Cassandra

Surveillance video caught TSA agents at Miami International Airport stealing from passengers as they went through security.

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Is the inquiry into the impeachment of Biden as justified as the one(s) into Trump?

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The Packers' first-round pick in the Rodger's trade was contingent on his playing 65% of snaps.

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Cassandra

Arundhati Roy was interviewed recently about the G20 meeting in India. She's still furious after all these years. (You wonder if the brilliant Keung is on this path.) She talks about the divisions in India--rich-poor, Muslim-Hindi--and its growing anger and episodes of savagery and injustice. It's long (and depressing) but here is a summary of her overview.

"It would be foolhardy for you to think that a process in which a country of 1.4 billion people that used to be a flawed democracy – and is now falling into a kind of, well, I can only use the word fascism – is not going to affect the rest of the world, you’re extremely wrong. What I say wouldn’t be a cry for help. It would be to say, “Look around at what you are, what you are actually helping to create.” There was a moment in time in 2002 after the anti-Muslim Gujarat massacre – in which intelligence reports by countries like the UK actually held Modi responsible for what they called ethnic cleansing. Modi was banned from travelling to the US, but all of that is forgotten now. But he’s the same man. And every time somebody allows him this kind of oxygen and this kind of space to pirouette and claim that only he could have brought these powerful people to India, that message magnified a thousand-fold by our servile new channels, it feeds into a kind of collective national insecurity, sense of inferiority and false vanity. It’s blown up into something else that’s extremely dangerous and that people should understand is not going to just be a problem for India.

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The state of India is very precarious, very contested. We have a situation in which the Constitution has been effectively set aside. We have a situation in which the BJP is now one of the richest political parties in the world. And all the election machinery is more or less compromised. And yet – not just because of the violence against minorities, which of course causes a kind of majoritarianism and may not cause them to lose elections – but because of unemployment and because we live in one of the most unequal societies in the world, we have an opposition that is building up. This government is seeking to crush it because it does not believe that there should be an opposition. We are in a situation of great flux and we don’t expect, I don’t think anybody expects, anybody outside of India to stand up and take notice because all their eyes have dollar signs in them, and they are looking at this huge market of a billion people. But, you know, there won’t be a market when this country slides into chaos and war, as it already has in places like Manipur. What they don’t realise is that this market won’t exist when this grand country falls into chaos as it is. The beauty and the grandeur of India are being reduced to something small and snarling and petty and violent. And when that explodes, I think there’ll be nothing like it."

Roy is a wonderful writer and a wearying activist but this is a scary warning.