Armando Sosa

In a well-researched piece for the New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer writes about the “network of well-funded far-right activists” who are making plans for Trump’s second term. It’s more than just Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation — and as his first term showed, it’s not necessarily about what Trump himself wants, it’s that the chaos that surrounds him creates opportunities for these ultra-conservatives to wreck havoc on the freedoms enjoyed by Americans.

I can’t decide which of the plans in these three excerpts is most terrifying:

Stephen Miller, at America First Legal, has been devising plans to enact a nationwide crackdown on immigration, just as he had hoped to carry out on a vast scale in the first Trump term. The impediment then was operational: a lack of personnel to make arrests, a shortage of space to detain people, resistance from Democratic officials at the state and local levels. Miller has since vowed to increase deportations by a factor of ten, to a million people a year, according to the Times. The President would have to deputize federal troops to carry out the job, because there wouldn’t be enough agents at the Department of Homeland Security to do it. The government would need to build large internment camps, and, in the event that Congress refused to appropriate the money required, the President would have to divert funds from the military.

The person close to C.P.I. considered himself a denizen of the far-right wing of the Republican Party, yet some of the ideas under discussion among those working on Project 2025 genuinely scared him. One of them was what he described to me as “all this talk, still, about bombing Mexico and taking military action in Mexico.” This had apparently come up before, during the first Trump term, in conversations about curbing the country’s drug cartels. The President had been mollified but never dissuaded. According to Mike Pompeo, his former Secretary of State, Trump once asked, “How would we do if we went to war with Mexico?”

Those close to Trump are also anticipating large protests if he wins in November. His first term was essentially bookended by demonstrations, from the Women’s March and rallies against the Muslim ban to the mass movement that took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, in the summer of 2020. Jeffrey Clark and others have been working on plans to impose a version of the Insurrection Act that would allow the President to dispatch troops to serve as a national police force. Invoking the act would allow Trump to arrest protesters, the person told me. Trump came close to doing this in the final months of his term, in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, but he was blocked by his Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

You don’t even need to be a scholar of authoritarianism to recognize where this is going — it’s not like they are being secretive about it.

Tags: Donald Trump · Jonathan Blitzer · politics · Project 2025 · USA

Vox Samples has just released Pitchmunk, a freeware pitch shifter plugin for Windows and Mac (64-bit). I have to admit that I am not up to date when it comes to pitch shifters. I make fiddly electronic music, so vocals aren’t usually in my wheelhouse. If I have to keep to a pitch, Melodyne is [...]

View post: Vox Samples Releases FREE Pitchmunk Pitch Shifter Plugin

A friend shared a new business idea with me yesterday. Some business model questions came to mind, asked here rhetorically. If you get them right, everything else is easier:

How will you get new paying customers?

Why will your paying customers tell their friends and colleagues?

Will this business work at a scale that you can both achieve and are happy living with?

Is it easy to start?

If it is, what will keep others from starting it?

How do you avoid a race to the bottom where you’re trapped making a cheap commodity as a middleperson?

Will it get easier as you go? Why?

What incentive do customers have to stick with you instead of switching to a cheaper or more convenient choice?

Businesses that are cheap to start, depend on providing a useful service at a cheap margin and are largely fungible or invisible are often difficult to turn into thriving enterprises. Customer traction, the network effect and emotional connection can change this, particularly if you build them in from the start.

       

In the Atlantic, Ed Yong checks back in with the long-haulers, people who are still experiencing Covid-19 symptoms months after their initial infection. (Read his previous article from early June.)

Lauren Nichols has been sick with COVID-19 since March 10, shortly before Tom Hanks announced his diagnosis and the NBA temporarily canceled its season. She has lived through one month of hand tremors, three of fever, and four of night sweats. When we spoke on day 150, she was on her fifth month of gastrointestinal problems and severe morning nausea. She still has extreme fatigue, bulging veins, excessive bruising, an erratic heartbeat, short-term memory loss, gynecological problems, sensitivity to light and sounds, and brain fog. Even writing an email can be hard, she told me, “because the words I think I’m writing are not the words coming out.” She wakes up gasping for air twice a month. It still hurts to inhale.

As Yong says in a thread about the article: “The pandemic is going to create a large wave of chronically disabled people.” Once again for the people in the back: this is not just the flu. The flu does not incapacitate otherwise healthy people like this. I know at least two long-haulers personally and am astounded on a daily basis by how casually some Americans continue to regard Covid-19.

More than 90 percent of long-haulers whom Putrino has worked with also have “post-exertional malaise,” in which even mild bouts of physical or mental exertion can trigger a severe physiological crash. “We’re talking about walking up a flight of stairs and being out of commission for two days,” Putrino said. This is the defining symptom of myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome. For decades, people with ME/CFS have endured the same gendered gaslighting that long-haulers are now experiencing. They’re painfully familiar with both medical neglect and a perplexing portfolio of symptoms.

You can read Seabiscuit author Laura Hillenbrand’s excellent article on her chronic fatigue syndrome diagnosis and how difficult it is for people with chronic conditions like this to get the right diagnosis and to get family and friends to believe what’s going on.

Also, Yong should win all the awards this year for his pandemic coverage. It has been simply outstanding.

Hamza Shaban, reporting for The Washington Post:

Ivanka Trump urged out-of-work Americans to “find something new” Tuesday as part of a new jobs initiative designed to tout the benefits of skills training and career paths that don’t require a college degree.

