Last week the Pandora Papers were coming out just as I was putting out the Sift, so all I could do was say that it was happening and give you a few links. With a week to think about it, this week’s featured post will discuss what to make of it all. Is there more going on here than just confirmation of the eternal truth that the rich play by a different set of rules?
It’s a holiday and I’m running on a slower schedule, so that post probably won’t appear until around 11 EDT.
The weekly summary has a number of things to cover: the debt ceiling deal, and the continuing negotiations around the Biden agenda; an interim report on the Trump coup; Facebook’s whistleblower testifying to Congress; the back-and-forth court rulings about the Texas abortion law; a discouraging jobs report; worries about China and Taiwan; and the continuing turn-around in the Covid surge — all of which leads up to a closing about the things a puffer fish will do for love.
Look for that around 1.
It’s been a week of good news and bad news. The government didn’t shut down, but the debt ceiling is still hanging overhead, threatening a self-inflicted disaster in about two weeks. Neither infrastructure bill passed by the deadline that had been set for it, but the deadlines got extended and negotiations continue. The 700,000th American died of Covid, but a promising new treatment got announced.
There is a certain amount of water in your glass. How do you feel about it?
The featured post this week is something I’ve been meaning to say for a while. My background in mathematics for once has some relevance to a major issue: Whether we beat the pandemic or not balances on the knife-edge difference between exponential growth and exponential decay. If every 10 infected people infect 11 more, we have exponential growth. If they infect 9, exponential decay. Once you grasp that, you see the importance of tactics that change the odds — like masks and vaccines — even if they don’t guarantee your individual well-being.
That post is called “Pandemics Are Beaten By Communities, Not Individuals”. It should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.
As for the weekly summary, the focus this week is on Congress, and we’re still in the situation I outlined last week: We all desperately want to know what’s going to happen, but we just don’t. For what little it’s worth, I remain optimistic. At least the government didn’t shut down.
Elsewhere: the Covid numbers continue to turn around. The vaccine mandates are working. Alex Jones is going to have to pay the Sandy Hook parents. And I enjoyed the new book about the Alamo. The summary should be out around noon.
So yet another counting of the votes in Arizona — this one by the openly pro-Trump Cyber Ninjas — showed that Biden won. But Trump continues to claim fraud, and his GOP allies still demand similar “audits” in other other states he lost — and even in Texas, where he won by less than previous Republican candidates.
Ostensibly, the audit was going to resolve the doubts — one way or the other — about Arizona’s 2020 election. But instead, the report doubled down on the “raising questions” tactic that undermined faith in the election in the first place. It’s almost like tearing down democracy was the point all along.
So I’ll examine that in the featured post “The Big Lie Refuses to Die”, which should be out between 9 and 10 EDT.
The weekly summary will discuss the increasingly clear picture of Trump’s coup attempt, the Haitian refugees at the border, the agonizingly slow turn-around of the pandemic’s Delta surge, Germany’s election, and a few other things. Look for it around noon.
It’s another week where many stories require more than a paragraph or two of attention: General Milley’s fears of what Trump might do in his final days in office, and the precautions he took; the California recall election; AOC’s dress; the Durham investigation’s first indictment; and whether or not the Covid surge is turning. Additionally, there’s the fizzling of Saturday’s demonstration in support of the January 6 terrorists, another anti-Trump Republican retiring, and a few other noteworthy things.
For that reason, there’s no featured post this week. I’ll put out a weekly summary around 11, and nothing else until next Monday.
In addition, the summary will include a brief introduction to the concept of “Disney Princess theology”, and close with a link to the Instagram page of a Dad who likes to appear to be endangering his kids.
This week, Biden upped the pressure on vaccine refusers, and Republicans freaked out about it. The new-case numbers finally started going down. We marked the 20th anniversary of 9-11. The Justice Department started fighting back against the Texas abortion law. And a big Robert E. Lee statue came down in Richmond.
This week’s featured post, though, backs up a little to address a more general question: Whether or not ordinary people should “do our own research” on the issues of the day. It’s easy to shake your head at the people eating horse paste to guard against Covid and say “Obviously not.” But the issue is actually more nuanced than that. This blog, for instance, is an example of someone doing his own research up to a point. I don’t run my own clinical trials, but if I totally trusted mainstream journalists to turn my attention in the right directions, there’d be no purpose in most of what I do.
So “On Doing Your Own Research” is a bit more sympathetic to the populist view than you might expect. It should appear around 10 EDT.
The weekly summary discusses the developments mentioned in the first paragraph, with particular attention to the legal basis for Biden’s “mandate” order, and for DoJ’s lawsuit against Texas. I’ll also go off on historical tangents about General Lee’s weakness as a strategist, and the similarity of the Thermopylae and Alamo myths. Let’s say that posts around noon.
The big news this week was the Supreme Court’s refusal to block Texas’ abortion-banning law. This was a backhanded way to subvert Roe v Wade, and other red states are already moving to copy Texas. There’s a lot to say about this situation — legally, politically, and socially — and there is no shortage of people already writing about it.
With that in mind, I have decided to take this blog’s name literally and do some sifting. Rather than write a long essay of my own, I’m pulling together what other people are saying as concisely as I can. So the featured post will be “[N] Observations about Abortion, Texas, and the Supreme Court”. N is currently up to 12, and I think I may stop there. The post should be out shortly.
Restoring the Roe rights is now another thing Democrats could do, if not for the filibuster. The weekly summary will make a list of these costs of the filibuster.
The summary will also examine the growing number of examples of Republican leaders embracing gangsterism and violence, including Kevin McCarthy threatening telecommunication companies with vague consequences if they cooperate with the investigation of January 6, and Rep. Madison Cawthorn’s threat of “bloodshed” if elections “continue to be stolen”. (Since no elections have been stolen, Democrats can’t avoid this bloodshed by not stealing them. But they could avoid it by not winning, which seems to be Cawthorn’s point.)
Hurricane Ida ravaging the Gulf coast makes this week’s Covid numbers hard to interpret. (Reported infections on the coast are down, but what does that mean?) The summary will include a few other odds and ends, before closing with a more kinetic variation on the domino principle: stick bomb explosions. That should be out before noon.
This week I contributed to the negative-Covid-test statistics. It turns out I had a cold, which is one reason why there’s no featured post this week. The other reason is that Ezra Klein’s article “Let’s Not Pretend that the Way We Withdrew From Afghanistan Was the Problem” already said what I wanted to say about that issue. I’ll quote from that in the weekly summary, and add a few late-breaking-news details as tomorrow’s deadline on the Afghan airlift approaches.
In addition to the usual pandemic stats, the summary also contains a perversely satisfying rant about the ivermectin craze. (I suppose I could have broken that out into its own post, but I’m not all that proud of how snide it gets.) Then there’s the hurricane, and a couple of important Supreme Court decisions, one of which I even agree with.
Like last week, there’s a book section. I discuss Charles Blow’s surprisingly radical book The Devil You Know, where he floats the idea of reversing the Great Migration to create Black majorities in several Southern states. Since he’s trying to convince other Black people — the point is to get them moving in, not White people moving out — reading his book as a White man gives me a fly-on-the-wall feeling. The rarity of that experience is a reminder of my privilege: Most people who write books write them for me.
And I’ll close with a Holderness Family music parody about back-to-school paperwork.
I’ll predict that the weekly summary will post around 11 EDT.
This week’s public discussion was dominated by the ongoing tragedy of Afghanistan. What struck me about that discussion, though, was how one-sided it was. Even ordinarily liberal MSNBC shows, or newspaper outlets like the Times and the Post, were unified in their denunciation of the Biden administration and its plan to withdraw our troops.
I haven’t seen that level of unanimity since the post-911 era, when the Iraq and Afghanistan wars started. A lot of bad ideas sneaked into the discussion around that time, and didn’t get criticized because there was no room for criticism. I think the same thing is happening now. That’s the subject of “Afghanistan, Biden, and the Media”, which should post around 10 EDT.
The weekly summary will also cover the ongoing Covid surge, which seems to be slowing down, but hasn’t turned around yet. I also want to call your attention to some longer reads that are well worth your time: Geoffrey Cain’s new book The Perfect Police State about China’s high-tech oppression of the Uyghurs, CNN’s article on the Colorado River, and the NYT’s report on “superweeds”, plus a couple of long interviews that are worth streaming.
I can’t decide how much attention to give the truck-bomber-without-a-bomb who terrorized central DC Thursday. The incident itself is of little consequence, but it points to the ongoing threat of Trumpist terrorism. The Sackler family is hoping to escape their role in the opioid crisis with their wealth largely intact. And I’ll close by marking the 20th anniversary of a legendary act of guerrilla public service: the guy who improved an LA freeway sign so well that nobody noticed until he announced it.
That should post around noon.
Lots of news this week, but I don’t believe I have any special insight into most of it, so there won’t be a featured post. Instead, I’ll collect other people’s takes in the weekly summary and make short comments.
The big event is the fall of Afghanistan. Nobody is surprised that the Afghan government couldn’t hold the country against the Taliban without our help, but the speed of the collapse has been stunning. Kabul fell yesterday. A broad consensus of Americans wanted this war to end, and understood that the Afghanis would suffer after we left. But it’s hard to watch all the same.
Against my predictions, Republicans in the Senate voted for a bipartisan infrastructure bill. Charlie Brown really did kick the football this time! I’ll outline what’s in this bill, what’s expected to be in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package, and what’s likely to happen next.
The IPCC put out a new climate report, which is hard to evaluate if you’re not an expert, so I’ll link to some experts. The 2020 census found surprisingly few white people in the US, or at least it looks that way. Despite predictions, Trump was not reinstated on Friday. Barack Obama had the audacity and nouveau-riche bad taste to celebrate his 60th birthday. (I mean, who does that? And why didn’t Beyoncé come to my 60th birthday party?) Haiti had an earthquake. And the closing video proves that elephants can play basketball. They don’t dribble well, but they’re unstoppable on the alley-oop.
I’ll predict that the weekly summary comes out a little after 10 EDT.
The big story this week was the series of revelations that came out about Trump’s interactions with the Justice Department prior to January 6. After Rudy Giuliani’s dripping hair dye and the clown show at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a lot of us began thinking of Trump’s attempt to hang on to power as a dark comedy. But it now looks like his coup attempt got further than we thought. With just a little more corruption in DOJ, he might have pulled it off.
Those discoveries, together with Republican attempts to make a coup easier next time, are the subject of this week’s featured post “The Once and Future Coup”. It should be out shortly.
The weekly summary will cover the infrastructure bill creeping towards passage in the Senate, the endgame of Governor Cuomo’s harassment scandal, the continuing surge of Covid cases, Tucker’s homage to the EU’s most authoritarian government, the end of an odd Olympics, Rudy’s resemblance to an Underdog villain, and a few other things. I’m still looking for a closing. That should be out before noon, EDT.
The Weekly Sift 