8.12 Spider-Man: A Brand New Day 8.12 A year after buying the Los Angeles Lakers for $10 billion, Mark Walter sells the team to Bob Iger and Joshua Kushner for $12.5 billion. 8.11 Julia Cartwright in the Washington Post:“[Daron] Acemoglu charges liberalism with two sins. First, the “sin of omission”: When automation, globalization and deindustrialization severed wages from productivity after 1980, liberal elites failed to respond. Median wage growth collapsed from 2.5 percent a year to 0.45 percent, the jobs anchoring Rust Belt towns vanished, and heroin moved in. A canyon opened between the college-educated and everyone else — a divide Acemoglu traces back to Vietnam draft deferments — and the classes stopped mixing in neighborhoods, in marriages or at the airport bar. Second, Acemoglu names the “sin of commission”: Elites walked away from liberalism’s core commitments. In recent decades, they diverged from the working class on immigration and the identity issues that make up the culture wars. When the working class objected, elites reached for what Acemoglu bluntly calls “social engineering”: compulsory diversity trainings, ideological litmus tests, language policing. He places these efforts in a lineage of thought policing that includes the Islamic ulema and Maoist China. Social media manufactured outrage and supercharged the cycle of provocation and counterprovocation. As of 2023, only about a quarter of Americans strongly trusted the president or the Supreme Court, and only 8 percent said the same of Congress. Asked to describe American politics in one word, respondents reached for “corrupt,” “divisive” and “chaos.” In the 1990s, about half of Americans held a mix of left and right views; today the parties barely share a planet, and majorities in both oppose meeting halfway. Yet just when despair seems warranted, Acemoglu plants his flag: “Liberalism is worth saving and remaking.” For a man who won the Nobel Prize by showing that institutions are the wellspring of prosperity, a nation losing faith in its institutions is a challenge he is compelled to answer. Acemoglu’s remade liberalism rests on four premises. First, fallibility: No belief is beyond question, which makes humility a necessity rather than simply a virtue. Humanity, after all, was once quite sure the Earth was flat. Second, learning in community: Humans acquire knowledge from others, not through solitary discovery, which makes community the infrastructure of liberalism. Third, gentle epistemic improvement: With open debate, better ideas slowly win out. Fourth, collective knowledge: Pooled and shared, knowledge is how societies get healthier, richer and freer.”
8.11 In honor of Illinois native Pope Leo XIV, the White Sox distributed 40,000 Pope hats to fans at the ballpark last night. The Reds rallied from four runs down, however, and beat the Pale Hose 5-4 in extra innings.
8.11 Paul Krugman: “If Medicare is socialism, then the whole U.S. health insurance system, with the government paying most of the bills and placing conditions on private insurers, is almost equally socialist. If you insist on calling any program the government pays for and regulates socialist, then U.S. healthcare would best be described as a partially privatized form of socialism. And one must ask, what is the point of the part that is privatized? Do private insurers add anything positive? Or are they simply parasites, skimming money that could have been paying for care? The case for viewing insurers as parasites is strong. Many Medicare benefits are now delivered via Medicare Advantage, plans paid for by the government but run through insurance companies. MedPAC, an independent advisory commission, estimates that last year Medicare Advantage plans were overpaid by $84 billion, thanks to practices such as “upcoding,” in which patients’ health problems are overstated.What do private insurers offer to compensate for these costs? [It’s hard] to avoid the conclusion that they are, in fact, parasites.”
8.10 Washington Post: Around 2030, the United States is projected to surpass three milestones. According to the CBO, 2030 is the year when federal debt held by the public as a share of the economy will exceed the record set by World War II. Unlike in the ’40s, this debt shows no signs of ever declining. In 2025, 73 percent of federal outlays were on mandatory spending or interest payments, which are legally obligated to continue. The year 2030 is also roughly when the ratio of seniors to the total population will reach 1 in 5. As recently as 2008, the ratio was around 1 in 8. Seniors’ rising share of the population mechanically raises Social Security and Medicare costs and pushes them onto a proportionally smaller working population. In 1952, there were six people between ages 25 and 64 for every one person 65 or older. That meant there were six people whose wages could be taxed to pay for benefits for every one senior. In 2011, there were four. Today, there are 2.7. The U.S. always used to be able to count on a naturally rising population as an engine for economic growth, but the only source of population growth after 2030 will be immigration. That’s because 2030 is also the year when the CBO projects that deaths will begin to exceed births. The entitlement programs making up much of the budget were designed under 20th-century demographic expectations that no longer hold true. Social Security used to take in more money than it gave out, but the program has run annual deficits since 2010. It is projected to go insolvent in 2032, at which point seniors would receive a roughly one-quarter cut in benefits across the board. Medicare’s budget-busting makes Social Security’s look modest by comparison. Of the projected $138 trillion budget shortfall over the next 30 years, $109 trillion is from Medicare. Rising health care costs, combined with an aging population receiving far more in benefits than it ever paid in taxes, spells fiscal Armageddon. The Medicare Hospital Insurance trust fund goes insolvent in 2033. These projections are actually based on optimistic assumptions. They are from the CBO’s baseline estimates, which assume no wars, no recessions, low and stable inflation and no new government programs or tax changes.”
