bkmbooks

🇺🇸 November 1985 Scritti Politti "Perfect Way"

Haley Stevens is one crazy bitch, T.

On this Israeli election day, I’d recommend reading this extraordinary @haaretzcom interview with billionaire Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress and once one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest confidants. One of Lauder’s most striking conclusions: “I realized at the end of the day that Israel really didn't want peace, but they wanted dominance.” This is coming from someone who helped launch Netanyahu’s political career, introduced him to powerful figures in American politics and media, and secretly negotiated with Hafez al-Assad and Rafik Hariri on his behalf in the late 1990s. In one of the interview’s biggest revelations, Lauder says Netanyahu agreed to a comprehensive peace deal with Syria and Lebanon, including withdrawal from the Golan Heights, but ultimately refused to sign it for political reasons. “He chose politics over peace. He put his political future before the deal.” Now 82, Lauder describes his profound disillusionment with Israel’s direction. After decades of supporting Israeli and Jewish institutions, he has sold his Tel Aviv apartment, given away his Be’er Sheva property, and says he has no intention of returning to Israel. He warns that Netanyahu’s dependence on figures like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich is damaging Israel, alienating diaspora Jews and eroding support in Washington. The interview is also full of fascinating details about Lauder’s role in Netanyahu’s political rise. The two became close friends in the 1980s, when Netanyahu was Israel’s ambassador to the UN, speaking almost daily at times. Lauder says he introduced Netanyahu to speech coach Lilyan Wilder to improve his public speaking and, crucially, to Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein, who would become instrumental in Netanyahu’s electoral success. When Netanyahu left New York to pursue a political career in Israel, Lauder threw him a farewell party attended by some of the most influential figures in American media and politics, including Rupert Murdoch and the head of the New York Times. Lauder recalls opening doors for Netanyahu and helping him cultivate the relationships that would underpin his rise to power. What makes this interview so revealing is that Lauder is no longtime critic of Israel. He had been a committed Zionist, a Republican power broker, and a man who spent decades financing Jewish institutions, cultivating relationships with Arab leaders, and pursuing diplomatic openings on Israel’s behalf. A fascinating read 👇 haaretz.com/israel-news/elec…

❤️‍🩹 “I’m home.” Freed Ukrainian POWs call their families for the first time in years following the latest prisoner exchange.

The Vels - "Look My Way". (1984). The Vels are an American synth-pop and new wave band formed in Philadelphia in 1980. Although short-lived, the trio established itself as a stylish figure on the alternative scene of the early 1980s.

"Haldeman, Erlichtman, Mitchell, and Dean It follows a pattern, if you know what I mean" ~ Gil Scott Heron, 'H2O Gate Blues' youtube.com/watch?v=H87noKYR…

📚 Au Japon, des gens vont désormais en boîte de nuit… pour s’asseoir silencieusement et lire un livre pendant qu’un DJ joue de la musique d'ambience. Le concept s’appelle JUCY BOOK RAVE et se déroule notamment dans un club souterrain de Shimokitazawa, à Tokyo. Ici, pas besoin de danser ni de hurler pour parler à la personne située à 30 centimètres de vous. Les participants viennent avec un livre, s’installent dans la pénombre et lisent pendant que la musique accompagne leur soirée.

The ARTS Place Pop-up brings art and community together on Langston Boulevard. Stop by to explore work from more than 40 artists and enjoy free art activities through October 25th.

A new bookstore opened in Kyiv. I visited it today. russian drones burn warehouses full of books and damage whatever they can reach. A new bookstore opened in Kyiv. russia will never win.

À l’arrivée du TGV en gare de Marseille, le chef de train a mis pendant quelques secondes une chanson de Rita Mitsouko sur les hauts parleurs en hommage à Catherine Ringer…

Every damn time the Grim Reaper comes for Mitch McConnell, the Republicans drag his raggedy, wrinkly ass out of reach like:

Every damn time the Grim Reaper comes for Mitch McConnell, the Republicans drag his raggedy, wrinkly ass out of reach like:

