughs, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Debbie Harry at Burroughs’ New York apartment. Photographed 1986 by Victor Bockris.
The Voight-Kampff Testing Machine from “Blade Runner”, 1982