8.9 The Washington Post: According to a GAO audit, “The U.S. DOGE Service, the cost-cutting group spearheaded by Elon Musk, consistently overstated its savings in online posts, taking credit for lease cancellations initiated before the group existed. . . DOGE also claimed contracts were terminated that had not been and loaded its database with savings that could not be verified.”
8.9 Mark O’Connell in NYRB: “In a notorious conversation on Joe Rogan’s podcast last year in which he spoke about his belief that the Democrats were working to import as many immigrants as possible to the US so that they could shift the demographic makeup of the country in their favor—a cherished conspiracy theory of the internationalist far right—[Elon] Musk used the idea in typically computational terms. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit,” he said. “They’re exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response.” If Musk’s brief and disastrous tenure as the de facto leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency last year achieved anything, it was to run a virus check on the system of the American government, and to remove from its code anything that might look like the empathy bug or the woke mind virus. Under his reign, DOGE oversaw the dismantling of the US government’s Agency for International Development. The aid cuts are estimated to have resulted in more than 700,000 deaths, mostly of children, in the last year alone. According to The Lancet, the funding cuts could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030. That fact might give us some idea of what a world defined by Muskism would look like. It might, in other words, look like the cybernetic merger of the world’s richest man with the world’s most powerful government, the withdrawal of vital aid to the world’s poorest children, and the funneling of public money toward his own companies. Musk’s worldview, in this as in many other ways, is an explicitly antihuman one. But it is also . . .not just Musk’s worldview. It already underpins much of contemporary capitalism and may come to be seen as the presiding pathology in our time of monsters.”
8.8 Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, reportedly said that reopening the strait would require Washington to lift its naval blockade and economic sanctions, withdraw U.S. military forces from the region, pay war reparations and release frozen Iranian assets. Iran’s council also called for an end to U.S. attacks against Tehran’s regional allies and what it considers threats against Iran. CNBC said it had not independently verified the reported demands, while the White House had not immediately responded to a request for comment.
8.8 Barbara McQuade on Bloomberg: “The only contempt that occurred during Anthony Fauci’s Senate hearing was its members’ regard for the Constitution. GOP members of the committee that questioned Fauci about his leadership during the Covid pandemic voted to hold the former top health official in contempt of Congress for invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. While the full Senate is unlikely to muster the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster and adopt the resolution, the committee’s vote is a cynical ploy to portray Fauci as a villain without any basis in law.”
8.8 David Rothkopf writes in the Daily Beast that replenishing the munitions stockpiles Hegseth and Trump have depleted will take years and will cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Rothkopf reports that experts in the military and former employees of the Defense Department consider Hegseth’s record “to be the most egregious example of defense management malpractice in our history.”
8.7 Rick Wilson on MSNOW: “This is a setup for watching a Democratic wave hit the country this fall after failing completely to address affordability. [Trump] thinks affordability is a joke and a fraud. But I also think he’s setting it up in the fall to say ‘[Speaker] Mike Johnson don’t seat these new newly elected Democrats. It’s all a fraud.’ I think he’s looking to raise that level of chaos and uncertainty and give Republicans something to cling to after the election is over. The shenanigan here is to deny Democrats their victory.” 8.4 George Lombard Jr. debuts with the Yankees, homers in second at-bat. Yanks beat Cards 2-0. 8.3 Sen. John Kennedy on Trump: “He grows anxious when he has an unexpressed thought.’ 8.3 Trump on Jeanine Pirro and her decision to drop charges in the Reflecing Pool case: “I was disappointed in Jeanine Pirro. Really disappointed in Jeanine Pirro. She folded like an umbrella. . . .Frankly, I think she choked, because the judge was really vicious. Instead of going after the people that did it, the judge went after her and went after her department, and I guess she choked.” Hours later, after Pirro brought a boxful of evidence to an Oval Office meeting, Trump declined to fire her.
8.3 In a new court filing, Capital One says it closed more than 300 Trump Organization accounts following a months-long anti-money laundering (AML) review, not because of Donald Trump’s political views. The filing marks the first time the bank has publicly detailed why it ended its relationship with the Trump Organization, setting up a high-profile legal battle over whether the move was driven by compliance concerns or political bias. The dispute stems from a lawsuit filed by the Trump Organization and Eric Trump, who claim Capital One “debanked” the company in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot because of Donald Trump’s political beliefs. Capital One is now asking the court to dismiss that lawsuit.
8.3 Axios, discussing an article in The New Yorker“China produces 70% of the world’s drones, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries and solar cells, the magazine says, and “deploys more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, and, in medicine, it has surpassed the United States in the number of registered clinical trials.” China’s shipbuilding capacity is 200 times that of the U.S. Between the lines: China’s rulers avoid “overtly antagonizing America, because they believe that, even in decline, it remains uniquely dangerous.” But Rush Doshi, China specialist at Georgetown and CFR, says that if the U.S. loses the next wave of industries — AI, biotech and robotics — as it lost on solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles, “it would irreversibly change the balance of power.” A think tankat Renmin University of China, in Beijing, published a report called “Thank Trump,” which argues that his tariffs, attacks on allies and immigration policies have hastened the “twilight of an empire.”‘
8.3 Tressie McMilan Cottom in the Times: “All of the speculation and hype around A.I. is hiding the fact that the technology isn’t just large language models or agents or data centers. It is the backbone of a superstructure that merges regressive politics with unchecked economic power in the guise of technological innovation. Put simply, there is too much money, some of it too untraceable, giving a small group of unelected people too much power over the people. That’s data politics–the right’s answer to what’s next after Trump: more Trumpism, without the man who gave away the country’s store for personal gain.”
8.3 M. Gessen in the Times: “Two months into his second term, President Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, in which he directed officials to “remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums, to cut funding to “programs that degrade shared American values” and to reinstate some monuments removed following the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. A very incomplete list of things that have happened since that order was issued: The National Park Service has been removing signs about slavery; the statue of a Confederate general has been reinstalled in Washington; a scathing report by the White House Domestic Policy Council accused the Smithsonian of using history “as a political instrument to divide, dispirit and discourage our citizens”; and on July 24, Trump issued a new executive order mandating that signs be installed outside the Smithsonian “warning visitors about the ideological capture at the National Museum of American History.” . . .Trump wants Americans to unlearn what they have come to know about the history and legacy of enslavement. What his executive orders really promise to restore is a sense of comfort contained in the most reductive and sanitized stories about the United States — the bliss of ignorance. Trump appears to believe that the job of museums and memorials is to instill “pride in the hearts of all Americans,” as one of the executive orders put it. The report from Trump’s Domestic Policy Council faulted the National Museum of American History for failing in this precise mission.” 8.2 A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South, by Melvin Patrick Ely
8.2 Ezra Klein in the Times: “ `A lot of the thinking, and also the practice, about what it means to have freedom of thought, what it means to be a powerless minority, was done by Jewish thinkers,” the Israeli-born historian Yuval Noah Harari told me. He added: `For 2,000 years, Jews all over the world saw studying and learning as the highest spiritual activity. After 2,000 years, you ask them: What have you learned? You have studied for 2,000 years. What have you learned? And then people like Netanyahu tell you: Oh, we have learned that you need to be a Roman, that you need to be strong, that you need to build legions, that you need to destroy cities. This is the only thing that matters in life. It’s a legitimate value system. Rome had its usefulness. But if after 2,000 years, the Jews simply become the Romans, what was the point? Why did you waste 2,000 years, then? You could have just become Roman back then.’ This is [Christopher] Nolan’s finest trick: to make one of our oldest moral rules sound new again. To turn the best of Judeo-Christianity into the law of Zeus, so we can see why it might matter and what it might still have to say to us. What Odysseus sees, eventually, is that his violations of the moral order have brought ruin to all around him. Agamemnon, the king who launched the war against Troy, is dead, his throat slit by his wife, who never forgave him for sacrificing their daughter for fair winds. Troy is destroyed. Ithaca, Odysseus’ home, is overrun by suitors who seek his wife and land and think nothing of murdering his son in their pursuit. Odysseus and his men were not fighting the barbarians; they were the barbarians. And their actions led to more barbarity. So, too, has the political movement that rose promising to make Western civilization great again betrayed its inheritance. The world now looks at America and sees us as the barbarians: the country obliterating the global order, the country that takes what it wants and demands tribute from those who cannot resist. And what the political opposition has to do now is recognize what Nolan recognized: That it is an affirmation of our civilizational values to say that cruelty is a weakness.”
8.2 Anthony Conwright in the Times: “The linguistic whitewashing of the Confederacy is more than a manufactured myth of Southern redemption. It is a ritual of national forgetting, one in which American society participates every time we call the Slaveholders’ Rebellion against the United States the Civil War. “Civil War” is no name for a war waged by slaveholding traitors against the United States to hold Black Americans in human bondage. Now, 165 years since the war’s first shots, we should be honest about how we hold its memory.”
8.2 Tigers trade Tariq Skubal to Dodgers for prospects.
8.1 Vincent Pastore dies at 80.
8.1 Trump on Truth Social, commenting on the decision to drop charges in the pool liner case: “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM, that included the grass, which had a big 86 47 emblazoned in giant letters on it.”