Two men in my family gave the moms carte blanche to do whatever we wanted to do this morning. So, here goes!

I was tempted to construct this blog post as a series of screenshots from articles recently remembered by the web browser on my phone. It would look something like this:

Mother’s Day in the U.S. has me thinking of the mothers and grandmothers of the children in Gaza targeted by Israeli bombing last week. The kids had to die because their elders are Palestinian resistance leaders, according to Israel.

This hilarious block of Matt Taibbi’s article on censorship — allegedly on the grounds that the article was “hate speech” — has since been lifted following an outcry by Taibbi’s readers.

Mary Beth Sullivan’s excellent letter to the editor is behind a paywall at the Portland Press Herald so here’s a photo from the paper copy:

I write this blog to keep my head from exploding as I consider the news of the day. 

The item below has my head continuously exploding as I try to process the marriage of artificial “intelligence” to East German Stasi-style culture where every person is an informer. This coupling is sure to produce multiple Frankenstein’s monsters, but this particular example of our corporate overlords stoking civil war to stave off the revolution we so badly need is chilling to say the least. 

As Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn discuss, the Department of Homeland Security created in the wake of 9/11 now turns its attention to so-called domestic terrorists. In other words, your tax dollars are being used to fund a program that will train your neighbors and their kids to inform on you lest you become a threat to domestic tranquility. Or what’s left of tranquility in a land where there is a mass shooting on average every two weeks, where more people of color are incarcerated than anywhere else on the planet, and where industrial and military  pollution render human life tenuous.

Here’s a link to the full article on Racket News.

After they discuss the so-called Resilience Project and the “DHS OTVTP Choose Your Own Adventure Online” for inter-American spying, Taibbi and Kirn go on to have a literary discussion about a short story. Because they suspect that very soon we will be constrained in discussing political realities and current events, and we’ll have to do so mainly via metaphor.

If this reminds you of what you were taught about life in Soviet Russia, it should. If this doesn’t remind you of what you’re discovering about tech platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and reddit colluding with the U.S. government to surveil and censor users, it should.

A final thought. Am I the only one who thinks the name “substack” for the self-publishing platform I’ve been reading and just began publishing on is reminiscent of the Soviet-era term samizdat?