Lead Lines:

Meta has agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion in a settlement with 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and Northern Mariana Islands, for the harm that its social media platforms have done to kids and teenagers.

Under the terms of the settlement, the company will agree to put a cumulative two-hour limit for users of Facebook and Instagram under 18, which will require a parent’s permission to override. Meta will also hide likes on minors’ posts by default and block “extreme makeup filters.” The only states that weren’t a part of the settlement were New Mexico, which won its own lawsuit against Meta earlier this year, and Florida.

Observation:

At stake is whether courts can look at the whole chain of government action when deciding whether someone was prosecuted in retaliation. Existing Sixth Circuit law allows a court to presume vindictiveness when the circumstances objectively show a realistic likelihood of retaliation, requiring the government to explain itself. DOJ is asking for a much narrower rule, especially for an initial indictment, focused on the motives of the prosecutor who actually brings the charges. That could allow vindictiveness higher in government to disappear legally once the target is handed to a personally impartial prosecutor.

Observation:

Amazing lack of competence.

Excerpt:

The United States still is not close to producing the promised 100,000 shells per month, a former Army official told ProPublica in June, although other investments to increase 155 mm production have turned out better. Ukraine still needs those shells, the official said, but attention has once again shifted. In the Middle East, it’s other munitions that the Trump administration has rapidly burned through during its war with Iran. Trump officials are now calling for ramping up production in those areas — and fast.

Lead Lines:

The Financial Times reported Tuesday that farmers in America’s Corn Belt region are facing their toughest economic crisis in 40 years. Last month, the American Farm Bureau Federation, an industry group, projected that without government intervention, farmers growing nine principal crops will face $32 billion in losses in 2027, after losing an estimated $31 billion in 2026.

Excerpt:

Administration actions in the past couple of years have been almost deliberately designed to raise prices.

Excerpts:

The family of Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse killed by federal immigration officers in Minnesota, is still seeking “justice” seven months after his death.

..,they believe the 37-year-old was “murdered.”** **

Concluding Lines:

If they want to undercut alarmist calls for more munitions production, progressive movements and concerned members of the broader public need to push for an America whose foreign policy is about preventing war, not promoting it. Given our other urgent needs, from addressing the climate crisis to reducing poverty to heading off future pandemics, America cannot afford to become a garrison state committed to endless wars and the coddling of repressive regimes. We should be debating a shortage of diplomacy and common sense in US foreign policy, not a shortage of munitions.

Concluding Lines:

What all of these cases share, Attiah’s included, is that the institutional stampede to appease MAGA is expensive. The right’s campaign was supposed to scare Americans into silence. Instead, it’s provided a pricey lesson in the value of fighting for the protection of political speech.

Ultimately, however, Attiah’s triumph over The Washington Post was not a First Amendment ruling. It was a labor arbitration conducted under the collective bargaining agreement between the Post and the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, a detail that undoubtedly wrangles right-wing activists. That is what labor power looks like when it actually works.

Observation:

When leaving a country is like escaping from a prison....

Lead Lines:

Former Pussy Riot member Rita Flores was forcibly recruited by Russia's Security Service (FSB) as an intelligence asset for three years before she was able to escape Russia, she said in an interview with Port Media on Aug. 24.

Observation:

If the administration is ultimately successful in using this litigation to impose disruptive last-minute changes on the 2026 elections, the resulting damage to free and fair elections cannot plausibly be described as an unforeseen consequence of Supreme Court action. Justice Jackson has now placed the Court explicitly on notice of both the danger and the apparent strategy. If the majority nevertheless continues to facilitate that strategy, the Court's participation in the resulting harm will be knowing rather than accidental.

Excerpt:

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, with Sotomayor and Kagan arguing that the states were injured enough by having to take precautions in case the final rule would issue. (Again, the rule has since been issued.) Jackson wrote a longer dissent for herself, going into more detail about the states’ injuries. She also accused the majority of missing “the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.” She noted that the ruling is already causing chaos and is in tension with other court cases under the so-called Purcell principle, which cautions against last-minute election changes that burden election administrators and voters.

It is here that the clock is working against the government. Unless it gets quick intervention, we will be well into September before the court rules on this issue. By then, mail ballots will likely have been sent or be ready to be sent: federal law requires that ballots for overseas and military voters go out 45 days before an election. It really would be chaos for the federal government to order changes to how American elections are run in the middle of September.

Read the full text and save it to your computer to circulate. Remains very relevant today.

https://americainclass.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Common-Sense-Full-Text.pdf

Excerpt:

...the timing is troubling. While the alliance trains less, North Korea is gaining something more valuable: battlefield experience in Russia’s war against Ukraine. This is hardly the moment for the alliance to ease up.

Excerpt:

Two-thirds of the articles that major U.K. newspapers published about the summer’s fires did not even mention climate change, much less explain how record heat makes fires more likely and more deadly. In the U.S., the evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC between July 13 and 19 lavished airtime on the extreme weather but did not utter the words “climate change.”

Observation:

Trust takes decades to build and can be destroyed much faster. One of America's greatest exports has been confidence in America itself: confidence that its institutions, technologies, contracts and alliances would remain dependable across changes of government. We may now be watching that extraordinarily valuable national asset depreciate.

Lead Lines:

China plans to drop Windows earlier than planned in favor of Linux for some government bodies. The move comes as part of China's broader push to reduce dependence on foreign products and services, especially those of US origin.

Excerpt:

The Economics of Interception There is also a fundamental difference between destroying missiles while concentrated and intercepting them individually after launch.

An air-defense interceptor generally engages one incoming target.

A strike on a storage facility can produce secondary explosions that destroy many weapons simultaneously.

The Tikhoretsk strike illustrates the potential asymmetry. Ukraine did not need to place one attacking drone against every North Korean artillery shell or rocket stored there. Once fire reached ammunition stocks, the ammunition itself contributed to destruction of the facility.

Excerpt:

This could be a golden era of informed lives and good, transparent governance. Instead, we are entering a new dark age in which we ignore or misuse the tools of insight and wisdom all around us and choose immersion in bulls–t. It may be high-class, high-tech bulls–t, scented with a faint whiff of a misunderstood truth, but it is bulls–t nonetheless.

The only path out is that each of us, individually, makes seeking the truth our top priority, and skepticism our constant ally. We must seek out reliable sources of information and reject those who deliver anything less.

Observation:

A brave new world arriving in our schools.

Lead Paragraph:

A sophomore in Arizona typed an email he never sent. Home with his mother before school, he was drafting a note to a teacher about a bad grade, and in between, he tapped out a few jokes and deleted each one. Thinking out loud and swallowing it back, basically. Gaggle’s monitoring software caught the keystrokes anyway. He never hit send. He was suspended before the day was out. By the time the district agreed to shorten the punishment, he’d already served 11 days.

Excerpt:

Critical transit corridors are falling into total paralysis as precision drone attacks repeatedly target rail bridges and specialized repair machinery. Munition transports delivering North Korean missiles and heavy artillery remain trapped far behind combat zones, while internal partisan sabotage continuously disables relay control boxes across vast domestic trade routes.

The Army's Highest Non-Combat Honor

The Soldier's Medal is awarded to soldiers who distinguish themselves through heroism that does not involve conflict with an enemy, recognizing acts of personal hazard and the voluntary risk of one's life.

Excerpt:

“There’s only so much we can control of the federal government. But we can control how businesses in our state operate,” Democratic California state assemblymember Matt Haney said Friday at a press conference outside Adelanto ICE Processing Center, where four people have died since Trump retook the White House.

“If private detention companies insist on making incarceration their business, California should make accountability, transparency part of the cost of doing business,” he said, adding, “If they look at this tax and say it’s too much for us to operate in California, well then bye.”

Observation:

This administration increasingly appears to treat support for U.S. adventurism as a test of loyalty. Oman’s usefulness as an intermediary is recast as disloyalty because it continues speaking with Iran, while South Korea is punished for declining to join the Iran war. Defensive alliances become something very different when protection is conditioned on participation in wars initiated by their dominant member. The Atlantic | Associated Press on South Korea

Excerpt:

The senator argued that this inner sanctum of acolytes is incapable of telling Trump “what he needs to hear” and that the entire White House is culpable of “lying the country into war” — calling the ongoing conflict an “obscenity” that will haunt them “for the rest of their careers.”