But the effort — complete with website, advertising campaign and virtual roundtable featuring Apple CEO Tim Cook and IBM chair Ginni Rometty — was swiftly derided on social media as “clueless” and “tone-deaf” given the pandemic, recession and Trump’s own familial employment history.

I don’t know what the exact expiration date was on Cook’s stance that it was better to engage with Trump and his kakistocratic administration, but I do know we’re past it.

Update:

Contemplate this roundtable video from a historical standpoint — say, a few decades from now. What will people see? They will immediately note the stunningly low technical quality and production values. It will be instantly recognizable, whether our future viewers lived through these times or not, as “one of those awful virtual meeting videos made during the COVID-19 crisis”. You know, the crisis in which several hundred thousand Americans needlessly died and millions were sickened because of the Trump administration’s incompetent, insane, sclerotic response. The crisis that Trump’s disastrous, humiliating, “what the hell was anyone thinking when they voted for this obvious lunatic?” presidency is now and forever will remain synonymous with. Like how when I say “Jimmy Carter”, people think “genial peanut farmer who was in over his head and allowed 52 Americans to be held hostage by Iran for over a year and oversaw an energy crisis that culminated in an automobile-dependent nation being unable to buy gasoline”. Or I say “Richard Nixon” and people think “shifty crook whose crippling paranoia drove him to send a squad of bumbling goons straight out of a Coen brothers casting call to burgle his political opposition’s headquarters and then oversaw a criminal attempt to cover it up, inexorably leading to his resigning from office in utter disgrace”. When you say “Trump” decades from now, after our current hot moment has turned igneous, we’ll think about shamefully blatant racism, we’ll think about jaw-droppingly transparent corruption, we’ll think about his stupid-looking hair and poorly-applied bronzer and the rapidly degenerating incoherence of his every utterance, but more than anything we will think about the COVID-19 crisis, and his heartbreakingly cruel, incomprehensibly stupid and irresponsible response to it. That’s Trump’s lines-around-the-block-for-gasoline, his Watergate, his Hoovervilles. But hundreds of thousands of Americans didn’t die waiting for gas in the ’70s, or because G. Gordon Liddy shouldn’t have been trusted to shoplift a pack of gum without getting caught. Just try to imagine how much worse the jaded eyes of history will view a self-inflicted fiasco that resulted in so many American deaths that morgues were overrun in cities across the nation. It’s a presidential albatross without peer.

This roundtable isn’t particularly noteworthy in and of itself, but as an artifact it is emblematic of both the months-long-with-no-end-in-sight quarantine that necessitated the video’s socially awkward and jarringly-low-fi “Brady Bunch” title sequence format, and the I-can’t-believe-this-is-real hypocrisy of a White House initiative to glibly counsel the record-shattering number of unemployed to just “find something new” being led by a senior White House advisor whose one and only qualification for the job is that she is the president’s loyal daughter and only fully-acknowledged adult child who isn’t a complete numb nut.

That’s the roundtable video Tim Cook agreed to be a part of.

Bibo Bee Hotel is here to help solitary bees who are struggling to find a natural place to hibernate.

65 Easy Vegan Recipes for Beginners! Easy 1 Pot Meals, soups, stir fries, curries, burgers, pizza, Tacos, breakfast and dessert to get you started on your journey. Glutenfree Soyfree Nutfree options

Transitioning into and maintaining a vegan diet can have its challenges in the beginning. It can get overwhelming at times to replace some loved meals, try new ingredients, flavors and textures. Here are a few choice recipes from the blog to help you out! Many are 1 Bowl, 30 Minute easy recipes, some longer depending on your cooking experience. There are quick Pastas, Veggie bakes, Soups, Curries, Stir fries, noodles, Bowls, there are Burgers, tacos, pizza. Also breakfast- sweet and savory, and some desserts to please everyone. There’s something for everyone, many different flavors, cooking styles, ingredients, options. 

Lets keep those plans we made in Jan to eat well rolling along. Do let me know in the comments about which recipes you found easy and accessible. Looking for something specific, check my Recipe index. Also check out my cookbooks for even more options and inspiration(available everywhere in the world and often also in libraries). 

Continue reading: 65 Easy Vegan Recipes for Beginners

The post 65 Easy Vegan Recipes for Beginners appeared first on Vegan Richa.

Speaking of Penn and Teller, there’s a fantastic episode of This American Life on which Teller — the half of the duo who usually doesn’t speak — explains how he created one of his signature routines. Well worth listening to.

SchneidersLaden and Irrupt have released Supersounds, a freely downloadable royalty-free sample library featuring the sounds of hardware modular synthesizers. Released just in time for Superbooth 2018, the annual gathering of synthesizer enthusiasts and manufacturers in Berlin, this free sample pack will surely wet your appetite for seeing and hearing the latest hardware synth models in action. [...]

View post: Supersounds Is A FREE Modular Synthesizer Sample Library (WAV)

Fun life fact: practically every rental home you'll ever live in will have at least one thing that you don't like to look at. It might be a light fixture that's ugly as sin, walls that have seen brighter days, or some odd feature you have no idea what to do with. These eyesores aren't going anywhere permanently if you want your deposit back, but you can magically make them disappear while you're living there.

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