Much has been said by racists, politicians, and racist politicians (like Bo French) about Indians and UT Austin admissions. I thought I should shed some light so their racism could be slightly more intelligent. I'm a brown kid. I grew up in Frisco, went to a massive Texas high school, and went to UT. I would wager that the kids in this picture and I have practically the same background. Like me, they probably went to a massive, pressure-cooker suburban Texas high school, and survived the gauntlet to earn their admissions. These aren’t foreigners. State law requires 90% of UT's freshman class to be Texas residents. 75% of those in-state seats go to automatic admission on class rank. These are Texans. Texas, for better or worse, is one of the few meritocratic college admissions schemes in the country for a school of its caliber. The rules are simple. Today, the top 5% of a public school's graduating class is automatically accepted. There is nothing to game. You can’t fake being a competitive rower or have some consultant write your essays for you. There isn’t anything to steal; it’s all there on the table to compete for. And the competition starts the moment the bell rings for your first period of freshman year. You are ranked in your class every single year, for us, #1 to #450. You knew exactly where you were, exactly how hard you had to compete. My year was even less competitive than it is today. The top 6% made the cut, so that’s an all-out war for ~27 kids to get auto-accepted into UT. So we worked our butts off. Here's what my life was like, starting in kindergarten. Every summer, before the school year started, I had to finish the upcoming year's math textbook. I sweated over getting As, even in elementary school. One funny memory is walking to my parents' room, crying, to report my first-ever 89 on a report card. I did Kumon, my least favorite thing in the world. I still hate that weird half-smile that is their logo. I went to math and science competitions, where I always lost, and came home crying again. (Quite the crybaby, wasn't I!) And everyone else around me worked just as hard. Actually, a lot of the kids worked much harder. I know people who took extra classes (zero period) just to boost their GPA. Who routinely slept 5 hours a night to nail every assignment they had after band practice. Who were distraught when they got a 98 instead of a 100. People who stopped doing things they loved, like sports or arts, because those classes dragged down their GPA. People put their entire life force into getting into this school. I wasn't even in the top 10% of my class. The competition was too good. I wasn't disciplined enough to hang with them. I got in as one of the 22.5% of admits who are at-large Texans. These are American kids who earned their way into this school in the most American way possible. Competition. They were told the rules, they competed, and they got the number. And on Saturday they were in that stadium in burnt orange, screaming their heads off, like every other Texan at DKR or around the country. I can’t feel anything but pride for them. That they get to live the dream that so many of us dreamt growing up! Kids like this have helped improve UT’s standing on the national stage. They made it out of the pressure cooker and placed well in Finance, Big Tech, and more recently, startups. They meaningfully contribute to the economies of our state and country. You should be proud of them too. Overall, this seems like a meritocratic (albeit flawed) way for Texans to be admitted to our state’s flagship school. It’s racially blind. But politicians like Bo French are asking for something different. They want the student body to rebalance racially. Surely they aren’t advocating for affirmative action, are they?

Okay everyone. Here’s the YouTube interview with @jimmykimmel and @jamestalarico. You know what to do. Watch it. Share it. Donate. Bury them. youtube.com/watch?v=WLDE9LrG…

☀️ Hello to our new followers! Be sure to follow us at @washsunmetro for our D.C. Metro coverage and @washsunperspect for ideas and analysis.

There are so many parallels between what is happening with the Dems and Piker in the US and what happened with Labour under Corbyn. Like so much of the Dem establishment, the Labour right and the Labour Together Project were far more animated by their total hated and intolerance of the left. It was visceral. They - literally, and with premeditation - worked to undermine the Labour Party under Corbyn so that the Labour Party would lose to the Tories. Their internal strategy documents listed a "Labour government" as a threat to their political project. So they set about working with the press to undermine Corbyn's Labour. Morgan McSweeney, Steve Reed and fellow-traveller Imran Ahmed (now at CCDH) worked covertly and in collaboration with the media and Jewish communal organisations to foment the "antisemitism crisis", often based on tendentious evidence. They did so precisely because the 2017 election showed the public wanted social democracy, an end to wars in the Middle East: not more reheated Blairism at home and neo-conservatism abroad. This is exactly what is now being revealed with Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed and other primaries - when voters in the US (especially Dem voters) are given the chance, they vote for progressive and anti-imperialist politics. The Labour "antisemitism crisis" is a complex and nuanced topic (not least because, like every mass movement, there were some clear cases of antisemitism to be dealt with, which were then mixed and confused with nonsense cases to create a sense of crisis and scale). But one of the functions of the "antisemitism crisis" was to launder the more base impulses of the Labour Together Project. It transformed a five year hissy fit based on more base instincts - like envy, ego, lust for power, fear of losing lucrative lobbying gigs - into a noble project to eradicate anti-Jewish hate. Too bad it so often ended up targeting left-wing and anti-Zionist Jews, who were hounded in the media and by the party: including on their literal deathbed. It was because I was exposing this project, including how it was funded with an illegal slush-fund, that I was targeted by Labour Together, who paid over £30k for a mad and defamatory smear "report" on me and my family, and them reporting me to the security services. This is what's plainly happening with Piker. Let's be clear: the current media circus is plainly and incontrovertibly based on systematically misrepresenting Piker and his views. It's not even subtle. It is a wholesale and wide-spread collapse in basic journalistic standards. It's being driven by right-wing media but with the active collusion of the Democratic Party establishment. They are pretending that a bare-knuckle fight against their own irrelevance (and to defend their own corruption) is actually a noble endeavour to protect the Jewish community. But what happened when the Labour Together Project eventually won power? Almost immediately it was revealed the ideological and political cupboard was bare. Starmer was removed in two years. They just reverted to status quo politics and taking policy from lobbyists. and their popularity collapsed into public hate almost immediately. We've had two years of a Labour super-majority and they've been tinkering at the edges and collapsing into sordid crisis. This is exactly what will happen if the Dem establishment wins this contest with the DSA and progressives. They might win power in the future - and then reveal that they've got no new answers to old problems, and they'll be hate once more, and some new version of Trumpism will fill the vacuum. So act accordingly.

Don't let AI lobotomise you or dumb you down. Keep reading books. Here are ten great ones about Berlin. Full article on the website, and open access so we can keep this literary thang going... Full article (no paywall): slowtravelberlin.com/city-li…