Attention to the Unseen

Mamdani rebukes Trumpism with pro-immigrant speech for America’s 250th birthday

From elsewhere — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:20:14 +0000

The Guardian reports: New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, exalted the city’s legacy of immigrants on Friday in a historically laden, ideological counterpoint to a US semiquincentennial address that was expected later in the day from Donald Trump – who has sought to deport immigrants en masse throughout his second presidency. Speaking from behind a desk at New York’s city hall that belonged to the US’s first president, George Washington, and which itself is a century older than the Resolute desk...

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Kleptocracy is Trump’s most lucrative business venture

From elsewhere — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:19:55 +0000

Timothy Noah writes: Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career. The June 30 release of his financial disclosure report makes this official. Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry. In 2025, Trump mined more than $2.2 billion in income from being president, most of it from crypto, from which he extracted $1.4 billion. That’s all the more remarkable when you remember that crypto entered...

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The children Elon Musk denies killing, have names and had lives cut short by the destruction of USAID

From elsewhere — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:19:37 +0000

Nicholas Kristof writes: Elon Musk is newly minted as humanity’s first trillionaire, but the world’s richest man seems grumpy. And he definitely is not a fan of mine. “Kristof is lying through his teeth,” he announced on social media this week. I got on his nerves for pushing back at his claims that his demolition of the United States Agency for International Development last year did not cost lives. The fracas began after Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, said...

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Technofascist Peter Thiel warns: The pope is ‘working for the Chinese Communists’

From elsewhere — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:19:09 +0000

CNN reports: Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel delivered a series of provocative warnings and predictions about the future of artificial intelligence and the West on Tuesday, accusing Pope Leo XIV of inadvertently serving as a “Chinese communist agent” by calling for AI regulation. In his remarks at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado, he also warned of a “democratic-socialist takeover” of the United States’ Democratic Party. Thiel, a co-founder of Palantir and PayPal, was an early supporter of President Donald...

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Gasoline shortages in wartime Russia evoke memories of the Soviet Union

From elsewhere — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:18:47 +0000

The New York Times reports: Alyona Sadovnikova first experienced gasoline shortages in mid-June, when she pulled into a station and was told it was only serving customers who had ration coupons. “I was horrified: Are we in the Soviet Union now where you had to get coupons to buy sausage?” she said in a telephone interview. Just a few days later, Ms. Sadovnikova found herself waiting 18 hours to fill up in the city of Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia, almost...

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Pluralism is a moral commitment: a virtue that we each have a responsibility to cultivate

From elsewhere — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:18:30 +0000

Traditional dancers perform in front of the Buddhist Temple of the Tooth, celebrating the Buddhist festival of Esala Perahera, in Kandy, Sri Lanka, on Aug. 8, 2025. Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images By Eranda Jayawickreme, Wake Forest University I grew up in Sri Lanka. Much of my adolescence was spent in Kandy, a city built around a lake, set amid the lush tea plantations of the hill country. Its northern shore houses the Temple of the Tooth, one of...

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Astrophysicists puzzle over the new universe revealed by Webb

From elsewhere — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:18:12 +0000

Jay Bennett writes: When Charlotte Mason ponders cosmic mysteries, she likes to doodle. “I am quite a visual person,” she said. “I usually draw a lot of pictures trying to understand what’s going on.” Mason, an astrophysicist at the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, has lately been filling pages with sketches of “little red dots,” perplexing objects discovered by the hundreds in images from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Little red dots were never seen before the telescope came...

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Music: Pat Metheny — ‘America The Beautiful / The People United Will Never Be Defeated’

From elsewhere — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:17:51 +0000

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The plot to subvert the midterms is getting stranger and more dangerous

From elsewhere — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:55:55 +0000

Media Matters for America reports: Over the last several weeks, the outlines of a plot have begun to emerge that could signal how President Donald Trump, along with MAGA media figures and activists, could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national emergency posed by China. The details of the scheme remain publicly vague, and may not yet come to pass, but the short version looks something like this: First, the White House would declassify...

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The many ways Trump is trying to tip the scales for the midterms

From elsewhere — Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:55:41 +0000

The New York Times reports: President Trump is trying to use the levers of the federal government, along with personal influence over state and local lawmakers, to reshape the rules governing the 2026 midterms and future elections in extraordinary ways. Many of these efforts have been blocked by courts, stymied by the Constitution or stopped in Congress. But the relentless assault by the president on the electoral process — both administratively and rhetorically — is likely to sow doubt and...

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