This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Perry Bible Fellowship — by Nicholas Gurewitch:
  
• The people of the Middle East should be reassured by one thing – their autocrats are no longer a global anomaly — Robert Fisk at the Independent: President Hassan Rouhani of Iran got it right on Tuesday. He said that the White House is “afflicted by mental retardation and doesn’t know what to do”. Donald Trump’s new sanctions may not be as “outrageous and idiotic” as Rouhani claims, but we’ve now reached a stage where the American president’s mental incapacity is plain for all to see. It is a sign of the times – our times, I’m afraid – that all the rantings and ravings of Iran’s leaders over the past 40 years at last sound clear cut, true, absolutely on the cue. Trump is crackers, barmy, off the wall, categorically lunatic. Rouhani is a sane man, but in the past we could listen to folk like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was crackers, and take a chuckle at Iran’s expense. Talk of the “Great Satan” could even get a bit boring after a while. But Trump, while possessing some of the characteristics of Colonel Gaddafi, now sounds like Ahmadinejad.
• Are Cryptocurrencies the First Crack in the Wall to Regulate Facebook? — Marshall Auerback on Zuckarus flying too close to the sun, in Naked Capitalism: How does Facebook potentially bypass central banks, bank regulators and existing currency systems when it is backed by these very same government-issued currencies? Even more anomalous, the company is provisionally partnering with entities firmly locked into the existing payments system, such as Visa or MasterCard. It has even suggested that banks are welcome to join the “Libra Association” if they wish to do so. What’s the point, and what advantages would these companies secure? Ultimately, this makes Libra look like just another link in a daisy chain of credit, the “moneyness” of its proposed cryptocurrency effectively established by its backing by other pre-existing monetary instruments. So why bother? Just because the label says Facebook (or Libra)? In case Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t noticed, Facebook isn’t quite the reputable brand it was a few years ago, and companies like PayPal already provide many of the types of services purportedly on offer from Libra (already operating under regulatory sanctions from the existing monetary authorities).
• Absent — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• Political Cartooning Was Murdered. Here’s the Autopsy. — Tedd Rall: Individual cartoonists are under fire around the world. Only in the United States, “land of the free,” has the art form as a whole been targeted for systematic destruction by ruling elites and cultural gatekeepers. After decades of relentless, sweeping and never-reversed cutbacks there are now far more political cartoonists in Iran than in the United States. After terrorists murdered 12 people at Charlie Hebdo, a single publication in France, hundreds of U.S. newspapers ran editorials celebrating the power of cartoons; 99% of these hypocritical blowhards didn’t employ a single cartoonist. American editorial cartooning didn’t just die. It was murdered. Here’s how it happened/it’s happening
• What a Pediatrician Saw Inside a Border Patrol Warehouse — Jeremy Raff in the Atlantic: Sevier set up a makeshift clinic—stethoscope, thermometer, blood-pressure cuffs—in a room, lined with computer stations, that agents use for paperwork. Each of the agent stations had its own bottle of hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes. But when Sevier asked the 38 children she examined that day about sanitation, they all said they weren't allowed to wash their hands or brush their teeth. This was “tantamount to intentionally causing the spread of disease,” she later wrote in a medical declaration about the visit, the document that the lawyers filed in federal court and also shared with me. (Asked for comment on this story, a Customs and Border Protection official wrote in an email that the agency aims to “provide the best care possible to those in our custody, especially children.” The agency’s “short-term holding facilities were not designed to hold vulnerable populations,” the official added, “and we urgently need additional humanitarian funding to manage this crisis.”) As agents brought in the children she requested, Sevier said, the smell of sweat and soiled clothing filled the room. They had not been allowed to bathe or change since crossing the Rio Grande and turning themselves over to officials. Sevier found that about two-thirds of the kids she examined had symptoms of respiratory infection. The guards wore surgical masks, but the detainees breathed the air unfiltered. As the children filed in, Sevier said she found evidence of sleep deprivation, dehydration, and malnutrition too.
• The System Doesn’t Forgive You. Why Would You Forgive It? — Ted Rall:
  
• The New Right: how a Frenchman born 150 years ago inspired the extreme nationalism behind Brexit and Donald Trump — Pablo de Orellana and Nicholas Michelsen in the Conversation: We spent the last two years analysing hundreds of documents written by New Right thinkers and their forebears to explain how and why these ideas take root. This ideological history is important if today’s nationalists are to be understood, and if there is to be any hope of overcoming the racism and sexism inherent to their ideas. What our research shows is that we are living through the latest battle in a 300-year long ideological war over the meaning of humanity itself. On one side is the belief in a universal idea of humanity, which produced notions of equal rights, humanism and liberalism. Opposing it is the belief that marks all forms of nationalism: that humanity is not a single entity but rather, one divided by nature into national identities.
• In which One become Two — Wondermark by David Malki !: