Author: sauer@technologists.com

curated news excerpts & citations
… trying to ‘unbury the lede’

Qasim Rashid, Esq.: Why Did Dr. King Say White Moderates Are Worse Than The KKK?

On April 12, 1963—Good Friday—the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested and jailed in Birmingham, Alabama.

His “crime” was organizing peaceful, nonviolent protests, marches, and sit-ins against the brutality of legalized segregation. He was not throwing bricks. He was not inciting violence. He was doing precisely what every civics textbook tells us citizens we are supposed to do: peacefully assemble and demand that the government live up to its own stated values.

For that, Dr. King was locked in a cell.

He was finally bailed out eight days later—on April 20th—by the United Auto Workers, who posted $160,000 bail. In those eight days, confined to a Birmingham jail cell, Dr. King wrote one of the most important documents in American history.

Every person committed to justice should read it in full. But today, I want to focus on the passage that cuts most deeply—because it was not written about the Klan. It was written about the people who, while claiming to be on Dr. King’s side, were his greatest stumbling block.

Dr. King wrote:

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a more convenient season. Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

Read those words again. Slowly. Because Dr. King was not describing the enemy. He was describing the ally who refuses to act like one. He was describing the person who agrees with the goal but objects to the urgency. Who believes in justice in theory but demands cowardly patience in practice. Who is more committed to maintaining the comfort of the powerful than to delivering the rights of the powerless.
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Julia Conley @ Common Dreams: ‘Absolutely Crazy’: Horror as Trump Moves to Dismantle Crucial Ocean Monitoring System

“Blinding the public to climate change won’t make it go away. It will only accelerate its profound consequences.”

In what a number of scientists suggested was the Trump administration’s latest effort to stop tracking the changing climate in hopes of convincing the public that the climate emergency isn’t happening, the National Science Foundation announced Monday that it was dismantling a crucial deep-ocean monitoring system that for years has helped researchers understand the impacts of the crisis on the world’s oceans.

The NSF said it plans to send ships this month to remove more than 900 instruments, part of a project called the Ocean Observatories Initiative. The project collects data on temperatures, currents, and the ocean’s absorption of carbon dioxide off the coasts of Oregon, Alaska, Washington, and North Carolina, as well as in the Irminger Sea between Iceland and Greenland.
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Merlyn Thomas, Alex Murray, Matt Murphy @ BBC:
Iran attacks damage 20 US military sites since start of war, satellite images show

Iran has damaged 20 US military sites since the start of the war, satellite images and videos analysed by BBC Verify show, suggesting the attacks are more extensive than publicly acknowledged.

Iran has targeted key facilities across eight countries in the Middle East since the end of February, causing millions of dollars of damage to state-of the-art air defence systems, refuelling aircraft and radars.

Tehran has targeted both US bases and shared military facilities in retaliation to the US-Israeli strikes across Iran and Lebanon over the past three months. …

Will Neal @ Daily Beast: Trump’s War Story Blown Up by Jaw-Dropping New Evidence

Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – June 1, 2026

… Iran and its role in the president’s deteriorating mental condition are going to take center stage.
…

His base demands that he look strong and accomplish what, after the initial strikes failed, he claimed to have started the war for: to make sure Iran doesn’t have the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. He also needs to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—which was open before he began the strikes—and get oil flowing again from that region of the Middle East. Prices in the U.S. are rising, and the looming threat of oil reserves running out adds even more pressure to consumer prices.
…

… Permitting Iran to control the strait is not just about oil; it’s about the principle of freedom of the seas set out after World War II. Global trade depends on that concept. The exchange of money is also a problem for Trump. He has spent much of his political life attacking the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that China, France, Germany, Russia, the U.K., the U.S., and the European Union negotiated with Iran during the Obama administration, claiming that former president Obama “gave” Iran $1.7 billion. In fact, the JCPOA simply permitted the release of Iranian assets frozen overseas by sanctions, but much of Trump’s base believes that Obama showed weakness by buying an agreement.
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
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Tulsa race massacre

The Tulsa race massacre was a two-day-long terrorist massacre perpetrated by white supremacists that took place in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States, between May 31 and June 1, 1921. Mobs of white residents, some of whom had been armed and appointed as deputies by city government officials, attacked black residents and their homes and businesses. The attackers burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the neighborhood—at the time, one of the wealthiest black communities in the United States, colloquially known as “Black Wall Street.” The event is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history.

More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were interned, many of them for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded that 36 people died. In 2001, the Tulsa Reparations Coalition examination of events identified 39 people dead (26 black and 13 white), based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates, and other records. The commission reported estimates ranging from 39 people to around 300 people dead.
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Laura Millan, Kyle Kim, Armand Emamdjomeh, Ishika Mookerjee @ Bloomberg:
How Switzerland Is Adapting to Melting Glaciers

Climate change is leading to the melting of glaciers and the thawing of permafrost worldwide.

A year ago, the Swiss town of Blatten was destroyed after part of a glacier collapsed. Today’s newsletter looks at how Switzerland faces difficult decisions over the risks and costs of mountain living in an era of dangerous climate change.

