This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Your Man in the Public Gallery: Assange Hearing Day 10 — Craig Murray: The gloves were off on Tuesday as the US Government explicitly argued that all journalists are liable to prosecution under the Espionage Act (1917) for publishing classified information, citing the Rosen case. Counsel for the US government also argued that the famous Pentagon Papers supreme court judgement on the New York Times only referred to pre-publication injunction and specifically did not preclude prosecution under the Espionage Act. The US Government even surmised in court that such an Espionage Act prosecution of the New York Times may have been successful. It is hard for me to convey to a British audience what an assault this represents by the Trump administration on Americans’ self-image of their own political culture. The First Amendment is celebrated across the political divide and the New York Times judgement is viewed as a pillar of freedom. So much so that Hollywood’s main superstars are still making blockbusters about it, in which the heroes are the journalists rather than the actual whistleblower, Dan Ellsberg (whom I am proud to know). The US government is now saying, completely explicitly, in court, those reporters could and should have gone to jail and that is how we will act in future. The Washington Post, the New York Times, and all the “great liberal media” of the USA are not in court to hear it and do not report it, because of their active complicity in the “othering” of Julian Assange as something sub-human whose fate can be ignored. Are they really so stupid as not to understand that they are next?
• First Elect Obama, Then Move Left! — Ted Rall:
  
• Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People — Ashwin Rodrigues for Motherboard: "SINCE COVID-19 MANY AMERICANS FELL BEHIND IN ALL ASPECTS," reads the website copy. The button below this statement is not for a GoFundMe, or a petition for calling for rent relief. Instead, it is the following call to action, from a company called Civvl: "Be hired as eviction crew." During a time of great economic and general hardship, Civvl aims to be, essentially, Uber, but for evicting people. Seizing on a pandemic-driven nosedive in employment and huge uptick in number-of-people-who-can't-pay-their-rent, Civvl aims to make it easy for landlords to hire process servers and eviction agents as gig workers.
• The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world — Nick Couldry and Bruce Schneier, CNN: What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It's that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or institution-building.
• Sutton Impact — Ward Sutton:
  
• Did the FBI Downplay the Far-Right Politics of Las Vegas Shooter Stephen Paddock? — Daryl Johnson and Eric Lichtblau at the Intercept break Betteridge's law of headlines: The FBI’s silence on a possible motive is unsatisfying. Attacks carried out by Muslims and Middle Easterners are routinely labeled as terrorism inside the United States, while many of those carried out by non-Muslims like Paddock — a 64-year-old white man — often are not. It was not until earlier this year, after mounting evidence from outside studies, that FBI Director Christopher Wray acknowledged, belatedly, that the bureau considered the rising threat of violent domestic extremists to be on a par with foreign and Islamic-inspired terrorist groups like the Islamic State. Then came the news earlier this month from a high-ranking Homeland Security whistleblower who said he had been pressured to downplay the threat of white supremacists and other intelligence that might be frowned upon by the Trump White House. Another high-ranking Homeland Security official made the same claim in a Forbes interview last month.
• Facebook Sued Over Kenosha Killings — Theodore Hamm at the Intercept: In order to recruit foot soldiers for the August 25 protest, the Kenosha Guard created an event page on its Facebook account. Titled “Armed Citizens to Protect Our Lives and Property,” the posting summoned “patriots willing to take up arms … and defend our City from the evil thugs.” Over 450 Facebook users alerted the platform’s moderators that the Guard’s violent rhetoric violated the company’s policies. According to BuzzFeed News, four Facebook moderators deemed the Guard’s posts “non-threatening.” In Flores-Williams’s view, Facebook’s actions subsequent to the event — shutting down the Guard’s account and admitting to what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called an “operational mistake” in not heeding the 450 warnings — amounted to a recognition it behaved with negligence.
• All of Us Are Smarter Than Any of Us — Alfie Kohn: In America, the individual is almost always the point of reference for thinking about success, about morality, about how children are educated and what defines adulthood. It’s about me, not us. As I argued recently, the astonishing selfishness of people who refuse to wear masks or restrict their activities during an epidemic — putting their “liberty” to do whatever they please above a sense of responsibility to (let alone concern for) the well-being of others — is really just an amplified version of what our whole culture represents. Once you start to pay attention, you notice this motif everywhere. You hear it when we’re told that the hallmark of maturity — the primary indicator of healthy development for young adults — is self-sufficiency. (The corollary is that moms and dads who value their children’s interdependence, not just their independence, are often accused of “helicopter parenting.”) You hear it when well-meaning teachers talk about providing “scaffolding” for students — that is, temporary support for what the kids can’t yet, but soon will be expected to, do entirely on their own. Again, it’s taken for granted that continuing to rely on others is something to be outgrown. (And if it’s not, well, providing help to — or receiving help from — a classmate is sometimes given another name: “cheating.”)
• Your Man in the Public Gallery: Assange Hearing Day 16 — Craig Murray: On Wednesday the trap sprang shut, as Judge Baraitser insisted the witnesses must finish next week, and that no time would be permitted for preparation of closing arguments, which must be heard the immediate following Monday. This brought the closest the defence have come to a protest, with the defence pointing out they have still not addressed the new superseding indictment, and that the judge refused their request for an adjournment before witness hearings started, to give them time to do so. Edward Fitzgerald QC for the defence also pointed out that there had been numerous witnesses whose evidence had to be taken into account, and the written closing submissions had to be physically prepared with reference to the transcripts and other supporting evidence from the trial. Baraitser countered that the defence had given her 200 pages of opening argument and she did not see that much more could be needed. Fitzgerald, who is an old fashioned gentleman in the very nicest sense of those words, struggled to express his puzzlement that all of the evidence since opening arguments could be dismissed as unnecessary and of no effect. I fear that all over London a very hard rain is now falling on those who for a lifetime have worked within institutions of liberal democracy that at least broadly and usually used to operate within the governance of their own professed principles. It has been clear to me from Day 1 that I am watching a charade unfold. It is not in the least a shock to me that Baraitser does not think anything beyond the written opening arguments has any effect. I have again and again reported to you that, where rulings have to be made, she has brought them into court pre-written, before hearing the arguments before her.
• Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro: