Music For The Masses

Sergey Brin-Backed Group Tries to Undercut California’s Billionaire Tax Proposal Building a Better California is funding competing ballot measures that could nullify the proposed wealth tax.

A new political effort backed by the Google co-founder Sergey Brin and other Silicon Valley magnates is backing several ballot-measure campaigns aimed at undercutting a proposed wealth tax on California billionaires. More here: www.wsj.com/us-news/serg...

L.A. TACO Investigative Journalism Fund By L.A. TACO

Today @lataco.bsky.social launched a fundraiser to help me start their investigative news desk. We're hoping to raise $25k to help pay for lab tests, analyze ICE data that the Daily Memo's been compiling + work with more freelancers. Been dreaming of this for years!

givebutter.com/la-taco-inve...

Of so many things to be infuriated about, this is perhaps my biggest gripe. Pancreatic cancer patients, who face a future without hope, are being denied a potential game-changing therapy
www.mskcc.org/news/can-mrn...

Casey Wasserman Agrees To Sell Agency Amid Fallout From Epstein Files After Casey Wasserman’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein were revealed in the latest batch of the Epstein Files, musicians on Wasserman Group’s roster have been reckoning. Chappell Roan, Wednesday, Water From ...

This week Chappell Roan, Weyes Blood, Wednesday, and over dozen other acts left Wasserman Group following revelations about its CEO in the Epstein Files.

Casey Wasserman now says he will sell the talent agency as he’d “become a distraction.”

He will remain the 2028 Olympics chairperson.

Mexican officials feared El Paso airspace closure signaled U.S. incursion into Mexico Coming weeks after airspace was closed over Venezuela before the overthrow of Nicolás Maduro, the shutdown of airspace over El Paso alarmed Mexican officials, who thought it might presage U.S. military activity in Mexico.

Mexican officials feared El Paso airspace closure signaled U.S. incursion into Mexico

DAILY MEMO: Border Patrol Has Left Los Angeles, ICE Carries On Taking Around 25 People This Week

@eltragon.bsky.social

💔 Heart to heart on taxes and City of LA spending spending spending. 💔

Check out these sites for budget and financial info on the City of LA:

Budget.lacontroller.app
Revexp.lacontroller.app
Liabilityclaims.lacontroller.app

Create your own LA budget at mylabudget.lacontroller.app

Band To Watch: Cardinals Cardinals speak about their songs as if they have a life force. For this band, though it can come off as evasive, creative ambiguity is a kind of protection for artist and listener alike. Vocalist-lyr...

Meet our newest Band To Watch, the young Cork, Ireland rockers Cardinals, and stream their excellent debut album 'Masquerade'

YouTube video by Cardinals Cardinals - I Like You (Live from The Everyman, Cork)

Cardinals album is out today, lxds.

youtu.be/cVVmd-NCVak?...

Keep on - you're getting through, even if they aren't able to admit it in the moment.

A Reuters photographer captured this image of a page from Pam Bondi's "burn book," which she used to counter any questions from Democratic lawmakers during an unhinged hearing today.

It looks like the DOJ monitored members of Congress’s searches of the unredacted Epstein files.

Just wow.

Figure 1 from the paper shows the Association between Percentile Wealth Bins (x-Axis) and: (a) Contribution Rate, (b) per Capita Contribution Amount. Figure 1 presents two plots. Panel (a) displays the percentage of donors in each wealth rank that contributed to each of the six campaigns (i.e., Democratic and Republican nominees in 2012, 2016, and 2020).Footnote 17 Panel (b) displays the per capita dollars from each wealth bin, by campaign (including those who donate nothing). As Figure 1 shows, the association between wealth and contributions is approximately exponential. The wealthiest are much more likely to contribute, and the wealth gradient is even steeper in dollars because the top 0.1% contribute very large sums. This is one of the most robust findings in the campaign finance literature, but the figure demonstrates it with considerably more precision. By measuring wealth independently of contribution size, we avoid misattributing smaller contributions to non-wealthy donors and underestimating wealthy dollars. Most relevant to our analysis, Figure 1 compares the wealth gradients for Trump versus other candidates. In 2016, compared to other candidates, Trump’s wealth gradient is far flatter, because Trump elicited far fewer wealthy contributors and per capita dollars. For example, among the top 0.1%, Trump’s donors and per capita dollars represent about one third of Romney’s. While Trump did worse than all other candidates among nearly all wealth groups, that deficit was larger among the wealthy. In short, in 2016, wealthy donations to Trump are low compared to other presidential candidates. In 2020, Trump’s performance among the wealthy improved considerably over 2016 (Figure 1). Consider donation rates (Panel a). Among the wealthiest 0.1%, for example, Trump roughly doubled his rate, though he still significantly lagged Biden and Romney. He did even better in per capita dollars (Panel b) than in rates. Open access link to paper: http://cup.org/4cfm0Az

The wealthy dominate political donations. My co-authored research found the top 0.1% contribute at rates 10-15x higher than bottom 90%. They’re not just more likely to donate, they give exponentially more per capita. The wealth gradient in politics is real. cup.org/4cfm0Az

This is a for-profit concentration camp run by the despicable Core Civic who has not and will not comply. Tell us what you're doing to close it down for good, asap. Nothing in your sentence above is enough.

Why Is It So Hard to Set a 9/11 Trial Date? Here’s What to Know.

Latest: The military judge in Guantanamo's 9/11 case has told lawyers he will hear arguments next month on the prosecution's request to set a trial start date for 1/11/27. That's 25 years to the day after the Bush administration opened its prison there.
Context: www.nytimes.com/2026/01/16/u...

Link to recipes www.ranchogordo.com/blogs/recipe...

Palantir for Governor? Why is extremist MAGA billionaire Joe Lonsdale funding a California Democrat?

In California, the right-wing tech billionaires behind Trump are funding a gubernatorial candidate named Matt Mahan.

Leading the pack: Joe Lonsdale, the Palantir co-founder who recently said the USA should resume public hangings.

Why is he funding a Democrat?

www.thenerdreich.com/palantir-for...

YouTube video by X - The Band X - I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts (Official Audio)

🎶I'm guilty of murder of innocent men
Innocent women, innocent children
Thousands of 'em
My planes, my guns, my money, my soldiers
My blood on my hands
It's all my fault

I MUST NOT THINK BAD THOUGHTS🎶

youtu.be/32z8TjXePSQ?...

One of every thousand American residents has been taken into custody by ICE in the last year.

US Olympic Curling Team member speaks out against ICE:

"I'm proud to represent Team USA. But we'd be remiss if we didn't mention what's going on in Minnesota and what a tough time it's been. What's happening is wrong. There's no shades of gray."

No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring's Amazon Ring’s Super Bowl ad offered a vision of our streets that should leave every person unsettled about the company’s goals for disintegrating our privacy in public.In the ad, disguised as a

Ring has announced a new “Search Party” feature that could eventually bring mass biometric surveillance to our streets. It’s on by default. Shut it off.
www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Brandi Carlile's accompaniment for "America the Beautiful" before the game last night was SistaStrings. The duo, Chauntee and Monique Ross, played another American anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing," on the Library's Stradivarius instruments in 2024.
Here's a clip of that impromptu performance. ⬇️

#BadBunny's performers continued to dance and party outside the stadium after the #SuperBowl #HalftimeShow

Benito is a threat b/c he makes art so alluring and enjoyable you want to understand everything about it and then you end up learning about sugar and slavery and colonialism and the Taínos and Hawaii and then you probably have some thoughts of your own, and that's why art is powerful and dangerous

a city skyline at night with giantmonster written on the bottom left ALT: a city skyline at night with giantmonster written on the bottom left

TVs across the country as soon as Bad Bunny finishes performing at the Super Bowl.

How did those Bad Bunny-themed, anti-ICE towels get into the Super Bowl? Before the game, activists clandestinely distributed 15,000 of them to fans entering Levi’s Stadium for the Super Bowl, seeding grassroots support toward a performer who spoke up for Latinos and immigrants at the Grammy Awards last week.

How did those Bad Bunny-themed, anti-ICE towels get into the Super Bowl?

Inside TurboTax’s 20-Year Fight to Stop Americans From Filing Their Taxes for Free Using lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.

With tax season in full swing, here's our reminder that TurboTax owner Intuit spent two decades fighting to prevent Americans from filing their taxes online for free.

(Published 2019)

Marimar Martinez is so incredibly courageous in her quest to demand justice and transparency. We all owe her a debt.

YouTube video by Wajahat Ali The Epstein–MAGA Billionaire Alliance Explained

If you understand the concept of Epstein Island—territory where the rich escape reality and law—you understand the Network State.

Crypto, eugenics, fantasies of global control.

Was Jeffrey Epstein a godfather of tech fascism?

w/ @wajali.bsky.social

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0dM...

Please read all of this:

5. The administration continues to treat state sovereignty as fungible. As strange as it feels for organizers, a states rights orientation feels like the more progressive position. They are figuring that whiplash out.