It is springtime in the Lötschental Valley, and yellow dandelions are blooming under the shadow of the Swiss Alps. The landscape is an idyll of snowcapped peaks and meltwater streams, but the changing season brings with it dangers.

Heavy rains in late April caused a mudslide that damaged the foundations of a 35-meter (115-foot) bridge hanging across a nearby gorge. It could take two or three years to fix …
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D. Brian Blank, Brandy Hadley @ Conversation: It’s not just high gas prices – inflation is now spreading through the US economy

Americans don’t need a press release to know that inflation is rising. Gasoline is above $4 per gallon amid the ongoing conflict in the Middle East and closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and the release of key price data on May 28, 2026, underscores why policymakers are worried these pressures could spread into the broader economy.

The report offered a mixed but still uncomfortable picture. The month-to-month rise was softer than expected, but the change year over year still points to concern: a 3.8% jump from a year earlier, the fastest pace since 2021, and a less volatile index that excludes food and energy up 3.3%.

This increase suggests inflation isn’t limited to gasoline. Housing, utilities and recreational spending are also keeping underlying inflation elevated, even as other data shows a slowing economy and weaker income growth.

Dan Frosch @ WSJ: Americans Are Falling Behind on Their $1.25 Trillion Credit-Card Bill

Soaring interest rates and stubborn inflation have led to highest delinquencies since the financial crisis; ‘a pattern of survival debt’

Paul Krugman: Who’s Deranged, Exactly?

Of partisanship and economic sentiment
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Paul Krugman:
Curing U.S. Health Care, Part II

How we got to Obamacare
…
The ACA, which went into full effect in 2014, created a system of subsidies and regulations designed to make health insurance available to many Americans who had previously been left out. It worked: In 2010 there were 47 million uninsured people in America, but by 2016 this number had dropped to 27 million. This still fell short of the universal health insurance that every other advanced nation has, but it was real progress.

In 2017, during his first term, Donald Trump tried to destroy the ACA, replacing it with the American Health Care Act — legislation that would have eliminated most of the provisions that expanded health insurance under Obama.

At the time the Congressional Budget Office projected that the G.O.P.’s replacement bill would nearly double the number of Americans without health insurance, increasing the total uninsured population by 23 million and undoing all of the progress achieved under the ACA.

However, the attack on Obamacare failed by one vote in the Senate, and the ensuing public backlash against the G.O.P. delivered a large victory in the 2018 midterms to the Democrats. After these developments many observers assumed that the ACA had become a more or less permanent feature of American life.

Such assessments, however, failed to take into account the deep hostility of the U.S. right toward policies that expand access to healthcare. As we’ll see, this hostility goes back generations. And the second Trump administration has taken actions that the CBO projects will add 16 million people to the rolls of the uninsured by 2034.
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James Eagle: China has rewired global trade

The most important geopolitical change of the past 25 years is visible in ports before it is visible in speeches. In 2000, the US was the larger goods-trading partner for much of the world. By 2025, China had taken that position across large parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe.

The chart is about goods trade, not services, investment or military power. That caveat matters. It also makes the message cleaner: the physical economy has bent towards Chinese factories and Chinese demand.

This is why decoupling is so difficult. A country can distrust Beijing, welcome US security guarantees and still rely on China as its dominant commercial counterparty. Trade creates a form of dependence that cannot be unwound by rhetoric.

The China story is too often told as a clean contest with the US. The better reading is messier: countries can fear Chinese power, rely on Chinese trade and still want American security.
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Noah Berlatsky: Musk Attacks Nyong’o For The Same Reason Hitler Attacked Jewish Art

Last week, Christopher Nolan confirmed that Lupita Nyong’o is going to play Helen of Troy in Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey. Most people thought, “Helen of Troy was supposed to be incredibly beautiful; Lupita Nyong’o is incredibly beautiful—this seems like a reasonable choice.”

But a handful of people on the right, led by Nazi billionaire Elon Musk, were enraged. Lupita Nyong’o is Black. Racist pseudo-intellectuals like Musk believe that the Greeks were not just white, but transcendental icons of white culture. Casting Nyong’o, therefore, is, supposedly, an insult to whiteness, and a sign of Hollywood’s assault on Western purity and honor.
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Rebecca Solnit:
“This May Well Be the Most Consequential Case in the History of Humanity”

… the International Court of Justice just handed down an epochal ruling that “obligates States to regulate businesses on the harm caused by their emissions regardless of where the harm takes place. Significantly, the Court found that the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is fundamental for all other human rights, and that intergenerational equity should guide the interpretation of all climate obligations.”

Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s special envoy for climate, said of the decision: “I choose my words carefully when I say that this may well be the most consequential case in the history of humanity.” Christiana Figueres, who presided over the negotiations that created that Paris Climate Treaty declared, with jubilation, on her podcast Outrage and Optimism: “this is without a doubt, the most far-reaching, the most comprehensive and the most consequential legal opinion we’ve ever had.”

How this decision came into being might be one of the all-time great David and Goliath stories. …
(Rebecca Solnit more…)

Petra Sorge, Natasha White, David Fickling @ Bloomberg: A Hunt to Track Down Dubious Chinese Carbon Credits

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