Good morning. It is August 28th. It is another pleasant, mildly warm morning in New York City on an open-ended run of moderate weather in the forecast, and this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

This is another morning when the accumulated news is terrible, along so many different dimensions, it’s hard to decide which part should come first, but the one that really jumped out at bedtime and was still jumped out in the morning, despite not being the story of greatest magnitude, was a report in the Seattle Times, which begins, “two people fighting the Bear Gulch fire on the Olympic Peninsula were arrested by federal law enforcement Wednesday in a confrontation described by firefighters and depicted in photos and video.

Why the two firefighters were arrested is unclear, but a spokesperson for the incident management team leading the firefighting response said the team was aware of a Border Patrol operation on the fire, that it was not interfering with the firefighting response and referred reporters to the Border Patrol station in Port Angeles. Over three hours,” the story continues, federal agents demanded identification from the members of two private contractor crews. The crews were among the 400 people, including firefighters, deployed to fight the wildfire, the largest active blaze in Washington state.” This story goes on to note it is unusual for federal border agents to make arrests during the fighting of an active fire Especially in a remote area. It would be interesting to hear the spokesperson for the incident management team go into a little more detail about how lining up the crews fighting a fire to make them show their papers to federal agents, is not interfering with the firefighting response. Certainly, it seems like it's going to interfere with the next firefighting response, should they need one. But it seems like the reported facts are just going to have to do the work of the rebuttal. 

In other news about how the current federal government approaches the public interest, the Centers for Disease Control essentially went through a decapitation strike yesterday. The New York Times writes “the White House said late Wednesday that it had fired Susan Monarez, the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after a tense confrontation in which Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. tried to remove her from her position. A lawyer for Dr. Monarez said in response that she was refusing to step down.” That's a good job there of using the language “said” that it had fired rather than asserting that a firing happened. The Times goes on to explain, “because Dr. Monarez has been confirmed by the Senate, previous CDC directors were not subject to such confirmation. She serves at the pleasure of the president, and Mr. Kennedy likely did not have the authority to dismiss her.” A White House spokesperson then backed up Kennedy's position by saying the White House has terminated Monarez, but her legal team announced that they consider the firing legally deficient unless it comes directly from Donald Trump himself. While all this was going on, the Times writes, “four other high profile CDC officials quit en masse, apparently in frustration over vaccine policy and Mr. Kennedy's leadership.” The word “apparently” is not really necessary there, given that at least one of them specifically said so. The Times writes, “the four high ranking agency officials who did resign are Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC's chief medical officer, Dr. Dimitri Daskalakis, who ran the center that issues vaccine recommendations, Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who oversaw the center that oversees vaccine safety, and Dr. Jennifer Layden, who led the Office of Public Health Data.”

Daskalakis posted his resignation letter to x.com. In it, he wrote that he was “unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public's health. He also wrote, have never experienced such radical non-transparency, nor have I seen such unskilled manipulation of data to achieve a political end rather than the good of the American people that the administration has put people with dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor in charge of recommending vaccine policy to a director hamstrung and sidelined by an authoritarian leader. Their desire to please a political base will result in death and disability of vulnerable children and adults.” He wrote that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should not be considered a source of accurate information and wrote of the shooting at the CDC building in Atlanta that it was the result of “the cowardice of a leader that cannot admit that his and his minions words over decades created an environment where violence like this can occur.”  Again, no reason to tack apparently onto the motivations. He just out and said it. 

And the third first thing to talk about in the news is that a 23 year old armed with an assault rifle, pistol and shotgun opened fire on a back to school mass for students at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. Two children ages eight and 10 were killed. 14 other children and three adults were injured. This gets a top of the page photo of the outside of the crime scene in the New York Times and a single column over on the left-hand side of the paper. There were only two fatalities after all, not including the shooter killing herself.

So heinous and horrifying as the specter of someone spraying gunfire through the windows of a church into children at prayer. Maybe it's not really a stop the presses kind of deal. It wasn't one of the big ones. For people looking for second order political controversies, the shooter identified as a trans woman. Or if you want to approach it from the other direction, she'd apparently decorated her weaponry with racist slogans.

For people looking for a, I don't know, one-and-a-half-order political angle, some of these scrawlings specifically referenced right-wing mass murderers and right-wing nihilist memes. But the first order fact is that all these semiotic gestures were gun decorations. One more American had access to high-quality killing technology in a country where high-quality killing technology is essentially ubiquitous and they chose to use it to kill people. A whole school's worth of children are now traumatized for life, even if they're not personally recovering from grave injuries. But that's what this country has decided children just have to deal with. 

The Times quotes Jacob Fry, the mayor of Minneapolis, saying, “don't say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying.” 

At the top of page one in the right hand lead news column, is a NEWS ANALYSIS piece. “Trump Takes Power Quest To New Level / Attack on Fed Official Likely to Test Justices.” It's a roundup of Donald Trump's abuses of power, similar to the Times’s recent roundup of his acts of outright racism. It's good. It's important. It's accurate. It's one column wide. What are you supposed to do when the overturning of the rule of law is just a background fact of daily existence.

Next to that, the story is “F.D.A. Limits Who Can Get Covid Vaccine / Most People Under 65 Won’t Have Access.” This would, the Times writes, “mark the first fall winter season that COVID shots are not widely recommended to most people and children, pitting federal health officials and the Trump administration against several national medical groups that oppose the restrictions. To say nothing of pitting the Trump administration against federal health officials, hence yesterday's mass resignations. 

Down below that, at the bottom of the page, is another story that could have gone up top and will probably end up there in one form or another as time goes by. “Money Being Poured Into A.I. Is Propping Up Real Economy,” is the headline. “It's no secret by now,” the Times writes, “that optimism around the windfall that artificial intelligence may generate is pumping up the stock market. But in recent months, it has also become clear that AI spending is lifting the real economy too. It's not because of how companies are using the technology, at least not yet. Rather, the sheer amount of investment in data centers, semiconductor factories, and power supply needed to build the computing power that AI demands is creating enough business activity to brighten readings on the entire domestic economy. Companies,” as the story continues, “will spend $375 billion globally in 2025 on AI infrastructure, the investment bank UBS estimates. That is projected to rise to $500 billion next year. Investment in software and computer equipment, not counting the data center buildings, accounted for a quarter of all economic growth this past quarter, data from the Commerce Department shows.” Yeah, it seems like the fact that the economy is being propped up by a fake and useless technology, that's a catastrophic waste of resources, might raise some problems in the long term. It sort of feels like an extremely high gloss version of Chairman Mao's pivot in the Great Leap Forward, to emphasizing domestic steel production, in which people just melted down their own bicycles and cook pots in the backyard to produce useless ingots to meet output targets. 

And speaking of the miraculous promise of technology, back above the fold. The story is “False Arrest Shows Pitfalls of Facial Recognition / In New York Case, Man
Didn’t Match Victim’s Bodily Description.” The bodily description was that a woman told police that a five-foot-six delivery men had exposed himself and a facial recognition program pointed police to a six-foot-two person who was 12 miles away from the scene, according to his phone's location data, at the time of the crime, but police arrested him anyway. New tools, same cops. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you're able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow.